by Chris Hauty
As the cabinet secretary turns to head in that direction, she says over her shoulder, “The good news is POTUS is close to broadening Homeland Security’s mandate.” The cabinet secretary’s smile is born from her sensing victory after a long fight. “We’ll finally be able to protect our citizens!”
Hayley acknowledges Clare’s statement with a respectful nod, anxious to get going. The meeting with Andrew Wilde is in slightly less than an hour. As Hayley starts for the closest stairwell to head upstairs to her office, she retrieves her KryptAll phone.
* * *
APRIL STANDS UP from her workstation at USCC and heads for the door. She had been pushing the personnel in her unit all morning for results. The arduous task of reviewing the thousands of most recent student visas from Iran is almost complete. Sadly, these efforts have produced no positive results. Either available photographs of the students fail to match, or the geographical location is off. Maybe the young man captured in the surveillance video entered the US illegally through Canada or Mexico? Maybe he legally obtained a student visa but more than six years ago? With over sixteen thousand Iranian students currently in the US, it will take days to follow up on these additional possibilities, with a slim chance of success. For all she knows, the hacker is an American citizen and they’ve been wasting what precious time they have on a wild goose chase.
April Wu has begun to resent Hayley for failing to provide her with adequate backup. Her fellow deeper state operative seems needlessly focused on her cover as White House aide. Hayley’s original mission after leaving the Publius training camp in Oregon two years ago, whatever it may have been, undoubtedly must be completed by now. Instead of hunkering down in the West Wing, Hayley could be helping review the students’ visa applications. Scouring the streets of Georgetown or Foggy Bottom for any sign of the hacker would be a help. April is sure their suspect is close. She just knows it.
The army lieutenant climbs the stairs up from the basement, anticipating a cup of coffee in the main cafeteria. Often enough, the best way to solve a seemingly intractable problem is to step away from it. As she exits the stairwell, onto the wide ground-floor corridor, April feels her phone vibrate and connects after checking the caller’s identification.
“I got nothing for you,” she tells Hayley, walking up the long hallway toward the cafeteria entrance. Just a few minutes after ten, some civilian NSA staffers are only now arriving to work. Slackers, thinks April.
Hayley, standing in Kyle Rodgers’s office at the White House, says, “We have Andy Wilde in fifty minutes. Moscow is threatening to ‘liberate’ ethnic Russians in Estonia. We’re on the brink of all-out war, April. We need something tangible, man. We need Red Jersey.”
In her zeal, Hayley reveals a trace more of her West Virginia accent than she usually lets on. April feels that old resentment is creeping up again. Fucking Hayley Chill, superstar.
“I’m trying,” she says, recalling their physical altercation while at the Publius training camp. Before the West Virginian’s arrival, April had been queen bee of the camp. No other candidate came close to her evaluation numbers. Then Hayley happened. Despite April’s best efforts to intimidate and out-hustle her rival, the result was never really in doubt. Their superiors tapped Hayley for the first operation. All April got was a broken finger as a consolation prize.
Phone pressed to her ear, April hears Hayley saying something about Secretary Ryan. But the army lieutenant is distracted by the sight of a person approaching from the other end of the ground-floor corridor. Dark complexion. Black snapback hat. Manchester United football jersey, with the gleaming yellow and gold Chevrolet “bow tie” splayed across the front.
April freezes where she stands.
Rafi Zamani sees the Asian American female in an army combat uniform staring at him. He recognizes her as the other young woman who had come looking for him at the Iron Pony with Hayley Chill. At the same moment, April recognizes him.
“Hey,” April says quietly. Then, louder, she says again, “Hey!”
Standing in the West Wing office, Hayley unconsciously grips her phone harder. “What is it? April?”
At the NSA headquarters on Savage Road, Rafi’s brain is finally able to communicate with the muscles in his legs. Pivoting about-face, he flees in the direction he had just come.
April Wu starts forward again, not one to shy away from a fight. Not ever. She charges down the gleaming hallway as Rafi dashes for the exit. “Somebody! Stop that guy!”
