To listen was to animate the evidence in time, bring it to now, carry the audio files into the moment of knowledge, Lyle had to believe that. He had left the apartment to clear his mind, just a meal, knife and fork, this technique of survival in the cutting and spearing at which it was simple to succeed. Roast chicken.
Back home, his parents whispered their beautiful granddaughter was sleeping God bless her. His father said it was not so far to Queens that a visit once a week would be too much. His mother promised to take Marina shopping. She urged just call and she’d do the shopping for supper. And when they were gone, when he had switched on the light that spun stars over the walls and ceiling where Marina slept, and Lyle had checked that the door was locked, he dug into piles and files.
The dates divided the interviews. The sentences differed. Yet somehow all of it together is supposed to answer who is M? Can the man who hacked him be the one man who will tell the truth about US intelligence?
He looked at his notes, and he knew it had been foolish to refer to M as M when Lyle knew his name. But the code had given the project weight, secrecy. It was a gesture that imagined eventual subpoena, that the book could reverberate that much, displace an order. Marina lay sleeping in her bed, and that her face was true was something for Lyle to remember, but his breath caught in his chest: a thought inflicted. And he was terrified suddenly of the day when he could first catch her in a lie.
Believe the facts are thicker than paper. Authenticating details.
Lyle wondered now whether he’d misread M from the beginning. Perhaps Lyle had missed something.
“I’ve met your type,” M had said that first time they made contact. “You think adversarial journalism is ipso facto moral high ground. You think the more adversarial, the more it’s a public good. Whoever stirs the most anger is the most meaningful. The biggest spoon you call impact.”
Lyle had shifted in his seat. He had wanted to show M around his ethics like a museum. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“As complicated as you’re messing with my sister, I’m guessing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lyle said.
“Pee-pees and vaginas, Michaels. Fitting and separating. Birds, bees. They breed babies that way, communicate the drippy diseases. You said you’re a ‘friend’ of hers. I’m not such a shut-in I’m too shut-in to be a cynic.”
He’d not thought the antagonism would extend beyond the night. He’d thought it was a test, or the performance of a test. M didn’t talk, exactly. He orated. Speech bleak as the ramblings of a failed actor, and always stringing code.
The second time they met, M had brushed the bottom of the bar with his hands quickly, knelt to peer beneath the chairs. He had sat down and took a long sip of tequila. It had seemed to Lyle that if he could only break past the first barrier, no more would be erected.
“You think what I say I remember is evidence,” M had said. “The beakers are clear, but bent glass warps if you know what I’m saying. You forget it is harder to prove the truth than to tell it.”
That should have scared Lyle. But Lyle had only shrugged. “You know better.”
“I am a lie.”
“The liar’s paradox,” Lyle said.
“All Cretans are liars, says the Cretan.”
“To begin, I believe you.”
“A man of faith,” M had said. M had sneered.
And Lyle had figured autobiography was part of it. M had grown self-sufficient with secrets, back channels, pretend profiles and counterfeit cards, a whole network of corroboration, reference on reference pointing both nowhere and only to him, just like any other fact. He had manufactured reality so easily, it was nearly a joke.
“You were a good poker player.”
“Are. Is that what my sister told you?”
“She didn’t tell me anything about you. She doesn’t know we’re here.”
“Then who’s the liaison? Two strangers in a room. I want to know what got us here.”
Lyle had selected his words like grocery fruit. “I think Glen Close is exciting work, all that intellect in a room, the opportunity to stop pretending instinct is empirical.”
“I do miss intellect in a room. What chips do you bring to the table?”
“To begin, I know who knows what you’ve been up to.” A lie. The tip had been anonymous. “I know who knows you have a story.”
M had sounded his own knuckles in his fist, efficient cracks rendered with a blank face. “Ten minutes, Michaels. Your move. Are you diddling my sister?”
“I’m not fucking her. She’s married.”
“So’s any executive with a secretary on the side,” M had said. “But you wonder because you see she is becoming one of them. They will steal your attention in every direction they can, so everything you know is something the architect of search engines decided met the metric of relevance. Sweaters in our communications, between swiped lives! And somewhere, eventually, we aren’t needed for thinking. They have automations, convenient as a microwave dinner, one-click shopping. They want to keep us at our desks, complacent and clicking away.”
“You’re angry with her.”
M had bit a lime, leaving a deflated fringe of cellulose attached to the rind, dropped it right into his already empty glass. A swooped finger brought two more glasses. He had looked over a hunched shoulder, leaned his elbows on the table. “That your opinion, Michaels?”
“I’m a journalist.”
Lyle remembered M’s eyes then, glossy and large as black olives. “You’re an ex-blogger, Lyle, Lyle, pants on fire. Please don’t play make-pretend objectivity.”
“I will write this book. Question’s who do you want to tell your story? The Senate Intelligence Committee?”
“The politicians with a direct line to media can’t,” M had said. “They have no idea what I did. They don’t understand the mechanisms, the rhetoric embedded in the code. All they know is the fairy tale that Little Red Riding Hood isn’t tricked. What gives away the wolf in the sleeping bonnet, Michaels?”
“They greenlit the project.”
“They greenlit money for science,” M had said. “Numbers. They think quant’s the prefix for self-evident in Latin. I gave my declamation: after a terror, the signal is always clear. Hindsight is.”
“But you signed on anyway,” Lyle had said. “Why?”
“Because if I did it, I’d have wrung out a paradox,” M had said.
Lyle had followed M’s words with a pen on paper. “What does that mean?”
M had put his glass down. He had neatly fanned a jacket over his shoulders, as he turned away said, “Tell Lex I said hello.” Lyle had perceived then that M must feel that Lyle was his connection, not hers, if he were to allow Lyle to report the story. He had believed trust would somehow pass between him and M so long as he did not speak of their meetings with Alexandra Chen.