Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller)

by Thomas Waite

  The nun appeared obliging, but showed him only two of the rooms. The novitiate trailed silently behind them.

  “Isn’t there a third room?” he asked.

  “It is not clean. It was just used.”

  He shrugged as though it didn’t matter to him, but then said, “I’d like to see it anyway. If I like it, I’ll be patient while you clean it for me.”

  The nun peered at him. He thought about what he’d just said. What could possibly be off-putting about saying you’d be patient?

  She shook her head. “It’s not ready.”

  “Is that it?” He nodded at a door across the hall, the only one in the small cloister that he had not entered.

  She did not respond, at least not quickly enough to suit Oleg. He walked across and opened it, finding Galina. Not her person, but her scent. The lavender he loved so much on her skin, which rose so seductively to his nose when she began to sweat. Unmistakable amid the old wood and stone and tiles.

  “Dark hair. This tall.” He held out his hand. “With a little girl, right?” He spoke with none of the patience he had just professed to have.

  The nun glanced at him, saying nothing. But the novitiate raised her face to Oleg for the first time. Such a sweet-looking creature, perhaps seventeen, eighteen, just coming into bloom, which even her shapeless black frock couldn’t hide. Neither could her face, frozen with alarm, deny the truth of what he’d just stated.

  Oleg knew, and the novitiate knew he knew. He thought to calm her. “Do not worry. She is a dear friend. Which way did she go?”

  The novitiate looked at the nun, who replied for her: “We don’t know who you are talking about.”

  “You are lying,” he said as he approached the old woman. “Have you had a bad experience with a man?” She was ugly, with big pores on her nose. How he loathed them. But the novitiate looked sweet, pure, unadorned and untouched. But not for long. Any guy worth his manhood could see that immediately. Oleg made a point of letting his eyes settle on the nun’s charge, who averted her beautiful green gaze.

  “You must leave. Call the police,” the nun said to the younger woman.

  “No need,” Oleg replied, smiling and grabbing the novitiate’s wrist. “I am the police. So, I ask you again: Which way?”

  “I don’t know,” the nun said. She had the audacity to even offer a shrug. And she, a religious woman. What kind of example was she setting for the novitiate?

  Liar.

  “It’s too bad that you don’t know.” Oleg still held the young woman’s wrist. “What car was she driving?”

  “Car? I didn’t look,” the nun said. “Now let go of her.”

  Oleg shook his head. Then he pushed them both into the room with the lavender scent that he’d always found so arousing, and closed the door behind him. It had an old lock that he snapped into place. He turned back to them, smiling.

  Where is everybody? It’s empty. What was I thinking?

  There had been so few cars on the road to Sochi. Galina had seen five to be exact; two were police SUVs. How was that possible? Billions had watched the Olympics, and now nothing? Millions had visited Sochi, and now nothing?

  Worse than nothing. There were potholes; curbs breaking away from traffic circles; and apartment buildings that looked empty, eerie with the same two chairs and table on every balcony.

  How could they ever get lost among the faces of tourists if no one was even there?

  Galina realized she’d been living in her own world, such an insular life in Moscow, so focused on Alexandra and AAC and fighting global warming that she’d become oblivious to other events in her own country.

  They found a restaurant in the southernmost part of the city. Galina donned a scarf and told Alexandra to stay in the car. With dark glasses, despite the setting sun, she walked inside and ordered potato latkes.

  When she came out, her daughter said she had to go to the bathroom. Galina drove her to a park they’d passed; it had been built for the Olympics. Now the grass was overgrown and the concrete paths cracked. But they found a bathroom. When Galina flushed the commode for Alexandra, it roared and raised a brown geyser that made them run like refugees under fire.

  Still breathing heavily, they hurled themselves into the Macan. The night was darkening. It was the only cover Galina could find for them.

  Gratefully, she started driving, but after twenty minutes realized she was lost. She didn’t dare go online to check maps, haunted, as always, by Oleg’s desire to track her down.

  She found a car park and shut off her engine, thankful for the anonymity of darkness, but haunted by every pair of passing headlights.

  CHAPTER 19

  LANA WAS READY TO leave for Fort Meade after less than five hours of sleep, yet she wasn’t tired. Fatigue had been overwhelmed by urgency. Just one more thing to do, but she was certain it would be the hardest task of the day: She had to say good-bye to Emma, even if the girl was asleep, because Lana was all but certain she would soon be deployed to a coastline somewhere in Russia. Regardless of the reservations that she and Holmes and the White House itself had about letting an “asset” as valuable as she enter Russian territory at a time like this, she expected to be airborne in a matter of hours. Holmes as much as said so in a message only minutes ago: “You’re our best bet.”

  Our only bet, Lana had almost volleyed, which she considered less an egotistical comment on her skills than the dearth of leads available to the intelligence services.

  She left her travel mug of coffee on the kitchen island and hurried upstairs to where Emma lay next to Tanesa on the foldout futon in Lana’s large bedroom. Her daughter’s eyes were closed, her breath scarcely a whisper. She had her arm draped over Tanesa’s side. They looked like they’d known each other all their lives.

