There. At last, a link between a third-tier messenger service and the encryption.
Eleven twenty-six. He couldn’t risk missing the deadline. Still, he had to find out more about IRGG. He went back to the NSA’s main database and found the very first hit for IRGG was a file called Indian Army Software Suppliers. A military application made perfect sense for a messaging service like this one, with decent but not top-rank encryption.
Brian looked everything over. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he’d made some mistake so obvious that the Tailored Access guys would laugh at him and put up his submission as an example of what not to do. But if he had, he couldn’t see it.
He wrote up what he’d found, included the links. And at 11:55 p.m. he sent it off.
* * *
He drove home that night as excited as he’d ever been. His mood didn’t survive thirty seconds with Becks. Who was sitting on the couch by herself, watching Saturday Night Live.
“I did it, Becks.”
“Did what?”
“Solved it.”
“That’s amazing.” She couldn’t have sounded less amazed if he’d told her he’d stopped on the way home to buy Cheerios. “When will you know for sure?” Her way of saying, Yeah, right.
“It was intense.”
“I can smell that.” She wrinkled her nose. “You should take a shower.”
She was mad that he’d worked all day and not called, he saw. Did she have any idea what a hypocrite she was? Their entire marriage she’d worked this way, left him with the kids. He almost said something like, I thought you’d be happy for me, but screw it, he wasn’t showing her any weakness. Let her sit there watching Kate McKinnon.
* * *
When he got in on Monday morning a short black guy was waiting at his desk.
“Brian Unsworth?”
“Guilty.”
“Jim Reynolds. We need to talk.”
The heat of Rebecca’s disdain had evaporated whatever confidence Brian had felt. She was probably right. He couldn’t have seen what no one else had.
“I mess up somehow?”
Reynolds didn’t answer, just nodded, Come with me. He led Brian at race-walk speed down a fire staircase to a basement corridor that Brian hadn’t known existed, swiped his badge to unlock a thick steel door. Down a hallway to a conference room, where a man and woman sat on one side of a table. On the other side, an empty chair, obviously meant for him.
Brian sat. Reynolds stayed standing.
“Can you walk us through your thought process on the challenge?”
Guess we won’t be introducing ourselves. Brian hoped the truth didn’t make him sound like an idiot. “I didn’t see how I could beat the encryption directly. An end-around seemed like the best option.”
“Did you have any outside help?” the woman asked.
“No.” He shook his head for emphasis.
“Your boss came by.” This from the guy.
“Only to dump water on me.” Brian started to laugh, then stopped when no one else did. “Really.”
“Someone from TAO tipped you,” the woman said. Not a question this time.
“I don’t even know anyone from TAO.”
“You have ten minutes,” Reynolds said. “Walk us through how you got from X to Y.”
So Brian did. They listened, no questions. When he was done, Reynolds looked at him. “You’d be okay taking a polygraph to confirm this.”
“This is getting weird.” Though he knew the NSA loved the box. He’d already taken one before he was hired.
“Yes or no to the poly?”
“Yes, sure.”
Reynolds looked at the other two. “Okay, you’ve met him. Any problems?”
They shook their heads.
“Okay,” Reynolds said, and extended a hand. “Welcome to TAO. Assuming you pass the poly.”
“Holy shit,” Brian said.
* * *
Three days later Brian was officially part of Tailored Access. Over coffee, Reynolds explained the job, and why he’d hired Brian:
“We need some coders who think like you, who see cracks in the architecture, exploitable holes. I mean, a lot of the time it’s not going to work, and I gotta warn you that some of the hard-core guys may not take you seriously. But it doesn’t matter, we run a pretty open shop. I want you to feel free to ask questions. I’ve got enough tanks. I need some snipers. Make sense?”
“Sure does.” What could be better than having the chance to think of himself as a sniper?
He didn’t realize at the time that—like his marriage—his new job would never again be as good as it was in those early days. Be careful what you wish for.
* * *
But for a while all was well. Reynolds was as good as his word. The internal walls were low, and the coders encouraged to collaborate. Sure, some of the PhDs made clear they thought his Ender’s Game win was a fluke. But so what? If he had to eat a little crap, so be it. He had plenty of experience with that at home.
And as for home… not much changed.
Sure, their money problems improved now that he was working, and he got a raise once he joined Tailored Access. They made progress on their credit card bills. But Brian couldn’t see how they’d ever pay for college for the kids. Of course, he could live with them not going to college. Not his first choice, but he hadn’t gone and his life had worked out. But he knew he couldn’t even mention the possibility to Becks. She’d freak.
Worse, Becks still didn’t treat him as an equal. Brian thought sometimes it was like she didn’t believe he worked for Tailored Access.
What did she want from him? Now he had a real job, and she still didn’t take him seriously. Maybe she was so used to thinking of him as her lovable loser husband that she couldn’t look at him any other way.
Maybe she liked thinking about him that way, maybe she always had.
But he was done trying to prove himself to his wife.
