with a former NSA basement dweller named Walt. He’d called Walt the night previous in hopes of handling things on the phone, but Walt was one of those old-school guys who liked to be face-to-face, though Sam got the impression the guy just wanted a free meal. The more aggravating aspect was that Walt, now that he was retired, thought meeting somewhere at six a.m. was perfectly normal. Sam hoped that once his pension came in, he wouldn’t be one of those people. He didn’t want to see six a.m. unless he was creeping up behind it on the way home.
But there Sam sat, surrounded by a breakfast gang that seemed to know each other intimately. Sharing newspapers. Bitching about the Democrats. Drinking coffee like their prostates were made of Teflon. Not a Bloody Mary or Mimosa to be found, which Sam considered a punishable offense.
“You come here a lot?” Sam asked.
“Every morning,” Walt said. “Most of the people here are ex-military or government. It’s a good crowd.”
“Just so I understand,” Sam said, “you spent thirty years in the NSA so you could retire, move to Miami and surround yourself with all of the same people?”
“You want that I should have gone to San Fran cisco and moved into some liberal hippie commune?”
Sam liked Walt, thought he was a nice enough fellow, a good American, all that, but he got the feeling Walt hadn’t turned on a television since Reagan left office. That wasn’t punishable, but watching him eat runny scrambled eggs might have been, which he’d been doing for the last fifteen minutes. Three times the waitress had brought over a plate of eggs, and three times Walt had sent it back after a few bites, saying the consistency wasn’t right, until finally the waitress brought over a serving that made Sam seriously ponder vegetarianism for a few moments.
“All that’s missing are the feathers,” Sam said.
“You overcook scrambled eggs,” Walt said, “you lose all the iron.”
Sam didn’t think that was true, didn’t even know if eggs contained iron, but at this point didn’t even really care. Two Tums from now and this whole nauseating aspect of the experience would be rectified. Besides, there wasn’t a better computer security guy in all of Miami than Walt, even though by the looks of him now, in his country club windbreaker and yellow polo shirt, he was probably spending most of his time on a putting green. He was one of those guys who looked like he was fifty when he was twenty-five, from all that time spent sitting around dark rooms, analyzing data on a computer screen, which made Sam wonder just how old Walt really was, since now the poor guy looked damn near dead, albeit relaxed, in his new retired state. He noticed Walt even had dentures now. Weird, because the last time they’d done work together was just a few months previous, and the guy had a full mouth of god-given teeth.
“Listen, Big Walt,” Sam said, “I’ve got a top-secret mission I need some help on.”
“If it’s so top secret,” Walt said, “why are you coming to a private citizen like me?”
“That’s how secret it is,” Sam said, “even people in government are suspect.”
That seemed to satisfy Walt, or at least found a spot in his ego that was sufficiently inured from actual truth. Anyway, working with ex-NSA guys was always a bit of a pain in the ass. They just knew a lot more than other people. But that was okay, Sam thought, since it gave someone like Walt something to be proud of in addition to his penchant for eating, essentially, the moderately warmed ovum of a chicken. And it wasn’t like Walt was feeding information directly to Rumsfeld back when they were both still employed, anyway. Walt’s job was your basic low- level computer security gig at the NSA, like tracking minor threats on things like the Eastern Interconnected System power grid and calls about suspected terrorists with MySpace pages. Nine to five, no weekends, no direct knowledge of Dick Cheney’s whereabouts at any given time, but a business card that said NSA, which was pretty good for getting people to waive late charges at Blockbuster.
Sam showed Walt the Web site and the video, which Sam noted had been updated since the night before. There was even more footage now.
“Don’t tell me this is some kind of pornography,” Walt said, shoving Sam’s laptop away at the first sight of the woman and child.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Sam said.
“Because I’m here to tell you that pornography leads to terrorism. Studies have proven this.”
The other pain-in-the-ass aspect of working with ex-NSA is that a lot of them were desperately odd people who’d spent their best years scared out of their minds by the shit they’d witnessed, even if they witnessed it on the computer or through secondary reports.
“Agreed, totally,” Sam said. Sometimes it’s just better to not argue over the peccadilloes of the retired. Sam explained to Walt the bare bones of the issues-which is to say he decided to just make everything up. “The woman in this video is the princess of Moldavia, as you know,” he said, “and we have reason to believe that she’s being tracked by Carpathians intent on harming her and her crown. But it’s not entirely certain where these evildoers are currently operating out of.”
Walt nodded and took another mouthful of egg and then broke off a piece of toast and dunked it into the liquid. “Interesting,” he said. “Haven’t seen anything on the news about this.”
“Very hush-hush,” Sam said. When he’d done some work with Walt in the past, he was upset to learn that Walt was one of those people who liked to lecture others about alcohol consumption before certain hours, which was too bad since Sam now couldn’t get it out of his mind what an injustice it was that he was up this early and couldn’t reasonably order a Bloody Mary without drawing undo attention. Sam thought it would make this meeting a lot less mentally taxing, never mind dulling the sounds of Walt’s chewing, which included a troubling amount of whistling. “I need to get some tracking on this site, get an idea of who is viewing it, who is uploading it, access points, whatever you can find out. The safety of Moldavia depends on it.”
Sam couldn’t remember if Moldavia was a real country or if it had something to do with the Ice Princess from General Hospital back in the day, a brief addiction he’d unabashedly had while recovering from a bullet wound. Anyway, it didn’t seem like Walt knew, either, since he took Sam’s laptop and started typing absently on the keyboard with one hand, the other still busy with breakfast. After about ten minutes of this one-handed show, which also involved Walt making a weird clicking noise with his tongue against the roof of his dentures, he set the laptop aside.
“A decent IT guy will see someone breaking into this site in fifteen seconds.”
Sam was afraid of that. Technology has a way of passing you by if you’re busy getting dentures and playing golf. He really had to ask him about the denture thing. It was quite curious, since the NSA had a helluva health plan. “I understand,” Sam said. “You know someone else I could talk to?”
“No need,” Walt said. He pushed the laptop across the table. “I already got you the information.”
Cagey bastard.
Sam clicked through the files. It was a pretty extensive array, considering Walt managed to literally get it all with one hand.
“Impressive,” Sam said. There were almost fifteen pages of information stored now, but Sam couldn’t figure out what he was looking at, as most of it consisted of lines of letters and numbers that reminded him of launch codes.
“You don’t just lose it,” Walt said.
“What do we have here?”
“Everything. Lots of stuff for you to chew on.”
Sam considered that for a moment in light of all the information he’d gleaned just by looking at Walt. “What happened with your teeth?”
“Got tired of ’em,” he said. “One less thing to worry about. That’s the great thing about being retired. You get to make your own decisions about what you want to spend your time obsessing about. Mark my words. Day you retire, you’ll start thinking about getting rid of your chompers, too.”
Sam found that hard to believe. If he was going to get some kind of body modification, he might go for a robotic arm that fired missiles, or see about what a hollow leg would actually cost, or just go straight toward the Superman route and get X-ray vision, which would be pretty useful living in Miami. But his teeth were staying put. In the spirit of being fraternal, however, Sam thought he’d ask Walt for the name of his dentist at some point so Walt wouldn’t feel like Sam was just using him for his technological expertise.
“Tell me something, Walt,” Sam said. “This system you just cracked. How much would someone spend to set something like this up?”
Walt ran his tongue over the front of his “teeth” and thought about it for a moment. “Whoever did the work on this was pretty sharp,” he said. “And getting through the Italian was a challenge. Don’t Moldavians speak
