by Chris Hauty
At Lincoln’s, the cabinet secretary mops up the remaining globules of maple syrup from her plate with the last bite of waffle and pops it into her mouth. The chatter between Clare and Hayley is staccato, a conversational volley that reveals a potential for kinship between the two women. Though they come from wildly different socioeconomic backgrounds, the DHS kingpin and low-level West Wing staffer share a disciplined temperament and dedication to the country. The older woman sees her best qualities in Hayley. If Clare weren’t pressed for time—a meeting with officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled at 8:15 a.m.—she would probably order another waffle. She feels positive about this little alliance with Hayley Chill, one that she congratulates herself on having the cleverness to nurture.
“In the aftermath of COVID, the CDC and FEMA have required rebuilding from the ground up. Same as what happened to the intelligence community after 9/11, the reorientation of huge swaths of the federal bureaucracy has been a monumental undertaking. All hands on deck. The president has asked me to help out in any way I can.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Clare gestures impatiently. “Old news. We have more immediate issues to discuss.”
“Madam Secretary?”
“General Hernandez. You understand the precariousness of the situation, don’t you, Hayley? Left unchecked, the NSA is going to talk the president into jumping off a cliff… and take the whole country with him.”
Hayley understands what the cabinet secretary wants from her. She also knows privileged information isn’t something you just give away. Her silence speaks volumes.
Clare says, “Of course, I won’t easily forget your assistance.”
“Assistance.”
“A fly on the wall. Chatter in the West Wing that you think might be of interest to me. Any influence you might wield in the pursuit of national security and safety.”
“This conversation is making me uncomfortable, Madam Secretary.”
“I’m not asking you to betray anyone. I need allies, Hayley.”
“Sounds like you need a spy, ma’am.”
“As I said, your service won’t be forgotten.”
Hayley knows she is supposed to name her price—everyone in Washington has one. But she remains silent.
Clare smiles knowingly. “You’re too good.”
Hayley shakes her head. She hasn’t asked for anything in return because she doesn’t know yet what she needs. “As I said before, ma’am, nothing is more important to me than service to country.”
“Great! Then we’re in agreement.”
Hayley can’t help but smile, marveling at the older woman’s persistence. “I’ve agreed to what exactly?”
“To keep an eye on things. Be vigilant against any plan of action that deviates from the measured approach of prior administrations. And if you can, report back to me.”
Hayley shrugs. “I’m only a small cog in a very big machine, ma’am.”
Clare understands why the younger woman must play it coy and is willing to play that game. “You have a special relationship with the president, Hayley, a commodity of incalculable worth in this town. It’s a great comfort to know I can count on you.” Checking her lipstick in a Givenchy compact, the cabinet secretary says, “Together, we can keep our country safe.” Standing up, she places a twenty-dollar bill on the tabletop and gestures to the younger woman.
“Come on. I’ll drop you.”
* * *
TUESDAY, 8:05 A.M. April Wu knows she could kick the guy’s ass with one arm tied behind her back. Hell, wrap both her hands, and she’d still triangle choke the little freak in three seconds flat. But even April has to admit the dude one table over in the cafeteria of the Big Four—as its brainy occupants call the NSA’s main building—possesses some historical justification in ostentatiously talking shit about soldiers like herself. His disdain is evidence of an entrenched and divisive dynamic on the campus at Fort Meade, an installation shared by the civilian National Security Agency and the more recently created, military-run US Cyber Command. Most civilians employed by the NSA possess advanced degrees from fancy universities and, by those lofty educational heights, look down their noses at the enlisted cyber warriors. The ridicule isn’t the first (or last) time civilians deem a US soldier as something less than a professional. The bias could trace its origin back to the complacency of 1950s America when pursuit of the dollar replaced the honor of military duty as a national priority. At Fort Meade, the forced cohabitation between military and civilian agencies is like a blended family: part sitcom and always awkward.
