Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  “Voila,” Ed said, as Luke pulled the door open.

  * * *

  “I’m not going to lie. This one looks bad for him.”

  Sergei Abramoff was watching the Putin fiasco unfold on TV. He sat at his desk in the security office of the building the government officially called Special Ministries Annex, but everyone else called The Breadbox. Spare, utilitarian, and Soviet in every possible way, it was an unsightly carbuncle added to the baroque grandeur of Red Square during the Stalin years.

  The place was drawn with a cookie cutter. In the beginning, the offices were, quite literally, all the same. That had changed somewhat over the years, with walls being torn down and added, bathrooms upgraded, security features installed… but even so, it was as drab as a building could possibly be.

  It was slated to be removed at some point, and Sergei himself would happily bulldoze it for them. The sticking point was the more than two hundred officials, aides, minor governmental organizations, office workers, and miscellaneous others who were warehoused here and needed to be close to the Kremlin to carry out their daily duties. You couldn’t simply tear down a building and leave all these people with nowhere to go in the morning, could you?

  Sergei sometimes entertained fantasies of getting this same job—night watchman—at the Kremlin, where he could wander the grand marble halls, his footsteps echoing in the shadows, as he absorbed the wonders of times long past. The time of the tsars, and the time of vision, and imagination, and possibility.

  But he knew it wasn’t to be. Jobs like that… they came to those who were well-connected. The men who had those jobs guarded them more jealously than they guarded the Kremlin itself, as if the fate of the world hung in the balance.

  No. Sergei would work here until they tore the old place down, and then probably he’d be transferred to somewhere equally dispiriting.

  He stared at the television. There were no windows in this room, but just outside this building, in Red Square, the largest commotion in fourteen years was unfolding. The Square, so many times the site of Russian history, was filling with policemen, soldiers, protestors, and counter-protestors.

  Putin was being credibly accused of corruption, and possible treason. He had risked the Apocalypse by sanctioning a Serbian attack on American interests, all to benefit his gangster friends in the oil and gas industries. There was the question of his removal from office, and even his arrest. It could happen as soon as tonight.

  And Sergei was trapped inside here, with history happening not even a kilometer away.

  “Putin will fall,” he said, while on the silent TV, a swarm of people behind pro-Putin banners chanted and raised their fists. “And I will miss the whole thing.”

  He took a deep drag of his cigarette. He sipped his cold black coffee, which was spiked with two shots of cheap vodka. He had been nipping at the bottle since the shift started. And he had been nipping at it before he came in, if he was being honest.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing ever happened in this building. Here he was, in his dungeon lair, with about six hours to go, the world standing on its head outside these walls, and he was a little bit drunk. He almost felt like he could take a nap.

  “This is my fate.”

  He glanced at the bank of security screens. Five screens high, eight screens across. The security cameras shot video that was as drab as the building itself. Black and white, grainy, snowy, poorly lit, with everything seeming to take place in the shadows. Watching these videos was like an exercise in contemplating post-modern abstraction. What was happening in there? People were moving around, but what were they doing? Did it even matter? These people were functionaries, at best.

  “Let them stay home after all,” Sergei said.

  At the bottom of the screen a message was blinking. EAST DOOR: 12:57 a.m. ID: CHEVSKY, T. 8675309.

  Hmmm. Tomasz Chevsky had come into the building... just a few moments ago. That figured. He was always creeping around. After years on this job, Sergei knew the office tenants by heart.

  Chevsky was a young guy in his thirties. He was tall to an extreme, and thin. He resembled a piece of taffy that had been pulled too far. He supposedly worked for the Academy of Sciences, overseeing research funding in various corners—universities, government labs, private think tanks. He traveled a bit, both abroad and across Russia. Sergei suspected he was FSB, with some minor role peering over the shoulders (and policing the thoughts) of scientists and professors. Why else would they put someone from the Academy of Sciences, all by himself, in this building?

