by Drew Chapman
Garrett’s stomach suddenly clenched in pain. Was this really happening? He had brought them together. They were a team. They weren’t perfect, but they meshed, each complementing the other; they couldn’t leave. Why not? Because they were . . . He searched for the word. They were . . .
. . . a family.
And suddenly he realized why he was doing everything he’d done over the past two weeks: why he had notified Alexis, asked for the team to be brought back together, worked to keep them involved and motivated. He realized why he was trying so hard to save the country. He was doing it because he wanted a family around him. And Ascendant was the only family he had left.
“Okay,” he yelled.
Bingo, the last to leave, stopped in the doorway. Mitty, Patmore, and Celeste looked back in.
Garrett felt all the pride leave his body—all the defenses, all the ego, all the arrogance. He was, at that moment, a child, desperate not to be left alone.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Garrett said. “Just don’t leave.”
LYADY, BELARUS, JUNE 23, 8:17 A.M. (GMT +3)
Gennady Bazanov hurried through the stand of birch trees, trying to listen to the morning breeze rustling the leaves. Summer sunlight cut through the tree branches and dappled the ground around his feet. Bazanov could even hear the call of songbirds above him; that is, he could hear them when the grind and roar of tank engines less than half a kilometer away died down.
The tanks were supposed to belong to Belarusian separatists, fighting against the fascists in Minsk who were bringing tyranny to their country, although Bazanov knew full well that they were Russian-owned T-90s, from the Twenty-Fifth Motorized Rifle Brigade stationed just west of Moscow. The separatist ploy was a convenient fiction, a smoke screen that the Kremlin could hide behind as it tried to undo what was left of the Belarusian democracy movement, and the tanks were an efficient way to batter the Belarusian Army—or what was left of that as well.
Bazanov checked his watch and lit a cigarette. He had parked a few hundred meters to the south, in Lyady, a miserable junction town in eastern Belarus, whose geographic curse it was to lie on the border with Russia. He had parked near an abandoned school—no one dared live in Lyady since the separatists had arrived—and walked through the empty town north into the birch trees, just as he’d been told.
The man from the SVR had called late last night, identifying himself only as Luka. He wasn’t Bazanov’s normal handler, which meant that whatever he had to say was important. Extremely important. He sounded young, and completely without a sense of humor—or compassion. “Eight thirty, two hundred meters north from the old church.” His voice was cold and precise—the voice of exactly the type of vicious functionary that the SVR seemed to favor these days. Bazanov shivered with the memory, even though the June day was hot, and getting hotter. The smoke from the intermittent shelling and the fires that it caused didn’t help blot out the sunshine or the heat—it only seemed to make matters worse.
Bazanov drew hard on his cigarette and kept walking. He was nervous, and he hated himself for that. He was a colonel in the glorious Russian intelligence service after all, a decorated officer in the Russian Army, and a longtime patriot. He had nothing to worry about. But when they called from Yasenevo, you worried, even if you felt there was no cause; they were getting their orders from the Kremlin, and the Kremlin could bury anybody.
“Polkovnik Bazanov.” Colonel Bazanov. The voice seemed to come from nowhere, and Bazanov jumped in surprise. He spun around, and a black-haired man in a shiny suit appeared from behind a tree. He had sucked-in cheeks and black eyes that matched his suit. He was tall, and thin, like some sort of badly drawn cartoon character that was all arms and legs. Bazanov blinked in surprise: How the hell had he missed him standing there? Bazanov had walked right past him.
The thin man in the suit stepped forward and nodded without offering his hand. “Good morning.” The briefest of smiles appeared on his lips.
“Luka?” Bazanov figured the name was some form of greeting code. Bazanov had little chance of ever knowing Luka’s real name.
The thin man shrugged, half yes, half no. Bazanov took a deep breath. Luka was a classic SVR message boy: say no more than absolutely necessary, spread fear through ambiguity. He was young, no more than thirty, and he had the presumption to try to intimidate Gennady Bazanov? Bazanov scowled, trying to mask his fury.
“We have been following events in the United States,” Luka said. “And you as well? You are in contact with your man?”
Bazanov took a deep draw from his cigarette and pondered how to deal with this errand boy. Of course he was following events in the United States. He had coordinated the entire thing. How could he not be following events there? It was his fucking job. Yet, truth be told, he was not in constant contact with Ilya Markov. Markov had broken off with him a few days ago and had not resurfaced, nor would he. This was not unexpected; he had put Markov on the job because of Markov’s reputation as a man who could appear anywhere, at any time, without warning—even if you spotted him in one place, a week later he’d have you so turned around that you would be convinced you’d seen him somewhere else entirely. He was that good.
But Bazanov could not necessarily say this. The Kremlin wanted control above all else—and they were sending this SVR boy to regain it. If Bazanov admitted he’d lost control—well, it might be a quick end to Gennady Bazanov, and he knew it.
Bazanov tossed his cigarette to the ground and rubbed the burning ember into the dirt. “Yes, I am following events,” he said, opting for feigned omniscience. “And in contact.”
“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 beyon
d 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 abandoned school 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 were 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 o
ff 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.