40
Gavin Biery had been given access to the complete hard drive of Vadim Rechkov’s computer, via a two-party authenticated link sent to him by a DoJ computer forensics investigator, on orders from Attorney General Dan Murray. When Gavin clicked on the link and entered the password proffered by his contact at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, he opened a window on one of his laptops that perfectly mirrored Rechkov’s own computer. It had been set up this way so various DoJ analysts, FBI agents, the NSA, and other personnel involved with the federal investigation into the Rechkov attack on Naval Commander Scott Hagen could look at the data at the same time from multiple nodes.
A quick look at Rechkov’s computer’s history had shown Gavin that the young man was a habitual visitor of Reddit, a website of message boards where different links from around the Web were shared and discussed and voted on. A key feature of the site was that thriving niche communities of people with similar interests formed in very specific subreddits, each its own discussion forum with its own discussion topic. The complete website history of Rechkov wasn’t available from looking at his hard drive; Gavin could look back only a few weeks into the man’s online past, but he saw Rechkov had visited Reddit some 160 times in just that period.
Gavin scanned back to the earliest date in the time window that fell after Rechkov’s history appeared on the computer and before he would have left on his cross-country drive to attempt the assassination of Scott Hagen. He clicked on one of Rechkov’s Reddit sessions to find his username, and then he used another laptop to log in to the same subreddit online, using a profile he’d created to navigate around. He then typed in Rechkov’s username, TheSlavnyKid.
Simply by typing in this handle and clicking on “Overview” he could see every subreddit that Vadim Rechkov had contributed to for the eight years he had been a member of the website.
Eight years, Gavin noted. The Russian had been surfing these discussion groups since he was fifteen.
Jack returned to the office, showered, and changed into casual attire. When he entered the conference room he had been sharing with Gavin, the older man showed him what he had been doing. The two men sat together while Gavin navigated around Rechkov’s entire Reddit history. The young Russian had visited hundreds of subreddits over the years, involving very specific matters related to obtaining a student visa in the United States, jobs in the technology industry, jobs in computer science, money problems, and then, recently and of particular interest to Gavin and Jack, last year’s battle of the Baltic.
Even this one subreddit had nearly 2,900 posts in all, and nearly 500 post interactions from Vadim Rechkov, aka TheSlavnyKid, himself.
Jack said, “That’s a lot for us to go through, but the attack on Hagen was weeks ago. Surely to God the DoJ investigators are all over this by now.”
Gavin said, “A special court order is needed to go through a suspect’s social media, and it has to be done a certain way so as not to abuse the civil rights of any innocents he was in communication with. I’d say DoJ techs have looked into some of these pages here, but they wouldn’t have dug down deep into the other user profiles like you and I are going to do.”
Jack said, “You think he might have used this vector to make initial contact with whoever offered up the intel on Scott Hagen?”
Gavin said, “I’ve spent the past hour looking through his website history, and I can say this: Unless the entity who breached the OPM just happened to be a personal friend of Vadim Rechkov’s, which I see as very unlikely, then it’s a good bet Rechkov was approached through Reddit, specifically through this five-month-long string of posts about the Baltic. He didn’t interact with anyone else on the subject online that I can see. How about you start going through his conversations here, and I’m going to keep looking through his hard drive to see if I can find anything else that might be relevant?”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “So I read five hundred or so posts, write down the usernames of everyone he came in contact with, and look for clues that someone was offering him intel about killing Hagen. Is that it?”
Gavin shrugged. “You’re an analyst. Analyze.”
“Right.”
Jack started with Rechkov’s first offering in the subreddit discussion about the Baltic conflict. Under the username TheSlavnyKid, he wrote a diatribe of more than 2,500 words that claimed his brother Stepan was one of the victims of the illegal American naval attack on the Russian submarine Kazan, which had come to the Baltic only to defend Kaliningrad from NATO aggression. The post was an angry screed against America, to be sure, but Jack found the writing itself to be lucid and the young man’s conclusions thought-out, even relatively convincing. Not to Jack, he was positive his father had done what needed to be done in the Baltic, but at least to anyone reading it whose mind wasn’t already made up on the matter of who was at fault during Russia’s attack into Lithuania from Kaliningrad and Belarus.
Rechkov wasn’t a native English speaker, but he conveyed his message well. Jack could feel the agony in the words of the twenty-three-year-old Russian studying in America, the very nation he blamed for his brother’s death. He talked at length about his relationship with his older brother, their love of fishing in the lakes and streams in their rural home near Slavny, and also his brother’s complete lack of interest in politics and international affairs.
Stepan died doing his job. He didn’t start the fight and had no personal beef with America at all. Therefore, Vadim Rechkov held America responsible for his brother Stepan’s murder.
Jack could have argued back that the thousands of men and women killed by Russian sea, air, and land forces during the Baltic War sure as hell didn’t start the fight, either, but arguing with a grieving young man would have been senseless.
And anyway, Vadim had died in a Mexican restaurant in New Jersey.
What Jack did not see in this first lengthy post was any personal vow that Vadim Rechkov would exact retribution for his brother’s death on anyone, much less the commander of the USS James Greer. No, although Vadim Rechkov was very clearly angry, more than anything, he seemed inconsolably sad.
Jack took the time to glance at the dozens of comments below this initial post by Rechkov; he read expressions of sympathy, expressions of agreement with the sentiments voiced against the USA, as well as posts from a significant number of those who said Stepan Rechkov got what he deserved for fighting for an evil power. There were even a few trolls who hoped Vadim’s dead brother suffered mightily before his death.
Jack knew well that people with poor character, when allowed to hide behind a pseudonym and shout in others’ faces without showing their own, had a tendency to be jackasses.
Next he moved to TheSlavnyKid’s responses to individual threads of the conversation; he continued the discussions, the arguments, and echoed the angry sentiments of others.
But as time went on, in further postings under the same subreddit, Jack noticed a change in the writing, a deepening of the invective, a militancy that wasn’t there in posts written just weeks earlier.
Jack realized he was watching someone descend into a state of absolute rage, perhaps even into the early throes of madness, consumed by anger and impotence. He talked about failing out of school, drinking himself to sleep, moving from his nice apartment to a dump when he could no longer make rent, and he placed blame for everything back to an ASROC missile that was fired at 3:23 a.m. local time from the deck of the USS James Greer.