I’d arranged this meeting on a remote section of the Great Northern Mat, about three miles from the population center of New Malé. Personal flyers sat, parked randomly on the thick vegetation surface. The invitees were a heterogeneous mix of security, administration, and technical people, as well as a few individuals with no credentials at all, except that I liked and trusted them. My friends, whom I’d come to think of as the inner circle, stood off to one side. They’d declared that this was my show, and they would stay out of it.