“The bomb factory,” said Lotz. “That would seem to be the closer, along with that line in our conversation here where the Kahuta guy says, ‘It has to be shielded. It may be a while before the theft is discovered, but we can’t take the chance that an alarm will go out and the authorities will be watching with… ah… special equipment.’ ”
“Yes, and that’s to make us believe they’re worried about radiation monitors,” said Cynthia. “And yet they’re not worried about blurting the whole thing out over a cell phone that might be compromised. And they bought their supposed equipment on the open market in Pakistan instead of smuggling it into the country, even though smuggling is half of Pakistan’s GDP. It’s absurd, Ernie! At the levels of al-Q we’re talking about, they smuggle everything they use, including cell phones, which they typically use once and then ditch. No one involved in a plot like this would use the same phone day after day to report on the progress of a load of stolen weapons-grade.”
“Abu Lais did. And we know for sure that he was talking to al-Zaydun; we have the voiceprint. Do you think that’s a fake too?”
“No, but one ambiguous conversation does not a nuclear conspiracy make.”
“So what would convince you, Cynthia, a mushroom cloud? You know what I think? I think you’ve got stage fright.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about us, N Section. For years we’ve been sitting in our tiny offices, forgotten, more or less, watching for something that nobody really thought would happen, and now it has happened and suddenly we’re going to be the most important people in the whole government. This intel is going to go from our hands straight to the president’s people, and they’re going to want to make damn sure it’s right. And you’ve got butterflies.”
She looked at him coldly. He seemed a different person now, hectic, avid, like a frat boy planning a date rape. She said, “You’re wrong. It has nothing to do with my personal shit. The tapes are wrong. The people on them are reading scripts. And if you’d spent as much time listening to real conversations as I have you’d know that.”
“Yeah, well, maybe that’s why we have analysts and why the munchkins in the headsets don’t get to make the decisions.”
She stared at him, stunned by the nastiness of this remark from the ordinarily genial, flirty Ernie Lotz. The supposed plot must have unleashed some kind of testosterone storm in the men involved. She had little hope that Morgan would be any different.
Nor was he, later in the day, after Lotz had briefed him on the latest intercepts and the commercial information, what he insisted on calling Lam’s bomb factory.
The three of them were in Morgan’s office. With every bullet point on Lotz’s briefing paper, Morgan seemed to expand, his face to glow, his bright blue eyes to send forth sparks. The grand finale was the playing of the Qasir intercept. He didn’t need Cynthia to understand that. Lotz concluded with a recommendation that the GEARSHIFT material should be passed up the line for an executive decision. When it was finished, he turned to Cynthia and said, “That should satisfy even you, Cynthia.”
They both looked at her. Seconds ticked by in silence. She said, “What do we know about this guy Qasir?”
“What do you mean?” said Lotz. “He’s legitimate. He checks out. He’s in Kahuta; he handles nuclear materials for their bomb program. What more do we have to know?”
“His politics maybe?”
Morgan said, “Oh, please! You think he and his wife are in on your conspiracy too?”
“I didn’t say that,” she replied, trying to keep the snap from her voice. “I have reservations, I won’t deny that. I still believe this could all be a clever provocation. But I concur with Ernie’s recommendation. There’s no way we can come to a conclusion just on the basis of comint. We have to have people on the ground. Besides that, if there’s one thing we learned from 9/11, it’s that if intel agencies don’t share all their data it leads to disaster. It may be a provocation, but if it’s not, and someone detonates a nuke and it comes out that we had this data and did nothing… I don’t even want to think about it. So let’s get everyone in the same room and find out whether this thing is real.”
It was a reasonable finesse, she thought, and was satisfied to feel the tension drain from the office. Morgan favored her with an amused smile. She was a team player again. This is why empires collapse, she thought: Vietnam, 9/11, Iraq. Everyone wants to be a team player, to bask in the respect of their peers and the favor of their superiors. She was no different.
“Okay, generate a briefing,” Morgan said. “Fifteen minutes. Just the data and our conclusions. I’m sure I can get a meeting with both Holman and Spalling on the strength of this. After that, I think it’ll move very quickly indeed. Don’t plan on going anywhere until this is resolved.”
Interesting, that. He’d given her the responsibility for pulling together the briefing: her, not Ernie. She could see the brief wave of disappointment pass across Lotz’s face. Morgan was rewarding her for caving on this; besides, she was a lot better at putting together briefings than Lotz was. She had the language skills.
While the meeting was being organized by those at levels far above her, Cynthia returned to her office and worked on the PowerPoint presentation Morgan had ordered. When it was done, she e-mailed it to him and an hour later it came back with a note requesting some corrections, all weakening the caveats, which she duly made. After that she noodled. She read some technical articles, answered e-mail from colleagues, and stared blankly at the door and the wall clock.
At ten of six her phone rang and it was Morgan’s secretary telling her to be in front of the building in five minutes. She was, and in a few moments Morgan came down the drive in a gray government car. She got in, hauling her special NSA laptop and a stack of copies of the presentation and tapes of the source material.
“We’re going alone?” she asked, as he drove off.
“No, of course not. Spalling and Holman are coming in their own car.”
Yes, she should have known that. The iron law of bureaucracy insisted that no one can talk to anyone several rungs higher in the chain of command without the intermediate rungs being in the room. James Spalling was the deputy director of operations, NSA, and Ken Holman was the head of W, Morgan’s boss.
Anticipating her next question, Morgan said, “We’re going to Liberty Crossing.”
Cynthia nodded. The Liberty Crossing Building in McLean, Virginia, was where the National Counterterrorism Center had its headquarters. The main purpose of this tiny organization was to encourage the mammoth organizations that actually countered terrorism on behalf of the American people to talk to one another and to avoid the ignominy that attended upon one counterterrorist mogul having to actually visit the lair of another. She asked Morgan who would be there and he said, “The usual cluster-fuck,” which did not encourage conversation, so they drove the rest of the way in silence.
She looked out the window at the uninteresting traffic and the bland suburban scenery, the golf courses and homes of a peaceful nation at war. She had been a government employee long enough to understand what Morgan’s salty term implied. Another iron law of bureaucracy: no one in government will take seriously a command from anyone who does not directly control his budget or hiring. For counterterrorism in general there is no such person other than the president, who has a lot of other stuff to worry about. The director of national intelligence is supposed to speak with the voice of the president on these matters, but this person certainly does not control the bud get of the secretary of defense, who spends 80 percent of the intel bud get and personnel and who, like the president, has many things other than intelligence to worry about. Even within the defense empire there are intel rivalries; all the services have direct connections to Congress and to their contractors, who also have direct connections and generous lobbyists, which is why the U.S. Army has a navy and an air force, and the U.S. Navy has an air force and an army. Everything that’s done has to be negotiated with many layers of people, all of whom see their particular organization as the center of the national effort or would like to build it up as such, and nearly every office with “intelligence” or “terrorism” in its title wants to directly control guys with face paint and silenced submachine guns. All these important people were about to make, she thought with growing dread, a terrible mistake, one that she would be helpless to stop.