EXFIL

by Anthony C. Patton

  An amateur would claim that Anna was one of his phone contacts, but a professional would know that Jade Envy would never do that. A subsequent investigation of their phone activity would reveal no electronic contact between them. By having Anna’s number on a document, the assumption was that he used a different phone to communicate with her. I let them ask questions to see which way to steer the discussion.

  “I’ll admit,” Brett said with a gesture to the others, “this Anna working in the J6 and Jade Envy having her phone number is intriguing, but doesn’t prove she’s a spy. In fact, it could mean he’s assessing her for recruitment.”

  Lewis and Nguyen nodded in agreement.

  I nodded with them to keep everyone on the same page.

  “Anna studied in China for one semester and her top secret clearance is on hold,” I said and shrugged. “And—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Lewis said and groaned.

  “Among professionals,” I said, knowing that a confession of this kind would add credibility to my story, “Anna and I were intimate.”

  Lewis shook his head in disappointment. Brett and Nguyen kept straight faces, without eye contact or looking around.

  “When I stepped out of the bathroom the other day,” I continued, “I saw her rifling through my things. She asked direct questions about my work. At first, I didn’t think much of it—she might just have been curious, as some women are—but taken together, it suggests something more sinister…nefarious. I think we should consider the possibility that she’s behind the cyberattacks.”

  “Worth a look,” Nguyen said. “We could start by monitoring her computer activity at the J6. My guys can begin immediately.”

  “You said her top secret clearance was on hold?” Brett asked. “How could she facilitate the cyberattacks with only a secret clearance?”

  “She still has access to classified information,” I said. “Besides, my understanding is the system is a mess and needs to be replaced.”

  Lewis nodded. “She has a secret clearance with a pending top secret clearance, but she could still be in a position to do real damage from within the J6.”

  “But,” I said to break the flow and add a twist, “when I called her at work, they said her contract had ended and she was no longer working there.”

  “Fired or moved on?” Brett asked.

  I shrugged to promote a team effort.

  “I can look into it,” Nguyen said.

  Lewis nodded.

  “Sounds like we can take some discreet steps to investigate,” he said. “I propose we meet back here soon, just the four of us, to discuss the results. No written or phone records until we have more details.”

  Brett glanced back at me as he and Nguyen left.

  Lewis grabbed the laptop from the safe and handed it to me. “Guard this with your life,” he said. “And for God’s sake, keep your dick in your pants. For the life of me, I can’t understand why you treat Beth this way.”

  I nodded. “Anna’s not working there now, but she might have planted tools on the system to defeat the security patches, or she might have someone on the inside. I’ll advise the J6 guys to be on full alert for the next few days.”

  I could accuse Anna of espionage because she was working for Jade Envy, but I couldn’t tell them how I knew. Instead, I had to build a reasonable yet circumstantial case to point them in the right direction. Such an investigation could take months. On the outside chance that we got lucky and caught her in the act, I would be vindicated and hailed as a hero for stopping an American spy. If Anna tried to accuse me, I would deny it. Jade Envy wouldn’t have told Anna the results of his meeting with me, and he wouldn’t come to her defense during a public trial. The most surprising part was that Anna was willing to play such a direct role in the approach to me, knowing that it would reveal her work with the Chinese. She might have been confident I wouldn’t say no, or the Chinese might be willing to burn her for this one shot.

  All of this might sound reasonable—I had correctly advised them that Anna was a Chinese spy—but it concealed what I was ultimately trying to avoid: the Chinese revealing their derogatory information on me if I refused to cooperate. Therefore, for this ruse to continue, there was one thing I had to do before delivering the new security patches to the J6.

  The drive from Cyber Command to the Pentagon was eerily uneventful.

  Despite our propensity to project our inner world, events in the outer one rarely reflected the turmoil within. After powering down my phone, I took a circuitous route, stopped at a convenience store to buy a diet soda, and checked my rear-view mirror intermittently to ensure that no one was following me. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which anyone would dedicate a surveillance team to follow me, but I always took precautions.

  I made an aggressive U-turn before heading south on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, with no surveillance vehicles noted. The challenge in detecting surveillance was not allowing statistically normal events to spook you or make you see things that weren’t there.

  To avoid this, Intelligence Officers were taught to sift through the noise, to know with a high degree of confidence whether they were clean.

  I memorized my approach to a mall underground parking lot without security cameras, where Jade Envy was sitting shotgun in a parked car. I parked in the adjacent space, lowered my window to hand Jade Envy the laptop, and observed in silence as a technician in the back seat booted it up and inserted a USB drive. They were smart enough to know that I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat.

  The technician nodded approvingly, removed the USB drive, and shut down the laptop. Jade Envy returned it to me, along with a piece of paper with instructions for the next meeting.

  “See you soon,” he said.

  And just like that, in an underground mall parking lot, Jade Envy accomplished what some might consider one of the greatest intelligence coups of the 21st century. Under normal circumstances, I would have included this operation in the Museum of Modern Spycraft, except for what I had planned—and what he didn’t know.

