The Good Son

“Yes?” says Father Shea in a certain tone, when the pause she made after this remark had gone on for a while.

“Oh, no, nothing like that!” she says quickly. “It was a child I fell in love with, not a man. A little boy; he was four at the time. He was the son of my father-in-law’s bodyguard and his wife, who was the only real friend I had in my father-in-law’s house. It’s hard to explain. I had Theo, I had my own baby, but he wasn’t really mine, he was the heir of the Lagharis, somehow alien and a reminder to me that I had done exactly the same thing as my mother had. I had married a man I didn’t really love in gratitude for saving my life. Every time I looked at Theo I felt trapped, and it made me a terrible mother. I abandoned him twice-though I told myself it wasn’t really abandonment because he had that gigantic, overwhelming family-and I used him. I tried to make him into an ally, or at least someone who wouldn’t be smothered by the family as his father was, or almost was. I mean he married me, poor soul. But my real attention was focused on Wazir.”

“The bodyguard’s son,” Shea says. “What was the attraction?”

“Oh, he was beautiful, first of all, just a knockout. And strong, athletic too, and very, very smart. When he was seven or so I found him in the courtyard with little piles of pebbles. He’d discovered prime numbers and he was scratching with a stick in the dirt trying to generate number theory. But more than that, there was this air about him, even as a little boy, that he was going to be something special, something really grand. And Theo, I have to admit, is a sweet enough man but nothing special; and I wanted to be part of something great. Pride, again, the ghosts of ten generations of impoverished aristocrats howling in my blood.”

“What happened to him?”

So she tells him the story. Afterward he says, “I’m afraid I don’t understand you when you say you sold Wazir to the CIA.”

“In return for their help in getting Theo out of the war and bringing him back to the States. They were recruiting Pashtun mujahideen. They found out where Wazir was and brought me in there, and I convinced him and they took him away, back to America, and sent him to college, as I said. I made it sound like it was a great opportunity, and he went along with it. We were very close. His mother had died while he was on jihad and I was more than a mother to him. I don’t know what they’ve done to or with him, but at the time that didn’t bother me. I just wanted Theo out. Mother love? Or guilt. You tell me.”

“I’m afraid that’s not part of my job, Sonia. But I will say that in Guatemala I heard confessions from rebels and soldiers and paramilitary police officers during the dirty war there, and as a monster you don’t stack up. What are you guilty of? Lack of singleminded devotion? Excessive interest in another woman’s child? Betrayal? Yes, you meddle too much in the affairs of others. Cut it out. Trust in God more. Be easier on yourself. That’s your penance, although being in this place would seem to be penance enough for worse sins than you’ve just told me about. Do you want a formal absolution?”

She did.

Father Shea said the magic words and made the motions, and Sonia thanked him and went back to her own cot. She did feel better. She had made a good act of contrition in her heart and wondered whether that would be sufficient for God. Because she hadn’t told the priest anything near the whole truth.

12

T hey held another meeting of the GEARSHIFT group the following day, but Cynthia Lam was not invited to this one. Ernie Lotz went in her stead, and she understood why. She’d admitted her doubts to Ernie, not as devil’s advocate but for real, and he had naturally passed them along to Morgan. She was now officially unreliable on the next phase of the project, which, according to Lotz, was bending every sinew of NSA to pinpoint the location of the supposed bomb factory. The president had given approval to start pla

Cynthia believed this was a waste of time, because any calls they were likely to intercept would be fakes, like the others. She thought the original Abu Lais call was genuine, but whether or not it involved a nuclear conspiracy was at present unknown. N Section was also receiving feed from optical cable intercepts out of Pakistan; no Pakistani official could pick up a phone, she thought, without NSA listening in, although here, as always, the bottleneck was translation. She was particularly interested in traffic from the security services, because if there really had been a nuclear theft, these should be going mad. But they were not, or not that she could tell. It seemed to be business as usual in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, so either they were back to carrying messages in cleft sticks or there was nothing big going on.

Still, she logged her dutiful hours and even demonstrated zeal in the futile hunt, and at the same time she embarked on a covert venture of her own. First she searched NSA’s secure intranet and found no reference to the code name Ringmaster. This was not particularly surprising. Security clearances at NSA are highly compartmented and her own Top Secret clearance gave her access only to those parts of NSA’s vast trove of information that directly related to her work. Besides that, Ring-master was a CIA operation and, despite changes in intel policy after the 9/11 events, Langley was not inclined to share. She would have to figure out some other way to discover what was going on.

It was, in contrast, no problem to research the nuclear scientist Jafar Baig Qasir, his family, and their co

He hadn’t called back by the time she left work, at around seven, but she knew that Harry kept odd hours, spook hours. He’d rung her up occasionally in the middle of the night.

He might be one part of the thread she was begi