Mighty Chair came to an abrupt halt. The kid had surrendered control. I whirled the chair around and powered toward him. He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m sorry,” he shouted before I got there.
“How’d you do that?”
His hands remained in defense mode. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Stone. I had to get your attention.”
“It worked. You got my attention.” The kid looked shook up. Probably like I looked the day I met Barack Obama. I offered him my hand. “Rollie Stone.”
“I know,” the young man responded, shaking it with teenage enthusiasm, “I know.”
“Now it’s your turn. Who are you?”
“Me?” The question seemed to surprise him. “I’m just Brain—Brain McLane.”
“Brain?”
He nodded. “That’s what they call me—my friends. I mean. It’s Brian, really.”
McLane was so small he almost disappeared beneath his coat and blanket, but he had a broad, somewhat reticent smile that was pretty much overwhelmed by extra-large round wireless Harry Potter specs, as if he was wearing magnifying glasses. It was his chair that caught my attention. If Mighty Chair was my office on wheels, this kid’s chair was a mobile teenager’s room. It was festooned with stickers and signs promoting political causes and metal bands; a variety of tools and toys dangled from hooks. It actually reminded me of an old western Conestoga wagon, with pots and pans dangling along its sides. “I really need to talk to you,” he said with an earnestness in his voice. “It’s really important, really.”
“As long as you can tell me how you did that.” And how to stop anyone else from doing it again. “C’mon, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” I caught myself. “Or a Coke or orange juice or something.”
We formed our own mini-wagon train as he trailed me down the street and up the metal ramp into Nonna’s. As was typical at that hour, the coffee shop was warm and noisy. “There’s one in the back,” George yelled to me. As we maneuvered down the narrow aisle between the counter stools and the row of tables, several people greeted me. Coats were hung on the back of most chairs, so several people had to pull in closer to the table as we went by. One well-dressed woman made a show of ignoring us for several seconds as she buried herself in the menu, then expressed her disdain at being disturbed with an overdramatic sigh. I flashed her my winningest smile and whispered in her ear, “Whoosh!”
George deftly removed two chairs from a small corner table, and Brain and I slid in across from each other. I handed him a menu. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
Before responding, he took off those huge glasses. “It’s a disguise,” he said sheepishly. Then he filled me in. Brain was a sixteen-year-old high school junior from New York City. He had taken Amtrak, not the Acela, from the city that morning and needed to be back by early evening.
“I’m assuming your parents know you’re in Washington?”
He rolled his head from side to side. “Sort of,” he said, then looked around suspiciously.
“It’s okay,” I said reassuringly. “Spies only do takeout.”
He leaned closer to me and said urgently, “I’m not kidding, Mr. Stone. You have to listen to me.”
“Okay, all right, I said I will. First, though, tell me how you did that.”
Brain dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “That was nothing.” McLane explained that he was vice-president of his high school hacker club. Hacking, it turned out, was an extracurricular activity, for college credits, and his team had finished second in the state championship. He’d like an onion bagel and an orange juice, please. With a schmear. I got an everything with coffee.
Brain McLane spoke in great bursts, his excitement causing him to race through each sentence, pausing only at commas and breathing at the period. After reading about me following Detroit, he continued, he had decided to put his own chair online. “The Beast,” he called it, tapping it proudly. But to do that he’d had to learn the generic operating system. “I found out who made Mighty Chair…” He said it with hesitation, as if perhaps he was crossing a personal line, and raised his eyebrows questioningly.
I tapped Mighty Chair. “I’m sure Mighty Chair is happy to meet you. Cher, say hello to Brain.”
“Hello, Brain,” Cher said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
Brain’s entire face split into a huge smile, and his cheeks reddened. “Hello, Cher,” he said, and laughed.
“So you found out who made Mighty Chair…”
His head bobbled. “You know, the original. Before, you know, all that extra stuff.” After the attack in the garage, Chair had become pretty well known himself within the community. “From a photograph,” he continued. “Then I hacked into their database. It wasn’t hard at all—they probably didn’t think somebody was going to bother hacking into a wheelchair. Once I had the code, all I had to do was find a back door into the operating system. That back door let me bypass all the upgrades you’ve made.”
I was impressed. “That’s why Cher didn’t see you looking up her skirt?”
