Savage Road

by Chris Hauty

  Monroe takes the folder from her. “I asked.” His tone of voice is sharp. Almost petulant. “Cyber Jihad is not a GRU operation.” Tucking the folder under his arm, he climbs the stairs without allowing Hayley to speak any further.

  She watches the president salute the Marine standing guard at the stairs and quickly board. The reliability of the president’s intelligence is anyone’s guess.

  Minutes later, as Marine One lifts off and turns toward the east, it occurs to Hayley that Monroe was unusually eager to deliver this new information. He could have as easily allowed the Secret Service agents to thwart her efforts to connect. The president usually is so hostile to being “handled.” Why cooperate now?

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, 1:15 P.M. Hayley walks through the doors of a Corner Bakery franchise two blocks east of the White House complex, escaping what is becoming an uncomfortably muggy day. One of the more affordable places to grab lunch in the area, the air-conditioned restaurant is crowded with Washington’s support staff like herself. She sees April, in uniform, sitting in a booth with a window view of the street. Sitting down opposite her fellow deeper state operative, Hayley realizes she ate nothing all day except for an apple. There’s only a glass of iced tea in front of April, whose appetite also seems to have vanished. Between them is the army lieutenant’s open laptop.

  “Let me see it.”

  April spins the laptop around so Hayley can view a video clip, surveillance footage of Rafi Zamani approaching down a sidewalk. He wears his customary Manchester United soccer jersey. The clip is barely six seconds in duration but provides a clear image of the hacker’s face and features. Without his motorcycle helmet, he is fully recognizable.

  Hayley cannot tear her eyes off the screen. “Where did you get this?”

  “Restaurant next door to the Iron Pony had cameras on the sidewalk.”

  “They just gave this to you?”

  “Hell no. From Meade, we can even access the baby monitor in your sister’s house.”

  “I’d rather you not.” Hayley plays the short video again. “That’s him. That’s the guy I saw at the Rosslyn station after the derailment.”

  “Not really Slavic looking, is he?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Iranian more like.”

  “Retaliation for taking out Suleimani?”

  “Maybe. Tehran has sleeper agents in the US. Most came over on student visas and never left.”

  “Good place to look.”

  “Iranian foreign exchange students with computer science majors is going to be a really big database.”

  Hayley receives a text and checks her KryptAll phone. “He’s here.”

  A black Yukon SUV with darkly tinted windows idles at the curb. Walking briskly from the restaurant entrance to the vehicle, Hayley opens the front passenger door and gets in. April climbs in back, carrying her computer tote.

  Andrew Wilde is behind the wheel, anxious to be moving again. He steps on the accelerator even before April has closed the door behind her and merges into traffic on Seventh Street, heading north. “Talk to me.”

  “Sir, we have video of the cyberattacker, or at least one of them,” says Hayley.

  “This is the individual you saw outside the Metro station?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wilde gestures impatiently.

  April pops open her computer and holds it up, over the front seat, so that Wilde can view the video. Hayley pretends not to notice him driving without watching the road ahead.

  “Mideastern ethnicity, sir. Without a doubt,” April says.

  Wilde puts his eyes back on the road. “That covers a lot of countries.”

  “We’re thinking Iran’s Cyber Defense Command, given the sophistication of the Metro attack.”

  Wilde looks to Hayley for a second opinion. “What else makes you think this guy is involved?”

  “He swatted me hours after we looked him up at the bar he frequents,” says Hayley.

  “How do you know he was the one who swatted you?”

  “You mean, how do I know it wasn’t you?”

  Andrew Wilde maintains a stony expression, waiting for Hayley to get to the point.

  “I have a camera on the street and building entry, sir. This guy likes to watch. He was at both the train and swatting locations.”

  Wilde doesn’t respond to Hayley’s statement but instead pulls over to the curb. “Keep pushing, Lieutenant Wu. We’ll communicate through normal channels tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest. Put a name on this guy.”

