Alex looked into his eyes. He had not the slightest doubt he meant every word. After a moment, he said, "Fine, I'll go. This young lady, however, you will leave alone. I don't know her. She's not with me."
"Don't be stupid, Konevitch. Katya will kill you, or your wife, or both of you. Doesn't matter to us."
Alex's face froze. His name. The man had used his name, and he knew Elena was his wife. For three years he had prepared himself for a moment like this. Dreamed about it. Dreaded it. Now it was actually happening, and he couldn't think or react.
Vladimir's thick hands shot out and grabbed Elena by the neck. He spun her around like a puppet; one hand slipped under her chin, the other against the back of her head. Elena squirmed and fought at first, but Vladimir was too large and strong. He tightened his grip, and she yelped with pain.
Vladimir said to Alex, "You have a black belt, I hear. Surely you recognize this stance. A quick shift of my weight and her neck will snap like a rotten twig. Now, will you please get into the cab?"
As they were sure he would, without hesitation or another word, Alex climbed inside. A moment later, Elena was shoved in beside him and landed awkwardly against his side. The man knew what he was doing; he was using her as a buffer from Alex's hands, and he squeezed into the backseat to her right. The woman in the nun's outfit, obviously anything but one of God's saintly servants, slipped into the front passenger seat with her pistol in Alex's face.
The driver, a trusted cohort and a skilled getaway man, gunned the engine, popped the clutch, and off they sped with a noisy screech. Nobody said a word. As if on cue, the lady in the front shifted her gun at Elena's face. The man in priest's garb said to Alex, "Hold up your hands, together."
Alex did as he was told. The man bent across Elena and efficiently slapped thick plastic cuffs on Alex's wrists, then with a show of equal dexterity, Elena's.
After a moment, Alex asked, "What do you want?"
"Be quiet," came the reply from Vladimir. He withdrew two black hoods and clumsily covered their heads. In March 1992, two months after the press frenzy over Alex Konevitch began, the initial attacks on his companies were detected.
Somebody was making repeated highly sophisticated attempts to break into Konevitch Associates' computer networks. Quite successfully, or so it appeared. The Russian Internet backbone, like everything inherited from communism, was shockingly backward and inefficient. Alex had therefore hired an American company that specialized in these things and plowed millions into creating his own corporate network, a closed maze of servers, switches, and privately owned fiber-optic cable that connected his companies. The only vulnerabilities were in the interfaces between his private network and the Russian phone companies, interfaces that were, regrettably, unavoidable. Naturally this was precisely where the attacks occurred.
That discovery was made minutes after a new American anti-virus software program was installed, a magical sifter that sorted gold from fool's gold. Tens of thousands of spyware programs were detected-like small tracking devices-that had penetrated and riddled the entire network. The programs were sophisticated little things, impossible to detect with homegrown software. They not only tracked the flow of Internet traffic, they caused each message to replicate and then forwarded copies to an outside Internet address.
Private investigators easily tracked the Internet address to a small apartment on the outer ring of Moscow and burgled their way into the flat. It was completely empty and wiped clean. Nothing, except a small table and dusty computer. The plug was pulled out. The hard disk had been removed.
What was going on? Alex had anxiously queried his technical specialists. Somebody is mapping your businesses and transactions, came the answer. For how long? he asked. Maybe weeks, more probably months, and it seemed fair to conclude that whoever launched this attack now had an avalanche of information regarding how his rapidly expanding empire came together, how one piece interfaced with the next, how and where the money flowed, even the identities of the key people who pushed the buttons. The computers in the human resources department, particularly, were riddled with enough spyware to feed a software convention.
The programs were wiped clean, gobs of money were thrown at more protective software-all imported from America, all state of the art, all breathtakingly expensive-and nothing was heard from the originator of the attack. Corporate extortion or any of several forms of embezzlement had been anticipated-pay us off, the intercepted traffic will be destroyed, the attacks will stop. But after long weeks during which Alex's hired computer wizards held their breath and nobody approached the firm, a new, more hopeful scenario was reached. It was probably one of the expanding army of nettlesome computer nerds, his technical people speculated-nothing to be overly concerned with. This was an everyday problem in the United States, Alex was told, where hackers sat up all night and thought up ways to be bothersome for no greater reason than the idiotic satisfaction of imagining it made them something more than the insignificant little twits they were.
In fact, Alex was warned, it could have been much worse; the sneaks could've hacked in, crashed the entire system, and demolished mounds of irreplaceable information. A helpful and timely warning, actually-take better precautions, spend whatever it takes, and then some. Stay alert. Be thankful we detected the problem early and eliminated it, Alex was told by his head technician, an American imported and paid a small fortune for his erudition in these matters.
4
The old lady was merely daft, Bernie Lutcher concluded, at first.
She had jumped in front of him, repeating something loudly in Russian. At least it sounded like Russian. He understood not a word and shrugged his shoulders, and she switched to a different tongue, more quick bursts of incomprehensible gibberish-possibly Hungarian now-while he continued to shrug and tried to brush past her. To his rising impatience, she clutched his arm harder and ratcheted up the incoherent babble.
He recalled her from the plane, the old lady with apparent incontinence issues who made trip after trip to the potty. Maybe she was seeking directions to the air terminal ladies' room, he guessed. Or maybe she was a certified loony, a lonely human nuisance of the type found in every city in the world.
He tried to tug his arm away again and noticed how surprisingly strong she was. Ahead, he watched Alex and Elena pass through the electronic doors, and felt a sudden clutch of alarm. Depending on the length of the line outside, it might take only a few seconds for them to climb into a taxi and disappear into the vast, winding labyrinth of Budapest streets.
He knew their schedule and the name of their hoteclass="underline" he could always catch up with them there. Unfortunately, he was pathologically honest and duty-bound to enter any coverage lapses in the report he assiduously completed and turned in after each job. In his mind he had already spent his annual bonus on a nice holiday in Greece, on a luxurious slow cruise through the sunbaked islands, sipping ouzo and ogling Scandanavian tourist girls in their Lilliputian bikinis; he now was watching it all go up in smoke.
He tried to recall any fragment of every language he knew and quickly blurted at the old lady, "Excuse me… entschuldigen… excusez-moi… por favor…" Nothing, no relief.
A large crowd began catching up to him, impatient travelers who had just cleared customs and now were plowing ahead and jostling for choice spots in the taxi line. He could hear their voices, but kept one eye on the old lady-who clutched his arm harder and acted increasingly distressed-and the other on the glass door Alex and Elena had just exited. He never turned around, never observed the old man who quickly approached his back.