The NSA, with offensive strategic ambitions, has its illustrious past, as well as seemingly limitless funding. In that long shadow, Cyber Command, created in 2009, has been hell-bent on being perceived as something other than the National Security Agency’s idiot (and mostly useless) younger brother. Theirs was a sibling rivalry that shared not only a campus but also, in General Carlos Hernandez, leadership as well. To the surprise of many, USCYBERCOM has been flirting with a dramatic, come-from-behind parity in the last few years. With more significant influxes of funding and personnel, the military command became completely independent of its big brother in 2018 and increasingly positions itself as an offensive force. But the civilian NSA employees seem unwilling to let go of long-held prejudices. Physical altercations are not unknown, most often occurring in the Big Four cafeteria where both sides frequently mingle.
Her nemesis this morning is an improbably named Antonio Ferrari, a math wiz on loan from an assistant professorship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. April has swapped her torn denim and Chanel jacket for her army combat uniform in an operational camouflage pattern. She has been sharing a few minutes of coffee time with some of her fellow soldiers before heading downstairs to the unit’s basement offices. Ferrari gets April’s attention by loudly complaining about the agency’s perfectly good code getting “urinated” on by the “grunts” in Cyber Command. Who the hell says “urinated” anyway? They exchange more harsh words. Soon enough, the West Point grad is out of her chair and charging toward the civilian math nerd. Aware of the consequences of a physical assault charge, April’s fellow soldiers spring from their chairs and stop her.
The Rensselaer prof, attached to the NSA’s Information Systems Security Directorate Group 6 and backed up by his agency colleagues, feels secure enough to remain seated.
“Don’t you have any villes to torch, G.I. Jane?” Ferrari asks April, arms casually crossing his chest.
April badly wants to pound the guy, but her fellow soldiers push her back toward her chair. “It’s not worth it, Lieutenant. Let it go,” one of them says.
She allows herself to be guided away from what would surely be a one-sided fight. Her tormentor laughs, enjoying her frustration.
“That’s good. Hate me,” he says, chuckling. It just so happens that all of Ferrari’s colleagues at his table from Group 6 are male. Buttressed by these disproportionate numbers, April’s nemesis feels he has yet another line of attack on her character. “Bros before hoes, right?”
All personnel in the vicinity of the two tables freezes. The soldiers surrounding April stop and turn to face Ferrari, with faces of stone. Two of April Wu’s fellow soldiers are female. In unison, they move aside so that the first lieutenant has a clear path toward her nemesis. Ferrari loses his smug expression, replaced by something that looks like real fear.
“Now wait a minute,” he says as April draws with arm’s reach.
April is gunslinger cool. “I’m not going to hit you.”
Ferrari is relieved. “You’re not?”
She shakes her head. “The truth is, I wanted to ask you out.”
The NSA systems engineer, despite his brilliance, is utterly confounded by April’s behavior. His arrogance prevents him from maintaining a healthy skepticism. Ferrari wants to believe this attractive female in an army combat uniform is sexually attracted to him.
“You do?”
“Yeah
. I’d like to invite you to the award ceremony at the European Conference on Object Oriented Programming in September. I’m being given the Dahl-Nygaard Prize for the young researcher who has demonstrated great potential in software engineering. If you happen to find yourself in Barcelona.”
April turns and heads toward the cafeteria exit, trailed by the other soldiers from her unit. Ferrari hasn’t quite figured out just how badly she’s burned him.
“Is Dahl-Nygaard even a thing?” he asks one of his tablemates.
The career NSA staffer throws a balled-up napkin that hits Ferrari in the head. “Yes, you idiot. It’s a very big thing.”
