The Good Son (37 page)

“It’s not just hunches, Harry. First of all, I’m the language guy in this, and the language is fake. I know a staged conversation when I hear it. The original Abu Lais colloquy was genuine; I had no doubts at all about
that one. But the others weren’t. You can put that in the bank. The second thing is I did a little checking on Dr. Qasir. The woman he was supposedly talking to is Rukhsana Laghari Qasir, his wife. She’s a journalist, works for a liberal English-language newspaper in Lahore. Have you been following this hostage thing in Pakistan? With Bill Craig?”

“What about it?”

“One of the hostages is Sonia Bailey Laghari, the writer. She’s Rukhsana Qasir’s sister-in-law.”

“So?”

“So she’s being held by a jihadi group. What if someone decided that this would be a good time to engineer a provocation, using the connection between Sonia Laghari and her brother-in-law, the nuclear engineer? Maybe the Laghari family is trying to fake up something. Maybe the point of this provocation has nothing to do with an actual bomb but is—I don’t know—a way to get Sonia Laghari out of the hands of the mujahideen?”

“That’s a big jump, Cynthia. A senior Pakistani scientist is going to commit treason to save his sister-in-law?”

“If it really
was
Jafar Qasir.”

“You haven’t checked?”

“No. I’m telling you, Morgan put this whole thing together on the fly. He finally gets to play in the bigs, he’s not going to check every little detail. But I’m going to put in a call to Qasir to night, and also to his wife, and I’ll match the voiceprints to the intercept. Then we’ll see.”

Harry said, “I want more tea. Would you like dessert? I’m going to have the
phirnee
.”

Cynthia shook her head, and Harry called the waiter over and had a brief Pashto conversation with him. When he went away, Harry said, “I assume if this voiceprint checks out the way you think it will, you’ll go to Morgan and tell him to stop the train.”

“Not Morgan. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”

“You want to go around him.”

“Or something. God, Harry, you have no idea what he’s been like. He doesn’t listen to me, he doesn’t take me to the big meetings. . . . I honestly think that if I show him that the Qasir intercept is a fake, he’ll suppress it or tell me I made it up or I don’t know what. Whatever, I’ll be finished at NSA.”

“Uh-huh. Well, we can’t let that happen.” He smiled. “I’ll tell you what. If it turns out the Qasir intercept is a scam, get your evidence written up, the voiceprints and all, and shoot it over to me by courier. I’ll make sure it gets to the right people and that they know you saved the day.”

She felt some tension drain. “Thanks, Harry. But there’s something else.” She explained about the acoustic freak in the meeting room, what she’d overheard, and her conclusion: “There’s some other link between the hostages and this nuclear scam.”

“What connection could there be?”

“That depends on who this Ringmaster is and what Showboat is. Anything ring a bell?”

Harry looked up at the approaching waiter. He said, “This is really good phirnee they make here. It’s a kind of rice pudding with rose water and pistachio nuts. Want some?”

Cynthia took a fleck of the stuff on her spoon, to be polite. It tasted like cold cream.

He caught her look. “No? Well, it’s an acquired taste. I ate a lot of it in Peshawar during the jihad.” He started in on the dessert. Cynthia waited for what seemed like a long time and then said, “Harry? We were having a conversation.”

He put his spoon down and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “No, actually you were trying to pump me, which I thought we had an agreement you weren’t going to do. My advice to you is to forget you ever heard those words.”

As he said this, he gave her a look she did not recall ever seeing before on Harry Anspach’s face, bleak and cold, the eyes blank and pitiless as a shark’s. It lasted for only a second, but it stunned her; she felt her jaw slacken embarrassingly, like that of a schoolgirl caught at some naughtiness.

