The Hunt

by Jack Arbor

  Max exited the cab near the botanical garden, hitched his backpack to his shoulder, and took off along one of the wide dirt pathways that meandered among a late fall landscape of browns, tans, and muted greens. To his left, a wedding party was bundled in coats and scarves as the bride and groom exchanged vows. A student with a purple streak in her dark hair squatted and studied a placard next to a stand of bushes. Otherwise, the park was empty, except for the two men that followed him, keeping their distance, making no attempt to disguise their presence.

  Similar to Moscow, any stranger entering Tiraspol should expect to be followed. The two men resembled retirees, with white wisps of hair escaping their caps and large bellies protruding over belted pants straining to contain their bulk. Maybe the two men were simply out for their daily constitutional. But after Max made a series of unhurried turns through the park, pausing in strategic locations to watch behind him, the two retirees stayed with him.

  It was a chilly day, no precipitation, but an occasional wind from the north blistered his face. While the two men strolled without conversing, their track jackets flapped in the breeze. When Max left the gardens to walk along the town’s pedestrian mall that teemed with tourists, they stayed with him. The message was clear: The Transnistrians were watching.

  Had they identified him, or were they simply tagging along behind a stranger?

  As he made a show of glancing into store windows along the mall, he weighed his options. He could pull a few tricks out of his bag and ditch the two men, but a sophisticated move might signal Max’s status as an operator, something he wasn’t eager to do.

  After reaching the end of the pedestrian mall, he made a right turn in the direction of the hulking brown and tan parliament building that resembled an American college dormitory. Standing in front of the structure, towering over a smattering of pedestrians, was a regal statute of Vladimir Lenin, his back ramrod straight, cape billowing out behind him.

  Tells you everything you need to know about Transnistria.

  He made a left, away from the parliament building, and turned down a side street with alleyways running behind the stores and restaurants on the pedestrian mall, looking to duck through a back entrance. The retirees had disappeared. He made another left, zigzagged around two dumpsters, and opened the door leading into the kitchen of a family restaurant. Several men in white uniforms, with sweat pouring off their faces, looked up as he wormed his way through the kitchen. Avoiding a waiter, he pushed through the swinging door leading into the dining room and ran directly into the muzzle of a pistol.

  Three large Slavic men with white faces and red lips blocked his path. Two held guns while the third waved a piece of black material. The man in front, who resembled a lineman on an American football team, pushed the gun into his stomach while a second man shoved the black material over his head, sending his world into darkness.

  “Took you guys long enough.”

  Twenty-Two

  Tiraspol, Transnistria

  With a pistol jammed into his back, they hustled him through the restaurant and shoved him into the back of a van, his shins barking on the bumper. Through the hood, he caught the foul odors of decaying food and mold. His arms were secured in front of him with duct tape, and he was relieved of his backpack, phone, and wallet. No more words were spoken by his captors, and he kept his mouth shut.

  The ride was jarring but short. Little effort was made to avoid the potholes and broken pavement along the city streets, long neglected since before the fall of the Soviet Union. By the time they came to a screeching halt, he was bruised and battered from rolling around on the van’s metal floor.

  When they stopped, Max was pulled from the vehicle’s rear and dragged through what he assumed was a dirt lot, catching smells of motor oil and animal manure. After entering some kind of structure with a concrete floor, he was pushed into a chair. The din of power tools sounded in the distance, and voices carried from far away. A pneumatic whir was followed by the release of compressed air. Closer was the sound of tape unspooling before he felt his torso secured to the chair. Crude but effective.

  Muffled voices receded into the distance. Hoots and guffaws in Russian came from somewhere behind him. A waft of cigarette smoke he recognized as a Russian brand. An engine roared to life and receded.

  The takedown was crude but distinctly Russian, rough but efficient. No one talked. The only thing non-Russian about the snatch was that no one had beat him.

  Yet.

  Russians liked a good beating thrown into a kidnapping for good measure. Maybe a bullet would end his life without warning. Except Russians didn’t mess around. He was alive because someone wanted him alive.

  Approaching feet clicked on concrete. More cigarette smoke and a low scratchy female voice in Russian. “Unhood him.”

  A gun muzzle was pressed into his neck as the hood was yanked off. He blinked in the dim light, his eyes adjusting to the murk. The room contained rows of decrepit metal shelving holding stacks of auto parts, some in boxes, some corroded with rust. Through an open door, a late model German sports sedan, out of place in the exceptionally poor republic of Transnistria, was on a lift. A man in dirty overalls was in the process of removing the vehicle’s exhaust. The silhouette of a woman stood before him.

  A fist slammed into his face, followed by a second punch that might have broken his nose. Warm blood and mucus dripped down his lip and seeped into his mouth. One of the retirees wound up for another strike but held back when the woman touched his arm. “Enough. For now.”

  A halo appeared around Max’s eyes, and his head pounded. “Why the fuck did you do that, Raisa?”

  “Hello, Mikhail. Been a long time, no? I think you were heading off to the military academy the last time I saw you.”

