He gestured toward a sprawling leather sofa that, when the reporters sank deeply into the cushions, made them look like dwarves. Kasperov gesticulated more wildly now as he spoke: “Welcome to my life. A poor boy from St. Petersburg. I got lucky. But you know story, right?”
One of the reporters glanced at his notes. “At sixteen you were accepted into a five-year program at the KGB-backed Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications, and Computer Science. After graduation, you were commissioned as an intelligence officer in the Soviet Army.”
“Yes, but reason I’m here is because one day, I’m like on my computer, and it’s virus there. This is long time ago, 1989. Every time I find new virus, I get more curious. I spend hundreds of hours thinking about them, working on them. This is how I made name for myself in Soviet Army.” Kasperov glanced to the doorway, where, in the shadows, a man appeared, a familiar man whose presence suddenly dampened his mood.
“Mr. Kasperov, you’ve been touted around the world as a generous and remarkable businessman, but you have to admit, you’re surrounded by others in your country who might not be quite as honest as you are. Oligarchs, mafia… How do you keep yourself above all the corruption?”
Kasperov glanced once more at the doorway and tried to keep a happy face. “I keep pictures of my family close to my heart. I keep pictures of children all over the world I’ve helped close to my heart. I know they need me and believe in me. I know this company can help me do great things because I believe in it.”
“Do you think your company can help foster better relations between our nations?”
“Oh, I think it already has.”
“I can see why you say that… Your girlfriend’s an American. Any talk of marriage?”
He blushed. “No marriage yet. Now, gentlemen, you’ll have to excuse me, I have another visitor. If you’ll go downstairs, one of my best managers, Patrik Ruggov — we call him Kannonball — will show you exactly how we work with customer.”
The journalists rose and Kasperov escorted them to the spiral staircase, then he returned to the man who’d been waiting for him in the shadows.
“Hello, Chern,” Kasperov grunted in Russian.
“Igor, I see you are massaging your ego again.”
Kasperov ignored the remark and stormed back into his office. Chern followed.
“Shut the door,” Kasperov ordered him.
Chern smirked and complied.
Kasperov knew this man only by his nickname, “Chernobyl,” aka “Chern.” Leonine, with a prominent gray widow’s peak and fiery blue eyes, Chern contaminated everything he touched and was often the bearer of bad news. While officially he was a member of the SBP, the Presidential Security Service, he served unofficially as President Treskayev’s personal strong arm and courier.
“How is your daughter doing?” Chern asked.
“Very well.”
“She’s away at school, yes?”
“She just flew home for a short visit.”
Chern grinned over that, then moved to the window at the far end of the office. He spent a long moment staring at the snow through the frosted glass, then lifted his voice. “There’s someone else who needs to go home.”
“And who’s that?”
“Calamity Jane.”
Kasperov nearly spit out his vodka. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“That can’t be possible.”
Chern’s eyes widened. “Are you that naïve?”
“I was told from the beginning that it was a deterrent, a deterrent that would never be used.”
“Then you are that naïve.”
Calamity Jane, named after the famous American frontierswoman, was created by Kasperov and a few of his lead programmers, most notably his man Kannonball. It was, in their estimation, the most malicious computer virus in the world; it not only would bring down the American banking system but would also render the country’s GPS system useless by exploiting a systemic problem with the cryptographic keying scheme. The virus would take advantage of this weakness before Raytheon delivered to the U.S. Air Force its Next Generation Operational Control System, or OCX, with the GPS III, third generation, satellites. With banks and GPS offline, the virus would move on to major utilities. Of course, he and his team were the best people to construct such a piece of horrific code because as antivirus champions, they knew the enemy better than anyone.
“I need to think about this,” said Kasperov.
Chern snorted. “There’s nothing to think about. You’re a brilliant man, Igor. You follow the news and world events. You understand the pressure. You know why it’s come to this. All the other elements are falling into place.”
Kasperov closed his eyes. Every time he consulted one of his news websites, there was a new threat to the motherland’s interests.
The merging of local European missile systems into a NATO defense system now put each country’s weapons under NATO command and standardized the command and control, along with local radar access and tactical communication systems. This gave NATO HQ the ability to launch each country’s missiles. The system was coming fully online, and the Kremlin feared it would interfere with Russia’s ability to launch their own preemptive strikes. The military had been threatening to attack the European sites for months…
The U.S. Navy’s decision to home port many of its Aegis missile system — equipped ships throughout key Mediterranean ports served as a bold parry to Russia’s opposition to American land-based missile defense installations in the region.
And then, of course, there was the recent surge of American natural gas being exported and sold to European nations at less than half the cost of the Russian natural gas those nations had been buying.
However, there was an even larger economic threat, one Kasperov himself had noted to the Kremlin:
European nations were aggressively developing thorium reactors, the so-called green reactors with their low levels of radiation, minimal waste materials, and outstanding safety features. Thorium, a white radioactive metal with nonfertile isotopes, was proving a viable substitute for nuclear fuel in reactors, and its demand was ever-increasing. In fact, the United States had just struck a deal to sell its current stockpiles of thorium, which were stored in Nevada, to European nations. These stockpiles would be used to bring hundreds of liquid fluoride thorium reactors — FLTR, pronounced flitter—on line throughout Europe, ultimately making Europe fossil fuel independent and destroying Russia’s customer base there.
Finally, recent U.S. sanctions against countries like Syria and Iran, where Russia had strong economic interests, continued to tax the motherland’s ability to sustain herself.
If this was a new cold war, it was one of economics under the umbrella of MAD — mutually assured disruption. There had to be a better way to address these problems.
Kasperov locked gazes with Chern. “This doesn’t come from Treskayev. It comes from the men controlling him. They’ve forced him into this. They don’t think he’ll stand up to the Americans.”