by Thomas Waite
“I understand,” Lana said. “Is there anything else you can tell—”
She was silenced by the abrupt appearance on-screen of the sub’s interior. Now she saw why: it had surfaced and was also visible on the split screen. The hackers had taken control of the ship’s cameras in the control and attack centers. Sailors were staggering, clutching their throats, and falling to the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Deming said, jumping out of his chair.
“What’s going on?” Lana said, staring in horror as sailors appeared to be dying right before her eyes, just seconds after the video had come alive. They were staggering, vomiting, gasping for breath, and falling to the floor. Some were now going into convulsions.
“Poison,” Deming said, still standing. “They’re poisoned.”
“Good God,” Holmes replied. “Isn’t there emergency oxygen?”
“Of course,” Deming said sharply. “But this is happening so fast nobody has a chance to grab it, and it might not do them any good anyway because oxygen isn’t always an antidote for poison.”
Sailors kept dropping to the sub floor. All appeared to be in their death throes. It was the most ghastly sight Lana had ever seen.
And then the video ended as the sub dived back down, as if to suggest the men and women were headed to a watery grave, leaving a shadow of terror on the faces of Admiral Deming and Bob Holmes.
If she could have seen herself then, Lana would have noticed a familiar look on her own face: fear mingled with fierceness. Her jaw was tight, shiny black hair pulled behind her ears, clear blue eyes staring nakedly at the blank screen. And if she’d lowered her gaze a mite more, she would have seen her fingers flying across the keyboard, trying desperately to find her way into the deeply veiled and violent world of digital terrorism.
CHAPTER 2
YOU COULD MISS STARBUCKS if you blinked. It was so unlike Russian businesses, which screamed for attention in the post-Soviet capitalist apocalypse. Oleg Dernov had just walked past a hotel—granted, a most esteemed establishment, one his father naturally favored—with a Rolls Royce dealership in the lobby! What, you can order Phantom with room service now?
For so long Oleg had had such a weakness for those cars. So beauteous. And he would own one soon, maybe even the hotel and the block it sat upon. Not a pipe dream. Very serious.
So’s this, he thought, swinging open the door to a more modest Moscow establishment, the Starbucks he’d been looking for. It spoke of wealth, too, but maybe not so loudly as a Rolls Royce Phantom. Though his English-speaking friends could no more read the Starbucks sign than the future, they recognized the distinctive green lettering—the color of the new one-thousand-ruble note. No wonder Muscovites loved Starbucks so much, a little bit of heaven with every sip.
For Oleg, heaven also had a name: Galina Bortnik. Where was she? The Starbucks was not so crowded, but Galina was so tiny.
Ah, there she was, her nose buried in a MacBook. Good girl. Always working. Fast as fire. But not online. No hacker would ever risk having their computer’s Mac address captured on a public network.
So adorable in her swishy pale-blue pleated dress that fell not even halfway down her milky thighs. Such a munchkin. Five feet—maybe. Black hair cut by his own stylist, so it looked chic, as in you’d never guess Galina Bortnik was a single mom, stuck with a deadbeat dad, or a former nanny or dropout from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Most of all, do you know what you would never guess? She is greatest hacker in all of Russian Federation. Maybe greatest in world.
Except for me.
He rushed to her table. Muah, a kiss for the right cheek. Muah, a kiss for the left cheek. Muah, a kiss for her cushiony lips. She smelled like lavender. And her cheeks so red. A shy girl, a sexy girl, a girl who blushes from such a modest greeting. How good is that?
She already had taken her first sip of her espresso con panna, three shots with real whipped cream. Nothing light for her. And she had the appealing, slightly plump pulchritude of a ripe apricot, and the complexion of—what did the Brits and Americans call it?—“peaches and cream.” That’s it. She was the whole fruit basket. She didn’t skimp on fats, but good fats. And she was slightly plump, but good plump.
