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My letter didn’t have a signature.
“Would a person who received a National Security Letter be allowed to keep it?”
“Of course,” she says. She pulls back the hood and looks at me. “Are you in trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
We hug. It’s a hug that lasts exactly three seconds too long and I remember exactly the way we used to fit together. Wendy had a fondness for Billy Collins poems and foot massages. Her girlfriends didn’t like me.
Now she walks to a silver Lexus and drives away. I stand in the rain. So many pieces of me are left in so many places. Some times it’s a good feeling and every once in a while it hurts like hell.
***
I am losing time. The Sunday column is due in less than seventeen hours, but I can dig into the evergreen file. A column idea squirreled away for a slow news day. The bosses are so distracted they won’t notice. In fact, they seem to prefer it now when I don’t write about controversial topics—another change from the old days when the Free Press had real balls. But I’m not getting results where it counts. Wendy was my hope for a home run. Troy was under investigation for a massive investment fraud? Maybe that would have made him a target for suicide—or maybe assisted suicide if he made powerful enemies. The only trouble is, it’s apparently not true. Not only did Wendy say he was clean, but I haven’t received one tip about trouble in Troy’s hedge fund. I am further than ever from connecting him to Megan Nyberg, Ryan Meyers, and Heather Brady—kids who should be far out of the orbit of Troy’s lavish life.
I ride back toward Pioneer Square on a quiet, electric Third Avenue bus. As night has arrived, the clientele has changed. I look like the only person aboard who makes more than $25,000 a year. A woman with a long, scraggly beard sits across from me. Parts of downtown are dark and seedy looking, new empty storefronts added just since the last time I was along this way. A long recession will do that.
I pull out my Blackberry, wanting to call Amber. I am missing her. I am missing Pam and Rachel and the two Melindas. I put it away. It’s untrustworthy for much more than calling to order a pizza. Why am I really surprised? It was well-reported, including by our soon-to-be-dead Washington bureau, that the National Security Agency had spied on reporters during the Bush years. I thought most of that was all in the past. And why would anyone be listening in on a business columnist at a paper in Seattle?
That had been Faith’s question to me that afternoon, a quizzical half-smile on her face—after thirty minutes spent fiddling with my computer.
“Has it been slow lately?” she asked, running an anti-virus program while I sat on my desk watching. I told her it had been, and had crashed a couple of times. She nodded and opened different menus. “No obvious viruses,” she said. “I see from the AV program that you’ve been rebooting every day. That’s when we install new anti-virus patches. You wouldn’t get it if you didn’t…”
I nodded cooperatively.
“Sit down here.” I followed her instructions and sat at the keyboard. She got on her knees and swept her black hair out of her face as she watched the CPU on the floor. Her hair fell in a perfect crescent just below her shoulders. “Just open a file and start typing. Any old thing.”
So I did, discreetly appreciating the shape of her denim-clad behind.
“Now stop.”
I stared out the window at the rain. She said, “Now start typing again.”
After a few minutes of this, she went out into the business newsroom and worked on a spare computer. Then she came back and sat cross-legged on the floor, looking up at me. She pursed her lips, moving her mouth to the side and up. “This is really interesting. See the processor lights?” She pointed to the box on the floor. “They blink when you’re not doing anything. So I looked in back, at the network interface card’s activity light. Packets of data are being sent out when they shouldn’t be…”
“So I’m being spied on?”
“I’d say. It’s pretty sophisticated snooping, though. I called up the task manager a few minutes ago…”
“Don’t know nothing about no science, Faith.”
I got a smile out of her. She adjusted her black oval glasses. “The task manager, Mister Economics Columnist, should show any spyware that’s running.” She smiled with one side of her mouth. “If you know where to look. Now they can name it something innocuous, but I couldn’t find anything. But I’m pretty sure we’ve got a cracker. Somebody who’s broken through our security.” She rubbed her small hands together. “Takes me back to my cracking and hacking days. Want me to take it down? Re-route them to a porn site? Send them a virus?”
I shrugged. It might be useful to let them think I was as clueless about this as I was about the rest of the situation. I asked her to let me think about it.
“I’d guess it’s just you,” she said. “I have to check and make sure it’s not a general breach, but it looks like they are targeting you. Why would anybody be snooping on the business columnist?” she said, rising to go. “No offense.”
“None taken. Thanks, Faith. You’ll have a job long after I am living under a bridge.”
“I actually gave notice today. I’m going to a startup. May as well get off the Titanic.”
I told her I was sorry to see her go, knowing she was too young to miss the good times of newspapering, wondering if she even reads the paper, if someone of her generation has had her brain so rewired by constant electronic distractions as to be like me at all. She broke my reverie.
“You write at home, too,” she said.
“I own a Mac. Two, actually.”
“Don’t sound superior. Assume that’s been cracked, as well.”
