The Russian Bride

by Ed Kovacs

  * * *

  The technology to remotely capture all of the information on a target computer’s hard drive has been around for a long time. That’s why the infamous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden didn’t have to personally hand over digital secrets to the Chinese or Russians after he fled America. Those foreign intelligence agencies simply had to use equipment to “image” his laptops from a distance; he was possibly completely unaware they were taking the information—every last 0 and 1—from his computers.

  Bennings had “imaged” the contents of Al Lara’s Sandia laptop even though it was locked in his car, a car primarily made of plastic, not a medium that defeats electromagnetic function.

  And while Kit Bennings wasn’t in Jen Huffman’s league, he still knew how to do a few things digitally. As he sat at the kitchen table of the vacation rental near Kirtland Air Force Base, he hacked away. Within an hour, Kit had sent “URGENT” messages using Al Lara’s e-mail box to the security post at Sandia and to a small detachment of the 898th Munitions Squadron of the Air Force Materiel Command, directing them to take certain actions concerning a Model RT-Seven EMP bomb, serial number 55327VL, that was securely stored at Sandia Labs.

  E-mails from a honcho such as Al Lara tended not to be ignored, but security would confirm it with a phone call, which is why Kit had pickpocketed Lara’s BlackBerry. He expected a call to come anytime now.

  To better sell the ruse, Kit had attached a fake but very authentic-looking e-mail from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology asking Al Lara to grant all cooperation to its two scientists as part of a snap inspection of the bomb in the clean room of Building 27A.

  Al’s e-mails to security and to the 898th apologized for having overlooked the CIA request and not scheduling it sooner.

  With the e-mails sent, Kit reconsidered the plan. What the hell—it just might work. Since the directed-energy and EMP weapons at Sandia were now held in an underground bunker with the kind of state-of-the-art overkill security systems that truly kept the bad guys out, Bennings had decided to make the theft a little simpler and have the military deliver the e-bomb right to him. Sometimes audacious is the best way to go.

  As he sat at the kitchen table trying to remember what he’d forgotten to do, Al Lara’s BlackBerry rang. Yulana silently watched as Kit quickly stuffed into his cheeks the cotton balls he’d earlier laid out on the table. He turned the volume up high on a digital music player, and with a gruff slur answered the phone. “Lara.”

  “Sir, this is Lieutenant Saputo at—”

  “You got my e-mail?”

  “Yes, that’s why I’m calling. Sir, this is highly—”

  “Complain to the CIA. Just make it happen.” Kit terminated the call. That should do it.

  The irony, of course, was that Sandia National Labs, which was owned by Lockheed Martin and managed by them for the U.S. Department of Energy, had made running Red Teams something of a specialty for themselves, training other agencies or companies in how to do it right. And they maintained their own ongoing Red Team, constantly probing their own vulnerabilities. But politics, as it always does, trumps everything, even security. The egos and tempers of those at the top, upper management pukes who expect rules to be bent at their whims—people who can make or break the careers of those lower on the food chain—often had the effect of cowing subordinates into violating procedures, even inviolate ones.

  Hubris was a wonderful thing to exploit.

  CHAPTER 28

  Bennings had cloned the electronic keycards of Al Lara and the female scientist from Chili’s. He’d printed out a decal and bumper sticker with a bar code that mirrored Lara’s.

  Armed with terrific fake credentials, Kit and Yulana easily accessed the sprawling, campuslike area of Sandia National Labs, located within Kirtland Air Force Base.

  Sandia had come into existence from Z Division, the supersecret nuclear assembly, testing, and design apparatus of Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II. With the advent of a nuclear weapons testing moratorium in the 1990s, the focus of Sandia’s ten-thousand-strong personnel roster shifted in several nonnuclear directions, although they still remained closely connected to America’s nuclear weapons program.

  Bennings and Petkova drove unescorted to Building 27A. He opened the rear hatch of the SUV and brought out the hand dolly. He muscled his toolbox with both hands—it contained a hundred pounds of steep pipe—and set it on the dolly. Yulana’s toolbox contained real tools and went on top of his. Yulana closed up the SUV, Kit tilted the dolly back and wheeled it to the entrance where they used their cloned keycards to enter.

