“Sarah, I have no idea who you’ve been talking to, or what you’re talking about right now, but I had nothing to do with what happened to Mark. Nothing.”
“Bullshit,” Sarah spat.
“Wait, just … wait. The software—what about it? What does that have to do with me?”
“Whoever set Mark up, they were using him to get the software contract closed. I don’t know why, but the software is vital to this whole thing, and you fed Mark crucial information that helped close his deal. You’re on the Pentagon IT team—you’re telling me you had nothing to do with that?”
Aaron remained frozen beneath Sarah, even though he could have shoved her hundred-pound frame off his body with relative ease. The frenzy of her physical assault had assuaged, and she noticed the beads of sweat forming along Aaron’s hairline and running off the side of his face. His eyes were frozen on her, unblinking, and Sarah could see that he was scared. Not nervous, not anxious to talk his way out of being busted, but scared. She wasn’t ready to withdraw the physical threat she held over him, but Sarah’s certainty of Aaron’s guilt began to flag. Guilty people were afraid of being caught; Aaron was clearly afraid of being hit again.
“Sarah … I just implement the software and keep it running. I have no say, none, in what we use or the scope in which we use it. I mean, occasionally they’ll ask my opinion, but it’s not like anyone actually listens to me. I’m just an IT nerd.”
Sarah dug her knees into Aaron’s shoulder, and he grimaced in pain. She believed him, but she didn’t want to—Aaron was the key, she had been certain, to free Mark. But now it was seeming less and less likely that was the case.
“What about Vishny?” Sarah pressed, just to cover all her bases. “You have no relationship with him at all?”
Aaron’s face twisted in full-on bafflement. “Sergei Vishny?” he asked, confused. “That’s … weird.”
“Don’t test my patience, Aaron,” Sarah warned, driving her weight into Aaron once more. “Weird how?”
“Okay, okay,” Aaron yelped. “Sergei Vishny … he’s rich. Crazy rich. You know that, I’m sure. What you probably don’t know is Vishny got his start in the underground tech world. He was, like, the best Russian hacker, and he earned his fortune by developing spyware software and apps that blew everything else out of the water.”
“So what?”
“Well, after Vishny left the underground a different Vishny emerged. Or was created. That’s what a bunch of people say. There was a moment where the Vishny everyone knew—this weird, reclusive, innovative anarchist—disappeared. Like, poof. He was just gone. And then this new Vishny emerged. And people have speculated that the real Vishny is gone, bumped off by his own government.
“These days, Russian hackers use the name Vishny for their work. If someone stole everyone’s personal information from, like, a video game server, ‘Vishny’ would take the credit. Or when the Ukraine government was hacked, ‘Vishny’ claimed responsibility. Basically, Vishny is the calling card for Russian hacking. It might be one person, it might be a group of people, it might even be the Russian government. No one knows. It’s like Anonymous, but not as obvious.”
“So the real Vishny, he hasn’t made a comeback?”
“Not that anyone knows.”
“Aaron, if you’re lying—”
“I swear, Sarah,” Aaron pleaded. “I swear.”
With a small amount of reluctance—Sarah harbored suspicions against everyone, and Aaron was no exception—she pulled the pepper spray away from Aaron’s face and stood up, releasing him from her hold. “Sorry about beating you up,” she murmured.
Aaron dusted himself off and dabbed his finger over his cheek, checking the gash Sarah’s ring had made against his skin. “I wouldn’t say you beat me up—it was more a sucker punch, and a couple lucky knee shots to my stomach.”
“I also knocked you over the couch,” Sarah added.
“All right,” Aaron said, waving Sarah away as she stepped close to help examine his cut. “Let’s drop it while I still have a shred of dignity left.”
He fell onto the couch and exhaled sharply. “So, you mentioned that Pentagon software—I haven’t told you, but we’ve been having nothing but problems ever since launching that new program. That’s why I’ve been working so late every night.”
“The software is bad, Aaron,” Sarah said, sitting on the coffee table across from him and catching his gaze. “Someone has been setting Mark up for a long time, using Vishny … whatever … to make it look like he had ties to Russia. From what I can tell, Mark wasn’t only being framed as a traitor, he was being manipulated into getting this software contract closed. Somebody—probably the Russians, if I had to guess—were hell-bent on Mark making that deal.”