Now that he had a few bucks to spare, he started hitting the strip clubs again. He didn’t like the ones in D.C. as much as Houston—those strippers had been the best part of living down there. But they did the trick, especially one club called the Peppermint, just inside the D.C.-Maryland border, about a half hour from Fort Meade. After the club he’d usually hit the gym on the way home. Gave him an excuse to take a shower.
He had no problem making sure Rebecca didn’t find out. The kids had their own lives now. No one cared if he came home at six or eight. Plus he could always find an excuse, say he was having a beer after work. Not like Rebecca would check up on him. Maybe she didn’t care, or maybe she was just busy. Anyway, if he was being honest with himself, he liked putting one over on her. The great FBI agent didn’t even know what her husband was doing.
Though when the strippers offered to take him upstairs, the anything-goes rooms, he still said no. He couldn’t explain why, but he supposed maybe his vows mattered to him more than he realized.
* * *
The thrill of being part of Tailored Access slowly faded. The NSA was pushing machine learning and artificial intelligence, letting the software do the work, at speeds humans couldn’t comprehend. Writing those programs required an understanding of software theory Brian didn’t have.
Funny part, no one seemed to notice. He wasn’t a star, but he made himself useful on secondary projects, and every so often he had clever suggestions. Still, deep down, he felt like a fraud.
And he started to question the job itself. Sure, the stakes seemed high. Networks ran everything. The Internet was a new battlefield all its own, with skirmishes that moved across countries and nodes at the speed of light.
Still, it was all just code. A lot of NSA guys liked to think of themselves as soldiers. They tossed around the language of war a lot. But Brian figured none of them, including him, would have the stones for real war. The difference between him and the rest of them was that he knew it. If they made a mistake, someone else—on some front line somewhere—would pay the price long
before they did.
He kept his opinions about the fake NSA machismo to himself. Not much percentage in talking about it.
* * *
The days went by. Rebecca laid off a little. Mainly they focused on the kids. Brian realized a strange truth: until it exploded, a lousy marriage could make for good parenting. Maybe he and Becks were competing to prove their worth to their children. Maybe, deep down, they hoped to save the marriage through the kids.
As he approached forty, Brian’s life was objectively fine. He had a good job, healthy kids. Yet more and more he hated everything and everyone, except for Kira and Tony. No point in thinking about a divorce. Tony wasn’t even a teenager, and Brian didn’t plan to go anywhere at least until he’d graduated high school.
When he needed to psych himself up, he thought about the speech he’d give Rebecca after he filed the divorce papers. He used to play the same game with his father, imagining what he’d say at his funeral.
He wondered sometimes if Rebecca felt the same as he did. But from a practical point of view the marriage had worked for her. Rebecca was nothing if not practical, he thought. His practico-path wife.
* * *
Then it happened.
One Monday night at Planet Fitness, he noticed a woman reading a programming manual as she pedaled slowly on a recumbent. A female coder. He’d never seen her before. He would have remembered. Even at the NSA they were rare. She was skinny, small, with blond pixie hair and a tiny tattoo on her arm. Twenty-five or so. No wedding ring.
She looked up, caught him staring, smiled. A tiny smile, elven. He was about to take the bike next to hers when his courage deserted him. He chose a treadmill behind her instead and spent his workout watching her from behind. Lame and creepy. Back in the day he would have gone straight to her. Worst of all, he had something to talk about with her. She was reading more than working out, hardly moving the pedals as she paged through the manual. But as he decided to say hello, she finished, tossed her book in her bag, walked straight out. No shower.
He spent the next day waiting for his chance to go to the gym.
She wasn’t there. He was furious with himself. Where had his game gone?
Then, Friday, he saw her. Don’t blow it. He walked over, took the bike next to hers.
“I usually stick to something easy like Python when I’m exercising.”
“You’re a coder?” She sounded vaguely European to Brian, German maybe.
“Maybe.”
“So, Mr. Maybe, can you walk me through this question of error correction?” She pushed the manual at him.
“I’ll need something very important first.”
“Yes?”
“Your name.”
Eve. And they were off. They spent the next forty-five minutes chatting and pretending to work out. Brian liked her. She was younger than he’d realized, twenty-three, and shy. She was Finnish and had lived in Helsinki until she was nine. Then her dad took a job with Microsoft and they moved to Seattle.
“Do you miss Finland?”
“Not so much. The winters make everyone a bit crazy. And it’s hard to understand if you’re from this country what it’s like to live in a place no one cares about. For a while we all thought Nokia was so important, the great mobile company, and then it stopped mattering, too.”
“Honestly, I don’t think I ever thought about Finland before Nokia. Or since. I probably shouldn’t say that.”
“No, it’s fine.”
Finally, she looked at her watch and stuffed her book in her gym bag.
“I have to go. I’m sorry.”
“Will you be here Monday?”
“Will you?” She winked at him, the flirtiest gesture she’d made, though it was a little bit geeky, too. Again she ran out, no shower.
