David Walton - The Genius Plague

I stood. “What is it?”

She swept the remote off the coffee table and pointed it at the TV, which burst into sound, breaking the tranquility of the quiet room. It was a news channel, and the banner across the bottom of the screen read, “Fourteen Dead and Two Missing in Amazon Massacre.”

My stomach clenched into a painful knot. “What happened? Is it Paul?” Mom just shook her head, eyes glued to the screen.

The newscaster described a scene of horror: twelve Americans, two Canadians, and one Brazilian pilot had been gunned down on a riverboat somewhere on the Amazon river. The names of the victims were not being released until the families could be contacted. Two other passengers were missing, possibly kidnapped, or else their bodies were floating down the river and had not yet been found.

We watched, numbed. I didn’t know how much my father understood, but he sensed our agitation. Until the families could be contacted . I stared at my parents’ house phone, willing it not to ring. Surely there were many American travelers in the Amazon basin. There was no reason to think that Paul had been on that particular boat. Then my cell phone rang, startling me so much that I nearly tripped on my chair. I spotted it vibrating on the coffee table and lunged for it, answering on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Hey, little brother,” Paul said. “Is Mom there? She must be worried sick.”

“You’re… alive,” I said, my tongue like rubber.

The voice on the other end was serious. “It was a near thing.”

“It’s Paul,” I said to my mom. “He’s okay. He’s alive.” She let out all her breath in a rush. “What happened?” I said into the phone. “Were you on that boat?”

He gave me a brief overview, until my mom snatched the phone and took up the conversation where I’d left off. He had been inches from death, by the sound of it. When I finally got my phone back, I said, “How did you get back to Manaus? I missed that part.”

He hesitated. “I don’t remember.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No… I don’t think so. I just can’t remember. We walked for a long time… and that’s it. We must have found our way to a road.” He coughed violently.

“Have you been to a doctor? You don’t sound like yourself.”

“I’m fine. Just some infection I’m fighting off.”

Paul confirmed that he would be home on American Airlines on Monday evening and would meet me there. The police had interviewed him for hours, but he was a victim, not a suspect, and they couldn’t keep him in the country.

He spoke to my father briefly, who seemed more like himself for a time, recognizing Paul’s voice and teasing him about a girl he’d apparently met on his trip. When he handed the phone back, however, his smile disappeared, replaced with the increasingly familiar expression of fear and panic as some part of him realized that there were critical things he couldn’t remember. It tended to happen whenever his mind made a brief connection to the person he used to be, enough that he could recognize that something was missing. He sat down again and studied his tiles.

“Now I don’t know what to do,” my mother said. “We were supposed to visit Julia this weekend.” Julia was my sister, older than Paul by a year, and she had just given birth to my parents’ first grandchild, a girl named Ash. My parents had driven up to see her the day she was born, but my mom had been anxious to return.

“You should go,” I said. “I’ll be here to pick up Paul. Julia needs you more than he does.”

She sighed. “I’m already packed. We just need to get in the car and go.”

“Enjoy,” I said. “Give them both a kiss for me. Honestly, it’ll probably be easier on Paul not to have a crowd worrying about his well-being.”

“All right. But you call if he needs me, okay?”

“I will.”

I sat across from my dad again. After a few minutes, I placed the word perjury on the board and quietly recorded my points. Dad would get upset if I didn’t keep score, so I always did. He would also get upset if he thought I wasn’t playing my best.

While Dad and I finished our game, Mom collected the last few things she needed and brought them out to the car. I used the last tile, and then subtracted Dad’s remaining letters from his total. “What’s the damage?” he said.

I folded the score sheet so he couldn’t see it. “It’s time for you to go,” I said. “Can you believe you’re finally a grandfather?”

“What’s the score?” he said. “Don’t tell me you won.”

“It was a good game. Let’s go find your coat.”

His face changed to confusion, anger. “Don’t patronize me, Neil. What’s the score?”

I sighed. “Four hundred and twenty-two,” I said, pointing to myself, “to seventy-eight.”

“What are you talking about, seventy-eight?” His eyes radiated anger. “Are you messing around with me? Tell me my score.”

Mom reappeared. “What’s wrong?”

“Your son won’t tell me my score,” Dad said. “Seventy-eight points, what kind of a score is that?”

“He meant four hundred and seventy-eight,” Mom said. “It was a close game, but you always come out ahead.”

I winced. I didn’t like to lie to him. It felt like disrespect to treat him like he was a two-year-old throwing a tantrum about losing in Candyland. Mom could often handle him better than I could, though, and sometimes a lie would turn aside a problem before it made him really upset. I couldn’t really fault her.

My dad wore a magnanimous smile. “Well played, Neil,” he said. “Sometimes the right letters just aren’t there for you.”

I nodded and smiled half-heartedly. “Have a good trip to New York,” I said.

Dad stood and shook my hand. “Good luck on your interview.”

I was surprised he’d remembered. “Thanks,” I said. “It’ll be a snap.”

“Good for you,” he said. “I always wanted to work for the NSA.”

When I drove my battered Nissan through the NSA gate the next morning, I felt hopeful but nervous. I knew I had a lot to overcome. My school record wasn’t exactly stellar, and although I hadn’t been convicted of any felonies, or anything else that would directly interfere with a security clearance, there were some things in my history that were hard to explain.

The screening and interview process took place at the Friendship Annex, a surprisingly jolly name for a complex that housed thousands of employees ranging from cyber espionage experts to signals intelligence analysts in the world’s largest intelligence agency. The Friendship Annex, or FANX, was a twenty minute drive away from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. It had been named after the nearby Friendship International Airport, which had since been given a more dignified title. I thought they should have renamed the NSA complex, too. The Crypto Annex, perhaps, or the Annex of Cyber Warfare.

Two armed MPs scrutinized my driver’s license and application letter. They took so long checking their list that I started to get nervous, but eventually they waved me on. At the next checkpoint, I was asked to step out of my car while a K-9 agent and his German shepherd checked it for explosives. Nobody smiled. It was a serious place, for a serious purpose. It was a place I wanted to belong.

My upbringing gave me an appreciation for the importance of good operational security. Even 256-bit encryption didn’t keep your message safe if the enemy had access to your private key. A password wasn’t secure if you told it to someone who said they worked for the data center. In a world more and more governed by computers, people were often the weakest link.

I pulled up to FANX III at 7:00 a.m., two hours early. They let me in, which was fortunate, because it was one of the coldest days of the year, and my Nissan’s heater didn’t work anymore. The security guard watched as I untangled two scarves, gloves, a hat, and a coat, and put them on the conveyor belt to be X-rayed. My wallet and keys followed them, and I stepped through the metal detector without a hitch. Finally, they gave me a bright red-and-white striped badge with “Visitor—One Day Only” stamped on the front in two-inch high letters.