“You know, I just remembered,” said Harry, in a different tone, as if that look and his comment had not occurred, “I ran into Sonia Laghari once, in Peshawar, back in—oh, gosh, it must’ve been ’eighty-seven. The war was winding down and we were tying things up, preparing to go back to ignoring Afghan i stan and ditching all the people we’d been supporting, the usual American deal. You know, when I first started with the Agency, in the late sixties, when someone really fucked up, we used
to roll our eyes and say, ‘Afghan i stan,’ like he was going to get assigned to someplace of absolutely no importance. Anyway, I used to have an office, sort of, over a tea shop in the Meena Bazaar, and when I was in town I used to sit there all day drinking mint tea and people knew where to find me. So I’m sitting there one morning and in walks this woman in a burqa. Well, the place just froze, everybody stopped talking and stared, because women just don’t stroll into tea shops in that part of Peshawar, and she walks up to me, hands me a piece of paper, and walks out. The note said she had to see me, matter of life and death, and she’d come by at ten that night, and it was signed Sonia Bailey. Of course I knew who Sonia Bailey was. After she wrote that book on Soviet Central Asia, half the Agency was trying to get next to her, to pump her about what she hadn’t put in the book, but no dice. She said she was a writer and she didn’t want to compromise herself, and so forth, so I gathered they gave up trying. And obviously I was interested. Did you ever read her books?”

“No. Are they any good?”

“Yeah, they are. But you’re not that interested in travel. Or in the people who speak the languages you speak so well.”

Cynthia was about to object to this remark but forbore. A personal revelation from Anspach was so rare she didn’t want to stem his flow.

“So I’m in my room that night, and there’s a knock, and in comes this little guy in the full Pashtun rig: shalwar kameez, waistcoat, turban, little mustache, never saw the guy before, and I jump up and the guy says in Pashto, ‘Relax, Mr. Anspach, I’m Sonia Bailey.’ Could’ve knocked me over. The mustache was phony, of course, but aside from that she
was
a Pashtun guy—language, gestures, the whole works. Better than me, as a matter of fact, and I’m pretty good. I mean, even though I
knew
she was an American woman, I totally
bought
her as a Pashtun man. Uncanny. And what she wanted to see me about was her kid, a teenager. Told me the damnedest story about how her kid had been kidnapped as a boy by this Pashtun bodyguard of her father-in-law’s down in Lahore and had fought up in Afghan i stan for years and she’d thought he was dead, and then she finally figured out that this legendary boy mujahid that everyone was talking about in Peshawar must be her son. And of course I’d heard of Kakay Ghazan; they were singing songs about him in the streets.”

He motioned to the waiter, who was there in an instant with the check. Harry laid some bills on it, which Cynthia noted included a huge tip, and then the patron came out and they had some chat about wonderful to see you again and the best Afghan food in America, all smiles and embraces, and a special smile for Cynthia too, and then they were out in the street.

“So what happened?” Cynthia asked. “With the kid.”

“What? Oh, I pointed her to some people and apparently they got him out of there. Interesting woman, though. Sad about what happened to her, getting kidnapped. I heard there was a fatwa out on her. The Muslims don’t like mixing up the sexes, they like to know who’s a woman and who’s a man. Especially in Mecca.”

“Do you think they’ll kill her?”

“Oh, yeah. If they haven’t already. So that idea you’re developing about how this thing might be a Laghari family domestic intrigue probably isn’t worth pursuing. The woman is toast.” This thought seemed to depress him and they walked back to his car in silence. When they were driving, he said, “Look, Cynthia, I meant what I said about not messing with that stuff you overheard. I know you like to think you’re a real insider, but there’s some shit you don’t want to get inside.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, a little stiffly. “I’ve been put in my place.”

“Yeah, and that attitude. It doesn’t go with your chosen career path. You need to stay on the reservation, do your excellent work, and when the boss says jump, you say, ‘How high, please, sir?’ ”

“You didn’t.”

“Right, and look where it got me. You notice I’m not running Langley these days.”

“No, but you know all about Ringmaster.”

“Never heard of it. And in the same vein you need to look again at this business about
GEARSHIFT
being a jihadist provocation. Do you really want to go ahead with rocking the boat? Morgan won’t appreciate one of his people making an end run.”

“But if it’s a provocation, Morgan’s finished anyway.” She hadn’t meant to say this. He slowed for a red light, and the red glare from above gave his face a devilish cast as he turned and looked at her.

“Yeah, I figured that was your plan, more or less. A chance for a big win and you kick your mentor in the ass, and not only your mentor but the guy you’ve been screwing for years; what does that say? That you’re ruthless,
that you won’t let anything stand in the way of your devotion to the job? A very popular point of view around headquarters and why I couldn’t ever stand working there for long. On the other hand I ended up in Afghan i stan, where betrayal is a refined art, like calligraphy is in China.”

