Page 8 of One Knight Stand

None of us answered.

Chapter Five

ISAAC REMINGTON

Executive Director, Research Directorate, NSA

Things that are worth having are often the most challenging to obtain.

That was a motto Isaac Remington lived by. He’d been born poor and an only child to a father who worked two jobs and a mother who stayed at home and worked as a seamstress to supplement the family income. They’d lived in a rural town in West Virginia, a state Isaac despised as much as he’d hated being poor. He’d gotten out and hadn’t been back since, not even to visit his parents. That place and those people were a part of his past, and he was completely content to leave it, and them, there.

He’d discovered early on he had certain skills that would get him far in life. Manipulation, smarts, and an appreciation for a lifestyle far above what he’d grown up in. It hadn’t been hard to rise to the top of his class, given the quality of the students at his tiny rural school. Top scores and a poor family had earned him a full scholarship to Yale University. He’d been recruited into the NSA upon graduation and had steadily worked his way up the ranks.

Now he had his sights on the top spot—the NSA directorship.

Every move he’d taken since he joined the NSA had brought him closer to that prize. The NSA mined worldwide communications for intelligence, though its efforts and successes were cloaked in the shadows. Now, with the world becoming increasingly virtual and interconnected, the agency’s mission had become even more critical. That meant the NSA needed to be more than just an intelligence-gathering agency. It needed the ability to defend and attack on behalf of the country. All it required was someone who understood the mission and could deploy that power against the nation’s adversaries.

The NSA neededhimas a director.

He was so close to that goal after a near catastrophic disaster almost derailed his career. Fourteen years ago, the NSA had built a hidden back door in the RSA encryption program used worldwide to send secure data. It was intended to be used to monitor foreign terrorist activities. Ethan Sinclair and his colleague J. P. Lando were the NSA researchers who built that back door and then moved on to other research.

Only Isaac and his small band of peers within the agency recognized the true potential of the back door. They had begun using it, without permission from the top, to take down America’s internal enemies, too, despite antiquated laws stating they couldn’t spy on US citizens without a warrant. They had multiple successes until Lando discovered their activities and threatened to expose them. Isaac tried to reason with him on the back door’s benefits to national security, but Lando refused to listen. So, he’d paid the ultimate price for his stubbornness.

Isaac had hoped that Lando’s “accident” would serve as a warning to Sinclair to keep his mouth shut. But Sinclair had done something completely unexpected—he vanished. Soon after, a mysterious figure calling himself the Hidden Avenger had popped up on the Internet and created a patch called ShadowCrypt, effectively slamming the back door shut and locking the NSA, and by extension, Isaac, out.

The NSA had been thrown into chaos. Coders and cryptographers tried desperately to break the patch or create a new one, but were unsuccessful. Operations had stalled, as had the careers of many, like himself, who had previously been able to deliver success after success. It had taken him years to recover from that setback, and he wasn’t going to allow Sinclair to interfere with his plans again.

The current NSA director, General Maxwell Norton, also posed a problem. He’d been a disaster for the agency, spouting nonsense like transparency, accountability, and diversity. He was far too soft to run the most important spy agency in the world. He was a strict by-the-rules type and didn’t realize that spying meant operating in the gray areas of human behavior. But, finally, after four years, Norton’s time was coming to a close, and he’d announced his upcoming retirement.

About time.

Even better, for the first time in the history of the NSA, government officials were looking for a civilian director instead of a military one. Isaac had worked hard to shape that opportunity, and now it was his for the taking. Hefinallyhad a chance to right the wrongs and restore the agency to its full glory. But first he had to permanently remove Ethan Sinclair and get his hands on the back door once again.

“What’s the next step, boss?”

The words of Glen Sampson, his deputy, jolted him out of his thoughts. Isaac sat in his car in his driveway, engine still running, while speaking on a burner phone. Burner phones were the safest form of communication if you didn’t want to be overheard.

“I haven’t heard from Sinclair since he sent me a text right after the botched kidnapping attempt on his daughter,” Isaac said, his voice hard. “Before he disappeared, he said he was going to bring me down. Not surprisingly, the text was impossible to trace, and he’s apparently gone dark. Candace hasn’t heard from him, either, so far as I know.”

Candace Kim was the NSA’s director of the National Security Operation Center, or NSOC for short. As far as Isaac could tell, she was a token woman in a man’s world, allowed to rise within the agency only to promote an appearance of equality, not because she deserved it. It boiled his blood that she had been personally guided and advised by none other than Director Norton himself. Did the director really believe a woman could handle or understand the complexity of intelligence missions? Now her ineptitude was the greatest internal threat to his assumption of the directorship. He would never,everlose to a woman, not when he’d come so far. Still, Candace was extremely observant, so he had to tread carefully, so as not to arouse her suspicions or focus any attention on himself or his directorate. She could definitely pose a threat to the operation.

“It could be that Sinclair believes her not to be trustworthy,” Sampson offered. “He doesn’t know who to trust.”

“That works in our favor. I don’t want him to trustanyonein the NSA or the Justice Department. He needs to stay isolated so we can feed his paranoia. He’s declared war on the wrong man. We’re going to move things up a level.”

“How are we going to do that?” Sampson asked. “We failed to kidnap the daughter. She’s being watched now, and besides, she’s way too protected on the UTOP campus. How do you intend to get his attention?”

“It’s time we hit Sinclair where it really hurts. I want him to come crawling to me on his knees, begging for this to be over. He thinks he’s so clever, threatening me.”

“Are you sure it’s worth the risk?”

“Don’t be stupid. Of course it’s worth the risk. He wouldn’t come in without some kind of leverage that will make him look like a good guy. We just don’t know if that leverage points to us or not. Either way, he’s made it personal now. Weneedthat back door. It’s criminal that it’s wasting away in the hands of an incompetent coder with no operational experience. We also can’t have him lobbing accusations around at this critical time in the NSA directorship selection process, even if he doesn’t have any proof. And, if he’s somehow dug up some actual evidence after all this time, then it seals the deal. We have no choice but to go after him, and go after him hard. And there’s only one way to do that that.”

“His wife?”

“His wife. Trust me, Sinclair doesn’t think we’ll do it. He thinks she’s protected or that we’d never be so bold, but he’s wrong. He’s a coward, which is why he’s been in hiding for so long. But we’re men of wisdom and action. I say all options are on the table.”

“What about the eldest daughter, Gwen?”

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