Aaron’s face went flush. “If that’s the case … shit. Then what does that software actually do? I mean, if someone is planting some kind of virus or spyware into the heart of the Pentagon, that could be, like, apocalyptic.”
“That’s why we have to get to the bottom of this and stop whoever’s behind it.”
Aaron snickered. “Sure, an IT drone and a nurse are going to unravel an international conspiracy. And how would you suggest we do that?”
There was a long moment of silence as Sarah processed Aaron’s point. They were standing on the shores of deep, dark water, and neither of them were equipped to navigate their way to the other side. Or get there before someone shoved their faces beneath the waves and held them under until they stopped moving. Still, Sarah couldn’t stop. For Mark, for their baby. She couldn’t stop until Mark was free or their unknown enemies broke her. And this was not her breaking point. Not even close.
“How do we learn what this software does, what it’s really doing?” Sarah asked.
“I’d have to hack my way into its root operations. And I can only do that from the Pentagon’s central mainframe. Which is restricted from me and especially from you. I guess we just break our way in, hack it, and find what we’re looking for.”
Sarah nodded, resolved. “Okay.”
“Okay? Okay … what?” Aaron said, an eyebrow cocked in Sarah’s direction. “Breaking into the Pentagon mainframe, that … that was a joke. We can’t really do that.”
“Aaron, my husband’s life is at stake. The safety of this entire country might be at stake. We can’t not do this.”
“Sure we can. We just need to tell someone else what you’ve found out.”
“Aaron, we have nowhere to turn.” Sarah stood up from the coffee table and began pacing the room. “I can’t go anywhere with what I know because no one will ever, ever believe me. I’m the wife of a spy, as far as anyone is concerned. And you can’t bring this to anyone because it looks like a crazy conspiracy theory.”
“It sorta is.”
“And,” Sarah continued, ignoring Aaron, “if anyone asks how you found this stuff out, the road leads right back to me. We have to do this, Aaron. We have to find a way to do this.”
Aaron exhaled, fanning his lips as he did. He was caving, Sarah saw it in his eyes. “I mentioned the part where I’m just an IT nerd, right?”
“Well,” Sarah said, grasping Aaron’s hand and helping him to his feet, “we’ll just have to make do with what we have. Now come on, we need a plan.”
25
Though Mark was learning—quickly—how to survive in extreme circumstances, he was far from being an actual spy. Still, some tactics were obvious. Like, when you’re following someone, stay a few car lengths behind them to avoid detection. That insight came to mind after a few blocks of riding on Gregori’s tailpipe, anxiously waiting for him to get to where he was going.
Wherever Gregori was going, though, it wasn’t in Moscow. And that filled Mark with a profound sense of unease. Leaving the Hotel National, he pursued the oversized SUV—oversized and reinforced with blacked-out windows, like the military-grade cousin of an Escalade—down streets and landmarks he’d become familiar with thanks to his field trips with Ole
g and Alex. Mark had a strong internal compass, and that helped him acclimate to new places in a short amount of time. Within days, Mark had begun deciphering how Moscow functioned. Ultimately, it was a major city like so many others—its streets had their own rhythm, the architecture its own character. There were tourist traps and insulated wealth, wasteful sprawl and islands of poverty. Mark would never claim that he knew Moscow completely, but he was at least achieving literacy. The more the SUV drove, however, all those things Mark had acquainted himself with were becoming less and less part of the fabric of his surroundings. Ornate buildings, ripe with history, gave way to uniform concrete housing edifices; those edifices gave way to industrial lots and belching smokestacks. And, soon, all the vestiges of Moscow, shed piece by piece, were gone, replaced by a flat landscape barely visible against the night’s darkness.
Snow started to fall and Mark drove on, thinking of Ania. His only ally; his only friend. And he’d left her, dead, on the floor of a bathroom. He couldn’t shake the image of her dying in his arms, and he didn’t want to. Her life had been ruined by machinations beyond her control, the same as Mark’s. Ania’s existence was destroyed for no reason other than greed. Greed and power. He’d made a promise to her, to get Gregori. To make him pay for what he’d done to both of them, and damn it, he was going to make good on his word.