  April realizes her superior is ordering her out of the vehicle.

  “Are you kidding? I’m blocks from where I parked.”

  Wilde says nothing but only stares out the windshield, waiting for her to leave.

  April pushes open her door, exiting. “And I thought Uber sucked.”

  Wilde pulls away from the curb the moment April has shut her door. “You have to do what you can to influence the president. The intelligence community is going full tilt at this Russian theory. We need to know why. And we don’t want him to do something stupid.”

  “Like going to war with Russia?”

  “That would be one thing.”

  “Secretary Ryan has essentially asked me to perform the same function.”

  “Is this your way of asking me if the secretary of Homeland Security is with Publius?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Clare Ryan is not one of us.” Off her dubious expression, Wilde says, “Our superiors are no longer in government service, remember? That’s what makes it work.”

  “But agendas still might overlap. There are good guys out there, sir.”

  “Your primary objective remains the same: running Richard Monroe as a double agent. Assist Wu only in that capacity, from inside the West Wing. In other words, stop running around the city chasing after bad guys.”

  His manner is brusque even by Wilde’s standards. Though they have been in almost daily contact for more than two years, it occurs to Hayley that she knows nothing about her superior’s personal life. Is Andrew Wilde married? Does he have children? What had he been before he became involved with Publius? He is a specter. Unknowable. Her association with this man is inherently insecure.

  “Have I done something to disappoint you, sir? Why am I suddenly not to be trusted?”

  “We’re not in the trust business.” He clearly has no patience for such chatter. “Did the president make contact with his Russian handler?”

  “I was able to speak briefly with Monroe. Moscow denied responsibility for the cyberattacks.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I have no reason to believe him or not.”

  “Precisely.” Wilde reaches into his pocket and withdraws what looks every bit like a presentation box of a wedding ring. He offers it to Hayley.

  “What is this?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Hayley accepts the box and opens it, revealing a gleaming white dental crown.

  Wilde says, “Fauchard bug, in recognition of the French physician credited with being the father of modern dentistry.”

  “A listening device? I thought those were an urban myth, like Bigfoot.”

  “What makes you think Bigfoot doesn’t actually exist?”

  Hayley says nothing, wary of the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” quagmire.

  “DARPA is working on something like it, still in the trial stages, but our people have refined the technology,” says Wilde, referring to the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. “Ingenious, really. Records to an encrypted server. Every fart, every belch. The subject’s skull acts as an organic transducer, converting sound that enters the tympanic cavities and drawing from the body’s temperature for power. It’s good kit.”

  “For the president… or for me?”

  Wilde ignores that gibe, too. “We’ve accessed and reviewed his dental records. The bug fits directly over his second molar, upper-right side. Comp
letely undetectable.”

  Hayley pockets the device. “Monroe isn’t going to like it.”

  “Who would?” Wilde checks his watch. He has someplace to be.

  * * *

  WORKING FROM HIS laptop in the Foggy Bottom apartment, Rafi accesses the Pentagon’s servers by utilizing exploits he’d discovered months earlier. Blowing through every security measure he encounters, the hacker marvels at the idiocy of his adversaries. Those faceless information technologists have constructed their flimsy firewalls and porous safeguards with the digital equivalent of rice paper. Swatting Hayley Chill and watching it all go down was super cool. But Rafi won’t feel completely secure until he has her in his cyber grip. Strolling through the DoD directories and subdirectories, with his pursuer’s unique surname as a search term, Rafi prowls for additional nuggets. Now the real fun can begin.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, 4:41 P.M. April’s team has been on the case since Monday, the day of the Metro derailment. The results of their analysis are similar to those of other units at both Cyber Command and the NSA. Instructions in all of the cyberattacks were sent via different, seemingly random mobile devices, and from every corner of the globe. The server in Estonia was the second link of the chain in each attack, unmistakably linking them. Analysts believe the signature is intentional, Cyber Jihad’s way of saying, “Yeah, this is us again.” Given the sheer volume of traffic through the Estonian server, however, it is virtually impossible to trace the attack instructions back to a primary source. Cyber Command’s soldiers are talented systems engineers. Despite access to some of the most powerful computers in existence, however, they have so far failed to achieve full attribution with an acceptable level of confidence.

