6.3.2013
Brought Wendy to the airport, to fly back to MD. She didn’t want to go back, but she has work. I took her as far as I could go and hugged her. I didn’t want to let go of the hug. Then she got in line for security. Came home to find Ed’s Skype status has changed to: “Sorry but it had to be done.” I don’t know when he changed it. Could’ve been today, could’ve been last month. I just checked on Skype and happened to notice it, and I’m crazy enough to think he’s sending me a message.
6.7.2013
Woke up to a call from NSA Special Agent Megan Smith asking me to call her back about Ed. Still feeling sick with fever. I had to drop off my car at the autobody shop and Tod gave me a ride back on his Ducati. When we pulled onto the street I saw a white gov vehicle in the driveway and gov agents talking to our neighbors. I’ve never even met the neighbors. I don’t know why but my first instinct was to tell Tod to keep driving. I ducked my head down to pretend to look for something in my purse. We went to Starbucks, where Tod pointed out a newspaper, something about the NSA. I tried to read the headlines but my paranoia just ran wild. Is that why the white SUV was in my driveway? Is that the same SUV in the parking lot outside this Starbucks? Should I even be writing this stuff down? Went home again and the SUV was gone. Took some meds and realized I hadn’t eaten. In the middle of lunch, cops showed up at the kitchen window. Through the window, I could hear them radioing that someone was inside the residence. By someone they meant me. I opened the front door to two agents and an HPD[1] officer. They were frightening. The HPD officer searched through the house as Agent Smith asked me about Ed, who’d been due back at work on May 31. The HPD officer said it was suspicious when a workplace reported someone missing before the person’s spouse or girlfriend did. He was looking at me like I killed Ed. He was looking around the house for his body. Agent Smith asked if she could see all the computers in the house and that made me angry. I told her she could get a warrant. They left the house but camped out on the corner.
San Diego, 6.8.2013
I got a little afraid that TSA wouldn’t let me leave the island. The TVs in the airport were all full of news about the NSA. Once onboard the plane, I emailed Agent Smith and the HPD Missing Persons’ detective that my grandma was having open heart surgery, requiring me to be off-island for a few weeks. The surgery isn’t scheduled until the end of the month and it’s in Florida, not San Diego, but this was the only excuse I could think of for getting to the mainland. It was a better excuse than saying, I just need to be with my best friend Sandra and also it’s her bday. When the wheels left the ground I fell into a momentary coma of relief. When I landed, I had a raging fever. Sandra picked me up. I hadn’t told her anything because my paranoia was off the charts, but she could tell that something was up, that I wasn’t just visiting her for her bday. She asked me if Ed and I had broken up. I answered maybe.
6.9.2013
I got a phone call from Tiffany. She asked how I was doing and said she was worried about me. I didn’t understand. She got quiet. Then she asked if I’d seen the news. She told me Ed had made a video and was on the homepage of the Huffington Post. Sandra hooked up her laptop to the flatscreen. I calmly waited for the 12-minute YouTube video to load. And then there he was. Real. Alive. I was shocked. He looked thin, but he sounded like his old self. The old Ed, confident and strong. Like how he was before this last tough year. This was the man I loved, not the cold distant ghost I’d recently been living with. Sandra hugged me and I didn’t know what to say. We stood in silence. We drove out to Sandra’s bday bbq, at her cousins’ house on this pretty hill south of the city, right on the Mexican border. Gorgeous place and I could barely see any of it. I was shutting down. Not knowing how to even begin to parse the situation. We arrived to friendly faces that had no clue what I was going through on the inside. Ed, what have you done? How can you come back from this? I was barely present for all the party small talk. My phone was blowing up with calls and texts. Dad. Mom. Wendy. Driving back up to San Diego from the bbq I drove Sandra’s cousin’s Durango, which Sandra needs this week to move. As we drove, a black gov SUV followed us and a police car pulled Sandra’s car over, which was the car I’d come in. I just kept driving the Durango, hoping I knew where I was going because my phone was already dead from all the calls.
