But there was nothing on the front page, and when I took the paper inside and went through it carefully I found nothing anywhere. “How do you keep something like that secret?” I wondered.
I went on into work at the usual time and everything seemed normal. My co-workers showed no sign of awareness of anything unusual. “How was your holiday?” they asked, and I realized they had no way of knowing what had transpired. It was a little deflating.
Then about an hour later I got a summons to see Ben’s boss. I was smiling when I entered, expecting congratulations and maybe more, but instead I got a scowl. He held up a document with my signature on it. “When you joined the NSA, you signed an oath to protect any information you gathered while you work here. Under Section 18 of the U.S. Legal Code, disclosure of any information about codes or ciphers of the U.S. or any foreign government, or any information relating to the acquisition or use of any device, apparatus or appliance involving such code is subject to a fine and/or imprisonment for up to ten years. That particularly applies to the session you witnessed yesterday and all events leading up it. Are we clear on that, Selfridge?”
When I nodded dumbly, he said, “Good, then you need to get back to work.”
“What a come-down!” I thought as I headed back to my floor, “I didn’t want a medal, but a little gratitude would have been nice.”
By now it was clear that somebody had clamped a lid on the whole affair. Not only wouldn’t there be any ticker-tape parades in my future, but I was beginning to feel as though I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The depression I’d been feeling last night returned, and it was compounded by the fact that I had another unpleasant duty to perform. I went on the Internet and began searching for a divorce attorney.
Things only got worse over the next few weeks. I saw a reference to the FBI, and that reminded me about Agent Henry. I did a Google search on him and found a small news item buried in the Knoxville News Sentinel. It reported that a federal employee named John Henry had died in a traffic accident in Frozen Head State Park. He was 37 years old; there were no other details. That made me sad. Henry was a decent guy who had died trying to protect me. I thought he deserved a lot better than a truncated obituary. I tried to get a little more information from FBI headquarters, but I hit a blank wall.
A few days later, a guy who sits next to me popped his head around the corner. “Hey, did you hear the news? Our boss’s boss is getting a nice promotion. Apparently he pulled off some sort of coup back over the holidays and now he’s getting his reward.”
I didn’t say anything, but inwardly I was seething. As far as I knew, the only thing he’d done to stop ISIS was to use me as bait. And now he was being rewarded?
I thought about trying to go to the Director of the NSA about what was going on. But before I could explore that avenue, some kind of brouhaha about Israel came up on Capitol Hill. The IDF had made some sort of incursion into Syria, and many in Congress were up in arms about Israeli aggression. When it came out that the NSA had made certain intercepted communications available to the IDF, there were howls of protest, and the next thing I knew the Director had resigned and the NSA had a new leader. There was even talk about delaying Israel’s purchase of additional Patriot missile batteries, but ultimately the deal went through.
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