Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller)

by Thomas Waite

  Lana had a good idea what that would be, but asked anyway.

  “I want the same from you,” the Russian replied.

  “That will make my bosses uneasy.”

  “And what I’m doing could get me killed. My daughter, too.”

  “But you want to come here, don’t you?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Don’t play games with me. Do you or don’t you?”

  “Yes, I want to come.”

  “You know what we could guarantee you and your little girl, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “And, I repeat, you came to us.”

  “Not ‘us,’” Bortnik corrected. “To you. I will give you what you want.”

  Lana thought she sounded nervous. Who could blame her? Who knows who’s listening? “And your daughter. I want to see you both in our videoconference. Have her on your lap.”

  A pause now greeted Lana, even longer than the one that came during their first call.

  Bortnik broke the silence: “Yes, my daughter, too. But there are critical time restraints. You have to get us out of here. I have traveled close to a coastline. That is all I will say for now, except that I can’t cross a border checkpoint. People are looking for me. You must come for us very fast. Not just for us. It’s in your interest, too.”

  “And what will you do for us, if we get you out?”’

  “I can give you many pieces of the puzzle,” Galina said, speaking rapidly, as if she feared she’d be silenced—by her own timidity or the harshness of others—if she didn’t say everything at once. “But I am dead, and so is my daughter, if you don’t come right away. I mean you, Lana.”

  Using her name for the first time. Not her surname, but still a gamble. “Why me?” Lana asked.

  “Because I want to know the person I’m betting my little girl’s life on is betting hers as well. Simple quid pro quo. But there’s something else you must bring—all your expertise and computers. We will have to go to work immediately to stop this madness. These men are crazy. They think they are playing games. They won’t stop with one missile.”

  “Why are they waiting now?”

  “To make everyone cower. They think they’re in total control.”

  They are, thought Lana reluctantly.

  “Every minute is precious, Lana. Do you understand?”

  “All too well. Let me see what I can do. I’ll look for that information you mentioned. We must start with that, and the means of verification must be foolproof.”

  “Then let’s begin.” Bortnik hung up.

  Lana imagined the woman’s fear, fleeing Moscow with her only child. Near a coastline, either in the north or south of her country. Which wasn’t giving away much, either to her or those searching for Bortnik.

  But Lana also imagined a setup. How could she not? Bortnik, or whoever was posing as her, had put tremendous pressure on Lana to take personal action to exfiltrate her and her daughter from Russia. No mean gamble, especially at a time like this.

  Plus, Emma had been right: Lana had almost been killed the last time she got involved in kinetic action against hackers. Physical derring-do wasn’t her strong suit. And she’d promised her daughter that she wasn’t going anywhere.

  But at each stage of Emma’s development, Lana had tried to protect her from the bleakest, most age-inappropriate truths. She’d edited fairy tales, for instance, when she’d felt her daughter wasn’t ready for the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm. Now Lana felt that Emma, even at fifteen, hadn’t grown beyond the simple comforts of her mother’s deceptions. So she wouldn’t tell her if she were deployed overseas. Lana would just go, if it came to that, and trust that she’d return in one piece—and quickly.

  There were always myths a famous mother couldn’t control, though. After last year’s violent cybersiege, Lana wished Emma had not accepted that her mother could overcome the grimmest possibilities and most excruciating penalties.

  Lana had tried to tell Emma that what actually had happened in Yemen was much more complicated than the torrent of news stories would have had the world—and her own daughter—believe. Truth be told, Lana felt she’d been more lucky than brave during that climactic struggle—and that whatever had passed for her courage then was about to be cruelly tested again.

  Fearing that she’d fail herself, her daughter, and her country, she glanced at the phone and shut off the light.

  Sleep did not come easily.

  CHAPTER 18

  GALINA AWOKE JUST BEFORE noon, her sense of displacement so great that she did not recognize the monastery room for several seconds. It looked so small it could have been a prison cell—but for the sleeping beauty in the bed across from her.

  Alexandra lay with her eyes closed and mouth slack, looking blissfully happy, but five hours was all the sleep Galina would get. Even so, it represented the longest uninterrupted rest since she’d first spoken to the woman whom she now knew was Lana Elkins, owner of a cybersecurity firm and a former NSA star. Elkins, Galina had learned, was a troubleshooter for that agency and had survived a brutal firefight that ended the cyberattack on the U.S. grid. All of which told Galina that Lana Elkins had the clout to provide her with what she most wanted: safety for her daughter and herself from men who would kill them on sight. That had certainly been Tattoo’s goal, and she doubted Oleg would stop simply because the first thug he’d sent after her had failed.

  She hoped Alexandra’s slumber would continue a while longer. With a belly stuffed with bread and cheese—and a body fully exhausted from all the stress they’d endured since thug number one had shown up—Galina thought it likely her daughter would sleep right through her mother’s next contact with Elkins, this time directly via satellite; the monastery did not have Wi-Fi but a satellite dish nested on a nearby building, so she would poach its digital video broadcast signals to get to the Internet posthaste.

