Three years of planning and now he was down to less than a week, and everything that had sounded so ambitious in the beginning was falling into place. Oleg smiled over his private pun.
But he was still Papa Plutocrat’s son, and PP had summoned him to cottage country outside Moscow.
In the Soviet era, they called them “dachas,” special places where party officials with influence could rest and relax with one another and their mistresses — or, in Stalin’s case, make fun with his pen and sign tens of thousands of death warrants and condemn hundreds of thousands to slave labor camps while he sat on his bulletproof couch. But most dachas were tiny places on tiny plots. Who wanted one anymore? Not fit for men of means.
“Why don’t you just call it my country mansion?” Oleg had once needled PP.
“Not a mansion. A cottage.”
Okay, a cottage that was twelve thousand square feet with an indoor pool, ice-skating rink, ballroom, movie theatre, and two kitchens, one for the servants and one for the family. It looked like a French castle, complete with dungeon. Oleg wasn’t sure what his papa did down there, and even as a boy he knew better than to ask. He’d been forbidden to enter the castle’s north wing, under which the dungeon lay like a sleeping snake.
Still, he was a boy’s boy so he’d snuck down there and looked around. Very interesting dungeon. Iron rings on the wall. And a rack, too. He had been only fifteen but thought the rack was the coolest thing he would ever see. Such big gears and a hand crank. When he turned it the rack went clickety-click and the table spread apart. Clickety-click-click-click and it spread even more. Beautiful manacles had clearly been hand forged to fit feet and wrists. Superb workmanship, which he came to admire more as he grew older. The same artist had made the iron rings for the wall, and when Oleg had seen them close-up he’d been doubly impressed.
He had led his half brother Dmitri downstairs the very day he’d discovered the dungeon and swore the mutt — born to an ex-peasant mother — to secrecy. Then he told him to lie down on the “bed.”
“I’m going to make you big like Papa, stretch your bones a little. How’s that sound? No more ‘little’ Dmitri. Make you a big boy fast.”
“Big like Papa? You can do that?”
“Yes, big like Papa. Like me.”
“I want to be big like Papa.”
Whatever.
Oleg chained him up. Dmitri was not a good specimen, though. He started wailing with the first clickety-click. You can imagine what it was like after a couple more. So sweet Oleg had to shove one of his father’s old boot socks in the boy’s mouth. But he still had to threaten him with head injuries if he didn’t shut the fuck up.
After a few more clickety-click-click-clicks, he cranked the table back together.
“Now I’m going to take out Papa’s sock. But if you scream, I’m sticking it back in.”
He unchained his brother and said, “Look, you’re so much bigger.”
Dmitri had looked down, all wet-eyed, and shook his head. “No, my pants are still in the same place.”
Five years old and already an empiricist. That pissed Oleg off, so he led Dmitri toward the Iron Maiden replica, open and showing its broad array of sharpened spikes. With a cry, the peasant brother tried to run screaming from the room, but Oleg grabbed him before he could flee up the stairs.
“I will show you something else, and you can do it to me,” he’d told Dmitri.
“I can hurt you?” the boy said with more vengeance than Oleg would have liked.
“Sure.”
Oleg walked him over to a medieval skull crusher. Dmitri stared at it.
“What is it?” the boy asked.
He told him.
“I’m not putting my head in there,” the boy said.
“I will, if you’ll keep everything secret that we’ve done down here.”
“Get in,” Dmitri said.
Oleg placed his chin on the base of the torture device and told his brother to turn the wooden crank that would drive a metal cap down onto his noggin.
The child did it with abundant enthusiasm, but when Oleg felt the cap pressing down on him, he’d reached up and stopped his brother.
“No, I want to hurt you,” Dmitri yelled, yanking on the crank. Then he grabbed the saliva-slick sock Oleg had used on him and tried to push it into his brother’s mouth.
But he was no match for Oleg, who reached up and unscrewed the cap.
“No fair,” Dmitri said.
“Someday you’ll get your turn,” Oleg told him.
“That’s not what I mean,” Dmitri yelled.
“But you will,” Oleg had vowed.
Oleg now drove past lots of peasants on his way to cottage country. The last of the ordinary poor lived only a mile from the big green walls that surrounded the country homes of some of Moscow’s richest men. Twenty-five years ago the Russian people owned everything, according to Soviet propaganda of the time, which meant, in fact, they owned nothing. There were no millionaires, much less billionaires. Now, after free-market reforms, most still owned very little but Moscow had seventy billionaires, more than any other city in the world, and those men owned a quarter of the country’s entire economy. Even Oleg had to admit that his father’s friends had raised the bar, but not to a truly towering height. Not for him.
At last, Oleg’s red Maserati pulled up to the green wall that surrounded his father’s cottage. He didn’t even have to press a button. An electronic eye opened the gate. Good-bye potato-faced peasants, hello handsome happy people. Oleg didn’t disdain the peasantry. Not as much as the billionaires in cottage country. They had plundered old industries — mining, petroleum, steelmaking, shipbuilding — but most couldn’t even work the simple computers of that era. But they all knew how to come up with fistfuls of rubles when the whole economy had come up for grabs. They’d thought that meant they were smart. They had confused greed with intelligence.
But the sharpest ones had sent their sons to school — Caltech, MIT, University of Cambridge, and Moscow’s own Institute of Physics and Technology. And the lucky offspring studied computer science, software engineering, and the emerging fields of cybersecurity and information assurance. That was what he had done. His father was always saying, “Come work for me. You can make millions.” But Oleg didn’t want millions. He wanted billions so his father could work for him.
He slowed to motor across the drawbridge at Papa’s castle. Another electronic eye recognized the Maserati and the portcullis rose, revealing silver-tipped spikes on the bottom.
Oleg drove into the interior courtyard, one huge English garden with a dozen varieties of roses and pergolas and lush grass and striped canvas chairs. Like a Saturday fair every day of summer. Sometimes PP even had magicians dazzling guests, and musicians strumming and strolling, playing Russian folk tunes.
He drove into a car elevator, which lifted him to the second floor, then turned like a wheelhouse till he was pointed at his reserved place. As he parked, his phone vibrated. The Ukrainian hacker again, telling him 146 crew members were dead. “Even the captain.”
Yes! Oleg pumped his fist. Just the ones he needed alive. Like he’d planned.
“This is very good,” Oleg said. Then he affirmed that a news blackout was holding.