Phantom Drone IX

ONE YEAR EARLIER

If you're ever in Houston, Well, you’d better do right.

You’d better not gamble, There, you’d better not fight.

Or the Sheriff will grab ya, And his boys will bring you down.

The next thing you know, boy, Whoa, you're prison bound!

I bopped to the blues played over the speakers in the dim, green-themed restaurant, enjoying the warm, zesty fragrance of exotic foods. Then, I dipped my chopsticks back into the huge white ceramic bowl to retrieve more noodles, vegetables, and meat from the hot, spicy broth. Chewing, I glanced up from my meal, noticing the half-full restaurant at midday, walls decorated with plants and pictures from the theme country.

“Hey Dante,” muttered my table partner through a mouthful, using a fork to shovel food into his rapacious maw. “How much you think they have to pay for that song?”

“Chop suey?” I responded, “Really?”

“Why not? I’ve loved this stuff since I was little kid!”

“It’s a Vietnamese restaurant Malcolm, they specialize in Vietnamese cuisine. You’re missing out, man!”

“Vietnamese, Chinese, who cares?”

“First, chop suey is American, not Chinese. And second, I assure you the Chinese and Vietnamese care a great deal.”

“You didn’t answer my question."

“Well, I’m no expert in music licensing for restaurants, but lucky for you, I can give you an answer. It costs nothing to play that rendition of "Midnight Special"; it’s a traditional Black folk song from the early 1900s. Maybe even earlier. The song’s in the Public Domain.”

Then, letting my chopsticks fall to the table, I lifted the large bowl to my lips and drained the last of the tasty, seasoned broth.

“I can’t believe you ate that whole thing,” Malcom commented, his speech finally, blessedly food free. “They brought you a bathtub of that stuff!”

“Well, I do love pho,” I explained. “And I was plenty hungry, because I hardly get to eat anything at home.”

“Ah. Wife trying to put you on a diet?”

“Well, she is my Mommy after all.”

“You know, I kind of think of myself as a sort of Mommy over my region.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah. Why don’t you send me your latest schematics for the Phantom Drone? I’d like to have a look at them.”

“Those schematics are Top Secret, Mal!” I protested.

“So what, Dante?” he retorted. “I have Top Secret Clearance, just like you!”

“Yes, but you don’t have a need to know, man. You’re going to have to trust me. Also, maybe don’t talk about Top Secret stuff when we’re out in a public restaurant?”

The waitress arrived to refill our drinks, and I asked for the check.

“Separate checks?” the rather pretty Vietnamese server asked.

“Nah, one check please,” I told her, “I got it.”

“You got it?” Malcolm asked, raising an eyebrow. “I always get it, Dante. I am the boss, you know.”

“Not today, man.”

“Well… thanks!”

“Don’t thank me yet. I think your meal was about forty-eight bucks?”

“Something like that.”

“There’s a liquor store across the street. Buy me forty dollars’ worth of booze, and we’ll call it even.

Malcom flinched, giving me a curious look for an uncomfortable moment as he leaned back in his seat.

“Dude. There’s some reason you can’t buy your own liquor?”

“My twice-yearly medical checkup was a couple days ago,” I explained, pulling a black card out of my breast pocket. “Doc said alcohol was starting to damage my liver, so I had to stop drinking or at least cut way back. Now, in a perfect world, my private medical history would be between me and my doctor. But in our world…”

“Your wife got the report?”

“Mommy got the report. Probably paid someone off. We had a huge fight. This black card here still has no Credit Limit, but Matilda fixed it where I can’t purchase any alcohol with the thing. It won’t work in a liquor store, and I can’t even get beer or wine at a gas station, grocery, or a big box retailer. Ask me how I know this.”

“You make six figures for us, Mr. Program Manager. What do you need your wife’s black card for? Why don’t you just use your own salary?”

Here, I took a deep breath because I had to admit something shameful to my boss.

“When I discovered my wife -- my ex-wife – was… um, messing around, I made some very poor decisions. The lawyer General Krauthammer got for me cut a clever deal where I could be considered… ah… incompetent. For five years. I needed a legal guardian, like I’m a… a child.”

“A Conservatorship? Ouch!”

“Yeah, that’s the word. Conservatorship. Here I am, an adult, all the money from my military benefits and anything else I was paid had to go through my mother. Humiliating, but it beats prison. I guess."

