David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

The line crossed was treason, actually. Because there was no ombudsman at the CSS; there was no mediator who was going to take his complaint up the chain of command. The papers he’d signed at his commission to the Service made it very clear: If he did what he had just considered doing, he was on the outside; if he was on the outside, he was a risk; if he was a risk, he was a threat; if he was a threat, he was a target.

He couldn’t just tell her straight out. If he told her that 85 percent of electronic correspondence (worldwide) and 100 percent of electronic correspondence (English-language) was run through a threat-sieve network commissioned by the U.S. government but increasingly outsourced to a consortium of private companies, she would not believe him. But if he gave her just enough so that she could go looking for the rest? She was smart, and apparently determined. Give her something to run with — one of the Dear Diary portals he’d identified but had never been allowed into — and she’d probably chase it down. And with her Farsi and Burmese, her monk minders and her Rolodex, she was just the kind of asset that Dear Diary might hook and land.

And if Dear Diary did open a door for Leila, Ned could follow her in. After the e-mail, Nigel had bumped her to level-8 surveillance. At that level she could have a low-altitude UAV snooping her every step; her financials would be flagged; her scent would be waved before the computers. If it came to it, she could be extraordinarily renditioned from, like, a women’s toilet. So keeping an eye on her should be cinchy. But he’d have to get clear of Nigel for a few weeks. Taking time off work when you work for the world’s most elite clandestine agency is not a cinch. You can’t just cash in sick days and forward your voice mail. If you say it’s a vacation, there’d better be sand in your shoes when you come back, and if you say it’s a family illness, they’ll be wanting to see those biopsy reports.

He’d find a way. Maybe he could work from Sydney station. The more he thought about it, and the more he drank, the more likely it seemed to him that Leila Majnoun was his ticket into Dear Diary. The obsession had nearly derailed him, and he was still looking for a way back to it.

Okay, so he had an ulterior motive. But his anterior motive — to see that she had at least the chance to fight back against Nigel’s plan — that was sincere.

He marveled again at her choice of phone. Ned had ghosted every single one of her devices, and he had real-time access to 80 percent of the phone lines in Myanmar. If she’d been on any one of those, he could have been listening to her now. But the phones at the Excellents were trunked from one of the last predigital exchanges in the city; they used twenty-pulse-per-second crossbar switches and crossbar tandems. Of course, he could get the feed from the other direction, but to do that he would need to involve Bethesda, and the feed would be copied to Nigel’s station per protocol. Ned didn’t want to risk giving Nigel anything else on Leila or drawing any more heat on her than she was already taking, so he had to settle for recording and subsequent collection. The device he had installed in the handset of the Excellents’ lobby phone was the size of a grain of basmati rice. It was unpowered and nontransmitting. He would collect it in the morning.

But he was worried about the morning, worried that by the time it came, he would have lost heart or come to his senses. He needed to do something tonight; he needed to commit.

Ned bicycled swiftly through the hot dark streets to Leila’s little apartment above the tailor shop. He passed by twice, looking for her plainclothes detail and/or minder monks, but he saw no surveillance. What tails she had would be outside the Excellents right now, where she was. He stashed his bike and slipped up to her building along its darkest flank. His heart was beating as it hadn’t in twenty years of espionage. His heart was beating as it hadn’t since he and a girl from a million years ago used to climb over eight feet of chain-link on a Saturday night to sneak into the marina and onto her parents’ cabin cruiser.

He reached her front door and slipped the note beneath it.

I think your father was framed, it said. Meet me at the Excellents tomorrow. 8p.

The next day, Ned stayed away from the office. The hangover was not terrible and not unwelcome — it kept reminding him of what he’d done last night. He didn’t regret it exactly, but in the cold light of day, his plan looked rickety and tenuous. He would never have pulled the trigger if he had waited until morning.

First thing, he collected the device from the phone at the Excellents, replaced it with another. Then he brought it home and listened to it while he drank coffee and ate cheese.

It was worse than he thought. The dad’s arrest sounded brutal. The SWAT team had scared the shit out of the mother; the brother had been injured during the arrest, presumably trying to defend his father from what must surely have seemed to him a nightmare. Cyrus Majnoun was charged with the possession and distribution of child pornography, aggravated by his being a school principal. After hours of interrogation, he’d suffered a mild heart attack. He was hospitalized and stable now.

Leila was definitely angrier than she was hurt or scared. Her voice seethed out of Ned’s laptop. She had really burned up that Excellents’ phone last night. She’d spoken to her brother and her sister and then an attorney in California and then three more attorneys in New York, and then with her brother and sister again on two extensions of her parents’ home phone. Ned could hear the glasses rattle in the Majnoun kitchen when the little brother closed the fridge door.

If any of the Majnoun children doubted their father’s innocence, not one betrayed a hint of it. Leila was the most galvanized. At one point, Dylan referred to “clearing” their dad’s name, and Leila responded, “Clear him, D? We’re going to see him reinstated, apologized to, and recompensed. Like, recompensed in a way that will make the FBI wish they’d never heard the name Majnoun.”

Roxana said she had begun to organize parents and faculty at the middle school.

“Will they support him?” Leila asked her sister.

“Hard to say right now,” she answered. “I think most of them know it must be a setup or a mistake. But we need to figure out why he was set up, and by whom. There are a few people saying terrible things already, and those voices will only get stronger. We need something to say back to them, some alternative theory. It helps that there are no victims. If he were a predator pornographer principal, he would have hurt a child by now; some victim would have come forward.”

Ned was impressed by her detachment, her analysis. This was the eldest child, the armless genius.

Dylan was to going to assist the attorney and start pushing back against the FBI and the prosecutor. “That lawyer you found, Leila, he says we need to get our hands on the seized computers as soon as we can. It looks like their entire case is digital. But the guys we’re going to need, the forensics guys, they’re very expensive. Like four-fifty-an-hour expensive.”

Leila had told them she’d be home in three days. To Ned that meant that his only chance to talk to her would be tonight — if she even showed up.

Roxana quit the line before Dylan, and Ned heard Dylan ask Leila, “Sis, there’s no way, you think, any of this could have anything to do with, you know, the trouble you’ve been having in Burma? Or that e-mail you sent me?”

Ned leaned in to his laptop.

“No. No. The Burmese already kicked me out. And whatever I saw in the forest — and even if it was something that I wasn’t supposed to see — I wasn’t able to do anything with it.”