Frame 232 by Wil Mara

decades ago, his luck had been remarkable   —he hadn’t lost a cent. It was easy to beat the system when you were one of the people running it.
    The best part was that the money was only one component of a larger plan; the rest was what really got him out of bed in the morning. After his official retirement, he would move down to the Keys and burn a few months, just long enough to do the requisite debriefings, tie up a few other loose ends, and create the illusion that he was settling into the sunset of his life.
    Then, when the time was right, an accident would occur. He was leaning toward the Boston Whaler exploding in a spectacular column of flame a mile or so offshore. The following inquiry would suggest he had been out fishing and become the unfortunate victim of a crude bomb, likely planted by someone seeking to even an old score. Considering the number of years and volume of raw energy he had poured into tripping up the bad guys, the list of potential suspects would be endless. No body would be found, of course, so a memorial service would be held. Hundreds would attend, tearfully recounting the exemplary career of this true-blue American. His legend would grow into myth; they might even name a building after him. And all the while, following a meticulously planned alteration of his appearance, he would be sitting on a much larger vessel in the heart of the Caribbean, catching marlin, drinking tequila by the gallon, and learning to forget his previous life until it seemed like some fairy tale he’d read as a child. No more liberal policies aimed at exposing the agency’s doings to the public because the average American had “a right to know.” No more regulations against torturing prisoners. And no more academics in the president’s inner circle promoting heavilyrevised political history and whispering that drugs should be legalized, African Americans should be compensated for slavery with tax dollars, and Bobby Kennedy should replace Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill. Rydell had had enough of these people for ten lifetimes.
    And now I’ve reached my goal   —five million.
    He chuckled to himself, saved and closed the file, then went back to the e-mails. It took about a half hour to dig through them all. Then he swiveled around to the table behind him and began sifting through an intimidating stack of files that needed to be assigned to other agents. The mere sight of it was depressing, but he thought about the tequila and the marlins again, and suddenly it didn’t seem so bad. He grabbed the one on top and flipped it open   —a report on a potential terrorist connection with several overseas Internet poker sites. Ironically, the agency’s main concern at this point was about the cash the terrorists might be skimming. The previous administration had attempted to clamp down on online gambling in the U.S., but the new laws turned out to be as porous as America’s border with Mexico.
    No sooner had he reached the bottom of the first page than the computer chimed to let him know a new e-mail had arrived. He would have ignored it had it been the normal chime   —but this was one of the others. He had programmed the mail application to use different alerts based on specific criteria like sender address and keywords in the subject line. He hadn’t heard this one in over a year.
    Rydell spun around and found an auto-forwarded message from his personal address. Getting onto the Internet, he accessed that in-box and found seven messages waiting. All seven appeared to be spam, and six were just that. No one but Rydell would have known the seventh was any different.It claimed a well-known department store as its point of origin, and the content announced an upcoming sale with special prices on men’s shoes and ladies’ rainwear. But it was entirely fictional, part of a complex alert system Rydell had personally designed, through which he could be informed of certain important events. He decrypted the