Page 42 of Sherwood
“I putham in it,” Will said, affronted, and then left us with a very Gallic sniff. Jove followed, giving us a wave as she went.
Marian turned to me. In the low light of the room, I could only make out the implication of her face in the dark. A full mouth, high cheeks, an upturned nose. All of it bathed in a green, almost forest-like glow.
“What was all true, Lox?” she asked, returning to what I’d said earlier. “What did you see?”
ChapterEleven
LOX
“It wasn’t meant for me,”I tried to explain. “The first one. A message from Lackland to someone in the Carpathian government.Proceed. For Ys. That was all it said. The next day, three American birds were blown up on a Carpathian base. No injuries, but millions of dollars gone up in a plume of smoke.” I sighed. “Rafe thought I was seeing something that wasn’t there.”
“But I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” I continued. “The timing, the sign-off.For Ys. It didn’t take being a cryptographer to know that meant something. So I did what I wasn’t supposed to do and started searching more of Lackland’s messages, not just from that data lake, but from other lakes as well. And like I said earlier, I thought I must be wrong, or that I’d fucked up the installs, orsomething, because the more I searched, the more I found shit that shouldn’t be there. Stray things, you know, because Lackland’s a jackass, but he didn’t get to where he’s at without help from others, and he’s been coached on security, on how to communicate. But thank God he’s still a jackass, and lazy too, because a smarter person wouldn’t have even left those crumbs for me to find. Those crumbs were enough for me to start finding the numbers of burner phones, addresses, money transfers. They were enough for me to find what really mattered.”
One of the big fans at the end of the room began rotating slowly, sending puffs of air down the central aisle.
“And here’s what mattered. There is a global network that operates on a scale you can’t imagine, and has for…well, for longer than I think it’s possible to prove. It’s called Ys, and its members are politicians, religious leaders, military leaders, businesspeople, along with people you’ve never heard of and never will. Lackland is one of them, which means all the intelligence gathered by the United States is available to Ys, and any move that a member makes is done with Ys in mind first. It is almost entirely invisible, entirely made up of whispers and ghosts, but their hand is in everything. Our largest decisions as a country—wars, sanctions, legislation—are filtered through Ys.”
Marian was staring at me, and I gave her a sad smile.
“That’s the same expression Rafe wore when I told him.”
“Is this the night you tried to kill each other?”
I sighed. “If I’m honest, I wasn’t actually trying to kill him. Just make him…well, sitdownfor a moment so I could get away. But yes. It was that night.”
“Did you decide to run before you talked to him?”
I closed my eyes. “Do you think you can be loyal to your country even as you’re committing treason? Do you think that you can serve a country you’re stealing from?”
“Yes,” Marian said softly. “I do.”
I opened my eyes. “Rafe didn’t,” I responded. I was proud of how level I sounded, how unwounded.
“Categorical good and bad applies to so many things, but I don’t think loving a country is one of them,” she said, and I was so goddamn relieved to hear her say that.
“But why haven’t you gone public with it yet? That’s what whistleblowers do, right? They blow the whistle for other people to hear?”
“Yes,” I said with a heavy sigh. “They do.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
An excellent question. One with no answer—at least no agreed upon answers among the Merry Men. “Jove and Tuck want to wait until we have more before we release it to the press. They think the more damning it all is—the sheer amount of material we could have if we waited—will make what we’ve found impossible to ignore. Which is sensible, given how improbable this whole thing is. Will and Much want to move faster. We can always release more as we get it, but in their view, if we don’t act now, we risk getting caught and not able to release anything at all.”
“Surely you agree with Will?” Marian asked. “Acting fast, that’s usually your style, Lox.”
I didn’t like hearing this. Not because it hadn’t been true in the past, but because I worried that it was no longer true. That I’d lost some essential character trait in the last year—that I’d lost hold of some indelibleLoxnessthat made me who I was. That I’d become slow, overly careful, and t
hat somehow, in following what I believed more empathically than I ever had before, I had become less like myself.
It was an uncomfortable feeling. A lonely feeling, except the loneliness wasn’t located in being alone, but being separated from the oneness I used to feel inside myself.
“I don’t want to fuck it up,” I said finally, the admission coming out in such a low voice that Marian moved closer to me to hear it. “All my life, I’ve been like my father, stepping off cliffs and leaping and grabbing at what I wanted. MIT, the Army, Ranger school…working for the NSA. I never stopped to wonder if I was doing the right thing, because it all felt right. It all felt necessary. But now—well, this might be the most important thing I ever do, and both options feel right, so how do I know which one to choose?”
Land or sea?That was what my father had asked me, but I wished I could ask him what to do when the choices necessarily excluded one another. Act now and tip our hand, or wait until we had a stronger position…but possibly miss our chance.
And the stakes were too high to choose wrong.
Marian reached for my hand, and I took it, seized it.
