My father said, “He seems an unlikely fellow to lead a mujahideen band.”

“Oh, for that he has Idris Ghulam Khan, his field commander, an entirely different sort, the usual fanatic. Bahram negotiates with the Pakistanis and plans grand strategy and Idris does the shooting. It seems to work, and now they have pulled off this coup. It is just the sort of affair that Bahram is good at. He likes to keep the world guessing.”

“Can you get to them?” I asked. “Find out what they intend to do with the hostages?”

He frowned and shook his head. “I can leave messages with people who might be in contact with them, but I could not guarantee that al-Faran would receive them. I feel so helpless in this matter.”

“You could do something,” I said, and my father looked at me with interest.

“Anything in my power.”

“You consult with the U.S. government, don’t you? On politics among the mujahideen?”

He smiled faintly and replied, “Officially, no, I’m afraid. But should I be asked to consult, what would you like me to do?”

“Someone must be following the terrorist chatter about this kidnap, in the CIA and the NSA. There can’t be that many people fluent in Urdu or Pashto or Dari working on this end. If you could find out who they are and what they’re talking about over there, it could give us a better idea about what’s going on.”

After that there was some polite protest from Afridi that he was a very small fish and could not pretend to penetrate very far into the guts of the national security establishment, but I pressed him a little and he promised to keep his ears open. I believed him. He’s one of the many my mother has charmed.

When he left, my father asked me why I’d made that request and I told him it could be helpful in our plan.

“What plan?”

“The plan to get the U.S. Army to invade Pakistan and rescue Sonia.”

And I laid it all out for him, just like it had popped into my head while I was filling out that eval form on the conference in the Virginia woods. It would involve my going to Pakistan, yes, but not just wandering around at random, and it would have to involve our family. I thought he would object, being a lawyer and having that legal-procedure cast of mind, but he didn’t. He thought it was a good idea, and I thought this was another example of what so often happened when my mother was in the picture, people cranking it up to do for her what they never thought they would or could do.

4

S hortly after six in the morning, with the sun just a pink promise overhead, Cynthia Lam left her apartment on California Street in the Adams-Morgan district of Washington, D.C., entered her Taurus, and began her commute. She worked at Fort Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of the National Security Administration, and it would take her a little more than forty minutes to drive there at this hour, instead of the ninety that would be required by a later departure. Cynthia liked living in the city and did not mind rising before dawn. She went to sleep early; like many young people on the make in Washington, D.C., she had no appreciable life outside of her job.

Cynthia Lam was the product of a Vietnamese father and a French-Canadian mother. Her father, Colonel Lam, late of the air force of the late Republic of Vietnam, had emigrated to the United States after a spell in a reeducation camp and an extremely trying voyage on a small boat, and like many boat people he had cast ashore in the capital of his former patrons. Like many of his colleagues he had been corrupt, but not very corrupt, for the money he had managed to sequester was just enough to buy a small dry-cleaning establishment on the wrong end of Massachusetts Avenue, a mile or so southeast of Capitol Hill.

The shop did not flourish but survived anyhow, and toward the end of its first year of operation it received the custom of a pretty young woman named Celeste Moreau, a French-Canadian employed as a nanny in the wealthy zone. Colonel Lam was ordinarily morose behind the counter but he had an eye for beauty and a certain look in women’s eyes, which Celeste had, and one day the woman forgot herself and addressed him in French, at which he lit up and answered her in kind, and the kinship of shared language led to other things, and eventually to the birth of the girl Chau-Thuy, who called herself Cynthia.

The small family lived above the dry-cleaning shop, but their life there was not a happy one. Colonel Lam had never got over not being a colonel anymore, with an orderly and a staff to command, and Celeste bridled under the quasi-military discipline. She thought she might as well have stayed in Montmagny and endured the fists of her dad, so it often happened that she ran from him into the streets of southeast D.C., where crack was as common as dog shit and there were plenty of enterprising fellows to teach her how to smoke it and how to pay for it too. The colonel wasn’t having any of that, and at the age of three little Chau-Thuy found herself motherless.

The next Mrs. Lam was a plump, dull Vietnamese girl obtained through an ad, who knew how to follow orders and press shirts. She raised Cynthia with care but without much love, reserving her affection for her own baby, which unhappily never arrived. Colonel Lam’s contribution to this rearing consisted of ignoring the embarrassing fact that Cynthia was a girl. He applied rigor and discipline and was rewarded with a brilliant and beautiful not-quite-son, who won all the prizes and got a full scholarship to Stanford, the most distant school that made an adequate financial offer. (She did get offers from schools closer to home, but she trashed them before her father learned of these successes; at seventeen she was already an expert in disinformation and the keeping of secrets.)

Now Cynthia worked as a translator for NSA, although she did not translate from the Vietnamese. Her usual joke was that although she was Vietnamese and a translator, she was not a Vietnamese translator. Her languages, besides her native English and Vietnamese, were Modern Standard Arabic, Urdu, Dari, and Pashto, and she could do Persian in a pinch as well. This was an unusually rich and useful suite of tongues for an American citizen to own. Cynthia had planned it this way, starting in her days as an undergraduate at Stanford, for it answered the question of how to distinguish herself from among all her frighteningly bright peers, to make C. Lam into a unique product that someone would want to buy.

She’d been amused and contemptuous when the dorm chatter turned to selling out. No one, it seemed, wanted to sell out-all the computer geniuses, the science geniuses, the artistic geniuses said they had a horror of selling out, or so they claimed-but Cynthia wanted nothing more than to sell out, although at a very high price. And since the only thing she had going for herself, besides her startling Eurasian looks, was a facility with languages, and since in the late nineties it was obvious that the languages that would count in the future were those spoken in the contested areas of the earth-the Middle East and South Asia-she had set herself to master them.

This had worked as planned. NSA snatched her up right out of graduate school. She was now the senior translator in her section, but she did not intend to remain a translator forever. She intended to ascend through the GS ranks to the Senior Executive service and beyond.

Because she understood that if she knew the languages she would know the secrets, the subtle hints, the nuances that could only be communicated in a native tongue, and this would give her an unassailable advantage over her monoglot rivals in the perilous world of national intelligence. Eventually she would be one of the mandarins who actually ran U.S. foreign policy behind the shadow-puppet politicians. She would write the critical memos, she would accompany the figurehead on the secret mission, she would propose the options, trade or boycott, peace or war, carefully crafted to force the choice she desired, she would leak the career-destroying indiscretion to the press, she would exercise the power of the anonymous, from which there is no redress.