#KillAydaKhoury

Alex Hart is Missing

Ayda Khoury

NSA Special Collections

Fort Meade, Maryland

My signals assurance team has gone to the Iranian nuclear negotiations in Vienna without me, and the State of Utah is threatening to retaliate for the domestic spying scandal by turning off the water at the data center and burning our servers to a crisp.

The office is full of Internal Affairs investigators and it's witch-hunting season, but maybe that's exactly what I need, if this leak turns out to be internal. There's a certain surrealism to clocking in and investigating Anonymous, but we're not supposed to be killers, and Hart's leaked agent is dead.

Monitoring of the Google complex—apologies to Snowden and Manning, I'm really guilty—tells me YouTube had an execution video up before they took it down ten minutes ago.

My counterpart at CIA's end of Special Collections has messaged me to tell me Hart should be on a plane home from Ankara.

The phone rings and I put on my syrupy Ventrilo gaming-voice for CIA. I'm viralpanacea and I'll be your healer today. "Ayda Khoury here."

"You gave that talk about tracking people by cellular hardware identifiers?" I feel like I should recognize the man's voice.

"That's right."

"I want you to find someone. Alex Hart never made his flight."

He wants me to try the cell phone tracking I talked about last year at DEF CON, the one my mom wants me to use for Samir. The kidnappers could have thrown Hart's phone out, but they'll expect the Chief of Station's contact list to be valuable if nothing else. Odds they kept it are pretty good.

They could have pulled out the battery. Please tell me Hart had a smartphone with a captive battery.

"Who am I talking to?"

"Jasper. Global Investments."

Global Investments is a local pseudonym for CIA, and I recognize the pseudonym Jasper. He's not a hacker or cryptographer; he's everything wrong with CIA. An Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages negotiator whose verdicts came out not guilty--but made him infamous and confined him to a declared embassy desk for the rest of his career. I'm obligated by policy to call him by his CIA pseudonym, but everybody knows who he is. Jasper's real name is Jack Kolda, a bureaucratic snake whose hostage negotiating history put him across the table from the current Iranian President, years ago when the President was just an up-and-comer political functionary. Now Jack Kolda's the appointed chief negotiator for Vienna.

"Hi Jasper." I keep the sweet Vent voice on. No one wants to make enemies in Langley with the investigation going on. "What kind of phone did Hart have? And was he on Turkcell, Avea, or something weird? I need his phone number, and if you guys ever had the IMSI, it would help." I remember who I'm talking to. "That's the International Mobile Subscriber Identity."

"I'll find out." He hangs up.

My phone buzzes. An email address I don't recognize, and not a one-use like my friends might use. Subject line: It's Samir, he took my phone.

Thank God. He's talking to me after all. Right there is why I sold out for a solid government paycheck, more money than our parents, and math problems so big they've got their own gravity. And I don't even get to go to Vienna.

If I ever see my little brother again I'm going to kill him.

I email back: Where are you?