  Bennings had deliberately chosen a lab designed for unclassified work, so no biometric scan was necessary to gain access. The only workers present were those on a cleaning crew, who weren’t doing much in the way of cleaning; they pretended to get busy when Kit and Yulana showed up, and pretending to be busy was good enough for most government or government-contracted work. The cleaners quickly moved to another part of the building, no doubt in search of privacy.

  Bennings found the clean room. He and Yulana donned clean-room garb over their clothes: lab coat, cap, and booties. As he entered the clean room behind her, he noted the overhead security cameras. She quickly prepped a worktable and two rolling polished-aluminum carts.

  They lifted her toolbox and placed it onto a cart. Then they pretended his toolbox wasn’t heavy as together they heaved it onto the other cart. They opened the toolboxes and positioned the carts in such a way as to screen the cameras from seeing the switch they intended to make. Kit turned on the handheld radio clipped to his belt under his lab coat, connected the earbuds, and placed one of the earbuds into his right ear. The radio was another item from the Pelican case and was calibrated to monitor the frequency of the Sandia guards.

  He checked his watch and was almost overcome by the temerity of what he was attempting to do. Yes, he had breached Sandia before, but he did so with ten days of prep, eight operators, and generous resources. Tonight was a rushed, last-minute cowboy operation flying on a wing and a prayer, with a Russian who seemed to enjoy large quantities of vodka. He started to have serious doubts about the entire plan and absentmindedly pressed hard on the migraine acupressure point on his hand.

  But it was too late to start second-guessing now, and Yulana was watching, so he put aside his concerns and gave her a reassuring look.

  “Stay relaxed, and in an hour, we’ll be driving out of Albuquerque,” he said with all of the assurance he could muster. In his heart he didn’t believe it and felt certain there was something terribly important he’d forgotten to do. But what, what had he forgotten?

  He heard radio traffic in his earbud. It was exactly 12:15 A.M., and the security escort had arrived outside. The bomb was here.

  * * *

  Two Humvees and a specially rigged two-and-a-half-ton truck pulled up to the cargo bay of Building 27A. Soldiers from the 898th set up a special trolley and rolling jigs. They carefully removed a crate from the truck bed using a roll-out assembly, and by cranking a wheel, lowered it onto the trolley. The crate was made from some kind of nonmetallic composite material and was about the size of a steamer trunk.

  The exterior roll-up cargo door of Building 27A was akin to a jumbo-sized garage door, and it slowly rose open. Soldiers wheeled the trolley through the doorway and into a large two-story-tall air lock, where Bennings stood waiting in clean-room garb.

  Sergeant Simms, a lanky veteran noncommissioned officer, was in charge of the bomb transport detail, and Kit could tell the man wasn’t happy. Having spent many years in the army, Kit read Simms like a book; the sergeant was worried that this was one of those unscheduled last-minute deals that had a tendency to screw up easily. Simms held a clipboard as he approached Kit.

  “You’re Doctor Gned?”

  “That’s right, Sergeant,” said Kit, holding up the photo ID he had generated.

  “May I see your CIA ID, sir?”

  “Of course.” K
it handed over a CIA identification—another item that had arrived in the Pelican case—to Simms, who copied down information from it.

  Simms handed back the ID. “Sign here, please.”

  Kit took the clipboard and signed “Dr. Rick Gned.”

  “If you and your men will wait outside, I’ll get this done as fast as I can,” said Kit, smoothly assuming the role of ranking authority figure.

  “Sir, due to the last-minute and irregular nature of this inspection, I have to stay with the weapon.”

  Damn! Kit hadn’t anticipated this. He couldn’t allow the sergeant to stay, or there could be no switch. He had to be careful how he handled his response.

  “No offense, but I don’t want you in my clean room, Sergeant. Still, I understand your orders. I’ll tell you what: you, and only you, can wait here in the air lock. You can watch through these windows in the inner roll-up door here. That way you can keep eyes on the device if you feel that’s necessary.”