Antonio Ferrari frowns, his humiliation sinking in. That shame will grow, with increasing weight, until it bogs down his soul. It will reside there for the remainder of the day and the following week, too. The gnawing mortification will fail to ebb even six months later after the professor receives commendations from the Group 6 leader and returns to Rensselaer. That disgrace will infuse every aspect of his hard-won tenured professorship. No matter how many papers he publishes in prestigious periodicals or lofty mathematics awards he receives, Ferrari cannot completely ice the blister inflicted on him by the army lieutenant in the cafeteria of the Big Four that fateful morning. Over years of failed relationships that never quite warrant an attempt at matrimony and a cheating scandal that will scuttle his position at Rensselaer, Ferrari will repeatedly return to that brief confrontation with April Wu. He will search in vain for the forgotten detail that might alter his memory of it and thereby alleviate his suffering. In the year before his premature death from colon cancer at the age of fifty-four, Antonio Ferrari finally acknowledges his full culpability in the cafeteria incident. How soothing it is to admit, yes, he truly was an awful prick that day. And, in this moment of startling recognition, the disgraced professor finds some solace.
* * *
MINUTES AFTER TANGLING with Ferrari, April and her fellow cyber warriors sit down at forty-two-inch-wide curved monitors in their basement, blast-hardened office suite. A Category 5 hurricane could sweep across the state, but down in Cyber Command’s lairs, no one would be the wiser. With the colonel in charge of the unit out of the country, April is the ranking officer. Enlisted personnel rotating through USCYBERCOM from other service branches fill out the roster, integrated under the shared mission to coordinate cyberspace planning and operations in defense of the nation’s interests. The current project of April’s unit—reverse engineering framework process with Ghidra software for the Pentagon’s supply chain risk-management needs—isn’t exactly on the front lines of any cyber war, declared or not.
“Anybody else curious about who’s responsible for derailing the Metro Blue Line train yesterday under the Potomac?”
All of April’s fellow cyber warriors are eager for a meatier assignment and furious that an enemy has so viciously attacked the US. Fingers flying across their respective keyboards, they intend to find the individuals responsible.
* * *
TUESDAY, 9:11 A.M. The National Press Building at 529 Fourteenth Street is home to the TASS Russian News Agency’s Washington bureau. Aleksandr Belyavskiy arrives there for work every weekday morning at eight thirty. His cover—working journalist who reports on the US political developments for news consumers back in Russia—is obvious to even the rankest beginners in the CIA’s counterespionage units. In his forties, with a broad face and penchant for the nondescript style offered by L.L.Bean, Belyavskiy hardly fits the stereotype of a chain-smoking, hard-drinking Russian journalist. His comprehension of English is rudimentary. The qualities he possesses that secured him this highly desirable posting were neither his distinguished military record nor his keen patriotism, but rather his birthplace of Mirnyy. Just northeast of Moscow, the village was also where Richard Monroe’s grandparents lived. The rural locality continues to hold an extreme sentimental pull for the US president. Their shared geographical history made Belyavskiy the ideal candidate to become Monroe’s GRU handler after the Russian mole’s election to that highest American political office.
Though they have yet to meet face-to-face, Belyavskiy is in frequent contact with the president. A staff member inside the White House residence, whose identity is unknown to both Belyavskiy and Monroe, serves as their intermediary. If Monroe wishes to communicate with Belyavskiy, he signals the intermediary by shifting two volumes on a bookshelf in his White House bedroom. He leaves a note in one of them, volume three of the Sangamon edition of Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. Monroe can expect a reply left between the pages of the same volume within forty-eight hours, signaled by the book’s return to its original placement. When Belyavskiy needs to communicate to Monroe, he uses a dead drop near the TASS offices. A small maintenance box at the southwest corner of Franklin Square is the designated site.
He has dutifully reported on Monroe’s psychological deportment over the last year. Unlike his jocular messages with the president, Belyavskiy’s dispatches to his superiors in Moscow are officious and free of editorializing. The information the Russians have obtained from their asset in the Oval Office—from extensive alterations in US foreign policy to top secret planning for new weapon systems—has been deemed of immense value. But the fear in Moscow, of course, is that American intelligence services have discovered Richard Monroe’s true identity. That they have flipped their prized mole. Consequently, the US president is under unusually intense scrutiny by Russian intelligence. Every minute detail of Belyavskiy’s interaction with his asset is analyzed. The Directorate thoroughly screens anyone who comes in contact with Richard Monroe for having possible clandestine affiliation with the CIA or FBI.
