She raises herself up and points a steady finger at Idris Ghulam. “You have forgotten the wisdom of Rahman, who says, ‘Do not be fooled by the outer appearance of a man; look at the inside of the nut to see whether it is soft or hard.’ I am not a man, but I am hard as steel inside. And I tell you that if you kill me except by the letter of the fiqh, my blood will be upon you, and my son will avenge that blood according to the law of the Pashtuns, upon you and your brothers and your father and your sons. Be warned, Idris Guhlam. This is not an idle threat, for I have no ordinary son.”
She turns and stares at the man with the hennaed beard.
“Sir, forgive me for addressing you, but I require your witness. You were in the real jihad against the Russians, were you not?”
The man slowly nods his head.
“And when you fought there, did you hear of a certain Kakay Ghazan?”
Again he nods, and says, “Everyone has heard of Kakay Ghazan. He was a famous warrior, although a boy.”
“He is still a famous warrior,” says Sonia, “but now he is a man, and I am his mother.”
Consternation. The three men all begin talking at once, but Sonia’s voice rises above theirs; now she is on her feet, her head aching, but speaking directly to Idris. “And he is a Pashtun of the Barakzai, of the Taraghzai, of the tribe Kakar, and all these he will raise against you, if you kill me outside the law, so beware, Idris Ghulam! You thought you had a load of fat geese, ready for plucking, but one of them is a scorpion.”
For a moment Idris seems mesmerized by her revelation, but then he comes to himself, resumes command, gestures to the guard, and says, “Take her away! Lock her in the stable! Now!”
The guard grabs Sonia roughly. She points again at Idris and says, “Nor will you sleep easily, Idris Ghulam, until the day you repent.”
Sonia is hustled out, but she can hear the sound of violent argument coming through the door. She shakes her head and works her swelling jaw. She thinks it has been a very successful interview and looks forward to one with the real leader of the group.
8
C ynthia often lost track of time when she worked with sound files, a habit that originated during her language studies in graduate school. In the language lab, eyes closed in concentration, in the little soundproofed cubicle with a big padded Bose headset on her ears, the uncomfortable syllables of a conversation in Arabic or in Dari filling her mind and her foot on the replay pedal so she could hear the same phrase over and over like some kind of rap sample, she would fall into a strangely delicious state, bordering on intoxication, although her auditory senses, at least, were strung to the last notch. She loved it, she supposed, because of the element of control. She had always been a good girl up until then, which is to say she fulfilled the expectations of others-her father, her teachers, her peers, society at large-but in the lab she was the queen of time; with the headset on, the various external pressures on her seemed to dissolve in that universe of perfect feedback, the voices starting, stopping, repeating at the tap of her foot. She spent more time in the lab than she had to-it was a kind of addiction, she supposed later, as was her pursuit of perfection in the shaping of sounds in her own throat. They had a machine that gave you a word or phrase and you had to repeat the phrase perfectly, if you could, and then the machine showed you a sonogram that told you how well you’d done and gave you a score. Cynthia had reached the maximum score in all her languages.
Here was something.
She played the sound file over again. Two men were speaking over cell phones in Urdu. She checked the source notation and found that one cell phone was in Kahuta and the other was in Lahore. They were young voices, and the one in Kahuta was obscured by what sounded like wind and motor traffic; the man was outside, at any rate.
KAHUTA: Hello, is that you, Walid?
LAHORE: Please! No names!
KAHUTA: Sorry. I am told to tell you we have the shipment on board.
LAHORE: Excellent. You can leave immediately?
KAHUTA: Absolutely. I have the directions.
LAHORE: No trouble at all? No alarms from the… the facility?
KAHUTA: Nothing. It went as we planned.
LAHORE: Thank God! Everything is ready at the destination; all the equipment arrived today. They should be setting it up now. How long do you think-
KAHUTA: No more than three days, God willing. I will call in on the way.
LAHORE: Then peace be with you, brother, in God’s name.
KAHUTA: And peace unto you. God is great!
Cynthia typed out the translation on her computer, removed her headset, and sat for several minutes in thought. There was something wrong with the colloquy. For one thing, the conversation was in Urdu, which was fine-Urdu was the official language of Pakistan-but in general, when Pakistanis conversed with people they knew they spoke in their cradle tongues, of which that land had hundreds: Panjabi, Lahnda, Pashto, Sindhi, and on and on. That these two were speaking Urdu to each other meant they were from different origins and the transaction was a commercial one, which didn’t seem right. Terrorist groups were famously tight, especially in that part of the world, with its endemic mistrust of the stranger, one reason why they were nearly impossible to infiltrate. And there was something else: the tone and rhythm of the talk were a little off; there were none of the minor hesitations and repetitions that appear in natural conversations, no ahs, no hmms. It was almost as if they were reading a script.
Or maybe she was losing it. She attached the source header, the sound file, and her translation to an e-mail and zapped it off to Ernie Lotz: READ THIS AND LET’S TALK.
She put the headphones back on and returned to the stolen etheric whispers. Even with the most sophisticated electronic filtering, there was still an enormous amount of dross to get past. A lot of people in South Asia were talking about shipments, many of which were illegal but were of no interest to NSA or to her. The listening at this point was automatic, and her mind was free to drift above the chatter. As she often did, she thought about her career and where it was going. N Section was a fine place to learn the ropes, but it was a dead end. Vital, yes, because obviously terrorists could not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, but it was vital in the way that night watchmen were vital. You didn’t want the factory robbed or burned down, but you also were not going to offer the guy with the square badge a seat on the board. No, N was a springboard to something better, a wider scope…
Something touched her shoulder and she yelped, tore the headset off, and spun around in her chair.
“Jesus, Ernie! Don’t come in and touch me when I’m listening!”
“Sorry,” he said, “but you have to see this.” He handed her a piece of paper.
“Did you get my message?” she asked.
“Yeah, but that’s nothing compared to this.”
It was a few lines of typescript in English.
“Who translated this?”
“No one. It was English in the original. Read it!”
She did.
MAN: Hello, it’s me. Don’t be angry, my dear, but I have to tell you I will not be home to night.
WOMAN: What? Are you mad? To night is the party for Shira and the Sajjids.
MAN: I am sorry, my love, but it is quite impossible. We have an emergency at work.
WOMAN: God help us! Not the reactor?
MAN: No, thank God. But it is almost as bad.
WOMAN: What then? What is more important than your daughter’s happiness?
MAN: I can’t tell you. It is a security issue.
WOMAN: Before God, if you do not give me a proper explanation I will never speak to you again. This is the most outrageous thing I ever heard of. The Sajjids will think it is an intentional insult.