by David Walton
Time can seem incredibly slow when you have absolutely nothing to do and your future is in doubt. It occurred to me that if I were a foreign agent, applying for a job at the NSA would be a great way to get in the doors. They must be vigilant about security for such unvetted visitors. On the other hand, they had told us to hack into the account. I was just doing the exercise.
There was no clock in the room, and no windows, so I had no idea how much time had passed before I was joined by a uniformed man with the silver bars of an Army captain. He sat across from me at the table. I thought they might send someone to shout at me, to threaten to bury me in a hole where I would never again see the light of day if I didn’t tell them who I was working for. Instead, the captain—Scaggs, by his name patch—was soft-spoken and professional. He asked me for every detail of what I had done and why, which I was eager to provide. He went over it several times, asking the same questions in different ways. He sometimes asked me about technical concepts, using words I didn’t understand.
I had plenty of time to study his uniform while answering his questions, since I was afraid of looking him in the eye. I noticed a patch on his sleeve—a blue circle with an eagle carrying a key. Around the circumference of the patch were a series of letters and numbers that looked like a code. I recognized it as the emblem of the United States Cyber Command.
“Wow,” I said. “You’re with USCYBERCOM, aren’t you?”
“Let’s stick to talking about you,” he said.
“Okay. But wow. I’m a fan. You’re the guys who wrote that software worm that destroyed Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, aren’t you?”
Scaggs gave me a sidelong look. “I can’t comment on that.”
“Yeah, I know. You had nothing to do with it. But that was some piece of work. You guys are my heroes.”
“What connections do you have with members of the Brazilian government?” he asked.
I sighed. He had asked the question already, and I still didn’t have any connections with them. I hadn’t even been to Brazil in five years, and though my father had kept in touch with some of the movers and shakers until a few years ago, I barely knew their names. The closest thing I had to a government contact was a childhood friend whose father had worked for Brazilian Intelligence, but I hadn’t talked to my friend in years either.
We went around and around for what seemed like hours, him trying to trip me up or make me reveal whatever I was hiding, and me trying not to shout at him that I was exactly who I said I was and wasn’t hiding anything at all. I wasn’t truly afraid—I had heard stories about people disappearing into the labyrinth of the US intelligence agencies, held under clauses allowing detainment of suspected terrorists, but I didn’t really believe they could just yank an American citizen off the streets and never let him out again. My real concern was that my hopes of working for the NSA—or any other intelligence agency—seemed to be going up in smoke. They might let me leave, but they were never going to let me back in again.
The sound of raised voices in the corridor snapped me out of my funk. I heard my name, but I couldn’t make out what else was being said. Scaggs left me in the room and went out, apparently to join the conversation.
Eventually, somebody new came in. She was small and slight, wearing black slacks and a thin red sweater with three-quarter-length sleeves. Beneath a tasteful layer of makeup and red lipstick, the skin around her eyes and neck was deeply wrinkled, making me wonder if her long black hair was dyed. Her posture was military straight, but she walked carefully, like someone for whom walking is no longer as easy as it once was. Real NSA badges—not the visitor kind—had grids indicating which security compartments the bearer was cleared for, and hers was packed with number and letter signifiers. It also gave her name: Melody Muniz.
“Mr. Johns,” she said, and held out an elegant hand. “You’re lucky I heard the news.” Her voice was clear, commanding, with no hint of age.
“You’re Shaunessy’s boss,” I said.
She gave me a nod. “Melody Muniz. Pleased to meet you. You do know how much trouble you’re in?”
I glanced at my armed guard and then back. “I’d gotten an inkling,” I said.
“Whatever possessed you to break into your instructor’s account?”
“He told us to hack our way in!”
“Into the seminar account. The one being used for the assignment. Not into your instructor’s personal login.”
“I didn’t know hackers were bounded by rules.”
Her face was unreadable. “The truth is, you fell afoul of a trap. There are a number of such measures in place to catch foreign spies trying to use the application process to gain access to our systems. You fell for the most basic of these traps, in fact—the call to tech support for a password reset. As you might imagine, there are a number of more sophisticated ones.”
“So what happens now?”
“Good question. I’m afraid the fact that I don’t personally believe you are a spy holds very little weight with the counterespionage unit. If they turn you over to the FBI on an espionage charge, that is a very serious thing indeed.”
I was aghast. “You mean I could go to jail?”
“Not if I can help it. In fact, if I can pull the right strings, you’re going to keep the job that you very nearly threw away in your first few hours of employment.”
I was relieved, but surprised. “Why do you care?”
She pressed her lips together. “Shaunessy told me you solved a Playfair cipher by hand.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that was an important skill set in the digital age.”
“It’s not. Our computers can solve them quickly, in any language. But they do it by brute force, plus a few tricks. You did it through some mix of ingenuity and mathematical intuition, and that’s something I’m very interested in indeed.”
I thought it would be a bad time to mention that it had been mostly guesswork. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Melody, please. Or Ms. Muniz, if you must. Don’t call me ma’am.”