As she runs in pursuit of Rafi Zamani, April shouts into her phone, never taking her eyes off her quarry’s retreating figure. “It’s him, Hayley! It’s fucking Cyber Jihad, in the headquarters of the NSA!”
* * *
HIS PARENTS HAD noticed the odd behavior before Rafi was three. Significant developmental concerns included communication and sensory challenges, problems in socializing with his peers, and repetitive behaviors. Rafi’s mother was a successful real estate broker and his father a trial lawyer, emigrating from Iran in 1979 as a couple in their early twenties. Ormazd and Donya Zamani adapted effortlessly to their new lives in the United States and thrived. Assimilation was a priority, more so than with many of the other émigrés from Iran. While not inclined to turn their backs completely on the traditions and heritage of their country of birth, Ormazd and Donya believed in the power and saving grace of the American Dream. The United States was their new homeland of their future.
Donya assumed the responsibility for raising Rafi and his younger brother, Hamid, while Ormazd attended Yale Law School. After obtaining his degree, Ormazd was recruited by Arnold & Porter in Washington and subsequently moved his young family to suburban Maryland. From the outside, the Zamanis appeared to be the picture of success. With the purchase of a new, five-thousand-square-foot home in a desirable neighborhood and a marriage that seemed strong, any recent immigrant to the United States would have been suitably envious of what the Zamanis had achieved. But a more intimate perspective would have revealed that a deep problem existed within the home. Ormazd and Donya’s eldest son, Rafi, was a behavioral time bomb.
Rafi’s parents searched for a clear diagnosis after administrators sidelined the boy for special education services in preschool. Rafi Zamani was a keenly intelligent child, but his cognitive abilities only aggravated his social problems. His conduct became increasingly erratic and, in some instances, physically violent. Sadistic tendencies manifested themselves in the torture of small animals and insects. Most parents in the neighborhood forbade their children from playing with Rafi. Even his younger brother, Hamid, avoided him. No amount of therapy seemed to help. Ormazd and Donya’s marriage suffered under the strain of their oldest son’s disruptive presence in the home. Ormazd, having established himself as one of Washington’s most elite corporate lawyers, found escape in his extremely demanding work. Donya, Rafi’s staunchest defender, wasn’t so lucky. After her son had cycled through four different schools by the seventh grade, Donya elected to homeschool him. When he was thirteen, Rafi’s parents divorced. Tellingly, eleven-year-old Hamid chose to live with his father.
Isolated and friendless from the earliest age, Rafi found companionship in computers and expression with their mathematically based languages. He blazed through computer science courses offered by local community colleges. Diagnosed with multiple syndromes and psychological maladies, conventional enrollment in a university was out of the question. Rafi remained, for the most part, holed up in a bedroom of the only home he had ever known, a prisoner of his anxieties. He even avoided Donya’s physical presence, preferring to communicate with her via email. Despite her devotion and dedication to him, Rafi blamed his mother for Ormazd’s leaving the marriage. He distrusted all women and considered them selfish beyond redemption. Eventually, this extreme misogyny led Rafi to embrace the incel community of similarly “involuntary celibate” young men. Never having so much as held a female’s hand, smoldering resentment, rage, and self-pity dominated his everyday thoughts.
&nbs
p; Donya had enough by the time Rafi was twenty-one. After several years of being single, Donya Zamani met a nice, middle-aged widower in line at the Yekta Kabobi Restaurant & Market. Within three months, they became engaged. Two weeks after that startling announcement, Donya informed her eldest son that she was selling the house and moving in with her fiancé. The young man had many dark thoughts in these furious weeks after his mother’s engagement. Chief among them was to murder Donya in her sleep. But Rafi loved computers too much to get himself sent to jail for the rest of his life, where his love affair with those beloved machines would certainly be curtailed. Instead of killing his mother, Rafi called the National Security Agency.
