Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

“Martin isn’t my boss, and neither, frankly, are you.”

Martin was working on a new series of articles, which would be published in the Guardian , and would only communicate with them via secure back channels or on the burner phones he sent them. “That’s where our focus should be,” said Penn. “The documents are the thing people can’t get anywhere else.”

Instead of arguing further, Kelly went on a beer run, and an hour later Danny said he wouldn’t mind a little food. “Burgers or pizza?” he asked.

“I’d go for some Chinese food,” said Kelly. He didn’t really care what they ate, but there was a pretty girl at the Chinese restaurant, and if they wanted Chinese, he’d go for it himself so he could see her shock of black hair bob around her ears as she shook her wok back and forth and dipped rice out of a big metal vat.

The beer worked on all of them differently. Danny would get hungry, Le Roy would get even quieter than usual and eventually fall asleep, and the captain would start dwelling on everything he was doing or had ever done wrong. Kelly thought he was immune to beer. He wished he had some of those pills Harraday used to give him. If he had those pills, he’d go back and get to know the Chinese girl better. He’d like to see the shock of hair without the pointed cap the owner of the restaurant made her wear. It had been a long time since he’d really had some fun, but then he realized he was having fun now. Mostly he was having fun, even if it was of a tamer variety than he was used to.

10.6 Joe Kelly

Kelly was thinking about the Chinese girl, who had turned out to be engaged, when he opened an email that had no subject line and no signature, just a compressed file containing a clip of videotape and a message that said, “I want to make sure I have the right recipient. Tell me what this means to you, and if I’m satisfied with your answer, I’ll send you the rest.”

The video clip showed Kelly and Pig Eye up on the Toyota. It showed them raising their fists in the air. It showed Pig Eye stepping up on the truck and standing beside and slightly behind Kelly. “Stand right up next to me, motherfucker!” Kelly hissed at the screen, but even though he watched the video several times, Pig Eye never did.

Kelly played the clip a total of five times before it vanished. “Hey, Le Roy,” he called out. “Is it possible for emails to self-destruct?”

“Yeah, man. I think I heard of that,” replied Le Roy.

But what did the video mean to him, and what was he supposed to say to the person who had sent it?

He could answer with his name and rank, but the sender hadn’t given a name, which made Kelly apprehensive about giving his. He finally wrote, “I’m the guy with his fist in the air. Who the fuck are you?” As an afterthought, he asked the date of the event. He figured that was something only someone who had been there would know.

The next bit of film didn’t come until almost a week later. Although Kelly had been expecting it, he jumped in his chair when he saw it in his in-box. The new clip was date- and time-stamped. It showed a television crew milling around while a convoy was preparing for departure. Thirty seconds into the tape, Colonel Falwell drove by and waved. Someone called out from off screen, “Colonel, is it true that Al Anbar Province is lost?”

The colonel gestured for the driver to stop the vehicle. “The situation there is certainly deteriorating,” he said. “But lost? Not by a long shot.”

“Should we go there then, or accompany this unit to Tikrit?”

“That unit isn’t going to Tikrit,” said Falwell. “But keep that to yourselves for now. They’ll get the news soon enough. Now I’ve got a chopper to catch.”

This clip didn’t self-destruct, and Kelly watched it again and again, letting his head of steam build until he couldn’t contain it any longer. When the captain came back with Subway sandwiches for everybody, he called out, “Hey, Captain! Get a load of this!” The captain didn’t immediately answer him, so Kelly walked around the table and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and hauled him over to his computer terminal and pushed him down into his chair.

“Did you know?” he shouted. “Did you know that we were never going north, that we weren’t waiting for orders, that even the film crew knew the supplies were going west — that everybody knew it except for you?”

“I knew it was a possibility,” said Penn. “Falwell told me I should sit tight until I heard from him. The new orders finally came through about three hours after you left that morning.”

Kelly played the tape for the captain, and then he played it again, and again after that.

“Who sent it?” asked the captain.

“The television crew, obviously.”

“Why is it obvious? Did they say so?”

“Because they were a film crew. Because it’s a piece of fucking film. They must have seen our website. They must have seen your email exposing the cover-up of the IED incident and noticed that the dates didn’t match up, and now I’m seeing that the colonel knew the supplies weren’t going north before he even left for HQ.”

“He didn’t tell me,” said Penn. “He acknowledges that right in the film. Maybe he wanted to be absolutely sure first. Hell, that wouldn’t be the first time he held information until he couldn’t hold it any longer — like the way he sat on the stop-loss orders.”

Then Kelly told Penn about the vanishing email that showed him up on the Toyota with Pig Eye.

“The film crew didn’t send it,” said the captain. “Think about it. The first clip showing you and Pig Eye was the teaser. That was just to get your attention. The second clip was what whoever sent it really wanted you to see. But it wasn’t sent for the website. It won’t mean anything to anybody but us — who else is going to spend the time to work out where the convoy was going and when the orders changed and who knew about it and exactly when they knew it? And why would the film crew send you something that can only have one effect?”

“What effect is that?”

“Exactly the effect it’s having. It’s causing us to turn against each other. What if it was Falwell who sent it? What if it was from someone who wants this site to disappear? Whoever it is sent it to sow the seeds of discord. If they know you, they know exactly what buttons to push — hell, it was right there on the first film clip they sent you. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out it’s pretty easy to tick you off. Did you ever think of that?”

Kelly hadn’t thought of it, and he didn’t want to think of it now.

“Or maybe it came from someone who is trying to find out who we are, which you very obligingly told them.”

Kelly wanted to let the steam rise up in him. He wanted to take something gigantic and make it broken and small. But then he found himself remembering how Pig Eye had stepped up onto the hood of the truck beside and a little behind him and how he had liked it that way. If Pig Eye had stood right next to him, he would have stepped forward a little, just enough to preserve the front-and-center position he had thought of as his due.

“If the supply convoy was going west, what about the road-clearing crews?” asked Danny. “Were those moved, and if so, when?”

“I was curious about that too,” said Penn.

It was Kelly who said what they all were thinking: “That would have made the northern route even more dangerous than usual. It would have raised our chances of being hit.”

10.7 Penn Sinclair

Penn was at his desk, but his mind was elsewhere. Falwell hadn’t changed the date on the AAR just to give Penn a second chance. He was covering up his own mistake too. He hadn’t passed on critical information, information that would have caused Penn to make a different call about the convoy and the school. But whenever he started to get angry at Falwell, he remembered that Falwell had told him to hold the convoy, and the bottom line was, he hadn’t.