In guerrilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths.
Well, if they’re big and you’re small, then you’re mobile and they’re slow. You’re hidden and they’re exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That’s the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time.
The government’s been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They’ve infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls… Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It’s a brave new world out there. At least it’d better be.
No. To your family, your friends, everybody you know, everybody you meet. That’s why I went away and didn’t come back. You’ve got to go away, Robert.
Fort Meade has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You’re talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word “bomb”, “president”, “Allah”, any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.
In the old days, we actually had to tap a wire into your phone line. Now with calls bouncing off satellites, they snatch’em right out of the air.
So, we were helping the secret police supply weapons… to the Afghani rebels fighting the Soviets. My partner and I were on the eastern border monitoring Soviet military transmissions. It was kind of fun actually.
I liked the Iranians. Back in Tehran, the hard-liners seized the embassy, and overnight, the whole country changed. People we’d been working with, they turned on us. I got out. My partner didn’t. By the time I got home, the whole mission had become a press disaster waiting to happen. Aiding and abetting the new enemy. The agency conveniently forgot I existed. I don’t blame them. It’s what they had to do. I loved the agency. I loved the work. I loved the people. It was my whole life.
Yeah. The idea was…
…the idea always was that if one of us got out, he’d take care of the other’s family.
Rachel was all he had. So she became my promise to him.