The human resources office failed to return his multiple phone messages. Inspired perhaps by the British teenager from the East Midlands who infamously broke into the email inbox of CIA director John Brennan in 2015, Rafi hacked the NSA account of Carlos Hernandez. In a taunting email exchange with the chagrined NSA director, the young computer wiz offered to reveal exactly how he had managed the feat for the price of a lunch at the local Cheeburger Cheeburger. Deemed unfit for a salaried position with the clandestine US agency, Rafi was hired as a part-time contractor one week shy of his twenty-first birthday. He moved out of his mother’s house on a rainy Sunday morning without telling her he was leaving. Since that date, Rafi Zamani hasn’t had a single word of communication with any member of his family. Even though he lives and works only a dozen miles from his family home, Rafi may as well be dead as far as Ormazd and Donya know.
Getting his place in Foggy Bottom and a job he worked mostly from home marginally improved Rafi’s social skills. His immediate supervisor at the NSA’s F6 unit, Alfred Updike, valued the young man’s programming talents enough to give him huge leeway. Consequently, Rafi reported to work at Savage Road only a few times a week. On the occasions he did make an appearance at the Big Four, however, Rafi entered a work environment crammed with math geniuses, PhDs, and computer engineering prodigies. In other words, he had found a world in which his behavioral maladjustments weren’t entirely unusual.
Compared to the world outside Savage Road, Rafi got along reasonably well with his NSA colleagues. It was through his acquaintance with another programmer there that he discovered the world of motorcycling. Second only to his computer, Rafi Zamani loves his Ducati Monster 1200. Never having a girlfriend, or much in the way of male friends, either, Rafi expresses himself in only three ways: computer programming, incel chat rooms, and his motorcycle riding.
Rafi remade himself after his mother’s abrupt engagement in one additional aspect. Less than a year after he had rented his first apartment, he was mugged on the street just down the block from his building. Three guys about his age had cornered him on the sidewalk and demanded money. Under the threat of violence, Rafi had silently handed over his wallet. One of the young men demanded the backpack containing his work computer. Rafi hesitated. The thug punched Rafi in the face and stripped him of the bag. Rafi always secured his devices with powerful password protection, so he had zero concerns the thieves would be able to access the laptop. He emerged from the ordeal determined never to allow something like it to happen again. Rafi immediately enrolled in classes specializing in the Krav Maga form of military self-defense. Derived from the street-fighting experience of Hungarian-Israeli martial artist Imi Lichtenfeld and perfected by the Israel Defense Force, contact combat provided the young NSA contractor with the tools he needed to defend himself.
Or kill people, should the opportunity, er, need arise.
No doubt, being recognized on the ground floor of the Big Four was bad luck. Despite having to lug his helmet, gloves, and motorcycle jacket, Rafi loses the army lieutenant in the vast parking lots of the campus. When he returns to the bike and throws his leg over the saddle a couple of minutes later, he is dripping wet with sweat from his exertions in the morning heat. As he hauls ass through the main gate and up Savage Road, the rush of wind blow-drying the sweat from his neck and face, he realizes the game has changed. Rafi Zamani, NSA contractor, will be invariably linked to Cyber Jihad. In an hour or less, he will be a wanted man. But an intellect like his doesn’t fail to plan for contingencies. Rafi Zamani won’t be your average fugitive, armed with a knife and a sport bike. He has an additional skill set with which to evade capture. The game has changed, but it is far from over.
Rafi Zamani is confident he will prevail. The Ducati gives him tremendous speed and agility. With a computer and a link to the Internet, he projects the strength of nations. His mind and technical skills are unmatched by anyone at the NSA. Nothing can stop him. The motorcycle thrums between his legs, its engine in a high shrill and hurtling him through space. No one can catch him. He is free!
* * *
INVESTIGATORS FROM THE FBI and military intelligence swarm the office suite of Unit F6 at the NSA headquarters. They begin the long process of rigorously interviewing Alfred Updike and every member of his team. Within the hour, April identifies the young man wearing the Manchester United jersey as Rafi Zamani. For the time being, her allegations regarding the contractor are only that: allegations. Sitting on a bench in a corridor on the top floor, April waits with two officers from military intelligence whose only job, it seems, is to babysit her. Finally, a grim-faced official emerges from a conference room across the corridor. They are ready for her.