  The unit’s workspace resembles NASA’s mission control room. Soldiers wearing army combat OCP uniforms sit before a bank of video monitors stacked in a double row. Larger flat-screen monitors line three walls of the room. Corporal Oscar Nathans, born and raised on the east side of Wilmington, Delaware, occupies a prime position at one end of the rear tier of consoles. With a mind and math skills that might have withered in the public schools available to him, Nathans was fortunate to have a mother who refused to accept a subpar education for her only son. Through a combination of scholarships and his mom’s two full-time jobs, Nathans was able to attend All Saints Catholic School, where a dedicated staff emphasized instruction in science and engineering. He excelled in that nurturing educational environment, flourishing in a manner even his mother could not have anticipated. Intending to take advantage of the US military’s education benefits, Nathans enlisted in the army the day after high school graduation.

  Tireless, good-natured, and uncomplaining, he was a natural for Cyber Command. Corporal Nathans is first to arrive for his shift and often the last to leave. Last summer, the unit got together at a local bar to drink some beer, eat crabs, and watch the Nationals pound the Mets. Some drunken doofus made the terrible decision to make a too hard play on April. With her training, both at basic and the secret Publius camp in Oregon, the army lieutenant didn’t need anybody’s protection. Regardless, Nathans threw all of his 165 pounds at the drunk and his inebriated buddies. By the time the fight was settled, and the combatants separated, the soldiers from Cyber Command bestowed on skinny Corporal Nathans the nickname “Nails.” He will separate from the army in four years, lured away by a job in San Jose, California. The software he will develop for the distribution of cryptocurrency will revolutionize blockchain technology, catapulting him to the ranks of the one hundred wealthiest people in America. Not even his closest associates or family members will know the origin story of his company’s name, Nails Tech, but Oscar Nathans likes it that way. Who would understand the subtleties of his secret, unrequited affections for the army lieutenant in charge of his old unit at USCYBERCOM?

  Though April directed the unit’s energies into the analysis of Cyber Jihad’s attacks, Corporal Nathans has endeavored to maintain routine monitoring of Defense Department networks. His genius is an uncanny sensitivity to systemic anomalies, subtle blips in observable data that scroll across the computer screens in real time. Nathans had been working the Cyber Jihad trace when something unusual on one of his monitors caught his attention. Focusing more closely on the DoD net display, Nathans observes what he’s sure is an unauthorized intrusion. Though attempts at getting inside government networks occur on the order of thousands of times on any given day, a successful breach is extraordinarily unusual. Nathans sits up straight in his seat.

  “Lieutenant?”

  April, seated at the first tier of consoles, glances in Corporal Nathans’s direction. The look on his face tells her it’s important. She immediately stands and goes to his station, looking over Nathans’s shoulders at the screen he indicates.

  “You see, Lieutenant? DoA records servers.”

  April says, “Jump on it, Corporal Nathans. Let’s see where this bandit’s coming from.”

  Nathan’s fingers fly over his keyboard, his face cast in the green glow of the monitor bank arrayed before him.

  * * *

  YAZAT IS BARKING his fucking head off like an idiot, which means he needs to be taken out for a crap, but Rafi doesn’t have three minutes to spare. He got what he wanted. But the hacker is looking for just a little bit more candy in the DoA servers when he sees a digital alarm he placed on his network exploit exactly for this reason. His fingerprints are still fresh on the army servers. There’s no time to start erasing them. The Boss didn’t approve an attack on the Pentagon—Rafi hasn’t received any communication from his honcho in more than a day—but there is no other option. He must zero out the DoA servers.

  He knows precisely where to find the logic bomb in the Pentagon system because he placed it there months earlier. Rafi can’t suppress a grin. He always wanted to do a number on the US Department of Defense.

  * * *

  NATHANS WATCHES THE Pentagon servers—specifically Department of Army nets—blow up on the monitors in real time, his face registering his dismay.

  “Holy crap!” Nathans’s fingers freeze over his keyboard.

  About two seconds later, every screen in the unit’s command room blossoms with digital gibberish. Three seconds after that, the screens go entirely dark. Cyber Command itself has been taken out.

  “Army nets dropped and took out the rest of the DoD!”

  April is the unit’s commanding officer. She doesn’t have the luxury of disbelief. The Pentagon has been attacked in a manner that is as real as terrorists commandeering American Airlines Flight 77 and flying it into the side of the building on 9/11. She stands and directs her voice to the entire room.

  “Repair and rebuild, people! Now!” She looks to Nathans. “This could be the same group we’ve been after. We caught him with his hand in the cookie jar.”

  “On it, Lieutenant!”

  As Corporal Nathans and the rest of the unit swings into action, April reaches for her phone.

  5

  THE TRUTH IS AN ACT OF LOVE

  Wednesday, 5:10 p.m. The takedown of Pentagon servers raises the level of frenzy inside the West Wing to the degree that would alarm the most casual of observers. America is under attack. No one can say with absolute certainty by whom. Seated at her desk in Kyle Rodgers’s office, Hayley Chill juggles tasks both complex and mundane. She hasn’t been able to communicate with the president since he lifted off from the South Lawn in Marine One that morning. Her orders are clear: exert her influence in the West Wing, as artfully as she can, to prevent the intelligence community from bullying the president into an unnecessary conflict. But that task was made much more difficult by the attack on the DoD servers. An unknown actor is in play. Events threaten to spiral out of control. Hayley hasn’t heard from April Wu since their brief meeting at lunchtime. No doubt, the scene at Cyber Command is even more chaotic than at the White House.

  Hayley doesn’t look forward to informing Monroe of his need to affix the Fauchard bug in his mouth. She plans t
o assess the president’s emotional state at the National Security Council meeting. Hayley is scheduled to attend with Kyle Rodgers. Her primary concern is the attack on the Pentagon’s servers will force the president’s hand. The deeper state operative can count on Clare Ryan to lobby for a cautious approach. But Monroe has seemed increasingly antagonistic toward his Homeland Security secretary. Does he have a problem with powerful women? Seated at her desk, Hayley watches Rodgers prep for the NSC meeting. His influence with Richard Monroe cannot be overestimated.

  “Will it be war, sir?” she asks Rodgers, interrupting his review of the briefing book.

  The presidential advisor shrugs. “Define ‘war.’ ”

  “Missiles launched. A radioactive Richmond, Virginia. Projected losses in the millions.”

  “We’re several levels lower than that, war-game-wise, don’t you think?”

  “Not if you’re on the chat boards that I monitor.”

  “Nothing good ever came of a chat board.”

  “Sir, the president might call on you for your opinion in the NSC meeting.”

  “Thanks for reminding me what my job entails, Hayley.” He is vague for a good reason; they are entering uncharted strategic territory. At Pearl Harbor, the US knew who the bad guys were. The situation wasn’t a subtle one. Though Hayley has always struck him as entirely loyal, Rodgers realizes with a start that he might have gravely misjudged his chief of staff. “What are you driving at?”

  Hayley says, “I’m just curious what you think, sir.”

  “I think we’re under attack.”

  Aware she is pushing too hard but compelled to do so by the circumstances, Hayley asks, “And the president?”

  “Your guess is most likely better than mine,” Rodgers says, more pointedly than he wants. He checks his watch. “It’s time.”

  His caginess does nothing to alleviate Hayley’s concerns. Has she lost his trust? Even more than before, she is relieved to have made an ally in Clare Ryan. Friends in the West Wing are in short supply.