  The statuesque brunette in her early fifties wore a white blouse open at the neck to reveal a deep dove-white décolleté. Except for her high cheek bones and Slavic features, she looked like a Western business woman with expensive shoes. A thin cigarette was held between hooked fingers with glossy nails, and she regarded him through a pair of fashionable glasses.

  Max flashed a smile despite the ringing in his ears. “Not the reception I was hoping for, Raisa.”

  She pursed her lips. “You’re a hot commodity these days, Mikhail. One has to take precautions. Call this insurance.”

  Max managed a small shrug despite the bindings. “Anyone finds out I was here, at least you’re covering your ass.”

  “Something like that.” Raisa waved away the thug. “Don’t stray too far, Igor. This one was trained by Andrei himself. He’d kill you just as soon as look at you.”

  Max rolled his eyes. “I would never do that. Raisa, what’s with the drama here? Why the mugging? I just came to talk.”

  “I don’t know, Mikhail. Call it instinct. The only thing that’s kept me alive all these years has been my gut, and something told me it’s not safe to invite you in for tea.”

  The noise from men working continued in the background, and Max projected his voice to be heard. “You and my father go way back. He looked out for you. He took care of you.”

  She snorted. “That was a long time ago. Now he’s dead, and he left me to take the fall.”

  A lanky man appeared from the garage with a metal tire iron hanging from a fist. Tall enough to be a basketball player, his thick curly hair was hidden under a greasy knit cap. Max recognized the young man as Raisa’s son Dominik. Dominik set the tire iron on a table, leaned against a metal shelf, and lit a cigarette.

  Working his muscles to try to loosen the tape, Max smiled. “Getting into the family business I see.”

  A laugh. “The disavowed secretary of a KGB traitor has to make a living.”

  He shook his head. “Andrei would be disappointed.”

  Her face flushed a dark shade of red, and Raisa slapped him. “You think I give a fuck what Andrei thinks? He left me to take the heat. When someone defects in the KGB, who do you think they interrogate first? I spent
two months in a hole in the basement of Lubyanka before they decided I didn’t have anything to do with Andrei’s…um…extracurricular activities.”

  The sting in Max’s cheek subsided. “He didn’t defect.”

  Another snort. “He might as well have. You know what I’d be doing if I were a few years younger?”

  Max looked away. Yeah, I know.

  “That’s right. They’d kill my son and evict my parents from their apartment in Moscow, leaving them homeless.” She banged her fist on the table, making the tire iron rattle. “Fucking those fat men in the Kremlin would be my only option.”

  “So instead you run this chop shop and funnel part of your profits to the Kremlin,” Max said. “It’s protection—as long as you’re paying, you’re safe.”

  Raisa snorted again and turned her back on him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s not hard to figure out. My guess is you’re part of Victor Volkov’s network—”

  She spun around to face him. “We were, until you took him out.”

  “The first of many, Raisa. So who do you pay now?”

  She looked away as she took a drag on her smoke. “Fuck off, Mikhail. Why are you here, anyway?”

  Are you angry at being left to fend for yourself? No, I don’t think so. You’re bitter because he never loved you like you wanted him to.

  Slowly, Max flexed his muscles and loosened the tape around his arms. “Andrei left something with you. I’ve come to collect it.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Left something?”

  Max’s heart sank as Raisa searched her memory. He envisioned a warmer homecoming to a woman who was close to his father.

  “He didn’t leave something with you and ask you to hold it in case I came looking?”

  The former secretary shook her head. “Why—”

  “Think. Was there anything you took from his office? A book, or set of files, or some kind of keepsake?” Like the memory stick hidden in the back of the photograph? “A picture maybe?”

  She turned away from him again. “There’s nothing. The day after he was killed…” She wiped her cheek and faced him. “I was escorted from the building. The next day, two men in suits showed up at my apartment and took me into custody. They said evidence was found that Andrei gave information to a foreign government, and they needed to talk to me. Two months later, I was released. They said they didn’t find any evidence that I had helped him.” Tears streamed down her face. “It was horrible. I couldn’t believe it about Andrei. I never saw the inside of my office again. A few of my things were sent to my apartment, but I was already packing to move here to be with my son.” She glanced at Dominik, who was cleaning his nails with a pocket knife.

  Max’s eyes widened. “What happened to the stuff they sent?”

  Raisa shrugged. “I guess it’s in our flat somewhere.” She looked at Dominik again, who concentrated on his nails.

  “Let me look through it.” Max shuffled the chair in her direction. “After that, I’ll leave you alone.”

  She finished her cigarette and flicked the butt into the corner in a shower of sparks. “How do you know he left something?”

  He kept his face blank. “The less you know, the better. Trust me.”

  A snort from Raisa. “Trust the son of a spy accused of treason who is also wanted by the SVR for treason. If they find out you’re here, I’m a dead woman. What’s stopping me from turning you in? Lots would be forgiven if I marched you into Moscow wearing cuffs.”

  Max raised his eyebrows and smiled. “In your heart, you know Andrei is innocent. Just like you know I’m innocent. Otherwise, I’d already be dead.”

  With a sneer, she turned on a heel and marched from the room.