“I thought you beat prison by claiming self-defense.”

“I did. The Conservatorship came about because… of some other stuff.”

“Oh. Well, let me guess. You got married, and your spouse became your legal guardian.”

“Twelve years younger,” I growled, feeling the anger and frustration rise. “For two more years, every penny I make goes through Matilda. And at the end of those two years, I must stand before a judge, who will make an evaluation which might end the Conservatorship. Might!"

“Ah dude!” Malcolm crowed, clearly amused. “That little White bitch is your literal Mommy!”

“Shut up!”

“Relax man, I’m just busting your chops.”

“I convinced Mamma -- my real mother -- to arrange the transfer because I thought Matilda wouldn’t take it seriously. But she does! She takes it very seriously! I also agreed because I thought no one could be a worse tyrant than my mom. Well! I was wrong about that!”

The check arrived, and I gave our server the black card with no limit. Having paid for lunch, Malcolm and I strode across the street for the liquor store.

“Hope you gave her a fat tip,” my boss stated, “Cause she fine as hell!”

“She did a good job,” I noted. “And my wife is all the pretty any man would need.”

“Tell me about it! What’s she going to college for? She should be a supermodel or an actress or something.”

I opened the door to the liquor shop and held it for my boss.

“Don’t be jealous, Mal. That Chinese intern you’ve been hanging with is just as hot.”

“Yeah, lucky me, right?”

After the outside heat, we entered the coolness of the store, and I swept my gaze across the shelves stacked with bottled happiness.

“You don’t think that’s odd?” I noted, wandering down the aisle.

“What’s odd?”

“That a Chinese intern would want to date a man as old as you are?”

“Well, I am the Regional Manager! At heart, they're all golddiggers.”

“Yeah, about that. Pretty sure it’s against company policy for you to have "relationships" with your subordinates. Can your career survive a sexual harassment lawsuit? I mean, you do realize this woman is holding the Sword of Damocles over your head, right?

Malcolm scowled, took in a deep breath, and snapped, “Look, Johnson...."

Yep, he was upset. My name was “Johnson” now.

“I don’t need grief from you about how young my girlfriend is,” the boss continued. “You didn’t just rob the cradle; you raided the damn maternity ward. That makes your house way too crystal for you to be throwing stones. You take care of your own business, and I’ll take care of Malcolm Forbes.”

I intended to continue that conversation, but after I got my liquor, so I let the matter drop for the moment. Thus, I made my selection and showed it to Malcolm.

“Quality Kentucky bourbon plus cheap vodka,” I announced. “This should be under the forty-dollar mark.”

“Dante! You have hundreds of millions of dollars, and you settle for that trash? What are you, homeless?”

“It works for me.”

Here, the boss reached up to the top shelf and brought down a fancy bottle of clear liquid. You could tell this liquor store wasn’t in the Hood, where something like that would have been locked up behind the counter.

“Sir, that stuff is a hundred and fifty bucks!” I exclaimed.

“This here vodka is much better than that garbage you’re holding!”

“Is it a hundred and thirty-five dollars better?!”

“The Lord has blessed us, Dante. We’re rich! Why shouldn’t we enjoy the finer things? Huifen introduced me to this, man. She loves this stuff!”

“And how many college interns do you know can afford top shelf booze?”

There was a sudden frostiness in his demeanor, and I could feel an invisible wall going up between us. I had hoped to confront him after he bought my liquor, but now that the topic had been breached… in for a penny, in for a pound.

“What are you saying?” he snarled, a dire threat in his voice.

“I’m saying that nine months ago, your ex-wife cleaned you out in the divorce. On top of that, your mother was diagnosed with cancer, and you are her only support. Just six months ago, you were in debt up to your eyeballs. You didn’t even know if you could keep your house! Now look at you. Buying a fancy new handmade Italian sports car, dashing off to Paris for the weekend with your hot young Chinese girlfriend, and dropping a hundred and fifty bucks for vodka like it ain’t nuthin’. Where’s the money coming from, Mr. Forbes?"

“I had some investments that paid off,” he sniffed.

“Really? Well, instead of throwing cabbage around like you’re tossing salad, how about you take your um… ‘investments’ and use some of it to buy a legit company or two? Then report your remaining ‘investments’ as business profits over time. Five years from now, you’ll still have anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of your money, but it’ll be nice and clean. Then spend it like a drunken sailor!”