  In a way, they have, Lana thought, if the most important measure of a full life with someone came only after surviving a near-death experience with them. Those two had certainly endured that—and more—together.

  At least Emma and Tanesa weren’t in direct peril this time. But another mother and daughter were: Galina and Alexandra Bortnik. Six thousand miles away, or thereabouts, Lana guessed. Who knew where they really were? Near a coastline. That was all Galina had revealed to her.

  While it was true that Russia did not have the world’s most significant coastal cities threatened by rising seas, Galina’s hint could mean that she and her daughter were in any one of hundreds of small towns, cities, and ports from Russia’s northern seas to the Baltic and Black Seas in the west and the Caspian Sea in the south. Just thinking of the thousands of miles of shoreline—and all those radiating possibilities—made Lana realize she could be gone for a while.

  No, Lana corrected herself: You could be gone for good. If she’d learned one truth since the attack on the grid, it was that there were no guarantees you’d return. God knows, so many hadn’t back then.

  She kissed Emma’s forehead, thinking she’d slip away without waking her. Daylight was only now easing past the blinds. But Emma gripped her mother’s hand even before her eyes blinked open.

  “You’re leaving?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m going to Meade.”

  “No, I mean you’re leaving the country. I know you are. You’re going somewhere.”

  Lana felt caught in the crosshairs of her own conscience. Had she been too blithe last night in assuring Emma that she wasn’t leaving? Too quick to reassure her one more time? Had Emma detected the same cosseting tone that she’d heard her whole life whenever her mother had sought to soften the toughest stories for her?

  “Mom?” Emma said, demanding an answer.

  “I’ll let you know if I have to go.”

  Lana expected a volley of furious complaints, a temper tantrum even, though Emma hadn’t thrown one of those in a long time. Instead, her daughter shocked her: “Be safe, Mom. I want you back. An
d don’t lie to me anymore. I know what you do, and I know why. Someday I’m going to do it, too.”

  Lana kissed her again, choking down a flood of emotion, some of it pride. Most of it, though, was barely repressed grief at the fear of dying and never seeing her daughter again, just when her deadbeat dad came back into her life. The irony would be almost piercing.

  “How will I know if you’re gone?” Emma asked.

  If I don’t come back, Lana thought. But she promised to let her daughter know, “no matter what.”

  “For real this time?” Emma asked.

  “For real.”

  Lana made excellent time driving out of Bethesda. Commuter traffic had thinned considerably as social chaos affected work schedules as much as shipments of goods and the delivery of vital services.

  As she drove, she received a message from Galina explaining that Oleg Dernov had left a threatening video—and pillaged Galina’s FSB files. Then, just as Lana wondered who the devil Dernov was—and whether she’d missed a message from Galina—the woman dropped a bombshell: Dernov was the superhacker who’d been “running” Galina and the entire operation.

  Galina added that Dernov was not officially FSB—a contention Lana would have Jeff Jensen chase down—and attached a copy of Dernov’s threatening video.

  Lana turned it on as she merged easily onto the Beltway, glancing at her laptop on the passenger seat just long enough to catch Dernov’s smirk. She knew that she, along with many others in the nation’s intelligence services, would need to study the video closely, but she wanted to hear the gist of his message as soon as possible.

  In a word, it was creepy. Dernov’s standard-issue charge that Galina had betrayed her country was one thing, but what snagged Lana’s attention much more was when he said, “I wonder, most of all, if you know the price of betraying me?” Making it personal in a way that was the very antithesis of cyberwar with its calculating, almost clinically cold cunning. His threats then went further: “I could be outside your door right now . . . Why don’t you take a look? I really might be there.”

  Megalomaniacal, too, by claiming that tracking her down would be a “small achievement for a man who has accomplished what I have . . . literally changing the face of the earth.” Lana had met many men and women with ample egos in the cyberfield, but Dernov appeared to be in a class of his own, which she guessed he’d relish hearing.

  His efforts to intimidate Galina included a hint at real violence when he unveiled a large, gleaming knife. Even though all Lana could do was glance at the screen while she drove, she still squirmed when he pressed the shiny tip of that blade just below his eye and told Galina that she was “blind” to what she was doing.

  But what Lana took personally was Dernov’s vow that Galina and her daughter would never get out of Russia.

  We’ll see about that.

  Lana hurried directly to Holmes’s office. He looked up as she entered and, before he could ask, she lifted her laptop, as though in victory. “I’ve got it right here.”

  He watched the video in silence. When it ended with Dernov’s threats to Galina’s erstwhile Greenpeace colleagues, Holmes shook his head: “Amazing that he’s the face of the enemy.”

  “Almost too bizarre, but cyberspace has always had a disproportionate share of brilliant crazies.”

  “When are you going to video link with her? Soon, I hope.”

  Lana checked her watch. “In less than thirty minutes.”

  “We want you to do it in your office. Keep it as normal as possible, plus there’s no telling whether she’s already seen your office.”

  An allusion to remote activation of computer cameras, though Lana had as much security protecting her system as anyone up to and including the President.

  “I doubt she’s seen my office, but I’d prefer to do it there for the reason you first stated, keeping it nice and normal. With your flowers in the background,” she added. Delivery of the deputy director’s weekly bouquet had not been stopped by the crisis.

  “We’ll have our voice analysts and psychiatrist present. I want to keep the group small, though. Everybody will have a chance to go over the recordings of both Bortnik and Dernov later.”

  “I don’t see how the Russians can play innocent after this,” Lana said. “The video was embedded in FSB files, for God’s sakes.”

  “They’ll say he’s a great hacker and messed with their files, and then they’ll make a big deal of saying they’ll arrest him as soon as possible. But that won’t happen until they finish whatever business they have planned with those missiles. That’s what they want,” Holmes added matter-of-factly, “to sit on top of the world, no matter how damaged, as long as they’re number one.”

  Lana agreed. It was as if many powerful Russians shared dreams of empire and would sooner take possession of the planet, no matter how damaged, than squat further down the food chain in a healthier world.

  She reminded herself that past performance was often the best predictor of future behavior. And past performance with the Russians now included a nuclear missile strike and dangerously rising seas.

  “The Chinese ambassador contacted me this morning to say he’s received approval to send over more than a hundred of their top cyberspies.”

  “Does anyone outside this office know we’re going to be working with them?”

  “The President, of course, his chief of staff, the secretary of state, the joint chiefs, and the heads of the various intelligence agencies along with their chief deputies. Only people with the highest security clearances. Absolutely nobody on the Hill. Not even the chairs of the intelligence committees. They’ll be screaming.”

  “Let them,” Lana said, unable to hide her contempt.

  “Even so, there’s always a risk it’ll leak.”

  “The Chinese might even find a leak in their interest,” Lana noted.

  “McGivern says they’re much more intent on stopping the damage to their principal ports and cities.” McGivern was NSA’s chief China expert. Holmes went on: “We may not know the meaning of bipartisanship in Congress, but we do with one of our chief economic and military rivals. Go figure.”

  “That would take much more time than we have,” Lana replied.

  Holmes nodded. “You should probably get ready.”

  Lana checked her watch. Indeed.

  As she headed to her office, she wished she’d had the time to actually study Dernov’s video before linking to Galina. Lana’s takeaway, based mostly on hearing him—and a few glances at his imperious facial expressions while she was driving—was that he was a control freak, perhaps to his own detriment. Going after Galina right now, with all that he had in motion, did not appear to make sense, unless Galina was truly in a position to torpedo—perhaps in the most literal sense—his whole operation. In any event, Lana was anxious to catch the psychiatrist’s take on Dernov.

  She’d already performed cursory research on the Russian mastermind. He was a son of a plutocrat: Dernov père was an oil, gas, and minerals magnate. She’d found nothing in a quick search on Dernov senior to indicate that he was anything more than a moneymaking machine who had achieved prominence, along with so many Russian plutocrats, by plundering state-owned companies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Still, that was more than she was able to unearth about Galina in FSB files, just as the woman had warned. She’d done no better trying to dig any deeper about the younger Dernov.

  She messaged Jeff Jensen and added Galina and Dernov’s father to his research tasks.

  After studying the Dernov video, she saw that she had about sixty seconds before she was scheduled to link to Galina and her six-year-old. She was beginning to wonder whether Holmes and his team were going to show up on time, when they strode into her office.

  At precisely the scheduled moment, an exhausted-looking woman with a hollow-cheeked child appeared on a large monitor mounte
d on Lana’s wall. It was almost shocking to see the girl, who appeared so genuinely ill that Lana regretted asking Galina to put her through this. The child also had a dark bruise on her face.

  Emma had been a lean girl by that point in her life, but strong. Alexandra was curled up on her mother’s lap like a three-year-old.

  Galina herself had stylishly cut black hair that came to her chin. Clearly, a woman who had taken care with her appearance—until she’d gone on the run. Now her hair hung limply. Some of it stuck to her round cheeks, as though she hadn’t had time for a shower and shampoo in days. And her eyes, large and round, had dark circles under them that were only accentuated by the lousy lighting of video sessions.

  Lana would have bet her career then and there that mother and daughter were not poseurs.

  “Did you see his video?” Galina asked.

  “I did,” Lana replied.

  “He’s not as crazy as he seems in that. Don’t underestimate him and think he’s just nuts. He’s not.”

  “Were you intimately involved with him?”

  “Yes,” Galina answered without pause. “Until recently. He is not Alexandra’s father. Her father died recently.” She said it in such a way that Lana knew Alexandra’s father had not died of natural causes—and that Galina wanted to shield her daughter from that news. “I was asked a lot of questions about his passing,” Galina added.

  “I understand that you and your daughter might have been accosted as you drove south from Moscow.”

  For a blink, Galina looked worried that Lana had mentioned the direction; she hadn’t reacted to “accosted.” Then Galina recovered and nodded: “It was terrible. She witnessed it.”

  More than witnessed it, Lana thought with another glance at Alexandra’s face.

  “Was this, in your view, an assassination attempt?” No way to dance around that question. Lana simply hoped the English word meant nothing to the Russian child, who gave no indication that it did.