Michael Gruber - The Good Son

“People make mistakes,” he said. “The history of intelligence is full of boners.”

“Yes, Lloyd, we both know the history of intelligence,” she replied. “But I’m more concerned with recent history. This country is involved in two wars right now, and both of them are the result of massive systemic intelligence failures: we missed 9/11, and that’s the war in Afghanistan, and we screwed up on WMD, and that’s Iraq.”

“I’d hardly call Iraq an intelligence failure. There was no evidence of WMD because there weren’t any weapons.”

“No, but our intel on the Iraqis was so piss-poor that any bunch of bozos could make a temporarily plausible case for an invasion. Now we’re making noises at Iran. So I ask you, who would benefit from a stolen-nuclear-weapons scare in Pakistan? Who would love to see us involved in yet another attack on a Muslim country?”

“Iran?”

“For starters. The mullahs would love it. Plus, any hints that the Paks are not reliable custodians of nuclear weapons drives a wedge between us and them. Actually, al-Q would like nothing better than a U.S. involvement in northern Pakistan. The country would come unglued. Half the population would go jihadi. A big chunk of their military and intelligence service are sympathizers already; so we have to make absolutely sure that this is the real thing before we pass it upstairs.”

“There are no absolutely sure things in intel,” he said. “That’s one of the things you learn when you’ve been in the business as long as I have. I got a good feeling about this one, Cyn. And I’d like to win one for a change.”

As he said this Morgan leaned back in his chair, and Cynthia saw his eyes pass across a souvenir of a lost one, a framed North Vietnamese battle flag Morgan had brought back from his tour as a junior army intelligence officer in 1968. That was one of his object lessons: we had tried to fight a war where the enemy knew everything about us and we knew practically nothing about them-or, rather, we had all the information we needed but wouldn’t use it.

After a moment, Morgan continued. “Look, get off anything else you’re doing and tell Ernie to do the same. Focus on the intercepts from Peshawar and the Kahuta area. I’ll make sure all that material is routed to you. If you get any confirmation, anything at all, come direct to me.”

They spoke about details for a while, and Cynthia asked if he wanted to open a permanent file on the intercept. Morgan said he did and, after consulting his computer and a list of available code names, he told her to call the file GEARSHIFT.

As she left she reflected once again on Morgan’s perfect discretion. Within the bounds of the institution, even when they were alone in an office, never did he indicate by a look or an action that they were anything but subordinate and superior. In this too was Morgan a career model.

Cynthia went back to Ernie Lotz’s office and found him hunched over his keyboard.

“Are you recovered?” she asked.

“My shorts are still smoking, but I’m fine. He never yells at you like that.”

She ignored this. Cynthia didn’t really know how widespread was the intel that she was sleeping with Morgan, but gossip usually filled in the blanks

“Actually, I should have thought of checking the alleged al-Zaydun voice against the files. Sorry, my bad. Did you have any luck with it?”

“I did some preliminary checks. The software says it’s the same voice. So it’s the real deal.”

“It could be. Morgan certainly thinks so.”

“And you don’t?”

“I’m reserving judgment.”

Lotz made a face. “Yeah, but if it’s real and we don’t blow the whistle, we’re in deep shit. Why do you think it’s a fake?”

“I didn’t say it was a fake. I’m a little suspicious, is all. And I didn’t like that cat-eating-cream look on Morgan’s face. He’s been waiting for this for years. It justifies his whole existence. So let me play devil’s advocate for a while. Anyway, this intercept is now GEARSHIFT, and just for the three of us until further notice. You didn’t tell anyone else about it, did you?”

“No. I put it up on my Facebook page, but no one ever looks there. I have three friends, and one of them is my mom.”

Cynthia let this go by, and there was the kind of silence that occurs when someone has made an inappropriately facetious remark. Ernie was prone to these little high-school-level comments, excusable as office banter, self-deprecating remarks about his social life, although why he should have trouble in that department was beyond Cynthia’s comprehension. The sad-puppy thing did not suit him, she thought, or maybe it really did and it didn’t suit her. Irritating, at any rate.

After a moment, she said, “We need some way to refocus the comint screens around voiceprint catches off these two subjects,” and they began to work in their usual easy professional way, planning how to lay off their current duties on others and roughing out communication intelligence protocols.

Afterward, Cynthia went back to her own office and started to read through recent transcripts from relevant areas. Now that they had this lead, she thought, maybe other conversations that seemed innocent at the time might appear in a different and more interesting light. She searched for package, first phase, sheikh, occurring in the same intercept and also for that odd locution, some small time. Not an idiom, the phrase was more likely to be used by someone not at home in Modern Standard Arabic.

As she worked, she thought about her paranoia, if that was the word. She knew Morgan didn’t think that their enemy’s psychology ran to this kind of deception. They were true believers, not at all like the cynical gamesmen of the late Soviet regime. These people were perfectly frank about their aims. They felt that God was on their side and, while they were crafty enough, they were not crafty in that way. On the other hand, there was always a first time. The events of 9/11 had drilled that lesson deep into the minds of the entire U.S. intelligence community.

So she would try to keep a lid on Morgan’s enthusiasm. And as she thought about this she considered the possibility that his enthusiasm, his desire to be at the center of the largest conceivable kind of national security crisis, would lead him to overstep, to push the evidence further than it warranted. And if he did that, and if she was the one who reined the whole thing in, who prevented America from falling into yet another blunder fueled by faulty intel-well, that would be it, the much-desired coup. She would be made. Morgan would be destroyed, of course, at the same time, and as she reflected on this she found, a little to her surprise, that she didn’t mind at all.

B ound together in a line, the Conference on Conflict Resolution on the Subcontinent: A Therapeutic Approach is herded through the night over rocky trails, across drifts of sand and shale that drag at their feet, through ankle-twisting boulder fields, across freezing streams. Sonia is tied behind Karl-Heinz Schildkraut and in front of Annette Cosgrove, who is the last of the coffle. Schildkraut is wearing European slip-on shoes and in the waning daylight Sonia can see they are coming to pieces. Sonia herself is wearing sandals made of buffalo hide, of local manufacture, and she has complete confidence in them, although her feet are now soaked and numb with cold. Schildkraut stumbles often and several times falls heavily. When this happens their silent captors jerk at his rope and prod him with the butts and barrels of their rifles until Sonia and Annette grab him by his arms and help him to his feet. He is ashen and wheezing, and Sonia tries to suppress useless feelings of guilt. She thinks he might not survive this travail.