The Good Son (38 page)

“So you won’t help me.”

He paused and gave her a long stare, but in the dim car she couldn’t quite make out his expression. He said, “Of course I’ll help you. I’m your friend. But you need to think about it more than you have, okay?”

“Okay, Harry,” she said. “I’ll do that.” She held out her hand and he took it and she leaned over and kissed his cheek. He smelled faintly of rose water.

Back in her apartment, confused and angry, she paced back and forth on the living room rug in front of her television set, turned to cable news with the sound off, and tried to make sense of what Harry had said. The content of his talk she dismissed as clearly nonsense—who could believe such a line? The problem lay in his intent. It was a smokescreen, it was
meant
to confuse, and it had started immediately after she’d mentioned Ringmaster and Showboat. No,
SHOWBOAT
, she thought, making the word appear uppercase on the screen of her thoughts, obviously an operation of some kind, something to do with nuclear weapons or nuclear theft, and Ringmaster, now held by the terrorists somewhere in the ungoverned wilds of Pakistan, must be an agent connected with it. Yes, she’d explained her theory that
GEARSHIFT
was a provocation, and he’d accepted it blandly, had even seemed pleased, and then she’d said the secret words and he went,
Cynthia, be a team player; it’s all a game; don’t rock the boat
.

But he’d forgotten how deep she was into the secrets of NSA. She had Top Secret clearance for all matters relating to nuclear theft, and therefore if
SHOWBOAT
had to do with nuclear theft (and what else could it be?) she
would
have known about it because
Morgan
would have known about it and he told her everything; she was sure of that. And suddenly there came the dawning of a new idea: what if
SHOWBOAT
was a
rogue
operation, what if the only people who knew about it were a small cabal at Langley—not the president, not the director of national intelligence, not the directors of NSA and DIA? A secret beyond secrecy! Immediately she felt a thrill race over her skin and sweat popped out on
her forehead.
That’s
what had gotten Harry so uncharacteristically upset; he was in on it too. It was a Pakistan-Afghanistan operation obviously, and nothing whatever went on in that region without Harry Anspach’s thumbprints all over it.

What to do? What to do? Using Harry was now out of the question, and there was no one else she could think of who was both outside her normal chain of command and had the appropriate connections in the intel community—
and
whom she could trust. That was the problem. This thing had to be so big, that. . . okay, slow down, she told herself, she didn’t yet have a lock on the scam. She needed one further piece of incontrovertible evidence.

She made herself relax. She switched on the sound and watched the news and then watched a late-night talk show. Gradually an alternative plan formed in her mind. She didn’t have to knock off Morgan, not if she could use him, if her intel was so good, so undeniable, that
he
could carry it upstairs and save the day; he could be the hero, and he’d owe her big time. He might get a promotion out of it, and she’d make sure she got the credit for the save, and she’d move with him to the higher regions.

Cynthia felt a sense of relief and was in a strange way grateful to Harry for his odd little lecture on loyalty. Yes, a nice finesse. The show ended at midnight and she turned off the set and lit up her computer. She went to her bag and retrieved the small notebook where she’d written down the cell-phone numbers from the Qasir intercepts and also took out two pieces of contraband: the voiceprints of the two parties to the Qasir intercepts. It was a violation of strict NSA policy to remove anything from its premises, but she believed it was justified in exigent circumstances. Besides, no one would ever know.

She rigged the computer to make a digital recording of any conversations it might carry using voice-over-Internet protocol and then placed the first call, to Dr. Qasir’s cell phone, at ten A.M. in Lahore. She got the answering service. In her fine Urdu she identified herself as an officer at his bank with an urgent question regarding his balance and a possible fraud. He called back ten minutes later and she engaged him in conversation for an additional five. Then she called his wife, got her right away, and had another five-minute conversation, posing as a potential source for a story about corruption in the Ministry of Finance.

