On the dashboard of Evan’s rental car, pressed up against the windshield, was a blocky electronic unit that resembled a police scanner. He was parked across the street from a brick building that wouldn’t have been out of place at an Ivy League school. Adams Morgan, a diverse neighborhood in Northwest D.C., was known for its active nightlife. People streamed out of bars and restaurants, providing plenty of movement to get lost in.
Evan had been sitting here unnoticed for the past hour and forty-seven minutes.
Waiting.
The unit on his dashboard was a cellular tower device interceptor, better known as a Stingray. If a targeted mobile device came within its transmission range, it would force the device to affiliate with it rather than with the nearest legitimate cell tower.
Law-enforcement cell phones featured increasingly effective encryption. But they had an Achilles’ heel in the authentication process.
Authentication works in two directions—to and from the cell phone.
One of those directions was rock solid, the network going to extreme lengths to confirm the validity of a phone before allowing it to connect.
But the other direction was essentially unprotected. A phone did virtually nothing to determine that the network it was joining was in fact the network it claimed to be.
The Stingray on the dashboard was, like Evan, presenting itself as something it was not.
He’d lived under false cover for so many years that he wondered if he’d even know what it felt like to be real anymore.
Peals of laughter snapped Evan out of his thoughts. A cluster of college-age kids strolled past, cheeks flushed with alcohol—You know you so want to hook up with him!
They swept right past his car.
The guys sported man-buns of different sizes. The women wore strikingly similar designer jackets cigarettes stubbed up between manicured fingers, their lip gloss uplit by the screens of their iPhones.
Watching them go, Evan had the experience he often did when looking at normal people: that of looking through aquarium glass. They flitted by in happy schools, apart but somehow in concert, their movements choreographed to music that existed at some dog-whistle pitch he couldn’t hear.
He’d been raised outside the mainstream, his childhood hours spent not at movies or the shopping mall but on rifle ranges and in dojos. He didn’t understand the unspoken rules of intimacy, but he knew precisely at which angle to thrust a finger strike to dislodge someone’s eyeball.
Ahead, one of the girls pressed a guy up against a brick wall and kissed him, one foot lifted behind her as the moment demanded. They broke apart a bit breathlessly and ran laughing to catch up to the others and the promise of the night ahead.
For an instant Evan wondered if he’d be willing to trade his knowledge of a well-directed finger strike for the ability to go out into the night—just once—with the sole purpose of enjoying it.
Across the street Naomi Templeton appeared.
Her Jeep Cherokee cruised up to the curb, and she hopped out, head lowered, already thumbing at her Boeing Black smartphone.
Evan raised the small Yagi directional antenna from his lap and aimed it at her.
The Stingray lights blinked on and off, a low-key Christmas display, waiting for Naomi’s cell phone to affiliate itself with Evan’s impostor network.
It did.
Now that the small box on the dashboard was the end point of Naomi’s connection, it no longer mattered what kind of encryption was used, because Evan had all the keys.
He pulled his laptop over from the passenger seat, straining the cord connecting it to the Stingray, and alternated his attention between Naomi and the screen.
She headed for her apartment, phone pressed to her cheek.
He thumbed up the volume on his laptop and heard her saying, “—still catching up to this. Look, Director, he said Doug Wetzel would be my main interface, and as much as I’m flattered by the president’s faith in me, I don’t trust that guy.”
Director Gonzalez’s voice came through Evan’s speakers next. “You don’t have a choice, Templeton. This is what’s happening now. If the president wants you dealing with his deputy chief of staff, that’s who you’ll deal with.”
“So I’m running point on the investigation.”
“You’re not just running point. You’re running the whole fucking thing.”
The call severed with a click, and Evan watched Naomi shoulder through the building’s front door a bit harder than seemed necessary.
He scrolled down his laptop screen, scanning over her text messages. He could see inside her phone, and he could see inside everything the phone saw inside—data packets going back and forth, applications, her desktop calendar.
The big question would be whether he could use her phone to breach the Secret Service databases, which resided on a private secure network unhooked from the Internet at large.
To answer that, he’d have to get back home.
For now his work in D.C. was done. He’d given Bennett a final chance. The bridge had been torched, the last thread severed. Bennett wouldn’t call back.
The next time the RoamZone rang, it wouldn’t be someone hunting for Orphan X. It would be someone who needed the Nowhere Man. Evan wondered what that mission would be and—given the danger of what he was about to embark on—how the hell he’d manage it.
Maybe fate would look upon the daunting task before him—the murder of the most powerful and protected man alive—and take that into consideration before directing some innocent to reach out to him in time of direst need.
He could always hope.