A Work of Fiction

He is an unremarkable looking man, not quite six feet tall, his wavy dark brown hair giving way to grey and the occasional white. By all appearance he is in his early 50’s, a slight bulge around the middle, the benefit from copious indulgence of alcohol. He routinely laments his current situation, perpetuating the angst he feels annually, or more precisely every winter when the weather turns brutally cold, yet that cold feeds his bravado, his inner sense of survivalist. He works as a writer for a rural backwater newspaper, whose circulation is dwarfed by any big ten school weekly publication; but no matter, for he has seen the wider world, and eschews contact with it because of the horrors he has seen. Terror bombings, murder, rape…he was tasked to find those responsible, bring them to justice often via force majeure. Sometimes at the end of a day, those memories come racing back, feeding his sense of loneness, for those who have seen the grim reapers handiwork close, know no peace of mind. His only regret not serving out enough years in the military to be “one of those retired dicks earning chicken scratch wages and laughing all the way to the bank”. He does not laugh when he goes to the bank. It is for these reasons he is no longer married, but lives alone, getting by on poor wages, cheap booze, cigarettes, coffee…and cyber friends. She is one of those friends.
She was drawn to his short stories...

He had written a series of somewhat complicated and twisted stories, in part based on his experiences in Europe serving his country. His name seemed vaguely familiar, and because of modern technology, it took her no time at all to amass a sizable dossier regarding him. A few well place emails to people she knew revealed some considerable details about him from the community…she was well known in those circles, and not just for her more recent work.

She often speaks of being a middle school teacher to American children in Europe, but anyone with knowledge of government security knows a teacher does not warrant a security clearance of COSMIC TOP SECRET ATOMAL (CTSA). She had been recruited in her senior year of college to work for the government alright, but not the Department of Defense civilian schools. She was a communications analyst, with knowledge of computers, which in the mid 1970s was not all that common a field for women. And so she had been recruited to work for the National Security Agency. She had been sent to Germany to monitor military and government communications. It was well known that less secure telephone communications connected various military commands; her job was to find those commands(and people) that were passing sensitive information over these channels. She was not supposed discuss her occupation, and so the idea of being a teacher was born. A convenient fairy tale.
That was where she first heard of him.

Prior to his current daily duties in the news media, he had been a uniformed member of the Air Force security apparatus. His name was on many reports, and she had spent many hours of monitoring his communications to find leaks. An inopportune comment, a name of operation yet to begin; He was always cleared, considered too insignificant a violator to pursue.

Then in 2006, after she first posted her blog , readers become friends, and by following links from friend to friend she discovered him….his name seemed so familiar. It was only after her background work on his name that she realized who he was, his linkage to her past. Yet she knew that he would not know her. Even if she explained it all, he would not believe her. She had spent hours looking at his face in photos, listening to his voice on tapes, and now here he is a correspondent with her over the Internet. It is a strange thing indeed. She had stared at his face those many years ago and imagined herself having a crush on him; perhaps she did. She was warned to never reveal what she had known, else 30 plus years of secrets be revealed. And so she does not tell him, how could she? He continues to labor on his writings, she continues to build her dossier.