“What I do with my money is not your business, Johnson!”

“Oh, but it is, Mr. Forbes! Because if you get arrested for doing something stupid or… dare I say, treasonous? All your subordinates could lose their jobs! Worse, the FBI might think we had something to do with it, and now we got Federal agents crawling up our butts and into every aspect of our lives. Hundreds of innocent employees, Mr. Forbes. Your Sword of Damocles will fall on us all!”

“This conversation is over, Johnson!” Mr. Forbes insisted. “And even though you’ve pissed me off, I’ll still buy you this fancy vodka! Because I’m nice like that.”

“You’re going to get caught, man!”

“I said shut up, Johnson. Before something bad happens to you.”

*

“Sweetie, come to bed?”

That night, I was in the darkened master bedroom of the multi-million-dollar house where I lived in the gated community at the top of the hill. I was typing away at the keyboard of my computer while my wife called to me in a slinky silk nightgown from her enormous canopy bed. My back was to the bed as I reclined in my awesome gaming chair.

“Be there in a moment honey,” I replied, and I meant it because bed was the only thing about Matilda I actually liked. Well, that and the money. Youth and Beauty were side missions, and while I got plenty of both, make no mistake; the main quest of that game was her money. It’s great that she’s hot, but I’d have married her if she looked like Vladimir Putin.

I could hear Matilda rise from the bed and approach me from behind. I saw her in my mind’s eye, the silky teddy revealing most of her smooth, lathed-shaped dancers legs and draping her full, feminine curves. She threw her arms over me from the rear and set her head down on my shoulder, against my neck, with a soft, feminine sigh brimming with raw sexual desire.

“Whatcha doin?” she purred.

“Getting a new car,” I replied. “My boss has an Italian roadster handmade by a Master Mechanic. I figured I’d trade in the minivan and get one of my own.”

“Would you really get rid of the minivan?”

“What, you finally ready to have babies, now?”

“No, but what if I change my mind? We’re not poor, you know, it’s not like we have to trade it in. I’ll let you keep both the minivan and a new car.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you let me do things!"

Evidently the sarcasm flew right by her.

“So, this new car. Is it electric?”

“No, it’s not electric. I’d just as soon shoot myself.”

“But Dante sweetie, what about the environment? At least make it a hybrid.”

“It’s a sports car Matilda, it needs to be all muscle!”

She got off me with a gasp and stepped around in front.

“A sports car?!” she cried, incredulous. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious!” I retorted.

“Well… what are you going to do with it? Drive it to work? To show off to all your friends, ya?”

“Mostly. But I also plan to ship it out to a desert or maybe Montana somewhere so I can floor it and see how fast it goes!”

Matilda replied with a loud gasp, right hand at her throat as she staggered back in horror. Had she’d been wearing pearls she would have clutched them. Seeing where things were going, I got up out of the gaming chair to better confront the girl. She was so much smaller and younger than me! It’s as if my daughter was catching an attitude.

“It’s a luxury sports car, Matilda! Sports driving it is the point.”

The woman planted her bare feet and leaned at me from the waist.

“Hell no!” she shrilled. “I won’t let you kill yourself!”

“Matilda…!”

“No, Dante! You know that actor, that guy from those racing movies, ya? Well, well he was a hell of a lot better driver than you! And, and, and he killed himself in a crash, in a sports car. They, they said his body was all charred, but his lungs were burned on the inside, which meant he, he breathed in the fire you know, which meant he was still alive after the crash. That man burned to death in that car, Dante. He burned to death!”

“Everything’s dangerous, baby,” I replied, trying to sound soothing. “Over a hundred thousand Americans die each year in bathroom or shower accidents; seriously, look it up. Twenty-four people died last year from freaking champagne corks. I don’t think you’re gonna be killed by a champagne cork, you don’t think you’re gonna be killed by a champagne cork, but those 24 people last year…”

“Are you seriously comparing a lunatic driving a car as fast as possible to drinking champagne?”

“Baby, I’ve wanted a racing car since I was a little kid!”

“You think I’m going to let the love of my life burn alive just so you can relive your childhood? Grow up, Dante!”

“No one gets out of here alive, Matilda. I’m here for a good time, not a long time.”

“Yeah (eff) that. Mommy says you can’t have a sports car!”

“How dare you!” I raged suddenly, surprising even myself. “I’m a grown-assed man and you are a child! My truck is older than you! How dare you tell me what I can’t buy with my own money!”