After running a voice analysis program on both conversations, she
made hard copies of the voiceprints and compared them to those from the original intercepts. Her sensitive ears had already told her what the voiceprints now revealed. The man in the original intercepts was
not
Jafar Baig Qasir; the woman definitely
was
his wife, Rukhsana.

So no one had stolen any uranium from Dr. Qasir’s facility. That intercept was proved phony, and thus all the intercepts after the original Abu Lais one, all that stuff about moving shipments, had to be phony as well. It was the proverbial smoking gun. But she wasn’t going to show it to Morgan yet, because what she’d now learned was bigger than N Section, maybe bigger than NSA. Nor would she send it to Anspach. Harry’s response to her questions had confirmed that it was a major secret, involving the capture of hostages and the faked theft of uranium. Harry had tried to slam the door of the big boys’ club house in her face, but she was not having any of that, oh, no: she was going to find out what
SHOWBOAT
was all about and who Ringmaster was, and just at that instant it popped into her mind how she was going to do that as well. It had been triggered by the memory of the odd odor of roses that had come off Anspach. She was tapping away at the computer when it came to her: the unlikely smell and the computer. Borden.

A
long with the rest of the village, Sonia awakens to the sound of the azan:
make haste to worship, make haste to the real triumph, prayer is better than sleep!
Agreeing, she shakes out of the really interesting dream she has been having, not even pausing to write it down, and goes to the prayer rug in the corner of the room marked with the qibla. She performs the ritual washing with the ewer and basin there and hears the sound of soft footsteps behind her. It is Amin. They wish each other peace, he washes, and they unroll the prayer rugs provided by the management and pray the Fajr, the dawn prayer.

Around them the infidels also arise, in their different ways. Father Shea kneels by his charpoy with his breviary, Manjit sits silently on his charpoy, perhaps in a meditative trance; Schildkraut sits slumped, coughing at intervals, staring at the ground; Ashton stomps heavily to the alcove where the slop pot is kept, trips over a blanket, curses vilely, and urinates with vigor, still cursing. Over this earthy noise they hear a sound that has become distressingly familiar: Porter Cosgrove has begun his groans and wails, and they can hear the soft strained murmur of his wife, trying to provide comfort.

“I thought Quakers were famous for being quiet,” says Amin. “Shame on me! That is uncharitable. See how quickly the peace of prayer evaporates under these conditions?”

“Yes,” says Sonia, “but isn’t it strange then that every religion looks back to its time of persecution as one where the faithful practiced the purest religion with the most fervor? Perhaps it’s different when one isn’t being persecuted for the religion per se.”

“No, I hardly think this captivity has to do with the religious beliefs of

our hosts. It is a tribal matter entirely, in my view. On the other hand, I confess I have become more punctilious in my observances since we were taken. Perhaps the mind is concentrated by the prospect of eternity, except in cases like poor Cosgrove there, when it is utterly destroyed.”

He cast a glance around the room, then stared for a moment at a particular vacant charpoy. He grabbed Sonia’s arm. “Good God! Where is Mr. Craig?”

Ashton emerged from behind the curtain. “What’s the matter?” he asked, when he saw Amin.

“Craig isn’t here. Is he behind the curtain?”

“No, nothing back there but the old piss pot. What, you mean he’s done a bunk?”

“I rather doubt that. They must have come in the night and taken him. My God, can they mean to kill him?”

“Why would they do that?” says Ashton. “He’s worth millions to them alive. Isn’t it obvious now why were were kidnapped? It’s a simple ransom scheme. All of us were what they call side catch in the fisheries game. Although I daresay they’ll find some propaganda use for us. Christ, I could kill for a drink! And I’d pick that weepy little bastard.” He gives the Cosgroves an angry stare. “What an absolute waste of a beautiful woman. Can you credit it? I wonder what she ever saw in him.”