He covered his guffaw with his palm. “Don’t worry, I sealed it for you. Nobody else can get in, I promise. But if you want to, you can tell the manufacturer.”
Y really was going to be impressed when I told him about this. Or highly pissed. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it. Sometimes you forget to lock the door and you don’t want the burglar reminding you. “Now you go ahead. What do you need to tell me?”
I was curious. This kid had come a long way to tell me something that obviously was very important to him. I couldn’t imagine what it might be. But whatever it was, I intended to treat him with respect. Brain obviously was a smart kid with great potential. I was going to take him seriously and send him home feeling good. I made a show of listening intently.
He leaned forward in the Beast as far as he could, made sure there was no one within hearing distance, and told me, “I know who cyjacked that plane.”
Brain continued, “I mean, I don’t know exactly who it was, but I know where he was. Or, or, or maybe where she was. Sorry.”
George suddenly was standing at our table. Brain sat back as he put down our breakfast. “Anything else?” George asked as he wiped his hands on his white apron.
“No, that’s great, George, thank you.” We waited until he was gone. Then as I poured half-and-half into my coffee, I told him, “Okay, you got my attention. Tell me.”
More than three months had passed since NA342 had been cyber-jacked. The administration had twice claimed to be close to unraveling the cyber-knot, but eventually admitted those leads had not panned out. It was very hard for me to believe that a sixteen-year-old high school junior had succeeded when the best hackers at the NSA, the CIA, and all the alphabet agencies had failed. But Brain was wearing a big, confident “ha, I got you” smile that said at least he believed it.
“It started as a challenge,” McLane explained. “We knew that every intelligence agency in the world was trying to identify the hackers, so we thought wouldn’t it be really cool if we could beat them to it. If we could, we figured, we could use that on our college applications. That’s a lot better than math club or building houses in Guatemala, right?”
“Right.”
“We knew we couldn’t really compete with those guys.” He threw his arms up in the air. “Like, our whole budget was $45, which was all we’d been able to raise with this terrible bake sale.” He closed his eyes and smiled at that memory. “Boy, that was awful. But we didn’t have any of the tools they have and we didn’t have their experience, so we had to find a completely different path to follow.”
Brain was eating his bagel as he continued, and even that didn’t slow him down. All his club had to work with, he said, was the snippet of the code the cyjackers had used to take control of the plane, which the Defense Department had released to the hacker community when asking for assistance. “So we had this code.” His voice was infused with confidence. “See, Mr. Stone, most people don’t know this. Well, I’m sure you do, but most regular people don’t. Every coder leaves a cyber-footprint. Like, you know, a pattern.” He flipped his hands up in the air. His enthusiasm seemed to activate his body. “Everybody does it one way or another. Like every time people go online, they always go to the same few sites. Usually in the same order. That’s a trackable habit. An identifiable footprint.”
I thought about that. Brain was absolutely right; when I went onto the internet I always went to the same sites, generally in the same order.
“I read in this book that the feds use that to find fugitives. They work with the person’s provider, and as soon as anyone goes online and hits those sites, they get an alert.” With a chaw of bagel puffing out his cheek, he waved the other half in warning. “So you should be careful about that.”
Next time I’m a fugitive, I thought, I’ll remember that. Life sure is strange sometimes.
Kanye interrupted us. Brain glanced at his clearly jerry-rigged pop-up monitor to see who was calling, then ignored it. He was on a roll. “We started dissecting the code they released, seeing if we could find a footprint. It was really hard. But then Judy, Judy McElnea, she’s secretary of the club, anyway, she also plays the guitar. She’s in a real band…” He frowned, then admitted, “They’re not that great. Anyway, Judy told us that music has footprints too. She was doing a project, trying to figure out why some groups get popular when their songs don’t really sound that different. So she converted their music into code, trying to find the repetitive elements. You should see what she came up with, Mr. Stone. It’s really good, I mean really. You could look at a code and figure out what band it came from.”
As he dived into this explanation, Brain was transformed from a teenager huddled in a chair to a confident young man, swimming easily in his element. His whole being had come alive as he explained this to me. The chair seemed to disappear. There was a twinkle in his eyes, a brightness to his spirit. And suddenly, enjoying my bagel and very impressed by Brain, I suddenly realized why I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut. Why I felt compelled to stand up against the Wrightmans of the world. I wanted to make sure the America this kid and his friends inherited provided for them the same opportunities I’d enjoyed. I wanted them to know what it meant to be proud to be an American.
I caught up with him mid-sentence. “… treat the segment of code they released as a piece of music instead of digits. We graphed the repetitive elements and we were able to figure out its rhythm. Listen.” He hummed about fifteen seconds of seemingly atonal bars, moving his hand up and down as if conducting it. I have to admit it sounded a lot like progressive rap to me, which I don’t appreciate. He ended his demonstration and looked at me somewhat sympathetically. “You understand what I’m saying?”
“Oh yeah, sure. Absolutely.” I did get the general concept. “That music you were humming is the code.”
“Exactly. Anyway, we named it ‘Judy’s Screaming Cat.’ That was ’cause Judy has this cat that just wouldn’t be quiet. But we took that rhythm and backtracked, trying to find the composer, the hacker. We had to go backward, find another code that had the same rhythm. If we could do that, we would know who wrote the cyjack code.”
He paused as George refilled my cup.
“That was tough. Honestly.” He looked down, into the past, as he remembered that. “It took weeks and we tried everything we could think of. We got code from all over, from any source we could think of.” He confided to me, “If you want to know how Barbie is programmed to answer questions, just ask me. And this was all going on while we were prepping for the SATs. It was totally crazy.” Then he sat back and smiled with self-assurance. “Then we found it.”
I didn’t say a word. I didn’t move, not wanting to interrupt this narrative. It wasn’t possible that a bunch of high school kids could do this, I knew that. But it did make sense.
“A long time ago, three or four years at least, there was this big international teenage hackers’ competition. We were just kids then, none of us even were in high school, and we didn’t win anything. They gave everybody samples of code to hack. We went back and looked at all of those samples.” He looked at me.
I waited. Then wound my hand in the keep-going gesture.
“One of them had exactly the same rhythm. We couldn’t believe it. We couldn’t believe it really worked. But we tested and retested it.” He hummed a few bars that sounded equally awful as the first one. “So we could say with a high degree of confidence that whoever wrote that code for the competition was the same person who hacked into the airplane.” He nodded toward Mighty Chair’s arm. “Go ahead, check your screen. I sent it to you.”
I glanced at Mighty’s pop-up monitor. I was looking at a graph showing two roughly parallel lines. While the baselines were different, both lines spiked at about the same points. While not duplicates, the similarities between the two were obvious. I nodded. “Okay, I get it.” I have to admit, the kid had me at “I know who cyjacked the airplane.” I looked at him. “Go ahead. Who wrote these?”
McLane squeezed every bit of enjoyment out of this moment. He sat perched on his chair like a peacock on a perch. “You know how cool this is?” he marveled. “I mean me, sitting here with you. You know, Mr. Stone, you’re like my idol. I’ve read everything they wrote about you and Mighty Chair.”
I imitated his surreptitious glances around Nonna’s to make sure no one else could hear me. Then I whispered, “Don’t forget Cher. She’s very sensitive.”
Brain laughed with the delight of a sixteen-year old Spider-Man discovering his web-slinging powers.
“Now, tell me, who do you think it is?”
“It’s not exactly who.” He shook his head, then admitted, “We don’t know exactly who it is. Just where it comes from.”
Several months earlier I had played the guessing game with just about every journalist in the country. I had pored through all the available information and decided that the cyjackers had to be Eastern Europeans, or possibly Iranian. Iranian hackers were good. In 2012 they had wiped the servers of Saudi Aramco, Arabia’s state-owned oil company, successfully attacked a Las Vegas casino, dug into numerous American banks, and—this was key to me—they had attempted to take control of a small dam in upstate New York. But the Russians were good too. And so were the Chinese. I thought the cyjacking was a demonstration of capabilities and would soon be followed up with a demand for a billion dollars. But that hadn’t happened; in fact, no one had claimed credit for it, which had made it even more of a mystery. “I give up. Where did it come from?”
“You’re really not gonna believe this, Mr. Stone. It came from Fort Meade, Maryland.” With a slight nod to reassure me he was serious, he added, “You know what’s there, right?”
