The Good Son (24 page)

“To night would be perfect. “ She handed him the sheets of paper. “Here’s the apparatus list and the company list. Thanks a million, Borden. I owe you a big one.”

“Indeed you do, and yet I surmise that the payback would not include, say, sexual favors of any kind.”

“Correct. But I will allow you to fantasize about me all you want. And by the way, there are women on this floor who might not find that kind of remark amusing.”

“Well,
those
women can kiss my pimply ass,” said Borden. “I happen to be very selective about whom I fantasize about.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I was starting to feel like, you know, cheap? Oh, and Borden.” Cynthia was now moving toward the door. “Let’s just keep this little project between the two of us, okay?”

“What project?” said Borden, and swiveled his bulk back to the screen.

Cynthia stayed at work until eight or so that evening, long enough to determine that Borden had set up his phony Pakistani Web site and sent the e-mails, and then went home. The next three days passed without any
significant intercepts. On the fourth day, a Friday, Cynthia received an e-mail from Borden with an attachment containing the catch from their fake Pakistani government survey. She was perusing the information on her screen when Lotz burst in.

“We got another one. It’s dynamite. So to speak.” He handed her a paper, a sheet from the NSA’s machine translation service.

She read it, put on her headset, and called up the referenced sound file. The Urdu conversation had been recorded off the same cell phone that Cynthia’s original trucker had used outside Kahuta.

KAHUTA: Peace be with you, brother.
PESHAWAR
: And with you be peace. All is well?
KAHUTA
: Yes, we are on the road. We have the birdcage concealed under sacks of wheat.
PESHAWAR
: And it’s satisfactory? No leaks?
KAHUTA
: No, we tested it. We used one made by the same plant that manufactures birdcages for Kahuta itself.
PESHAWAR
: It might have been better to dispense with the barrel and just bury the material in a sack of wheat.
KAHUTA
: No. It has to be shielded. It may be a while before the theft is discovered, but we can’t take the chance that an alarm will go out and the authorities will be watching with . . . ah . . . special equipment.
PESHAWAR
: Well, you know best. You have done wonderful work! How long will you be?
KAHUTA
: Not long. A day or two at the most. Tell our friends they will have their birdcage by Thursday evening at the latest. God is great!
PESHAWAR
: God is great! Death to the enemies of God!

She listened to it three times, making notes, and then removed the headset.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Speaker ID was fairly accurate for a change. I assume the search term was
birdcage
.”

“Yeah, we have a priority on it. Anytime anyone mentions a birdcage on any of the phones we’re tracking we generate a translation. They use the English term.”

“Yes, people there often do with technical words,” said Cynthia. She stared at the transcript and recalled the care with which the trucker (if he was a trucker) had mentioned the word. He’d used it three times. Cynthia didn’t think he would’ve done that if he’d been talking about structures for confining fowl rather than the fifty-five-gallon steel drums with internal bracing that were used throughout the world to transport highly radioactive matter.

Lotz’s attention had turned to Cynthia’s computer screen. “What’s that stuff?” he asked.

“Just a survey I did. Four days ago, M. K. Chupa Metal Fabricators Ltd. purchased from Lahore Foundry Supply Company Ltd. a Morgan Mark IV dual-energy bale-out furnace and a used Bridgeport Series One manual milling machine, plus graphite crucibles and various other casting and machining accessories, for the equivalent of ninety-three hundred dollars and they paid cash. Before you ask, Pakistani tax records have no record of any M. K. Chupa Ltd.
Chupa
, by the way, is Urdu for “hidden.” Could be just a coincidence, I guess.”

“The bomb factory,” said Lotz. “That would seem to be the closer, along with that line in our conversation here where the Kahuta guy says, ‘It has to be shielded. It may be a while before the theft is discovered, but we can’t take the chance that an alarm will go out and the authorities will be watching with. . . ah. . . special equipment.’ ”

“Yes, and that’s to make us believe they’re worried about radiation monitors,” said Cynthia. “And yet they’re not worried about blurting the whole thing out over a cell phone that might be compromised. And they bought their supposed equipment on the open market in Pakistan instead of smuggling it into the country, even though smuggling is half of Pakistan’s GDP. It’s absurd, Ernie! At the levels of al-Q we’re talking about, they smuggle
everything
they use, including cell phones, which they typically use once and then ditch. No one involved in a plot like this would use the same phone day after day to report on the progress of a load of stolen weapons-grade.”

“Abu Lais did. And we know for sure that he was talking to al-Zaydun; we have the voiceprint. Do you think
that’s
a fake too?”

“No, but one ambiguous conversation does not a nuclear conspiracy make.”

