Puppet Master

by Dale Brown

  “We should think about taking her on as an intern,” suggested Chelsea.

  “What? Reward a hacker?”

  “She’s fifteen. She’s smart enough to figure this out—maybe with some help, maybe a lot of help, but still. She’s got potential. The kind of person who ought to be working with us.”

  Massina pressed his lips together. No way was he hiring the girl, under any circumstances, even if she wasn’t a thief, and even if her father wasn’t part of the Russian mob.

  “I was wrong about how it works,” said Chelsea. “She gave me a hint. I have to work on it.”

  “Commercial applications?” asked Massina.

  “I think so. If you want to branch out into banking systems and security.”

  “Keep working on it,” he said, turning back to his computer.

  49

  Boston—a half hour later

  Needing to perfect an excuse for her father, Borya stopped briefly at Mary Lang’s house on the way home. Mary, an awkward, wallflowery kid at school, was overjoyed to see her, eagerly inviting Borya in and asking if she wanted to stay for dinner.

  Borya ignored both invitations, asking instead about a social studies assignment she had finished at school. Lang ran and got the handout with the question, copying it out for her in a neat script. Handing her the paper, she offered to help with it; Borya managed a polite smile, then told her that she had to get home.

  “Did my dad call your house?” she asked, stepping back from the door. Mary shook her head. “If he does, I was here all afternoon. Right?”

  “Oh, yes.” A bright smile broke out on Mary’s face. She practically salivated at the idea of being in on a conspiracy. “The whole afternoon. Doing social studies.”

  “Not the whole afternoon,” coached Borya. “Just from like, three. Until now.”

  “Until now.”

  “Gotta go.”

  “See you tomorrow,” said Mary Lang.

  “Oh yeah.”

  Borya flew home on her bike, confident that her cover story would stand any scrutiny her father threw at it. Skidding to a stop behind the back porch, she hoisted the bike on her shoulder and hustled up the steps, chaining it quickly and heading inside, barely catching her breath.

  Her father was standing in the kitchen.

  “What is Smart Metal?” he asked.

  The question drained the blood from her head. How had he found out where she had gone?

  He must really be a spy, she thought. He must have put a bug in my clothes.

  Her father held a business card out to her. “Smart Metal?” he asked again. “Chelsea Goodman?”

  “Oh.” Borya struggled to come up with an explanation. She had completely forgotten about the card; it must have been in the front hall. “My, uh, she’s my friend’s older sister. They do computer stuff. And robots.”

  That wasn’t enough explanation. Borya struggled to find the line between just enough information to satisfy him and not enough to get her into trouble. Part of her wanted to tell him about the place—it had been the coolest thing she’d ever seen, awesome beyond awesome. But opening that door would expose her to many more questions.

  “Uh, she, they want to hire more girls to be in, uh, like STEM stuff,” said Borya, stitching in information from a school assembly they’d had a few weeks back. STEM was big, especially for girls.

  Study your math!

  Ppppp.

  But finally an assembly had proved good for something.

  “What STEM?” asked her dad.

  “STEM, you know. Like, science, technology, engineering, and mom.”

  “Mom?”

  “I mean math.”

  The unintentional slip caught them both by surprise. Borya felt as if she had lost all the air in her chest. Her father looked the same way.

  “I . . . I don’t know why I said that.” She felt tears starting to well in her eyes.

  “It’s OK, baby,” said her father softly. His eyes were heavy as well.

  Tolevi worked silently in the kitchen, making his daughter’s favorite dinner, soft tacos with extra cheese. Technically, it was only her third or fourth favorite—pizza was number one, and her aunt Tricia’s pot roast was number two—but it was the only one of her favorites that he could actually cook himself.

  Borya didn’t know her mother’s cooking. If she did, those would surely be her favorites.

  Tolevi pushed his sadness away, concentrating on the meat cooking in the pan. He stirred it around, working it until no pink remained. He drained the oil into the sink, then put the pan back on the stove and began adding sauce and spices.

  I need to ask about this friend’s sister, he thought as he stirred. Get us off the topic of missing mom.

  “Borya, set the table,” he called.

  “Already done.”

  He turned around, surprised to find his daughter already at the table. He wondered if she had somehow heard what he was thinking.

  “Good day at school?” he asked, getting the taco shells out of the warming tray.

  “OK day.”

  “A lot of homework?”

  “I’m on it. I told you I did most of it.”

  “You did?” He didn’t quite succeed in making that sound like a statement rather than a question.

  They ate in silence, Tolevi dreading the fact that he had to tell her that Mrs. Jordan had bailed on him and he was substituting a former au pair, Mary Martyak. Borya hated Martyak, and he wasn’t particularly fond of her himself, but she was the best he could do on short notice.

  “Can I be excused?” Borya asked, her plate clean.

  “I have to travel again.”

  “You told me.”

  “I’m going to be gone for a week. Maybe more. I don’t know. The business—there are a lot of loose ends. It may be less time,” he said, trying to sound optimistic. “But Mary Martyak is coming to stay with you, starting tomorrow.”

