The Good Son (61 page)

“Why, you are in Egypt, my dear woman. And I am bending my every resource to get you out of it. It is just that you are so very unofficial, and they fear to take cognizance of holding you. I mean that until they admit they have you, they cannot very well release you. The Americans are, I believe, satisfied that they, and you, have been the victims of a hoax; the evidence is irrefutable, and of course they would very much like to forget it has ever happened. Such embarrassment for the government! But there is you, of course—”

“Who
are
you?” she demanded.

He smiled and issued a self-deprecating laugh. “Oh, forgive me,” he said. “I am Farid B. Laghari, at your service. I am your lawyer.”

T
heo seems frozen. The footsteps and the rattle of armed men sound closer on the stairs. Ahead, Abu Lais beckons urgently to them. Sonia shoves Theo forward, putting all her weight behind it. His instincts take over and both of them dash into the room at the end of the hallway. Abu Lais shuts the door behind them. Theo is stunned, staring at the other man. He says, “It
is
you. They told me you were dead.”

Wazir’s face breaks out in his famous smile and Sonia sees her son throw his arms around his brother. The men embrace, and Theo begins to ask a string of questions in rapid Pashto that Sonia can barely follow, but this reunion is interrupted by a pounding on the door. Wazir motions them to the far corner of the room and opens it.

Sonia hears a brief conversation in Arabic and then heavy footfalls and shouted orders.

Wazir says, “The sentry on the roof was shot. They thought it was one of the locals, a sniper, because they thought it was impossible for anyone to get up on the roof without passing them. I told them to stay inside and that I doubted that anyone would try to assault the house.”

He sits at the desk chair, as if normal business can now resume.

Theo asks, urgently, “Wazir, what are you doing here?”

Wazir shrugs. “I’m a Pashtun and this is Pashtunistan. Where else should I be? Let’s say it’s a long story. I don’t have to ask what you’re doing here—you came for her. But by God, I’m glad to see you!”

Theo is grinning and shaking his head in amazement. Then he sobers and says, “I’m sorry. I shot one of your friends.”

“They are not my friends,” Wazir says. “They are nominally under my orders, but in fact they were sent to watch me. The Arabs are very
suspicious, especially of Pashtuns. You might even have done me a favor.”

“I don’t understand.”

He looks at Sonia. “How much does he know?”

“I have no idea,” she says. “I don’t even know how he found this place.”

“How did you?” asks Wazir.

“That’s a long story, too,” says Theo. Sonia studies his face as he looks at the other man. It is like flipping through one of those books that depicts the range of human expressions: love, anger, astonishment, confusion; each blooms, flickers, dies, and is succeeded by another. Her heart aches.

Theo says, “I can’t believe it, Wazir, by God, it’s been half a lifetime! Where did you learn English? You sound like an American.”

“I practically am. I was in the States nearly as long as you. I was educated there, Case Western and Berkeley.”

“How? The last time I saw you, you were a Pashtun mujahid. How in hell did you get a college education?”

“A Ph.D., actually.”

“And you never tried to contact me in all those years?”

Wazir looked a little embarrassed at this and asks Sonia, “Can I tell him?”

“That’s up to you, Wazir,” she says. “I’m retired.”

“Retired from what?” asks Theo. Now the confusion on his face gels, with an angry flush, a knotting of the brows. “Wazir, what is she talking about? What in hell is going on?”

Wazir leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath, lets it flow out.

“Well, let’s see—where to start? Let’s start with your mother.”

He makes a rotating motion with his fingers.

“The axis, the source of it all. Sonia’s the reason I got an education in America. She pulled me out of the jihad just like she pulled you, but in my case I did a little better in school than you did. I can see you’re about to ask why she did such a thing. Why me? Well, I’m smart, she knew that from Aitchison College and our many conversations up on the roof at your grandfather’s house, and she needed a smart Pashtun with good mujahideen credentials.”

“I don’t understand,” says Theo.

Wazir looks at Sonia, eyebrows elevated in surprise. “You never told him?”

She shakes her head.

“Told me what?”

After a considerate pause, Wazir answers, “Your mother has been an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency for a very long time, and she’s been involved in a very deep Agency game, probably the deepest it has ever played.”