I closed my eyes and laughed. Of course. Of course. It was so fucking obvious. How could I of all people, me, how could I have missed it? The NSA, spy central, the nation’s top intelligence agency, was headquartered at Fort George G. Meade. It made perfect sense. Wrightman needed a fresh terrorist attack to scare Congress into supporting his request for war powers. And what could be better than this scenario? Unlike an attack on some distant city or even two cities, this one hit home with every American who ever got on an airplane. It sucked them into the middle of a real-life survival drama more exciting than a Jordan Peele movie, then left them feeling vulnerable. And no human beings were hurt in the making of this entertainment.
It had achieved the ultimate goal of all terrorism: it made people terrified that the next time, it … could … be … me.
Brain continued: After the hackers’ challenge was done, all the code providers had been identified and thanked. This sample was “courtesy NSA.”
“Brain, listen to me.” I made sure there wasn’t a quiver in my voice. “Have you told anybody else about this?”
He thought about that. He pursed his lips. “Just our faculty adviser, Mr. Calandros. And he warned us not to tell anybody else.”
“He’s a smart guy, Brain. Listen to me.” I lowered my chin and locked eyes with him. This was no joke. I wanted him to hear my urgency. “You and your friends, you can’t tell anybody about this. I mean it, nobody. If you’re right…”
“We’re right,” he insisted.
“Okay, whatever. But I’m completely serious. Do you understand? You can’t tell anybody, even your parents.” I waited until he nodded acceptance. I tapped the screen. “Have you got anything else to back this up?”
Brain responded with an “are you kidding me?” shrug. “Are you kidding me? We got all kinds of stuff. We compared them about twenty different ways. We got probability charts, formulas…” He smiled at the next thought. “We even made a tape of Judy’s band playing both of them. We overlaid them on the tape, so you can hear the two codes together.”
“Did you tell the band what they were?”
“Those guys?” He laughed at that thought. “Those guys wouldn’t understand it anyway.”
“Good.” I rested my left elbow on Mighty Chair’s arm and dug my chin into the well between my thumb and index finger on my left hand as I figured this out. “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Go home. Send me everything you’ve got. Tell all your other people, tell them not to say a word about this to anybody. Tell them not to talk about it; don’t hum it, don’t even think about it if you can help it. I’m going to give you my email address and a good phone number. Give it to everybody and tell them to contact me right away if anybody comes to talk to any of you, or even if you get any weird messages.”
I just stared at him, hoping he understood the danger. If there was any truth at all to this, the NSA would take every necessary step to protect the administration. “You got it, Brain? I’m serious. This information could be dangerous.” I hesitated to say out loud what I was thinking: This is Wrightman’s America. No one knows how far they might go to protect themselves.
His smile was gone. He nodded tentatively.
“And don’t you give that number to anybody except the club. If that number rings, I’ll know it’s one of you.”
Brain tilted his head and asked, “What are you going to do with this, Mr. Stone?”
“Rollie. From now on, I’m Rollie.”
“Rollie.” He smiled broadly, then repeated more firmly, “Rollie.”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll need to check it out first, you know, just to make sure it’s accurate. Then I’ll have to make some decisions. But I promise you, if this is what you guys say it is…”—tap, tap on Chair’s pop-up screen—“I’ll protect you. And if anybody ever gets credit for it, I’ll make sure you guys get all of it.”
“Do you think we were right about it helping us get into college?”
I wet my unexpectedly dry lips. “Maybe. But for now you can’t use it.” I chuckled. “Somehow I don’t think you’re going to have any trouble getting into a good school. You and me, we’re diversity on wheels.” I was about to suggest I go with him to Union Station, but it occurred to me that he would be better off not being seen with me. Just in case. “You gonna be okay getting home?”
He reached into a pocket and held up a train ticket. “Shit, yeah,” he said.
“Do me a favor. Call that number when you get home so I know you’re safe. And one more thing: I want you to give Cher your contact information.”
“Really?” His face lit up brighter than the national Christmas tree.
“Cher, record and file this, please.” Brain gave Cher his phone numbers, his email, and his social media contact information. I paid the check and one more time told him how important it was that he not tell anyone about the club’s discovery. I didn’t want to freak him out, but I also did not want to pretend there was no danger. “All right, time to go to work. You’re gonna be careful, right?”