True, Oleg’s plutocratic father had warned him that girls like Galina turned to lard quickly, with everything “sagging and dragging” by the time they were thirty-five, but right now Galina Bortnik was twenty-six years old with full bouncy breasts and thighs so smooth and wonderfully soft when she wrapped them around his back and rocked him in the warm bath of pleasure he didn’t care if she put on ten kilograms a year for ten years. They would be like candy to him. Besides, his father was a rich asshole, married six times. Still waiting for his Galina.
Was this love?
Not so much for Oleg. For her, yes. But for him, many girls to bed before he wed. On that he and his father could agree.
Not that his father didn’t like “the rose,” as he’d nicknamed Galina the first time he saw her blush. He worshipped her for nannying Dmitri after Oleg’s little brother took quite a hit to the noggin. Since he was eight, Galina had taken care of him. She was the only steady female presence in Dmitri’s life because Papa married three times during those tumultuous years. But now Dmitri, a hulking fifteen-year-old who towered over Galina like a polar bear, could tie his shoelaces and feed himself and take care of the business at the other end as well, which the doctors said was a miracle of no little magnitude in and of itself. Given “little” brother’s enormous size, Oleg had to agree these were major accomplishments. But miracle? No, not a miracle: Galina Bortnik.
After ordering, paying, and insisting on a mug, not a paper cup—because this was coffee with the former regional director of Greenpeace Russia, mind you, who had to be bribed to walk through the doors of a Starbucks—Oleg sat down and opened his own MacBook. Hers was already bleeding electrons, but hers, she would remind him when necessary, used a solar cell for its juice.
“So when are you going to tell me who?” she asked softly.
He smiled but shook his head, feeling his wavy dark locks brush against his thick eyebrows. He’d split up Professor Ahearn’s files to disguise his identity and give her only what she needed to break the professor’s algorithms and contextual esoteric information and nothing more. So far she had been extraordinarily productive.
It was her hacking, after all, that had led him to Ahearn. To find the latest research on Ambient Air Capture, he’d hired her almost two years ago to scour the web, finding promising leads, pinpointing the most likely servers, and even identifying their network administrators.
He’d known it was out there, and the incalculable potential—and profits—to be had from the technology. Last month she’d closed in on an MIT professor. Oleg took it from there, spearfishing the administrator with a faked LinkedIn request from a beautiful academic researcher. The administrator took the bait and promptly downloaded a payload of malware, including a keylogger. Then the man logged in to the server. Bingo! Oleg exfiltrated the files—zipping and encoding them to avoid attention.
Oleg was doing Galina a favor by not revealing whose science she was studying, even if he could never tell her what the favor was or why he was bestowing it upon her. Galina was a peaceful person, lured into providing her hacking skills for the “benefit of all humankind.” That was exactly how she put it when he told her about the AAC technology. She would not want to know about the others in the operation who got their hands very dirty. Let her think she was on the side of the angels in stealing the AAC from profit-binging pirates in the hands of U.S. oil companies.
“I think he was a man,” she told him. “An academic.”
“Sure narrows it down. A male academic.”
“Don’t make fun.” She eyed him for a moment. “I’m right, aren’t I? Do you know you can read gender rhythms in keystrokes?”
He shrugged. “Mayb
e.”
She nodded, puckering, then opening her lips to mouth the word “true.”
Shy, but also very sexy girl.
“I’m protecting you. I really am,” he said.
She would curl up and die if she knew what they’d really done to obtain the complete files of the professor. But America had so many homicides that she would need a whole new set of algorithms just to link the Ahearns to the work she was executing so brilliantly. And why would she look for murders? This was hacking computers, not fingers, using a keyboard, not a cleaver. She wouldn’t even think of such bloody business. And if she did? The consequences for her would be too gruesome to consider.
“Whoever he was, he—”
“How do you know it was a he?” Oleg jumped in. “And don’t tell me gender rhythms.”
“Don’t dismiss them. There’s a lot of research into unique biometric profiling in keystroking.”
