Original Sin by Beth McMullen

Author:Beth McMullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books

Once upon a time in a jungle I can still not bring myself to mention by name, Simon Still, delirious from malaria, was ranting about the government of Pakistan. Because it was not good for our life expectancies to have the supposed Frenchman howling in English about extremists hidden in the mountains, plotting our downfall, I lay down next to him on his grass mat and tried to soothe him. I stroked his sweaty hair back from his forehead and sang verse after verse of “Oh My Darling Clementine” in French, which he seemed to like very much. After a while, he felt cool and limp in my arms. But as I tried to slide my arm out from under his shoulders and escape back to my own scratchy mat, he reached up and grabbed me, panicked.

“Stay,” he whispered, his eyes clouded with an unknown terror.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. I’ll sing. Calm down. Go to sleep.”

“No, Sally,” he said, squeezing me tighter. “The passwords are secure. They are. I just add another number on to the sequence every month. Is that good enough? You must tell me.”

I am not normally an opportunist, but this seemed like due compensation for having to stay up all night singing.

“What’s the sequence, Simon?” I asked. “I’ll keep it safe.”

“The day it all began,” he said, as if I should have known. “The day I signed my life over to them. I like to remind myself of the time that has passed.”

Why he wanted to torture himself like that I would never know, because before I could ask he passed out cold. I wriggled out from under him and crawled back to my own mat. As I dug through the layers of mosquito netting to find the opening, I repeated Simon’s password to myself a few times. Not that I was at any risk of forgetting it.

In my head, I count off the number of months I have been gone from the Agency. I add those to 415288, the month and day that Simon began service to his country followed by the number of months he’d been at it when I left, and I’m in. It shouldn’t be so easy. If I liked Simon better right now, I might even point that out to him.

I remind myself that accessing the network is a small victory. The USAWMD was not known for its commitment to an electronic universe. The most important information, the things that would make the average American cringe with distaste and perhaps be moved to rail against our methods of democracy, those things were loosely bound together by rubber bands, stashed in cryptically labeled boxes, and stored in the belly of an undisclosed mountain. They were also written in a code so irritatingly complex that I used to make things up to see if anyone bothered to really read them. My conclusion was no.

But background information, dossiers on individuals of interest to the Agency, sometimes showed up on the network. And today I just got lucky.

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