Michael Gruber - The Good Son

After the spring rolls, she pulled her laptop out of her briefcase, which was the signal for the staff to leave her alone. No private device that can record or send electronic data is allowed within the buildings of NSA, so in order to check her personal e-mail during the day Cynthia had to leave Fort Meade for a place like this or one like it. The computer store had a powerful Wi-Fi signal and she had arranged with them, for a small fee, to use it whenever she was in the area. She logged on, found a note from someone she knew in school, answered it briefly, and deleted another message from a head-hunting firm looking for translators. She got a few of these every week. The rest of the inbox was junk mail-drugstores, sexual aids, a scam that asked her to contact a Swiss bank about her account-and two more of those peculiar encrypted messages. She’d received half a dozen of these in the past week, clearly from someone who had mistaken her for another person, or was it the back-wash of another more obscure computer scam? She deleted all of it.

After lunch she went to the mail center and used her key to open the mailbox she kept there. It was usually stuffed with catalogs and magazines and mail-order merchandise. Cynthia was a big Internet shopper, and she lived in an apartment building where the postman or UPS guy had to leave packages on the lobby floor, from which they would occasionally disappear. Adams-Morgan was a neighborhood where such things still occasionally happened, hence this mailbox convenient to work.

She opened the box and was astonished to find it empty. It was never empty. She went to the clerk at the desk, a large tan woman with beads in her hair, and asked her if there had perhaps been some mistake. Perhaps the label with her name on it on the inside of the mailbox had come loose? The clerk checked and said it was right where it should be. But there was something wrong. The woman, usually cheerful and willing, often too willing, to chat and pass the time of day, was reserved, close-faced, avoiding Cynthia’s eye. Had the woman stolen something? Cynthia dismissed this thought as unworthy, unlikely. She’d used the place for years without a problem.

Back at NSA, as she left her car, another car pulled into a nearby slot. Two men in suits got out, and as Cynthia walked by them she smiled and nodded in a friendly way. There was no response from the men; their faces stayed blank, as if they were looking at a telephone pole or a dog. Since passing through puberty Cynthia had seldom experienced this response to a social smile directed at a man, and it disturbed her. Was there something wrong with her face, cilantro on the teeth? When she returned to her office she checked herself out in a hand mirror. No, the same attractive face stared out at her but with worried eyes.

No, this was stupid; it was stupid to attribute meaning to a set of coincidences. She checked her office e-mail again and found a couple of routine circulars from administration, one about the schedule for annual evaluations and the other relating to changes in reimbursement for mileage in private vehicles. Ah, she still existed! She put the day’s slight oddities out of mind and returned to her headphones and the dull conversations that might or might not be terror talk. Some were simple duds, people mouthing off about America or the Jews. These she erased with a few keystrokes. Even the vast storage facilities of NSA could not contain the far vaster flux of the intake. A few that seemed to fit certain predesignated patterns she saved in various files. Across the breadth of the great ear of the agency, scores of others were doing the same task, searching for patterns, specific words, the output of certain SIM cards, in hopes that significance might emerge from the buzz. Tedious work: she understood that it was necessary, but she hoped she would not, personally, be doing it much longer.

It was just after three when, with an almost physical shock, she heard it, a familiar voice, one she’d listened to dozens of times, the anonymous man who was pretending to be the nuclear engineer, Jafar Baig Qasir. Quickly she checked the log file. The call had been placed from Kahuta at 10:46 A.M the previous morning, near midnight on the East Coast of the United States. Both parties were speaking Urdu, and she did not recognize the other one, who was in Lahore. She listened to it again:

KAHUTA: Peace, brother. Any news?

LAHORE: Peace to you, brother. Yes, the best. The products are completed and ready to ship. The courier just arrived from Paidara.

KAHUTA: When will they leave Paidara?

LAHORE: Very soon, not more than a day or two, God willing. The trucks are moving as we speak.

KAHUTA: Wonderful! I would not like to be in Tel Aviv or New York next month. I assume the money has been distributed.

LAHORE: Yes, I made the wire transfers myself. It is all done, and soon the whole world will know it. Death to America!

KAHUTA: And to Israel! God is great!

LAHORE: God is great! God be with you, brother.

KAHUTA: And with you.

Cynthia felt her belly roll and had to take several deep breaths. This was insane, patently false, but the GEARSHIFT people would never stop to ask why men who had stolen weapons-grade nuclear material would reveal the location of their bomb factory over a cell phone. They’d bite so hard the hook would never work loose, the elite troops would go on full alert, the planes would spin up their engines on some midnight runway, and the invasion of Pakistan would be under way. Almost without volition her fingers flew to certain keys and the message disappeared. She knew it would reside in backup for thirty days and then be purged, but she didn’t care. This whole thing would be over far sooner than that.

Could anyone else have seen or heard it? She checked the machine translation files. There it was, a little crude, as ever, but the gist was clear and the place-name Paidara hung there on the screen, the hook’s juicy worm. But she was the chief translator and had certain privileges on the system. She had the authority to correct certain critical translations before they were distributed. It was necessary to log in to the system and leave her fingerprints on the changes she now made, but no one would notice that. She did it all the time. When she was done, the place-name was gone and the conversation made as anodyne as possible. Maybe bad guys were shifting money around, so what?

But maybe someone had seen it and recognized its supposed importance. She got up and found that her legs would hardly support her weight. Her face felt odd, and when she touched it her fingers came away wet. Sweat was running in streams from her hairline down to her neck, as if she had just completed a heavy workout. That was ridiculous. She hardly sweated even when she actually worked out. She ran from her office to the bathroom.

Who was this person in the mirror? What had happened to the famously cool Cynthia Lam? A wave of nausea griped her, and she fled to a stall and heaved futilely over the bowl, willing the attack to pass. After a quarter of an hour she felt calm enough to approach the mirror again, where she dried herself with paper towels, adjusted her hair and makeup, and realized that she was feeling this way because she had crossed a line for the first time in her life. Although she had no problem with dissimulation and the subtle lie, never before had she done anything frankly illegal. She had never shoplifted, cheated on exams, or inflated her résumé, nor had she ever even had a traffic ticket. She had been a good girl and had reserved a silent contempt for those who weren’t, who committed impulsive and stupid acts.

She practiced a disarming smile. She thought it looked ghastly but it might do for Ernie Lotz. He answered her knock, she applied the smile, and asked him if he’d found anything hot in the recent traffic.