David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

They rode most of the rest of the way home in silence, though not the frosty kind that had stretched between them at breakfast or the taut kind that had snapped in the Costco. It was kinder; a détente. Nearing home, they passed Peggy Pilkerson’s place, with its plaster lions rampant before six feet of driveway. Leila tried to bring up again the subject of the nights out till all hours with Peggy. What she wanted to say but couldn’t quite was: Why are you choosing right now to quit being the Good Wife? Don’t you know he’s innocent?

“I think you could stand to go out, Leila,” said her mother as they neared the house. “You’re helping neither yourself nor your father by just sitting in that little room and looking at that Tubeface.”

Unfair. Leila had been reading her dad the newspapers, trying to help with the house when and where her mother left an opening. She wasn’t online more than a few hours a day, and then certainly not on Facebook. She worked in the little room under the stairs because she was sleuthing; she needed to concentrate, and she didn’t want to explain every page, or the black electrical tape over her webcam.

There was nothing on the Internet about Dear Diary. Finding nothing on the Internet about something is suspicious. Like, yeah, too quiet . There was a scrapbooking website called Dear Diary and some wry hunter’s blog called Deer Diary. But there was no whiff of Dear Diary the secret resistance and people-smuggling network with postnationalist aims and a neurotransformative eye test, nor of its pitched battle with a fascist consortium of data miners. Was there another Internet besides the one she knew about? Were there secret domains? She scoured her computer for the little owl icon that had let her contact Dear Diary in the first place, but it was gone. She went over and over the Heathrow meeting and the day in Dublin, but she could think of no way back in.

“I’m helping Dylan with the legal stuff, Mom.”

“How? Dylan’s taking all those meetings. He updates you . And what’s with that other phone you carry around and look at but never use?” Her mom was like this — oblivious, oblivious, oblivious, and then— bam —a noticer.

Then Mariam’s phone rang. She dug it from her purse. “Hello, Dylan,” she said. Her voice always brightened for him. As long as we’re talking about who’s nicer to whom, thought Leila, Dylan had better be getting this hard sell on grandchildren also.

Then Mariam sat up straight in the passenger seat. “What?” Her voice was hard with disbelief. Leila stepped on the accelerator. “But I don’t understand,” she said. Leila slowed a little; if the news were bad and medical, she wouldn’t have said that.

“What is it?” she asked her mom. “Can you put him on speaker?”

Mariam waved her away, annoyed. “How can you be sure?” Nod. Squint. Hmmm-mmm. “Okay.” She hung up, and even then she didn’t start sharing. She was savoring knowing something Leila didn’t. And when Mariam did speak, it was strange, because instead of sounding ecstatic and relieved, she sounded puzzled.

“That was Dylan,” she said needlessly. “They’re going to drop the charges against your father.”

“He didn’t tell you his name? He didn’t have some funny name? Did he mention me or Dear Diary?” Leila asked Dylan. They were outside the house, Leila breathing hard. She had run the last half a mile at three-quarters intensity. Before going out to run, she had left a note on her brother, who was asleep on the couch. Can you meet me outside 8:30? it said. When she pulled up at 8:35, he was outside, smoking a cigarette, drinking slurpily from a Winchell’s cup. He was definitely looking unyoung these days, but that was probably the hours he was keeping. He worked full-time at Whole Foods, went to law school at night, a school much less fancy than the one he’d dropped out of.

“No. I told you. I was just eating a hot dog, on a bench, like a schmuck—”

“This was yesterday?” she interrupted.

“Yes.” And he punished her for the interruption by taking an especially languid drag from his cigarette. It was going to be hard for Dylan to quit smoking; he smoked so expertly, his eyes bright behind the noxious veil. “And this guy walks right up to me. Too fast, you know? Like I kinda thought I was about to get knifed. But he just hands me this folded manila envelope, like I should know what it’s about. So I said, Excuse me, but what the fuck?”

“Is that what you actually said?”

Dylan thought. “Yeah.”

“And what did he say?”

“Wow, you’re really helping me tell this story, sis.”

“Sorry.”

“He said, Show that to your solicitor . And then he walked away.”

Leila made her eyes wide to indicate That’s all?

Dylan made his wider to indicate Yeah, that’s all.

“Dylan. What was in the envelope?”

“A thumb drive. I was about to poke it into my own computer right there on the bench. But then I got spooked and thought it should go straight to Kramer. Which was prudent on my part, because it turned out to have this thing where it could make only one copy of itself before it died. And at Kramer’s office they brought it straight to their forensic electronics guy — who marks like four hundred and fifty dollars an hour, by the way, and sits in a room called a SCIF — a sensitive compartmented information facility. He took the one file that the drive had on it, and he immediately copied that file about a hundred times to their special offline servers. When I saw what the file was — like, on the screen — I didn’t understand it at all. It was code, computer code. It could have been anything.”

“Did the forensics guy have any idea what it was?”

“Well, first he says, ‘Oh, this is useless, it’s just a bunch of corrupt scraps.’ He said it was like someone had emptied the shredder bins at IBM and then glued everything together to look like a document. But twenty minutes later, he actually stood up from his chair and sort of started hopping around. I have never seen a tech guy so excited. He’s saying, ‘It’s written on the back, it’s written on the back.’” Dylan took another drag of his cigarette, squinted through an exhale. “And it turns out that if you turn the code over, there are legible files on the other side. See, Mystery Dude gave us both the encrypted file and the decrypted file. The tech guy said that the code he thought was junk is actually the first nontheoretical use of quantum encryption he’s ever seen. He said it was like someone had just FedExed us the Rosetta stone.”

Leila stretched her calves against the little concrete wall that enclosed the tiny garden. Her dad had another olive tree failing to thrive in a terra-cotta pot. She felt the taut line up the back of her.

“It’s a work order, Leila. Or an invoice. It’s an internal document, anyway. From a company called TMI Data Solutions, in Roanoke, Virginia. It details the work this outfit did on Dad’s hard drive. The file is called C. Majnoun Minor Porn. The work is broken down, itemized: Flick-Burst Transmission, and Evidence Custody Chain Repair — they did twelve units of that — and then there’s one line item that just says Collage Fabrication. And there are these things that I guess are chat windows within the working document. Like, where people scribble notes, you know, on a document that has to go through an office. And beside Collage Fabrication, some professional framer has written to another professional framer, like at shift change or something, Pull images of the blonde with the bangs in the folder JV Volleyball ’06. That’s the one I’d want to fuck if I was this guy .”