Mark couldn’t even guess where he was, and he was even more clueless about where he was heading. Each mile he traveled took him farther away from the hard-fought confidence he’d accrued, not only by becoming acquainted with the city that held him captive, but also by preventing it from killing him. That was gone, leaving Mark with only the dim taillights of the SUV he pursued long into the night. He’d turned his own headlights off when twisting around a bend and out of the SUV’s rearview scope, making the darkness ahead even more sharply pronounced. Mark, kept alert by adrenaline, maintained a white-knuckle grip on the wheel and reminded himself that out of darkness comes light. Clarity. And Mark would wrench clarity straight from Gregori’s mouth if that’s what it took. He hadn’t come this far to be denied the light that’d been snuffed out the moment Agent O’Neal wrapped a sack over his head and took him away from everything he knew and loved.
After two long, uncertain hours of driving, the SUV took a slow right turn, disappearing into a tree-lined road. Mark, cruising on the fumes of an empty gas tank, drove past the turn without even slowing. He glanced down the unpaved road just in time to see the SUV swallowed by the snow-covered trees, their branches bowed downward and resembling an expectant maw. Taking precaution to keep his distance, Mark drove a safe measure before pulling off to the side of the road. He took a moment, standing at the cusp of the wintry forest ahead of him. He didn’t know what to think or what to expect, but it was probably better that way. Maybe he’d descend into those woods and encounter Gregori’s sanctuary, maybe he’d find an FSB stronghold. Mark had no way of knowing, and it wouldn’t matter if he did. This was the chance to get some payback and possibly even take back his freedom and his life. As he stepped into the wilderness, the few inches of untouched snow crunching as it packed beneath his feet, Mark knew that everything was on the line. All roads bottlenecked here, and the other side only offered two scenarios: He’d walk away a free man or he’d dragged away a dead one.
It was one or the other.
* * *
From the bottom of a recessed slope that led away from the solitary cabin deep in the woods, Mark watched. Two guards armed with automatic rifles slung across their shoulders roamed the front of the cabin, pacing and re-pacing the tracks they left in the snow. As far as Mark could tell, this was the only security on hand. The cabin, diminutive and shielded by nothing other than its knotted-wood exterior, was no base of operations. It was clearly a getaway home that, at the moment, was acting as Gregori’s safe house. And if Mark had to guess, Gregori was hiding from him, whether he knew it or not. The murder of two of his spies—one of whom had turned coats against him—drove Gregori off the grid, and not even seclusion was good enough. Gregori needed guards. He needed protection. Which meant one thing:
Gregori was spooked.
That was good, Mark reasoned. He wanted Gregori rattled and off his game. He wanted him to feel like his life was at risk. And it was a life, judging by Gregori’s run-and-hide response to Viktor’s death, that Gregori didn’t want to have taken from him. He’d respond just fine, Mark considered, to having a gun shoved in his face.
Mark moved low and slow, crouching as he followed a crescent-shaped path that flanked his way toward the rear of the cabin. He hugged the bank of a frozen lake that demarcated a separation between the trees; through the fog that hung low over the icy surface, Mark could only catch a glimpse of the grove on the opposite bank, the bare trees resembling elongated specters hovering in space.