“I will. But can I ask you one favor?”
“Sure.”
“Can we take a selfie?” After he promised not to show it to anyone but the club, we bumped chairs like “walkies” might fist-bump. Then I went to work, wondering if a high school hacking club had handed me the evidence I needed to take down the Wrightman administration.
I have a terrible memory. (Did I tell you that already?) I can remember general details about the meaningful events of my life. But it is rare that I can remember every moment, every word, everything I was thinking and feeling during an event. This is one of those exceptions. Even today, when I close my eyes and think about it, it becomes a physical reality and I can reproduce my feelings.
Walking to the office from that meeting, I was confused, excited, exhilarated, doubtful; I was resolute and fearful. The question I was wrestling with was what to do with this information. If it was true—and boy, was that a big if—but if it was true and if we could prove it beyond any doubt, it would completely undermine the credibility of the administration. I didn’t kid myself, it wasn’t going to spark a great uprising. And this wasn’t Europe, it wouldn’t cause the government to collapse; our system isn’t structured that way, but it would inflict damage on the administration and give the opposition an issue around which we could make a stand. And it might cause our allies to take a good long look before reengaging with America.
The first decision I made was not to involve Howie. If the Pro published it, Homeland Security would declare us a “threat to national security” and close us down. They might even arrest Howie under the new sedition laws. That decision was easy. Whether or not to tell Jenny was the tough one. It was possible to view this as a test of my trust in her. To avoid having to make that decision, I reasoned it through and finally came up with a good enough excuse not to involve her: There was nothing she could do other than bring it to McDonnell, and just knowing about it and not alerting the government might put her in legal jeopardy. So for her own safety I did not tell her about it. Really.
Really, really.
Martha McDonnell was my only option. She had emerged as a leader of the dwindling opposition in Congress. That fact that there was little she could accomplish against the large majority from both parties who supported Wrightman actually provided her with a level of protection. The administration needed opposition in Congress to continue the charade that this country was still a functioning democracy.
“How do you know it’s accurate?” she asked, holding out her open bag of Cheetos to me. We were huddled in a quiet corner in an elementary school classroom waiting for the meeting to begin.
I waved it off. This was, I think, three, maybe four days after my meeting with Brain. That secret had been growing inside me and I was ready to burst. The same rationale I had used for not telling Jenny was applicable to members of the resistance: what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. But Martha could provide the outlet I needed. She had a reputation as a good listener and her previous career as a prosecutor had made her a deft questioner. But mostly she was a great politician. She had several gears and could shift effortlessly into whichever was needed to get to her destination. She could transition from a warm friend flattering a constituent to an incisive inquisitor in the time it took to exchange glances. She was respected in the House for being a loyal supporter or an honest enemy, and her harmless opposition to Wrightman was tolerated as Martha being Martha.
I’d spent a reasonable amount of time with her as Jenny’s plus-one at events and liked and respected her, but Jenny’s continued absence at these meetings stood between us. In this case, though, I needed her. As I started to answer her question as to how I knew it was accurate, I suddenly felt incredibly foolish telling her that a high school kid gave it to me. It didn’t get any better as I filled in the details. Even I had to admit, the possibility that some high school kids doing their club project had solved the problem that had stymied the leading intelligence agencies in the Western world did not sound particularly credible. When I told her that a kid named Brain riding the Beast had cyjacked Cher to get my attention, she looked at me with great sympathy.
And it didn’t get any better when I hummed a few bars.
She savored one Cheeto as she considered her response. “This is the kind of information that changes lives, Rollie,” she said as she slid my printouts back to me, “especially yours and mine. I’m willing to take that risk, but only if you can prove to me without any doubt this is legitimate. I can’t take that chance until we’re one hundred percent certain this isn’t complete bullshit.”
“Any suggestions?”
She held one long slim Cheeto between her teeth as she considered that. Then she crunched down on it. “I guess you could call the NSA and ask them if somebody around there had cyjacked an airliner. But other than that…” She shrugged.
