Streams of Babel (10 page)

I see the bright orange word
PRINCETON,
and pull out the black cap. I take my time straightening the brim and studying the plastic adjuster. I put the cap on my head, hoping I look sufficiently bored as would befit a man.

A few of Uncle Ahmer's words float up. "...not for less than fifty thousand American dollars," he is saying in Arabic.

Fifty thousand dollars.
I whisper into the air, which seems at times so filled with my father's kind and idealistic spirit. "Father ... Uncle's ambition has exceeded his honesty again and is ferociously working his jaw. We have nothing to give the Americans worth even a tenth of that amount."

I have two new programs half written, which Uncle could sell for about a thousand dollars each. One would search through known extremists' chat sites in Russian and translate their chatter to English. I have written other such programs for translating Arabic, German, French, or Spanish into English. These are the languages most extremists use on the Internet. Roger first called these programs Shahzad's track 'n' translate gems, and finally just TNTs. USIC loves the TNTs because a downfall in American intelligence has been Internet spying.
Once I finish these programs, their agents will be able to track chatter in yet another language without actually knowing that language.

Still, Uncle Ahmer has never asked the Americans for more than fifteen hundred dollars for one of my TNTs. Such is equal to one year's wages for both him and me.

"No less than forty thousand."

Forty thousand dollars.
"Uncle is making mischief for money, Father."

My father thought of America as the end of the rainbow, the place of free education, democracy, liberty, artistic freedom, pursuit of dreams. Of course, he was not so above it all, and he spoke of the material enjoyments, too. In his e-mails he frequently would send me digital photos of himself and would write the photo captions in his own lazy English:

"Her I am etting my Kentucky Fry YUM YUM YUM it will be yor favrit."

"Her I am in my new tommy hilfrigger jacket I look lik reel american yes?"

"Her I am at Yankees go Yankees go soriano! I eat oscar meyer weiner today ... pleeze don't tell your mother since meyer is jew."

My father spent many hours reading Arabic translations of American classics and history and idealism, yet he enjoyed nothing more, I think, than a roller coaster. One time, he e-mailed me his own screams from the Scream Machine at Six Flags Great Adventure, New Jersey. I miss my father's silliness as much as his wisdom.

Uncle Ahmer, on the other hand, does not love or hate the Americans, nor does he love or hate those who hate America.
He provides Americans with intelligence only for the payments. And he provides coffee and tea and uptime for their terrorists. He takes their money without thought, even when I have not successfully scripted their chatter. He sees no hypocrisy in this and says with much glee, "If I have the sun, the sea, and a fat wallet for my family, it is a very good day. It's none of my business what another man does."

"Ahmer, forty thousand is not realistic." Roger's voice rises slightly. "We should not pay that much to do
you
a favor."

I don't understand their prattle, and beneath two CDs, an Eminem album and the
Les Misérables
sound track, are two more Gatorades. I remove them, but then tear the Drake's pies package open, forgetting to look uninterested.

"No deal for less" Uncle Ahmer's voice stands firm, and I sense this time there is something very earnest in his tone. "I want assurance of years of wages for Shahzad and me if you bring this thing to pass."

I freeze, the pie only three inches from my mouth. I understand this to mean only one thing:
For some reason, the Americans want to buy the café.
But that makes little sense. We have always given them intelligence at fair prices. Their "owning" us can in no way improve the job I have been doing for them.

"Shahzad ... come in here," Uncle's voice carries through at this most embarrassing time. I have both pies shoved in my mouth, with my lips spread as wide as the equator. Their staring embarrasses me, and then I can't swallow.

Hodji comes around, guffawing at my humiliation. He grabs a Gatorade, opens it, and gives it to me. As I drink, I realize I have forgotten to savor the taste of the pies for future reference, and they are both gone now, blobbed into mush in my throat by Gatorade.

Still, I address my uncle in Urdu, which the agents don't understand, swiping at what crumbs must be on my face. "Uncle, we must keep the café at all cost. It makes up our pride"

But Uncle Ahmer starts chuckling at the agents, and he sidles up to me, which means I am in danger of being pinched if I say the wrong thing.

