by Sean Parnell
On this particular evening, there were four Millennial Crude operators sitting at the four workstations, all of whom had been flown in from various global corners for Snipe’s latest project. They were Iranian, Syrian, and Bosnian—one of each gender—and Kendo, Snipe’s North Korean cyber femme fatale and occasional pornographic paramour. At the moment, they were all having a wonderful time screwing with the mechanical servos and computer servers of a U.S. government black budget special operations and intelligence outfit in the middle of Washington, D.C., which was the ultimate sort of video game fracas for all of them, since in this case they were being very well paid to wreak havoc.
Snipe was not at any of those workstations but was ensconced in a Herman Miller mid-century modern hard-backed plywood chair, in the middle of the salon, facing Lieutenant Colonel Kravchenko in an identical chair. Kravchenko’s thick gray hair and trim mustache gave him a distinguished air, while Snipe’s messy black coif made him look like a nightclub DJ, but on first glance they could have been a Mafia don and his son. They were both wearing roll-neck sweaters, smoking Belomorkanal cigarettes, and sipping Ukrainian Nemiroff vodka.
Kravchenko wasn’t concerned that Snipe’s four cyber warriors might be able to identify him and tie him back to the FSB, because he’d informed them all upon first handshake that they should forget his face, or risk dying horrible deaths. They’d seemed amenable.
Given that the lieutenant colonel had tasked Snipe and Millennial Crude with this current assignment, he was pleased to see that it was going so well.
“I have no idea how you managed this, Dmitry,” he said as he sipped his vodka, “but I am very impressed. Our sister comrades over at GRU seem to always be stymied by American countercyber defenses, and yet, here you are. . . .”
Snipe, feeling proud of himself, waved his cigarette in false self-deprecation and blew a stream of smoke at the pin spots above.
“We’ve had some luck, Colonel, but that was inevitable, given many, many hours of labor.”
“Well, as they say, luck is simply when preparation meets opportunity.”
“Yes, sir. Well put.”
Snipe actually thought that Kravchenko was an apparatchik ass, but the lieutenant colonel was also Millennial Crude’s walking wallet.
“And so,” Kravchenko said, now that the niceties were over. “Tell me the nature of your ‘luck.’” His smile had faded. He wasn’t a man who tolerated being left in the dark.
“Um . . . would it suffice to tell you that the nature of it relates to blackmail?”
“Blackmail.” The lieutenant colonel sat forward now and snuffed out his cigarette in a crystal ashtray sitting on the flat head of a two-foot marble gargoyle. “Are you telling me that you have someone on the inside of this organization?”
Snipe grinned and sipped his vodka, savoring the moment. “I am indeed.”
“Stupefying,” Kravchenko breathed and sat back again. “Absolutely stupefying. And is this how you cracked into their systems?”
“Well, it was much more than that, sir. . . .” Snipe didn’t want his boss to think that his demonic whiz kids were only able to manage their coup because they had inside help. “Our mild extortion simply made the task easier. It required the planting of an invisible, undetectable, tiny line of pirate code. And then . . . voilà.”
Snipe turned to Kendo, who was sitting nearby with her back to him, angled forward over her keyboard. She was wearing a long scarlet formfitting dress and large silver hoop earrings, with her sleek black hair piled up.
“Kendo, status please?” Snipe asked her in English.
“I think we’ve got them in the panic stage,” she cooed. “They are actually, physically cutting cables with pinking shears and yanking electrics from the walls.”
“Hullyunghan,” Snipe said in Korean—wonderful—and then he added, in the same language, “I’m going to bang you like a waterfront whore later on.”
She waved at him over her shoulder, and he returned to Russian.
“We have them on the run,” he said to Kravchenko.
“Yes, I understood her English. I was posted to New York for three years, you know.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Now, Dmitry . . . tell me about our girl from Gaza.”
Snipe was somewhat taken aback by the sudden shift away from his current triumph, but he answered frankly.
“Sir, I think she has outlived her usefulness.”
“Really? How so?”
“Well, first of all, she is very expensive.”
“This is true. But one million euros per target, when taken in perspective, is no more than the cost of a single Vympel air-to-ground missile. And with this crazy girl, we guarantee a kill every time.”
“Yes, but she is also arrogant, sir. She makes demands. . . .”
Kravchenko lit up another cigarette, took a long drag, and waved Snipe off.
“Artists are often that way.”
“We don’t need her any longer, sir.”
“Do tell, Dmitry.” Kravchenko sneered. “Are you going to fly away from Moscow, track down these Program assassins, and kill them yourself? As a matter of fact, are any of you here, or any of your other computer idiot savants, capable of doing what that woman does? If anything, I would say that now, she doesn’t need you. She’s enriched herself so far to the tune of a sizable nut, and whether or not we continue to pay for her services, she might carry on with this for personal reasons and subsidize the project herself. She doesn’t need our rubles anymore, but she might pin whatever she does going forward on us just the same. There are still a considerable number of operators left on that Program payroll, and I’d prefer to see that ledger balanced. Understood?”
Snipe shuddered internally. He remembered now how and why Kravchenko had risen to the top of his department.
“Yes, sir, but . . .”
“Continue to employ her, Dmitry, whatever it costs. Our leadership back at the office has, shall we say, made their desires plain enough. After all”—Kravchenko waved dismissively at all of Snipe’s fancy workstations—“this is all very nice, and you are all delivering a fine display of mischief. However, there is quite a difference between kinetic, and cute.”
That comment wounded Snipe’s ego so badly that his face flushed and he forked his fingers through his thick black hair and almost stood up. He suddenly had a flash fantasy of telling Kravchenko to get the hell out, and that he’d submit his resignation letter in the morning, and that he’d forfeit his comfortable FSB salary and pension, and the lieutenant colonel could go straight to hell. But what came out of his mouth was a bit more muted.
“Sir . . . I . . . ,” he stammered. “I object to that characterization of our operation and talents here. We are far more effective than you can imagine, and capable of highly destructive—”
And at that very moment, all the pinpoint spots in the ceiling went dark, all the flat screens turned from complex, multiple, scrolling data streams to Disney cartoons, and all the hard drives on all the extremely expensive 8Pack OrionX computers spun into screaming overdrive, and burned out.
“Bleht,” Snipe moaned. “Oh fuck . . .”
Chapter 27
Vienna, Austria
As a child, Lila Kalidi had always loved the Austrian capital. It was a fairy-tale city of soaring architectures, classical music, and horse-drawn carriages, far from the fetid heat and violence of her home in the Middle East. Her father, Walid Abu-Marwan Kalidi, had often taken her to Vienna, where he’d meet with his beloved cousins, and afterward they’d all reminisce while laughing and enjoying fine Germanic dining.
“Baba” spoiled his beautiful little girl, cutting his meetings short to take her to the Prater amusement park, buy her funnel cakes, and ride with her on the largest Ferris wheel in the world, where each passenger bucket was a chamber the size of a small train car. He escorted her to the Vienna opera, and they stayed at the magnificent Hotel Sacher, devoured its famous chocolate cakes, and strolled
through St. Stephen’s Platz, where she came away with jewels and princess dresses.
Those times with her father had been ones of beloved grace until the infidels had killed him. And Lila would only discover later that his “cousins” were actually high-ranking members of Hamas, like Walid himself.
Now she hated Vienna. The spoiled European lifestyle and snobbery reminded her of nothing but loss, and her visits only stoked her fires of vengeance. Nowadays she came to Vienna only to establish an alibi, or retrieve equipment from an Islamic Jihad dead drop, or, as was the case today, for psychotherapy.
Lila couldn’t talk about her problems or stresses to anyone. She had no mate, no lover she trusted, no friends who couldn’t be tortured or bought. Yet some years ago, she’d realized that part of keeping razor sharp meant also tuning her mind, which could be subject to clouds of self-doubt if one didn’t clear the air once in a while. So, for the past three years, she’d randomly selected one psychotherapist in each of Paris, Rome, and Madrid, and paid for a single long session during which she unburdened herself.
The visits only occurred once. She never went back, for good reason.
This therapist’s office was in his third-floor walk-up on Schlachthausgasse (Slaughterhouse Street) in Vienna’s dreary Tenth District. The salon was cozy, with overflowing bookshelves, a cream-colored patient’s couch, and a low coffee table on which a small white porcelain rabbit struck a laughing pose next to a crystal ashtray. Across from that, the doctor faced his new client from a flowery antique armchair. His name was Heinrich Goldwasser, a kind older man and student, of course, of the school of the late Sigmund Freud.
Dr. Goldwasser was wearing linen trousers, a dress shirt, and a tie, and instead of the cliché pipe he was chewing a pencil, with which he occasionally took notes in a leather-bound notebook perched on his bony knees. He had a crown of wild white hair and wore gold-rimmed glasses.
Lila was dressed in snug jeans, running shoes, a baggy teal dress shirt, and had taken off her sunglasses and wide-brimmed hat, which she often wore to defeat Vienna’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras. She had a large Coach handbag beside her on the couch.
Dr. Goldwasser had assured Lila that she could speak freely, though she wasn’t actually worried about confidentiality. She had, however, asked him if he secretly recorded his sessions, to which he’d replied that such a practice was unethical without express permission. So she carried on, in German.
“Mein Vater war ein liebevoller Mann,” Lila said. My father was a loving man. She’d been reliving her childhood for the doctor, which he understood had taken place primarily in the Gaza Strip, but also in various capitals of the world, to which she and her father had traveled via Cairo. “But, of course, he was also a terrorist.” She smiled. “At least that is the term used by you and your kind, Doctor. We think of ourselves as freedom fighters, determined to liberate our homes from the Jews and their imperialist cohorts.”
Goldwasser wasn’t alarmed. He had patients who imagined all sorts of crazy things, and it was his task to sort it all out. This beautiful young woman’s reference to “your kind” and “the Jews” did cause him to squirm a bit in his chair, yet he retained his kindly demeanor.
“Would you say, Ms. Kalidi,” he asked, “that these painful aspects of your past have affected your personal relationships?”
“Please, call me Lila.” She smiled.
“Yes, Lila.” He nodded. Her response seemed a bit more friendly, though he found it curious that she was wearing fine leather gloves.
“I would say, Herr Doktor, that my past indeed has affected those relationships. I fuck all kinds of people, both men and women, but that’s merely a physical need and is meaningless to me on a deeper scale.”
“I see.” The use of the term fuck didn’t faze him. Patients often tested him that way.
“Do you still fuck once in a while?” Lila asked him. “I mean, given your age.”
Goldwasser smiled. “This session isn’t about my personal habits, Lila.”
“Of course. I apologize. As I said, I lost my own father early on, which perhaps left some Freudian scars.”
“Interesting. So, you’ve studied some psychology.”
“Only as an amateur.”
“Well then, let’s pursue the heart of the matter.” Goldwasser paused to sip from a rose garland cup. “Would you care for some tea?”
“No, thank you.”
“All right. Then what, may I ask, has brought you here today?”
“Your reputation in the local journals,” Lila said. “And I’m concerned that I might be a bit obsessive-compulsive.”
“What brings you to that suspicion?”
“My vocation.”
“Which is?” The doctor began taking notes. This was going to be fascinating.
“I am, in your vernacular, eine Attentäterin.”
Goldwasser stopped writing and looked up.
“An . . . assassin.”
“Yes. I currently work for an organization called Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You may have heard of it. But I’m also a freelancer and engaged at the moment by another small organization attached to the Russian FSB.” Lila smirked. “That’s basically the old KGB, with a new face.”
Goldwasser offered a nod for her to continue, yet his pencil stayed poised above his pages and he wrote nothing further. He wasn’t sure now if he was dealing with dementia, or something else.
“May I smoke?” Lila asked.
“Please.”
He gestured at the ashtray. Lila reached into her handbag, came up with a silver cigarette box and electronic lighter, lit up, and went on.
“I am being paid very well, Herr Doktor. Very well. I could stop all of this right now and retire very comfortably, yet I feel compelled to continue.”
“Compulsion, once recognized, is an affliction with which one can struggle successfully. If one has the desire . . .”
“Yes, well, I do, and I don’t.” Lila exhaled a plume of smoke at Goldwasser’s ceiling. “You see, I discovered, only in the recent past, that it wasn’t actually the Jews who blew my father’s head off. It was an American assassin, with the aid of the Israelis, who committed the act. I’ve also discovered that he worked for a secret American intelligence organization called ‘the Program.’ That man, it appears, is no longer employed, or perhaps is dead. So, instead, I’ve been killing the other agents associated with that cavern of scoundrels.”
“You . . . have?”
“Oh yes, and successfully. But you know, at times I wonder if there shouldn’t be more to life than what feels like an utter compulsion to succeed. I mean, it’s at the expense of true happiness, isn’t it? Not that I really know what happiness looks like.”
“Well, yes,” Dr. Goldwasser agreed, though he recrossed his legs in the other direction, and despite the sweet tea his tongue felt thickened and dry. “And how do you envision . . . happiness, Lila?”
“Oh, who knows?” Lila laughed and waved her cigarette. “A partner of some sort, perhaps? Children? Though God only knows what I could possibly teach them, and you can imagine that I’m not much of a cuddler.”
He tried to smile, though a shiver rose up through his spine. Lila cocked her head.
“Do you find me attractive, Herr Doktor?”
“In a physical sense?”
“Yes.”
“I am sure you are aware of your physical attributes.”
“Of course.” Lila laughed. “Strangers sometimes tell me that I look like an actress.”
“And . . . are you an actress?”
The question, and the thought, brought Goldwasser a brief sense of relief. He considered that this young woman might be nothing more than that: a girl with money and mental issues whose form of entertainment involved spinning tales to psychologists. And still, he decided that as soon as this session was over and she’d left, he was going to make a call to Cobra, the Austrian counterterror branch of the Federal Police, and to hell with the ethics.
Goldwasser closed his notebook. “Well, my dear . . . my assessment would be that you should pause in your endeavors and take an extended vacation. Reassess, so to speak. You might consider Switzerland.”
Lila’s sleek eyebrows furrowed, and she dipped her face at him.
“You mean a sanatorium, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“No . . . I simply meant . . .” But he stammered because he’d been caught. “I think anywhere removed from your current environment, Lila. Someplace quiet . . .”
“Peaceful,” she said. “And perhaps . . . restrictive?”
“No, no, not that at all.” He was backtracking as quickly as possible, and his trembling fingers loosened his woolen tie. “As a matter of fact, it might be better if you complete whatever it is that you think you must do, first, and only then consider taking a long sabbatical.”
Lila snuffed out her cigarette and lightly slapped both gloved hands on her knees.
“That’s what I think I needed to hear, Herr Doktor. Thank you very much. I believe you’ve definitely helped me.”
“Good,” he said, and he set his notebook on the side table next to his teacup, uncrossed his legs, and also lightly tapped his knees. “Well, it appears our time is up.”
“It is indeed,” said Lila, and she pulled a silenced Walther PK380 pistol from her handbag, shot Dr. Goldwasser in the face, and took his notebook as well as the cigarette butt with her lipstick smear on it.