Michael Gruber - The Good Son

He was surprised that she’d never been there. She said she hadn’t traveled much; she was a headquarters kind of person. He said she should go, and said her Pashto was excellent but a little schoolmarmish, it was stripped of colloquialism of the sort you could only pick up in a Pashtun village. He said he’d heard about her; she was a prize catch with her languages. And they talked about her for the rest of their conversation; whenever she tried to turn the talk back to his obviously far more interesting life, he diverted it back with a laugh and a joke.

Since that time, every so often they’d meet for a drink or a meal, and she’d tell him what was going on at the agency and in N Section. Cynthia understood that she was a source, he was using her to keep track of what that part of NSA was doing, and also maybe he was checking up for someone about how free she was with things she wasn’t supposed to talk about-or even know. She didn’t mind. She liked him. She thought they were two of a kind, both dedicated to the secret world, both alone, both a little lonely. It was like having a father who really understood what you were doing and approved and would help if he could, quite unlike her actual father, who wondered why Cynthia, with her grades, had not gone into medicine or law.

Anspach called just after six. She asked him where he was and he said he was in the street outside her apartment house and would she like to get something to eat? She said she would and he took her to their usual place, an Afghan restaurant on the other side of Dupont Circle. It was a tiny place, eight tables, only one of which was occupied when they came in, by a large noisy family, the men talking loudly in Pashto, the women, demure in hijabs, tending to the wriggling children. The proprietor greeted them like old friends, all smiles, handshakes, an embrace and two kisses for Harry, a bow for Cynthia. They sat and he fed them, not bothering with menus. They drank scalding sweet minted tea and ate: kadu, aushak dumplings, fesenjan chicken with Basmati rice, steaming slabs of Afghan naan bread. As usual Cynthia talked about herself, what was happening at NSA, nothing personal. They did not have that kind of relationship, and she had long since given up trying to get anything out of Harry, a worm-proof man.

Inevitably, GEARSHIFT and its discontents came up. She told him the whole story, probably in violation of innumerable security regulations, but she didn’t care. She wanted to know if she was crazy or not. She told him about Abu Lais, and all the unlikelihoods, the phoninesses of the intercepts, and when she ran down he said, “That’s pretty thin soup. Paranoia is a virtue in intel work, but it’s got to be based on something more than hunches.”

“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?”