Storm Rising

A Thriller

Chris Hauty

• Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781668021880
• eBook ISBN: 9781982175870

This instant national bestseller leads a young intelligence operative into the depths of a dangerous white supremacy conspiracy that threatens to tear the country apart in a "high adrenaline adventure" ( Booklist ). Intelligence operative Hayley Chill is pursing the truth about her father's mysterious fate, which government officials seem determined to hide from her. But when she stumbles upon a ciphered document under the floorboards of her father's house, it becomes impossible to ignore the questions about his death. Was it suicide, or was it murder, designed to protect a deeper secret? She fears what she's discovered may be connected to current rumors of a dark conspiracy, one that no one will substantiate. Hayley's been loyal to Washington; has it been as loyal to her?With permission from her handler to probe deeper, Hayley is led into a terrifying subculture of white supremacy within the United States military. As her investigation intensifies, she uncovers an expansive conspiracy to bring about the secession of several states from the country. It's up to Hayley to stop a second Civil War before it starts while also confronting the ultimate truth about her father's harrowing deeds in this "timely and terrifying read" (Nick Petrie, author of The Runaway ).

1 TATER HOLE SAVINGS & LOAN

Hayley Chill’s most glaring weakness, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, has been her primary focus for the twelve weeks she’s been in camp. Days start with a ten-mile run at sunrise, followed by a healthy breakfast, rest, and then four hours of skills training. Nights begin at seven after a light dinner. For warm-up, she hits pads for three rounds. Circuit training follows, with double-arm rope slams, dumbbell thrusters, two-hundred-pound sled pulls, and a sixty-yard farmer’s walk with eighty-pound barbells. Twice through, before starting a second circuit.

In the last months of her tenure as an aide in the West Wing, Hayley gained fifteen pounds. Many days in that harrowing time passed without any physical exercise whatsoever. Since leaving the White House—twenty-seven years old and unemployed—Hayley Chill is determined to regain the physical fitness of her years in the US Army. Holed up in Princeton, West Virginia, and training six days a week at Elite Martial Arts Academy seems as good a way as any to accomplish that goal.

Today isn’t a typical workout day, however. In anticipation of her first amateur MMA bout later that week, Hayley’s coach has limited her to stretching and a single sparring session at 50 percent. The problem is her sparring partner. Almost six feet tall, with a murderous arm reach, Jewel Rollins ratchets up the intensity with every round. Flustered and stung by a snapping jab that feels like something more than 50 percent, Hayley retaliates. An amateur boxing champ in the military, she never suffered a loss in the ring. Her strategy when attacked—in the ring and outside of it—is to counterattack. Never relent.

Fuck 50 percent.

With her back foot slightly splayed for increased leverage, Hayley throws a jab, cross, and then hook at her sparring partner’s head. She then feints with her left hand, drops low, and shoots a stiff right, hitting the other woman dead center in her sternum. The perfectly timed jab lands with a thud, catching Rollins as she exhales. The punch might have rocked a fighter with less experience; Hayley has put opponents on the canvas with lesser stuff. But Rollins is an NAAFS amateur women’s champion. Her mixed martial arts skill set is deep. Hayley doesn’t see the wheel kick coming until it’s too late. If not for thickly padded headgear, the blow would have knocked her out.

Fredek Kozlov steps between the fighters to stop the session, helping Hayley to her feet. “You plan to lose, yes?”

His cartoonish Russian accent is made less comical by dint of an always-on physical intensity and Olympic gold medal for judo. A back injury short-circuited his transition to professional MMA fighter. Elite Martial Arts is the top training camp for three states around and Kozlov’s ticket to prosperity in the United States.

Winded by her exertions, Hayley tucks her chin as if in preparation to throw a jab at her coach. Instead, she shakes her head and fixes her powder blue eyes on Rollins.

Her coach says, “I tell you. Fifty percent. What is wrong with you? Stupid!”

“What about her?” Hayley asks, gesturing toward her sparring partner.

