by Drew Chapman
“When was the last time you spoke to him?”
This time Bazanov decided to be the one to play it coy and ambiguous. “Why is this important?”
The thin man from the SVR grew still. In the distance, the rattle of automatic-weapons fire crackled through the silence. Bazanov listened carefully, trying to calculate what direction the firing was, and how far away. He wasn’t worried about his own safety, but rather about the road he would need to drive back to Minsk. If the separatists and the government forces were skirmishing too far to the south of the M30, then he would have to drive considerably out of his way to get back, and that would add hours to his day.
“It is important because it is important.”
“Don’t play with me,” Bazanov snorted, his temper getting the better of him. “You don’t scare me, and you won’t intimidate me into doing whatever you say. The best way to get me to do my job is to just tell me whatever the fuck it is that you want me to do and get it over with.”
The thin man stared at Bazanov without betraying a trace of emotion. Not a flicker of anger—or concern or compassion—crossed his face. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, then typed out a text with his thumbs. Bazanov watched him, curious, suddenly thinking that maybe he had played his hand wrong. Perhaps this errand boy was not an errand boy at all, but an inhabitant of the inner circle, a dreaded crony of the Great Dark Lord himself. If so, Bazanov had made a crucial, and potentially fatal, error.
Text sent, the young, thin man turned his attention back to Bazanov, but still didn’t say anything. The silence was powerful, and frightening, and Bazanov worked hard to control his fear. Then, over the thin man’s shoulder, walking out of a field and into the stand of white birch trees, Bazanov could see a trio of soldiers. At first glance, Bazanov would have said that they were separatists, wearing jeans and sneakers, with T-shirts covered in green flak jackets. But their haircuts were buzz short, and recently cut, and they moved across the forest floor with practiced, catlike steps. They moved like Russian special forces commandos—Spetsnaz men—slowly and with caution, and they held their AN-94 assault rifles as if they’d been born with the guns in their hands. The leader of the three dropped to his knee, in a shooting position, while the other two turned to protect him, their eyes scanning the trees and the fields beyond the forest. The first soldier brought the AN-94 to his shoulder, then cocked his head to peer through the sight.
He aimed the gun directly at Bazanov’s chest.
“Derr’mo,” Bazanov grunted. Shit.
“You are in contact with your agent in the States?” Luka said again, in exactly the same bloodless tone he had used the first time.
Bazanov looked up at the sky, and the brown artillery smoke that was clouding it, then nodded to the SVR man. “I was. A while ago.”
“Did you know there had been an Amber Alert? On the East Coast? Four days ago?”
“An Amber Alert?” Bazanov repeated, surprised. What the hell was an Amber Alert? It had something to do with law enforcement in the United States, but what exactly he could not remember. His eyes snapped from the man named Luka to the special-forces goon aiming the gun at Bazanov’s heart. If they shot him, he would have no warning. One second he would be alive, the next he would be dead; he wouldn’t hear the shot or even see the puff of gunpowder smoke that would signal that the bullet was on its way into his body. He decided to lie.
“Yes, I did, of course,” Bazanov said.
“Did it not worry you that perhaps American intelligence has located him?”
“Yes, yes, I was worried,” Bazanov said quickly, trying to keep up with the conversation. “But I have faith in him. He is close to the target, so now he will be completely invisible.”
The Kremlin man took a long, steady breath.
“We are almost there,” Bazanov said, hope in his voice. “The whole thing is almost done.”
“If he has been discovered, then there is real trouble,” Luka began slowly. “If there were links to Russia—to the Kremlin—then it could become an international incident. And with the state of relations between world powers, events could spiral out of control.”
Control, Bazanov thought, always control. “No, no, no, it won’t happen.”
“If your man in America were to be caught, he would be traced back to us.”
“Absolutely not. I have thought of this, and there is no connection, no proof. A lone wolf, a rogue who follows his own instincts. As was discussed at the Krem—”
“There were no discussions. Ever.”
Bazanov winced. Right, right, nothing had been spoken of, ever, in any way, shape, or form. “Of course. Apologies.” Bazanov glanced at the Spetsnaz man, who continued to kneel, unflinchingly, with his rifle aimed at Bazanov. In the distance a howitzer fired, causing the leaves on the birch trees to shiver as the ground rumbled. “What is it that you would like me to do?”
“There cannot be loose ends.”
“There will be no loo—”
“You are personally responsible.”
“I am, of course. I will make sure of this.” Bazanov searched for a more appropriate way to grovel. To save his own skin. “I am a patriot. Now. Forever.”
Luka pulled out his phone and tapped out another text. Bazanov held his breath. Fifty meters away, Bazanov could see the second special operations soldier reach into his pocket and pull out a phone of his own. He read the text—Bazanov assumed it was the one Luka had just sent—and then whispered something to the soldier whose rifle was aimed at Bazanov’s heart. The soldier continued to aim at Bazanov, and Bazanov tightened the muscles in his chest, as if that would somehow protect him from the high-caliber bullet that threatened to rip apart his body.
Then, without warning, the solider stood, pointed his rifle at the ground, turned, and walked out of the forest. The other two soldiers followed him.
“We are all proud of you, Polkovnik Bazanov,” Luka said. “Of your service to your country. It is our sincerest wish that our pride only increases with time.” Then Luka turned and walked away as well.
Bazanov watched him go, sure for the first time in fifteen minutes that he would live to see the afternoon. A great weight lifted from his shoulders. But then he realized that he had much more to do. He had to make sure Ilya Markov could never be traced back to Bazanov, to the SVR, the Kremlin, or to anyone else in Mother Russia. But that was not so simple a task, certainly not from godforsaken Belarus. He walked slowly back to his car, parked by the tiny church in Lyady, and made up his mind: he would not drive west to Minsk. No, he would drive the opposite direction, east to Moscow, get a plane ticket to the United States, and see to it himself that all went according to plan, because it was clear from his morning in the birches of a Belarusian forest that his life depended on it.
BEACH HAVEN PARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 23, 12:22 P.M.
The house was big and perfect for the number of guests he had in mind: six bedrooms, four bathrooms, two entertainment rooms with a pool table and an air-hockey game, a vast kitchen and dining room, and a deck that wrapped around the ground floor and fronted the beach. Ilya booked the house through a vacation-rental website, and it was expensive—six grand a week—but he knew that a bunch of miscreant hackers liked nothing better than lounging around a beach house while they wreaked havoc on the rest of the population. Plus, no one would bat an eye when a gang of grubby twentysomethings invaded a house on the Jersey Shore for a week. Wasn’t that why the Jersey Shore had been invented in the first place?
The last of them rolled into the house around one in the afternoon. He gathered them in the basement billiards room, which was painted sherbet orange and smelled faintly of beer and bong water. A seventy-two-inch flatscreen TV hung on one wall, a framed oil painting of the Piazza San Marco on the adjoining one, and a signed poster of Snooki on the third. That seemed an appropriate troika to Ilya.
There wer
e fifteen of them in all; Ilya knew six of them by reputation, four because they’d spent time in jail, two from the hacker’s collective Anonymous, and the last three he knew personally because they were Eastern European immigrants. Eleven were men, four women; none was older than thirty-five. Most wore T-shirts and shorts, two were in bathing suits and flip-flops, and one wore a stained white linen suit that had obviously been purchased at a thrift store. They all claimed to be true believers, but Ilya suspected they believed in money more than anything else. He didn’t care: betrayal, if it happened, would come too late to change anything.
He pulled a thick-tipped black Sharpie out of his shirt pocket and wrote, in large block letters, directly on the only wall without a painting, a poster, or a TV.