Oleg snorted. She was using fancy language that didn’t fool him. All it meant was that metrics could apply to human characteristics and traits, which included keystroking. As for whether you could tell men from women working on a keyboard? Not for certain, not yet. Someday, though.
“And I have good instincts,” she replied, using both hands to raise her con panna, elegant fingers fanning out left and right as her lips met the mug just long enough to leave a narrow creamy mustache above her inviting lips.
Oleg had an overwhelming urge to kiss it away—and would have, too, had they not called his drink order. Instead, he rose, delighted to see that the prettiest foam artist was on duty today. She had Baltic blue eyes and teeth as white as glaciers. She’d drawn Lenin’s inimitable face on his latte, employing skills like that crazy Japanese artist whose foam and coffee creations—teddy bears, kittens, giraffes, and Daliesque melting clocks—had gone viral. Moscow’s foam queen had a more limited range: Lenin and Trotsky mostly. Icons of the left that appealed more to tourists than Muscovites themselves. What Oleg loved most about Lenin’s visage was devouring it the way the architect of the Russian revolution had devoured the motherland.
Good riddance, Vladimir.
“So now do I get to work on all of AAC?” Galina asked him as he sat back down.
“I’m betting you’re trying,” he said playfully.
She smiled, nodding at the remaining half of Lenin’s creamy head.
“Guess what she put on mine?” Galina slid her drink around so he could see part of the face of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot supreme; Galina had already sipped away the foamy chin. Nickname: Tolokno. “She’s doing her now, if you ask nicely.”
“No way!” He marched back to the counter as she started working her keyboard again. “Hey,” he said, “I want Pussy Riot, too. But the whole group.”
Baltic Blue shrugged. “I can only do Tolokno.”
Oleg plopped a one-thousand-ruble note down on the counter, about twenty-two U.S. dollars. That’s asking nicely, he told himself.
“But there are eleven of them. In foam? I can’t do that. Look, I’ve been working on Maria. I can try that, if you want.” Maria Alyokhina. A mouthy girl just like Tolokno, always sticking it to Putin.
Oleg glanced at Galina. “Okay, give me those two.”
“You’re crazy,” Galina said to him when he returned bearing a triumphant smile. “So you get two, and I only get one. How come that always happens?” she asked.
“I demand service. You ask for it like a nice little girl, even when we both know you can be so bad. How about if I pay you now? Before you let me see what you’re doing.”
Under the table, he slipped a hefty envelope filled with cash between her knees, a sex game that harkened back to her days as a nanny for Dmitri. When the boy was fully sedated—and Oleg made a sexy overture—she would tell him that she had to be paid. He would hand it over to her as he was doing right now, knowing how much it excited Galina, a girl who’d had sex with only one other man, her child’s father. She was blushing once more, as she always did. Oleg loved the game for other reasons: it made him feel less emotionally indebted, so for him it was real, and close to what he did a couple times a week with far less familiar faces.
“Now show me.”
“Show you what?” She reached down and took the envelope.
“Show me your screen.”
She looked disappointed, but swung her laptop around so he could see the AAC schematics she’d drawn up based on the files she’d been working on.
“But there’s still a problem of scale,” she told him. “He made amazing advances, but unless that stuff’s in the encrypted files, this isn’t the game changer you might have thought it was.”
Game changer. He could always tell when one of his hackers had been working American files because they started using the vernacular. But she was wrong. AAC would change everything. That was another key reason he’d held back the encrypted data—so she would not possess the means of unlimited riches, which in Russia meant her life would last about as long as it took some greedy bastards to extract the info from her. Not long, when any threat to Alexandra, her six-year-old, would have Galina giving away the worldwide “game changer.”
So Oleg gave and Oleg took away—data. Which she might have suspected because she suggested they publish everything about AAC on the web. “Pull a Snowden. Give it away,” she finished with a smile.
