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  “OPSEC, Officer Kim. You are not read onto that compartment of Megan yet.” Megan, a single mom, had perfected her poker face without having an alpha male around and raising two boys. She wanted to see if Joshua was only after one thing, and to find out if she pushed, whether he would push back or simply lose interest. Megan had had to sit and listen to a lot of other single moms at the Agency cry on her shoulder because they had fallen for men who valued the chase but not the catch.

  Sensing that this was a test, he decided to lay a marker on the table and show that he was still interested. “Referring to ourselves in the third person, are we?” He tilted his head twice over his left shoulder to point in a specific direction, “You know, there are Occupational Health shrinks right over in the next building; I can see about getting you an appointment.”

  Megan burst out laughing while trying to cover her mouth and not spray any homemade sprouts. She wasn’t used to someone absorbing her darts so well, but regained her composure and confided, “I’m a threat analyst for SADCOM.”

  “SADCOM?” Joshua furrowed his brow. “You mean “SOUTHCOM, as in Southern Command?”

  “No, ‘SADCOM’ is what the people who work for CENTCOM call their parent organization. While they look romantically at their counterparts in SOCOM and refer to that as ‘HAPPYCOM.’”

  “I see, maybe. No, wait, I don’t get it.”

  “Just about everyone who works for CENTCOM doesn’t like it, myself included. I’m employed by contract for the Agency, but I work in an office that has a liaison officer (LNO) capacity to CENTCOM on behalf of the National Security Agency. I basically analyze the area of operations and assess our ability to gather intelligence in foreign areas that are nonconsensual to our exploits.” Megan paused for effect, carefully trying to get a read on Joshua, and then continued, “I basically push paperwork from one side of the desk to the other.”

  Joshua saw that she was, in fact, a real person with real hurts, so he trod carefully, seeing if he wanted to dig deeper or not. Not knowing fully what to say, he keyed in on an earlier part of the conversation and said, “Sounds like that is rather unfulfilling for having to give up so much time during the week to work and not be home with the kids. Did you say that you had boys?”

  “Yes, two sons. They are everything to me, and the reason why I get up in the morning to do this at all is for them.” Megan kept it on a professional level and said, “I was a signals analyst in Company B of the Marine Cryptologic Support Battalion here at NSA-W. Before that I was stationed at the RSOC in Kunea with Company I, with my ex-husband, Eric—you don’t have to ask, yes, he is an ‘ex,’ not a ‘former’ husband. You might say that he earned his Big Chicken Dinner with me.” Megan caught herself in an uncharacteristically unguarded moment and couldn’t conceal her flash of anger. She felt that she had said too much, and decided not to reveal anything else.

  Joshua didn’t want to say something stupid, nor did he just want to fill the space with empty pleasantries. So he smiled and said, “I generally walk through your section in the late mornings. Do you mind if I knock on the door and see if you would like to do lunch again next week?”

  Megan was not one to live for others’ approval, so she had stopped feeling sorry for herself years ago. If Joshua was willing to link up again for lunch, then that was worth exploring, based on her initial impression of him as a thoughtful and seemingly kind Christian. She thought it over for what felt like an awkwardly long pause and said, “Okay, Officer Kim, we can do that. But I have to ask you not to stop by the office. A lot of my office mates hate their lives and long to turn their lives into the soap operas they so diligently DVR every day. My SID is ‘mclacro,’ you can find me on SEARCHLIGHT. You never know, I might even reply.”

  Joshua was smitten. He nodded and said, “Have a good day, Miss LaCroix.”

  6

  DIFFUSED RESPONSIBILITY

  Now, I’d like to ask people in the room, please raise your hand if you have not broken a law, any law, in the past month. . . . That’s the kind of society I want to build. I want to guarantee—with physics and mathematics, not with laws—that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.

  —John Gilmore

  Odenton, Maryland—Six Months Before the Crunch

  Subject: Lunch?

  Unclassified: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

  Megan,

  Hello. I hope that this finds you well. I have been thinking a lot about our lunch meeting and I would love to meet again to talk and get to know you better. How about lunch sometime next week? Do you like Korean food?