  And why would he creep around the way that he did? For example, now. Chevsky knew that standard protocol when coming in after hours was to access the main entrance, and give a wave and a hello to the night watchman. He hadn’t done that. Of course, this was because he was FSB and above the law.

  If the protocols were to make any sense, then the side entrances would be inaccessible during night hours. The ID cards simply wouldn’t work. Naturally, that wasn’t the case, or how could FSB men come and go as they pleased?

  Sergei smiled. He enjoyed theorizing as to what the denizens of this Breadbox actually did for a living. Of course, most of them probably did what they claimed to do, but that was boring, wasn’t it? Might as well liven things up a bit.

  He watched the screens that monitored the third floor. There was Chevsky now, the international man of mystery, wearing his long coat and his hat pulled down over his face. He moved down the narrow hall toward his office, 313. Sergei couldn’t see Chevsky that clearly—the footage on the third floor was the worst of anywhere—but he could see that Chevsky wasn’t alone.

  There was a second man with Chevsky. He was tall with light hair, pale-skinned—his skin color contrasted starkly in the image, between its whiteness and the poorly lit darkness of his surroundings. He was somewhat smaller than Chevsky, and less broad.

  Sergei took a drag from his cigarette. He took another long sip of his spiked coffee. Tomasz Chevsky had come into the building in the middle of the night, with an unauthorized and unannounced visitor.

  There was a reasonable explanation, as there always was. They had gone to witness the protests, of course. And they had come in to use the men’s room. Or Chevsky had forgotten a file and dashed in to retrieve it. Or he decided to take this opportunity to show his friend his office. Chevsky’s office could not be much to be proud of, but people in this world took what small victories they could get.

  Even so, the rules were the rules. Chevsky ignoring them and pushing them aside could one day get Sergei in trouble.

  Sergei sighed. He took another sip of coffee. He picked up his nightstick. His gun was where it always was—strapped to his right thigh.

  “Let’s go talk with these gentlemen,” he said.

  * * *

  The door to the office wouldn’t open.

  Luke watched Ed try every permutation of swiping the ID card against, or near, or along the side of, or over, the electronic lockbox. Every time he did anything, a small red LED light would flash. And the door wouldn’t unlock.

  The door itself was heavy steel, out of sync with most of the doors on this hallway, which were primarily thick wood and smoked glass. It was obvious that whatever was going on inside this Academy of Sciences office, Room 313 of the Special Ministries Annex, was not for public consumption.

  “Ah, man,” Ed said under his breath. “This thing…”

  “It doesn’t look good,” Luke said. “Standing around like this does not look good. We are on camera.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Ed said.

  There was a small black video camera mounted on the ceiling at the end of the hall. They kept their backs to it. Somewhere, someone might be watching that video feed. And the longer Luke and Ed stood here, the more likely that someone was going to start paying attention to them.

  “We’re just going to have to blow it,” Luke said.

  Ed shrugged. “Yeah, how do we do that?”

  “The tall guy’s gun,�
� Luke said. “I have it in my pocket.”

  Ed shook his head and sighed. “Look at the lock. It’s steel reinforced. You’ll need to shoot it two or three times at least, and even then…”

  “We have to get in there somehow,” Luke said.

  “It’s going to be loud,” Ed said.

  “Yeah, I know. But at this point it’s either that, or go right back out the way we came in. We could be an inch away from knowing everything. If we’re going to find out, it’s on the other side of this door.”

  Ed’s big shoulders slumped inside the engineer’s coat.

  “All right, well…”

  Just down the hall, the ancient elevator groaned into life. The sound of gears cranking was loud in the silent tomb of the building. Someone was downstairs, and had just called the elevator. The elevator’s pulley system sounded like it hadn’t seen an ounce of lubrication in decades.

  Luke pulled the gun, keeping it low and against his body, out of sight of the camera.

  “Stone…” Ed said.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything hasty.”