“Okay . . . Melody.” It was difficult to say. She didn’t look like a Melody, for one thing. She looked three times my age, with a hard professionalism that made me feel like a child. “I do appreciate it. And I’d like to come work for you. But I have one condition.”
She looked at me like I was mad. “I’m offering to use my influence to get you employment instead of jail time, and you have a condition?”
“Yes, ma’am . . . I mean, yes.”
“All right, let’s hear it.”
“I don’t want to work with Shaunessy.” She looked incredulous, but I pressed on. “She doesn’t like me. She doesn’t think I can do the job, and she doesn’t trust me. I appreciate her helping me out when I needed a ride and telling you about my predicament. And I don’t want to repay that by making her uncomfortable.”
Melody’s eyes narrowed, and she looked angry. “Condition denied,” she said. “Shaunessy works for my team, and so will you. We don’t have room for any dilettantes. If you can’t handle that, I’ll serve you up to Counterespionage right now, and believe me, they’re eager. I don’t care if you don’t like her, but you’ll treat her with respect and you’ll do your job.”
“I do like her. That’s why—”
She waved a hand. “Enough. This may be a huge mistake, but I’ll make this all go away. Just don’t make me regret it.”
Call me crazy, but I was disappointed when they escorted me out. I was happy not to be arrested, of course, but I was so intent on working at the NSA that I couldn’t bear the idea of waiting any longer, now that I was so close. Melody had told me to return to FANX the next day. I would sign various documents to confirm the accuracy of my identity, surrender all pretense of privacy to the US government, and agree to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law if I leaked classified information to any uncleared person. Once I did, I could be photographed and issued my badge. My badge! I would have spent the night in the lobby if they would have l
et me.
After several minutes of wandering, I managed to find my mom’s car in the parking garage. Remembering where I park has never been my strong suit, and it was several minutes of searching before I remembered I wasn’t looking for my Nissan. I started the engine—relieved when it purred to a start—and pulled out toward the exit.
I drove through the gate at a crawl, uncertain what the process was, or whether I would be searched. The guards at the security hut were facing the other way—toward the entrance—and there didn’t seem to be any obstacle or checkpoint. It was only when I had nearly reached the road that I realized I still wore my visitor’s badge around my neck.
I panicked. If they had reacted so badly to my little hacking stunt in the exercise, how would they react to me stealing a facility badge? I looked in my rearview mirror, and saw what I had failed to notice on my way through the gate—a metal box with a sign that read “All Visitor Badges Must Be Returned Here.” Hoping it wasn’t too late, I jammed the gearshift into reverse and pulled back toward the box. I heard the guard shouting at me just before my rear tires slammed into the metal spikes embedded in the road.
The tires burst with a pop like gunfire. The rims screeched, grinding against the spikes before I thought to lift my foot off the gas. Soldiers ran out of the security hut and surrounded the car, shouting at the top of their lungs and pointing automatic weapons at me. Adrenaline flooded my system, but I was frozen in place, too terrified to twitch a finger. Blood pounded in my temples and behind my eyes.
Finally, my overwhelmed mind began to comprehend the words the soldiers were shouting. “Turn off the engine and step out of the car! Come out with your hands in view!”
Hands shaking, I turned the key, killing the engine, and stepped slowly out of the car. One of the soldiers lowered his weapon and pushed me into the side of the car, pinning my arms and patting me down. “I was just trying to return my badge!” I managed to say. They didn’t answer.
A line of cars was forming behind me, NSA employees ready to get home to their families. The door opened in a blue sedan three cars back in line. Melody Muniz stepped out. She walked up the line until she could see me clearly. My eyes met hers, and I gave her a shaky, mortified smile. She shook her head. “You have got to be kidding me.”
CHAPTER 8
Even with a recent security clearance, it took weeks for me to get my badge. I had to take a polygraph—apparently even current employees were now getting them quarterly, ever since Edward Snowden had disclosed several thousand classified documents to journalists back in 2013. I also had to update and verify my security paperwork, take a drug test, and list in detail any relationships I had with foreign nationals.
While I waited, I visited Paul, sometimes several times a day. He gained strength quickly, much faster than the doctors seemed to expect. Finally, the hospital staff disconnected his IV and pronounced him fit for discharge. My mom and I came to pick him up. Before we could take him, a nurse repeated Dr. Chu’s earlier instructions about his prescribed sulfadimethoxime.
“Don’t skip any doses,” she said. “If you miss one, take it as soon as you realize. It’s dormant now, and you’ll start feeling fine, but it can come back. If it does, it’ll be resistant to the medication, and it will hit you a lot worse.
“Stay in bed for a week, even if you start to feel better. Drink plenty of fluids. Your body needs a lot of energy to fight this off, so take it easy.” To Mom, she said, “If his fever goes above 103 degrees, or you notice any other symptoms—any rashes, lesions, discoloration, difficulty breathing, pain in other places in his body—then he needs to see a doctor right away.”
We agreed to follow these instructions to the letter, and she brought a wheelchair to cart him out to the lobby. Once there, Paul stood, and though he was still pale and coughed a lot, he seemed his normal self. He walked out to the car, and we all drove back home.
