“Every foreign navy would want the plans for this drone.”
Glenn said, “And they’d do just about anything to get them.”
14
Glenn and I left the gym and arrived at Gertrude’s Crab House just after six o’clock. The outside deck was closed, presumably due to the autumn chill. Inside, the restaurant was only half full. Tyrell the bartender nodded and smiled as he pointed to two empty stools, but I waved him off.
“Hey, Tyrell,” I greeted him. “We’re going to grab some pub grub, so we’ll sit at a booth. Maybe we’ll hang at the bar afterwards.”
Tyrell dried a Manhattan glass with a cotton towel. “No problem, Bryce. Plenty of seats, at least until the music starts.”
An acoustic guitarist performed a sound check near the large windows overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. She strummed a few chords and spoke into her microphone before adjusting the volume of her amplifiers.
I asked Tyrell, “Would you let the server know that we’re sitting way in the back?”
“Yeah, sure,” he replied and then leaned forward to whisper, “not a fan of reggae, huh?”
“No, it’s good. We’re just going back there.”
“You got it,” he said.
Glenn and I walked to the far end of the crab house and took a booth that allowed us to see anyone approaching close enough to hear us. With the murmuring of the diners and the music about to start, we could speak privately. We looked over the pub menu.
The server arrived with plastic glasses of ice water with lemon wedges, which Glenn and I both drank to cool down after our racquetball games. Glenn had taken two out of three matches, so the meal was on me, even though I was going to snag the check anyway. I owed him for his investigative work on the Benton Dynamics case, even if it drained the last of my emergency cash.
“Can I start you’z guys with some drinks?” the server asked. “Need some time before you order?”
Glenn said, “I know what I want. A light beer. Draught. Half a dozen raw oysters as an appetizer, unless you want to share a dozen?”
I shook my head no. Oysters belonged at the bottom of the sea and not the bottom of my stomach.
Glenn continued, “And the all-you-can-eat steamed crabs, please.”
The server turned to me, so I asked her, “How’re the crabs tonight?”
“They’re awesome, hon. Came in nice and big today. Been a good season.”
I ordered an India Pale Ale, nachos deluxe, and steamed crabs as well.
She jotted our order on a notepad and said, “That’ll be right up. Back in a sec with your drinks.”
Glenn was still perspiring from the workout. He dabbed his forehead and temples with a paper napkin. We had finished our ice water by the time our beers and appetizers arrived. I took a hoppy gulp of ale followed by a cheese-soaked nacho topped with a jalapeno slice. Glenn selected the raw oyster nearest him and slid it off the shell into his mouth.
“Now, that’s good,” he said, wiping his chin. “Sure you don’t want one?”
“No thanks, I’m sure, but help me with this mountain of nachos. They’re no good the next day.”
He grabbed a few nachos, and when the server was back in the kitchen, we were free to talk.
Glenn set his mug down. “Bryce, how come you left NSA?”
“Why do you think?”
Glenn’s only reply was to stare back at me, apparently urging me to offer an explanation.
I said, “A lot of what we did wasn’t legal. Whenever I pointed that out … well, nothing.”
He took a short sip of beer. “So what then? You got fed up? Our bosses did what they did. Used us to find a way to get what they wanted, legal or otherwise. Come on, that surprised you?”
“At the end, they reassigned my better cases. I was banging my head against the wall.”
“Guess it’s true what they say. You can’t fight City Hall.”
“I don’t mind fighting City Hall,” I said. “They at least follow a few rules there. Some of our directors were above the law, or maybe completely outside it. I couldn’t go on. No one was guarding the guards.”
“Why not go up the chain of command?”
“You know what the consequences would’ve been.”
Glenn nodded. “Or perhaps become a whistleblower?”
“And do what? Go to the media or maybe that Project Transparrior website? I’m a lot of things, Glenn, but no traitor. We took an oath.”
Glenn threw back another oyster and dropped the shell onto his plate. “So you bailed out?”
“I didn’t study the law to find every angle to break it. To tell them where the line was and watch them cross it. And then the next line after that. You know what the agency did.”
“Sure,” Glenn replied. “Wiretaps, digital surveillance, hacking into private computers.”
“And not just foreign targets. Domestic, too. Our government even launched computer viruses and planted fake data.”
“Bryce, it’s called cyber warfare, not cyber beanbag … and the future is here.”
“I suppose, and I’m not naïve. We’ve played defense more than offense.”
Glenn said, “You and I helped to take down a lot of bad guys.”
“True. I can’t dispute that.”
“Nobody was faster at getting FISA warrants than you, Bryce.”
“Not the greatest achievement in the world. In all the decades the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has been around, fewer than a hundred requests for warrants were ever turned down. Over forty thousand granted. That’s not how a court of law should be.”
Glenn said, “We made the country safer. Our whole agency did.”
“Yeah, I suppose, but you know foreign agents weren’t the only targets. You realize what that means now?”
Glenn crunched on a nacho.
I said, “Our entire lives are digital. Everything we do is wide open for snooping, targeting, exposure, blacklisting, or worse. It’s too much power. Eventually, innocent people will get hurt. No one was putting on the brakes.”
Glenn dried his fingers with a fresh paper napkin. “You and I did good work. We saved lives. Ever consider coming