  This was some Keystone Kops right here. Albert had declined to come into the building. Luke could understand that. If Albert got picked up on camera during a break-in at a dead GRU agent’s office… forget it.

  Okay, so they were without Albert. They had the electronic door card, but it wasn’t working, and for reasons they didn’t understand. Maybe there was a button to push somewhere? Maybe a sequence to type in? There was no way to know.

  And now the elevator…

  Luke couldn’t move toward it. If he did, and anyone was monitoring the video camera, then they would see his face clearly, and they might alert whoever was in the elevator that Luke was approaching it. Instead, he had to stand here and wait, pretend the elevator didn’t bother him, pretend that he barely noticed it.

  Ding!

  The elevator passed the second floor and kept creaking along. It was coming.

  “Your call,” Ed said, his head still down, his body still facing the lockbox.

  “I’m not going to have a lot of choice,” Luke said.

  “I know it.”

  Ding!

  The elevator was here. It stopped. Luke took a breath.

  He held the gun pointed down, ready to swing it around.

  The elevator door slid open. It sounded like an asthmatic gasping for air. Luke turned his head to see what came out.

  A man in a blue uniform stepped from the elevator. He was bulbous, and the uniform fit him too tightly. He was smoking a cigarette—it dangled from his mouth. He turned, and the first thing Luke noticed was the gun strapped to his meaty thigh. The next thing Luke noticed was the nightstick in the man’s left hand. The man smiled and said something in Russian.

  Luke raised the gun, holding it in a two-handed shooter’s stance. He moved quickly down the hall toward the man.

  “Ne dvigaysya!” he said.

  Don’t move.

  “Politsiya!”

  Police.

  The cigarette dropped from the man’s mouth. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, Luke would have laughed.

  At the last second, the man must have caught the accent—Luke sounded like a first-year exchange student. The man’s eyes widened, and he went for his own gun. But Luke was already on top of him.

  Luke grabbed the man by the hair and pulled him backward, off balance. He spun Chevsky’s gun around, raised it, and brought it down grip first on the man’s head.

  Then again.

  And again.

  The guard’s eyes went blank. He swooned. His head hit the floor with an audible THUNK. It sounded like someone had just thumped a cantaloupe, checking for ripeness. The man’s eyes rolled back into his head, showing the whites. His mouth hung open.

  The camera was still there on the ceiling, and Luke felt its eye upon him. He was painfully aware that he had just assaulted a night security guard, in full view of that camera, in a Russian office building near the Kremlin.

  Okay, never mind that. Think fast.

  The man had a tether around his neck, with a white electronic key card, very similar to the one Ed had.

  Luke snatched it and pulled hard. The tether snapped and the card came free. Luke walked back to Ed with it and handed it to him.

  “Here, try this. With a little luck, this guy can open any door in the building.”

  Ed swiped it. The green light on the lockbox lit up. Luke heard the lock disengage. Ed turned the metal handle and pushed the door open.

  He gave Luke a sidelong glance and grinned.

  They were in.

  Ed led the way inside. The room was in shadow, with red and blue lights flashing in the windows from Red Square. There was a voice out there, booming through a megaphone.

  There wasn’t much in here. Near the window was a floor lamp, but they ignored it. There was a desk with a computer screen on top and a tower CPU underneath it. There was a rolling office chair that went with the desk—the chair looked like something a middle school vice principal would have sat in when Luke was a kid. He ran his hand over its leather seat—sure enough, here and there were cracks in the leather, patched with heavy tape.

  There was no filing cabinet anywhere. There was a small refrigerator, like a kid might take to college. Luke opened it and pawed around inside—a half-eaten sandwich, a couple of plastic tubs with leftovers of some kind, a few bottles of beer on a shelf built into the door, and a can of Coke.

  Besides the fridge, there was nothing—just this desk with a computer. Luke opened the desk drawers—barely anything in there, either. Here was a roll of heavy masking tape, probably the same tape Chevsky had used to patch his chair. There were some pencils and pens in the desk, a stack of lined paper, and a scientific calculator. There were no computer disks of any kind.

