Wallace tried and failed to speak, cleared his throat, tried again: “I lied to you, sir, because I knew that I would not be able to deliver the credit card numbers at the time promised. I could see that they would be a few hours late. I hoped that you would not mind a short delay.”
Ivanov pulled his sleeves back to reveal, and to examine, the largest wristwatch Zula had ever seen. “How many is ‘few’? Sometimes I have trouble with English.”
“The delay has turned out to be longer than I had expected.”
“What is nature of delay? Has Peter fucked us?”
Peter flinched.
“I apologize for language,” Ivanov said to Zula.
For a while, only a few muffled noises had been heard from the empty apartment next door, but now they heard the whoosh of plastic sheeting being pulled off the huge roll, followed by the sporadic thud/click of the staple gun, which came distinctly through the wall. This posed a distraction to Peter and Zula, which Ivanov noticed and misinterpreted. “Makink little kholes,” he said. “Not big kholes. Easy to fix. With a little—” He said a word in Russian, then looked to Sokolov. Sokolov, a bit distracted—maybe taken aback—by what was going on in the other room, missed the cue. Ivanov then looked to the giant potato-like man who was standing near the gun safe and asked him a question. This fellow was deeply apologetic that he was unable to help. But he did shout something downstairs to the smoker who was posted in the bay, who called back: “Spackle!”
“Spackle,” Ivanov repeated, and spread his hands, palms up, as if requesting forgiveness.
“It has nothing to do with Peter. Actually Peter has been working diligently to help me overcome the problem,” Wallace said.
“So Peter has not fucked us.”
“That is correct, sir.”
“You? Have you fucked me, Wallace?”
“This is not that kind of problem.”
“Oh really? What kind of problem is it?”
“A technical problem.”
“Ah, so you have drove your car to warehouse of Mr. Technical Genius, here, to get tech support.”
“Yes.”
“And he has given it?”
“Yes. And Zula as well.”
Ivanov blushed. “Yes, forgive me, of course, I do injustice.”
Silence, except for the whoosh-rustle-clunk of the plastic and the staple gun.
“And?” Ivanov asked, raising his eyebrows. “Still is problem?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Something is wrong with file?” This with a dark look at Peter.
“The file was fine.”
“Was fine?”
“Now it’s been rendered inaccessible.”
“You did not make backup?”
“I was quite careful to make a backup, sir, but it too has been rendered inaccessible.”
“What is this word ‘inaccessible’? You have lost computer?”
“No, both it and the backup drive are under my control, but the data were encrypted.”
“You forgot key?”
“I never had it.”
Ivanov laughed. “I am not computer specialist, but … how can you never have key to file you encrypted?”
“I did not encrypt it.”
“Peter? Peter encrypted it?”
“No!” Peter exclaimed.
“Zula encrypted it?”
“No,” said Peter and Wallace in unison.
“She cannot speak for herself?”
“I did not encrypt it, Mr. Ivanov,” Zula said, earning her an appreciative nod, as if she had just stuck her landing at the Olympics.
“Is missink person? Someone not here who encrypted both file and backup?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Ivanov’s face crinkled up and he laughed. “Ah, here is good part! Finally we come to part where bullshit starts. Makes me feel needed.”
The door to the adjoining space opened and the two men came out, carrying the roll of plastic, considerably depleted. Through the open door Zula could see that the entire apartment had been lined in plastic. One sheet had been unrolled on the floor and folded up the walls, and then other sheets had been draped over that to cover the walls and even the ceiling. The two men walked wordlessly through the room and went downstairs into the bay.
“In a manner of speaking!” Ivanov slapped his thigh. “What fine expression.” The smile went away, and he fixed his gaze on Wallace. “Wallace?”
“Yes, sir?”
“How many people have touched your laptop this day?”
“One, sir. Only I.”
“How many have touched backup drive in nice expensive safe?”
“One.”
“Then khoo—in a manner of speaking—khoo encrypted file?”
“We don’t know. But we can get the key—” Wallace was trying to talk over Ivanov now. “With these people’s help we can get the key—”
Ivanov had put both of his hands to his temples and was staring at the floor between his feet.
One of the plastic staplers came back up the stairs carrying a cordless drill, a blowtorch, a roll of duct tape, and a length of piano wire. He went into the plasticked apartment and closed the door behind him.
