Whatever the house on 15 Maple Drive was, thought thirty-two-year-old F.B.I. field agent Michael Stewart, it wasn’t sub-G or Anon. “They aren’t script kiddies either,” grumbled his surveillance partner Doyle. It always surprised Stewart, whenever he thought about it, how much hacker lingo he and Doyle had picked up over the years in their time at the Bureau, though neither of them were computer geniuses compared to the Edward Snowden-types back in the units, to whom all the data captured from 15 Maple Drive was bounced.

The main room in the watch house overlooked this quiet street in the South Side neighbourhood of Milford. The house was purchased by the Bureau only three months before, from federal funds earmarked for domestic terrorism and cybercrime, which after the 911 of 20 years ago, and the passing of the Homeland Security Act, there was no lack. When awake Stewart and Doyle most often occupied this front room, acting as natural as possible before the large bay window, from which only one windowless brick corner of the house across the street was visible.

The living room looked like any other in this mildly prosperous neighbourhood of Chicago. It was decorated with sleek, contemporary furniture and its walls hung with modern art—many pieces of which Stewart when they first entered the house found that he knew. He didn’t mention this to Doyle, whom he knew wouldn’t be interested. Directional wireless antennas and media access devices were carefully obscured from view behind the furniture so that anyone looking in from the street would see only the newly-occupied peaceful urban residence of two reasonably affluent young men—most likely queer—in jeans and colourful button-down shirts reading books and playing on their computers and making meals together. At night they slept in assigned bedrooms, separate of course, at the back of the house, and occasionally went on H-leave through a gate in the backyard through to the house behind this one, also owned by the agency.

Big op, Stewart thought, as he sat reading The Adventures of Tom Jones in a leather-backed chair in full view of the nearest active wireless unit behind the sofa that faced the bay window. Doyle was sitting at a table hunched over a crossword in the open-concept kitchen. Two Ozzies without a Harriet. Stewart sensed it wasn’t the shacking-up-to-be-queer-for-each-other-to-quell-neighborhood-curiosity cover story that made Doyle so grumpy. He was a supremely dedicated agent and would have dressed up as Mickey Mouse with a hard-on for Goofy if the op demanded it.

But they been acting these parts and running the equipment for months, and the seemingly unproductive stake-out was wearing them down. The pen-registered tap-and-trace being conducted on the house across the street was picking up little data, other than constantly shifting VPN ISPs from four Macintosh computers inside. Whoever was using those computers were accessing shopping and dating sites, checking email on medium-security encrypted public servers and so far the taps had revealed no dark web/TOR activity.

So while Doyle was doing his crossword, and Stewart sat reading in the stylish leather chair, they weren’t just play-acting parts for potentially nosy neighbours. They were genuinely bored and passing time and this is what was affecting Doyle’s mood. There was little value even in monitoring their own laptops which flashed strings of ISPs and packet info and addressing data automatically routed back to the unit servers. Stewart occasionally watched his laptop anyway, to be doing something besides reading and cooking for his pretend-boyfriend. This was how he noticed the two odd VPN ISPs that had briefly flashed on his screen yesterday afternoon.

Those VPNS interested him, but because he and Doyle’s job was to maintain the equipment and keep the signal bouncing they were not expected to review, analyze or even comment on the data. That was for the geniuses in the cyber units. But when the terminal window on his laptop showed from seperate computers in the surveilled house two identical ISPs, he put down his novel and lifted the laptop from the coffee table onto his lap.

That the ISPs on his screen should be the same was odd enough. Stewart may not have been an Edward Snowden, but he was cyber-savvy enough to realize that two identical ISPs assigned by separate VPNs was unusual. Neigh, as Tom Jones might have put it, it was suspiciously coincidental. The numbers soon shifted off and were replaced with other, more random digits but the incident still niggled at him. He even thought of calling it in in case the cyberunit guys missed it. He satisfied himself by mentioning it to Doyle that evening, but Doyle was about as interested in the VPN anomaly as he was modern art.

 “Let the downtown guys figure it out,” he said, and went back to the meal Stewart had prepared from the fridge stocked weekly from their ops-scheduled grocery shopping trips in Milford. That night Doyle went on H-leave and Stewart went to his bedroom. It had but one small curtained window in the outside wall so the prep team had given up the decorating pretence and the room was set up military-style—a cot and locker and metal night table with the walls left austerly blank.

