The phone on his desk sounded with a special ringtone reserved for only a couple of people. He knew it was important, either from one of his units in the field or from Andy Fleiss, information technology specialist.
“Hogan.”
“Paul, this is Andy.”
“Yeah? What’s my favorite nerd up to?”
“Weird stuff. sir, really weird. Can I come up?”
“Yeah, I’ll be waiting for you.”
Four minutes later, Andy Fleiss entered Hogan’s office without knocking. Andy Fleiss was in his mid-thirties and looked every bit the part of a serious nerd with unruly locks of wavy brown hair, dark eyebrows, and a long, narrow face comically accentuated by soda-bottle black horn-rimmed glasses and a plastic pocket protector stuffed with writing and calculating tools. He could recite from memory the entire code of the base Linux Kernel, could count to infinity in binary, and spoke fluent Tolkein Elvish, in addition to half a dozen real-world languages used by both humans and computers.
That being said, outside of work, women actually fawned over the man, something Paul Hogan had never really believed until he went out to dinner with him at a ritzy DC restaurant shortly after arriving in the capital when they both were promoted. Fleiss, outside of work, shed his nerd-by-day look, popping in contacts in place of the glasses and donning tasteful shirts and sport jackets that rendered him a quite remarkable likeness of the famous British actor Hugh Grant when he was at his heart-throb pinnacle in the nineties.
Today, though, Fleiss was all nerd as he stormed to the desk and quickly spread several sheets of paper across it without regard for any work Hogan may have been doing.
“Okay, Andy, what am I looking at?”
“I printed out these emails that I thought seemed significant,” Andy said. The energy in his voice seemed to indicate that whatever he saw should be obvious to anyone.
“Andy,” Hogan said, “this looks like the crap that clutters my inbox every morning.”
“Exactly,” Andy replied. “These are printed copies of spam emails sent from generic user accounts. The kind of thing you probably routinely delete from your email account without looking twice.”
“Why are these any different?”
“It's a puzzle,” Andy said. “First, take a look at these documents.” He pointed at the top pages. “The font at the top of the page is black and talks about some kind of spam advertisement for fake Viagra. But if you follow the text further, what do you see?”
“What do you mean, follow the text? It ends.”
“Look closer. It doesn’t end.”
“What are you talking about?”
Andy lifted the page and held it higher in the light. Hogan could make out a very faint, bright yellow glare against the white of the paper.
“You see that? There’s a whole paragraph at the bottom of the page in a pale yellow font on a white background. Nearly invisible on the screen, but…” He picked up the other sheets of paper. “I was going to delete it myself, but I accidentally clicked the print icon and sent it to my black-and-white laser printer. And this is what I got.”
The page he handed Hogan contained two additional paragraphs of text in a light gray font. It was faint, but readable. Andy handed him another page with the same text in dark black font.
“When I noticed the extra text, I changed the font to all black and reprinted it again. Read what it says.”
Hogan read the text.
So for your arrogance I am broken at last, I who had lived unconscious, who was almost forgot; if you had let me wait I had grown from listlessness into peace, if you had let me rest with the dead, I had forgot you and the past. My hell is no worse than yours though you pass among the flowers and speak with the spirits above earth. before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.
“What the hell is that talking about?” Hogan grunted, his face twisting in consternation.
“That, sir, is the million-dollar question,” Andy replied. “I did some research and found the whole poem, as well as a bio of the author and what she was originally writing about. What we see is a short portion, or rather, two short portions combined, of a long poem written by a lady known only as H.D., back about 1915 or so. It’s a pretty depressing poem. According to her biography, the author was struggling with bisexuality and couldn’t decide if she loved her girlfriend or her boyfriend more when she was surprised to discover those two were having an affair with each other behind her back. Screwed-up stuff, if you ask me.”
“Okay,” Hogan said, “why is this important to the Undersecretary for Terrorism Interdiction, Andy?”
“Ah, yeah,” Andy said. “The point is that it has nothing to do with the original intent of the poem. These were siphoned from an account used by someone on our watch list, one Steven Farrah.”
“The guy Hilde called about from Alaska.”
“The one and only,” Andy replied.
Hogan looked back at the pages and reread them more seriously. Rubbing the late-afternoon stubble on his chin, he muttered, “And you think it’s a coded message.”
“That’s where my brain is taking me.”
Hogan pressed into the wrinkles that creased the middle of his forehead with the tips of his fingers, smoothing out deep furrows that bounced back as soon as he moved his hand. He was only forty-six, but he felt old.
Fleiss continued, “They came from another person and were sent to him. That person is anonymous — we can’t figure out who they are.”
“What do you mean, anonymous? We’re the FBI — supposedly we can find out anything we damn well want.”
“Not in this case,” Andy replied. “Whoever created the sending account BallyHoo94423@gmail.com did a really good job covering their tracks. I even tried getting Google’s help, but they got me no further than I did on my own.”
“How about location? Do we know if it came in from Alaska, or was it sent there from somewhere else?”
“The message pinged off a server in Anchorage, but some of the links in the trace route indicate it may have been proxied from an rdp session that could be hosted from a client just about anywhere on the interwebs.”
Paul gave Andy a stern look. “English, Dr. Geek.”
Andy shrugged. “Sorry. Short answer is, I don’t think so. I think it came from somewhere else, but they tried to make it look like it came from Alaska.”
“What do you think it means?”
“Probably an attack being set up,” Andy said. “I’ve been thinking about that, and my first impression is revenge. It might also be a person who didn’t want to do it, but feels forced into a corner.”
Paul rose from behind his desk and paced toward the wall.
“Hilde said Kharzai was there.”
“You think this could be from him?”
“He sent me an email once before, during the Ohio bomb scare. It's what tipped us off to the bad guy's plans. Maybe this is another attempt at a warning from him.”
“To be honest, sir,” Andy said, his voice lowering with uncertainty, “it sounds more like a threat to me. I recently heard some scuttlebutt about a CIA operative who fits his description whose wife was killed in a botched drone attack.”
“Damn,” Hogan muttered, leaning back in his chair, the springs underneath gave out a long squeak. “It will not be good for us if he is on the rampage.”
Andy's eyes went wide as his imagination ran back to the bloody scene from Ohio. “He seemed pretty crazy the one time I saw him.”
“Yeah.” Paul nodded. “He always has been. Work on it. I’ll contact Hilde and let her know what you've shown me.”