“Your money? Boy, you don’t have any money! I’m rich Dante, you have nothing! You can’t even spend your own salary without my say so!”

Fulminating, she turned from me and marched to the nightstand on her side of the bed, a woman on a mission.

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

She snatched up her smartphone and began tapping away on it. Then she brought the phone to her ear, and threw me a glare. If looks could kill, I would have burst into flames.

“Matilda? What are you doing? Honey?"

She took the phone from her ear and said, “Conservatorship” loudly into it.

I began to walk over there and was close enough to hear a voice on the phone ask for a password.

“I love Dante forever,” Matilda replied.

I stepped closer, but my legal spouse held her hand up at me like a traffic cop and I found myself halted.

“Limit purchases to one thousand dollars a day, please,” the woman said, “and no payment for a vehicle of any kind without the express permission of the accountholder.”

“Oh, you bitch!”

She shot me another incendiary glare, this time using her free hand to shoot me the bird.

“No ma’am, I’m safe. He wouldn’t dare. Yes, and thank you very much. You’ve been a great help. Goodbye.”

She ended the call, dropped her phone to clatter back on the nightstand, and looked back up at me.

“Take yo bitch-ass out of here and go sleep on the couch.”

“There’s eight empty bedrooms in this place!”

“I said the couch! The couch in the living room, Dante!”

"That does it!" I seethed, "This marriage is over!"

Matilda put her hands on her hips, the fury on her face now modified with a vicious intellect.

"Is it?" she purred.

"Yeah, no amount of money is worth... this!"

"Oh? Do you imagine the Conservatorship would end just because you divorced me?"

"Duh. Legal guardianship of my person will revert back to my Mom."

"Will it? Does your mother have the resources to fight a series of long, costly legal battles? Daddy says if you dig long enough, you can find skeletons in anyone's closet, even if you have to put them there. I can make your mother look like a monster before the whole world! Certainly someone unworthy of caring for you properly. Oh yes, I can do that. Besides, divorce is an adult decision Dante, and the State says you can't make adult decisions. I get to make them for you!"

I stood there in silence, at loss of what to say. After a painful minute of smiling wickedly at me, Matilda huffed, turned about, and then tucked herself into bed. There she quipped, "Oh Dante! I had forgotten that you were there! You may leave, now."

*

Obviously, I needed to divorce my wife. But dumping her right away would make me instantly poor. I also needed to wait two more years for the Conservatorship to end. In any case, before I left Matilda, I needed to put together a little nest egg.

The next day at work, I went to Molly Maguire, my Chief Engineer of the Phantom Drone Project, and found her in classic Molly state; a chunky, mousey looking female with a bush of dense, curly hair and thick lensed, “coke bottle” glasses, a soiled white lab coat, and exuding eye-watering body odor.

“Molly?” I asked, approaching her fantascially messy desk. I've seen dumpsters more orderly than that woman's desk.

“Busted!” the woman cried. “What can I do for you, hot boss?”

“I need you to prepare an encryption key for email.”

“Why? We’ve got five of ‘em from the government.”

“First, I need an encryption the government can’t crack. At least not immediately.”

“Oo!” Molly cooed, “Hot boss is being naughty! Well, I do have three keys for my own personal use. I suppose I can give you one of them. What’s it for?”

“Me and Mr. Forbes need to talk privately,” I explained. “Is that okay with you?”

“I don’t care,” Molly shrugged. “Once I give you the key, it’s yours. I can always make another one. Anything else?”

“Yes. Second, I want you to sweep my office computer and Mr. Forbes’s computer of all keylogging or any other monitoring software.”

“Dude, you’re a Project Manager, and Mr. Forbes is Region Manager. The government has all kind of crap on you guys’ workstations.”

“Yes, and I want them all gone. I hear you’re smart enough to make that happen. Are you?”

“Duh! Anything else?”

“Third, I want you to prepare some notes and schematics for the Phantom Drone that don’t work.”

She lifted her eyebrow at me and stepped back.

“With all due respect baby,” she began, “I’ve been trying to break this Invisibility Field thing for six months. All our notes and schematics don’t work! When I find a way to turn invisible, you’ll be the first to know. Trust me.”

“I want three designs that look hopeful but do not and cannot work. I will need another such design each month until further notice.”

