by Seeley James
“Do you know what he wants?” Pia asked.
“Something about Pozdeeva.” Bianca hesitated. “By the way, I told Mr. Pozdeeva where to find you. I figured you and Miguel could handle him if he turns out to be a nutcase.”
Pia thanked her and clicked off. As she started to dial Shikowitz, a voice shouted from the street. Miguel planted his feet and faced the man running across the grass.
The figure staggered more than ran. He called out Pia’s name and dropped an overcoat and trudged a few more steps. Miguel and Pia exchanged a glance. The man was now thirty yards away, his arms stretching to reach them. He shouted something unintelligible, then fell.
Pia ran to offer aid. Miguel tracked slightly behind. As she approached, the man rose to his hands and knees. He pulled something from his pocket, tossed it on the grass, then threw up pink-and-yellow bile.
Instinctively cautious about his condition, Pia slowed and stopped two feet away. “What’s wrong?”
“They kill me.” The man’s Russian accent was thick. He barfed more. “In the … tashnit.”
The man rolled on his back and thumbed at his pool of lunch slowly sinking into the grass.
“What is tashnit?” Pia looked at Miguel, who was busy dialing 911. “What happened? How can I help you?”
“No help. Too late.” He coughed uncontrollably. “They kill me. Kaliningrad.”
“An ambulance is on the way. Hang in there. Who killed you?”
The man spluttered, “Job fifteen…verses fifteen and sixteen.”
Screeching tires on the street drew her attention. Eight men jumped from two plain sedans and ran toward them, shouting over each other.
“Are you Pozdeeva?” She knelt next to the man.
He ran his fingers through his thin, black hair and pulled out a shocking handful. “Poisoned. Like … like Litvinenko.”
His eyes rolled back in his head.
A mass of men in dark suits crowded around them. “FBI. Stand back.”
“Wait a second!” Pia pushed her shoulder into one of the agents. “He was trying to talk to me.”
“We’ve got this under control, ma’am. This is an international incident. Step away. Now.”
He and another man politely pushed her back.
Pia finished dialing her call and spoke in a loud voice. “Director Shikowitz, this is Pia Sabel. I’m sorry I couldn’t take your call earlier. Several of your men are here along with the man I think is Pozdeeva.”
The FBI agents stopped what they were doing and faced her.
“Pozdeeva is a Russian officer trying to defect,” Shikowtiz said. “It sounds like they got to him. Let me speak to an agent.”
Pia handed the phone to the nearest Feeb. After the director spoke to him, the tight circle opened wide enough to let her in. One agent held Pozdeeva’s head up and gently poured water into his mouth.
“Can you hear me, Mr. Pozdeeva?” Pia knelt again, her phone on speaker for the director. She examined his cold, clammy skin. His lips looked frozen despite the summer heat. More clumps of hair fell as the agent holding him up adjusted his grip.
“Radiation.” Pozdeeva opened his eyes. “In my drink. I was … not careful.” His head lolled. He tried to raise his hand to Pia’s face. It fell into his lap. “You remember me?”
She wanted to help him, remember him, cure him, but the threat of radioactivity froze her in place. Pia tried to remember his face—round and pleasant, the far end of middle-age—but came up with nothing. She shook her head sadly.
“Job.” He coughed again, deep and horrible, ending with a spit of blood. “FSB. FBI. CIA. Don’t …”
He puked again, this time on the knees of an agent. Everyone but Pia stepped back.
“You remember …” He gasped for air and reached for Pia’s hand. “You will love your neighbor as yourself.”
He spasmed and shook. The life blinked out of his eyes. Black bile oozed from his mouth.
A siren preceded the ambulance. No one moved from the dead man. They stood and stared at his form while the paramedics grabbed their gear and ran to join them.
The huddled group backed up to give the first responders access.
An agent turned to Pia. “Did he give you anything?”
“No. He was puking his guts out. I didn’t get too close.”
“Did he tell you anything?”
