“Your tax bill going down won’t actually stop the ocean from rising, Dad.” Normally we avoided talk of politics, especially after the siege. The TV’s volume thundered through the first floor.
“Nah, Matty, you can’t shit in my cereal today.” He shot me an effervescent grin. “This whole idiotic law is done. Your girlfriend couldn’t win in the end.”
Of course, he was not talking of Moniza, my wife, but of Kate, and right then, right there, I almost punched him. A hot rage flooded into my face. It was the first time he’d brought up Kate since her murder. He looked back at the TV like the comment had been some harmless teasing. Without saying a word, I left the house and made the long drive back home. The argument ensued via text, and it was a week before my mom got to him and he apologized.
In May, as Warren Hamby equivocated about his options, his hands tied by the court, I got a letter from a woman named Jaquelyn Shipman. She’d been Moniza’s source in a story about hedge fund chicanery prior to the crisis and had asked Moniza if she could disclose their relationship before publishing her memoir. She’d also asked Mo to blurb the book, and Moniza agreed, though I was not exactly happy about it. Shipman had been one of the four survivors of the attack at the Staten Island offices, and I felt like she was cashing in on her brief proximity to Kate, especially given the book’s driveling title, A Woman I Knew. I was going through my own waffling on this front as well. An editor at a major house had reached out a few weeks earlier to offer me a way out of my marginal employment with a sizable book contract. The catch was, of course, they wanted a memoir of my time with Kate. I told the editor I’d have to think it over.
“She’s cunning,” Mo said of Shipman. “She’s a ruthless woman in a lot of ways. A bit scary, and clearly quite sad. Yet I liked her when we met. I still do.”
As it turned out, Jaquelyn Shipman’s book never made it to press. A host of lawsuits descended, from Wall Street, from her former partner, Fred Wimpel, from the Sustainable Future Coalition, and most bizarrely, from The Pastor. There were allegations that she’d fabricated parts of her story, and the pressure on her publisher was so relentless, after a few months they withdrew the book. Shipman disappeared behind a team of lawyers.
That might have been the last thought I gave her, had she not sent me the letter—twenty-two pages front and back. As I began reading, it’s hard to overstate the fury I had at this woman. Ravenous for attention, wounded that her bullshit memoir had been shelved, she was now seeking out allies among likely marks. Her writing was cold, clinical, and she began by saying she was almost relieved that her publisher was pulping all the copies. She’d not set out to expose anyone, she said, and couldn’t tell me the nature of the objections for legal reasons. She then went on a twelve-page aside about her childhood in Iowa, her family, her work as a flak for the ad industry, and finding her mother after her suicide. Instead of a book tour, she’d moved to Italy to work as an administrator for an organization in Rome that aided refugees and asylum seekers. Why am I telling you all this? she wrote, anticipating my question. She then described meeting Kate, the short time they spent working together, and how my former girlfriend had changed her life.
I expected her to gush about Kate, as so many people now did, to fill the page with clichés in her hard, edgy handwriting. Shipman was grinding the pen so hard into the paper at that point, stencils of the words were showing through on the other side. I expected something like I know she still loved you, she’ll always love you, etc. I expected the ritual blather. But far more disconcerting, I recognized Kate through her eyes. Kate’s self-absorption, her anger, her volatility, it was all there, and by the end I realized this woman had not only known Kate but had seen her in a way few people ever did, and I was left bewildered that Kate had allowed this mannered corporate woman into her inner sanctum.
I live with an astonishment, a rage, a grief at the woman I was, she wrote. And I know intimately a guilt most people don’t even know they carry.
There was enormous grace to what Shipman did by writing me that letter, even though by the time I finished I was filled with a sense of dislocation, like I’d been kidnapped and dropped off in a foreign city without even a suitcase. For days this followed me, my unease at how Kate had left this trail of herself everywhere, and I was grateful I’d not told Moniza about it. At the end, Shipman said, Do not feel like you have to write me back. But I wanted to, if only to thank her for her honesty. The letter and her address sat in my office drawer for weeks as I prepared to do so, and I may well have. I was still mulling what I would say when an FBI agent showed up at my door.
Over two years after Kate’s death, Coral Sloane came to see me in North Carolina.
Mo and I didn’t get many visitors, so I was surprised enough by the doorbell, let alone to see Coral standing there in a dusty beige jacket and ill-fitting jeans. I made coffee, and we sat in the kitchen. Moniza was in New York that week, but I’m sure they knew that. I asked if they were still undercover or here to see me on official FBI business.
“No. They have me on a desk now. Training. I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Training? Like training other people how to lie and betray their friends?”
Coral limply humped one shoulder up and down. “Yeah, I suppose. It’s very inappropriate for me to be here, Matt. I’d appreciate your discretion.”
“Sure.” I sipped my coffee and visualized hurling the hot drink in their face. When Rekia told me that Coral had been undercover FBI, it shook me to my core. Yet Coral did not seem remotely contrite. Their matter-of-fact at-all-costs manner had not been a put-on. I thought of their kindness to me, talking me through my lowest moments with Kate. To think that they’d been a spy while actively participating in every internal debate, argument, and decision within A Fierce Blue Fire for over half a decade—it was a betrayal I still couldn’t wrap my mind around, and this had the counterintuitive effect of blunting my rage.
“Was anything true about you, Coral? The Salton Sea? That story about your dad?”
“I was myself, Matt.” Coral pushed their glasses up the bridge of their nose, and though they’d assured me they were the analog kind, I obviously remained alert. “And you were my friend. That was real. All I will say in my defense—and then I’d like to leave it at that—is that we had strong suspicions there were people in your organization who were 6Degrees.”
I snorted. “You don’t believe that.”
“It never mattered what I believed. I had a job to do.”
I stared into my mug, trying hard to summon any fury, but it had turned as cold as the coffee.
“There are things, Matt, that no one has exactly put together.”
“Like I’m going to listen to any theory from you. And great job, Coral. It turns out all those attacks were masterminded by a handful of people mailing each other fucking lotto fliers.”
Their blunt fingernails, painted brown, played a little syncopated beat on the Formica of the kitchen island.
“Have you ever heard of Megadata Narrative Reconstruction?” they asked.