The next week was hard. Paul gained strength and looked healthier every day, but he was morose and irritable. I knew it was a kind of survivor’s guilt, a struggle against the apparent wrongness of his continued existence when everyone else involved in the incident was dead. It implied something supernatural, that he had been preserved for some higher purpose. It put a pressure on his life, as if he were living it for all of the people who had died. Maisie most of all, whom he had failed to save.
At least, I thought that’s what he was thinking. He didn’t say much, and he resisted any attempts on my part to broach the subject. I even suggested once that he ought to consider seeing a therapist, but he dismissed the idea. “I’m sad,” he said. “It’ll pass eventually, but for right now, that’s how it is. I’m allowed to be sad, aren’t I?” I admitted that he was and let it drop.
As he recovered, Paul started to move around a lot more. He tired of sitting still and watching daytime television. He was lucid enough to play chess, which he always won, and Scrabble, which I did.
One evening, he took me aside and showed me an online article from Folha de S. Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper. I skimmed the Portuguese, taking in the meaning without processing every detail. It reported a dramatic increase in the number of fungal lung infection cases in the Pará and Amazonas states, including a large number of deaths. “Don’t you see what this means?” Paul said.
“What?”
“If there’s an epidemic, some new fungus that’s getting around, then Maisie wasn’t my fault.”
I gave him a hard look. “She was never your fault.”
“I’m the one that took her through the jungle. I gave her mushrooms. I’m supposed to know about these things.”
I wanted to argue with him, but it seemed better to let it go. “You’re right,” I said. “She could have picked up that infection even if she’d never met you.”
“She was a great person,” Paul said. “Nothing was ever going to come of it, between us, not living on opposite sides of the country. But she didn’t deserve to die.”
I couldn’t disagree with that. “I’m sure she didn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry she couldn’t have lived as well. But I’m glad you’re alive.”
Finally, I was given my badge—with surprisingly little pomp for what was to me a momentous occurrence—and told to report on Monday morning to my new job.
FANX was a pretty big place, but it was nothing compared to Fort Meade. The NSA Headquarters was the size of a city, complete with bank, post office, hair salon, movie theater, and medical center. It was home to thousands of people and a daily place of work for thousands more. The fact that so many other people were doing the same thing dulled none of my excitement, however, when I pulled off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and joined the stream of cars onto Savage Road, my very own badge around my neck.
From a distance, the obsidian glass of the giant headquarters building caught the eye, but the true scope of the place wasn’t immediately obvious. The road brought me between two guard towers, beyond which a pair of ten-foot fences topped with razor wire marked the edge of the property. Between the fences, guard dogs patrolled, and the soldiers at the gate wore fatigues and carried the biggest guns I’d ever seen.
I stopped at the checkpoint, holding up my badge, which had my picture and name printed on it. I had spent most of the weekend sneaking looks at it, trying it on, and admiring myself in the mirror. The soldier at the gate scrutinized it and compared it to my face. I donned my most serious secret agent expression and nodded at him smartly when he handed it back. He ignored me, already looking toward the next car.
The misunderstanding at the FANX gate a few weeks earlier had been cleared up without too much difficulty. Apparently I wasn’t the first idiot visitor to try to back up in the exit lane, though I was the first to actually shred my tires on the security spikes. Once the car was thoroughly searched, the soldiers had pushed it out of the way—requiring eight of them to actually lift the back of the car off of the spikes—and I had called the same bemused tow truck driver to retrieve yet another car of mine from th
e NSA facility.
My employee badge allowed me to bypass the K-9 search, and I rolled right into one of several enormous parking garages. I was still driving my mom’s car, now with a new set of tires. I had promised to repay her for the tires the moment I got my first paycheck, and to buy a car of my own soon after that.
I walked toward the building, breathing the fresh air and admiring my surroundings. The high fences, the concrete stanchions designed to stop a tank, the towers bristling with antennas and manned with armed soldiers—all of it combined to make me feel like I was special, someone worthy of being trusted with the secrets of the United States government. I was entering the sanctum sanctorum, a place very few people—comparatively—were permitted to go.
If I hadn’t already been inclined to approve of everything I saw, I might have been disappointed by the working facilities in Melody Muniz’s room. I had envisioned a state-of-the-art mission center, huge wall displays with the political status of the world, intense and busy agents working at high-tech stations. Kind of like Houston’s Mission Control, but futuristic and top secret. Instead, her group worked in a basement office with burnt orange cubicles that looked fifty years old. It could have been an office in any aging tech company in the country, probably one whose stock was plummeting. A low hum permeated the space, like the background engine noise in an airplane.
The cubicles were arranged in quads, four seats each, and there were three quads in the room, plus a tiny kitchen area and an office for Melody. That made twelve team members, including Melody, with me as the thirteenth. Not that I was superstitious or anything.
Melody took me on the tour, introducing me to each of the members of the team. They were mostly young, and friendly enough, but I forgot their names almost as soon as I met them. Names had never been my strength.