“What about her? Maybe I tell her to go seventy percent. Or one hundred percent. Your directions are to go fifty percent, yes?”

Hayley stares at the mat, recognizing now that she has screwed up. Again.

“You fight your fight!” Kozlov points a sausage-size index finger at Rollins. “You don’t fight her fight. Fight your fight!”

Basic stuff. The earliest lesson. Hayley can scarcely believe her embarrassing lapse.

I was played. What is wrong with me?

Kozlov says, “Angry, you are blind. Emotions, you are stupid!”

“Yes, sir.”

She can think of nothing more to say, wanting only Kozlov to step aside and open a path to her sparring partner. To redeem herself. If that’s possible.

But the Russian remains between the fighters. To Hayley, he says, “That’s enough. Go home. We fix this tomorrow.”

Rollins sneers from behind the Russian. Kozlov plants both feet on the mat and anchors his weight, anticipating Hayley’s loss of temper.

“Save it for Friday, tyolka. You are going to need it.”

---

HER MOTEL IS two miles east on Oakvale Road. Hayley jogs there at a comfortable pace. Past a sub shop. The local Dairy Queen. A Mitsubishi dealership. Losing fifteen pounds is only one part of the motivation for finding refuge in West Virginia. Transitioning from amateur boxing to mixed martial arts isn’t the whole point, either. Hayley left a tumultuous Washington, DC, after a revelation so shattering that escape seemed the only sanity-preserving response. What she found inside a modest, brick home across the Potomac River, in Arlington, destroyed all reverence for the one person she loved most in the world. Without a job or apparent purpose—trapped in a city that never felt like home—her emotional anguish was like a third eye. Impossible to disguise. Every waking moment after that fateful Sunday morning in Virginia was filtered through a lens of despair and loathing. Only time and distance would alleviate the pain.

The focus and discipline required by her MMA training help speed the process of mental disassociation. In the meantime, she waits for a call or message from the one man in her life who matters. Not Sam McGovern, the fireman she started seeing before she fled Washington. Not anyone from work, either. Her West Wing colleagues have dispersed, forced into exile after the historical abomination that was the Monroe administration. Future employment in government for any of her White House coworkers would be a miracle. Hayley is different. As a trained operative in a clandestine effort to preserve the nation’s constitutional democracy—a kind of “deeper state”—her job as chief of staff for the president’s senior advisor was only a cover. The phone call she anticipates is from her direct superior in that secret organization, Andrew Wilde.

The man who recruited her.

He represents a loose affiliation of powerful Washington emeriti—ex-presidents, former Supreme Court justices, retired NSA and CIA directors, senators, and military brass—linked by lifelong government service and unambiguous love of country. There is no official name for this group. Nor is there a definitive leader or hierarchy. All members have left their official offices, thereby guaranteeing that their motivations are pure and shorn of self-serving incentives. Few of the participants have ever met each other, their true identities hidden behind pseudonyms. An ultra-secure, cloud-based intranet run from a server farm in north-central Canada facilitates communication among members. Though the group has no name, Wilde and other members have come to call themselves Publius, a nod to the Federalist Party formed by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison Jr., and John Jay in support of the still-unratified US Constitution. The essence of their cause, and entire reason for being, is the protection of that hallowed document and its tenets, no matter the origin of the threat to its preservation.

Recruited from the US Army, Hayley joined a corps of similarly capable individuals to serve as covert agents of Publius. Her first operation—protecting the president and turning him against his paymasters in the Kremlin—was initially an unqualified success. But that mission ended abruptly with Russia’s exfiltration of Richard Monroe. A concurrent crisis was devastating cyberattacks that nearly brought Washington to its knees. Had it not been for Hayley’s initiative, not to mention her extraordinary gift of eidetic memory, the country might have stumbled into a third world war. Rescuing a besieged US senator from the Capitol when the building was stormed by white nationalists is a cruel punctuation mark on Hayley’s recent months as an operative for the deeper state. The stress has laid her emotions bare, a mental state further ravaged by family revelations almost too grotesque to imagine.