But Stewart couldn’t sleep. Something else bothered him about those numbers. In addition to the repeat anomaly they looked familiar, and lying naked but for his underwear above the sheets on the cot he couldn’t figure out why. One thing Stewart did have, unlike some of the Snowdens at the units, was an excellent memory. Most surveillance-and-arrest field agents did. The Snowdens claimed that if you were sitting at a computer, always connected, with a universe of knowledge at your fingertips, you didn’t need memory. It was as much a thing of the past as Rolodexes and stereo CD players.

Stewart disagreed. The ability to see something and remember it was a valuable skill, especially in law enforcement. The problem with relying on the Internet to contain your knowledge was you under-utilized your mind. The cyberunits seemed to get around this—they didn’t miss much—but the reliance on technology over the years in law enforcement troubled him. He worried that with so many agents staring at screens looking for Russian hackers and high-tech terrorists with invisible weapons of mass destruction they might miss the real-world guy coming at their back with a noose and a machette and a dirty bomb.

One thing the cyrberunit agents did tell him about this op: there was more going on at 15 Maple Drive than just hacking. The prep team had informed he and Doyle that some kind of unique social organization was at play here that interested them, perhaps the same that the mafia had used for years—passwords and secret rankings and subjective signs of authority and code-based communication. But Stewart was told no more, other than being further informed that the video from the cameras hidden under the front eaves of the watch house and aimed surreptitiously at the house across the street would be analyzed later by organized crime units who specialized in social ops, and he and Doyle were for the most part kept in the dark. Still he worried that amid all the tech for this op, and lack of real-time observation, they still might miss the man with the machette. He did not tell Doyle, and especially the Edward Snowdens, his theory that technology was not only making us more radical but was also making us dumber. A dangerous combination, thought Stewart.

Just as he was falling asleep, his conscious now merging with his unconsciousness mind—the point at which so many revelations arise—he suddenly saw it. The numbers that had flashed so briefly on the screen and continued to flash for hours in his mind afterwards—122 159 944— was his own security number. He sat up in the cot with the shock of latent recognition, surprised it took him so long to see it though, he later supposed no one would ever be looking for their own data in the surveilled electronic effluvia of suspected black-hat hackers.

As the revelation wore off he lay his head back down on the pillow and stared up again into the darkness, considering the second anomaly. If it has been just one number it could be dismissed. But random ISPs from two of the four VPN-connected computers—an anomaly in itself—flashing out his own SSN. He lay there for an hour trying to figure it out. There were no good explanations beyond coincidence—which Stewart as a decent agent and a naturally suspicious human being did not entirely credit. The only other explanation that suggested itself was not credible. Eventually he was able to dismiss it from his mind, another invaluable quality among over-worked and otherwise dedicated agents, and fall asleep. The next morning he found himself making coffee for himself and Doyle, who was back from H-leave and changed out of his suit into navy blue lounge pants and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt, once more musing over his crossword puzzle at the table.

Doyle asked, not with complete indifference, if Stewart had slept well.

“Tolerably,” he replied. “Everything up and running?”

“Yes,” said Doyle, and then added, his unconcealed dissatisfaction with this assignment now truly beginning to show, that it was “too bad we’re only getting the fucking shopping channel.”

Doyle was not unattractive. Solidly built with dirty blonde hair, and about the same age as Stewart, he looked like a younger, fitter Nick Nolte. His thoughtful blue eyes when he looked at you partially belied the surface appearance of the archetypal agent. Stewart sat beside Doyle at the table thinking about the anomaly and smoking a cigarette. Doyle didn’t smoke, and beyond the macho, steroidal F.B.I exterior, was meticulous about his health and complained to the assignment team about Stewart’s smoking. But the team did not want Stewart going outside to light up, and though he had the self-discipline to easily forgo nicotine for the duration, the social contractors thought it might be a nice touch: the bickering between two supposedly gay men over cigarette smoke would make them more believable. It was the habit of the contractors when conducting an op to go unnecessarily deep, so much so that the joke on agency floors was that counter surveillance would pretty much have to crawl up the ass of an agent and inspect the contents of his large intestine in order to break his cover. In the prep room the day the covers were presented Doyle had joked, in his laconic way, that it was a wonder that the team didn’t want them to sleep in the same bed, and fuck occasionally in the living room before the bay window in view of the whole neighbourhood.

Doyle had drained the last of the coffee from his mug and excused himself to go down to the basement to work out in the make-shift gym, also provided by the social contractors. Stewart poured a second cup to coffee and sat back down to finish Doyle’s puzzle, disturbed and feeling a little guilty that had not told his partner about the social security number either.