"Shahzad, these USIC agents are confused" He laughs, too casually. "Did you know, Shahzad, that all this time, these men think you are
sixteen?
I tell them you are
eighteen,
and they want to see your birth certificate."

I cannot process so quickly his scheme. These agents know I am sixteen; they know everything about me from years of friendship with my father. They are looking at each other, not me, as if they are questioning how far they will carry an ill-begotten scheme of my uncle's.

"Please go over to the house and ask your aunt Hamera to find your birth certificate," Uncle says, nudging me sideways.

My real birth certificate will say I am sixteen. He means for me to go up the street to our less-than-honorable neighbor, Aman Somadi, pay him twenty American dollars, and have a birth certificate made to reflect eighteen years. I don't understand why Uncle would want me to lie about my age, or why the Americans are not objecting to this stupidness.

His suspicious behavior intensifies as he speaks very slowly, too casually. "Shahzad. Do you know what an
internship
is?"

I do. It means you work for a wealthy Karachi businessman for nothing. I already make money and don't see why I would give away my valuable skills for free.

"I don't know why these agents never mentioned to me before that you are eligible for an
internship,
Shahzad. I think it is because they perceived you have never attended high school. While you're at it, go dig up your latest report card."

So, I will need forty dollars. If I object, Uncle Ahmer will pinch me until I bruise, or stand on my foot until Drake's pie plasters the walls. But I don't want any USIC internship, especially since, gauging from the price Uncle Ahmer is holding to ...
this internship is in New York and not Karachi.

My uncle is not bargaining for our café, I realize. He is bargaining for my life. I do not like this.

"Is anyone going to ask me what
I
will do? Being that I am in charge of my choices?" I ask. This is a very American argument, I have learned. Americans seem to back down if you imply they are infringing on your rights to choose.

Hodji does sigh but doesn't back down. "Shahzad, first and foremost, there is your health. You need American medicine—"

"I am healthy! I have bad asthma attacks maybe once a month!"

"You have them once a week! You only pass out once a month. That is
not
normal."

"A terrible thing, yes," says Uncle Ahmer with too much drama, since he is very accustomed to seeing me pass out. The sympathy behooves his position.

Hodji plops down in Uncle Ahmer's chair and looks weary tonight. "Look. You need an American hospital, American tests."

I shake my head. "You always say that if ever I go to America I can no longer be a v-spy. I don't suppose that has changed?"

They are quiet for such a long minute that I am stunned.
The way American culture protects its young, I do not conceive of how this could change.

"If you're eighteen, there is
one
allowance for what Americans would consider work in ... the Hot Zone," Hodji stumbles. His fingers rake through his dark hair. "If it were Twain, the answer would be no, no, no. But Twain has my health benefits and a five-dollar co-pay for whatever might ail him"

Twain is Hodji's son, who is my age. He goes to private school in Manhattan and makes good marks. Sometimes Hodji slips and calls me Twain, usually when I am in the throes of asthma and he is panicking.

I realize the "Hot Zone" of which he speaks. I repeat my father's oft-spoken words: "Computers have blurred the line between child and adult, because in the land of computers, children are the men, and the men are the children."

"Correct," Hodji says, though he will not look at me. "But I'm out of my comfort zone here. It's one thing to pay a Pakistani kid for v-spying in his backyard. It's another to put him on an American payroll to do it on Long Island."

See, he knows my age to be sixteen. He is pretending he doesn't know, probably because this internship would get me some medical benefits. One reason for the start of USIC is that it can do faster work, because it will not take years to check credentials, as do the FBI and CIA. I now see Uncle's motivation for the false documents, though I do not have any such motivation myself. My father would not want huge buildings falling on me, or for me to accidentally drink the very poisoned water I seek out. Roger can think that Colony One is in Africa all he wants. I do not.

"Things have changed since my father spoke of his hopes for me to follow him," I remind them.