Snowden. Why did we ever let him in? Now every do-gooder—and Galina, a blushing outlaw in a short dress, was definitely a do-gooder—wanted to “pull a Snowden.”
More vernacular. And no doubt the favorite phrase of a do-good hacker.
“We have to be very careful now,” he told her. “You got paid and others must be paid. There were people in the States who collected the data.” He would say no more about that. “Investments have to be monetized.”
“How long will it take to pay the others?” Galina asked. “Every day is precious. We need to start extracting carbon dioxide everywhere we can. I have a list of all the solar and wind sites in Russia so we can set up carbon capture at as many as we can.”
“But it’s a very powerful tool, and in the wrong hands?” He smiled, for his hand was back under the table, thumb and pointer opening her knees again, the way you’d swell images on your screen with a track pad by spreading those fingers apart. He and Galina spoke the same sign language of sex, and had for years. Her legs opened just a little, teasingly, but enough that he could feel the velvety skin of her inner thigh right below her silky hem.
And then she took an audible breath as he reached farther and began to languorously stroke her upper thigh just below her underpants, borrowing another motion from most track pads, the one that drew three fingers toward the operator to ferry a particular document or image to the forefront of attention. Each recoil brushed his fingernails against the taut fabric at the top of her legs.
Now that he had her attention, Oleg took the seat next to her, leaving his jacket hanging on the back of the chair he’d just vacated to block the view. He slid his hand back under her dress, delighting in exerting a firm grasp on her thigh. Then he inched aside the delicate elastic band and felt her most intimate pleasure as Galina, eyes looking far away, whispered, “It’s ready.”
“I know. I can tell.”
“No, I mean your latte.”
“What?” He looked up. Baltic Blue was smiling, waving him over.
“I have your Pussy Riot,” she called to him.
With an erection tenting his pants—and no sign of embarrassment—he picked up his latte and walked back with the likenesses of two of Russia’s most notorious women sharing the circular frame of his mug.
As he sat back down next to Galina his phone went off. He had to take it—a young Ukrainian hacker who’d been working for him almost as long as Galina. Oleg thought of himself as a great conductor, offering the baton of his expertise and wealth where it could d
o the most good—for him. Others might have called him a venture capitalist, a vulture capitalist, a vulgar throwback to a greedy era, but Oleg knew better. He was fusing the techniques of terror to the Digital Age, transcending politics as he pointed his baton left and right from center stage.
“Yes?” Oleg said, boldly pulling Galina’s dress all the way up and slipping his hand inside the satiny front panel of her panties. But instead of picking up where he’d left off—he froze, then gripped her pubis so tightly that she squeaked, “No!”
But he didn’t hear her. How could he? His ears were filled with the kind of wonder that trumped anything Galina Bortnik could have offered.
He turned from her and spoke into his phone with great care: “Tell me again. Say it slowly.”
“It is done,” the voice told him. “You can see for yourself. Then we can talk.”
“See for himself” meant the Ukrainian had posted an encrypted video on a YouTube channel and deliberately posted the decryption key to a Dark Web forum that the intelligence agencies monitored. That way the USIC—U.S. Intelligence Community—would find it. The Dark Web, a small portion of the Deep Web, was the part of the Internet where a lot of illegal and malicious behavior took place. It was inaccessible to conventional search engines, which meant only the most sophisticated users could access it.
Oleg already had the decryption key. He rushed out to his Maserati, away from the Starbucks’s Wi-Fi and surveillance cameras, and poached an unsecured Wi-Fi signal. In seconds he was looking at the interior of a nuclear-armed submarine with dead American sailors—proof that the young Ukrainian hacker had used the guidance and funds Oleg had provided him to unprecedented advantage.
Nobody, but nobody, had ever held the reins of world power as he did right at that moment. The submarine now had a job to do—and the tools and men to do it. And so did Galina. Though neither she nor the Ukrainian knew each other, they were working hand in hand through him—the conductor, now with a nuclear-armed baton.