“That’s crazy,” Theo says. “Sonia’s not a CIA agent.”

“Asset. There’s a difference. Think about it for a minute, Theo. In 1973, Sonia Laghari probably knew more about Soviet Central Asia than any other American. She was an embarrassment to the KGB. Don’t you think the CIA would’ve been interested in her? And they were. An agent approached her and she turned him down: oh, no, she was not going to spy for America. Then, what happened to your grandfather happened, and we did what we did. As I’m sure you know, she thought you were dead too, and when she found out you weren’t, it was nearly as bad, because you were lost in the jihad. You, her last child; she was desperate to get you back. And they knew this. They contacted her in Zurich again, and this time she agreed to do anything they asked her to do if only they would get you out. They gave her a contact in Peshawar, and he arranged for you to be snatched and taken to America. So then it was time for the payoff, and the payoff was me.”

“Why did they want you?” Theo asks. “They were funding the jihad all along, they had access to all the leaders, and you were just a foot soldier.”

“Yes, then I was, but I was also young. I could be—how should I say it?—groomed for greater things.”

“I don’t understand. Are you saying the CIA educated you? For what, to spy on the jihad?”

“Not exactly. Let me give you a hint. My B.S. is in physics, and my doctorate is in nuclear engineering. My thesis was on new computational approaches to the analysis of nuclear explosions. The research was paid for by the Department of Energy, the people who manufacture nuclear weapons.”

Sonia is silent, watching her son’s face as he thinks this through. She feels a wave of shame, another blast of her failed-mother grief, and also
compassion for what she has allowed to happen to him. He is not stupid, her boy, but neither is he Wazir; no, she has not groomed
him
.

At last Theo says, “You’re a Trojan horse.”

This provokes another sunny smile on the handsome face. “Exactly! I am Abu Lais, the great hope of the whole jihad to lay hands on nuclear weapons. Isn’t that a joke?”

“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” says Theo, unsmiling.

Wazir does not notice this, his grin grows broader. “Yes, and the kind of joke only a Pashtun can really appreciate: Pashtunistan, the Brillo pad of intersecting betrayals.”

“Why you?” Theo demands. “Why do you get this terrific education, courtesy of Uncle Sam?”

“As I said, it’s a long story,” Wazir says, not smiling now.

“We got time,” says Theo. “I like long stories.” He unslings the AK, props it against the wall, sits down on the charpoy. Sonia sits next to him.

“Theo. . . the gun,” she says. “I think you can put it away, yes?”

He looks at the Stechkin in his hand, realizes he has been gesturing with it, gives her a quick annoyed look, replaces the pistol in its holster, and returns his attention to Wazir.

“Okay, brother,” says Wazir. “So, it’s 1987, the jihad is winding down, and the CIA is thick in Afghanistan. And what do they see? This Soviet threat they’ve been working against for their whole lives is crap. The great Red Army can’t even provide bullets and food for its troops. The idea that this army could attack Europe or anywhere else against the wishes of the U.S. military is revealed as nonsense, Chad with rockets, and all that. So they start asking, Where’s the next enemy? And what do they see? They see the jihad, the movement they helped to create, and at the center of this movement is a man they have built up into a great leader, and what a surprise! They find this great leader has no love for America; in fact he sees that America, far more than Russia, is the reason the Muslims are groaning under oppression. America is the prop for the Saudis, for the Egyptians—”

“Bin Laden,” says Theo.

“Yes. And the CIA tells this to Washington, but Washington doesn’t listen, communism has always been the enemy and always
will
be the enemy, and if, for some reason, communism falls, there will be an era of
endless peace; democracy and capitalism will spread throughout the world, the end of history, and so forth. But one small group of operatives had their eyes open. They’d read the books bin Laden read—Sayyid Qutb and others in the same vein—and they understood that his goals were the destruction of the apostate regimes, the recovery of Palestine, and the re-creation of a caliphate that would unite the entire umma under one political roof. Well, of course this is ridiculous on the face of it—the Prophet, peace be upon him, was hardly dead before the umma fell apart into factions, where it has remained to this day. But uniting the world under a supposed Aryan master race was ridiculous, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was ridiculous too, yet the world paid dearly in blood for these two absurdities, and the same could happen again.”