Retreat to her home state of West Virginia—in equal parts beautiful and tragic—has been a soothing balm. God bless the Mountain State. Almost heaven, indeed.

The motor-court-style Turnpike Motel is low-slung and strenuously well-kept. Older-model cars occupy one in five parking spaces. Newer, franchise hotels can be had in town at double the price, but Hayley prefers these modest, humdrum lodgings.

Hyperventilating slightly as she slows her pace and then stops running entirely, the deeper state operative is surprised by her elevated heart rate.

Hayley bends over and places her hands on her knees for support. A wave of inexplicable fatigue washes over her. She feels sick to her stomach.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Standing up straight, Hayley Chill waits for her heart rate to slow. The shortness of breath dissipates. She opens her room door with a key card. Stepping inside the darkened room, Hayley clocks a figure sitting in a chair by the window and drops into a defensive crouch. Only after recognizing the intruder as her fellow deeper state operative does she relax.

“Jesus. You startled me.”

“I’m a spook. That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

April Wu’s apparent ill health—pale and visibly weak—wins her little compassion from Hayley, who is displeased by the surprise visit.

“Are you comfortable? Put your feet up on the bed, why don’t you?”

“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Chill. Clashes with your unabashed earnestness.”

Hayley strips off her trail pack and drops it on the bed. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m worried about you. I’ve seen you do this before—though usually, you’re breaking stuff.”

“This?”

“This,” says April, gesturing at their surroundings.

Hayley pulls an insubstantial chair out from the sad motel desk. Sits. Her silence concedes the point.

April smiles, pleased with the win. “How was your workout?”

“Light.” She considers leaving it at that but adds, “I have my first bout Friday.”

“Sam coming down?”

Hayley shakes her head. “Working.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Will you stop? He’s been here three or four times.”

“Three ‘or’ four. Must’ve been extremely memorable.”

Hayley resists an urge to throw a water bottle at her friend. “You look like hell, by the way.”

Before her accident, April Wu had been at the mercy of fashion. Pairing ripped jeans with a James Perse T-shirt and Chanel bouclé jacket was as effortless as breathing air. The expense was never an impediment. But today, in this sad, dumpy motel room, April wears tragically banal canvas cargo pants and a black Army pullover hoodie. The dark clothing only heightens her sallowness and the circles under her eyes.

“I feel like hell. Wish that car landed somewhere besides on my head.”

“Me too.”

“Has the pope called you?” April asks, referring to their superior with the deeper state.

Andrew Wilde recruited them both, Hayley out of Fort Hood and April from Cyber Command at Fort Meade.

“Nothing.”

“Maybe he can’t find you.”

Hayley suspects Publius has the resources to find anyone on the planet, but there’s no way of knowing for sure. “I’m training, April, not hiding.”

“Hard to tell the difference.”

This has been their way forever. The best of friends and die-hard competitors.

April asks, “Wanna talk about what happened?”

“You mean that business with the president faking suicide, his exfiltration to Moscow, and unmasking as a Russian mole?”

“That was fun. But I mean the other thing.”

“What other ‘thing’?”

“What you found at Charlie Hicks’s place,” says April, referring to the house of horrors in Arlington. The world shifted on that Sunday morning. Wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Tater Hole Savings & Loan
• Chapter 2: The War Hawk
• Chapter 3: Can You Help Your Country Out, Big Fella?
• Chapter 4: Pink
• Chapter 5: El Pequeño Doctor
• Chapter 6: Balmorhea
• Chapter 7: The Lake of Fire
• Chapter 8: The White Rajahs of Sarawak
• Chapter 9: Battle Cry
• Chapter 10: Liberty Day
• Chapter 11: Atomic Demolition
• Chapter 12: Darkness and Distance
• Chapter 13: We Beat the Turk
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright