It was nothing anybody could see on his body, but knowledge improved Lyle’s blood flow. How it happened, the story—his—had been nearly like the Noze days. Lyle had received a letter with a phone number. An anonymous tip. He had been curious enough to use it. Just see. And what came back was something more important than anything Lyle had been a part of in a long time.
On the phone, they talked about agencies. They talked about terror. They talked about why the man whose tip it was had chosen Lyle: the suppressions and delays of legacy media. You have the Miami Herald killing their Bay of Pigs story in deference to Dulles. You have the Times sitting on Little Bush’s surveillance program over a year. You believe the institution that held a story all those months has told the whole, you are sweet or stupid. You aren’t sweet or stupid, Michaels. You know that. It’s what you were getting at in that CUNY panel. I saw the video online. You took them on. You take them on. It’s been your prerogative your whole career. That’s why we’re here. The story was his generation’s The Jungle, and Lyle was going to break it.
Now Lyle could feel the life in his hands organizing paper piles, fingers following the lines and fragments. He sat in the crumbs of bodega sandwiches as he grafted events and thought about men who daunt, how their shadows angled off points of suggestion. He was reporting on something wonderful, that is, secret, and the code of it gave him quiet substance. In his notes, his source became M, and though he knew the official name, he thought and wrote in a language of his own that made being in the world outside possible again.
There was an aquatic name. TIDE. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment watch list had grown to half a million individuals. TIDE, a drowning by data. All the emails, geo-tagged photographs, credit card purchases, comments, and preferences announced indiscriminately. The phone conversations of diplomats in the Middle East and northern Africa went straight to earphones in a Georgia listening center. It was strange, Lyle thought, to think that he’d been so disappointed over the subprime crisis. It felt like a sound you could hear but couldn’t find the location of no matter the strain of the ear.
What M described was snatching scaled larger than numbers you could imagine. And it circled back completely, drawing a circumference around anyone. Fat politicians who thought they were infallible. Soccer moms. Shadow brokers. His potential audience had never been so enormous.
It was M the book would revolve around, M who had an affinity for granules. He could point to the smallest thing, make it cascade back into thousands of decisions: how to take the filth off data, the rhetoric of the code, epistemologies of the algorithms, all the aspects that led to the number telegraphing threat. He was a man with chapters in him. Did Lyle know what had happened in Iran? M had asked.
And yet, it was difficult to pin down M. Insider, outsider, ethnographer, native, histrionic, recluse. It annoyed M, Lyle’s ignorance, but he enjoyed lording knowledge. He took Darwinian pride in his intellect, but he believed no one got what they deserved. He had a teenage show-off’s penchant for the offending remark, but he liked to hide.
Lyle thought of how he’d portray M—an architect of something terrible, perhaps, but not like the career baskers who liked nothing better than to sit on leather furniture alongside important people calling them by their first names. M didn’t have urgencies for cigars or praise. He was in it for proving others wrong. It was why M had used the organization’s own tools against them. The weapon is swapping numbers.