“Get to the fucking point, Wazir,” says Theo. Sonia feels the atmosphere in the room changing, growing more tense. She can feel the anger pouring off her son like waves of heat from a stove; she has never seen this part of Theo before—he has always been careful to shield her from it, but not now—now she really understands that her boy kills people for a living.

Wazir makes an acquiescent gesture. “All right. Very simply: In 1987 elements in the CIA conceived a plan to recruit a mujahid and train him in the United States as an expert on nuclear weapons, so that if the jihad ever came close to getting nuclear material, they would have someone on the inside, a sleeper, as they say. The operation was codenamed
SHOWBOAT
and it was secret beyond secret, so secret that this person had to be recruited outside normal CIA channels. Not only the recruit, but the recruiter had to be perfectly secure. So they thought of your mother, who famously had turned down the CIA’s overtures. A man named Harry Anspach, who had been deeply involved in the Russian jihad, had noticed a young warrior named Kakay Ghazan, and done the usual background check on him. Anspach was making a list of the future leaders of the jihad, should it ever turn against its sponsors, and in the course of this he was surprised to find the connection between you and your mother. I believe he thought you might be a candidate for his sleeper. He had your mother contacted in Zurich with the news that you were still alive and that Harry Anspach in Peshawar would be willing to help her get you out of Afghanistan, for a price. She immediately left for Peshawar, with the results you know. You were taken and returned to America,”

“But they didn’t make me the sleeper,” says Theo.

“No. I’m afraid your mother had another candidate for that role. I’m sorry, my brother, but you would not have been suitable. As I recall it, you were having problems with your studies at the age of ten. So I was recruited instead, and my existence is secret from all but a tiny handful of people. I am not on any list of assets, and my handler is not a CIA agent. My handler is codenamed Ringmaster, and I believe you can guess who she is.”

Here he glances at Sonia and goes on, “Anspach understood the doomsday scenario was that al-Qaeda might get hold of nuclear material. India had exploded a nuclear weapon in 1974, and everyone knew Pakistan was working on one. Pakistan is a Muslim nation full of people sympathetic to the jihad. It was only a matter of time before doomsday arrived. So when the jihad gets hold of some plutonium or whatever, what do they do with it? You can’t make a nuclear device in your kitchen like you do a roadside bomb. You need an expert, with excellent mujahideen credentials, who has kept contact with the movement throughout his education and who has been allowed to dig into classified material, despite those connections, protected of course by Anspach and his friends. AlQaeda needed someone like Abu Lais, and here he is, finished and packaged by the CIA. Naturally, such a figure is close to the leadership of al-Qaeda, but he doesn’t betray them, not even for 9/11 does he betray them; oh, no, he is far too valuable. He waits for the moment when the jihad obtains nuclear material. Yes, Anspach is a farseeing man, Theo, farseeing and very covert. And here we all are.”

The confusion is back on Theo’s face, Sonia observes. He says, “But there
isn’t
any nuclear material.”

There is a silence now, and Wazir takes a long moment before responding. “Why would you think that, Theo?”

“Because I invented the whole thing. It’s a scam. We needed a serious effort to rescue my mother, and the only way the U.S. was going to send a competent force into Pakistan was if they thought Pakistani weapons-grade uranium had gone missing. Farid and the family generated a set of fake conversations to convince NSA that there’d been a theft.” He turns to his mother. “I had to do something. America wasn’t going to try to rescue you, and the ISI was in with the kidnappers. I sent another phony message the other day saying the bomb was here in Paidara. I have a radio. In a minute I’m going to make a call saying that
I’ve located the nuke and the specials will come in and secure the area and that’ll be it.”

“Oh, Theo!” cries Sonia.

“What?” he says, and sees that Wazir is looking at him with a peculiar expression on his face: amazement, dismay, the kind of look one uses with madmen on the street.

“If true, that’s actually quite amusing,” Wazir says. “Because, you know, there
was
a theft. I have seventy-five kilograms of enriched uranium. And I made it into bombs.”