  Simms thought about it. “That sounds okay, sir.”

  Kit pushed the green button, and the exterior roll-up door closed, so only he and Simms now stood in the air lock. When the exterior door had closed, Kit crossed to a different control panel and pushed the button to open the interior roll-up door—an equally large cargo door with four rectangular eight-by-twelve-inch windows.

  As the door rose they could see Yulana waiting in the clean room next to the rolling carts. Although she stood a good thirty yards away, Simms looked to be momentarily distracted by the sight of Dr. Petkova.

  “Oh, and Sergeant, if you haven’t already, turn off your cell phone and two-way radio so we don’t have any unwanted interference with the inspection. If you have to have your electronics on, then you’ll need to wait outside the building with your men.”

  Simms liked the whole situation less and less. He tugged on his ear as if thinking about the options.

  “How long will your inspection take?”

  “That’s classified, and you’re wasting my time with all of this. Why don’t you just wait outside, so you can keep your phone and everything else on,” said Kit pretending to be irritated.

  “It’s okay, sir. I’ll wait here in the air lock.”

  Kit watched as Simms turned off the electronics. Kit then wheeled the trolley holding the crated weapon into the clean room and closed the interior roll-up door, leaving Simms in the air lock, where he wouldn’t be able to hear them. Kit pulled the trolley over to the carts where Yulana waited.

  “Good thing you’re covered up with the clean-room gear. Otherwise, he’d never stop looking through the window.”

  The small windows in the roll-up door were about five feet high, and Simms stood bent over in the air lock looking into the clean room.

  “How can we do this if he’s watching?” asked Yulana.

  “I’m hoping his back will start hurting from bending over and he’ll lose interest. In the meantime, I’m trying to come up with plan B.”

  The sergeant appeared to be standing still as stone, observing from the other side of the glass as Kit opened the crate. The small device, which looked like a conventional type of bomb dropped by an aircraft, rested on rubber-padded mounts. It was only about three feet long and weighed one hundred pounds. A GPS guidance system was enclosed in the rear next to four stabilizer fins.

  “The bomb was designed to be worked on without being taken from the crate,” said Yulana. “I can simply remove the housing panels and do my inspections and the alterations we discussed.”

  “I think we’d better take it from the crate and position it next to my toolbox. Make a big show of it, like the bomb is heavy and it takes two of us to move it, okay? Then you can go to work.”

  She nodded. They took up positions at either end of the bomb crate and carefully lifted the unit, exaggerating its weight, and making it look to Simms or any security watching on camera that it took two people to move the bomb.

  With the device securely on the cart, Yulana went to work. Kit checked the lead pipes he had already removed from his toolbox and had hidden under towels on one of the aluminum carts. But if Simms didn’t stop watching, there could be no switch. No switch, no trade for Staci’s life. Kit started sweating under his clean-room garb, even though the room was quite cool. He used his right thumb to press hard on the pressure point on his hand; he didn’t get migraines often, but when he did, they were killers. The balls-out stress of the last few days had opened the door for one of his debilitating head-bangers to make an appearance—headaches so bad he could barely walk. Acupuncture worked best to fend off the symptoms, but this was hardly the time to go looking for a doctor of Oriental medicine.

  * * *

  Yulana completed her work. From the corner of her eye, she saw Sgt. Simms looking at her through the small window in the roll-up door. Even if the man were a weapons engineer, he stood far enough away that there was no way he could know what kind of adjustments she had just performed. She carefully replaced the bomb housing panels and then looked to Kit. “I’m finished,” she said. “The bomb functions check out, so if someone tests it, the results will be good. I changed the GPS identifier and modified the guidance system so that we hold the key to track the bomb. The U.S. government has now lost any tracking capability of this device. And as we discussed, I installed a remote kill-switch. It will be up to you or me to deactivate the weapon.”

  “How?”

  “By sending a special code using the GPS carrier signal.”