“First thing I must understand: has someone fucked us or not?”
“Yes, someone has most certainly fucked us, sir,” Wallace answered.
“Apologize to Zula when you say such word!”
“Beg your pardon, Zula,” Wallace said.
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
“You have on laptop, on backup drive, many important files to us.”
“Yes.”
“Status of these files?”
“The same.”
“All encrypted?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Originals and backups?”
Here the tension had become so unbearable that Zula did not know whether she might faint or throw up.
Ivanov laughed.
“I know how to do this,” he said. “Someone fucks us extremely badly, I am familiar with situations of this type. Sokolov too. Peter!”
“Yes, Mr. Ivanov?”
“You know of Battle of Stalingrad?”
“No, sir.”
Ivanov was crestfallen.
“The biggest battle of all time, probably,” Zula said.
Ivanov brightened and gestured eloquently at her. “A wonderful and glorious victory for Mother Russia?” he asked.
“I don’t know if I’d call it that.”
“Vwy not!?” Ivanov demanded, in such a blustery tone that Zula was certain he was playing her.
“Because the Germans penetrated very deeply into Russia and inflicted horrendous losses.”
This was the correct answer. “Khorrendous losses!” Ivanov repeated. He turned to face Wallace, daring him to appreciate how clever Zula was. “Khorrendous losses! You hear Zula? She understands. Where are you from? Not from this ridiculous fucking country.”
“Eritrea.”
“Eritrea!”
“Yes.”
He held out his hand to her again. “Khorrendous losses! This girl understands nature of khorrendous losses. Where are your parents?”
“Dead.”
“Dead! Khorrendous losses indeed. But! Eritreans won war.”
“Yes.”
“You, here, in nice country—a victory of a kind, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Russians, after Stalingrad, marched to Berlin. DO YOU UNDERSTAND POINT, Wallace?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You said that these two, Peter and Zula, could solve technical problem and win our little battle in spite of khorrendous losses, yes?”
“Yes, we were working on it but—”
Ivanov held up his hand to shut him up. “Wallace, do favor and go through door.” He gestured toward the plastic-lined room.
Wallace didn’t move.
“Just that door,” Ivanov repeated helpfully.
�
��Can we just get this done quick and simple?” Wallace asked.
“Not if you sit on couch. Quick and simple depends on how fast you move. And on what information I get from Peter and Zula. Now, go wait.”
Wallace, watched curiously by Sokolov, stood up and tottered into the adjoining room. One of the men in there stepped forward, moving carefully on the slick plastic, and closed the door behind him. Through it they could hear the screech of a length of duct tape being jerked off a roll.
“Mr. Ivanov,” Zula said, “Wallace is innocent.”
“You are beautiful girl, smart, I guess you know of computers. Convince me of this,” Ivanov pleaded. “Make me believe.”
ZULA TALKED FOR an hour.
She explained the nature and history of computer viruses. Talked about the particular subclass of viruses that encrypted hard drives and held their contents for ransom. About the difficulties of making money from ransomware. Explained the innovation that the unknown, anonymous creators of the REAMDE virus had apparently come up with. Ivanov had never heard of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, so she told him all about their history, their technology, their sociology, their growth as a major sector of the entertainment industry.
Ivanov listened raptly, breaking in from time to time. Half of the time this was to compliment her, since he seemed convinced that any female who did not receive a compliment every five minutes would stab him with an ice pick in his sleep. The other half of the time it was to ask a question. Some of these were keenly insightful, and others betrayed a disturbing lack of technical understanding.
Once these preliminaries were out of the way, Ivanov began to drill down on the question of Wallace’s culpability. Was the infection chargeable to any carelessness on his part? How, in other words, did the virus spread?
