Fortunately, despite the desperate state of the world, it did not prove necessary for Gretchen to book any consultations on this particular weekend. So she had both days off – although I am, technically speaking, on call year-round, 24/7. And so it was that shortly after breakfast in bed, while Cerise and I relaxed with cappuccinos, mimosas and Mozart, that my iPhone played Beautiful Day by U2, indicating an incoming call from Secretary of State John Kerry.
Kerry: Hello? Tom Collins?
Tom: At your service, Mr. Secretary.
Kerry: Is now a good time for a private conversation?
Tom: Just a moment while I leave the room I’m in presently, walk down the corridor to my home office and lock the door behind me. Honey, it’s John Kerry – he wants to speak with me privately. I’ll be back afterward.
Tom: Hello, Mr. Secretary? I’ve locked myself in my home office and I’m completely alone now.
Kerry: Are you sure that nobody in the immediate vicinity can overhear your side of this very important conversation we’re about to have?
Tom: The walls, door and ceiling of my home office are heavily sound proofed and the floor is solid oak and thickly carpeted. The only window in this room overlooks my back yard and has customized triple-layered construction with a vacuum chamber in the center – not only is it impermeable to sound waves, the outside glass surface has been treated so as to scatter laser beams aimed at it, rendering sympathetic vibration analysis infeasible. My home is located in the center of a two-acre lot on a cul de sac in Great Falls, Virginia, and my nearest neighbor’s property line is more than three hundred feet away. In addition, I routinely have two different top-notch security firms sweep my house for bugs at random intervals, the last of which was less than a week ago. The only other person here at the moment is my long-time friend and companion, Cerise, and I can assure you, she is completely trustworthy and discreet. Furthermore, looking at the security camera display on my computer, I can also assure you that she is still in the bedroom, drinking coffee, sipping a mimosa, listening to Mozart and reading today’s Washington Post.
Kerry: Okay, good – that sounds satisfactory.
Tom: What did you want to discuss, Mr. Secretary?
Kerry: Well, as I’m sure you know, that snot-nosed little pain-in-the-[expletive] Ed Snowden struck again this week, and now the French and the Germans are madder than scalded chickens because the NSA eavesdropped on their official communications.
Tom: So I’ve heard – at length, all week, from French and German diplomats, as well as representatives of Brazil, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Poland, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Austria, Panama, Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, Japan, Guatemala, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kenya, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Tunisia, Greece, Taiwan, Cyprus, Portugal…
Kerry: All right, already! I get the idea.
Tom: They’re all, as you put it Mr. Secretary, madder than a flock of scalded chickens.
Kerry: Well, tough noogies! Time for them to grow up and face the realities of the world, that’s what!
Tom: Yes, Mr. Secretary.
Kerry: What a bunch of pathetic cry-babies!
Tom: Certainly, Mr. Secretary.
Kerry: As if going around patching up all the messes that stupid [expletive] Hillary Clinton made all over the [expletive] planet wasn’t bad enough, now I have to deal with a mob of [expletive] hypocrites traipsing up to the United Nations to complain about us spying on them! I mean, come on, people – everybody does it – what’s the big surprise that the USA does it best?
Tom: None whatsoever, Mr. Secretary.
Kerry: Exactly! Anyway, what I called you about is the stuff we got on Angela Merkel.
Tom: The Chancellor of Germany?
Kerry: Right, sure.
Tom: What stuff?
Kerry: The stuff we got from listening to her private cell phone conversations.
Tom: Which the United States is not currently doing, and, naturally, won’t ever, ever be doing again?
Kerry: Yeah, sure.
Tom: But which the NSA did, in fact, do in the past?
Kerry: Um… look… as a matter of fact, yeah, we did, but don’t tell anybody about it, okay? The Administration has been very, very careful not to say that, and we have decided that unless some truly irrefutable evidence that we did it arises, we are going to steadfastly refrain from saying that we ever listened in on anything that fat, dumpy little Kraut woman said on her cell phone – got that?