  “I thought Mrs. Jordan!”

  “She can’t. But Mary was very excited. She really likes you.”

  “Ugh. Is she still doing that history stuff?”

  “Anthropology.”

  “Whatever. She thinks she’s a psychiatrist.”

  “You mean psychologist.”

  “And a know-it-all. And bossy.”

  “She’s in charge.”

  “Phew.” Borya got up from the table with her plate. “I’m old enough to stay by myself.”

  “And break curfew like the other night?”

  “I won’t do that again.”

  “Maybe next time. Break curfew or give Mary a hard time, and I’ll sell you to the nuns,” he told her, softening what had started as a threat into a joke. His daughter came and hugged him around the neck. “I mean it.”

  “I know.”

  “Where were you this afternoon?”

  “Mary Lang’s, studying. You said I could study with friends. That’s always been a rule. If their parents are home.”

  It was a rule. Though she should have told him.

  She had texted, though, hadn’t she? He was so distracted with everything else now that he couldn’t remember.

  Focus on your daughter. She’s all you have.

  “Mary Lang is the little fat one?” he asked.

  “No, you’re thinking of Georgina. She’s kind of skinny, with kinked-up hair.”

  “You know if anything ever happened to me, you would go and live with Uncle Bob and Aunt Lisa, right?”

  “What?” Borya practically crossed her eyes as she stared at him.

  “I’m not saying something is going to happen,” he added quickly. “But you know them and like them.”

  “Yeah.”

  Bob and Lisa weren’t actually related to Borya or her father, but were such close friends that they fully earned the title of uncle and aunt. As long as Borya could remember, she had spent at least a week with them every summer in upstate New York, where Uncle Bob owned a radio station and Aunt Lisa had the world’s biggest collecti
on of nail polish, always gladly shared. Their three daughters and son were a few years older than Borya, and all were out of the house now.

  “But nothing’s going to happen to me,” added Tolevi. “That I promise.”

  50

  Boston—two days later

  Johnny Givens took a deep breath, then lowered himself on his haunches in a squat. He put his two hands on the bar, closed his eyes briefly, then lifted.

  The bar with its plates weighed only twenty-five kilos, not a lot of weight; before his injury he was doing military presses with eighty easily.

  But this was different.

  He came up out of the squat slowly. So much of this was done with your legs, yet he felt nothing there, only a very slight strain in his shoulders.

  Hardly any strain.

  Up. Up!

  He cleaned the bar, pulling it from his waist to his chest with a quick jerk. Too quick a jerk, really; bad form, but he had it and this was no time to critique technique. He paused a moment, then pushed up slowly, shoulders doing the work.

  Easy.

  He felt a slight tremor at his back, the muscle weak. He fought against it, remembering what the doctor had said about how it would feel. This was all very strange. It was his body and yet it wasn’t his body.

  I’m still who I am. Still me. Still Johnny Givens.

  But who was Johnny Givens? An FBI agent? No—the Bureau had already put him on permanent disability, the bastards. The one time the bureaucracy actually worked expeditiously, and it was to screw him out of a job.

  “Oh don’t worry,” said the idiot HR person, “you’re on full disability. Losing your legs does that.”

  He wanted to scream at her. But some inbred courtesy kicked in, and all he did was hang up—gently.

  His mother would have been proud; he’d controlled his temper.

  But, Mom, you just don’t understand. Being polite, being reasonable—that’s not always the best way to do things. Sometimes if you don’t yell at people, they think what they’re doing or saying is OK.

  The world is not a reasonable place. If you’re reasonable, you’re at a disadvantage.

  Johnny lowered the weight to his shoulders. He took a deep breath, then slowly lowered himself. He could feel the strain in his thighs.

  Really? Strain in your thighs?

  You have no thighs! You have no legs! You’re metal and carbon and wires and digital crap and fake stuff. You don’t exist from a few inches below the waist.

  He knew he had nothing there, and yet he felt it. He was sure he felt it.

  He let go of the weights and stood straight up, head swimming.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here!” said Gestapo Bitch.

  He glanced up and saw her in the mirror at the side of the room. She had her arms crossed and was staring at him with a look of disgust.

  “Who says?” he snapped. He didn’t bother to look at her.

  “It’s not on your rehab program. Weights—no.”

  “Yeah, well, here I am.” Johnny squatted back down, grabbing the bar.

  Up, up up!

  He held the bar straight overhead, then lowered it slowly to his shoulders, then pushed back up.

  Six reps.

  Six—you can do it.

  Six.

  “Your form sucks,” said Gestapo Bitch as he returned the bar to the ground. “Your tush is too far out. You’re going to strain your back. Then what are you going to do?”

  “Bench presses.”

  Straightening, he walked over to the dumbbell rack, still refusing to look in her direction.

  “You hate me, don’t you?” she asked as he selected a pair of dumbbells.

  “Bet your ass.”

  “Good.”

  Johnny made a fist and slammed his right hand down on the twenty-kilo barbell.

  “What turned you into such a bitch?” he shouted, turning to confront her.

  But she was gone.