She enters the brightly lit room and stands at attention, eyes locked forward. General Hernandez, seated at the head of the long conference table and wearing his green service uniform, is reserved in his emotions. He says, “Have a seat, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir.”
April sits, back ramrod straight and hands folded neatly before her on the tabletop.
“Lieutenant, please can you tell us how you came to know Mr. Zamani and why, precisely, you believe he has anything to do with the hacker group known as Cyber Jihad?”
“Sir, I am socially acquainted with a White House aide, Hayley Chill, who was on the Metro train that derailed. When she emerged from the station at Rosslyn after the incident, Ms. Chill observed Zamani at the scene, enjoying the spectacle of wounded and displaced commuters. My friend is a highly observant individual, with a near-photographic memory, and she recalled Zamani. Subsequent investigation led me to believe he was involved with Cyber Jihad.”
“I’ve read your report, Lieutenant. It didn’t mention how you recognized Zamani this morning.”
“Sir, I accessed surveillance footage from a local restaurant. I had good reason to believe that Zamani frequented the location.”
“You ‘accessed’ the surveillance footage?”
April is surprised by the general’s hostile tone. “Extralegal access, sir.”
“You’re a computer engineer, Lieutenant. What are you doing out in the field, acting like a cowboy and chasing after bad guys?”
She continues to be taken aback by Hernandez’s blatant antagonism. “Sir, while I’m aware my duty assignment is here, at my desk, with USCC, I perceived a unique opportunity to identify a hostile actor and confirm attribution for an ongoing cyberattack. I regret if any of my actions have been contradictory to our mission.”
Hernandez frowns and turns toward the deputy commander seated at the table to his right. “Loop in the FBI, with discretion.” He gestures in April’s direction without looking at her. “No interviews with Lieutenant Wu. She’s on lockdown until we’ve finished our investigation.”
The deputy commander nods. April understands she’s been dismissed and immediately stands. That’s it? Hernandez is done with her? It’s as if they don’t want her to reveal the results of her admittedly unsanctioned investigation.
A colonel shows her out the door. In the corridor, he pauses to have a word. “You have a weapon at home?”
“Yes, sir. Licensed for concealed carry.”
She doesn’t mention that, as an operative for the deeper state, she undoubtedly has received more extensive weapons training than a Marine officer assigned
to the Cyberspace Operations Group.
“Good. Go home, Lieutenant, and stay there. Don’t talk to anybody.” He returns inside the conference room, leaving April Wu alone in the deserted corridor.
* * *
FRIDAY, 1:15 P.M. Hayley sits at her desk in Kyle Rodgers’s West Wing office feeling trapped and useless. As best she can ascertain, the president hasn’t come down from the residence after his relatively brief appearance in the Situation Room earlier in the day. Absent a firm hand on the helm, the nation seems adrift. Her clandestine rendezvous with Andrew Wilde—a meeting April had missed because of the chaos at Fort Meade—was discouraging. Despite a massive break in identifying the true identity of Cyber Jihad, Wilde seemed more focused on the president’s comportment. The primary mission of the deeper state remains running a counterespionage operation against the Russians from inside the White House.
In Hayley’s opinion, the rogue NSA contractor, Rafi Zamani, is the more significant and wholly unpredictable threat. Within the hour, she is on the phone with the one person she believes can provide some answers.
“I commend your talent for persuasion, Ms. Chill. I’m normally limited to phone calls only on weekends,” James Odom tells her from the recreation room at FCI Cumberland.
“It helps when the call comes from the White House, sir.”
“I imagine it’s a rather hectic day over there. I’m flattered you’d steal a few moments to phone an old friend.”
Hayley is aware prison authorities are most likely monitoring the call, with perhaps the intelligence agencies listening as well. “I’d still like to count on your help, sir. Your love of country has never been in doubt.”
Odom has to grin to himself. “Home of the free.”
Hayley chooses to ignore his sarcastic aside. “Sir, if I came out to Cumberland—”