Positioned behind the cabin so the guards surveying the acreage ahead couldn’t see him, Mark tread cautious steps toward the back door. Every footfall, to Mark’s ears, was like a record needle scratching across the surface of spinning vinyl; every step he took, every twig hidden beneath the snow that he snapped, was amplified to an unbearable pitch. Even as the crisp air of the breaking dawn breathed its frigid tendrils down Mark’s back, beads of sweat still formed at his neck and rolled down the length of his spine. His hand, twitching over the butt of the gun, trembled as the nervous unease coalesced within Mark’s body. Fear, though, could be a revelatory experience. When Sarah told him that she was pregnant, one of the many emotions that flooded Mark’s brain was fear, right alongside happiness, excitement, and awe. Fear clouded Mark’s vision of his future as a father like a splash of ink dropped into a glass of water, spreading until the glass was robbed of its transparency. Mark figured he’d be afraid during labor, afraid the first night they all came home from the hospital and were alone with this brand-new human life. Feeling such palpable fear that those days—and many more like them—were coming, and all because of something that was the size of a jelly bean, alarmed Mark. But, strangely, he had been okay with that. He had been okay with having his life turned upside down and seeing what happened. As Mark treaded toward the cabin, he realized how little concern he harbored for the armed guards that were no more than a shout away. What really scared Mark was missing all those changes that would come with the birth of his child. If he didn’t win this encounter with Gregori, he’d never even know what life as a father was like. The more Mark thought about being robbed of that experience, the more his determination to outsmart Gregori grew. His entire life—however much of it was left—would be shaped by what Mark could pry from Gregori. Extracting information would not, Mark was certain, be easy.
Mark came to the back door, a fortified wooden slab that’d been warped by the effects of time. Though disjointed, it still hung snugly in the frame, protecting the interior from the elements, hungry animals, and intruders. Steadying his hand, Mark gripped the dented metal doorknob and gave it the slightest twist.
It clicked.
Mark continued the knob’s clockwise spin, enough to pop the catch away from the stop. Mark slowly pushed the door open, allowing just a few inches of space. Enough for him to squeeze his way through.
He reminded himself to breathe.
Inside the cabin, he held a steady, unmoving pose. Ahead of him was a narrow hallway leading into the cabin’s central artery. Three open doorways lined each side of the wall. Mark trained his gun straight ahead, his gaze unblinking, as he waited for someone to respond to his entrance. Being forced to fire a single bullet would spell trouble with the patrolling guards, but trouble was an upgrade compared to being gunned down by Gregori before he even had a chance to ask him a question. He waited, unmoving, for a long, anxious stretch. But no one came.
One foot in front of the other, each barely leaving the ground to minimize impact, Mark crept down the hall. Leading with his gun, he twisted into the first open doorway—an empty bathroom. Mark breathed the smallest sigh of relief then turned his attention ba
ck to the hallway. It seemed to stretch and deepen before his eyes. Another step forward; the subtle sound of his footsteps shuffling across the floor became drowned out by the rising treble of his heart thumping in his ears. Mark corkscrewed into the second room, which was crammed with nothing but boxes and plastic containers, dusty and smelling like they hadn’t been touched in a long, long time. One room remained, and Mark began to wonder if, somehow, Gregori had known Mark was pursuing him, and he was lying in wait. Mark could very well be walking into a trap. Gregori might be old, but he was seasoned, smart, and he probably didn’t make many mistakes. It was entirely conceivable—likely, even—that the spymaster had spotted Mark’s car in pursuit, and now he was just waiting for Mark to fall right into his hands. Mark hugged the wall adjacent to the third and final door’s frame, ready for anything. But just as he was about to twist his body to confront whatever was inside, Mark spotted something:
Gregori. Seated in the far corner of the living room, his back to Mark.
Mark waited for the old spy to respond to his presence, to whip around with a loaded gun in his hand or somehow alert the guards stationed just on the other side of the room’s northern wall. But he didn’t. Gregori, occupied by the computer that rested on the desk in front of him, had no idea Mark was there.
Terror washed over Mark. The man who held Mark’s future in the palm of his hand was sitting fifteen feet away; Mark had never known higher stakes in his entire life.
Mark approached, his thoughts occupied by how he’d draw Gregori’s attention. Maybe something simple like calling his name; maybe something more dramatic, like pressing the barrel of his gun into the back of Gregori’s bare neck. But then, a floorboard creaked. It squealed and sighed beneath Mark’s right foot, loud enough—in Mark’s mind—to be heard back in Moscow. Gregori froze. Mid-typing, he stopped his fingers exactly where they were and his body went rigid. Unblinking, Mark watched, waiting for him to do something. To somehow turn the tables. But Gregori had no play to make. No dramatic maneuver that would give him the upper hand. His body rigid as a slab of wood, he did the only thing he could: Slowly, Gregori raised both his arms to the sky. He said nothing.
The Throwaway Page 23