She looked at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care. Eventually, she said, “Weird request hot boss, but take me out to lunch today, and you got a deal!”

“Thank you,” I replied, while racking my brain for all the places we could eat outdoors.

“Busted!” Molly cried. “Look Ma, I got a date!”

*

I went to my boss’s office and gave him a zip drive with Molly’s encryption key, as well as instructions for how to set up a secure encrypted email link between us. Once we loaded up the key, I smashed the zip drive. I did it while we chatted about sports. Malcolm Forbes seemed quite happy to play along.

A little later in my office, Molly called me.

“Hey hot boss,” she breathlessly detailed, “I got rid of the spyware like you told me. But Mr. Forbes? That dude had all kinds of Chinese crap on his computer! You wouldn’t believe…”

“Molly?” I asked. “Did you get rid of it? All of it?"

“Hell yeah, I got rid of it. All the Chinese stuff from Mr. Forbes' machine, plus all the Federal stuff from yours. I’m the best!”

“Excellent, Smithers.”

“We’re still going out today, right?”

“Yes Molly, we’re still going out.”

“Busted! Thanks, Hot Boss!”

She hung up, and I emailed Malcolm on our special link. I made certain the link was encrypted with Molly’s key in both directions before I sent the first email.

[You asked about schematics on the Phantom Drone at lunch yesterday. I am willing to give you five such schematics, plus updated schematics every month.]

Then I sat back and waited for the response. I did not have long to wait.

[You’ve made the right decision Dante. Thanks, man!]

I smiled, and rapidly typed in the following:

[I want 20 percent of what you’re getting.]

Almost immediately, he sent back:

[20 percent of what? I don’t know what you’re talking about!]

[Now it’s 30 percent. Lie to me again, and I go straight to the FBI!]

He made me wait a full 23 minutes. Perhaps he was in a desperate conversation with his beautiful handler. But eventually Mr. Forbes responded:

[I can open an account for you.]

To hell with that!

[No! Under no circumstances will you open a bank account for me. You will use cash and only cash to purchase gift cards from a big box retailer. Then you will mail the gift cards to a P.O. box I shall designate.]

Then I had to wait 8 more minutes before he wrote:

[I will personally give you cash.]

[No, no, no! You will use cash and only cash to purchase gift cards from a big box retailer. Then you will snail mail the gift cards throughthe US Postal Service to a P.O. box I shall designate.]

This time I only had to wait two and a half minutes.

[I can’t do that.]

I responded:

[You want the schematics or not? I bet the Russians know how to follow instructions.]

It was less than a minute before:

[I want to see the schematics first.]

I was ready for that:

[I have five schematics. I will send you two. You want the other three, and an additional one every month, you will have to pay!]

Then I attached the first two of Molly’s phony schematics to the email before I sent it. After that, I waited over an hour without a response. Eventually, I had to take Molly to lunch. We went to an outdoor café, but I must admit that by that time, she didn’t smell so bed. She must have showered, and the much-reduced odor she still retained had been masked by an avalanche of roses. When I drove us back to work, I made sure to give her a slap on her voluminous bottom and a peck on the cheek. You could tell by the look on her face that Molly Maguire was over the moon; I’d had never seen her so happy.

I returned to my office to find that Malcolm had finally answered.

[Please send other three schematics. I have prepared ten (10) gift cards of $1,000 each. Please send addy for delivery.]

I whooped and spun about in my office chair. I had him!

*

Mr. Forbes paid me 10,000 dollars in gift cards every month. I called my mother and told her that my wife was stealing my salary – which was true in a sense – and that I needed her to secretly put some of my money away for me. Mom easily believed me, for she hated Matilda. Like, a lot.

I hired some high school kid – via the Internet, he never saw me -- a small fee to pick up the cards from a P.O. Box in a post office across town. He left the cards at a drop where he collected his pay, and where I recovered the cards wearing a ski mask. Before I picked up the drop, I carefully reconned the area, and turned on a police scanner I carried, set to local Police and FBI frequencies. Once the coast was clear, I picked up the drop and brought the cards to a local library -- local to drop, certainly not to my house -- where I used an Internet app accessed from said library’s computer to move the money from the gift cards to my mother’s savings account.

