by Dima Zales
I stare at her. It doesn’t take a brain boost to understand what’s happening. It’s the oldest trick in the book—the good cop/bad cop routine.
“I’m uncomfortable with the way things have escalated,” Agent Pugh says. If there were Oscars for government agents who could say rehearsed lines with proper regret, she’d at least get a nomination. “Please, work with me, and I’ll get you more comfortable.”
“What can I do?” I choke out, but I’m not sure she understood me with the gagging sounds coming out of my mouth.
“Just nod if you agree with me and shake your head if you don’t,” she says.
I nod to show I understand.
“I want to tell Agent Lancaster you’re ready to cooperate,” she says. “Would you like that?”
I nod vigorously.
“I also have news about your medical condition,” she says. “When you were unconscious, we did some X-rays, and it appears you’re intact.”
“The tube,” I gurgle out. What I mean is, “How do you expect me to talk with the tube?” as well as, “Why the hell is this tube in my nose if I’m intact?”
“Now that we got nutrients into your system, the tube will be removed,” she says, her nose crinkling. “We’ll also give you something for the pain, if that’s okay with you.”
I nod even more vigorously this time.
She moves her hand out from behind her back, and I see she’s holding a syringe. Instead of sticking the needle into my skin, like the asshole in the mask did, she uses the IV that’s already in my arm to deliver the medicine.
Warmth slowly spreads throughout my body, and I watch her leave the room as my vision blurs and I fall under.
I wake up feeling amazing. All the earlier pains and aches are gone, and when I try to swallow, I confirm that the tube is blissfully missing from my nose and throat.
My phone states that it’s 11:05 a.m. on the 16th, so I was out for three hours this time.
Opening my eyes, I see I’m no longer in the windowless cement room. Someone sat me on a chair in a new location—a room that seems to have been modeled after the most stereotypical interrogation room you’d see in a police procedural show. I spot three gray walls and one mirrored wall, a chair, and a table. Instead of leather straps as before, standard-issue police handcuffs bind my hands. I guess someone did this out of a need to stay consistent with the new decor. There’s even a glass of water on the table—out of my reach, as per the Interrogation 101 handbook.
Hopeful, I search for a Wi-Fi network but find none.
“Hello, Mr. Cohen,” says Agent Lancaster in his signature fake-friendly voice. His eyes are hidden behind his aviator sunglasses again, and his posture exudes calm confidence. “I’m glad you decided to cooperate.”
“Hello,” I say. Even with the pain meds, my throat is still sore from my earlier ordeal. Raising my handcuffed hands, I ask, “Is this really necessary?”
Instead of answering, Agent Lancaster slams a giant paper-filled folder on the desk in front of me and says, “Before we begin, I wanted to show you this.” He opens the folder to a random page and pushes the whole mess toward me.
I look at the page in question and feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I remember this email. It’s an email an investor sent me a couple of months ago—the one where he was thanking me for an outstanding quarter.
When he notices my reaction, Agent Lancaster flips the page, and I see a number of my emails. Some are from my personal account, including a very private email where Ada asked me to get us more condoms for a romantic evening we had planned (Muhomor was testing Tema for us at that time and our Brainocyte traffic was not private).
Thankfully, I don’t see any private texts or emails sent via Brainocytes. That would’ve meant that Agent Lancaster and his minions literally had access to our private thoughts. I wonder if our Brainocytes communications are somewhere else in that folder, but I doubt it. Before Tema was ready, Muhomor insisted we all get email and text accounts that couldn’t be traced back to us, and he had us all get new accounts on an annoyingly regular basis. With Tema in place, he agreed to be more lax in the future.
“As you can see”—Lancaster’s voice takes me out of my paranoid reverie—“we know a lot about you, Mr. Cohen.” He closes the folder and moves it out of reach. “I’m only showing you this so you know a large majority of my questions will be about things I already have answers to. That means if you lie, I’ll know it, and if I catch you in a single lie, no matter how small, our polite conversation will end.” He leans across the desk and looks me in the eye. “Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes,” I say, and it comes out too meekly for my liking. My earlier plan of pretending to cooperate might’ve suffered a major setback. I was, of course, planning to lie about everything just to spite the bastard, but now I have to be careful since I don’t know what he knows.