Roger ignores this fact. "It's actually a safer situation for you, Shahzad ... if we can make USIC see it that way. It's nothing you haven't done over here in Pakistan. It's actually the same thing, only in an Internet café on Long Island. If you are on the payroll, at least we could get you adequate protection, whereas over here, you're wide open. One mistake, and we could all be chopped liver."

"USIC owns this Internet café?" Uncle asks.

"No. We pay them not to ask questions," Roger says. "The managers know we've been using their intranet structure to capture the screens of several well-known subversives who chat from there regularly."

"Trinitron," I hear myself say.

Roger grins as if my guess is remarkable, though it is nothing. Trinitron is the Internet café on whose server I have just found VaporStrike. I often find VaporStrike using terminals with Trinitron's embedded codes. He has two friends who visit the café, also, known only to us as log-ins Catalyst and PiousKnight.

So ... Trinitron is serving as a spy trap for USIC, I realize. They want me to work there, doing very similar things to what I do here. Somehow, I do not think it will be as much the same as they are leading me to believe.

Roger continues, "Thanks to Trinitron, other v-spies have picked up quite a bit of intelligence. Still, we can't arrest VaporStrike or either of his friends. We can't even bring them in for questioning."

"Why not?" Uncle asks.

"If we alert them to our interest in them by arresting one, we'll end up shutting their mouths tighter than a steel drum," Roger says. "Better to give them enough freedom so that they don't know they're on a leash. We've found out a lot about VaporStrike, Catalyst, and PiousKnight since you first started sending us chatter, Shahzad."

I don't allow my eyes to jerk to his. While I have been unable to turn up any information on their identities, I have sensed that USIC had some luck via other sources. I pretend only mild interest as Roger reveals some intelligence.

"We know their names, aliases, travels, educations, criminal histories—all that good stuff. We know they were not involved in the 9/11 attacks, at least not directly. But VaporStrike and PiousKnight were in Yemen in 2000 when the USS
Cole
was bombed, and Catalyst was in Kenya in '98 when the U.S. Embassy was bombed. Now they're all together online, sending god knows what around the Internet on a daily basis. Coincidence? We don't think so. Of course, we could arrest any of them tomorrow, based on the chatter you captured." He jerks his head toward me but turns his eyes to Uncle, who makes an emphatic statement.

"Get out a hacksaw. Start taking off their heads. They'd do the same to us soon enough, if they'd any clue what we're up to." He strikes a match hard and lights one of his foul-smelling Pall Malls. Fortunately, he turns to gaze into the crack of fading light between the shade and the window and sends his smoke away from me.

I see fire smoldering behind Roger's restless eyes. "If I loved living outside the law and had the stomach for inflicting pain, I'd have gone CIA instead of FBI. Nah. God made me to uphold the law."

"Me, too," Hodji agrees, as if they have talked about this many times.

"You're stuck with us." Roger sighs, but there is resolve in it. "As far as we're concerned, these things have to be handled delicately. We're not pulling them in yet—especially considering that we're not going to drill healthy teeth to try to get information or set fires under their chairs. We're going to wait and watch them until they tell us some critical things. First: Who are they working for and what are they about? We can't find an association to any known terror cell. Second: What kind of poison is in Red Vinegar? Is it really infecting people, or is it a hoax? And finally: Who is Omar? Where is Omar? I think if we can find Omar, we'll find Colony One, we'll find the exact nature of Red Vinegar, and we'll find a sleeper cell that wants to kill lots of innocent people."

After my thoughtful silence, I return us to the point of the conversation. "It doesn't take a genius to capture their screens and script their chatter," I remind them. "I can continue doing that from here."

"The chatter won't script." Roger smiles knowingly. My story to him about disappearing chatter made more sense than he was letting on. "USIC had an agent in Trinitron last night, trying to script VaporStrike and a crony. He says they're using some homemade program that has a double whammy. First, it makes chatter disappear. He saw it himself. The chatter appears, and within thirty seconds the monitor blinks. Then the page reads like it was never there."

So he believes my story of VaporStrike and Omar0324.

Hodji continues, "Apparently, all the publicity of the 9/11 terrorists making their plans on the Internet has scared them.
The terror cell has this one way to continue communicating without detection."