“All he got out was that they killed him.”
“What did he mean?” The agent leaned into her personal space.
“I have no idea.” Pia planted a hand on the agent’s chest and pushed him back a foot.
“Why did he tell you to love your neighbor?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What’s your guess?”
“He’s religious, maybe? Jesus said to love your neighbor was the second most important of the Ten Commandments.”
The agent squinted and took a moment to think. “You sure he didn’t give you anything?”
“One hundred percent.” Pia held her hands out as if to invite a pat-down.
She could see the gears working in his head: did he want to search a friend of the director, or take her word for it? He said goodbye and turned away.
The agents went through Pozdeeva’s pockets and bagged everything. Then they returned to their car and drove off. The ambulance crew packed the body on a gurney and wheeled him back to their ambulance and roared away.
Pia pulled up a translator app on her phone and thumbed in a few phonetic spellings of tashnit until one of them made sense.
A respectful distance behind them, the practice squad had lined up to watch the commotion. They stared at the empty place where Pozdeeva died.
“Charnay,” Pia called over her shoulder, “would you bring me your water, please?”
A moment later, the midfielder handed her a one-gallon Bubba Keg. Pia opened the spout and poured water over a specific place in the puke. A shiny piece of silver and black emerged.
A large USB drive.
CHAPTER 4
A month after having ice cream with Kasey Earl, I strode down the halls of the Sabel Industries corporate office in Bethesda, Maryland. I was on the someteenth floor pretending I wasn’t lost while I searched for a clue about where they moved the big meeting room. Huge office buildings give me the creeps. They’re full of zombies wearing suits and shiny shoes, the most dangerous of our species.
Mercury matched my stride in his party-toga. You’re going to include me in the conversation again, right, my brutha?
In case you’re wondering, Mercury looks like Will Smith on steroids and claims the Roman artists were white-gazing their work.
I said, We had a deal: you saved my ass—and I introduced you to Ms. Sabel as promised. She didn’t see you—because you’re a FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION! I’m not going to risk my job by voicing my delusions again. End of story.
Mercury rose on his tiny bronze wings and floated around me. Dawg. She spoke to me. We made a connection. Pia-Caesar-Sabel is down with the program. C’mon, man. A new day is dawning. The Dii Consentes is going to make a comeback thanks to—
I said, She didn’t even look in your direction.
Mercury said, Aw homie, you know she was averting her eyes. Conditioned by all that Judeo-Christian crack about God being the almighty lord who you’re not worthy to look at. The burning bush and all that. She’s not used to us chill gods. You gotta tell her—the whole Roman pantheon is street. You can hold a ceremony in my honor and escort her to—
I said, I’m not escorting anyone anywhere. I gotta go back on my meds.
I stuck my head in the nearest office door and got directions. The big meeting room had not moved in twenty years—the guy claimed.
I was two floors off and headed for the elevator. I checked my watch while the elevator music tried to extract my soul. Three minutes late. Not bad for most corporate meetings, but the young lady holding this one was not like most executives.
When I opened the door, all
eyes turned to me. Including the president of Sabel Technology, Bianca Dominguez.
Bianca—who could have easily won the Miss Latin America contest every year for the last decade but instead chose to attend MIT and work for the NSA before joining Sabel Technology—stood in front of a wall-sized screen, pointing at a chart with a hundred circles and arrows. She loathed late-comers and stopped talking mid-sentence. She waited in silence and watched me search for an open chair. Everyone followed my painful progress.
I tried to become invisible as I took the last few steps.
From the head of the table, Ms. Sabel fixed her gaze on me. “Jacob, thank you for running that errand for me. You can begin now, Bianca.”
Saved by the boss.
In the world of brown-nosing, nothing pays off like dragging the company owner’s unconscious body out of a burning wreck before it erupts in a scorching fireball. Yeah, I did that. She’s been covering for me ever since.
Everyone turned back to Bianca.
