Now that he had her attention, Oleg took the seat next to her, leaving his jacket hanging on the back of the chair he’d just vacated to block the view. He slid his hand back under her dress, delighting in exerting a firm grasp on her thigh. Then he inched aside the delicate elastic band and felt her most intimate pleasure as Galina, eyes looking far away, whispered, “It’s ready.”
“I know. I can tell.”
“No, I mean your latte.”
“What?” He looked up. Baltic Blue was smiling, waving him over.
“I have your Pussy Riot,” she called to him.
With an erection tenting his pants — and no sign of embarrassment — he picked up his latte and walked back with the likenesses of two of Russia’s most notorious women sharing the circular frame of his mug.
As he sat back down next to Galina his phone went off. He had to take it — a young Ukrainian hacker who’d been working for him almost as long as Galina. Oleg thought of himself as a great conductor, offering the baton of his expertise and wealth where it could do the most good — for him. Others might have called him a venture capitalist, a vulture capitalist, a vulgar throwback to a greedy era, but Oleg knew better. He was fusing the techniques of terror to the Digital Age, transcending politics as he pointed his baton left and right from center stage.
“Yes?” Oleg said, boldly pulling Galina’s dress all the way up and slipping his hand inside the satiny front panel of her panties. But instead of picking up where he’d left off — he froze, then gripped her pubis so tightly that she squeaked, “No!”
But he didn’t hear her. How could he? His ears were filled with the kind of wonder that trumped anything Galina Bortnik could have offered.
He turned from her and spoke into his phone with great care: “Tell me again. Say it slowly.”
“It is done,” the voice told him. “You can see for yourself. Then we can talk.”
“See for himself” meant the Ukrainian had posted an encrypted video on a YouTube channel and deliberately posted the decryption key to a Dark Web forum that the intelligence agencies monitored. That way the USIC — U.S. Intelligence Community — would find it. The Dark Web, a small portion of the Deep Web, was the part of the Internet where a lot of illegal and malicious behavior took place. It was inaccessible to conventional search engines, which meant only the most sophisticated users could access it.
Oleg already had the decryption key. He rushed out to his Maserati, away from the Starbucks’s Wi-Fi and surveillance cameras, and poached an unsecured Wi-Fi signal. In seconds he was looking at the interior of a nuclear-armed submarine with dead American sailors — proof that the young Ukrainian hacker had used the guidance and funds Oleg had provided him to unprecedented advantage.
Nobody, but nobody, had ever held the reins of world power as he did right at that moment. The submarine now had a job to do — and the tools and men to do it. And so did Galina. Though neither she nor the Ukrainian knew each other, they were working hand in hand through him — the conductor, now with a nuclear-armed baton.
CHAPTER 3
“You missed it!” Emma glared at Lana with the disdain of a teenage daughter harboring a genuine grievance.
Despite her mother’s weary appearance and late arrival home, her only child offered no greeting at the front door. Only the damning, “You missed it!” And for the life of her, Lana couldn’t recall what she’d missed, but it was clear that her fifteen-year-old — going on twenty, or so she would have liked to think — thought it warranted the full arsenal of aggressive body language: arms crossed, legs crossed, so agitated, in fact, that her eyes were almost crossed.
“You don’t even remember, do you?” Emma shook her head. “The big rehearsal, Mother. Remember? The choir.”
Lana worked her key out of the door lock and sloughed her bag onto an entry table, trying to keep her chin up as she walked into the living room. The literal weight on her shoulders had vanished, only to be replaced by the metaphorical heft of Emma’s vitriol.
Lana set down her computer case and settled into a chair that let her relax while she faced her daughter. She took a breath, fortifying herself. “Listen, dear heart, something came up. I just couldn’t leave work.”
She’d spare her daughter the grim particulars of watching those poor men and women die before her eyes on the encrypted video posted on YouTube. The decryption key had been found by a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
She couldn’t share the devastating news, in any case. The whole intelligence community was in a collective lockdown: no release of any information about the events off the coast of Argentina. Also today had come the less-than-inspiring news that Admiral Wourzy, in charge of cybersecurity for the navy, had been arrested in an Indian casino in California last weekend for using counterfeit chips. How in God’s name does crap like that even happen? That had been Lana’s first thought. The admiral tried to argue that the Native American dealer had fed the phony chips into the game but casino security trumped him.
Lana knew more than she wanted to about the impulse to gamble. She’d spent countless hours gambling on virtual poker tables before finding the strength to stop throwing money away on cheap thrills that had never paid off in the long run. Even so, the desire was still inside her, recrudescing after an especially stressful period. But even at her worst, she’d never cheated like Admiral Wourzy. She’d never even thought of doing so.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Deming’s first impulse had been to demand his underling’s resignation. Which also happened to be the immediate response of the casino owner, who could scarcely believe the crook at the craps table was one of America’s highest-ranking military officials.
But the Pentagon brass couldn’t fire the admiral. Despite his blatant idiocy in this regard — all for measly ten-dollar chips — he was a gifted cyberwarrior largely credited with bringing the navy’s old guard into the twenty-first century.
“So whatever you do,” Emma went on, bringing Lana’s attention back to more domestic concerns, “don’t tell me you can’t come to the actual performance tomorrow night because — I hope you’ve remembered this — it’s going to be at the National Cathedral.” Emma paused and performed a dramatic toe-tap. “And I want you to be there.”
All Lana could do was shake her head. Even before the crisis with the Delphin, she had been slated to attend a top-level briefing at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade about a newly discovered Chinese army unit of elite hackers, code-named Magic Dragon. Which was why Lana had planned to attend tonight’s rehearsal instead of the actual performance.
“Sweetheart, please—”
“Sweetheart, dear heart, you say all that stuff all the time, but where’s your heart? Because it sure isn’t where your home is.”
If I could only tell her.
But most of the information that Lana would have liked to share would never be declassified. She’d be taking it to her grave.
A pot clattered in the kitchen, startling her. “Who’s that?” she asked Emma, who only glared at her more intensely as Tanesa stepped into the room.
“I’m sorry, Lana. I was just getting us something to eat when you came home, and then it sounded like you guys needed some space.”
“That was good of you, but come sit.”