Michael Gruber - The Good Son

“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.”