Michael Gruber - The Good Son

As often when she listened to music, an idea coalesced. She considered it, turned it around, found it potentially profitable, if not strictly a part of the normal order. After some browsing on the Internet, she worked for a while until she had covered half a dozen sheets of paper. With these in hand she left her office to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Morgan’s prohibition. She walked down many a sterile hallway and up several flights of stairs until she came to the part of NSA devoted to scouring the Internet for terrorist chatter, and specifically to the office of Walter Borden.

Borden was in. Borden was rarely out. On his own admission, he had no life, was a self-proclaimed nerd of the pear-shaped rather than the pencil-necked variety, and his office door was covered with a collage of Dil-bert cartoons, beer coasters, and dozens of tiny strips from fortune cookies. A bumper sticker proclaimed, NERDS DO IT DIGITALLY. Cynthia had a history with guys like Borden, having learned early how easy it was to obtain intellectual favors from desperate misfits-math tutoring, computer repair-in return for a modest investment of smiles and badinage. And she enjoyed the hopeless worship.

She knocked and without waiting for a response entered the usual nerd nest-wrappers and cans on the floor, science-fiction posters on the walls, cartoons stuck to his whiteboard with magnets. It had a peculiar smell, too, like someone had cooked an unsuccessful dessert featuring caramel and canned mushrooms. The origin of Borden’s smell was a topic in the local hallways.

His job was keeping abreast of the innumerable Web sites, most of them ephemeral as mayflies, that the international jihad used to keep its real and prospective membership up-to-date and to recruit new members. One reason they were ephemeral is that Borden and his section took them down by technical wizardry nearly as soon as they arose, except for a rotating number of favored ones, which they filled with misinformation or embarrassing pictures. Borden often remarked that he could hardly believe that they were paying him to do this work.

His office, as usual, was dark except for the glow of a huge flat-panel screen. Borden had his headset on, so Cynthia had to tap him on his Spiderman T-shirt to get his attention. He swiveled in his chair and brightened when he saw who it was.

“Hi, Lam,” he said. “Look, we can’t keep on meeting like this. People are starting to talk.”

“Let them, Borden. My passion for you knows no bounds.”

“I don’t think so, Lam of my heart. I think you’re fascinated by my unearthly intelligence, but you don’t love the real me deep inside.”

“You got me, Borden. I’m a faithless slut.” She glanced at the screen in front of him. It was blue and covered with dense lines of code. “What are you up to? It looks like work.”

“Yes, but it’s nothing I could put in girl language. It’s part of the AMICUS project.”

The name stirred a vague memory. “This is the thing about intel coordination? I didn’t realize it was up yet.”

“It’s not. It’s years away. Decades, even.”

“I’m surprised. I thought that was a big DCI priority.”

“Yeah, right, like anyone cares what the DCI thinks. Look, in the first place you have dozens of different systems, all mutually incompatible, a lot of them written in languages no one uses anymore. You could never get them to talk to one another. So let’s have a single system that everyone uses, right? I mean, we could just agree on a commercial database system and tweak it a little, but oh, no, the government can’t do that, it might save too much money, so there are endless committee meetings about agreeing to formulate a plan to plan for developing a data plan. It’s like riding on a glacier. But you didn’t come down here to talk about data set coordination. Tell me you want to sit on my lap and coo sultry songs in my ear.”

“I’ll have to take a rain check on that. Actually, I was interested in Paki -stani sites, any chatter about a big coup, any approaching major blow to the infidels.”

“This is nuclear, right?” Borden knew where she worked. “Someone lifted a bomb.”

“No one lifted a bomb, Borden. Get real. If someone lifted a bomb there’d be red lights flashing in the hallways and a whoop-whoop sound would be playing over the hall speakers. I’m just following up on some suggestive comint, and rather than send it through the usual channels I thought I’d come down here and get it from the unearthly intelligence himself.”

“Or itself. But now that you mention it, there was this little beauty. It sprang into being, as near as we can figure, at 9:53 P.M. our time and immediately went viral in the jihadi Web world.”

He pressed keys, and the screen of code shrank to a window and another, larger window popped up. Borden pulled out his headphone jack and the sound of a Pashtun song filled the room, a man singing, with tabla and rubab in back, a war song about jihad and how sorry the infidels will be when the Muslims take their revenge, how they will wail. The screen showed quick cuts of European and American cities, interwoven with shots of nuclear explosions and devastated cities: Paris, explosion, Hiroshima; New York, explosion, Hamburg ’44; and so on. Cynthia watched it twice.

“No idea where this came from, of course,” she said.

“Well, they try to mix us up, the usual anonymous cutouts, run it through Moscow and then Kiev and then Iceland, et cetera, but I’m pretty sure this one comes out of a server in Peshawar. There are technical similarities with some stuff we know was produced there, so odds-on it’s the same guy or group. Their production values are coming right along, I have to say.”

“They’ve mastered production values? Why fight on?”

“I agree,” said Borden. “You should order your burqa before the rush.”

“Seriously, though, the real reason I came down here was I need a favor.”

“I’m listening.”

“Suppose the Pakistani Ministry of Trade wanted to do a survey to see if certain items had been purchased domestically or imported into Pakistan over, say, the past three months, and because they’re an up-to-date country they would send an official e-mail to these firms, with a form attached, which I’ve designed for them, and the merchants would fill out the form and send it to a link at the official Ministry of Trade Web site but really-”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m all over it like a cheap suit,” said Borden. “The e-mail part is trivial, of course, and obviously you don’t want the Pakistanis to know you’ve doing this survey in their name. Interesting little problem.” Borden looked up to the ceiling and his eyes started to glaze as the unearthly intelligence cranked up.

Cynthia said, “So you can do it?”

Borden glanced at her, rolled his eyes upward, and mimed typing. “Mozart on the keys. To night too late?”

“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.