Together, they fell back onto the floor—which abruptly collapsed, this entire section reinforced with rotting wooden beams that she noticed at the last second. Nadia, who’d been just behind the bodyguard, fell through the hole as well, and all three of them plunged some five meters into yet another tunnel, this one flooded with inky black water rushing up around them.
Never losing her grip on the bodyguard, the Snow Maiden felt the concrete bottom slam into him. As the impact reverberated into her arms, she kicked out and realized she could stand, the water barely more than a meter deep. With Nadia coughing and screaming behind them, the Snow Maiden wrapped her gloved hands around the stunned man’s throat, then drove him back into the water. His hands locked around her own wrists. He tried to kick with his one good leg, the other still bleeding profusely from the gunshot wound.
The Snow Maiden raged aloud, her own cries echoing down the tunnel. The bodyguard was twice her size, twice as strong, and he was beginning to tear free of her grip—when he suddenly went limp. She screamed and shoved him back into the water, where he floated, inert.
She spun around to face the crying college girl, who stood there, trembling. She was barely visible in the faintest of light from their smartphones shining down through the jagged hole above.
“What do you want?” the girl managed.
“You,” the Snow Maiden snapped.
“My father has a lot of money. He’ll take care of you. Okay?”
Narrowing her eyes on the girl, the Snow Maiden started toward her. Nadia shifted a few steps back, sloshing through the water, but the Snow Maiden kept coming.
“Please, you obviously know who I am. We can settle this right now. I’ll pay you whatever you want. Just get me to the airport. Whatever it is you want, no matter how much, we’ll give it to you.”
Lifting her hand and shushing the girl, the Snow Maiden approached and said, “You haven’t worked for a thing in your entire life, have you?”
“That’s not true.”
“You think you can buy your way out of anything.”
Nadia’s lip quivered. “You police are all corrupt, aren’t you?”
“I’m not the police. I’m much worse.”
“If you do anything to me, my father will find you. He’ll find you, and your family, and everyone you care about.”
The Snow Maiden couldn’t help but grin. She drew a little closer, then suddenly clutched the girl by the throat with both hands. “Where money speaks, the conscience is silent.”
“Stop . . .”
It took everything she had not to kill this little bitch with her endless supply of rubles, a girl who had no idea what squirrel meat tasted like because her father’s business was hurting, who’d never shivered at night under four blankets because her house had no heat.
The Snow Maiden tightened her grip. “Now tell me. Where is your father?”
Before the girl could answer, shouts came from above. That’d be the garrison, drawn by all the gunfire. The Snow Maiden glanced up the hole, then back to Nadia.
She shoved the girl back into the water, then lifted her fingers to form a gun. “Bang, bang, bang—just like that you die. So where is he?”
Nadia trembled violently. “I don’t know.”
5
FISHER took another long pull on his cup of coffee, then rested his palm on the back of Charlie’s computer chair. “Anything else?”
“Well, I thought I got past the virus Kasperov used to infect the security camera systems, thought it was an old spaghetti code variation—some old-school trick—but it must’ve been on a timer and just shut itself down. Interesting. Looking at Kasperov’s duplex now; it’s in a gated community bordering a park in Moscow.” Charlie raked fingers through his short black hair, then pointed to a satellite map shimmering on one of his screens. He zoomed in to a 3-D view showing the buildings. The screen to the left was the black-and-white security camera feed, with a half dozen men posted outside the main entrance. “Looks like the police are getting their party on at Kasperov’s house. Same deal at his headquarters. They’re moving all the hardware into trucks, confiscating everything.”
“You thinking about going in there?” Briggs asked from his station opposite Charlie’s.
“Be a waste of time,” Fisher answered. “Like Charlie said, he’s planned this well, wiped all of his hard drives. There’s nothing to find there.”
Grim lifted her voice from the SMI table. “I’m sure if he’s left the country they’ve got the SVR looking for him, but they’ll take it one step further and bring in Voron.”
Fisher looked at her. “I was thinking the same thing. And if that’s the case, we’ll play our ace in the hole.”
Voron, which meant “raven” in Russian, was a clandestine group within the SVR whose existence was known only by a select few within the government. They were tasked with sabotage, corporate theft, and “talent extraction,” as well as other tasks from which even the SVR wanted to distance itself. Fisher had initially classified the group as a mirror image of the old Third Echelon, but more recently, when 3E’s assets went dark all over South India, Fisher and Grim realized that Voron had gone fully rogue and had access to Third Echelon’s intel—a frightening thought. Still, the team hadn’t been without leads. Fisher knew a former Voron operative who’d become a valuable asset, a man left for dead but who was now very much alive.
Mikhail Andreyevitch Loskov, whose code name was Kestrel, had run a joint operation with a Splinter Cell known as Archer; however, Kestrel was betrayed by Tom Reed, Third Echelon’s corrupt leader. Shot in the head and left for dead, Kestrel was destined to live out his days as a prisoner in Russia, placed in a medically induced coma, and would only be awakened when the men controlling him needed something, such as intel on Third Echelon’s operations or other Federation secrets Kestrel might know. It had been up to Fisher and Briggs to rescue the man—and they had.
Consequently, Fisher had made a deal with Kestrel. Once he’d learned what Kestrel had given up to Voron, he released the man. Kestrel said he was returning to Russia. He planned to settle the score with those who’d been using him and who’d forcibly extracted that intel.
Kestrel owed his life to Fisher and Briggs, but he was not a man who could be owned by guilt or gratitude. He’d suffered a lot of hardships in his life, had lost his parents in a terrorist attack, and had watched his army teammates being tortured and killed by Chechens. He was a stubborn Russian bastard, but he’d vowed to keep in touch with Fisher, even offered to sell him information when he acquired it. The last time they’d spoken, Kestrel had said he was “freelancing” in the Federation, ever prepared to exact his vengeance.
“Any luck getting us into the SVR?” Briggs asked Charlie.
“Are you kidding? Kasperov helped design their firewalls. It’ll be the hack of the century. But I’m not giving up. Some files are air gapped, but I may have found a backdoor that actually takes us through a front door, then it lets us sit there through a rootkit application.”
“Tell me more about this backdoor,” Grim said, raising a cautious brow.
“Oh, you don’t want to know.”
Grim cleared her throat. “Excuse me, I need to know.”
Fisher leaned closer to Charlie and said, “Play nice.”
Charlie alternated his gaze between Grim and Fisher, then finally sighed. “All right, so the SVR’s pumping tons of cash into R&D with a focus on social media networks like VK and Facebook. They’ve got a three-tiered program for the future of the Internet. They call these tiers Monitor-3, Dispute, and Storm-13. That last one, Storm, involves an army of spambots that’ll flood social networks with propaganda to influence public opinion.”
“So how does that get you inside?” asked Fisher.
“Well, there’s a double connection here. Kasperov’s boy genius, the guy named Kannonball? He was tagged as the lead programmer on this project.”