Dmitri hovered over his father most of the time PP talked, but on three occasions he drifted toward Oleg, only to veer away quickly.
“So it’s time you stopped playing with computers and came to work for me. Or I will have to put you on a budget,” PP said.
Oleg almost laughed. Everything was playing out as he had planned for years. In no time he’d buy his father’s companies and put him on a budget. And if he didn’t want to sell? Oleg would have the clout to make him.
But for now he smiled and repeated “Yes, Papa” every few seconds before getting up to leave.
But who got the last word?
“Skkkkuullll!”
Using his Maserati like the race car it had been designed to be, Oleg made it to Galina’s apartment in record time. She lived in a nice neighborhood near the Institute. Much better than student housing, but still Bohemian for someone with sweet milky thighs and big bouncy breasts. Three bedrooms, two baths, with a beautiful view of — what else? Onion domes. Enough space for little Alexandra to have her own room. And one for Oleg, too, Galina had told him many times.
Now she could tell him why she was planning to spend Sundays in cottage country.
“It’s simple,” she replied as she welcomed him into her immaculate foyer. “I like Dmitri and your father’s paying me a small fortune to work with him.”
“Let him work with someone else.”
“But Dmitri wants to work with me, and he’s making real progress for the first time in years, and—”
“I don’t care. I pay you plenty.”
“Not enough.”
Together they walked into her well-lit apartment’s living room. Galina looked horrible, he realized with a start. Dark circles under red eyes, as though she’d been crying. Maybe he should stop breaking her heart. Set her free like a bird. A nice bird. Not like a dirty gull. But definitely, she should take better care of herself, not let him see her like this. She never knew when he might stop by. Not that she appeared to care what he was saying because she was still talking:
“Alexandra has—”
“You’ll get millions when the AAC is running.”
“But it’s not yet and I need a lot of money because—”
“I will take care—”
“Stop, Oleg! You’re not listening.” She’d raised her voice to him. She’d never done that before. “Alexandra has leukemia.”
Oleg stopped. Now Galina was crying, and he was at a loss as to what to do with her. Alexandra walked out of her bedroom in her blue bunny pajamas with the attached feet, dragging a blanket as she had done when she was a toddler.
“What’s leukemia, Mommy?”
Galina rushed to take Alexandra in her arms as Oleg’s phone vibrated. Ukrainian hacker again. “I have to take this,” he said to the rose.
“I think I figured it out,” the hacker said.
“Figured what out?” What’s he talking about?
“The ‘or else?’”
“Don’t say another word.” Oleg hung up on him even faster this time.
No telling what the Federal Security Service — or even NSA’s latest-generation Echelon system — might scoop up. Oleg would take no chances with his crowning moment. Not now. Not when he was down to days.
He turned back to Galina, still holding Alexandra as if the little girl’s life depended on it. He gave them both a big smile.
“Now what were you guys talking about?”
CHAPTER 5
The appearance of normalcy in Lana’s home unnerved her. It made her feel eerie this morning. Such was the nature of cyberterrorism. The whole world could be on the very cusp of collapse, yet few, if any, palpable hints of mayhem would appear until it was too late. So while kinetic war — guns and ammo, jets and bombs, choppers and troops — made it explicit that life itself was at stake, the hackers’ hijacking of the U.S.S. Delphin made her feel as if she had a different kind of poison seeping silently, invisibly from under the floorboards as she walked into Emma’s room.
Her daughter slept on a twin bed across from the one occupied for the night by Tanesa. Their alarm was set for 7:00 a.m., when they would awaken to rowdy rock downloaded by the otherwise staid Tanesa. Despite her admirable restraint in so many respects, the young woman loved her headbanger music with the morning’s first blinks. Emma also did, and Lana supposed that would hold true even on the day she would make her solo debut singing Bach at the National Cathedral.
Lana kissed Emma on the head so softly she didn’t stir, then inhaled her sleepy scent in a manner not unlike the one she’d cherished fifteen years ago when her baby was a newborn and she’d cradled that dark-haired head in her hand and drawn her close enough to feel her breath. And of course Lana knew why the memory flooded through her right now and left a pang in her belly: life always felt most precious when it was under threat.
She tiptoed out of the room, knowing that by the time that rock music blasted the girls awake she’d be meeting with the nation’s top cybercommand at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. And when Emma and Tanesa stood in the National Cathedral, attired in blue satin robes along with the rest of the choir, Lana would find herself in yet another meeting — this one regarding Magic Dragon, the newly discovered Chinese Army hacker unit.
Lana backed her Prius out of the garage and left behind Bethesda, Maryland, a sleepy, leafy bedroom community, for DC. Most of the townspeople would rise blissfully ignorant of the crisis taking place off the Argentine coast. But a healthy number of the town’s population worked for the CIA, FBI, or NSA, and would learn soon enough of the impending peril, if they hadn’t been informed already. That would lead to a run on gas stations this morning; Lana had topped off last night. The more observant nongovernmental employees in town had long ago dubbed it “panic at the pumps,” having learned that the sudden, otherwise inexplicable lines could foretell a national crisis.
She merged onto the Beltway, soon passing Reagan International, recalling how last year’s disaster had her studying the skies as she drove to affirm that civilian airlines had been spared — and they had been, but only briefly. She winced, wondering what the latest calamity might bring.
Lana drove up to the guard station at Fort Meade’s main gate at 6:45 on the dot, plenty of time to clear security and motor to the complex of fifty-plus buildings that formed the heart of the nation’s intelligence complex.
At a glance, even a novice’s eye would have gleaned the tough security: antitank barriers, ubiquitous guards on foot and in patrol cars, electrical fences, one-way windows, and the vast variety of antennas sprouting from the buildings. But not even the keenest eyes could have spotted NSA’s copper-clad interior walls, which repulsed electromagnetic probes.
When she arrived at Deputy Director Holmes’s office, his longtime assistant, Donna Warnes, stout and gray and unstinting in her loyalty to her boss and country, directed Lana — with a tight smile of welcome — to a familiar SCIF, Secure Compartmented Information Facility: a room absolutely sealed off from the hydra-headed electronic incursions that daily tried to unveil the agency’s deepest secrets.
But who was the enemy this time? That was chief among the many questions plaguing Lana and, she was certain, everyone else meeting behind the windowless door still closed to her. She handed over her laptop and personal items to security personnel, black and white burr-headed men with demeanors that might have been chiseled from stone.
One of them, a former safety for Ole Miss, read her in, which meant he informed Lana that life as she had known it would end if she violated any of the security precepts to which she had long ago agreed. She acknowledged his every word, saw the slight, almost undetectable smile he bestowed upon her every time they met or passed each other since last year’s attack, and signed the obligatory form.