One month, the kid I'd hired to pick up the cards from the P.O. box kept all the cards for himself and went on a wild shopping spree. I tracked him, put on a hockey mask, and then beat him all the way down. I was nice enough to call an ambulance once he was down, bleeding, crapping himself, crying and begging for mercy as he held his broken arm. Afterwards, Isabella, the maid my wife hired, recommended an illegal alien family, and I offered their daughter the same deal I had offered my last mule. She faithfully collected the gift cards from the P.O. box and left them at the drop where she collected her pay, and the girl never betrayed me.

One day, I sat down with Matilda and told her how frightened I was of Climate Change. I even made myself cry. As she comforted her "distraught" husband, I told her I wanted to start a new charity called Gamers Against Climate Change. She exalted over my newfound climate activism and joined my cause with much passion. She even hired a lawyer and accountant for my new charity.

Between Matilda and myself, we convinced many to donate to my new organization. By law, you must have a Board of Directors if you are a 501(c)(3) charity organization that people can send tax deductible donations to. Me, Matilda, and my mother were on that board. The organization raised an impressive amount of money, mostly due to Matilda’s stupid cackling whore friends. Oh, and my Mom. Momma took large amounts of money from her savings account to donate liberally to Gamers Against Climate Change. Of course, as members of the Board, we deserved to be well paid for all our hard work saving the environment. Gamers Against Climate Change paid me and my mother six figure salaries, but Matilda refused to accept a dime – bless her heart.

My money wasn’t dirty; Gamers Against Climate Change paid me a legitimate salary. Same for my Mom. My salary, which I never spent (I still had Matilda’s $1,000-a-day little black card) went into a traditional savings account. But my mother’s salary went into some well thought out investments. If the investments turned a profit, great. But even if we lost all her money, we still had my savings account. My mother kept very little money in the other savings account fed by the gift cards; she kept donating almost all of those funds to our charity. To save the climate, you know.

Once I gave a speech in Orlando. The GAC-G paid for the plane tickets and the hotel and the rental car so I could reach the venue and give the speech. Now, there just so happened to be a popular theme park in Orlando, Florida, so Matilda bought tickets for her, me, my mom, and my mom’s boyfriend to go there. I also made passionate speeches decrying the evils of Climate Change in Rio De Janeiro. And Cairo. And Venice. And Tokyo. And Washington, D.C. Hey, the people in Paris really needed to hear my views on Climate Change.

Gamers Against Climate Change bought a couple of cars. For the organization, of course. They had to be 100% electric cars, but they were really nice ones with all the bells and whistles. Hey, we had to travel about town to tell people about the evils of Climate Change. Of course, GAC-C also paid all the maintenance on these pricey vehicles.

Then one day it happened. Molly Maguire showed up at my house to demonstrate her mastery of the Invisibility Field, which she called the Cloaking Device on the one-passenger flying vehicle we were developing. We proved it in the private park across the street from my house, except Molly had taken the Phantom Drone without permission, so the FBI showed up to arrest us both. They got Molly, but I used the invisibility and flying properties of the Phantom Drone to escape.

When I called my boss Malcolm Forbes, he didn’t tell me to bring the Phantom Drone back to the lab. No, he told me to bring it directly to him at the airport. That’s when I knew he was going to deliver it to the Chinese!

I had hoped to make enough money from Malcolm's gift cards payments and the GAC-C to set me and my mom up for life, but circumstances had forced my hand. Now, I was going to deliver the Phantom Drone to the Chinese myself for enough money that me and my Mom could be comfortable for the rest of our lives without that little witch "Mommy" Matilda. I would finally have my own money. Don’t judge me. The Chinese always steal our technology, without fail. Trust me, it’s inevitable, they always get it. I figured if someone was going to make money giving Phantom Drone tech to the CCP, that someone might as well be me.

But I never counted on Matilda’s genuine love. What was wrong with her? Have you seen her? That chick can have any man she wants! Why did she love me? Why would anyone?

And I never counted on bringing my beloved Leticia and her innocent daughter into this mess.

And now, after all that flashed through my mind, I sat on dirty concrete in the shadow beneath a high school stadium, wrapped up in no other clothing but a blanket, gazing at Leticia, the woman I loved, who had just asked me for the truth.

How could I tell her that after 15 years of faithful military service, I was a traitor who planned to give the Phantom Drone to my Chinese contact? That she could go to jail for aiding and abetting a fugitive, and that her precious daughter could grow up without a mother who was rotting away in Federal Prison? Noah Wang was right; I was destroying lives.