  51

  Moscow—two days later

  The Mercure Arbat was a well-regarded hotel in central Moscow used by many tourists and a decent number of businessmen, including those who had appointments at the nearby Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Gabor Tolevi booked a room there not because he liked the hotel—he did, in fact, but that was beside the point. He needed a place not only convenient to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but also one that would make it seem that he was doing nothing to hide his trip from any of the intelligence agencies that might be involved in Donetsk, including and especially SVR.

  Which meant that he would be followed whenever he left the hotel. He decided to test this with a walk immediately after arriving. Not bothering to change his clothes—he wanted it to be as easy as possible—he left his bag in the room and went out, strolling casually, as if taking in the sights.

  A young man in a blue sport coat and faded black jeans followed him out of the lobby. Tolevi wandered a few blocks, then went toward the metro, curious. Ordinarily the Russians used teams to trail anyone of real interest, and their usual procedure would call for a handoff at fairly regular intervals. But his shadow didn’t change, even inside the station; either Tolevi was considered of low value, or he was being followed by a Western service, probably the Americans, who didn’t have the manpower to waste on large teams.

  For someone used to the T in Boston, walking into a Moscow metro station was almost always disorienting. The stations, or at least those in the central part of the city, were works of art, temples even, as if the trains running through them were mythical gods. Walking into Smolenskaya metro station, which was hardly the fanciest, was like walking into a nineteenth-century monument. Arched glass fronts welcomed passengers, huge stone blocks made up the walls, and the platform could have been a dance hall at Versailles.

  The architectural flourishes and the artwork made it easy to feign interest while checking around, but Tolevi still couldn’t spot anyone tracking him except the man in the blue sport coat. He hesitated when the train came in, almost deciding to turn around and go up in the crowd, which would force the man to show that he was trailing him. But there was no point in that. He wasn’t trying to lose the trail, just make it seem as if he was taking precautions. And so he got on, rode two stops to Aleksandrovsky Sad, and walked to the Russian State Library; he mingled briefly inside, then came out and returned to the subway, heading back to the ministry.

  The man in the blue jacket had disappeared, but Tolevi couldn’t figure out if he had been handed off or not. As a final touch, he hailed a cab—more a whim, as he saw one nearby—and had it take him to the ministry.

  Even with all of his travel across Moscow, he was still nearly an hour ahead of his appointment. And this being Russia, it was another two and a half hours before an assistant to the deputy he’d been assigned to meet had him ushered in. The man’s name was different from that of the person he’d been told to meet, which was not unusual.

  Tolevi could complain about none of this. He sat as patiently as he could, trying not to squirm as the bureaucrat fumbled through some papers on a desk that looked as if it were a receiving station for a recycling operation. Files and loose papers were piled everywhere in the office, including on top of the computer at the side.

  “You are wanting to import household items,” said the clerk, fumbling with the paperwork.

  “No,” said Tolevi. “Common medicines—aspirin, cough syrup, bandages.”

  “Not Russian?” said the man, looking up.

  “These items are going to our friends in Donetsk,” said Tolevi. “There are needs.”

  He handed the man the paperwork. The man frowned, then slowly read through it.

  When Tolevi first started out in the import business, he’d made the mistake of offering a bribe to a Russian official. Fortunately, he did this subtly enough that he could back out with some amount of grace—and, more importantly, avoid arrest. It was not that all Russian officials were scrupulously honest; they were probably no more honest, on average, tha
n the officials in other developed countries. But corruption here took place at a different level than it did, say, in Azerbaijan. One did not bribe the men responsible for looking over the paperwork. If a bribe were to be required, it would be presented elsewhere, and always as a fee related to some function. It was very civilized.

  He’d already paid that fee. This should just be a formality.

  The clerk read through the paperwork, carefully checking each line against some mysterious page on his desk. Tolevi had no idea what he might be doing—the paperwork was very straightforward at this stage—but he knew better than to question the man.

  Finally, the man reached down and opened a bottom drawer. He took out a stamp and crashed it down on Tolevi’s documents until each was marked.

  отклонил

  Tolevi stared at the red characters in disbelief. The word—in Western letters, it was o-t-k-l-o-n-i-l—meant “rejected.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said, trying to maintain his temper. “Why is this rejected?”

  “You’re a foreigner.”

  “Yes, but I have the proper forms. I was told I had approval.”

  The clerk launched into a long explanation, speaking very quickly. Tolevi spoke excellent Russian—he had done so since he was a child—but he couldn’t understand half the words, let alone the logic.

  “How can I appeal?” he asked when the man finally paused to take a breath.

  “Appeal?” The clerk could not have looked more confused had they been speaking Greek. “There is no appeal.”

  “There is always a process,” said Tolevi. “I have been in business now for—”

  “I am sorry. I have another appointment.”

  “No. I want to see your supervisor.”

  The man rose. Tolevi debated; he could stay, which might bring out a supervisor, or it might result in a call to security. Once security was involved, anything could happen, including jail on whatever charge happened to be popular that day.

  “Really, there is no way?” said Tolevi, rising.

  The man shook his head.