Savage Road

by Chris Hauty

  Rafi stiffens visibly. “Who?”

  She gestures toward Hayley and April exiting through the front doors. “The blond one. Didn’t know your name, which is weird.”

  Rafi’s expression goes flat as he watches the two young women leave. He immediately turns away from the bar, abandoning his untouched pint, and makes a beeline for the doors. The bartender shrugs, only too glad to be rid of him.

  * * *

  HE EXITS THE bar moments after the two women and follows from behind. Fixing his gaze on his prey, Rafi pulls a wave knife from his right-hand pants pocket. With a hook on the spine of the blade that catches the pocket when retrieved, it releases automatically. The computer hacker used the same knife—an Emerson CQC-8—to kill the two muggers and Ethiopian convenience store cashier.

  His hand tightens, loosens, and tightens again around the knife’s handle as he listens to the two women in conversation.

  “You seem distracted. I guess that means you’ve come up with a plan by now,” the dark-haired one tells her blond friend.

  “Not quite.”

  “No more memory slideshow featuring Cyber Jihad?”

  “Give me time.”

  About fifteen feet separate Rafi from the two women. Oxygen moves in and out of his nostrils, massaging nasal mucosa and stimulating respiratory reflexes. Saliva secretes at an increased volume from submandibular and parotid glands inside his mouth in anticipation of slaughtering them both, responding to nerve signals from other centers of his central nervous system. Now that he has popped his cherry with the two muggers and Ethiopian dude, Rafi cannot wait to kill again. Years of martial arts and close combat training have paid off. The time to strike is now.

  As he starts to lunge forward, the two young women abruptly veer to the right. More problematically, their paths diverge. The dark-haired female stops at the passenger door of a parked VW. The other one steps into the street and walks around the front of the vehicle, to the driver’s side. Before he can be spotted, Rafi darts to his left and disappears into the shadows of a building doorway. He watches from his hiding place as the two young women climb inside the Volkswagen from either side of the car.

  Cunts! Who are they? What agency would send them, driving a piece-of-shit car like the Golf? And, more alarming, how the hell did they know to come after him? As the VW pulls out from its parking space and surges into the lanes of traffic Rafi emerges from the shadows and is careful to note the Volkswagen’s license plate number.

  4

  CYBER JIHAD

  Tuesday, 10:35 p.m. April’s place is well-ordered and fiercely decorated, as if still being staged for prospective buyers. Hayley stands in the foyer and takes in the exposed beamed ceilings, pocket doors, open shelving, and mammoth-size, stainless steel kitchen appliances with a muted expression.

  “Bitcoin,” April explains. “I got out when the dummies got in.”

  “Sounds legit,” Hayley says, her voice dry as burnt toast.

  “Don’t look now, Chill, but your West Virginia is showing.” April gestures toward a rusty pulley bracket still embedded in the exposed brick wall. “Helicopters used to be made in this building.”

  Hayley shrugs, more interested in the personal computer and large monitor attached to it. “Can you do any real analysis of the Stafford hack on that thing?”

  “That ‘thing’ is an Overclockers UK 8Pack OrionX, two computer systems in one case. Thirty big ones, not counting the Samsung forty-nine-inch UltraWide curved monitor.” She sits down at the workstation and taps a track pad, bringing the entire system to life. “Acquisition, documentation, and recovery of data within twenty-four hours of an incident is critical because hackers abandon cyber infrastructure within hours of its discovery. More crucially, advanced malware dissipates in computer memory.”

  “You can access the affected networks from here?”

  “Not all of them,” April says, adding with a smile, “but a lot.”

  * * *

  RAFI ZAMANI RIPS down K Street on the Ducati Monster 1200, reaching ninety miles per hour when the traffic lights are in his favor. Valves adjusted over the winter, the bike feels exhilarating between his legs, thrumming with powerful efficiency. Pedestrians scurry out of his way well in advance of his passing through an intersection, alerted by the Testastretta engine’s twin-cylinder yowl. An occasional participant in illegal street race gatherings, Rafi revels in the bike’s speed. The pure exhilaration and feeling of ecstatic freedom it delivers. He imagines this is what human flight would be like, the sheer exposure and propulsion of a human body through space.