Tom: Yes, Mr. Secretary.
Kerry: Good – okay, first of all, we found out that she pigs out late at night on all kinds of high-calorie foods.
Tom: You mean, she’s a binge-eater?
Kerry: Well, I’m not sure – if she does it every [expletive] night, is that a binge? A binge is like, sporadically – once in a while, isn’t it?
Tom: Bulimic?
Kerry: Maybe, I don’t know – but with a figure like that, if she’s sticking her finger down her throat, it’s pretty damn obvious she’s not doing it often enough.
Tom: What kind of foods?
Kerry: Well, there’s lots of potatoes – which I don’t suppose is any big surprise for a German – baked with sour cream, potato salad, potato casseroles, potato pancakes, fried potatoes – which she eats with mayonnaise, if you can believe that – I swear, Collins, that woman never met a spud she didn’t like. She’s got one hell of a sweet tooth, too, though – chocolate, caramels, cakes, tortes, pastries and marzipan – damn, Collins, the woman devours marzipan in every conceivable form – and truffles, Collins, I tell you, the variety of truffles she can snarf down at three in the morning – I had no idea some those flavors even existed – would you believe lavender? Violet? Rose petals? Hungarian paprika? Fennel? White pepper? Curry? [Expletive] wasabi? Can you imagine that, Collins – a chocolate wasabi truffle? And Nutella! My God, the woman goes through tubs of the stuff – on rye pumpernickel bread with caraway seeds in it, no less!
Tom: Oh, gross.
Kerry: Then there are the affairs. She’s banging a Turk and a Nigerian – all very hush-hush.
Tom: Makes sense.
Kerry: Neither of them knows about the other – and her husband… well, the truly amazing thing is, in ten years of her cell phone conversations the NSA monitored, she’s spoken with him a grand total of four times – and every time it was about dogs – some neighbor’s dog, some relative’s dog, some dog or another she wanted him to see about. She’s got this thing about dogs, apparently. And oh yeah – there was the pregnancy.
Tom: Pregnancy?
Kerry: Yeah, we’re pretty sure it was the Nigerian, too, because according to what we overheard, the Turk prefers the back entrance, if you catch my drift. Well, you can imagine what kind of reaction a Nigerian bun popping out of the German Chancellor’s oven would get.
Tom: Yes, I think I can.
Kerry: Right – and here’s the kicker – what with her being so fat and all, she didn’t even know she was pregnant for the first four months!
Tom: Really? What did she think it was?
Kerry: Indigestion! Man, you should have heard her go [expletive] ballistic at the doctor when he called and told her. And I thought Hillary could out-swear an Australian sailor!
Tom: Pretty salty language?
Kerry: Jesus Christ, forget about it – that Merkel [expletive] could [expletive] melt the nuts off a brass monkey! Oh, and then there’s the gambling.
Tom: Gambling?
Kerry: Well, yeah, Merkel’s a rabid “football” fan – “football” is what they call soccer over in Europe, you know. Thinks she knows all the statistics, follows the players’ personal lives in the papers and on television, convinces herself about who’s going to win and then bets [expletive] [expletive]-loads of cash on the game. We’ve got thousands of hours of her yelling at bookies about making bets and losing them.
Tom: It’s just sports betting, then?
Kerry: Well, that’s interesting, because it’s not like she could be seen visiting casinos in person to play baccarat and roulette, now is it?
Tom: No, I suppose not.
Kerry: So what we found out was, she goes casino gambling in disguise.
Tom: You mean, like an alter ego?
Kerry: I mean, she goes completely incognito. Sometimes, she even dresses up as a man. Then she goes and gambles at casinos, and not just baccarat or roulette, either – blackjack, craps, poker, even the slots!
Tom: Wow. And she loses a lot at those, too?
Kerry: Well, to tell the truth, according to what the NSA was able to learn from tapping her personal cell phone, she’s not as bad as a lot of compulsive gamblers. She basically breaks even, which we figure is how she’s managed to keep it a secret all these years. Right now, in fact – uh, well, as of the last week in September, actually – she was about sixty thousand Euros ahead.