  To avoid doing something stupid during my exit, like hitting a pillar or squealing the tires, I took a deep breath, eased the car back in reverse, paused in neutral, and shifted to drive. The surprising part was it wasn’t difficult to do.

  I guess my heart and mind hadn’t yet fully digested the gravity of my crime.

  My arrival at the J6 in the Pentagon was uneventful. The office was sparsely filled with the night shift holding down the fort. I glanced across the room where Anna had been sitting, seeing her desk had been cleared out. I waved at someone on the secure side of the room and raised the laptop. They buzzed me in and led me to the same table to take care of business.

  The beta male technician with eccentric attire opened the package for a new USB drive but was interrupted by Colonel O’Connor.

  “Welcome, Colonel Reed,” he said and turned to the technician. “Please allow me.” He opened the laptop, powered it up, and inserted the USB drive. “The folks here are raving about your big success. You have no idea how much trouble you saved us by stopping that cyberattack.”

  “Anytime,” I said as we watched the status bar move past 50%—kudos to him for working long hours and setting a good example to the troops.

  As the status bar got close to 100%, O’Connor hit a sequence of keystrokes. He removed the USB drive, powered down the computer, and lowered the screen. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you.” I grabbed the laptop and tucked it under my arm as I walked to the exit. “Oh, hey,” I said and turned, as if I’d just thought of something. “Please keep this close hold, but we have credible information that the Chinese are planning something big. I’m not a technical guy, but if there’s any indication of a cyberattack, you might want to shut down the system for routine maintenance. My guess is these security patches won’t hold any longer than the previous ones.”

  With the system down, the Chinese couldn’t execute their attack—easy and brilliant.


  I had no intention of allowing my misdeeds to actually damage U.S. national security.

  O’Connor stroked his chin. “I’m not sure that will work, but we’ll keep it in mind. Cheers.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I returned the laptop to Cyber Command. History was replete with stories of diplomats and Intelligence Officers losing computers filled with secrets. The best way to avoid this was to keep them secure at all times, not hidden under hotel mattresses. Cyber Command technicians were waiting for me when I arrived, promptly confirming the serial number. Many civilians might struggle with this lack of trust, but it was the cost of doing business in defense of national security.

  I didn’t understand all the technical details but my understanding was that all the work on these security patches had to be done on one computer to avoid leaks or cross-contamination, and many of the new patches had been derived from modified versions of previous ones.

  The more things such as the Internet and encryption shaped the way we lived and worked, the more often we had to resort to old-school solutions to protect our operations. Once something made it to the Internet, it was always going to be there in one form or another. In a previous age, we might have written our secrets on parchment with forge-proof calligraphy and stored them inside a cryptex, but in this case, the message was the medium in the sense that the digital code was functional and informative, understandable by both human and computer.

  I returned to my car and drove an indirect route to a hotel in Maryland.

  After confirming that no one had followed me, I did a drive-by of the place to get eyes on—all clear. I had half an hour to kill and parked behind a hotel on the other side of the road a few blocks down. The lobby bar with 1950s décor and jazz was like going back in time.

  I was under no obligation to arrive to the meeting punctually.

  In fact, the best strategy was to arrive a few minutes late, making them sweat.

  “Scotch on the rocks,” I said as I sat on a leather stool. The bartender, a distinguished-looking gentleman with gray hair, wore a white dress shirt with a black bow tie and maroon vest. He set an ice-filled tumbler on the rail, poured the Scotch with flair, and slid it my way with a wink.

  “Thanks,” I said and swirled the drink to melt the ice a little, downed it, and slid the glass back.

  The bartender finished wiping a glass and poured me another, with an extra jigger.

  “One of those days?” he asked, raising a brow.

  “More than you can imagine.” I didn’t elaborate, and turned to see a beautiful woman in her mid-forties with pale skin and red lipstick, likely Eastern European. She wore a black satin dress, black fishnet stockings, and black heels.

  She was sitting at a table with a laptop, next to an empty martini glass.

  For reasons I couldn’t explain, I actually entertained the idea of ordering her a drink and striking up a conversation, but the absurdity of the plan hit me like a ton of bricks. So, we just made eye contact and exchanged smiles, which suggested she might welcome some company. In fact, she might welcome more than that, but something deep within warned me that enough was enough—full stop. Besides, I knew that Jade Envy was waiting for me.

  A few minutes later, I confirmed the hotel’s room number on the paper and knocked on the door. I heard footsteps, saw the light through the peephole go dark, and waited for the door to open. Jade Envy made the right call, offering neither pleasantries nor a handshake.

  He gestured for me to enter and glanced both ways down the hall to ensure the coast was clear.

  Meanwhile, another Chinese gentleman had slid a kitchenette chair next to an end table in the living room for a makeshift polygraph station. One of the biggest challenges in intelligence, especially in sensitive cases like this, was vetting—taking systematic steps to ensure that the source was working for you, not against you.