  He has gone down once. Riding requires total focus, the computation of numerous real-time factors every second the motorcycle is in motion. Anything less than absolute attention, however brief, invites a catastrophic mishap. Working out a particularly stubborn programming problem in his head while riding resulted in his one accident. Distracted, he had remained for too long a duration—five seconds at most—in a car’s blind spot and was unable to evade the driver’s sudden merge into Rafi’s lane. Full-face helmet, riding boots, armored jacket, and Kevlar-lined pants provided adequate protection. Unharmed, Rafi walked away from the accident. His bike, a Triumph Street Twin, was a total loss. He bought the Ducati that afternoon and has since refrained from programming while riding.

  K Street is clear of traffic at this late hour and unfolds under the front wheel of his bike without incident. The two women who came to the Iron Pony looking for him are evidence of a problem he must address. Rafi’s sure he heard the dark-haired one say something about Cyber Jihad. Is it possible the attacks have been traced back to him? By any assessment, that would seem extremely improbable. To cover his movements, he initially tunneled into a mobile phone in Uruguay, then a server in Estonia, and finally into the SSH port of a smartwatch in Zimbabwe, which was the actual launchpad of the cyberattacks. There isn’t a chance in hell anyone tracked his digital footprints. So how did these two females find him? What was the connection they made between him and Cyber Jihad?

  As he parks his bike in a secure garage and heads around the corner to the apartment on F Street, the thought hits him: one or both of the women were on the Blue Line train. Going to the Rosslyn station after the derailment to gape at the survivors while wearing his Iron Pony hat is the only physical connection between him and the Metro attack. Why else wouldn’t they know his name? Rafi is astonished they identified him in the crowd of onlookers. No doubt, it was the idiot smile on his face that gave him away. Fuck. Rafi takes pride in his intellectual superiority. He has no tolerance for stupid mistakes, including his own. As punishment, he pauses at the entrance of his apartment building. He contemplates closing the heavy steel door on his fingers but decides the injury might impede his programming. Instead, he decides he will deny himself online porn for seven days. In many ways, Rafi would prefer smashing his hand in the doorjamb instead.

  He lets himself into the apartment on the eighth floor. Yazat is dependably excited about his owner’s return. The dog is Rafi’s best friend and near-constant companion, second in importance only to his computer. Soon enough, with the keyboard under his fingertips, Rafi will again feel powerful and godlike. The females who came looking for him don’t know his name or where to find him. He is invincible, beyond the reach of any who defy him.

  With the license plate number of the Volkswagen Golf, Rafi will learn much about at least one of the women who dared find him. He has all that he needs to begin to formulate his counterpunch. Those bitches will pay. This is going to be fun! But first, he’s got to walk the dog.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, 4:11 A.M. Wrenched from sleep, Hayley is unsure where she is and what’s happening. Shadowy figures attached to the tracking beams of flashlights flood into her line of sight. Shouting reverberates. Startled, she realizes this is not a dream.

  “On your knees! Hands in the air! Now! Lemme see your hands!”

  Hayley establishes she is in the compact living room area of her apartm
ent, not in the bedroom. In that split second, she realizes she must have fallen asleep on her couch after getting home late from April’s condo. Now there are ten gun barrels pointing at her head and chest. I am dead, she thinks. Her instinct is to fight her attackers, to take up the closest weapon, and fend off their assault.

  They got me.

  Unless I do something. Unless I fight back.

  Hayley crouches lower to spring forward and throw herself on her attackers.

  “DC Police! Let me see those hands!”

  The words slowly permeate her consciousness. They’re cops. She heard right, did she not? These are the police.

  Fully awake now, Hayley raises her hands.

