Michael Gruber - The Good Son

“Then why do you do it?”

“Because it’s what I do. It’s the only thing I know. It’s a game, like tennis, existentially meaningless but amusing. It takes me-or took me, I should say-to interesting places, just like a tennis pro, and the possibility of being killed just added to the thrill. I’m a pro at this and I thought you were shaping up to be a pro too. A pro does his job, collects the data, makes an honest report. The people responsible make their decisions and if they’re the wrong ones, in your view, it’s none of your business. Your business is to keep faith with the people you work for, and the people who work for you, and let the chips fall wherever, because in the end the fate of nations doesn’t depend on whatever bullshit passes for grand strategy.”

“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.