Again, he swiped back on his phone, to the video of his daughter. But again, he felt this thing he couldn’t quite see, this uncontrollable pull, this need—that was the only way to describe it—a need to swipe back to Nola, to the present.
It was time to admit that for these past two years at the funeral home, Zig was no longer serving the living. His time had been spent with the dead, with clients like ninety-three-year-old Mrs. Paoli. It was time to come back to those who actually needed him.
The bees were still faintly humming as Zig dialed the number he knew by heart.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Zig said into the phone. “I got a favor. How hard would it be to get me another look at Colonel Mint’s body?”
33
“What about Watergate? Ever hear of that?” Waggs asked.
“I’m not a moron,” Nola warned.
“Don’t take it so personal. A few months back, I asked an intern about Watergate and he said he’d seen the movie—starring Tootsie and some blond guy—though he probably deserved half credit for at least knowing Tootsie.”
In the back seat of Waggs’s car, Nola just glared.
“Anyway, Black House.” Out the back window, the security guard was gone, but Waggs barely noticed. “Back during Nixon’s Watergate days, he secretly taped his conversations in the Oval Office, never thinking they’d be used against him. Of course, they were—and once those tapes came out, Nixon’s staff started wondering what other White House rooms had ears in them. Taking no chances, his top military officials started holding meetings in the White House bowling alley, dubbing it the Black House.”
“For real?”
“If you worked for Nixon, would you hold your conversations in the great wide open?”
Nola didn’t answer.
“Exactly. But what really matters is this: with each successive President, from Reagan and Bush to Obama and beyond, the Black House kept moving. During the Clinton years, George Stephanopoulos supposedly used the White House gym to hold off-the-record meetings. During W.’s time, it was Dick Cheney’s office, with its man-sized safe. Era by era, whether it was senior staff talking in Washington, D.C., or two generals meeting at a hot dog stand outside the Pentagon, ‘Black House’ became the nickname for that secret spot where you could speak freely and no one else would be listening.”
“So now Black House is online?”
“Everything’s online,” Waggs said, holding up Nola’s phone. “The world moves too fast for us to dead-drop a note under a park bench and then wait two hours for someone to find it and write back. For a while, we started using fake email accounts. When those got cracked, we switched to encryption, then to even better encryption. But guess what happened?”
“It all gets hacked.”
“It all gets hacked,” Waggs agreed. “A few years back, our friends at the CIA thought they found a true solution: Rather than actually sending emails, they’d open a Gmail account, write an email, and just save it in the Drafts folder. Then they’d give the password for that account to whoever the recipient was. That recipient would then open the draft email, reply in there, and save it as a new draft. Two people could communicate without ever sending anything into cyberspace.”
“Why does that story sound familiar?”
“Because that’s exactly how former CIA director General David Petraeus was communicating with his mistress before he got hacked. Petraeus was the head of the CIA! Back in 2016, the Russian hack of the DNC proved it even more. Today, the moment you type something on a keyboard, every telecom company, ISP, social media site, and cell phone manufacturer can put eyes on it, making everything vulnerable and traceable. So what’s the solution?”
“Don’t type.”