“Good.” Agent Lancaster sits back and steeples his fingers. “Let’s start with an easy question first. How long have you been an agent for the Russian Federation?”
The question catches me so far off guard that for a few moments, I sit there, blinking at a rate of a hundred eyelid flops per second. I’d be less shocked if he’d slapped me in the face again.
“I’m not a Russian spy,” I finally say, feeling dumb at having to say these words. The whole thing reminds me of having to deny something extremely obvious, like not being an invisible pink unicorn. “So, zero time.”
Even as I say this, I realize how much trouble I might be in if he believes the accusation he made. I know very little about due process when it comes to captured spies. In movies, it doesn’t look like habeas corpus. Do suspected spies get phone calls or lawyers? I imagine it would be dangerous to let them have those things since they could code a message to their handler through the phone, or the lawyer they use can help them kill themselves to prevent giving away state secrets.
“Come now, Mr. Cohen.” Lancaster demonstratively massages his temples. “We know.”
“If you indeed know, then you know I’m not a spy for any country, least of all Russia. Doesn’t it say somewhere in there”—I point at the folder—“that I came to the US as a refugee? Or that I arrived at an age much too young to be recruited into the spy business?”
“I thought we agreed you’d cooperate.” Agent Lancaster flips through the pages in his folder and stops on something he must like, because he pushes the image toward me.
I’m stunned. The image is blurry because someone took it with their phone inside a poorly lit nightclub, but I can tell it’s a picture of me standing on a DJ’s stage. It looks like I’m aiming a gun at the crowd, though in reality I was aiming at the goons who’d come to attack us.
“That was taken at the Dazdraperma club,” Agent Lancaster says triumphantly. “In Moscow.”
“That’s me protecting myself from the KGB—err, I mean, SVR,” I say, then realize I might have admitted to something my lawyer would’ve advised against. Weakly, I add, “That’s the opposite of working for them.”
“Sure.” Agent Lancaster’s tone is dripping with sarcasm. “All venture capitalists are known to take little trips to participate in shootouts in Moscow.”
“I was saving my mother,” I retort. “Her kidnapping was in the newspapers. She wasn’t the only person I saved. There are a dozen American citizens you can interview.”
“You mean those handicapped Americans whose brains are being manipulated by the technology you created?” He rubs his temples again. “I can see this isn’t going anywhere.”
There’s a small silver lining to what he said. He didn’t refer to the Brainocytes by their proper name—something I’d expect him to do if he was interested in the technology. Then again, if he doesn’t want the Brainocytes, I can’t think of what else he might want.
If he truly believes I’m a spy, that would be really bad.
“Look.” I fight the temptation to get up and start pacing the room. “How can I prove I’m no
t a spy?”
“You can’t prove you’re not a spy because you are one,” Lancaster says. “But if you’re useful enough, we could overlook your other indiscretions.”
I already miss the brain boost with a passion, and right now, I’d pay a million dollars for a few seconds on the internet. Though thinking is difficult without the boost, I’m beginning to feel like I’m being skillfully manipulated. Agent Lancaster might be accusing me of being a spy as an interrogation technique. I’ve seen it used in shows. The detectives will often mention a murder or something big to get suspects to admit to a smaller crime. At least I hope that’s what’s going on. Unfortunately, if the purpose of this technique is to make me scared enough to tell them whatever they want, it’s working spectacularly well.
“I’m as much of a spy as I am a ballerina,” I reply, though my bravado sounds hollow, even to my own ears. “You want something. I get that. Just come out and say what it is.”
“Fine.” He removes his aviator sunglasses and looks at me with his colorless eyes. “In that case, let’s talk about Viktor Tsoi.”
I repeat the bit where I blink at him repeatedly and then vow to perfect my poker-face reaction to strange questions and behaviors in the future. Viktor Tsoi is the name of a famous Russian rock singer who tragically died in a car crash at twenty-eight. True, I love his songs even to this day, but I fail to see why Agent Lancaster would be interested in him, so I ask, “And why are we discussing Russian music?” He looks confused for a moment, so I add, “Viktor Tsoi was a songwriter and singer. He’s dead.”
“In case you don’t know,” Lancaster says in the tone of someone who’s sure I’m just messing with him, “Viktor Tsoi is the name of a man who is very much alive.” He opens his folder to a new page and hands me a picture of Muhomor and me sitting in a downtown café. The picture was clearly taken during last month’s Brainocytes Club meeting. “Viktor Tsoi goes under the hacker alias ‘Muhomor.’”
Chapter Twenty
Things become instantly clearer, to the point where I’d smack my forehead if my hands were free. Of course this misadventure is connected to Muhomor. If I weren’t so worried about Muhomor’s life, I’d want to kill him. As is, I channel my anger at the agent in front of me instead. But seriously, how many times have I told Muhomor to cool it with the hacking? Now something he did got me into this situation. I really hope we both survive our ordeals so I can properly express my displeasure toward the skinny hacker.
Since the agent is still waiting for an answer, I say, “I genuinely didn’t know that was Muhomor’s real name. Now that I know Viktor Tsoi is his name, I’m not surprised he goes by a nickname. Muhomor loves his individuality, and his celebrity namesake was as famous as Elvis Presley.” The agent doesn’t look impressed by my disclosures, so I add hastily, “I’d be glad to talk to you about Muhomor. Why don’t we start with his current medical condition? Is he alive? How did his surgery go?”
I expect Agent Lancaster to answer with the cliché, “I’m the one asking questions,” or something along those lines, but he surprises me by saying, “Muhomor is alive but in a coma.” There’s a dose of genuine regret in his voice, though I can’t tell if he’s upset that Muhomor is alive or that they can’t question him because he’s in a coma. “His spinal injury was severe.”
The ache in my chest returns in full force, and I instinctively try pinging Muhomor with the Telepathy app. The error message is a painful reminder that I can’t get in touch with him or anyone else.
“Look.” I take a deep breath and let it out. “Agent Lancaster, if Muhomor is in a coma, he isn’t a threat. Why all this?” I raise my handcuffed hands, and the chains clink against the table.
“The situation is more complicated than that.” Lancaster rubs the stubble on his dimpled chin. “As you well know.”
“I honestly don’t,” I say in confusion.
“All this”—he waves his hand around the interrogation room—“had to be escalated because you all nearly got yourselves killed.”
“Or you nearly got us killed as a way to pressure me to speak,” I reply, though I now wonder if it would be logical for Lancaster and his minions to hire Vincent Williams to come after us. After all, if they’re interested in Muhomor, killing him or putting him in a coma is a really bad plan—assuming he is in a coma, as Lancaster claimed.
“I thought we had an understanding.” The agent’s jaw tenses, and he puts his glasses back on—but not before I gleam the anger in his eyes. “If you need more time to think…”
I know that “time to think” is a euphemism for more torture, and the threat sends a wave of anxiety through me. However, my pent-up anger swiftly overrides it.
“We do have an understanding,” I say and do my best to look scared rather than pissed off. Perversely, I’m annoyed at how well I manage to sound meek, but I continue my performance by having my voice crack as I add, “I’ll tell you what you want to know. I really don’t want any more time to think.”
“Tell me about Muhomor’s recent hacks.” Agent Lancaster’s tone is patronizingly soothing. “In as much detail as possible.”
“He penetrated the IARPA systems,” I say. Though it feels shitty betraying my friend’s confidence, I’m sure I’m telling Lancaster something he already knows, so I look at this revelation as a necessary evil to earn the agent’s trust. “IARPA was working on a project to reverse engineer the algorithms that run the human brain. Muhomor was interested in the research.”