“So what
would
convince you, Cynthia, a mushroom cloud? You know what I think? I think you’ve got stage fright.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about us, N Section. For years we’ve been sitting in our tiny offices, forgotten, more or less, watching for something that nobody really thought would happen, and now it
has
happened and suddenly we’re going to be the most important people in the whole government. This intel is going to go from our hands straight to the president’s people, and they’re going to want to make damn sure it’s right. And you’ve got butterflies.”

She looked at him coldly. He seemed a different person now, hectic, avid, like a frat boy planning a date rape. She said, “You’re wrong. It has nothing to do with my personal shit. The tapes are
wrong
. The people on them are reading scripts. And if you’d spent as much time listening to real conversations as I have you’d know that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe that’s why we have analysts and why the munchkins in the headsets don’t get to make the decisions.”

She stared at him, stunned by the nastiness of this remark from the ordinarily genial, flirty Ernie Lotz. The supposed plot must have unleashed some kind of testosterone storm in the men involved. She had little hope that Morgan would be any different.

Nor was he, later in the day, after Lotz had briefed him on the latest intercepts and the commercial information, what he insisted on calling
Lam’s bomb factory
.

The three of them were in Morgan’s office. With every bullet point on Lotz’s briefing paper, Morgan seemed to expand, his face to glow, his bright blue eyes to send forth sparks. The grand finale was the playing of the Qasir intercept. He didn’t need Cynthia to understand that. Lotz concluded with a recommendation that the GEARSHIFT material should

be passed up the line for an executive decision. When it was finished, he turned to Cynthia and said, “That should satisfy even you, Cynthia.”

They both looked at her. Seconds ticked by in silence. She said, “What do we know about this guy Qasir?”

“What do you mean?” said Lotz. “He’s legitimate. He checks out. He’s in Kahuta; he handles nuclear materials for their bomb program. What more do we have to know?”

“His politics maybe?”

Morgan said, “Oh, please! You think he and his wife are in on your conspiracy too?”

“I didn’t say that,” she replied, trying to keep the snap from her voice. “I have reservations, I won’t deny that. I still believe this could all be a clever provocation. But I concur with Ernie’s recommendation. There’s no way we can come to a conclusion just on the basis of comint. We have to have people on the ground. Besides that, if there’s one thing we learned from 9/11, it’s that if intel agencies don’t share all their data it leads to disaster. It may be a provocation, but if it’s not, and someone detonates a nuke and it comes out that we had this data and did nothing . . . I don’t even want to think about it. So let’s get everyone in the same room and find out whether this thing is real.”

It was a reasonable finesse, she thought, and was satisfied to feel the tension drain from the office. Morgan favored her with an amused smile. She was a team player again. This is why empires collapse, she thought: Vietnam, 9/11, Iraq. Everyone wants to be a team player, to bask in the respect of their peers and the favor of their superiors. She was no different.

“Okay, generate a briefing,” Morgan said. “Fifteen minutes. Just the data and our conclusions. I’m sure I can get a meeting with both Holman and Spalling on the strength of this. After that, I think it’ll move very quickly indeed. Don’t plan on going anywhere until this is resolved.”

Interesting, that. He’d given her the responsibility for pulling together the briefing:
her
, not Ernie. She could see the brief wave of disappointment pass across Lotz’s face. Morgan was rewarding her for caving on this; besides, she was a lot better at putting together briefings than Lotz was. She had the language skills.

While the meeting was being organized by those at levels far above her, Cynthia returned to her office and worked on the PowerPoint presentation Morgan had ordered. When it was done, she e-mailed it to him and an hour later it came back with a note requesting some corrections, all
weakening the caveats, which she duly made. After that she noodled. She read some technical articles, answered e-mail from colleagues, and stared blankly at the door and the wall clock.

At ten of six her phone rang and it was Morgan’s secretary telling her to be in front of the building in five minutes. She was, and in a few moments Morgan came down the drive in a gray government car. She got in, hauling her special NSA laptop and a stack of copies of the presentation and tapes of the source material.

“We’re going alone?” she asked, as he drove off.

“No, of course not. Spalling and Holman are coming in their own car.”

Yes, she should have known that. The iron law of bureaucracy insisted that no one can talk to anyone several rungs higher in the chain of command without the intermediate rungs being in the room. James Spalling was the deputy director of operations, NSA, and Ken Holman was the head of W, Morgan’s boss.

Anticipating her next question, Morgan said, “We’re going to Liberty Crossing.”

Cynthia nodded. The Liberty Crossing Building in McLean, Virginia, was where the National Counterterrorism Center had its headquarters. The main purpose of this tiny organization was to encourage the mammoth organizations that actually countered terrorism on behalf of the American people to talk to one another and to avoid the ignominy that attended upon one counterterrorist mogul having to actually visit the lair of another. She asked Morgan who would be there and he said, “The usual cluster-fuck,” which did not encourage conversation, so they drove the rest of the way in silence.