He grimaced. Truznyev dead might not be a problem. But Truznyev alive and spilling his guts was a potential time bomb. At their last rendezvous, the former president had made it abundantly clear that he knew far more than he should about Russia’s top-secret cyberwar operations and infrastructure. And it was no secret that he hated and despised Gryzlov, the man who’d replaced him as president. What if he had decided to disappear, leave Russia, and then sell his information to the highest bidder?
Tarzarov’s frown deepened. If that was the other man’s plan, he would find no shortage of buyers with very deep pockets — ranging from the Poles to the Americans to the Chinese. Could Truznyev have arranged the murder of his own bodyguards to make it look as though he’d been kidnapped? It was perfectly possible, the older man decided. No man in Russia rose to such heights without being willing to sacrifice even his most loyal subordinates if necessary.
Almost of its own volition, his hand drifted to the secure phone on his desk, hovering over the button that would connect him directly to Gennadiy Gryzlov. If there were any possibility that Truznyev was selling their cyberwar secrets to a foreign power, it was his duty to give the president the bad news.
But then his hand drew back.
Think carefully before you leap into the unknown, Sergei, he thought. Decades spent up to his neck in Kremlin intrigue had imparted a very basic lesson: bearers of bad tidings were rarely rewarded. There were other considerations too. Briefing Gryzlov would necessarily entail revealing more than might be wise about his dealings with Truznyev. Russia’s president, while supremely self-confident, was also deeply paranoid. How would he react to learning that his trusted chief of staff and closest confidant had been holding clandestine meetings with the man he’d deposed? Would he see the value derived from maintaining such contacts? Or would he see them as evidence that Tarzarov might be plotting against him?
Without hard evidence of Truznyev’s real fate, it made no sense to take such a risk now, he decided. If allegations made by the former Russian president started showing up in the Western press, they could easily be dismissed as the disgruntled ravings of a failed leader. In time, any effects on international opinion they produced would fade — buried by the news of some pop star’s drug overdose or another petty scandal.
The chance that Truznyev’s information might be used for military purposes was a more serious threat. If the former president really had defected, he certainly knew enough to allow his new masters to pinpoint Russia’s buried cyberwar complex. But even with that information, could anyone really hope to launch a successful attack so deep into the Motherland’s territory? It seemed unlikely to Tarzarov. Not unless they were willing to send so large a strike force that it would represent an open declaration of all-out war against Russia. And not even the Poles were that crazy.
Besides, he reminded himself, Gennadiy was supremely confident that the defenses around the Perun’s Aerie complex were impregnable. Under the circumstances, Tarzarov concluded, wisdom dictated a course of waiting to see precisely how events unfolded.
Intelligence analyst Kristin Voorhees came back from lunch and entered her cubicle. The first thing she noticed after sitting down at her computer was that someone had futzed with her ThinkGeek Firefly magnetic word set. Clipped to one of her cube’s partitions, the board came with an assortment of words and suffixes used in dialogue from the cult-classic science-fiction series, and she was fond of arranging and rearranging them while noodling with complex database problems.
In and of itself, the futzing wasn’t a problem. She’d made it clear that her colleagues were welcome to reset the board whenever the spirit moved them. Many of them did, especially during those all-night shifts during a major international flap — when it seemed like every U.S. intelligence agency and administration senior executive was screaming for more satellite imagery and analysis.
No, it wasn’t the fact that the words had been rearranged while she was gone that caught her attention. It was what they now spelled out: Gorram wobble-headed doll caper.
Her breath caught in her throat. She’d been activated.
Years ago, while Voorhees was still just a computer-science postdoc interviewing to join the NGA, she’d been recruited by Scion as an unpaid sleeper agent. She’d never regretted her decision. Where so much of the U.S. intelligence community seemed bogged down in bureaucratic sloth and political infighting, former president Martindale’s private military and intelligence outfit had been out fighting the good fight — relentlessly opposing the enemies of the United States and the whole free world.
Then again, she thought wryly, feeling her heart pounding in her chest, as a sleeper agent, she’d never been asked to take any risks. Not until now. Her Scion handlers had only expected her to do the best job possible for the NGA, earning promotions and steadily working her way up into positions of higher and higher responsibility.
And now here she was, one of the agency’s data stewards charged with maintaining its huge archives of highly classified satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence information. Her post gave her high-level, read/write access to those databases, and now it was time for her to use that power on behalf of Scion.
For a moment, Kristen Voorhees was tempted to shuffle the words on her Firefly board back into random patterns and pretend the activation signal had never been delivered. That would be the safest course. If she were caught and convicted, the lightest prison term she could probably expect was something on the order of the two-year sentence handed to another government intelligence analyst caught passing classified satellite photos to Jane’s Defence Weekly back in the mid-1980s. But given President Barbeau’s long-standing feud with Scion and Kevin Martindale, her fate was likely to be a lot worse.
Deep in thought, she pulled off her glasses and absently polished them with the untucked tail of her blouse. Doing time in federal prison was not an appealing prospect. She was pretty sure that convicts weren’t allowed access to computers for anything but e-mail.
But she knew she couldn’t really just walk away. Not in good conscience. Anyone who followed the news knew that Russia was on the march again in Eastern and central Europe — using cyberwar weapons and terrorism to brutalize the small democracies America had turned its back on. Whatever Scion was interested in had to be related to that ongoing battle.
She sat up straighter and put her glasses back on.
Resolutely, she turned back to her keyboard, logged in with her access codes, and then entered a single, short command — a command that triggered a small piece of code buried long ago in the primary database operating software. In turn, this subroutine opened a tiny back door, a secret way into every NGA archive that could be used remotely by Scion intelligence operatives. For the next six hours, Martindale’s agents would have free, virtually undetectable, entry into every agency database. After that, the subroutine would erase itself until its next activation, sealing the back door and deleting any record of what she’d done.
At least that was how it should work in theory, she thought. But no one knew better than she did that systems as large and complex as those used by the agency had peculiar, little quirks all of their own. It was entirely possible that this Scion foray would leave traces the agency’s counterintelligence people would spot on their next security sweep. And if that happened, Kristen Voorhees was going to be neck-deep in trouble with a capital E, as in “violation of the Espionage Act.”