  Looking forward to it,

  Joshua

  Unclassified: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

  She replied:

  Re: Lunch?

  Unclassified: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

  Joshua,

  Okay, I’m game. I do like Korean food, as a matter of fact. I don’t eat out very much, but some of the girls here in the office rave about Mona’s Gourmet Carry Out on Annapolis Road in Odenton. They say that it is best to call ahead and place your order or else Congress is more likely to pass a budget before they get your food to you. I can take at most one hour for lunch. Give me a call on my high side phone: 962-4589.

  Megan

  Unclassified: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

  • • •

  Megan was a confident woman and she knew better than to call men. She and her sister, Malorie, grew up as the apple of their papa’s eye and they never felt incomplete without a man’s attention, especially if it was the fleeting kind of attention. Most women who were single moms would find themselves compromising proper judgment when it came to dating candidates and subsequent physical intimacy just because they felt less appealing to men because they had children. Megan was content to keep on working to provide for her boys whether or not the phone rang. But she did hold her breath when the National Secure Telephone System (NSTS) phone did ring five minutes later.

  “Four-five-eight-nine, this is Contractor LaCroix.”

  “Megan, hey. This is Joshua. Is this an okay time to talk?”

  “Well, I was just about to lower the ocean levels, win the war on terror, save the San Francisco Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, and secure world peace with this PowerPoint presentation, now that the fonts are in cornflower blue instead of ocean blue.”

  “Right, be sure to hit Save. You wouldn’t want to trust the fate of the free world to the default settings on that, would you? Hey, about lunch, I was going to suggest Mona’s Gourmet Carry Out, so I’m glad that you mentioned it. I’ll be at the range this Thursday and Friday for my weapons requalifications. What day works for you next week?”

  Megan noticeably lowered her voice so that she would not be adding fuel to the gossip inferno in her office. “Do you get to Mona’s by cutting across Fort Meade and going out the Mapes Road gate, to Telegraph Road?”

  “Yes, that’s usually the route I take.”

  “Well, how about Tuesday, then? I usually like to hit the thrift store over on post and it’s only open Tuesday through Thursday. You can find some good stuff there sometimes.”

  “Done. What sounds good to you? I can phone in the order.”

  “Surprise me, I’m not picky.”

  “Okay. How about we meet by the PG-165 facing Canine Road out the gate for OPS2B Tuesday at noon?”

  “Sounds good. See you then.”

  It had been so long since Megan had been on any sort of a date that she did an Internet search using DuckDuckGo.com for “conversation starters” when she got home and added that to her morning reading for the next few days’ commute. If Joshua was worth adding to her life, she wanted to get past the superficial pleasantries that usually transpire before the magical third-date threshold was crossed. Since the women in Megan’s office were notoriously generous with the gory details of their love lives, she knew it was generally acceptable for a woman to “give it up” after the third date. If Joshua wasn’t several orders of magnitude off that standard, she
would never have replied to the e-mail in the first place. But the dating sea had a lot of sharks swimming around in it, and she wanted to be sure that she could get to know him as a real person.

  • • •

  On Tuesday, Joshua was fifteen minutes early to meet Megan. He thumbed through his pocket testament to read through a psalm while the band Switchfoot quietly played in the background. Megan, notoriously punctual, was walking through the turnstiles at three minutes until noon.

  “Hello, Megan, good morning. How have you been?”

  “Good morning to you as well, at least for the next two minutes. I’m well, buckled up, and excited for some Korean food. Hey, that isn’t an I6 I hear. What are you running in this rig?”

  “I didn’t know that you were into trucks. That’s a small-block Chevy, naturally aspirated with a mild cam and a HEI distributor—not too flashy, but rock-solid reliable.”

  As they proceeded slowly down Mapes Road, passing the Defense Media Activity, Megan said, “My sister, Malorie, got the motorhead gene; mine is a bit more recessive. She is very handy with a wrench and would love to pick your brain about your Jeep. Is that a four-inch lift on here?”

  “I went modest; I could have gone with a six-inch lift, but I wanted a reliable vehicle versus a finicky trailer queen. Hence the simplicity small-block, and I have a spare circuit board for the HEI distributor in a small tin in my toolbox, uhhhh . . .”

  “You carry a what?” Megan feigned an incredulous tone; she wanted to cut to the quick and sort Joshua into either the “keeper” or “do-not-bother” category.

  “Well, the Chevy 350 is the most popular engine in the world, parts are ubiquitous, and these engines are a cinch to work on. However, I started to read certain blogs and I realized that the whole world is deeply connected and the linchpin is electricity.”

  “Hmmmmm, sounds like you’ve been doing some threat analysis; one of the blue badgers in my office is getting ready to retire—maybe you could apply?”

  “I should have taken into account that you were a threat analyst before I opened my mouth . . .”

  “Joshua, please don’t be shocked about my inquisitive tone; I really do want to hear more about your thought process.” Megan gripped the roll bar instinctively as she had on so many trips out in the backwoods of Maine with her family as the Jeep slowed down and turned right into the seedy rear parking lot of Mona’s Gourmet Carry Out.

  “This Jeep is my sole means of transportation. I maintain it meticulously, but I got to thinking that the stretch of land between Baltimore and Quantico is such a huge target—what if some rogue terrorist group were to pull up in Baltimore Harbor and set off an EMP? Or if those same people were to fly a small aircraft on approach to Tipton Airport and set it off over the NSA campus? Most cars, say ninety-five percent, would be dead—but I could be back on the road in twenty minutes.”

  Joshua was sure that he had just put himself on the weirdo do-not-return-phone-calls list, but little did he know that Megan was very impressed with his “prepper indicators” and that his stock value had just gone way up with her.

  As they entered Mona’s Gourmet Carry Out, Megan immediately noticed that they accepted only cash, a sign of a good place to eat. “Wow, everything looks great,” she said. “What did you order for me, by the way?”

  “I ordered the Kimchi Bokkeumbap for you; it’s reliably very good.”

  “What’s your favorite thing on the menu here?”

  “I’m Korean by ethnicity, but I never grew up in the culture. I much prefer fried banana peanut butter sandwiches on account of my origins, but I do love the Beef Bulgogi and the Spicy Korean Beef Soup combo here.”

  Megan was in full analyst mode. “I couldn’t help but notice your facial features.”

  “You mean that I don’t look very Korean? You’re right. I did some study on this—all of us orphans are obsessive about our origins—and I concluded that my mother must have been Chinese, or perhaps my father and/or mother were ethnically Chinese, but somehow I ended up with a Korean surname.”

  Joshua carried the tray back to the table, and they sat down. Megan did not want to waste any time during their lunch hour so she started out by asking, “I really want to hear more about you. So tell me, are you from Memphis?”

  “Since I was raised in an orphanage, where I’m ‘from’ is quite relative, but I claim Tennessee as home. I’m an average guy, I live off of Haviland Mill Road near the Brighton Dam in a rented room above a garage, I name Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I can’t relate with anyone on the first ten pages of Details magazine.” Joshua paused for effect, arranged the items on his tray, then continued, “I was left on the doorstep of a Memphis Catholic church when I was a newborn. My birth parents were never identified. They only left a note with my name, ‘Joshua Kim,’ and I was raised in an orphanage in Nashville.”

  Joshua pleasantly noticed that Megan was proficient with chopsticks as he continued, “I was raised to be Catholic and all in all I would say that my upbringing was pretty good. I had a lot of different exposure to other cultures, growing up. We had one nun from Ghana who taught us classical literature, a Jesuit priest from Bolivia who taught all of the math and physical sciences, as well as a nun from France. Eventually, I learned enough French to pass the CLEP for college credit when I was a junior enlisted airman.”

  “Vraiment? Tu parles le Français? Je suis Quebecois.”

  “So you’re telling me that I’m winning back some cool points for the tin foil hat comment about my spare HEI distributor?”