  * * *

  THE DCP PATROL chief arrives just after sunrise, joining a captain, inspector, and lieutenant. The previous night’s incident isn’t the city’s first case of “swatting”—the harassing tactic in which bad actors deceive emergency services into sending a police response team to another person’s address—but it is the closest an innocent victim has come to being killed. The original tip about an individual brandishing a gun from the apartment’s window was made via the MPD’s online reporting tool. The assumption is that the suspect is a spurned lover or jealous ex-boyfriend. Hayley says nothing to disabuse them of the notion. The patrol chief assures Hayley that department experts will trace the tip back to a specific IP address, but the White House staffer knows better. She is all but sure the “tip” directing the police to her apartment was sent from a computer utilizing a VPN, and therefore untraceable.

  Was this another of Andrew Wilde’s exercises in mind-fuckery? Another ploy to “keep her on her toes?” Hayley is pissed. Knowing who targeted her will go a long way to improving her mood. She has a hunch that whoever swatted her would want firsthand confirmation their action was successful. After the authorities have departed, Hayley fires up her laptop. The minicam on her bookshelf, which she replaced after April had destroyed the original one, isn’t the only surveillance precaution she has taken. The deeper state operative also placed a wide-angle mini-camera in the upper window frame, pointed down at the entrance to her building. The cops stormed into her apartment shortly after four; whoever swatted her desired to achieve the maximum disruption. The wee hours are the best time for operational mix-ups to cause unintended casualties, too. But four a.m. also ensures anyone on the street almost certainly has something to do with the attack.

  Accessing the camera web-based server, Hayley rewinds the footage, to when the time stamp reads 04:10.00. She presses play. The video recording shows a dark street devoid of traffic and a deserted entryway leading into the apartment building. Two DCP armored SWAT vehicles and two regular patrol cars, lights flashing, come to a hard stop out front. Personnel exit from all four vehicles. The officers gather briefly at the entry door, until it is popped open with a breaching bar. They immediately pour into the building, disappearing from view.

  Hayley continues to watch the footage, which depicts a static image of the stopped police vehicles in the street. At this hour, not even the customary lookie-loos happen upon the scene to gawk at the police action. Three more minutes pass without incident or any movement whatsoever in the street. After six minutes, she sees shifting shadows in the darkness of an alley across the street. A motorcyclist astride his bike, with the headlight switched off, slowly rolls out from a hiding place. The rider, wearing a full-face helmet with a mirrored visor, cannot be identified. But everything about his brief appearance in the footage—running lights off, stealth-like speed leaving the scene, and only after the authorities head into the apartment building—leads Hayley to connect the individual on the motorcycle with the swatting incident.

  April arrives at seven, entering past a shattered entry door the cops propped against the foyer wall. After watching the surveillance footage, she agrees with Hayley.

  “At least we know we’re moving in the right direction.”

  They were up for much of the night before, until after three. Hayley mostly looked over April’s shoulder as the army lieutenant probed the gas utility’s servers as well as searched the dark web for anyone bragging about pulling off the attack. Hackers are not known for their modesty. Part of the thrill is recognition by their peers. More than a dozen hackers claimed to be Cyber Jihad on three different forums, but April dismissed them as obvious wannabes. With only a few hours remaining before the start of another workday, Hayley politely declined April’s offer to spend the night. Ironically, she assumed she would sleep better at home.

  “The guy likes to watch. Seeing the havoc he can create with his keyboard gives him a sense of power.”

  April surveys the ruination of the apartment’s entryway. “Point taken.” She gestures at the surveillance video on the laptop’s screen. “Is there any question this is Cyber Jihad?”

  “Nothing is certain until it is.” Hayley freezes the video on an image of the motorcyclist. “But I think it’s a strong possibility.”

  “Well, if that’s our guy, I don’t think he’s going to be getting his buzz on at the Iron Pony anymore.”

  “Probably not.”

  April recites what they know. “Red soccer jersey. Snapback hat. Dark complexion.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Age?”