6.10.2013
I knew Eileen[2] was important in local politics, but I didn’t know she was also a fucking gangster. She’s been taking care of everything. While we were waiting for her contacts to recommend a lawyer, I got a call from the FBI. An agent named Chuck Landowski, who asked me what I was doing in San Diego. Eileen told me to hang up. The agent called back and I picked up, even though Eileen said I shouldn’t. Agent Chuck said he didn’t want to show up at the house unannounced, so he was just calling “out of courtesy” to tell us that agents were coming. This sent Eileen into overdrive. She’s so goddamned tough, it’s amazing. She had me leave my phone at the house and we took her car and drove around to think. Eileen got a text from a friend of hers recommending a lawyer, a guy named Jerry Farber, and she handed me her phone and had me call him. A secretary picked up and I told her that my name was Lindsay Mills and I was the girlfriend of Edward Snowden and needed representation. The secretary said, “Oh, let me put you right through.” It was funny to hear the recognition in her voice.
Jerry picked up the phone and asked how he could help. I told him about the FBI calls and he asked for the agent’s name, so he could talk to the feds. While we waited to hear back from Jerry, Eileen suggested we go get burner phones, one to use with family and friends, one to use with Jerry. After the phones, Eileen asked which bank I kept my money at. We drove to the nearest branch and she had me withdraw all of my money immediately in case the feds froze my accounts. I went and took out all my life savings, split between cashier’s checks and cash. Eileen insisted I split the money like that and I just followed her instructions. The bank manager asked me what I needed all that cash for and I said, “Life.” I really wanted to say STFU, but I decided if I was polite I’d be forgettable. I was concerned that people were going to recognize me since they were showing my face alongside Ed’s on the news. When we got out of the bank I asked Eileen how she’d become such an expert at what to do when you’re in trouble. She told me, very chill, “You get to know these things, as a woman. Like, you always take the money out of the bank, when you’re getting a divorce.” We got some Vietnamese takeout and took it back to Eileen’s house and ate it on the floor in the upstairs hallway. Eileen and Sandra plugged in their hairdryers and kept them blowing to make noise, as we whispered to each other, just in case they were listening in on us.
Lawyer Jerry called and said we had to meet with the FBI today. Eileen drove us to his office, and on the way she noticed we were being followed. It made no sense. We were going to a meeting to talk to the feds but also the feds were behind us, two SUVs and a Honda Accord without plates. Eileen got the idea that maybe they weren’t the FBI. She thought that maybe they were some other agency or even a foreign government, trying to kidnap me. She started driving fast and erratically, trying to lose them, but every traffic light was turning red just when we approached it. I told her that she was being crazy, she had to slow down. There was a plainclothes agent by the door of Jerry’s building, he had gov written all over his face. We went up in the elevator and when the door opened, three men were waiting: two of them were agents, one of them was Jerry. He was the only man who shook hands with me. Jerry told Eileen that she couldn’t come with us to the conference room. He’d call her when we were finished. Eileen insisted that she’d wait. She sat in the lobby with an expression on her face like she was ready to wait for a million years. On the way to the conference room Jerry took me aside and said he’d negotiated “limited immunity,” which I said was pretty meaningless, and he didn’t disagree. He told me never to lie, and that when I didn’t know what to say, I should say IDK and let him talk. Agent Mike had a grin that was a bit too kind, while Agent Leland kept looking at me like I was an experiment and he was studying my reactions. Both of them creeped me out. They started with questions about me that were so basic, it was like they were just trying to show me that they already knew everything about me. Of course they did. That was Ed’s point. The gov always knows everything. They had me talk about the last two months, twice, and then when I was finished with the “timeline,” Agent Mike asked me to start all over again from the beginning. I said, “The beginning of what?” He said, “Tell me how you met.”