The rest of the meeting that night is sort of a blur. As I listened to a litany of scary news, I just couldn’t help wondering how I could prove the kid’s claims. And there was a lot of bad news. The situation was getting worse. The administration was getting more active. The thin line between docile opposition, which the White House encouraged, and an effective movement was close to being crossed. The rapidly growing resistance had finally forced Wrightman to react. More people were being questioned and detained. A two-stater passed along a rumor that the White House was producing and posting antigovernment social material, then working with providers to identify people who passed them along. Those names were added to a secret watch list.
That night, for the first time, I heard people threatening violence. A squat, balding professor from American University was waving his arms furiously as he complained, “This is bullshit! When is enough going to be enough? We keep meeting here to tell one another how bad things are, but we’re not doing anything to stop it. It’s time we stopped talking and start to take some action.” He reminded me most of a burly union organizer from a 1950s black-and-white B movie, maybe played by Broderick Crawford, exhorting workers to march on the bosses.
I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep myself from saying anything. These big talkers infuriated me. I’d seen the damage they could do. Obviously we were a long way from planting IEDs along the 495, but stuff like that begins with blowhards like this professor planting those seeds.
It was Laura—she still went by Laura, so I guessed that was her real name—who responded. “I get it.” There was a resignation in her voice. “We all get it. What are we going to do to stop these people? How do we take back our country? Believe me, I get it. We all get it, that’s why we’re here. Here’s the reality; we can’t do it with violence; trust me, like every one of you there have been times I get so angry I wish we could. But it’s insane. That’s what they want us to do. We’d be playing right into their hands. We have to fight them with ideas.”
Several people snickered. I heard a frustrated sigh. Then someone said softly, “Here we go again.”
Laura heard it too and whirled around. “Are you kidding me?” She was furious. “You think we have a choice? You see what’s out there? We have one weapon. One.” She shook her index finger. I have to admit, it was an impressive performance. “We have got to prove to Americans that Wrightman is lying to them. That he is spitting in their face. We have to confront them with it so they can’t pretend…”
Somebody shouted from the other side of the room, “That sure didn’t matter with Trump.”
Laura whirled to face the voice. “You’re right, and you saw the result of that. Just maybe people learned a lesson.” She turned slowly, speaking to the entire room as she continued, “Here’s one thing I guarantee you: if Patrick Henry was standing here today, right here in this classroom in the Michelle Obama Elementary School, and he demanded ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ they’d disappear him. Big threats aren’t going to do anybody any good. We need to organize and take actions that make sense.”
She sat down moments later to a smattering of polite applause. A Maryland dairy farmer who called himself Chuck spoke next. He began by complimenting her, then said, “You know, I’ve been sitting here for a while, and until tonight I never said one word. I didn’t think I needed to, listening to smart people saying smart things. But here’s one thing I’ve figured out, years from now when people ask how this happened…” He shook his head. “Well, this is the beginning and I already hear people saying we should have stopped them yesterday. I gotta agree with that professor, I’ve had enough. I don’t know what I can do, but I want to do it.”
In response to Chuck the dairy farmer, Mike the dentist warned, “This is exactly what they want us to do, so they can crack down on us.”
It went on like that into the evening. I got their frustration, but while it makes great movies, the Bad News Bears are not going to beat the Yankees. As Mighty Chair was being lifted into Van, Laura’s words stuck in my head: We have to throw the truth in their face. For less than the instant it takes a neuron to jump a synapse I considered telling her what I had, but by the time it became a thought, I had already dismissed it.
In my first life I had been a runner. I’d stick a folded piece of paper in my waistband, hook a pen to my T-shirt, and let my mind wander as I ran. When an idea worth remembering wiggled into my mind, I’d stop and scribble it down. I’d started using my time alone in Van for the same purpose, turning off Mighty Chair’s sound system and letting my thoughts fill the silence. Instead of a pen and paper, though, I had Cher.
I considered my options. I had to prove that McLane was right: a cyber-footprint could be used to positively identify the source of computer code, and in this instance, that footprint could be traced directly to the NSA. And I had to do it without the government learning I had this information.
That meant trusting someone else. There were several men I’d served with who probably had this level of computer expertise, people who once had trusted me with their life. But those people had been trained by the government, had risked their lives for the government, were receiving benefits from the government, and maybe still worked in some capacity for the government, so they probably weren’t safe bets. I whittled down my list until I realized that the person who might be able to answer this question had been right under my nose for the past two years.