  “Midtwenties,” Hayley says.

  “My mind keeps circling back to the dark complexion part.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “My mind keeps circling back to an Arab dude.”

  “He could be Arab. He could not be. Iran is a non-Arab country.”

  “This Mideastern fuck almost got your head blown off. Is that the correct usage?”

  Hayley checks her watch. “I’m late for work.”

  “He knows who we are.”

  The White House staffer grins, just on this side of arrogant. “He knows who I am. My plates. Where I live and work.”

  “And so?”

  “I can handle him.” Not bragging. Just saying.

  April smiles now, too. Fucking Hayley Chill.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, 6:45 A.M. Aleksandr Belyavskiy walks quickly up Fourteenth Street, anxious about setting the dead drop signal before seven a.m. That is the time when the GRU agent inside the White House residence will be checking it, as per the standard operating procedure. The weather has turned warmer, with air temperature and humidity that feels more like a typical Washington summer day. Had the city enjoyed the shortest spring on record? With sweat dripping from his brow, despite the early-morning hour, the Russian mutters quietly. It doesn’t seem fair.

  Of course, Belyavskiy knows he is under surveillance by agents with the CIA or FBI. And by his overseers in the GRU, too. He has no doubt they’re all watching him now, though Belyavskiy cannot discern the enemy agents among the few pedestrians out this early in the morning. Are they watching him from the Spectrum TV van across the street? Or is it the transient sitting at a bus stop on the corner of K Street? What difference does it make? The dead drop isn’t operated in the conventional sense of the term. Belyavskiy designed the communication link between himself and his asset in the White House. In his humble opinion, the system is ingenious. He takes pride in the fact that the Americans, despite their excellent intelligence services, don’t have an inkling of the GRU’s massive infiltration of their executive branch.

  Konstantin Tabakov demanded a meeting with Belyavskiy late last night at the Ultrabar nightclub where a 106 dB noise level ensured the privacy of their conversation. The news Tabakov reported was a shock. Moscow’s interpretation of the signal that Polkan delivered with his most recent message is that the president believes he is under suspicion from US intelligence services. For all the GRU knows, the Americans are monitoring communications between Belyavskiy and his asset. Only a face-to-face interview with the president will reveal the full extent of damage to the operation.

  Dubious of his superiors’ suspicions, Belyavskiy follows the protocol as he approaches the southwest corner
of the park at Franklin Square and casually sits down on a bench. An FBI team of surveillance agents is indeed watching the Russian operative. Their subsequent report will suggest Belyavskiy had arrived at the dead drop but, finding no signal, left without further activity. But, after the TASS journalist leaves the bench, he strolls to the intersection at I and Fourteenth Streets. He may still be under surveillance, but the true extent of his actions go unobserved. With the tug on a cord inside his pocket, he deposits a few grams of blue chalk powder at the base of the traffic signal stanchion from a pouch inside the bottom of his right pant leg.

  The brief stop at the bench was a misdirect. Within an hour, the patch of powdery chalk will be gone, erased by the wind, but not before a passing, dark-skinned, middle-aged man wearing the black uniform of a White House usher takes note of the signal.

  * * *

  KYLE RODGERS LOOKS up from his reading when Hayley blows into the office, a quarter after eight and forty-five minutes later than her usual start time. Repairs to her apartment door took time she hated to lose.

  “Nice of you to join us.”

  Hayley sees no gain in telling her boss about the swatting incident. Her deeper state supervisor is another matter. She will have to find some time in the morning to make a full report to Andrew Wilde.

  “Sorry, sir. Feeling just a little under the weather today.”

  Rodgers exaggerates rearing away from Hayley, who is standing just inside the doorway. “Infect me and I’ll banish you to the EEOB,” he says, referring to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door and home to most staffers of Hayley’s rank. Her unique skills and abilities, not to mention almost single-handedly preventing Monroe’s assassination, won her the coveted blue badge that granted her access into the West Wing.