“We’ve unlocked some of his e-mails sent from a server when he was at MIT, and there’s loads of political stuff on there. Long, rambling e-mails with friends back in Russia about how Stalin derailed the Communist ideal and corrupted it, and how a new pure Party would save Russia from itself.”
“Hate to break it to you, Nikki, but long and rambling political discussions are part of what college students do. I ranted a bit myself.”
“Sure, but what’s important is who he was ranting to.” Nikki raised her hands and spread them, and as if by magic a list of names appeared in the air. Holograms are kind of cool.
The names were all Russian. “Valen — and I’m calling him that because it’s what he’s calling himself now, okay? — swapped e-mails with eleven different people in Russia, and a few Russians living in Ukraine. Over a period of months, his e-mails got more intense, and it’s pretty clear that he was completely sold on the idea of this New Soviet thing. If he’d been in America we would have put him on a watch list because of the things he said. About how old structures needed to be torn down and how this was a war. That was the key right there, Joe, because it’s clear that he saw the Cold War as a real, declared war, and that the fall of the Soviet Union did not end that war. He makes references to partisans and how their fight was never recognized as a declared war, but it was all the more honest because it was from the true heart of loyal Russians.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So where does that take us?”
“The names on the list are actually people he knew,” she said, but then she swept four names away. “We checked some out and dismissed them as ‘talkers.’ People who love to argue and wrangle about politics but really aren’t all that genuinely political. Not enough to try and bring something like the New Soviet into being if it meant pulling triggers.”
“Right. And the rest?”
“That’s where this gets really fascinating,” said Nikki, warming to the topic. “Of the remaining names, all but one are friends of his who were studying computer sciences in various schools. They all went into different related fields, including IT, information services, code writing, and public relations. I had a feeling, though, and kept drilling down into their lives. And… do you remember the list of Russians indicted a while back? The ones accused of hacking into voting records and also waging a disinformation campaign on social media? Well, all of Valen’s friends, the ones we didn’t eliminate from our list, were part of that.”
“Well… holy shit.”
“It gets better,” she said, and now Nikki was grinning as broadly as Doc Holliday. “The last name on the list was an old girlfriend of Valen’s who was probably the one who got him into politics in the first place. She was the granddaughter of a senior Party member during the old Soviet days and was in that group of very vocal radicals who were very open about rebuilding the Party and getting it right. By reading back through the e-mails, it’s pretty clear that she’s helped shape his thinking from when he was in high school. Maybe earlier, but that stuff isn’t on e-mails. There are references to ‘conversations’ they had, so it was probably in person. She and Valen stayed in touch for years even though they did not actually physically meet after he enrolled as a freshman in college; and then it all ended when she died in a skiing accident.”
“And…?” I asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“We deconstructed this girl’s life, and I think the person Valen was talking to via e-mails all those years was not that girl. Sure, she did die in an accident, but that happened right after high school. The e-mails went on all through college and then Valen’s graduate studies at MIT. Nearly seven years of constant e-mails.”
I frowned. “Okay… so if this girl died young, then who the hell has he been talking to?”
“I ran a syntax algorithm, and even though the fake friend did a pretty good job of pretending to be the old girlfriend, there are unique identifiers. Everyone has them. And I’ve found some hits that back me up on this. There are nine other people, kind of like Valen, who talk politics with ‘old friends,’ both male and female. All in cases where they aren’t able to see those old friends. Clever photo-manipulated pics are sent, but there aren’t any real-world encounters. I think they’ve all been talking to the same person. Maybe it’s a recruiter for the Novyy Sovetskiy. Certainly someone who understands psychological manipulation to an ultrasophisticated degree. Some of the verbiage from her political comments was cut and pasted into e-mails to the other nine.”
“So, this guy is cultivating talent?”
“I don’t think it’s a guy. Sometimes she pretends to be one, but the language structure is female.”
“You can tell that from e-mails?”
Nikki shrugged. “Of course I can.”
I did not ask how, because the explanation would take hours and I would sink beneath minute detail never to be seen again. I know this from experience.
“I also think I have an idea about who this woman is,” said Nikki. “Have you ever heard about a spy code-named Gadyuka?”
“The viper,” I said. “Sure. But she’s a myth.”
“More like a ghost. There’s a lot of crazy stuff about her floating around the intelligence communities. Like Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes. Gadyuka’s supposed to be behind all sorts of crazy stuff, but there’s never any evidence that points back directly to her.”
“I know,” I said, “but I read a Barrier report that theorized that Gadyuka was a cover name for a whole bunch of different agents. A shared cover.”
“What if it’s not, Joe? What if there really is a master spy, and this is her? I mean, what if she’s really behind the earthquakes and all of this?”
“I’d be more enthused about that possibility if we had even a smidge of evidence. That Barrier report gave eight or nine different physical descriptions of her, including one that said she was a slim man pretending to be a woman. No one has any idea who she really is, what she looks like, or… well… anything.”
Nikki did not look frustrated by that. If anything, she seemed intrigued. A new puzzle to untangle. “Mr. Church asked that everything we have on Gadyuka be sent to Lilith via the Oracle uplink. I think that means Arklight is hunting for her.”
“Sucks to be Gadyuka, then,” I said. “I wouldn’t want Lilith dogging me. Not after what happened to Violin.”
Doc spoke up. “Whoever this Jezebel is, I think our mystery woman is cultivating the zeal for the next generation of New Soviet party members. Valen is one, and he’s a geophysicist and seismologist. The others are specialists, too. Epidemiologist, meteorologist, botanist, geneticist. Like that. All very dangerous professions. All very skilled experts in those fields. Frankly it’s making my ass itch, and whenever my ass itches there’s trouble in the tall grass.”
Nikki nodded. “When we widened the search we found that, like Valen, some of the friends of each of these experts have likely been recruited, too, with a bias toward anyone with deep social media or hacking skills.”
“The new battlefield,” observed Doc, “isn’t tanks and bombs. It’s weird science and the Internet. Anyone who says different isn’t paying attention.”
“Well, this is scary as all hell,” I said, “but it doesn’t tell me why I’m flying to Russia. Valen is here.”
“Yeah,” said Nikki, “I haven’t gotten to the scary part yet.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN