Oleg was doing Galina a favor by not revealing whose science she was studying, even if he could never tell her what the favor was or why he was bestowing it upon her. Galina was a peaceful person, lured into providing her hacking skills for the “benefit of all humankind.” That was exactly how she put it when he told her about the AAC technology. She would not want to know about the others in the operation who got their hands very dirty. Let her think she was on the side of the angels in stealing the AAC from profit-binging pirates in the hands of U.S. oil companies.
“I think he was a man,” she told him. “An academic.”
“Sure narrows it down. A male academic.”
“Don’t make fun.” She eyed him for a moment. “I’m right, aren’t I? Do you know you can read gender rhythms in keystrokes?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
She nodded, puckering, then opening her lips to mouth the word “true.”
Shy, but also very sexy girl.
“I’m protecting you. I really am,” he said.
She would curl up and die if she knew what they’d really done to obtain the complete files of the professor. But America had so many homicides that she would need a whole new set of algorithms just to link the Ahearns to the work she was executing so brilliantly. And why would she look for murders? This was hacking computers, not fingers, using a keyboard, not a cleaver. She wouldn’t even think of such bloody business. And if she did? The consequences for her would be too gruesome to consider.
“Whoever he was, he—”
“How do you know it was a he?” Oleg jumped in. “And don’t tell me gender rhythms.”
“Don’t dismiss them. There’s a lot of research into unique biometric profiling in keystroking.”
Oleg snorted. She was using fancy language that didn’t fool him. All it meant was that metrics could apply to human characteristics and traits, which included keystroking. As for whether you could tell men from women working on a keyboard? Not for certain, not yet. Someday, though.
“And I have good instincts,” she replied, using both hands to raise her con panna, elegant fingers fanning out left and right as her lips met the mug just long enough to leave a narrow creamy mustache above her inviting lips.
Oleg had an overwhelming urge to kiss it away — and would have, too, had they not called his drink order. Instead, he rose, delighted to see that the prettiest foam artist was on duty today. She had Baltic blue eyes and teeth as white as glaciers. She’d drawn Lenin’s inimitable face on his latte, employing skills like that crazy Japanese artist whose foam and coffee creations — teddy bears, kittens, giraffes, and Daliesque melting clocks — had gone viral. Moscow’s foam queen had a more limited range: Lenin and Trotsky mostly. Icons of the left that appealed more to tourists than Muscovites themselves. What Oleg loved most about Lenin’s visage was devouring it the way the architect of the Russian revolution had devoured the motherland.
Good riddance, Vladimir.
“So now do I get to work on all of AAC?” Galina asked him as he sat back down.
“I’m betting you’re trying,” he said playfully.
She smiled, nodding at the remaining half of Lenin’s creamy head.
“Guess what she put on mine?” Galina slid her drink around so he could see part of the face of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot supreme; Galina had already sipped away the foamy chin. Nickname: Tolokno. “She’s doing her now, if you ask nicely.”
“No way!” He marched back to the counter as she started working her keyboard again. “Hey,” he said, “I want Pussy Riot, too. But the whole group.”
Baltic Blue shrugged. “I can only do Tolokno.”
Oleg plopped a one-thousand-ruble note down on the counter, about twenty-two U.S. dollars. That’s asking nicely, he told himself.
“But there are eleven of them. In foam? I can’t do that. Look, I’ve been working on Maria. I can try that, if you want.” Maria Alyokhina. A mouthy girl just like Tolokno, always sticking it to Putin.
Oleg glanced at Galina. “Okay, give me those two.”
“You’re crazy,” Galina said to him when he returned bearing a triumphant smile. “So you get two, and I only get one. How come that always happens?” she asked.
“I demand service. You ask for it like a nice little girl, even when we both know you can be so bad. How about if I pay you now? Before you let me see what you’re doing.”
Under the table, he slipped a hefty envelope filled with cash between her knees, a sex game that harkened back to her days as a nanny for Dmitri. When the boy was fully sedated — and Oleg made a sexy overture — she would tell him that she had to be paid. He would hand it over to her as he was doing right now, knowing how much it excited Galina, a girl who’d had sex with only one other man, her child’s father. She was blushing once more, as she always did. Oleg loved the game for other reasons: it made him feel less emotionally indebted, so for him it was real, and close to what he did a couple times a week with far less familiar faces.
“Now show me.”
“Show you what?” She reached down and took the envelope.
“Show me your screen.”
She looked disappointed, but swung her laptop around so he could see the AAC schematics she’d drawn up based on the files she’d been working on.
“But there’s still a problem of scale,” she told him. “He made amazing advances, but unless that stuff’s in the encrypted files, this isn’t the game changer you might have thought it was.”
Game changer. He could always tell when one of his hackers had been working American files because they started using the vernacular. But she was wrong. AAC would change everything. That was another key reason he’d held back the encrypted data — so she would not possess the means of unlimited riches, which in Russia meant her life would last about as long as it took some greedy bastards to extract the info from her. Not long, when any threat to Alexandra, her six-year-old, would have Galina giving away the worldwide “game changer.”
So Oleg gave and Oleg took away — data. Which she might have suspected because she suggested they publish everything about AAC on the web. “Pull a Snowden. Give it away,” she finished with a smile.
Snowden. Why did we ever let him in? Now every do-gooder — and Galina, a blushing outlaw in a short dress, was definitely a do-gooder — wanted to “pull a Snowden.”
More vernacular. And no doubt the favorite phrase of a do-good hacker.
“We have to be very careful now,” he told her. “You got paid and others must be paid. There were people in the States who collected the data.” He would say no more about that. “Investments have to be monetized.”
“How long will it take to pay the others?” Galina asked. “Every day is precious. We need to start extracting carbon dioxide everywhere we can. I have a list of all the solar and wind sites in Russia so we can set up carbon capture at as many as we can.”
“But it’s a very powerful tool, and in the wrong hands?” He smiled, for his hand was back under the table, thumb and pointer opening her knees again, the way you’d swell images on your screen with a track pad by spreading those fingers apart. He and Galina spoke the same sign language of sex, and had for years. Her legs opened just a little, teasingly, but enough that he could feel the velvety skin of her inner thigh right below her silky hem.
And then she took an audible breath as he reached farther and began to languorously stroke her upper thigh just below her underpants, borrowing another motion from most track pads, the one that drew three fingers toward the operator to ferry a particular document or image to the forefront of attention. Each recoil brushed his fingernails against the taut fabric at the top of her legs.