“First order of business: CR Logistics,” Ilya said as he wrote. “Based in Louisville, Kentucky. The fourth-largest trucking company in the United States, and the number one provider of food delivery into New York City. They move trucks full of beef, soda, vegetables, pasta, ice cream. They fill up supermarkets all over the city.”
Ilya continued to write on the wall. “This is their website. And this is the name of their back-end IT subcontractor.” He wrote an acronym on the wall. The hackers all had their laptops perched on their knees or laps, and Ilya could hear the click-clack of their fingers as they busily copied down what he was writing. He hoped that the best of them were already probing at the company’s websites.
“You want us to hack it?” said a young man with bleach-blond hair who went by the name ClarKent.
“I do,” Ilya replied.
“Take it down? Denial of service?” a woman named Uni asked. She wore thick makeup, as much, Ilya thought, to hide the circles under her eyes as to make a fashion statement. Hackers tended not to sleep much.
“No. Do not take it down.”
“Steal industrial secrets? Drain their accounts?” a long-limbed teenager from Pittsburgh shouted out. He had sleeves of green and red tattoos up and down both arms. Ilya thought he could make out unicorns on them. And snakes.
“No.” Ilya hauled a large FedEx box onto the billiards table and cut it open with a kitchen knife. Inside was a small suitcase, dark green and about the size of an airplane carry-on bag. He unzipped the bag and pulled a layer of T-shirts, socks, and underwear off the top. He waited a moment before emptying the rest of the contents. The room went quiet.
“What I want is more complicated than any of those things. I want you to track down every connection to CR Logistics on the Web. Every account, every warehouse, every client and customer, every bank or credit union. I want you to find all their employees, executives, directors, drivers. I want the details, from top to bottom, of how they run their business. And then”—Ilya smiled—“I want you to destroy their credit rating.”
A few of the hackers laughed. A few blinked in surprise. A young man with Jesus hair and matching beard said in a thick Ukrainian accent, “That is it? Just hack credit?”
“Yes, that’s it.” Ilya flipped the small suitcase over, and onto the billiards table fell a pile of $100 bills. They were balled up and wrapped with rubber bands, and they landed on the green felt with a satisfying thud.
“One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Ilya said after letting the wide-eyed hackers stare hungrily at the money for a moment. “Whoever does it first, gets it all.”
• • •
Ilya left the money on the table and went upstairs, knowing that if anyone tried to steal a bundle of cash, the other hackers would tear him apart. Greed was the best security system he could ask for. He poured himself a glass of vodka, lit a cigarette, then went out to the porch and sat in the shade. The heat was intense, thick and wet, and Ilya watched as sunbathers and swimmers waded into the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, splashing and floating on boogie boards.
He drank a second glass of vodka, then a third, smoking cigarette after cigarette. An hour passed, then another, and Ilya only moved to refill his glass. The crowd on the beach thinned slightly as the sun dipped lower in the sky, but the temperature didn’t change, staying hot and humid. Ilya’s T-shirt was rimmed with sweat, but he didn’t mind. The moisture cooled him.
At two minutes before six, Uni appeared on the porch with her laptop under her arm. “Done,” she said.
Ilya was surprised: that had been accomplished faster than he would have thought possible. She sat next to him on a deck chair, opened her laptop, and showed him her work. They scrolled through hacked databases, emptied bank accounts, altered tax returns, a series of forged letters—including half a dozen demanding immediate repayment of outstanding loans—and a press release stating that the company was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“And the result?”
She showed Ilya a memo released by a corporate-credit-rating agency. The time stamp on the memo was 5:52 p.m. CR Logistics had been downgraded to an extreme credit risk.
Ilya smiled. He looked at the girl who called herself Uni. She was prettier than he originally thought—or perhaps that was just her competency.
“Wait here.” He went back down to the billiards room, scooped all the money back into the suitcase, and pulled it off the billiards table. “You all lose,” he said to the remaining hackers. They spit out curses and grunts of disappointment. Ilya wrote the name of another company on the wall, and underneath it a series of usernames and passwords.
“Here is the next target. A credit-card-processing company. Here are usernames and passwords to their servers. A backdoor portal. Attack the company. Disable all its servers. That is your next chance to win. I will be back with more money in a few hours. Again, winner takes all.”
With that, he hauled the suitcase back upstairs and gave it to Uni. She beamed with pleasure.
“Do you have a car?” he asked.
She nodded yes.
“I want you to drive me someplace.”
She agreed, and they went out to her beat-up green Hyundai, which sat parked by a cyclone fence. She put the suitcase in the trunk, then drove him north on the Garden State Parkway. They said little as they drove, and they made good time, as traffic was light. Ilya watched the scenery and wondered briefly where Garrett Reilly was; he could have been in any of the towns they passed, in any number of buildings or houses. It didn’t really matter; wherever he had run since Ilya had unleashed Newark’s finest on him, Ilya would find him.
He had Uni drive away from the Jersey Shore and onto the Jersey Turnpike. When they got close to New York City and the sun had set, he had her take surface streets into Hoboken. She parked near the water, on Frank Sinatra Drive, and they got out to look at the Manhattan skyline across the river. The Battery, to the south, gleamed with enormous towers, as did midtown to the north. The Hudson River was slow moving, and black, as tugs and Circle Line ferries fought against its endless current.
“Can it be done?” Ilya asked, gesturing to the city across the water.
“The entire city?” Uni asked.
He nodded yes.
“Why all of it?”
“Why not?”
“There are innocent people.”
He let out a short hiss of disgust. “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“What?”
“The money, the power, the waste. All those people protecting their own interests. Hoarding and then forcing the rest of us to beg for scraps. To serve them. And you and me, we are on the outside looking in. Always on the outside.”
“I suppose it bothers me.”
“So we send a message. I exist. Outside of your kingdom. I am important. Outside of your view. And I do not consent to your rules. I do not consent to being fingerprinted, photographed, tracked, my conversations monitored. I won’t support a system that feeds the wealthy, not the poor. That only looks after its own. Where most people on the planet live in shacks, on pennies, and a few live in penthouses with maids and butlers and v
iews of the ocean. We send a message: We can bring it down. See how easily we can bring it down.”
She looked at him. “Is that what we’re saying?”
“Yes. That is what we are saying.”
Uni seemed to think about this. “I thought you were from Russia?”
“In Russia it is even worse. There are people with power, and then there is everybody else. The problem is across the planet. But it starts right here. In this city. In this country.” Ilya looked at her. “So, again—can it be done?”
“Maybe. With help.”
“The help is all around you. I’ve made sure of that.”
She smiled. “Then, yeah, why not? It can be done.”
He looked over at her and reached out and stroked her face with his hand. He could see, in the soft dusk, that the makeup she was wearing hid pockmarks and acne scars as well as exhaustion. He didn’t mind; it made her even more attractive. To Ilya, the ruin of her face was alluring and hinted at a life of struggle and isolation. Struggle gave life meaning.
He kissed her, and she kissed him back. Then they climbed into the backseat of her Hyundai and had sex under an old blanket, with the lights of Manhattan shimmering in the background, and Ilya felt, as his body was intertwined with hers, that he was a medieval crusader having a last night of pleasure just outside the gates of the castle that he would storm in the morning.
IRVINGTON, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 23, 7:01 P.M.
Sobriety did not feel good. Not to Garrett, at least. Sobriety felt hot, and constricting; it felt like a thin layer of normalcy encasing his body, but underneath that normalcy was a jittery, crackling pulse of need. Desire threatened to break through the skin of normal, to smash everything, to go wild. He tried to shake it off and focus on the task at hand.
“If he knew where we were,” Garrett said, wiping the sweat from his face with the bottom of his T-shirt, “why did he send the Newark PD to raid our offices instead of the FBI?”