  The prime directive of intelligence was collecting no intelligence is better than collecting bad intelligence. In this case, the Chinese wanted to be sure I had given them the correct security patches before they loaded them onto their own computers for analysis and exploitation.

  Ways of verifying whether sources were good or bad included monitoring their activities with technical collection or testing them, but the most direct way was to ask them point blank while strapped to a “box” and hope that the polygraph technician could interpret the resultant data correctly. I understood why they wanted to trust but verify.

  The most nervous person in the room, however, was Jade Envy; his reputation was on the line.

  “This gentleman is from our security office,” he said. “He will ask you some questions. If you are lying, we will release our information to your superiors. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, sat, and allowed the technician to connect me to the machine. I had met enough Chinese to know that they could be brutally direct when they spoke English, so I knew he meant no disrespect. Back in the day, we had used polygraph machines with floating pens and paper rolls, which was why we referred to someone who did poorly as “spitting ink.”

  Most intelligence services had switched to laptop computers with digital results. Everyone knew the polygraph was primarily an interrogation tool and not a foolproof way to detect lies, but trained technicians could achieve impressive results, to include provoking a confession.

  I would have no reason to tell them anything but the truth, but I took a series of deep breaths to calm my mind and forget about the blood pressure cuff numbing my arm.

  The technician looked up, ready to go. Jade Envy poured himself a drink and nodded in approval.

  “Is your name Colonel Lance Reed?” the technician asked.

  “Yes,” I said as he glanced at the computer and clicked the mouse a few times. He would do this each time, which would result in a five-second delay between questions.

  “Are you a brigadier general in the U.S. Army?” he asked.

  I could feel my heart beating. “No,” I said.

  “Are you married to Beth Reed?”

  My heart was pounding. “Yes,” I said.

  The technician leaned closer to the laptop. He knew the answers to these questions and was using them to establish a baseline of what the truth and lies looked like, as a reference point for when he asked questions to which he didn’t know the answers.

  He seemed satisfied with the results and gave a thumbs-up to Jade Envy, who sipped his drink and gestured for him to proceed. I leaned back and took a deep breath.

  “Did the U.S. government direct you to work for us?”

  “No.”

  “Have you told anyone about passing us the laptop computer earlier today?”

  “No.”

  “Did you give us the latest security patches for the Pentagon J6?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were the security patches created by Cyber Command?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you plan to tell anyone you passed us this information?”

  “No.”

  The technician stopped to review the data on the laptop computer. I cleared my throat and gestured to the blood pressure cuff. He bowed and twisted the valve to reduce the pressure, bringing welcomed relief to my arm. They had clearly put some thought into these questions to make sure there was no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation.

  The technician leaned back in his chair and nodded, satisfied but seemingly ready to ask the same questions a second time, if necessary. Jade Envy thought about it, looked me up and down, and shook his head with a dismissive gesture as he finished his drink.

  The technician disconnected me from the machine, assembled the equipment in a briefcase, and nodded to us both before excusing himself from the hotel room.

  Jade Envy walked to the couch and gestured for me to join him.

  “I imagine this was difficult for you,” he said.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks for your concern.”

  “We should discuss financial compensation,” he said.
“We are prepared to offer you one million dollars for the security patches. We have a few ideas to arrange for you to win money in a lottery or gambling.”

  “Keep something in mind,” I said, impressed with the creative payment idea. “We’re both in a delicate position. If things don’t work out exactly as planned, you’ll be declared persona non grata and Anna will be arrested.”

  He nodded. “We have everyone’s best interests in mind. I imagine the thwarted cyberattack on the Pentagon should help your chances of getting promoted to brigadier general.” He stood and we shook hands. “The next attack will be conducted in such a way as to make it look like my unit in Beijing was not involved. You will have plausible denial for why I did not warn you.”

  I left the hotel room and walked the road back to where my car was parked. The stars in the cloudless sky were spectacular, making me feel insignificant yet aware of my breathing and thoughts. I considered all I had done and feared that karma would catch up one way or another, but I also had the peculiar feeling that this would all blow over and things would work out. I’m not sure how to explain it, but I was expecting to feel a lot worse about what I had done.

  Before reaching my car, I turned and looked back at the hotel bar where I had seen the Slavic temptress. I can’t explain what motivated me, aside from sheer stupidity, but I returned to the bar and justified it by saying I needed a drink to relieve the stress of the polygraph.

  “Welcome back, sir,” the bartender said, inspecting a bottle of Scotch as he looked at me.

  I nodded and watched him pour as I scanned the lobby and looked at the table where she had sat. He slid the drink my way with a wink, dialed a rotary phone, and whispered a few words.

  Then he hung up.

  I surveyed the scene, felt oddly out of place, and reached for my wallet.

  “It’s on me,” a sexy voice said from behind me.

  I turned to see the temptress entering the bar again, no doubt in response to the bartender’s phone call—what the hell?

  “Charge it to your room, ma’am?” the bartender asked.