“He did some heroic negotiations in Mozambique,” Sonia says. “Apparently saved countless lives. It’s an attractive trait, I suppose. Everyone responds to danger in a manner characteristic of their temperaments. Some grow stronger, like my friend Amin here, and some go to pieces.”

“Is that so? And what do you do? Seek the comfort of religion?”

“Yes, I do. And you get nasty.”

“Do I? Well, you can just kiss my arse, Miss Laghari, or Bailey, or whatever your name is. As I recall, it was you who concocted this brilliant idea of trekking through the most terrorist-strewn portion of the planet with a billionaire in tow. You might as well have taken out adverts—
PARTY OF GORMLESS DO-GOODERS SEEKING YOUNG MEN WITH WEAPONS. MONEY NO OBJECT
.”

Amin said, “Enough, Harold. Let us not make enemies among ourselves. We have enough in the vicinity.”

A short while later the point is proven, when the door flies open and a group of armed mujahideen storm into the room, Alakazai among them.
The men herd the captives roughly into a group against one wall and Alakazai tells them that a missile strike in Badaur last night has killed fourteen people, four of them children, and that as a result, in accordance with his threat, one of the captives will be executed today after the noon prayer. To Sonia he adds, “Make your selection!”

“I haven’t decided yet,” answers Sonia.

“Then decide by noon, or by God I will take two at once. And before the execution you will have your conference. We shall all attend.”

With that, he leaves the room and his men follow after.

There is silence, except for Porter Cosgrove’s dripping sobs. Amin says, “Gather around this bed, my friends and we will do what must be done. Sonia, you have the cards?”

Sonia brings out her deck and places it on a blanket pulled tight across the string bed. She says, “Everyone cut the deck once, and then I’ll shuffle and deal out one card each. Low card loses, aces are high, repeat deal if there is a tie for lowest. Does everyone understand?”

Nods all around, and then, one by one, they cut the deck. Sonia gathers up the cards, gives them a thorough shuffle, and deals out one card to each. Ashton tosses his down first, turns and walks back to his bed. It is the ten of spades. Amin has the king of spades, Manjit the eight of hearts, Schildkraut the jack of clubs, Father Shea has the jack of diamonds, and Annette the six of clubs. Only Porter Cosgrove has not picked up his card. He is staring at it, like a bird at a cobra.

“Pick up your card, Porter,” says Amin.

“I won’t,” croaks Cosgrove. “I didn’t agree to this. This is not right. They have no right to do this to me.”

His wife reaches out a hand to touch him. Sonia notices that her face looks bleached, the freckles standing out starkly, like the onset of a disease. “Porter, please,” she says.

But he leaps to his feet and runs to the door, upsetting the blanket. The card flips and falls to the floor: the four of clubs. Instantly, Father Shea stands and runs after him, bringing him down with a football tackle. Annette lets out an un-Quakerish wail and moves toward her husband, but Sonia grabs her, folds her in a tight embrace. She resists, struggles a moment, then becomes soft, like a child, and from her throat comes the kind of hopeless keening that Sonia before this has heard only from Afghan women.

It takes the strength of Amin, Ashton, and the tiny contribution of Manjit to subdue Porter Cosgrove. He thrashes, he howls like an animal, he sprays thick saliva. At last, they use ropes torn from the charpoys to tie his hands and feet, and Ashton gags him with a strip of blanket, none too gently. But they can still hear him, cries like a distant bird and thumps as he strikes his head against the wall. In a civilized land he would, of course, be sedated, and his loved ones would not have to bear this, but here they must. Or she must.

Everyone goes to their own charpoy and lies down, exhausted, ashamed, except for Sonia, who sits with Annette and tries to comfort her. She is not good at it, she knows. Annette must sense this too, because she twitches her shoulders at the touch of Sonia’s hands, snarls, and tells Sonia to go away, to leave her alone.

Sonia does not. Instead, she reaches out toward the source of all compassion; she slides off the charpoy, kneels, and begins the zikr that will take her deep into contemplative prayer.