David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Back in Bethesda, his pay slip said he was a statistician for the Congressional Budget Office (he even had some of that work on his desk, a tradition among CSS analysts). He drove an old Saab. He read and read and read. It was like being a professor but with no students, which he understood from professor acquaintances was pretty much the way you wanted it. He had a wicker lampshade over his kitchen table; stalagmites of magazines and journals grew in his living room. He lived across the street from a doggy day-care place, and sometimes when he left his driveway in the morning, a beagle would be keening. He tried Internet dating. He worked on collation and discrete DiP software for Open Source, on the fourth floor. His parents sent him pears on his birthday.

If he hadn’t made such a scene about Dear Diary, he’d probably still be there; he’d probably be a grade 5 by now, and maybe he’d be able to effectively oppose people like Nigel and whoever else was putting the Service in the service of a growing web of ambiguously allied clients. These thoughts, and the whiskey, stirred the silt of Ned’s regrets and resentments.

The Dear Diary episode had nearly cost him his career. He’d gone out on a limb, and the limb had snapped off beneath him, and he’d been left looking like a neophyte who’d wasted the skills and assets of the Service by chasing a phantom menace. The Myanmar posting was punishment for all that. They’d done more than boot him from Open Source; they’d sent him into Nigel’s toxic little corner of the field.

“I believe outcome is being achieved, sir,” Ned had told Nigel that morning at the daily report he was now required to present on Leila Majnoun. “She has accepted the fact that she’s leaving. She’s received no useful response from the original recipients.”

“That’s because I’m making sure she doesn’t,” Nigel said huffily, puffily.

Ned nodded— rightyouaresir —and continued, “And she sent that e-mail to only one other person.”

“Who?”

“Her brother.” To underscore that the brother was unconnected, Ned added, “He works at Whole Foods.”

“I know where he works,” Nigel snapped.

Another little nod from Ned. “Anyway, I don’t think she’ll contest the deportation.”

“I don’t think she’ll contest it either,” said Nigel, mocking Ned’s word choice. “I think that that nosy cunt will begin her self-deportation in about”—he grandly looked at his heavy Rolex—“five hours.”

Ned put on his blankest face, but Nigel did not elaborate, and Ned did not inquire. Part of this game was letting Nigel enjoy the belief that he was as unreadable as the Sphinx when all Ned had to do, really, was wait him out. All morning, the man could barely contain his glee. Midday, he took a call in the microSCIF, and when he came out he was humming. Then, a few hours later, another SCIF call, and when he came out he attempted to turn on the office TV but got confused by the remotes.

“Swain, did you alter the settings on this thing?” he barked. “The channel won’t change.”

“Let me see if I can figure it out,” said Ned, accepting the remote like it was a partial differential equation. He made an aha face and switched the function selector from TV to CABLE. “I think that’s it,” he said.

Ned snatched back the remote and thumbed his way up to CNN. There was an ad playing— If you’ve experienced these symptoms, talk to your doctor about Synapsiquell —but Nigel waited so eagerly that Ned stayed right beside him. Then there was another ad for a wealth-management company — a fit and shrewd-looking older man walked along a private beach with either his adult daughter or his very young wife. Whichever it was, he was proud. Offscreen, a distinguished-elder-black-man voice stressed the importance of protecting the legacy you’ve built .

Then the show returned, and the camera swoosh-tracked to the anchor desk in that urgent way, and the handsome anchor was squaring the corners of the papers before him. He appeared to be especially troubled by the upcoming story.

“We’re starting to get some more details on this very troubling story out of Tarzana, California,” said the anchor — TARZANA was highlighted on the map of LA County that appeared beside the anchor’s head—“where authorities early this morning removed computers and other electronic equipment from a middle-school principal’s office.” A wide shot of a parking lot, then a zoom in on three or four men in blue windbreakers carrying boxes to the trunks of white Fords. “This after a police tactical unit arrested a man today in a predawn raid in a neighborhood near the school. While authorities have not yet confirmed any connection between the two events, neighbors told a reporter that the man arrested was Tarzana middle-school principal Cyrus Majnoun”—the anchor paused minutely at the foreignish name.

Cut to a man in a bathrobe outside his house, speaking to camera: “It was nuts. It was guys in body armor. They knocked the door down. I even thought, you know, You got the wrong house. That’s the principal’s house . But then they came out of there with Madge-noon . I never saw anything like it before. It was nuts.”

Then back to the anchor. “Authorities aren’t commenting on the arrest or the seizures at this time. But viewers may recall that a school district in nearby Orange County was rocked last year by a scandal involving a high-school principal and Internet child pornography. We’ll bring you more on this story as it develops.”

Nigel clicked off the set, looking like he’d just taken a pie out of the oven. “Ha!” he crowed. “See, Swain? That’s how you put a stop to all this Nancy Drew bullshit. Let’s see how curious she is now.”

And for a split second, Ned may have let the mask slip, because Nigel felt the need to say: “You should be proud of the work we did here, Swain.” He put no extra emphasis on the we . He didn’t need to. Was there any doubt that if something like this collapsed, it would collapse not just on Nigel but on everyone around him?

Thus the cigarettes, which Ned bought on the way home. And then the pre-dinner turn to whiskey. How had it come to this? thought Ned, and he meant all of it: the avoidance drinking, the loneliness, the being stuck under the thumb of a man he despised and implicated in an immoral conspiracy almost certainly unrelated to national security. Ned knew all about the greater good, and something about Patriot Act back channels, and he was annoyed by liberals who walked around all un-blown-up claiming that they liked their civil liberties more than their security. But he’d thought there were some controls in place, that there was still a grown-up in the room.

Ned was smoking as if to make up for two weeks of not smoking. What was the recipe for Camels? They were fucking delicious. What was this “Turkish and American blend”? It was chemicals sprayed out of nozzles, wasn’t it?

Leave aside for a moment the morality of what Nigel was doing to Leila, Ned thought. Leave that aside and it was still very wrong just in terms of resource allocation, wasn’t it? Unless Leila Majnoun was a future Hitler come back in a time machine, Ned couldn’t really see how such a vicious and elaborate operation could be justified. Nigel’s interest in her was unprofessionally vengeful. And what he was doing was probably illegal. The word still meant something, or was supposed to, anyway. Extralegal was fine; illegal was not. Plus, it was just terrible espionage — there must be a huge number of people involved in something like what he had just witnessed. Oh yeah — he was one of them.

And that’s when Ned had a thought that was one of those across-the-line thoughts. What if he told Majnoun what had been done to her? What would she do with the information?