  “You’re all right with me, Officer Kim. We happen to believe in spare parts and putting things away for a rainy day at our house, too. Please continue with your story.”

  “Well, if you’ve never been to an orphanage, it is rather hard to explain. The one thing that got me through was my best friend, Dustin. He and I were inseparable; we basically are brothers. He lives in Kentucky now, and we still talk all the time.”

  He paused for a moment, and went on. “One summer we both earned a trip to a boys’ summer camp that the local Diocese puts on every year in southern Illinois. We were both pretty nervous about the new setting, but since we had few worldly possessions and we were also used to daily routine we adjusted quite well. The first afternoon we got our bunk assignments and there was this one shy boy prone on his stomach flipping through an off-road truck magazine. He was tall and skinny with red hair and was pretty much minding his own business when a few kids who were sent from a rough Chicago parish decided to raise their collective testosterone level and bully this kid reading his magazine. The boys reached over him, grabbed the blanket on the other side of the bed, folded it over to envelop him, and in one motion jerked him down onto the floor. Two kids held him while the other two had bars of soap in a sock and started to hit him. Well, these kids did not factor in Dustin or his high sense of justice—probably what makes him such a good sheriff’s deputy now. Anyway, Dustin swept the legs of the nearest kid and delivered a sound knee to the right side of his torso, taking the wind out of him. Without missing a beat he grabbed the back of the shirt collar of the other boy who was hitting the kid, who appeared to be the ringleader, and put him right down on the ground with his knee on his chest, and said, ‘Get!’ It was really something to see, at eleven years old.”

  Joshua took a quick bite, and then continued. “Dustin does not suffer bullies or fools at all. The other two, who were holding the blanket, saw the trend and decided that they did not want any part of Bunkhouse Justice 101, and promptly left. Dustin and I helped the kid up and asked him if he was okay. His name was Ken Layton, and ever since he’s been one of my best long-distance friends. All three of us got to be great friends over those three weeks at camp. Ken told us all about drive trains and differential ratios, which started my long and expensive hobby of off roading. Turns out that Ken could also shoot pretty well, too. On the .22 range, he consistently took the top scores even with those old worn-out bolt action rifles. I’m getting lo
ng-winded here, but Ken went back to his house in Chicago and Dustin and I faithfully wrote back and forth with Ken for years, first by snail mail, and later by e-mail. Ken later met a guy named Todd Gray, who planted the seed with Dustin and me on preparedness.”

  “Preparedness?” Megan was nearly finished with her lunch and Joshua had not really touched his, but she was enjoying his story.

  “It’s the concept of redundant options. It’s like insurance.”

  “I’ve heard of that.” Megan figured it was time to lay a marker on the table here. “I first realized that the world was not capable of growing exponentially ad infinitum when I came across a link on the website peakprosperity.com called The Crash Course by Chris Martenson.”

  Joshua asked, “You like Chris Martenson, too?”

  “Indeed,” Megan said. “He made too much sense to ignore. I just wish that I had started listening to him years ago. Eric was into guns, but not prepping. They are not coterminous.”

  “I’ve got to say that the whole idea of one rifle and a backpack in the woods or a pallet of MREs and a box of ammo in Laurel, Maryland, are dangerous myths.”

  “Guns are useful tools, but I figure that they truly solve very few problems in and of themselves. That’s why Malorie and I have been studying all we can with permaculture and how to produce nutrient-dense food reliably in quantity. You may want to add the ‘survival seed pack’ to that list of dangerous myths. You’ve seen how crazy it gets when Snowpocalypse hits the D.C. area every other winter.”

  “When I-95 or I-70 closes, there aren’t enough supplies on the shelf, the trucks can’t get through to deliver more, and people panic. All of this happens in the good times when there is law and order present.”

  Megan knew that Joshua was speaking honestly and even reluctantly about things that most people never got to hear about, so she was careful to sound empathetic. “You’re correct: Batteries, flashlights, camping gear, toilet paper, disposable diapers, and bottled water are all the first to go.”