The longer Monroe remains in the White House, the more Moscow’s insecurity grows. Such is the cost of the operation’s astonishing success. Belyavskiy’s direct superior, Konstantin Tabakov, a GRU officer stationed at the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue, has been demanding meetings and detailed interaction reports with increasing frequency. These clandestine get-togethers have taken place at shopping malls, the zoo, and even a bowling alley in Columbia Heights. Such subterfuge is a waste of time and effort in Belyavskiy’s opinion. He has absolutely no doubt the American intelligence agencies are aware of his every move and Tabakov’s movements as well.
Belyavskiy exits the National Press Building and turns right on Fourteenth Street. Holding an umbrella as a shelter against the showers that have fallen intermittently throughout the morning, he relishes this bit of inoffensive weather. Spring in Washington is an all-too-brief interlude between a cold, gray winter and the long, muggy summer that will follow. Atypically, the Russian spy looks forward to his assignation with his superior. Of the seemingly countless museums and memorials he has eagerly sought out during his stay in Washington, Belyavskiy has never visited the National Museum of Women in the Arts. He is keen to sample its offerings.
With bushy eyebrows and a stocky build, wearing a suit bought off the rack at GUM, Konstantin Tabakov looks out of place in the gallery filled with artistic efforts of Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, and Faith Ringgold. A former officer in the special forces–oriented Spetsnaz GRU and since reassigned to lighter duty at Russia’s embassy in Washington, Tabakov is a dour man in his late fifties with an uncanny resemblance to Leonid Brezhnev. Belyavskiy approaches his superior, who is busily scrutinizing Leonora Carrington’s surreal Samhain Skin, a narrative painting depicting mysterious people and spirits participating in bizarre rituals. The two GRU agents have the room to themselves and converse easily in their native Russian.
“The obscenities of the West never cease to astonish me,” Tabakov says to his underling, gesturing with disgust at the painting. He retrieves a sunflower seed from a bag in his jacket pocket and plops it in his mouth, spitting the shell out moments later onto the carpeted gallery floor.
Belyavskiy pauses to study the work, tilting his head to one side in the semblance of a connoisseur. He says, “Celtic borrowings, I believe.”
Tabakov is
surprised by the junior officer’s display of culturalism and intellect. “How in the world would anyone know?”
Eager not to offend his powerful superior, who could have him posted to Outer Mongolia with a single phone call, Belyavskiy improvises. He proffers a museum pamphlet.
“Research, sir! Never fail to research!”
Mollified, the senior GRU officer turns his back on the aberrant artwork. “Why am I here, in this repulsive place? Is it Polkan?”
Headquarters had assigned the president a code name, one going back decades and starting with Monroe’s entering the US Army. Polkan is a character from Russian folklore, a half human, half horse that possesses great strength and speed. The code name seemed apt for Russia’s most successful mole ever.
“Polkan made contact, an urgent request regarding the cyberattacks on the subway system and American newspapers.”
“What of them?” Tabakov asks gruffly.
“Sir, he wants to know if this was an operation originating with Spetssvyaz,” he says, referring to the Russian Special Communications and Information Service. The agency is responsible for only a small percentage of that country’s signals intelligence. Even as the statement escapes his mouth, Belyavskiy knows how stupid he must sound. He is aware Spetssvyaz is an entity responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications, not inserting malware in enemy computer networks. But Belyavskiy must report Polkan’s messages, word for word. For all the glamour of the spy business and relative luxuriousness of his current posting, he misses the old days in the army. Are fresh orange juice and American baseball worth the uncertainties of being a spy behind enemy lines? Belyavskiy misses his wife, Katrina, as well. Twice-weekly trips to a Thai massage parlor in Hyattsville aren’t a satisfying substitute.
