An X-Special Ops-turned CIA covert operative and an Avante-garde Qatari woman become unlikely partners in a race against time to disable an AI-driven spyware technology that is programmed to destroy the free world. 

SYNOPSIS:

Tony Angelo is a West Point graduate with special ops training who was recruited by the CIA to work undercover within a Washington lobbying firm. Six members of the firm are secretly CIA operatives, including Tony’s boss, Crystal Jefferson and Constantine, their electronics security expert.

Angelo has a staged encounter with a retired Cold War spy operative as part of his new training in old-school spycraft. He is given an old-fashioned flip phone to use for CIA communications because using smartphones is now too risky because of Pegasus spyware. Pegasus, developed by the Israeli firm, NSO, can infect any smartphone and become a surveillance device, spying on the phone’s user by turning on the phone's microphone and camera. Pegasus can retrieve every bit of data within the phone, including phone and text records, email, passwords, documents, keystrokes and deleted data.

Tony meets with a U.S. senator to discuss Iraq’s needs for replacement parts for their F16’s. When he reports back to work, Crystal informs him that he is being sent to Iraq to investigate the resurgence of ISIS along the Syrian border. Before leaving on his trip, Tony needs to prepare his mother’s house to be listed for sale.

In the attic, he discovers some old documents written in Arabic, including a birth certificate that claims that he was born in Iraq, while his mother was working for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad years earlier. But there is a second birth certificate showing him born in New York. His alleged biological father, Khalid Fattah, was deputy oil minister in Saddam’s government.

When Tony arrives in Iraq, along with gathering intelligence about ISIS, he also wants to locate his biological father. In a small village, he hears the screams of a woman coming from a building and rushes in to break up an attempted rape of an Arabian schoolteacher by a U.S. serviceman.

The woman, Amira Kumar, talks Tony into driving her back to Baghdad. Tony explains he has a side trip first. He’s looking for someone out in the remote desert and only has GPS coordinates. Tony’s Jeep runs out of gas midway into their journey and they are forced to spend the night together out in the desert, which gives them the opportunity to form a close relationship.

The next day, they reach a secure compound and are taken inside by guards at gunpoint. Tony meets Khalid’s wife who explains that Khalid is not there and gives no further explanation. At the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Tony learns that his Khalid Fattah is suspected of being a financial supporter of ISIS. Two weeks earlier, Khalid was abducted by armed men and is now missing.

In a Baghdad hotel, Tony and Amira bond further. Amira appears to have a crush on Tony and invites him to visit her family home in Qatar on his way back to the U.S. Tony reluctantly agrees. In Doha, Tony meets Amira’s brother who is a producer for Al Jazeera. Amira secretly obtained an airline ticket on Tony’s flight back to the U.S. and her brother approves her travel. Seated together on the return flight to the U.S., Tony remarks to Amira that she’s becoming like Velcro.

Back in Washington, Tony’s boss takes him off of the Iraq account and reassigns him to their new client, Qatar. The government’s news agency and Al Jazeera have both been hacked. There is also a security breach which has to be investigated. After visiting the Qatari Embassy, Constantine can find no evidence of an electronic intrusion by Pegasus spyware. Tony’s boss says he and Constantine need to travel to Qatar to meet with their government communications minister and Al Jazeera to investigate the security breaches.

Before leaving on their trip, Amira unexpectedly shows up at Tony’s door. She’s just leased an apartment in his building, one floor below. After snooping around his apartment, she invites Tony for a housewarming dinner later that evening. After dinner, the two discuss international politics.

Tony and Constantine travel to Al Jazeera headquarters and discover that their phones have been infected with a Pegasus-like spyware. But this appears to be worse than Pegasus; enhanced and harder to detect. The two then travel to Israel where they learn that a key NSO engineer left the company a year earlier and has fallen off the grid. He has gone rogue and has apparently developed a new, more powerful and more dangerous version of Pegasus that could now wind up anywhere.

When Tony and Constantine arrive back in Washington, they learn that Instagram has been hacked by an AI-powered bot and hundreds of millions of deepfake messages were sent out throughout the world, attacking Al Jazeera for being antisemitic, anti-Hindu and anti-Shia. The impact causes shockwaves throughout the Arab world.

Tony invites a female co-worker over to his house to help him translate more of his mother’s Arabic documents. Amira shows up at his door, unannounced, and the two females have the opportunity to size each other up.

The series premiere concludes with an Arabic woman, dressed in a black abaya, entering the Qatari Embassy. In a secure room, we discover that the woman in black is Amira, being interviewed by two intelligence officers. Her intelligence handlers explain that she has been relieved of her mission in the Middle East and will now be assigned to the U.S., with an Al Jazeera correspondent assignment as her cover. Tony and Amira are both spies for their respective governments, but neither one is aware of it.

GENESIS ROGUE