"Are you going to get
married
?"
I must have sounded pretty intense, because he laughed -- and so did the weirdos at the next table. "Come on, Marcus, I'm nineteen years old. That's a little young, but it's not as if I'm a kid anymore. I don't know if I want to get married to Kylie right now, but the idea of getting married isn't the worst one I've ever heard. Lots of people do it, you know."
"I know," I said. "But --" I couldn't find the words.
But getting married is for old people
.
"My parents got engaged when they were eighteen. Like I said, I don't know for sure if Kylie is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, but there's a good chance she is. I mean, how do you feel about Ange? Are you planning on breaking up with her?"
"No! I mean, of course not! We had a big fight last week and I was ready to stick my head in the oven. I get sick just thinking about it."
"There you go, then. You're planning on spending forever with her. You just haven't admitted it. And from what I know about her, she's in the same place. Kylie's twenty-five, she was in a long-term relationship before, and so she knows that there's a point where you've got to fish or cut bait."
"You make it sound so romantic."
"There's nothing romantic about pretending you're not heading toward a lifelong commitment. How long are you and Ange going to stay together? It's a question worth asking yourself -- and Ange."
"How come no matter what, we always end up talking about my problems?"
He grinned. "Well, it's always easier to give advice than to take it, duh."
"So maybe I should give
you
advice."
"Marcus, you're one of my oldest friends. If you had advice for me, I'd listen closely."
"And once again, I've managed to put myself on the spot."
"Yeah. It's one of your most endearing traits."
"Argh. Okay, well, for whatever it's worth, I really like Kylie. I don't know her very well, but from what I've seen, she seems like really good people. And it sounds like she makes you happy. But Jolu --" I fussed with my pie and the spreading ice-cream slick beside the cooling slice. "Well, buddy, I mean, I think most people today like to spend a while making sure they know each other really well before they commit to forever. It sounds like Kylie thinks you can't afford to do that because if you decide you're not going to keep it up, you'll have to walk away from your job or she will. But what if you promised each other that no matter what, neither one of you will expect the other to quit? I mean, that may be a hard promise to keep, but is it any harder to keep than 'I promise to marry you and be with you forever until I die'?"
He chewed this over while I felt just a
little
bit smug. He was right: it was easier to give advice than to get it.
"Huh," he said. "You're not bad. Okay, that's worth a try. Now, what are
you
going to do?"
My mood fell. "I have no idea," I said. "Everything you've told me makes sense, but I don't know where to start."
"Start at the beginning," he said. "Move one step in the direction of your goal. Remember that you can change direction to maneuver around obstacles. You don't need a plan, you need a
vector
."
I finished my ice cream and left the pie. The sun was starting to come up, and Ange would be waking up soon. We'd hardly seen each other that week, and all Jolu's talk about breaking up made me really want to see her. I figured I could go by the Korean walnut-cake place she loved and bring over a box and grab a shower and have breakfast with her family before work.
As it turned out, Ange's mom had an early appointment, and her sister was staying at a friend's place, so we had a rather indulgent time in her bed, replenishing our strength with walnut cakes as required. I had this gnawing feeling that I was going to be late for work, but every time I looked at the clock, it was still ungodly early, and we returned to our business. In the end, I rolled up to work ten minutes early, grinning like a dirty fool and feeling better than I had in weeks.
Jolu was right: I just needed to take a step in the direction I wanted to head and stay flexible enough to keep moving that way no matter what happened. And of all the problems I had, the biggest one was Carrie Johnstone. For so long as she was gunning for me, I couldn't be safe enough to do anything else. I would have to do something about her, and I was going to need Joe Noss's help to do it.
"Where's Joe?" I said. Early as I was, Flor was always earlier.
She gave me a searching look, as if trying to figure out what to tell me, then she seemed to come to a decision. "He's talking to the FBI," she said.
"The FBI? Like the FBI FBI? The guys with the sunglasses and the suits, those guys?"
"Those guys," she said.
"Oh. Um, is someone trying to kill him or something?"
Flor smiled a little. "Nothing like that. At least, not yet. If he goes all the way, the way I think he can, I'm sure that'll come.
"No, the FBI wants to talk to him about the documents we're hosting on our website."
"Oh." Of course they did. And once they started talking to him about this, it was only a matter of time until they came to talk to me. And then I'd either have to lie to a bunch of hardcore fed cops, or tell them what was going on. Neither of those were my ideal position. "Does he have a lawyer with him?"
Flor smiled again. "Yes, Marcus, he has the campaign's lawyer with him. Harry has known Joe since they were in college together. I'm sure he'll do very well."
"Well, that's good." I swallowed. "The campaign has a lawyer?"
"Yes, since the beginning. He was one of the people who pushed Joe to run as an independent."
"Does that mean that if the FBI wants to talk to the rest of us that he'll come with?"
"Marcus," Flor said, "you work for this campaign, and so yes, the campaign's lawyer will represent you any time something you've done in connection with this campaign becomes an issue with law enforcement. But don't worry too much. Joe talked to Harry before he had Liam post those documents. He understood the risks. He's gone to talk to the FBI to preempt them coming around here to talk to the rest of us. It's just part of the job."
"Okay," I said, "thanks."
"On the other hand," she said, and I glimpsed the
other
Flor, the one I'd seen the day I was hired, the slightly scary, stern one. "If you've done something that
isn't
part of this campaign, something that might make the FBI or some other law-enforcement agency want to take some action against you, something that might embroil this campaign in needless controversy, then you will find yourself answering to
me
, because we've discussed this already, and I believe we have an agreement on this. Am I right?"
"Right," I said. I felt sure my guilt was scrawled across my face, but I made myself stay calm and look just slightly to one side of her steady gaze.
I sat down at my computer to discover that I was actually a pretty smart guy. Amazon had terminated our hosting in the night, and the system had seamlessly switched us over to our first fallback cloud provider with such grace and speed that none of the uptime monitors had even noticed. That reminded me that I still needed to get my phone number back -- if the uptime monitor had squawked, the messages would have gone to my phone, wherever it had disappeared to -- and I dialed into the carrier's customer service line and started a timer going just to see how long it took the rocket-scientists at the phone company to take my request. It had ticked past the thirty-five minute mark when a shadow loomed over my shoulder, and I turned around to see Joe, looking like he'd been through the wringer.
I hung up the phone. "Hi, Joe," I said.
"Hello, Marcus."
"How're things?"
"Things are complicated," he said. "Perhaps you and I could sit down for a few minutes?"
I knew then that I was about to be fired. "Sure," I said. I locked my computer's screen and followed him into the boardroom and closed the door behind me.
"Let me tell you a few things, Marcus, before we get to chatting. If you don't mind?"
"No," I said, feeling that tight, bloodless feeling in my face and extremities. "Not at all."
"First: I believe that my opponents are behind this FBI business. They don't like the attention this has brought to the campaign, so they've put me in the soup with the law. Monroe, in particular, has had a longstanding relationship with Zyz and its subsidiaries through his career in Sacramento. I'm not in the least bit surprised to hear that he's hurting over this and wants to hit us back.
"Second: I value the work you've done here, and I credit you with coming up with this whole plan. I think you're a bright young man, and I hope you'll stay in touch with me no matter what happens.
"Third: That said, the FBI say that they're reasonably certain that you aren't just someone who happened to suggest posting these documents to our site. They seem to believe you had something to do with their initial publication.
"Fourth: I don't know if that's true or not, but in the course of our discussion, we covered several possibilities for what could happen with you and this campaign. In the end, they reluctantly but firmly agreed that if you were no longer formally associated with this office, they would not pursue any further investigations about your role in those documents to date. This was not an easy offer to come by, and in my view, it represents an internal conflict in their upper echelons, who are simultaneously outraged over these leaks and over the intelligence they contain. They don't want another Wikileaks trial on their hands, especially since this one doesn't have the same national security dimensions of that entire affair. Very little of this material is technically classified or even secret, and Harry pointed out that the few documents that have surfaced with those labels would likely have been released if they were targeted by a Freedom of Information Act request.
"But still. They don't like the
look
of the thing. Here's this young man with a history of what they consider to be antisocial computer use, and he's implicated in both the release
and
the publication of these documents. They worry that if the story gets out, they'll look incompetent or worse."
"But if I get fired --"
"Marcus, I'm not going to fire you. Be clear on that. But we're talking about optics here, the appearance of the thing. You're right that if you were fired at this juncture, it would make you look more guilty and it would make me look more foolish. But if you were to, say, go off on your own to pursue private consulting work, then the campaign could pay you a decent retainer for your work to date, a sum more or less equal to what you'd have taken home in the event that you'd worked through to election day. You'll be paid your normal salary to the end of the pay period, in exchange for being available to Liam if he needs help getting up to speed on the really excellent systems you've built for us. And should I take office, well, there's always the possibility that you would find work in my office doing the very consulting you'd set out to do while you were on your own."
"I thought you said I wasn't being fired?" The anger bubbled in me, made me want to do something
stupid
. I literally bit the inside of my cheek to keep from saying anything more.
His expression didn't change. "You're not being fired, Marcus. You're not being thrown under the bus, either. That's what the FBI expected of me, you know. They wanted me to turn you over, denounce you as a criminal who'd used my office and its technology to commit your crimes. That was what my opponents were hoping for, too."
He dropped his voice. "The Bureau has some pure fools and vicious idiots in it, but it is not, at its core, rotten. What's more, even the most foolish, vicious Feeb at HQ has some self-respect and doesn't want to be used as a game token by scheming politicians who're hoping to score points with the electorate during the midterms. It wasn't easy to broker this deal, and Harry is still surprised we got it out of them. It's the best deal we're likely to get. It's a deal that keeps you from being investigated by the federal police, and one that lets you keep your pay. It does mean you can't keep coming here and you can't be a part of our team, and I promise you, Marcus, that however much you hate that idea, I hate it even more. I think that losing you is going to
cost us
, and if I get elected, it will be in spite of losing you."
I believed every word. When Joe Noss told you something, straight and even, looking you in the eye, you couldn't help but believe him. My anger drained away.
"I can't take the money," I said.
He shook his head once, minutely, but it was a gesture of total negation. "That's not optional. You were hired for this job, you were counting on that wage. The political machinations of unethical men and women shouldn't take money out of your pocket."
"That was money that you fundraised for your campaign. Your donors didn't kick it in to pay me not to work for you."
"Marcus, that's very big of you, but I anticipate paying that sum out of my own savings. Flor will paper it over. I can afford it."
"I'll just donate it back to your campaign."
He sat back, looking suddenly exhausted and beaten. "I can't stop you from doing that, but I urge you to give it some thought before you rush into this."
"I will," I said. "I think I need to go now." The lack of sleep from the night before was catching up with me. Tears were welling up behind my eyes, which was always a sign that I wasn't in my right head. I decided that Joe was right about making up my mind about the money later. I started to wonder how much of a good guy Joe Noss could be when he was ready to fire people for "optics" and then quietly rehire them later. I think I said thank you or words to that effect, and stepped, wooden-faced, into the office. There were always ten or fifteen people in the office: volunteers staffing phones or collating literature, a cluster of desks where the campaign strategist and the speechwriter and the PR guy all sat, people whose job I didn't even know. I'd met them all, but I only knew half of them by name. Now they were all staring at me, and pretending not to, as I crossed to my desk. There was a cardboard banker's box on my chair, and as I drew up to it, I saw that the few things I'd brought into work had been gathered into the box. I looked at Flor, and she nodded at me and gave me a sympathetic look. I supposed she had packed the box for me, and I supposed that this was a kindness, since it let me leave faster. I got into my jacket, slid Lurch into my backpack, picked up my box, and left without saying another word.