  She started hacking her way back into FSB’s cybercenter, following the invisible trails she had blazed long before to Russia’s darkest secrets. Next, she created a file to provide virtual paths for Lana Elkins that would lead the U.S. spy to everything FSB had on her and on Galina herself. She had read the Elkins files as soon as she’d managed to identify her. That was why she had been so comfortable moving forward with her: Elkins was formidable enough to have warranted lots of FSB interest. A credit to her, in Galina’s book.

  But before executing the final keystroke to her own files, she froze at the sight of a surprise video greeting from Oleg. It was as if he were standing in the room staring at her, his eyes boring holes into her own.

  It can’t be in real time, Galina thought. He must have placed it here, setting it up to be triggered by me. And she might have been right, but his message was much more menacing than even his shocking appearance could herald:

  “Galina girl, you have come back to nest in the FSB files. I wonder why you are doing that. I wonder if you are betraying your own country now. But of course you are. Do you know that by betraying Mother Russia you are betting your own blood, and your daughter’s, on an act so terrible it can only fail? I wonder, most of all, if you know the price of betraying me? I will have you again. That is the price. Yes, in the midst of so many responsibilities, of so many great historic achievements—of literally changing the face of the earth—I am also on your trail. Why? Because you must and will be stopped. I could be outside your door right now. That would not even be a small achievement for a man who has accomplished what I have in the past few days. Why don’t you take a look? I really might be there.”

  Galina paused the video and looked up. She couldn’t help herself. It was as if she suddenly believed in ghosts, or the idea that a bloodthirsty killer could be hiding under her bed. Or outside your door, she thought. After all, the rational side of her knew what Oleg was suggesting—that he was actually doing all this in real time only feet away—was supremely un
likely, but not impossible. That was what made her so uneasy.

  She stared at the door, genuinely frightened that it would swing open and he’d storm in. No, she told herself. If he wanted you, he’d have grabbed you by now. So that made no sense. But neither did this:

  “That’s right, Galina. I know you so well. You are wondering where I am, and if I can get you. The answer is yes, but how am I going to do it?” He smiled, so genuinely that it raised the hairs on the back of her neck. “That’s a secret you can’t hack. You’ll know that’s true when I put my hands on you and Alexandra. There can be only one reason you have disappeared: you betrayed me.”

  He raised a big knife. It looked like a blade a hunter would use to slay a boar. He ran the shiny tip across his cheek to just below his eye, pressing the flat side against the very bottom of the socket. So close to his eyeball that she flinched.

  “You are blind to what you are doing, Galina. You’ll never get across a border. A short, twenty-six-year-old woman with a sick, six-year-old daughter? Good luck. I’d like to see you hack your way through that.” He turned the blade till it reflected the light.

  “And when you are caught, guess who you’ll be delivered to? Me, because you are my responsibility, just like Alexandra is yours. You will see that you have betrayed your little girl’s trust. Everyone who means anything to you in the coming days will also suffer. Good friends. Your former colleagues at Greenpeace. We’ll get them all. That has been made clear to me, so it is only fair that I make that clear to you.”

  He waved good-bye with the knife, letting it catch the light again. She wondered how long ago he’d posted the video. She worked for several minutes trying to determine the answer before deciding she had bigger priorities.

  She also wondered what the posted video would mean to Lana Elkins. Would she believe her now, if she actually saw it? Or would she consider it an elaborate orchestration?

  Galina still wanted to hack her files for Elkins, but when she finally worked her way past Oleg’s video, she found they were missing. Completely removed. After all that, she had nothing to offer Elkins. Why would the NSA star ever believe her now?

  Oleg was not outside her door, but he was nearby—on a hilltop overlooking Voronezh. He wasn’t certain Galina was in the city that spread out before him, but Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov had been murdered on the main highway heading south—and so ruthlessly that Oleg was appalled, even offended, that a man working for him had been treated with such cruelty. A bullet and a Bic pen? He still could hardly believe it.

  He thought Galina might have braced herself to backtrack through Moscow, when she most wanted to leave that city—and for good reason, he chuckled to himself—but he doubted she’d have the stomach for that. Which would mean that if she were heading south she would have to pass through the city before him.

  Pass through? Maybe not.

  She might have been so tired, so stressed-out by the time she arrived with her cancer kid that she would have been eager to rest. Made sense. That was when an almost feral presentiment told him that if he were to just look, really look around Voronezh, he’d find her.

  He gazed, once again, at the city. His eyes roved left to right.

  Then again, he thought: intuition was one thing, Google was another.

  “Places of interest.” He found a literary museum built in the eighteenth century. How quaint. Named after a poet Oleg had never heard of. A house bearing the name of an agronomist. A city square. A monastery.

  None of it aroused his instincts, so he googled “Places to stay.”

  An art hotel. He groaned. Holiday Inn. He gave his phone the finger. A hostel. Possibly, even likely before Galina became a mom, but not with a sick child. And the monastery again.

  It had come up twice, like a slot machine with two cherries. Galina could be the third. The thought first amused, then intrigued him.

  From where he stood on the hill, he should be able to see the monastery; according to what he read online, it had been carved from a mountain so it would always be prominent to the faithful. He certainly considered himself faithful to the mission of finding—and killing—Galina.