Tom: Still, that’s pretty scandalous.
Kerry: Nothing compared to the drinking, though.
Tom: You mean, she’s… an alcoholic?
Kerry: Oh, hell, Collins, show me a European who is isn’t an alcoholic by American standards.
Tom: Yeah, we are pretty puritanical about drinking in this country. The French and the Italians with all that wine, and of course, the Germans, with their beer – for it to be any kind of big deal in Europe, Chancellor Merkel would have to drink like a fish.
Kerry: Like a fish? How about like a whale shark?
Tom: That bad, huh?
Kerry: I can tell you one thing – next to food, sex and gambling, the NSA found out that booze is her favorite subject of private conversation.
Tom: Whew! Just to think, that on the surface, she seems like such a dull, boring, uptight, inhibited, strait-laced and thoroughly conservative person.
Kerry: Not according to her red-hot seething, smoking personal cell phone history, she ain’t, not by a long shot! So, let’s go, Collins, how can we best exploit the potential of this pile of political dynamite? Who should we leak the information to first?
Tom: You mean, besides the British, the Russians and the Chinese?
Kerry: The British? The Russians? The Chinese? What the hell are you talking about?
Tom: Well, Mr. Secretary, speaking of cell phones, you called me on my cell phone, didn’t you? And you are the Secretary of State, so consequently, the British, the Russians and the Chinese have all been listening to our conversation.
Kerry: But that’s impossible! My cell phone has NSA-grade CellCrypt on it, and so does yours!
Tom: That’s true, Mr. Secretary, but to make a secure call using CellCrypt, the initiating user must open the CellCrypt Mobile application by selecting the CellCrypt icon on their smart phone, then manually enter a CellCrypt secure number, or select a previously saved contact from the CellCrypt address book, and then press Send. And since CellCrypt uses a secure IP channel, both of our devices would need to be connected through our cell phones’ IP channels, not our phones’ voice channels. But no such prerequisite secure session was ever established. On the contrary, as far as I can determine, you just picked up your smart phone and selected my number and pressed Dial, same as if you were calling Domino’s to order a pizza – Mr. Secretary, I assure you, I can tell just by looking at my iPhone here that your Blackberry is connected to me by plain old ordinary…
Kerry: God damn it all! Why didn’t that moron Bisbee tell me all this [expletive] before he let me use this [expletive] thing?
Tom: Oh – Bisbee?
Kerry: Yeah, [expletive] Bisbee! You know that [expletive]-ant Bisbee?
Tom: I’m afraid so. Dr. Bisbee is a career Foreign Service officer, Mr. Secretary.
Kerry: Yeah, so?
Tom: So his doctorate is in the history of Sino-Soviet relations.
Kerry: Yeah, and?
Tom: And therefore, it is entirely conceivable that he may not have completely understood the technical requirements involved with successful implementation of CellCrypt voice session security.
Kerry: “Not completely understood the technical requirements?” Bull-[expletive]! That’s his [expletive] job!
Tom: Well then, since he has a Ph.D., Dr. Bisbee may have read the instructions once and assumed he understood them, but…
Kerry: Bisbee, you overeducated son of a [expletive]! Get the [expletive] over here, now! [Expletive], Collins, didn’t I ask you if we might be overheard by someone else?
Tom: Mr. Secretary, you asked me if anyone in the immediate vicinity might overhear what I said, and I went to great lengths to assure you that no such person could do so. Furthermore, operatives of the British, Russian and/or Chinese governments are nowhere in evidence here at my home in Great Falls, Virginia. They are located elsewhere, most likely in their embassies here in Washington or at safe house listening posts in other locations, and…
Kerry: [Expletive]! All right, all right… look, Collins, I’ll call you back after I get this [expletive] straightened out, okay?
Tom: Certainly, Mr. Secretary. Goodbye.