“The USA is at war—and most people don’t even know it. Russia is waging a psychological war against us. The battleground is unfamiliar territory for the US: traditional print and television media, online advertising, social media, even our political leaders.” Bianca changed slides to a diagram of a brain. “The war is being fought in the human mind. What we believe, who we trust, and where we find information to form decisions is being controlled by actors we believe to be working for the Russian Federation.”
She brought up a photo of Ilya Pozdeeva, the man who died at Ms. Sabel’s feet.
“Thanks to Mr. Pozdeeva, we have an inkling of their capability, but we still don’t have enough information to fight back. He left us hundreds of clues that my team has been trying to untangle for weeks. Since Kryptos, the coded sculpture in the CIA courtyard, took years to crack, we don’t feel bad. However, in consultation with Ms. Sabel, we’ve decided to put more great minds to work on this project. That’s why you’re here today.”
Out of the twenty people in the room, Bianca focused a skeptical gaze on me. I didn’t blame her. Her team had some of the smartest people on the planet. Even I wondered what I was doing in the meeting.
Bianca gave us background on Ilya Pozdeeva. His career started in Russia’s Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye or Main Intelligence Directorate, GRU. The GRU functions like the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, only with twenty-five thousand spetznatz troops to help them. Later he transferred to the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki or SVR. They are Russia’s foreign intel service—spies and clandestine operations like the CIA, except that they report directly to the President of Russia. Pozdeeva was a liaison who carried top-secret orders from SVR officials in the Kremlin to various GRU units scattered around Europe.
“As an example of what the GRU can do,” Bianca said, “a man named Yevgeny Bogachev runs one of their projects. According to Treasury, he authored Cryptolocker, a ransomware program that shuts down a company’s servers until they pay a hefty fee. Bogachev’s believed to have earned over $100 million from his exploits.”
She changed to the next slide.
“Top-secret groups called bandas, Russian for team, run the GRU’s scariest operations. We aren’t sure how many are operating. Estimates run as high as twenty. Some bandas are special ops groups; others are purely technical, hackers. Some are in-between. One of them wrote an app that reduced artillery calculations from twenty minutes to fifteen seconds. They posed as Belgian software developers and sold their app to the Ukrainian Army. Once the Ukrainians started using the app, the Russians hacked in, retargeted the trajectories and caused terrible friendly-fire incidents.”
Having been fired on by US Army artillery, I felt the pain of the Ukrainian gunners and victims alike. Fratricide is among the most horrific and rarely discussed aspects of war.
“Democracy itself is under attack,” Bianca said. “Our country is built on trust. We trust our government, even if our favorite politicians are not in power. We trust our free press, even if our favorite sources are slanted left or right. We trust our two-party system to work out compromises. We have trusted our democratic system for over two hundred years. The information Mr. Pozdeeva gave us proves Russia is trying to break that trust to influence our elections. What we don’t yet understand is why or to what end.”
Bianca turned off the screen and nodded to Ms. Sabel, whose gray-green eyes swept the room like a colonel looking over the battalion before battle. She strode to the front of the room, looking like a tiger trapped in a business suit.
“Ilya Pozdeeva died of polonium-210 radiation poisoning.” Ms. Sabel started to speak, then stopped, winced, and took a moment. “I’m sorry. Until we did the research, I’d forgotten that I’d met him. His daughter played for Russia. We met after a game in Leipzig a couple years ago.”
She took a deep breath. “While Mr. Pozdeeva had ample opportunity to give this data to the FBI, he chose to leave an encrypted USB to me. The CIA won’t tell us anything about him. It took our people several days to crack the encryption. We’re now in possession of a significant cache of data.