“But I’m right! I mean,
if
I’m right it’s not just about me or Morgan or who comes out on top. It’s a national security issue.”

“Yeah, that’s what they always say. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that used as an excuse for doing something dirty.”

“Oh, fuck it, Harry! Blowing the whistle on a serious mistake is not doing something dirty. You make it sound like getting us kicked out of Pakistan is . . . is some kind of office politics I’m twisting for my own advantage. Jesus, wasn’t the whole 9/11 fiasco and the whole Iraq war fiasco the result of people who knew better not standing up and telling the truth?”

“Yes, but in those cases, the people who knew better didn’t want to risk career damage, so they stayed silent. You’re speaking out because you think it will
advance
your career. You want to be famous as the little girl with her thumb in the dike, the one person who found what all the big shots missed, that
GEARSHIFT
was an enemy provocation.”

“What does that matter,” she snapped, “if it avoids a disaster?”

They had come to her apartment building on California Street, and Harry swung the car into an empty space by a fire hydrant. He shifted in his seat and looked her in the face.

“You
think
it’ll be a disaster, but you don’t know. We never know. You have no idea what will happen if a strike team goes in and shoots up a Pakistani village and there’s no bomb factory there. Maybe it’ll be a nine-day wonder. Maybe the Pakistani parliament gets blown up the same day and it drives the raid clean out of the headlines. Or suppose the worst case: there’s an uproar, a national uprising, and the Islamists take over Pakistan and we have to evacuate Afghan i stan. So fucking what? I can recall when it was going to be the end of the world if we lost Vietnam. Fifty-six thousand American dead, three million Vietnam ese dead, two fucked-up countries, and now American tourists are sipping cocktails in Hue and the grandchildren of the Vietcong are lining up for jobs as busboys in Swiss hotels.”

“I can’t believe this. You’re saying it doesn’t matter if Islamists take over a nuclear-armed nation?”

“Why should it? I spent three-quarters of my working life fighting a completely amoral nation that had three thousand nuclear missiles targeted on American cities, and not one of them ever came close to being fired, so why should I worry about some mullahs having a dozen undeliverable nukes?”

“Unless one of them goes off in New York.”

“Yes, the old bogeyman. Just think for second, Cynthia! No one is ever going to use nuclear weapons against a nation that has nuclear weapons. As soon as anyone has nuclear weapons they immediately become grown-ups. They become part of the balance of terror. Nuclear terrorism is something that happens in the movies.”

“Al-Qaeda isn’t a regular nation.”

“No, and so what? The same rule applies. The al-Q leadership has been living underground for a decade because they knocked down two buildings. They’ll be underground for the rest of their lives. If they used a nuclear weapon on us we’d kill everyone in Waziristan and no one in the world would utter a peep.”

“Be serious, Harry.”

“I am. The only people who can really destroy the United States are the Americans, just like the only people who could destroy the USSR were the Soviets, and they did, and we seem to be following in their footsteps. Modern nuclear-armed nations are essentially invulnerable. They can never be conquered in the sense that Hitler and Stalin conquered nations sixty years ago, but all our political stances and the intel that supports them are based on 1930s thinking.
We have to prevent another Munich
. How often have you heard that? We can’t appease dictators? There
are
no dictators worth our trouble. It’s all a fraud, Cynthia; I mean the high seriousness that attends all this statecraft, this strategizing. It’s completely empty, down to the bones.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Because it’s what I do. It’s the only thing I know. It’s a game, like tennis, existentially meaningless but amusing. It takes me—or took me, I should say—to interesting places, just like a tennis pro, and the possibility of being killed just added to the thrill. I’m a pro at this and I thought you were shaping up to be a pro too. A pro does his job, collects the data, makes an honest report. The people responsible make their decisions and if they’re the wrong ones, in your view, it’s none of your business. Your
business is to keep faith with the people you work for, and the people who work for you, and let the chips fall wherever, because in the end the fate of nations doesn’t depend on whatever bullshit passes for grand strategy.”