Goodbye America. Daniel waved his hand across the window as the Air China flight took off for a 14 hour departure from Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington D.C. But, right before he took off, he did the unthinkable. He had mounted the steps of treason and released confidential documents of the wrongdoings the NSA had conducted over the past six years he had been working there. He planned to live his life out in China, maybe get a job at a local computer repair store. He did take two semesters of Mandarin in college, although he doubted he remembered most of it. He could only hope for the best.

And to think a couple of hours ago he was having doubts about going through with this. On his way to the airport he was sitting on the Yellow Line on the D.C. Metro and a couple of college students entered onto the train—well Daniel hoped they were college students. They certainly did have mouths like them. They were a racially mixed bunch: with some African Americans, a couple of white girls, and an Asian man thrown into the group. Daniel tried his best to ignore them—but they were obnoxiously loud, and drunk.

Daniel was cursing himself for choosing to fly so soon. He should have waited until morning. Now he had to deal with the college drunkards coming home from events they called "raves." He heard it mentioned a couple of times over conversations he listened into at the NSA. The definition of a rave varied from college to college. However, a majority of the time it referred to an extensively long party, sometimes lasting all night, where the kids drink a lot, smoke a lot of weird drugs, and dance uncontrollably to pulsating electronic music that was so loud it could rock a building to its foundations.

Daniel knew he was in for a rough ride when the drunk group of kids boarded the train. It was 2 A.M. and the Metro was about to close in about an hour. He usually walked to the front of the train because it was a habit. The front car usually contained the least amount of people, especially during rush hour. People loved to crowd into the middle cars, yet they seem to forget the train has multiple cars—or maybe they were just too lazy to walk the distance to the front. In either case, the front car was the best bet to have breathing room at rush hour.

But at two in the morning, there's no competition for breathing room because the entire car was empty. At least, until those college students came on.

The first words he heard mumbled from the group came from one of the drunk white girls who screamed aloud. "I'm so fucking wasted."

There were five of them, three guys and two girls. Two of the guys were black, one was Asian and the two girls were white. Stereotypical college campus ratio nowadays, although it was a bit lighter on the African American side.

"I think we have the car to ourselves," the Asian guy pointed out.

No, Daniel thought. I'm right here. Oh God this can't be good.

"Yo Derek," one of the black guys slurred. "We can knock out number six on the bucket list."

Derek smiled and one of the white girls asked. "Whoa, what's number six?"

Derek turned to the other black guy and laughed unnecessarily loud. "Noah, I'll let you tell them."

Noah unbuckled his belt. "It's when we fuck on a Metro car."

Oh God, Daniel thought. How many more stops till Reagan? He looked at the Metro map and remembered the last stop he was at was U-Street. He had a bit of a ways to go.

"But there's three of you boys and only two of us girls?" one of the girls said almost confused from all the math.

"Yeah, but Sean and I are bi," Derek pointed out. "So which one of you lucky ladies wanna have two dicks inside them today?"

Daniel thought the girl undoing her top and exposing her breasts was the one volunteering as tribute. Suddenly the train pulled to a stop and Daniel was ready to launch out of the car and move to the car behind it. But he noticed the train did not stop at a station, but in the middle of the tunnel.

The conductor announced over the staticky loudspeaker very faintly, "Single-tracking....momentarily. Thank....Metro."

Fuck! Daniel screamed in his head. He was not excited about the prospect of watching live interracial porn. He promised himself he would never stoop to so low of a level of sexual desire that one must watch people having sex to get off. He had seen plenty of workers in the office watching women and men stripping naked in their rooms. They called it work, but Daniel knew that was bull.

All Daniel could do was look away and pretend no one was behind him. Then he started to hear the chairs in the back of the car squeak repeatedly. Following the squeak was the wailing of the girl getting rammed from both ends by drunken animals. Then the sole couple next to them was contributing to the orgasmic orchestra with Noah breathing heavily and the girl he was deflowering moaning like a cat giving birth.

"Train moving."

The scraping of the metal wheels across the steel tracks added to the music. Slowly the music began to fade away and Daniel was lost in his doubt. Am I risking my life for people like this: people who are simply delusional? People who are reckless? People who just don't give a damn?

Am I doing the right thing?

Daniel decided that to test his will he should look ahead into the future. In five years down the road, will he regret turning back now when he was so esteemed on exposing such corruption within the government while a national tragedy was still fresh in the minds of an easily forgetful American public? Will him leaving right now make future Daniel look back to this moment and say: "Boy I'm glad I didn't go through with that!"

No.

Daniel wouldn't be able to forgive himself if he didn't go through with this. Even if for every 100 Americans, 98 of them were like these five drunkards here in the train, then there were still two smart, fair, and honest Americans who wanted what was right—their rights, protected by the law of the land.

So Daniel will go through with this—even if it was for only two Americans; because the minute we decide that a single person was nothing, was the moment the terrorists have finally won. They have made our own people turn on one another and spy on them. No longer can Americans trust each other. The Kabish, Al Qaeda, ISIS, they have made us look at one another with fear—fear that our neighbors could be terrorists, lurking amongst us, waiting for that perfect moment to inflict chaos upon us.

I will do everything I could to stop these criminals, and prevent us from helping them out by turning on our people. So when the next station arrived, Howard University, Daniel made his way to leave the train. He went to the car behind him and sat at the opposite end of the car, away from any view of what was going on in the next car. Again he was alone, but he had to get used to this. The path he had chosen didn't leave any room for social encounters.

***

"We are now a making our descent into a Beijing. Please a fasten all of your seat a belts and we will arrive in a China very shortly."

Daniel fastened his seatbelt as the Chinese woman over the intercom who loved to use the filler word "a" repeated the same message quickly in Chinese. On the approach into Beijing, Daniel could barely see the city until he was feet from the ground. The city was covered in an immense smog that choked the city of its air. He noticed around him that many of the citizens on the plane began to take out masks to wear. Daniel, clearly unprepared, was ready to use his shirt as a temporary mask until he could purchase one of his own.

Luckily, Daniel had saved up a lot of money for a rainy day. Throughout his six years working at the NSA, he had accumulated a good sum of money to hold him off for almost a year before he would need to secure a job to replenish the funds.

After the plane loaded off into the terminal he felt like it was rush hour to get to the baggage claim. A sea of people surrounded the baggage claim like vultures jousting for a carcass. He had to push and shove when he spotted his red giant luggage rolling around the conveyor belt. One man took it, thinking it was his, but Daniel had to let him know otherwise.

"My name," he pointed to a name tag with his name on it so that the Chinese man can understand that it wasn't his bag. The man studied the name tag and then the old man studied Daniel.

"You are the one—the one who released the dirty information on NSA secrets?" the man breathed heavily, saying each word with a giant exhale.

Word sure does spread quickly, Daniel thought. But Daniel was not willing to take any credit yet. He knew he had to get out of here. He was not planning to stay out in the airport open like this. He needed to get to the outer reaches of Beijing and find a hole to hide in until the storm settled. So he grabbed his luggage and rolled it towards the exit.

With his laptop bag strapped around his back, and his giant red luggage trailing behind him, Daniel was a susceptible target. Although his skin matched the paleness of the sea of Chinese men and women around him, his blond hair, his bright luggage, and his nontraditional travel bag, made him stick out amongst the crowd.

Daniel used a passport to get to China. His passport and plane ticket had his name, which was registered onto the FAA's terror suspect list minutes after he released the NSA information. [11] If an old man could recognize Daniel Mason without even knowing what to look for, than U.S. agents could easily spot him from amongst a crowd...

Because they knew who they were looking for.

"Sir," he overheard a man calling behind him.

Ignore him Daniel and just keep walking.

"Sir," the man behind him called again. "The one with the blond hair and giant red luggage."

Crap, they've identified me. I need to speed it up.

Suddenly two Chinese airport security guards were standing in front of him with batons blocking his path, like statues in front of a gate to a royal palace. The man behind him caught up to him and spun him around, revealing Daniel's face to the man pursuing him.

Daniel had no chance to make out who his assailant was before he was tased with 50,000 volts of electricity to the neck sending him into a spasm as he collapsed to the ground like a fish out of water.

As his eyes faded to black, the last thing he heard was, "We have the suspect in custody. I repeat, we have Daniel Mason in custody. Bringing him home for justice."

Footnote:

[11] FAA = Federal Aviation Administration