Zula told him what she’d learned, which was that REAMDE was actually spread through a security hole in Outlook, an extremely popular piece of software that, among other things, managed calendars, contacts, and whatnot. In order to do anything significant in T’Rain, you needed to run a reasonably deep vassal network. Coordinated group activities thus became an essential part of game play. Which meant that several of the players in your feudal hierarchy had to be online at the same time, to transact business and conduct war parties, dungeon raids, and the like. Those activities had to be scheduled around Little League practices, dentist appointments, studying for final exams, and so on, and so a stand-alone scheduling system, existing only inside of the T’Rain app, didn’t really serve. A third-party add-on had been created that built a tunnel between T’Rain and Outlook. Most T’Rain players used it. The add-on worked by sending messages back and forth, consisting of invitations to participate in group raids and the like. Most of these were pure text, but it was possible to attach images and other files to such invitations, and therein lay the security hole: REAMDE took advantage of a buffer overflow bug in Outlook to inject malicious code into the host operating system and establish root-level control of the computer, whereupon it could do anything it wanted, including encrypting the contents of all connected drives. First, though, it sent the virus onward to everyone in the victim’s T’Rain contact list.
There was another detail, mentioned on the internal wiki, that she did not share with Ivanov: the security hole in Outlook had been known for a while and most antivirus programs were hip to it. But hard-core gamers were still vulnerable since they ran T’Rain in fullscreen mode and so were oblivious to the increasingly hysterical warnings being hurled onto their screens by their virus-protection software.
Another detail she elected not to share: Wallace had almost certainly gotten the virus from Uncle Richard’s computer, spread via the thumb drive.
“So Wallace used this add-on,” Ivanov said, using air quotes, “and got infected by this virus.”
“Completely innocently, yes,” Zula said. During the first part of her lecture she’d been surfing on a burst of energy that had carried her most of the way through, but in the last ten minutes or so, exhaustion had come over her, and she had slowed down and begun to mumble her words and to begin sentences she didn’t know how to end. Now, she dimly realized that the upshot of all she’d said, in Ivanov’s mind, might be that Wallace had screwed up and deserved to be punished. This now left her almost paralyzed.
To her own considerable surprise and then shame, she began crying. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands.
“I am eediot!” Ivanov exclaimed. “I am stupidest man in world.” He stood up. Afraid that he was going to come over and comfort her, Zula tensed and forced herself to hold it in for a moment. She dared not look up. Through her tears and her fingers she could see Ivanov’s polished shoes moving around. He stepped out of the room. She let go of a train of little gasps and sobs, mixed now with self-anger and frustration that she was being such a stupid girl. She hadn’t cried in a serious way since her mother’s funeral.
Ivanov was back in the room after no more than fifteen seconds. She could hear his footsteps behind the sofa. She flinched as something limp and heavy fell across her shoulders. “What is wrong with you?” Ivanov wanted to know. He was addressing Peter. She realized that Ivanov had grabbed Peter’s arm and draped it over Zula’s shoulders and was now tamping it down into place like wet cement in a form. She got it under control then, certainly not because Peter had his arm around her shoulders but because of a kind of humor, albeit very dark, that was in the situation: the man Ivanov, whoever and whatever he was, jetting in from Toronto to give Peter lessons in how to be chivalrous to his girlfriend, and Peter trapped, unable to explain that they had just broken up.
Ivanov scattered orders to everyone in the room. People went into motion; phones were unfolded. Zula sat up straight, pushing back against the weight of Peter’s arm, and Peter, terrified of what would happen to him if he disobeyed Ivanov, left it where it was, a dead weasel draped over her shoulders.
“Only thing I actually believe is that someone fucked me,” Ivanov announced, with the customary nod of apology toward Zula. “You know any Russian? Kto Kvo. A saying of Lenin. It means ‘who whom?’ Today I am the whom. The one who is fucked. I am dead man. As dead as him.” He nodded toward the adjoining room. Zula heard her lungs filling with a gasp. Ivanov continued, “That is not question. Question is manner of my death. I have some time remainink. Maybe a fortnight. Would like to spend it well. It is too late for me to die gloriously. But I can die better than him.” Another nod. “I can die as a who, not as a whom. I can show my brothers that I was fighting for them to very end, in spite of khorrendous losses. I think they will understand this. I will be a forgiven dead man instead of a smashed insect. Only thing I need is: who is the who?”
Peter finally took his arm off Zula, who sat up fully straight and regarded Ivanov directly. Ivanov looked back at them—but mostly at her—with an interested expression. As if this were a highly formal, academic sort of drawing-room inquiry. “Do you understand question?”
“You want to know who did this to you?”
“I would use different verb but yes.”
They all sat there silently for a few moments. They could hear the engine of a vehicle starting down below, they could hear men talking on phones.
“You want the identity of the Troll. The person who created the virus,” Peter said.