“The only items that stood on their own was a group of reports about a network of tens of thousands of users on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media. There’s also a list of Russian-sponsored news sites. They’re all small and appear to be coordinated. Here is a meme posted by one of these groups.” She clicked to a picture of a woman wearing a headscarf shaking hands with President Hunter. Beneath them in Arabic-looking script it read, “American Muslims support Veronica Hunter.” Bianca clicked again, and another meme came up. This time a woman cried on a casket draped in an American flag. The caption read, “Veronica Hunter calls them acceptable losses.” Her third slide showed Jesus arm wrestling Satan. This one quoted Satan, “If I win, Hunter wins,” while Jesus replied, “Not if I can help it.”
Bianca waited while we processed the memes. She said, “Each of these came with a ‘Learn More’ button that took you to a dubious site. We traced those sites back to Kremlin-run media companies. These news sites will post a related, but dubious news story. Another site will quote the first site, and others will quote the second site, covering up the trail to the original. After the posts are shared all over the place, yet another Russian news site will post an article about their own fake news being ignored by traditional media outlets. Then their coordinated social media users pile on and create a fake news storm.”
“Excuse me,” Tania raised her hand. “H-h-how do we know the news is f-f-fake?”
Tania is Ms. Sabel’s best friend and my partner in leading the Sabels’ personal security operations. She wore a black beret over her wild hair to conceal a white bandage that covered a good portion of her head. A terrorist’s bullet had cracked her skull and left her recovering from a serious head injury. She was on the mend, but an annoying stammer remained. The doctors thought her speech would eventually heal.
“Whether you like mainstream media or not,” Ms. Sabel said, “professional news organizations do two things that give their work credibility. They name the publisher and reporter on each story, and they verify every detail from independent sources. They may not always get it right, and their sources may request anonymity, but they take responsibility for their stories as professionals. We can tell fake news because there is no confirmation, no verifiable facts, and no way to find the reporter who first posted the story.”
“Then we’ve found the source of all the fake news?” Miguel asked.
“Before you think we can stamp them out,” she replied, “all of the news sites in this database have been closed. The user accounts have been deleted as well. They put these up and take them down in a matter of days. But the conspiracy theories remain in circulation and take on a life of their own.”
“Why is-is-isn’t the FBI working-ing…” Tania flushed when her words refused to come out.
Ms. Sabel pointed to Miguel.
An Indian who grew up in LA, he spent his summers learning
the ancient ways from his grandfather back on the Rez in Arizona. The stoic Navajo philosophy didn’t leave him with an affinity for public speaking.
He stood and cleared his throat. “Just before Pozdeeva died, he said, ‘Job fifteen, verses fifteen and sixteen.’ Not my religion, so I looked it up on Biblegateway. It reads, God puts no trust even in his holy ones, and the heavens are not clean in his sight; how much less one who is abominable and corrupt, one who drinks iniquity like water!” Miguel shrugged. “My take: if your God doesn’t trust anyone, who can you trust? We think Pozdeeva meant, trust no one. Because of that, we decided not to share this with anyone outside this room.”
Miguel sat back down. It was more words in one stretch than I’d ever heard out of him.
Ms. Sabel said, “Social media companies and government agencies are constantly trying to shut these people down. But there’s only so much you can do when a government shields the perpetrators. Being a nuclear superpower means any small escalation can become a world-ending escalation all too quickly. I think that’s why Pozdeeva gave this to me. He might not trust the FBI or CIA. Or he might have given this to them already. We’ll never know.”
The group around the table murmured and nodded. The job seemed simple enough to me: find some hackers and pull the plug on them. But then I thought about it—how do you pull the plug on hackers? Posting fake news isn’t exactly a capital crime. It’s more like a bad-boy crime. A couple of months in jail, if we can crowbar them out of Moscow and pin a serious charge on them. Maybe we should punish the Americans who repost the stuff without verifying the news source.
Wow. That could wipe out a lot of innocent grandmothers—including mine.
I asked, “You want us to track down the people who set up the fake sites and eliminate them?”
The desk jockeys in the room turned to me like a school of fish that had just spotted a shark. I need to watch my language around the suits; they just don’t appreciate how many of the world’s problems can be solved with a well-placed bullet.
