He grinned. “And don’t talk to anybody else about this, right?”

I nodded. “Right.” That young boy finished reading the Gettysburg Address. “Thanks for this, Hack. Thanks for everything.”

As I drove home that night, I regularly checked my mirrors to see if I was being followed. This had become another new habit. When I first started doing it, I’d felt foolish, but then I discovered that other people at the meetings were doing the same thing. As a man who called himself Troy told me one day, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t following you.”

I made the proscribed four right turns to confirm that no one was tracking me, then headed home. Okay, I admit it, I still felt at least a little foolish. And when I was in a hurry I ignored it. But I had just handed over documents that could shake up the government, so at least I had a reason for it.

As was usual now, I didn’t ask Cher to find a radio station, preferring to muck around in my own thoughts. In the previous few months I’d begun reading about totalitarian regimes, fiction and nonfiction, from Animal Farm to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Talk about paranoid, I did not take these books out of the library or order them online under my own name; there were rumors the FBI was compiling lists of people who had shown a sudden interest in this topic.

So I got the books wherever I could. Then when I was done, I passed them along at the next meeting. I’d found a tattered paperback copy of 1984 on a used book table for $2 on U Street, for instance. I’d read it in high school and had forgotten most of the details beyond Big Brother was watching me. The irony of it was, I made an effort to hide my copy of the book from the ubiquitous security cameras on every building, on every floor of every building. Big Tech was watching me.

It did not surprise me that new copies of Orwell’s classic were “temporarily out of stock” from Amazon, or for that matter, from almost any source in America. Supposedly this was at the request of the executors of Orwell’s estate, who had suspended printing new copies because the book required “a major update to stay relevant.” (I could just imagine: Big Brother becomes Big Non-Gender-Specific Person or, more likely, Big Facebook Friend.)

I was still searching for the why. Why was Wrightman continuing to accumulate power when he already had operational control? Did he really believe this was necessary to save the American economy and restore the country to its international standing? Or was it megalomania, a psychological need to fill the void in his soul? These books provided an array of possibilities but no satisfying answers. What did Big Brother have in common with Pol Pot? What did Napoleon the pig share with Hitler? Was it simply human nature? Was Robert Browning offering an explanation when he wrote: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” Maybe short and stubby Henry Kissinger understood this when he said, trying to explain his personal appeal, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” But I kept coming back to the simplicity of mountaineer George Mallory’s response when asked why he so desperately wanted to summit Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.”