  On top of the desk, next to the computer monitor, was an old abacus.

  Ed reached out and touched the beads.

  “No way,” he said under his breath.

  He moved a few beads along a metal rail, from one side to the other. “When I was a kid, there was this old, old guy who owned a candy store. Him and his wife. White couple, they were from… somewhere. Eastern Europe, maybe even Russia. I used to watch the old man counting his cash sometimes, going over his receipts. He had one of these things. His fingers moved so fast, it was like…”

  “Ed,” Luke said, breaking the reverie. “We have to get out of here. I need you to bring that guard inside this room. We can use this tape to tie him up and gag him. I don’t want to kill him. If we’re lucky, nobody finds him until morning.”

  Ed nodded. “Yeah, all right.”

  Luke sat at the computer. He ran his hand along the CPU, looking for an On button. He found it in seconds. A round light appeared on the screen, went to black, then the screen came on. It was very bright in the darkness of the room.

  A login page appeared, with a box to enter numbers and letters. There was a blinking cursor inside the box. Words in Cyrillic instructed the user what to do. Luke couldn’t read words written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

  “Of course,” he said. “What else did I think was going to happen?”

  With nothing to go on, he tried a few easy password guesses.

  1111. He hit the button that would normally be the Return key.

  The numbers disappeared. The blinking cursor reappeared.

  0000.

  No good.

  1234.

  Negative.

  This was ridiculous. Luke didn’t even know how many characters there were supposed to be. Considering a guy like Chevsky—who carried a walking stick he used as a bludgeon, a .38 inside his coat, a rape whistle in his pocket, and who showed a surprising ability with the fighting arts for someone who looked like Big Bird…

  His password was bound to be complicated.

  Ed came back in, dragging the guard along the floor. He flipped the man over onto his face.

  “He’s heavier than he loo
ks. Toss me that tape, will you?”

  Luke gave Ed the tape. Immediately, Ed pulled a long strip of it, pulled the guard’s arms behind his back, and wrapped the tape around his wrists. He pulled another strip, and did it again, doubling the tape up. Then he did it again.

  Luke turned back to the computer. Ed knew what he was doing.

  He looked down at the CPU. It was a black rectangle, maybe two feet high. At the bottom, it was hooked to two metal clasps built into the floor. So much for taking the entire box with him. But that was probably a good thing—all he needed was the hard drive. Someone back home would be able to access it and read the contents.

  He hit the power button. The screen went dark, and returned to a white dot in the middle. After a few seconds, that faded and went out. Luke stood.

  He glanced down at Ed. Ed had already finished taping the guy’s wrists and mouth. Now he was taping the man’s ankles together.

  Luke lined up the computer tower, and gave it a heavy kick with the heel of his foot. The shoe connected, but the casing didn’t break. He kicked it again. And again. At each kick, the tower wanted to slide across the floor, but it couldn’t—the clasps anchored it to the spot.

  Luke kicked it again. The hard plastic casing cracked apart. He kneeled, put his fingers inside the crack, and wrenched it open further.

  “You want me to do that?” Ed said. “You seem to be having some trouble.”

  Luke smiled and shook his head. He took a breath, then pulled the two halves of the tower away from each other. He snaked an arm inside and found the hard drive. It was mounted inside the box with tiny screws. With no screwdriver, it could take all night to get those things open. He yanked on the drive and broke the plastic mounts. Then he unplugged the drive from the motherboard.

  He pulled it out and looked at it—just a silver metal box. Okay. He slipped it into his pocket, then reached inside the tower again on the off chance there was another one. His fingers moved along the board, then behind it, then along the top and bottom—nothing. Satisfied, Luke stood.

  Ed was already standing. The guard was hogtied on the ground, snoring deeply, the air being sucked through his nose. His mouth was sealed shut. Luke had clocked the guy three good ones—he was going to wake up with a whale of headache tomorrow.