  Twenty-Three

  Corsica, France

  Goshawk sat back and reflected on her work. In the world of the Dark Web, it was becoming harder and harder to maintain her status as an individual hacker for hire. After the notorious Bluefish discovered her location and launched a massive cyberattack on her firewall defenses and forced her to flee her Paris home, she linked up with a formidable fellow hacktivist named The Monk who offered her refuge and resources. Eventually The Monk would demand repayment for providing the safety of his network of firewalls, proxy servers, and dark networks.

  The cost of doing business.

  Since settling into her cottage at the south end of Corsica, she spent every waking hour working to determine Bluefish’s true identity. Using the hacker handles of 6URU, or Guru, and Z16Z46, or Zigzag, she established herself as an anti-NSA pro-whistle-blower railing in defense of Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks in order to attract attention. As her activity was noticed by what she assumed were NSA and other US government watchers, she deployed clandestine bots and secret spiders programmed to roam the internet and report back to her secure remote servers.

  Her tactics followed an electronic version of traditional human surveillance. It took months, but she assembled a map of identities, connections between those players and remote electronic locations, and networks used by those players. She wrote and launched an artificial intelligence machine-learning neural network that she called Grant after Grant Green, one of Max’s favorite jazz musicians, and put it to work on the vast database she was collecting. She searched for patterns in the data and kept a running list of curious anomalies in the results. Until this point, she had uncovered little, other than the identification of a few low-level actors tied to the NSA who watched her, not unlike how Russian spies often tracked Western business men visiting Moscow.

  Using another established pseudonym, 0DD17Y, or Oddity, she took a bolder approach. After several weeks of research and establishing her bona fides by performing pro bono hacktivist operations, she was led to a chat board in the Dark Web named The Jimmy Road. Jimmy meant to unlock, and Road was a knockoff from Silk Road, the first modern darknet marketplace. It was only after she agreed to break into a French police database and forge the parole acceptance affidavit of a former member of the hacktivist group Anonymous, who was imprisoned for stealing bitcoins, that she was finally granted access. What she saw made her grin for the first time in months.

  Like any chat room, there were a handful of moderators with names like Sphinx, Catch-22, and Tr@ce. Dozens of other identities offered up sporadic posts. Each one of the posters was someone seeking the identity of a fellow hacker, which was taboo among her brethren. Hackers guarded their secrecy with the utmost rigor. One can find anything on the Dark Web if they know where to look, and this board focused entirely on revealing identities of hackers.

  After ten minutes of browsing posts, she moved to the bounty section where posters offered to pay in exchange for an identity. The real business of the forum took place here. A quick search for Bluefish yielded no results. No surprise there. With an imp-like grin, she created a new post and entitled it One Fish, Two Fish.

  Wanted: Identity, IP, geolocation, and other particulars for a person or group calling themselves Bluefish. Likely government. Name your price.

  She hit Enter, got up, and made herself some tea, her mind wandering to Max, his predicament, and her role in helping his cause. Something in her heart fluttered, something she didn’t expect. With effort, she pushed it away, tossed the tea in the sink, found a bottle of Corsican rosé in the icebox, and punched in Carlu’s number.

  Only one way to cure love.

  Twenty-Four

  Tiraspol, Transnistria

  The mechanic shop fell into silence when Raisa walked out. Dominik followed her a second later. Max sat in the chair, arms secured, torso taped to the wooden slats of the chair’s back. The retirees stood guard, each with a Makarov pistol clutched in their meaty hands, track jackets stretched over protruding bellies. Requests to use a bathroom were ignored. A plea for a cigarette went unanswered. “How about some water?”

  No response.

  Eventually Raisa and her son reappeared. Dominik carried a cardboard box which he dropped at Max’s fe
et. It was one of those moving boxes sized for books, and it was sealed with clear tape and displayed the name of a moving company in Cyrillic text.

  Raisa motioned at one of her men to cut the tape, and she pried open the box.

  Max craned his neck to see better. “Can you untie me?”

  One by one, Raisa removed the items. An ornate candle in a glass jar. An old-fashioned desk clock. Several books along with a framed picture of a much younger Raisa alongside Dominik as a boy. “That’s it, except for a stack of papers.”

  “The picture.” Max pointed his chin at the framed photo. “Open up the back of the picture.”

  Raisa glared at him before she removed the cardboard and the picture from the frame. She held it all up to show him there was nothing there.

  “Try the clock.” Max squirmed to see better. “Open the back where the battery is.”

  She opened the back of the clock and took out the batteries. “Nothing.”

  Max wanted to pull the entire clock apart, cut into the candle, and shake out each of the books, but he couldn’t move.

  Raisa tossed the books into the box, followed by the candle and the clock. She reassembled the picture and gazed at it before carefully setting it in the box. As she did, a locket on a chain fell from her blouse and dangled from her neck. She shoved it back into her shirt and fastened a button.

  The flash of the precious metal caught Max’s eye. “What’s in the locket, Raisa?”

  “Nothing. Just an old picture.”

  “Of who?” Max arched his eyebrows.

  “No one.”

  He strained at the tape violently enough for one of the guards to move closer. “It’s my old man, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She pulled the blouse tight around her neck.

  “Did he give it to you?”