International Intrigue

Every morning, my clock radio goes off and classical music wakes me up—which is fine if it’s Debussy, but not so great if they’re playing Wellington’s Victory. (I think it reflects a perverse sense of humor to be playing something like that at 7am.) In any case, this morning the music dutifully began playing. Then, something else happened.

In the midst of the music and an NPR report, a series of beeps began. They had rhythm. There were breaks, which were followed by more beeps. My husband rolled over and said, “What’s that?”  I said, “Uh, I think it’s Morse Code.” Or some variation because it wasn’t exactly Morse Code.

So we began speculating which of our neighbors is actually a sleeper agent for the North Koreans. Could it be the young woman next door, who talks with a nervous wheeze? Maybe she’s nervous because she’s afraid we’ll discover her secret. On the other hand, a spy would probably have better training than that. It could be our other neighbor, the one who never does any weeding and her weeds migrate in our yard and flower beds when they go to seed. But I think spies learn not to draw attention to themselves—and weed problems are a definite attention getter, at least for me.

Of course, the cold reality of the situation finally cooled my writer’s imagination. We live in Chattanooga, not exactly a hot bed of international intrigue. The Morse Code was probably just some kid trying out his skills…at 7am…not likely.

Hmm. Maybe Chattanooga is the new hot bed of espionage—it’s our uberfast internet service (actually made the national news as fastest in the nation). And now Chattanooga is the home base for clandestine messages. It makes sense, and it explains the dozen Homeland Security officers that I saw at Starbucks.

Now I just have to figure out which of my neighbors is involved.

Spygirl

Every Thursday at the dinner table, Ariel tells us what she’s learned in Linear Algebra. I listen politely and smile at appropriate intervals. She blathers about three-dimensional vectors and invertible matrices while I eat my pizza and then she says, “Oh, and I know how to do encryption now.”

My ears perk up. “Encryption?”
“Yeah.” She takes a gulp of milk, clearly not realizing the amazing coolness of what she’s just said. “You know, encrypting messages. That sort of thing.”
“Luke,” I say, “did you hear what Ariel said?”
“No,” Luke says, “I don’t listen when she stops speaking English.”
“Ariel knows how to do encryptions,” I say.
“Ohhh!” Luke rubs his hands together. “Now the NSA will be after her.”

Sadly, Ariel misses the opportunity to play sexy Spygirl and instead launches into the mathematical “stuff” that you do to encrypt and unencrypt messages—she doesn’t get that matrices aren’t cool and sexy.

Nonetheless, Matt demands to be taught encryption. Ariel laughs. “It takes a lot of math.” She means you have to be an uber-math nerd. That doesn’t seem to mesh with sexy Spygirl. Although the woman in the movie Sneakers was both. Maybe it’s possible…