MAN: Be calm, for God’s sake! Look I may be able to get away, we may find the blasted stuff in the wrong place, but I must be here to supervise.
WOMAN: What stuff? What are you talking about?
MAN: I am talking about thirty-three kilograms of ninety-four percent enriched uranium that has gone missing.
WOMAN: Thirty-three kilograms? Is it that valuable?
MAN: Not as such, but it is enough to manufacture several nuclear weapons, and we must find it. If we don’t, I could conceivably be sacked.
WOMAN: Oh, God protect us!
“What’s the source here? Who are these people?” she asked.
“The source tap is from a cell phone out of Kahuta belonging to Jafar Baig Qasir. I looked him up in the database. He’s a nuclear engineer who works at Kahuta and lives in Lahore. He’s one of the people in charge of refining and casting weapons-grade uranium. From the context, I assume he’s talking to his wife.”
“Why are they speaking English?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Cynthia,” replied Lotz, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “Why shouldn’t they? A lot of upper-class Pakistanis use English as their second language.”
“Yes, but not on intimate family subjects to their wives. Besides that, don’t you notice anything fishy about the conversation?”
“No. What do you mean?
“It has the same phony tone as the one from the supposed trucker. Did you listen to that one?”
“Yeah, it sounded fine to me, and it just adds to the case. Cynthia, I don’t understand why you’re-”
“And on top of that, don’t you think it’s funny that a senior scientist should talk to his wife on an open cell-phone line about something that should be the most top secret thing that ever happened: a theft of weapons-grade uranium? He makes it sound like a fender bender or a coffee spill on his pants. What’s the traffic like from Pakistani security?”
Lotz said, “I haven’t checked it recently. I wanted you to see this right away.”
“Well, check it. They should be running around like chickens with their heads cut off if this is real.”
“I will, but don’t you think we should get Morgan in on this?”
“No, I don’t. The last thing we need is a premature orgasm, and I can tell he’s ready to pop.”
“You would know,” said Lotz, half under his breath. She didn’t call him on it, and he left her office. Yet another reason for getting the hell out of N Section.
She put her headset back on, but she was too restless to focus on the voices. Instead, she switched to her music collection. The Allegro of Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra sounded, in her ears, so much more soothing than the chatter of conspirators, a souvenir of a less dangerous, more orderly world.
If they were conspirators. If they had stolen enriched uranium. If they could make a bomb. Cynthia had been through a secret course given by some people from Los Alamos. She knew that making an effective nuclear device was a lot harder than most people supposed. Yes, there was a lot of public information available, but the devil was in the details and in the technical skills through which they were applied, and these were not so generally available. Could a group of terrorists actually steal nuclear materials and manufacture a weapon in some mountain village? Not very likely. Nevertheless, even the possibility was sufficient to provide employment for her, the rest of N Section, and the other parts of the government that worried about such things. On the other hand, a nuclear scam could be mounted with a lot less effort and, if America fell for it, it might be nearly as damaging to its cause as a nuclear explosion. American boots on the ground in some Pakistani village, civilian casualties, the erosion of what little trust remained between the two governments: a cheap victory and intensely embarrassing for the already embattled intelligence community. Cynthia would have recommended such a scam herself, had she been on the other side.
She listened to the music, the familiar melody of the clarinet, soaring, glorious, but always returned to earth by the repetitive thrum of the full orchestra, each phrase sculpted to fit, each original but grounded in its form. That’s how she wanted her life to be, soaring but under control. Her thoughts drifted for a time, lost in Mozart’s structured beauty, and then settled on the figure of Abu Lais.
If there was such a person, if this whole thing was not an elaborate ruse. Here was the paradox of espionage, and especially of the type NSA practiced. NSA snooped; everyone in the world knew NSA snooped; everyone knew that electronic communications were not secure; therefore, anyone with any brains would send into the ether only those things he wanted NSA to know; therefore, what NSA learned with its multibillion-dollar investment in snooping was essentially valueless. But such thoughts, although they occurred to everyone who worked at the agency from time to time, were distinctly not profitable, and Cynthia had no patience for the unprofitable.
As often when she listened to music, an idea coalesced. She considered it, turned it around, found it potentially profitable, if not strictly a part of the normal order. After some browsing on the Internet, she worked for a while until she had covered half a dozen sheets of paper. With these in hand she left her office to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Morgan’s prohibition. She walked down many a sterile hallway and up several flights of stairs until she came to the part of NSA devoted to scouring the Internet for terrorist chatter, and specifically to the office of Walter Borden.
Borden was in. Borden was rarely out. On his own admission, he had no life, was a self-proclaimed nerd of the pear-shaped rather than the pencil-necked variety, and his office door was covered with a collage of Dil-bert cartoons, beer coasters, and dozens of tiny strips from fortune cookies. A bumper sticker proclaimed, NERDS DO IT DIGITALLY. Cynthia had a history with guys like Borden, having learned early how easy it was to obtain intellectual favors from desperate misfits-math tutoring, computer repair-in return for a modest investment of smiles and badinage. And she enjoyed the hopeless worship.
She knocked and without waiting for a response entered the usual nerd nest-wrappers and cans on the floor, science-fiction posters on the walls, cartoons stuck to his whiteboard with magnets. It had a peculiar smell, too, like someone had cooked an unsuccessful dessert featuring caramel and canned mushrooms. The origin of Borden’s smell was a topic in the local hallways.
His job was keeping abreast of the innumerable Web sites, most of them ephemeral as mayflies, that the international jihad used to keep its real and prospective membership up-to-date and to recruit new members. One reason they were ephemeral is that Borden and his section took them down by technical wizardry nearly as soon as they arose, except for a rotating number of favored ones, which they filled with misinformation or embarrassing pictures. Borden often remarked that he could hardly believe that they were paying him to do this work.
His office, as usual, was dark except for the glow of a huge flat-panel screen. Borden had his headset on, so Cynthia had to tap him on his Spiderman T-shirt to get his attention. He swiveled in his chair and brightened when he saw who it was.
“Hi, Lam,” he said. “Look, we can’t keep on meeting like this. People are starting to talk.”
“Let them, Borden. My passion for you knows no bounds.”
“I don’t think so, Lam of my heart. I think you’re fascinated by my unearthly intelligence, but you don’t love the real me deep inside.”
“You got me, Borden. I’m a faithless slut.” She glanced at the screen in front of him. It was blue and covered with dense lines of code. “What are you up to? It looks like work.”
“Yes, but it’s nothing I could put in girl language. It’s part of the AMICUS project.”