Hack wasn’t a big man, but he was as solid as a three-story building. With a roof of blond hair. And arguably harder to move. More than anything else, though, he was a good guy. His bulked-up appearance belied his gentle nature and seemed more fitting for an NFL lineman than for some kind of computer geek. He also was a settled man; he and his wife, known to the entire brigade as Wake Up Maggie because her name was Margaret and they’d met at a Rod Stewart concert, had two young children and lived in Alexandria.

He was former military too, but never a grunt like me. He knew I had worked in the field, so it became a joke between us. “Mud spelled backwards is dum!” he liked to point out, “and my mama didn’t raise no dummy.” He was always vague about his MOS, his military specialty: “You know, stuff.” He actually didn’t go to college, taking great pride in the fact that he was educated by the Army. “They gave me a full scholarship to Can U,” he bragged. “As in, Wilson, can you do this? Wilson, can you do that?”

Supposedly he was the IT guy at a successful cybersecurity start-up, something to do with cargo containers, but he was vague about that too. I believed that one about as much as I believed that Mother Teresa had actually wanted to direct movies. “Cybersecurity start-up” was a popular catchall for men and women who needed to hide their actual employment. I never pressed him for details and he never offered any, which is proper etiquette in Washington, so I was reasonably certain he worked somewhere in Spooktown.

Could I trust him? Tough question. Maybe he did work for the government—okay, he probably worked for the government—but I knew his politics. He’d enthusiastically joined in my condemnation of Trump/Pence, laughing at the jokes and shaking his head in disbelief in all the right places. Long before the full extent of Trump’s relationship with Russian oligarchs was known, he was pointing out angrily that every move Trump made concerning Russia, even concerning our allies, “coincidentally” benefited Putin. As I drove home from the meeting I tried to remember if we’d had any conversations about the last election. This was where it would have been nice to have had a better memory. I did remember him cheering Biden’s election, but I couldn’t recall him voicing any support for Wrightman. One time, this I did remember, one time when he was pumping iron he started complaining about Wrightman’s gutting the capabilities of our intelligence agencies. He channeled his anger at that into five more reps. That was the closest he’d ever come to disclosing his real employer.

Could I trust him? A government man? I couldn’t overlook the risk he had taken in trusting Rollie 2.0, as he sometimes called me. Somewhere along the line I had to take a shot with this. And I was pretty sure he had the expertise to determine if the whole scenario was plausible. I didn’t have a lot of options.