When it was out of sight, she said, “Me oh my, you look good in a suit! What’s the special occasion?”
“Big meeting today,” said Kelly. He would have liked to linger in the cool morning air and enjoy the sense of change and possibility, but he had work to do. The buyers and their lawyers were coming at noon to deliver a draft of the sales contract and to answer any questions the men or the attorney they had hired might have. When Kelly had asked to make it a condition of the sale that the site wouldn’t be shut down and that the new owners would keep Le Roy and Danny on if they wanted to stay, the representative for the buyers had said, “No problem, man. Why would my clients pay a million dollars for something only to turn around and shut it down? They believe in this mission is why, and they have the money to do it right. They’re hoping you’ll all stick around for a while.”
The sewer crew started up their jackhammer, splintering the morning quiet as Kelly walked back down the street. Above him, the clouds exploded with brightness and the air was sharp with the smell of new-mown grass. With the captain gone, there was no one to question his decisions, but no one to help him make them either. It was both liberating and disconcerting.
He drained the last of his coffee and headed back inside. Le Roy had gone on his morning run, but Danny was standing in the middle of the room adding his voice to the din from the jackhammer:
The rich get richer and the poor stay poor
While we’re knock knock knockin’ on the devil’s door.
The Defense Department isn’t keeping score,
And the generals talk about esprit de corps
As they sign you up for another tour
So the rich can get richer while the poor stay poor.
Sinclair’s absence made the decision to sell the website easier, but now Kelly wondered if it was the right thing to do. He was beginning to feel at home in the warehouse. They had applied for an occupancy waiver, and the sense of being somewhat settled astonished him. Besides, now that the captain was no longer around as a force of opposition, Kelly had started to see the mission of the website from the captain’s point of view. He had started to wonder if making a profit off the sale was ethical and if he should divide the site into two separate entities — one for the everyday horror stories and one for hard-core revelations like those contained in the classified documents they had already published and the ones Le Roy said they were getting from a new source at the NSA.
He wished he had someone he could discuss it with, but Danny had started talking about going back to Oklahoma and it wasn’t the sort of question Le Roy cared about. If Danny left, he would be shorthanded if he wanted to turn the website into something bigger and more significant than it was now. Unless he decided to sell and get out from under the shadow of the war once and for all, the way Hernandez had done.
Closing the door on the street sounds, he poured himself another cup of coffee and sifted through the morning’s email correspondence. One of the volunteers wrote to suggest moving the site overseas, and the captain to say they were in over their heads — as if they couldn’t handle things without him! But he couldn’t worry about that now. The buyers would be there in just under four hours, and he still had to print out the spreadsheets and figure out his strategy regarding the sale. Then he had to loop Le Roy and Danny in on whatever the strategy was and remind them to let him do the talking. He guessed they could play a waiting game. He guessed they could listen and give the purchasers just enough information to buy themselves a little time.
The question of what Kelly wanted for the website was complicated by the question of what he wanted for himself, but that was becoming clearer. The idea that he was positioned to do something truly good took hold of him the way the starched collar and cuffs took hold. “Unsettling”—that was the word for it. Equally unsettling was a new and insistent desire to talk things over with Joe Senior, who was his father after all. He’d missed Christmas and Easter, but he’d go home for a weekend soon — the Fourth of July was approaching — he’d go home for that. Not that Hoboken was home. Of course it wasn’t. While he was there, he’d call up that Rita woman and get to know her better. An election was coming up in a few months — hell, maybe he’d even vote.
12.4 Le Roy Jones
While Kelly got ready for the meeting with the buyers, Le Roy generated a string of random numbers for use as an encryption key in preparation for receiving some explosive documents from his contact at the NSA. It was also a good idea to encrypt any encryption key and store it in a safe place. Le Roy believed in Kerckhoff’s principle, which said that an encryption system would remain secure if the key was secure. Even if everything else about the system was known to the enemy, the key was, well, the key. That made where to store the key the most important decision he had to make. While he was thinking about it, he sent an email to E’Laine:
I just did 5 miles in less than thirty minutes and I hardly broke a sweat.
With the captain gone and E’Laine back in Detroit, the warehouse seemed empty, like there was a blank place in Le Roy’s peripheral vision despite the fact that the row of sturdy, mismatched desks and the metal lockers and the cots and the kitchenette were still in their usual places — everything solid and just as it should be. As soon as he got back to work, the hole in the universe closed up until the next time he happened to raise his head, always scuttling just ahead of his line of sight. It was almost noon when he saw it — a shadow moving on the porch, an incomplete silhouette creeping and crouching silently, smoke-colored and indistinct. He sat cemented to his chair, afraid in a way he hadn’t been afraid since that day in Iraq, trying to figure out what it was. Just then his email pinged with a reply from E’Laine, and he turned his attention back to the screen.
Good going, track star.
Le Roy went back to figuring out where to store the encryption key and decided he could send it to E’Laine.
I’m putting something in your drop box. Keep it in a safe place until I ask for it.
You can count on me.
I know I can.
Now that that was solved, Le Roy could get back to work on his simulation. He felt good about the arrangement, but he knew that encryption programs and even keys weren’t the most important link in any security chain. People were.
12.5 Danny Joiner
When the stapler misfired for the third time, Danny threw it across the room. “Who bought this piece of shit?” he wanted to know, but Kelly was printing out documents and Le Roy was deep inside his simulation. They had their headphones on, happy in their separate bubbles of isolation.
As Danny watched them, his irritation was replaced by an unfamiliar sense of belonging, and when he walked over to retrieve the stapler, he put a hand on Le Roy’s shoulder and left it there for a moment before getting back to work on his epic. He had changed the beginning several times, trying to get it right. A possible title was “The Mars Hoax,” which referred to both the Roman god of war and to a widely believed but erroneous report about the planet that was based on a misread email. “Are Ares and Mars the same?” he had asked the captain a week or so before he left. “Or are there subtle differences between them that will color the meaning of whichever one I use?” The captain had studied classics as well as philosophy and seemed to have been placed right there across the room from Danny in order to answer his questions about the two ancient gods of war.