  “And we can do that from any computer connected to the GPS system?”

  She nodded. “I’ve been thinking…” She looked to the bomb, then to Kit. “Why does Popov want an RT-Seven? This is old technology. Very old in terms of EMP devices, even for Russia.”

  “It’s not just old, it’s ancient,” said Kit.

  “Boeing Phantom Works has developed a microwave missile called a CHAMP—Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project. A burst of high-powered microwaves will knock out the electronic systems and computers of a targeted building. A single building. And the weapon won’t cause chain-reaction blackouts.”

  “So Popov must want the rolling blackouts, the chain-reaction failures of electrical substations that will cause large areas to lose all electrical power.”

  “Because he’s hitting multiple targets?” asked Yulana.

  Kit nodded. “He must be. But there are other ways to create rolling blackouts. You don’t have to go to the trouble of using an e-bomb.”

  “Unless you needed the effects of the e-bomb at the first target, but not the subsequent targets,” she said. “Does that sound plausible?” Yulana was feeling more and more at ease with her give-and-take with Bennings. Somehow he made her feel comfortable, even in the middle of a high-tech heist that could get them both sent to Death Row.

  Kit looked like a man having an epiphany. “You, Doctor Petkova, are brilliant. There are two targets. I’d kiss you, but Simms is watching, and I think he’s already jealous.”

  “If we get out of here, I’ll give you a rain check.”

  He flashed her a small smile, then nodded. “Popov always was three steps ahead of me at chess.”

  “He made the mistake of putting us together, forcing us to marry with the assumption we’d remain at odds. So he’s not invincible, is he?” she asked, smiling. “If he always beat you at chess, play a different game with him. Play your game with him.”

  Kit locked eyes with her. “You’re right. I have to game Popov in a new way.”

  “Anyway, what’s next? The soldier sometimes looks away for a few seconds, but he always looks back.”

  “What’s next is a command performance starring you, in the reprisal of a role you play very well.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Sgt. Simms watched as the woman walked in his direction but then crossed to the “man door,” the door that accommodated personnel traffic when it wasn’t necessary to open the roll-up cargo door.

  Damn, she’s beautifu
l. He’d never seen a scientist so good-looking.

  Simms watched with anticipation as the doorknob turned, the door opened, and the woman sort of poured through it. Sweet Jesus, she was a fox, even though she was a doc. He called all of the scientists “Doc”—since most of them had Ph.D.s and always called themselves doctors. Doctors of Bull Crap, is what Simms thought most of them were. But this woman was …

  “Sergeant, you didn’t check my ID yet. And I need a break from that jerk, Doctor Gned.”

  Well, hello. Maybe she didn’t have her head up her butt like all the others did. Simms watched her pull off the translucent white cotton hair covering, and then a cascade of thick, jet-black hair fell down all the way to her waist. Hot damn.

  She popped open all of the snaps of her lab coat and produced her CIA ID from the front pocket of very tight blue jeans.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll check you out.” Simms crossed over to Yulana at the man door, meaning he was no longer able to look into the clean room through the small windows in the roll-up cargo door. He knew the camera jockeys were probably watching from the overhead eye in the sky—even the air lock had a security cam—so he would have to be quick. But maybe not too quick.

  He took his time and studied her name. “I can’t place your accent, Doc.”

  “Finland. I’ve been an American citizen for over ten years but can’t lose my accent.”

  He handed her ID back. “I don’t mind if you don’t mind,” he said, smiling.

  “Sergeant, do you smoke?”

  “Yes ma’am, but—”

  “Call me Elfi.”

  “We can’t smoke inside the building, Elfi.”

  “I know that,” she said with a grin. “Can you give me one for later? Doctor Gned is a nonsmoker and he won’t stop anywhere for me to buy cigarettes.”

  “Sure, Elfi.” Simms produced a pack and gave her a smoke.

  Yulana opened her lab coat wide, and Simms’s eyes riveted instantly to her cleavage. She tucked the cigarette into the front pocket of her tight blouse. The fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra was not lost on Simms.