“Yes!” Ivanov snapped, faintly irritated.
“And if we can give you that information, then … we’re cool?”
“Khool?” Ivanov demanded, clearly in no mood to be negotiating—if that was what this was called—with Peter.
“I mean, then it’s good? Between you and us?”
Now, kind of an interesting moment.
Though the whole situation was laden with implicit threat, Ivanov had not lifted a finger, nor intimated that he ever would, against Peter or Zula. His eyebrows went up and he regarded Peter, now, in a new light: as a man who had just, in a manner of speaking, issued a threat against himself. Volunteered th
at he owed Ivanov something and that consequences would be due him if he failed to deliver.
Ivanov made a little shrug, as if to say, The thought had never crossed my mind, but now that you mention it … “You are most generous.”
During this whole interlude, Peter had been realizing his mistake and was now trying to backpedal in quicksand. “You understand that the virus writer could be anywhere in the world, that he’s probably gone to great lengths to hide his identity, cover his tracks…”
“You confuse me,” Ivanov said. “Can you find Troll, or not?”
Peter looked at Zula.
“Why you look at Miss Zula? You are khacker genius, correct?”
Peter couldn’t get anything out.
ZULA WAS VERY tired, and her mind was in several places at once. The word “flashback” was much too fraught to describe what was happening in her mind. But it was the case that the mind pulled up memories that were germane to the impressions flooding into its sensory organs, and the first few years of her life related better to what was happening now than most of what she had experienced in small-town Iowa. She did not have the energy, the clarity, or what nerds denominated the “bandwidth” to deal with all aspects of this situation at once. Certainly the one that dominated was the sense that she was in danger. There was a technical side to it also. But neither of those explained the sick feeling that kept passing in waves through her abdomen. There was a moral aspect to this. She’d failed to see it at all until Wallace had been sent to the other room. For that, a man like Ivanov would probably see her as ridiculously naive. She could perhaps be forgiven that naïveté once.
Now, though, she was being asked to give up another person: a complete stranger, somewhere, who had created REAMDE. She had not volunteered for the job. Peter had betrayed her with a glance.
“Miss Zula? I apologize, I see that you are very tired,” Ivanov said. “But. You work at same company? Is possible?”
And the Iowa-girl response, of course, was always yes. Especially to a polite, older man in good clothes who had come such a long way.
For some reason she was remembering a moment when she had been something like fourteen years old, the apex of the crystal meth epidemic in Iowa. She had been home alone and had looked out the window to see a strange van coming down the road, very slowly. It had made a couple of passes by the house and then pulled into the driveway that led to their equipment shed. A couple of men had gotten out of the van, looking around nervously. Not knowing whether they might have come on a legitimate errand, Zula had made a phone call to Uncle John (as she called her second adopted dad), and Uncle John had extremely calmly talked her through the procedure of locking every door in the house, getting a shotgun and a box of shells, and hiding herself in the attic. His matter-of-fact instructions had been accompanied, and sometimes drowned out, by dim roaring, screeching, and thumping noises that, as she later understood, had resulted from his driving at a hundred miles an hour while he talked. Zula had barely gotten the attic stairs pulled up behind her when a lot of disturbing vehicular noises had ensued from outside, and she had peered out a gable vent to see Uncle John’s car in the middle of the front yard at the end of a long set of skid marks that completely surrounded the house (for he had orbited it once, checking for signs of forced entry) and John hobbling around it on his prosthetic legs to crouch behind and use it for cover while across the way the van screamed out onto the road with a door hanging open. A cloud of what she took for steam was rising from the side of the shed where they kept the anhydrous ammonia tank. A few minutes later the sheriff’s department was there in force, and Zula felt it safe to emerge from the attic. John yelled at her that she did not have permission to come down yet. Then he hugged her and told her that she was his wonderful girl. Then he asked about the whereabouts of the shotgun. Then he told her again how magnificent she was, and then he ordered her to go upstairs and not come out until he gave permission. She went upstairs and, peering out a window, saw what John did not want her to see: the ambulance men putting on their hazmat suits and placing a large brown wrinkled thing into a body bag. One of the thieves, startled, perhaps, by Uncle John’s sudden advent, had made a mistake with the anhydrous ammonia line and been sprayed with the chemical, which had sucked all the water out of his body.
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