Agent Lancaster must be an excellent poker player, because he betrays no clues as to what he thinks of my statement. Since he’s waiting for me to continue, I say, “Prior to that, he hacked into the Verizon servers to gain free cell phone service.”
What actually happened is that Muhomor hacked into Sprint’s servers, but I added that small discrepancy on purpose to see how detailed Agent Lancaster’s knowledge is.
The man slightly turns toward the mirror to his left, and his hand almost goes to his ear before he stops himself. Did someone feed him information on Sprint versus Verizon? Was it someone behind that mirror?
“Are you sure it was Verizon?” Agent Lancaster interlaces his fingers in front of his face and stretches his arms out. “Details are important.”
“I’m sorry,” I lie. “It was one of the major ones. I thought it was Verizon, but it could have been AT&T or perhaps Sprint?”
The fact we’re being watched limits my new plan to attack him when I can.
“What are the Qecho servers?” he asks.
If he wanted to catch me off guard, he failed.
“A 100-qubit quantum computer,” I reply right away. “Muhomor likes to use it.”
“What does he use it for?” This question comes out faster and more forcefully.
“Encryption and decryption. But I bet you already knew that.”
“What’s Tema?” The intensity in Agent Lancaster’s voice is now set to eleven out of ten. “How does it work?”
I’m not at all surprised at the direction this conversation has taken. The moment the agent brought up Muhomor, I suspected he would ask about Tema—Muhomor’s unbreakable cryptosystem. Out of everything the Russian hacker has done, Tema is the epitome of what would get on a government’s radar. Muhomor said so himself many times, but I always thought there was a dose of self-aggrandizement in my friend’s rhetoric. He claimed that governments rely on reading everyone’s communications at will and that his unbreakable cryptosystem would revolutionize the world, because Tema is impervious to attacks by quantum computers, unlike most “legacy” cryptosystems that rely on multiplying large primes. Looks like Muhomor was right on every count.
When the government can’t crack your messages, they do indeed get upset.
The biggest problem with this is that I can’t help Lancaster even if I wanted to. I barely understand the basic principles behind Tema with the aid of the brain boost, and right now, it might as well involve magic as far as my understanding goes. Worse, Agent Lancaste
r probably wants to know how to break Tema and won’t believe me if I tell him that the most powerful minds in the world haven’t been able to break Muhomor’s new baby, leading us all to believe that the thing is unbreakable.
“Tema is short for the Russian word ‘kryptosystema,’” I begin. “It’s a cryptosystem Muhomor invented. He thinks it’s unbreakable.” I’m tempted to add, “Given my presence here, I take it he was right.”
“How does it work?” If Agent Lancaster wanted to hide the importance of this question, he certainly failed. His whole body tenses, making him look like a jaguar preparing to leap at a deer.
“It’s complicated,” I say as earnestly as possible since the next part of my plan depends on this. “Do you have paper and something to write with? I’ll do my best to break it down for you.”
Without hesitation, Lancaster takes out a fancy pen from his inner jacket pocket and hands it to me. He then takes a couple of pages out of the thick folder and says, “You can write on the back of those.”
I take the pencil in my right hand and write as clumsily as I can. As I hoped, even without the pretense, the handcuffs make writing difficult.
“I think this would go a lot better if I didn’t have these on.” I jiggle the handcuffs and try not to look too eager.
Agent Lancaster betrays his excitement again by getting up and walking over to my side of the table. Heart drumming, I watch him take out a key and undo the cuffs.
As soon as my hands are free, everything around me comes into focus to the point where I momentarily feel as though I’ve regained internet access and my brain boost. In less than a blink, I relive the moment Agent Lancaster slapped me in the face and the indignity and pain I suffered while strapped down in that cement room. The awful recollections culminate in the memory of that feeding tube going into my nose, and my slow-boiling anger explodes with the force of Vesuvius.
My left hand forms into a fist, and I punch Agent Lancaster in the crotch—a move made easy by his current stance. Something soft crunches under my knuckles, and I almost feel male sympathy for my enemy.