  He was trying like hell to pick out the monastery when Numero Uno texted him.

  Until now, he had always welcomed hearing from Uno. But the Ukrainian hacker had been badgering him for the go-ahead for the second Trident II, reminding Oleg that the missile was ready for launch.

  “I am going to bury it in the ice sheet this time before it explodes,” he added. “That will melt even more ice and send a tsunami all the way to Asia.”

  “Not yet. No means no,” he texted Uno back. It was like dealing with a two-year-old.

  Oleg had his own people to answer to, and they thought there was plenty of flooding in the world right now, with terrific results: Canada, Norway, Denmark, and, of course, Russia, were pulling their ships out of the Arctic region. The only stubborn nation was the U.S., which was ruled by idiots. They were like bad poker players trying to raise the ante with the worst possible cards. The Russian President was known to be laughing at his pathetic rival in Washington.

  So there was no need to launch the twenty-three missiles that were left. How much radiation do we really want, Uno?

  But he could see that Uno was intoxicated with the power of being the man with his finger on the button. And Oleg understood that: with the coordinates fixed on the Smith Glacier, just south of Thwaites, Oleg felt twitches of envy over Uno’s chance to play nuclear plenipotentiary.

  “Not now,” Oleg insisted in a postscript. “Wait as I have instructed you.”

  “I don’t want to wait. Waiting is a mistake,” Uno replied with unmitigated gall. “Waiting makes us look weak and fearful.”

  What was Uno really saying? Oleg wished he’d actually met the Ukrainian in person at some point. You can be in nearly constant contact with someone for three years, as he and Uno had been, but that was still not knowing him.

  While Uno had done exemplary work with Grisha Lisko, the only reason the pair had actually been able to pull off the hijacking of the Delphin was the tomes of research by Russia’s own cadre of hard-core FSB hackers who had made countless incursions into the U.S. Navy’s command center for the Atlantic fleet in Norfolk, Virginia.

  So Uno’s success was built on a platform designed and built by many others, although Uno knew only what he needed to know.

  “Do not lecture me,” Oleg warned him. “And do not launch the second missile.”

  “I will wait,” Uno replied.

  Of course you will.

  Oleg wished he could be as sure of Galina’s moves. The monastery intrigued him because she’d been brought up in the faith. Like so many others, though, she’d abandoned it. But Oleg had heard that people often found it again when they had a child with a terminal disease. They might not ever think of praying for themselves, but for a sunken-cheeked cancer kid? And Alexandra was Galina’s whole life.

  There it is. He’d finally picked out a cross and building that had been carved out of a mountain a couple miles away. They’d been revealed in stone the way a sculptor will uncover a face with his chisel and hammer.

  Why not take a closer look? There wasn’t much else between Voronezh and Sochi. Just small burgs. And Sochi itself had turned into a $50 billion ghost town since the Olympics.

  He walked back down a short trail to his Maserati.

  After watching Oleg on-screen, and finding her own files missing, Galina couldn’t rouse Alexandra and leave the monastery fast enough.

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” she told her daughter. She couldn’t be as terse with the nun who had checked them in and wanted to know why a mother with an obviously ill child would be hurrying out the door in the middle of the day.

  “I need to get home. My mother is not feeling well. Maybe dying.”

  “What about your daughter? She loo
ks like she needs rest. And you look like you need to pray.”

  “She will sleep in the car,” Galina responded.

  “And will you pray when you drive?”

  “I’ll try.”

  The nun appeared unimpressed with Galina’s sincerity. Galina felt the woman’s eyes on her back all the way out to the Macan.

  Galina drove down the narrow streets of old Voronezh, eyes on the rearview mirror as much as the road ahead.

  The bright sun, high in the sky, filled the narrow streets with harsh light that felt brutal and made her fear they had no place to hide.

  But he doesn’t know you have PP’s new car.

  No, she corrected herself immediately. You don’t know what he knows—or where he is.

  But he felt as present as the sun, and as threatening as the shadows that darkened with every passing minute.

  Oleg pulled up to the monastery and strode to the door. He knocked as if he owned the place, reminding himself that he probably could if he wanted to.

  A nun greeted him with a curious glance, but no words. Beside her, head bowed, stood a younger woman not in a habit. A novitiate, Oleg presumed. An apprentice in the discipline of denial—of self, sex, and all the keen excesses that made life worth living.

  The information center for Voronezh had noted that the nuns were “self-sufficient.” This one looked at him as if she not only owned the monastery, but his soul, too. Oleg loathed that kind of arrogance. Who does she think she is?

  “How may I help you?” the nun asked in the manner of one who wishes to provide no help at all.

  “I understand you have rooms for ‘sincere visitors.’ Is that true?”

  She nodded. He thought he might have detected the slightest softening in her demeanor. Once again, he prided himself on knowing how to instinctively strike the right note with these bitches.

  “And you are ‘sincere’?” she asked.

  “Very much so.” Oleg managed not to smirk or offer even a hint of a smile. “May I stay here?” The monastery had three rooms for visitors, according to the city’s website.