They were still years in the past interview-wise when Sean McCreight agreed to a last-minute talk at the warehouse. Lyle disassembled the prepaid, handed it to McCreight to place in the freezer. He looked around the room, a high-ceilinged box with safes in the corner, a folding chair, a mattress, and a couch like a shabby flowered hot dog bun. On a table in the center of the room, McCreight had set up a computer, and throughout the room, there were small speakers, some hung from strings in the ceiling, others on boxes or shelves, and a metal object that looked like an open book springing antennae was set beside three typewriters positioned on the floor where it met the wall.
“Would’ve thought these were a century or so old school for you,” Lyle said.
“Would’ve thought but did something else instead. That’s a 1927 Underwood Universal,” McCreight said, turning in the cold buzz of the open freezer. “Remington Noiseless Portable. And the green one there, that’s the Hermes 3000.”
“Always wanted one of these,” Lyle said, “but whenever it came time to it, a flea market or an antique store sale, I’d think what if I lost the one copy of the manuscript?”
“You people think the worst thing that can happen is an accident. It is all icy roads and spilt milk,” McCreight said.
Knelt down, Lyle touched a ribbon and pulled away a black finger to wipe on his pants. He stood and let himself sag the center of the couch. He’d bought a new recorder, five inches, 555 hours of MP3 audio on a twenty-dollar memory card, just-brushed clean sound. At home, on the practice take, he could hear the rustle of his breast pocket. Now, Lyle lay the device on Sean McCreight’s laptop.
“Smart foreign governments are buying up precautionary antiques. Aren’t prior to telecom exactly, but not networked either. Less hackable.”
“I see,” Lyle said.
McCreight turned a metal chair and strung his torso over the back. “Truth is, typewriters aren’t immune either.” He began to talk of how, during the Cold War, the Soviets had bugged US embassies and developed a technique to decipher the clicks of typing. Under suspicion, the NSA launched Project Gunman in the eighties, seized and replaced all communication devices in Moscow, Leningrad. Sixteen typewriters had been compromised. “That’s why the white noise,” McCreight said, pressing a switch so that speaker boxes around the room sent something like audio spray. Then, as though Lyle were not there, he turned up the screen of his laptop and began typing, arms hung toward the table and chin rested on the chair back.
“All right,” he said. “What does my sister say?”
“Your sister says she wants to see you.”
“But what does she say about me, Michaels? What did she say when you told her about Glen Close?” McCreight jittered his feet on the ground, forearms held against his thighs. He moved his hands as though he were cleaning them, and he looked over his shoulder at a clock on the wall. He plucked the recorder up and set it down like a point in front of Lyle.
“What I said she said. She wants to see you.” Lyle slid the recorder forward. “I wanted to ask you about the hacker project.”
“What about?”
“Trojan horses from afar,” Lyle said. “That ostensibly we’re talking about the United States government setting hackers to work on a whole electrical system to disarm weapons. Mechanical failure at the level of code. You said maybe already.”
“And,” McCreight said.
“Is there someone you can connect me with on that project?”
“Find sources yourself or give up. How good a journalist are you, Michaels?”
Lyle removed a stick of gum from his pocket. The disdain was the sort leveled at Cain, but McCreight would want to refute the man, flash expertise. He crumpled the gum wrapper, left it on the table. “Cain is saying he doesn’t know of hacking mechanical weaponry.”
“What do you mean Cain?”
“I mean Barry Cain said the Iranian centrifuges sound impossible.”
“You went to Virginia to see Cain.”
“Hell’s Kitchen. Here to see his son. Kid’s been working here the last few years.”
“Cain’s son,” McCreight said.
“Goldman, I think he said. Does something with finance.”
“And you’ve looked into him with all your professional channels of peepholes,” Sean said.
“Cain’s son? No, Cain is a minor character.”
“Maybe he’d interest you. Maybe he is part of the story. That’s what you call the color, no? Rainbows, gardens. Pink, cerulean.”
“I’m not saying I doubt you,” Lyle said. “But I need to lock down confirmations. Anyone. Anyone at all you think you could put in contact?”
McCreight’s eyes narrowed. He pulled himself erect off the seat back. He smiled until Lyle felt his own foolish grin in McCreight’s expression. “Cain doesn’t have a son, Michaels. He has a daughter who came back newly left-handed from Mosul.”