* * *
All weekend Brian felt like a kid waiting for his birthday, watching the clock. He had a feeling she’d be there Monday. And she was. She smiled when she saw him, patted the bike next to hers. The conversation picked up where it had left off. She’d spent the weekend at home working.
“Your boyfriend must have been bored.” His old rule, better to ask fast, not waste time.
“No boyfriend. He moved to New York last year. Anyway, we weren’t compatible in some ways.”
Brian restrained himself from asking if she meant sex.
“How about you?”
“Married, but we’re getting divorced.” Not exactly a lie. More a matter of timing.
“Terrible. I’m sorry to hear that.”
Her tone was neutral. Was she flirting, or just stating a fact?
“You think you know someone and you don’t at all,” she said.
“Or maybe you know them too well.”
“That too.”
He was looking forward to a long conversation but her phone beeped. “I have to go,” she said. “I have a programming group in ten minutes.”
“You won’t have time to shower.”
She leaned over. “Maybe I like being dirty,” she said, under her breath so only he could hear.
Okay, she was definitely flirting. Don’t wuss out. Ask. In fact don’t ask, just say it. “Let’s have lunch tomorrow.”
“If you’re sure your wife won’t mind.”
“I’m sure.”
* * *
He met her at an overpriced Mexican place in Bethesda. They were early. The restaurant was nearly empty. They picked a booth in the back, ordered margaritas as soon as the waiter came by. She seemed to be having second thoughts.
“Have you ever done this before?”
“No.” And he felt he was telling the truth. The strippers only wanted money. They weren’t really there.
They sucked down the first margs even before the chips came, ordered another round. Twelve bucks a pop and strong. She relaxed.
“My parents are talking about going back to Finland. I tell them they’re crazy.”
“You have family there?”
“One brother, he’s a lot older, never left. Let’s not talk about my family, they wouldn’t like my being here.”
“What should we talk about?”
“C++.”
“Exciting.”
The drinks kept coming and Eve switched sides to sit beside Brian. He realized that without having to talk they had decided what would happen next. More than anything, he felt young, like his mojo had flown back in on the skinny shoulders of this Finnish girl.
When they walked out of the restaurant the sunlight stung his eyes.
“I can’t drive,” she said.
Fifty yards away a Marriott waited. They stumbled in hand in hand and after a short, awkward conversation with the clerk, I know check-in is three but we need a room now, I’ll pay for two nights if I have to, he had the plastic key to Room 524.
“Are you okay with this?” Eve said.
“You have no idea how much. You?”
She squeezed his hand.
* * *
What came next surprised him. Because Eve turned out to be one of those quiet women who was someone very different behind the bedroom door. “See this.” She pointed to a faded yellow bruise on her bicep. “This is what I like.”
She wasn’t the first woman he’d met who found pleasure in pain. “I get it.”
“Yes? Really?”
In answer he picked her up and threw her onto the bed. He slapped and bit and put his hands around her neck and the more he pushed her the more she wanted. Harder. More. Harder. Harder. Yes—
By the time he finished he was exhausted, panting like he’d just finished a race. He pulled out at the last moment. She ran her hand down his cheek, the only bit of tenderness since they’d entered the room.
“I didn’t know if you could do it.”
“You’re a totally different person in here.”
She grinned, showing him her uneven Finnish teeth. “You like it?”
“Oh yes.”
He rolled off, lay beside her. She went to the bathroom a
nd he closed his eyes and dozed. He wondered if he’d feel guilty when he went home and realized, no, he wouldn’t. He’d have dinner with Rebecca and the kids and think of nothing but this beautiful sliver of a woman.
He must have fallen asleep but then she was beside him again. She reached between his legs and began to stroke him.
“This time you hurt me. Really hurt me. I tell you to stop, you don’t stop. I say no, you get rough.”
A game he had never played before. It scared him a little. He wondered if it was the reason why her boyfriend had left. “Don’t we need a safe word?”
“Hah.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay fine. Avocado.” She looked at him, those pale blue eyes. “Yes?”
She was still stroking him. Without stopping, she leaned in and bit his lip. Hard, no joke, and now he was the one who was bleeding.
“Oh you bitch.”
“Then do it. Make me want it.”
So he did. He held her down, shoved himself inside her. She kicked and snapped and whimpered.
After what seemed like a very long time but probably wasn’t she dropped the pretense, stopped begging him to stop and instead pleaded for more. Oh yes. Coming coming coming. Soon he was too.
The strangest, most intense sexual experience of his life. One afternoon and he was ready to rob a bank for this woman. She fucked my brains out felt like a simple statement of fact.
“Next week? This time? This hotel?”
“Yes, please.”
* * *
But when he turned up in the Marriott lobby a week later, she wasn’t there.
That was the bad news.
The worse news came when a bulky man he’d never seen before said, “Brian?” and shoved a keycard into his hands—716—and walked away.
Maybe this was today’s game. But he had a bad feeling.
The Power Couple Page 24
