by Dima Zales
In Russian, muhomor is the name of a poisonous mushroom called Amanita muscaria, sometimes referred to as fly agaric. It’s a toadstool with a bright red cap speckled with white, and I was always told to avoid it as a kid. A nifty mental Google search informs me this mushroom actually has hallucinogenic properties I wasn’t previously aware of. This might explain why the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland was so fond of sitting on it (and maybe why Alice needed to eat so many shrooms).
“No,” Mitya replies from inside the chat. “It’s a person. I didn’t think he was real, let alone someone Alex might know.” From the iPad, out loud, Mitya says, “Alex, stop building the suspense. Why don’t you tell everyone who Muhomor is?”
“I don’t like repeating rumors.” Alex pours a shot of vodka with the air of someone who’s certainly looking forward to sharing this particular rumor. “I’m sure you’ve seen certain articles in Wired, such as the one about Russia hacking into Pentagon emails, or Russia hacking the Democratic National Committee, or the one about the Russian Dark Net marketplaces that allow one to buy illegal drugs, weapons, and stolen credit cards…” He downs the shot and chases it with a pickle. “If those stories have any foundation in reality, it’s Muhomor behind the curtain pulling the invisible binary strings.”
“And you know him how?” Mitya asks as the teleconference robot moves closer to Alex.
“Is it really relevant?” Alex pushes his glasses higher up his nose. “He owes me a few favors, just like I owed you.”
“If this Muhomor helps Mike, we won’t just be even,” Mitya says. “I’ll owe you.”
“I can’t guarantee he’ll help.” Alex sits down and faces the iPad. “I can only try to arrange the meeting.”
“Fine.” Mitya rolls the robot even closer to Alex. “Get in touch with him.”
Alex pulls out his phone and types at a speed a tween would envy.
“Why do you assume Muhomor is a him?” Ada asks in our private chat window. “What if it’s a her?”
“You have much to learn about the Russian language,” Mitya types back. “The word muhomor is a masculine noun. A lady hacker would’ve called herself something like lisichka.”
“I guess,” Ada says. “But those are chanterelle mushrooms, right? They’re way less cool than fly agaric.”
“Ah,” Mitya types back, “but that Russian word is also a diminutive of fox, which makes it kind of foxy, don’t you think?”
“I think muhomor is cooler,” I chime in. “It’s a rare Russian word that can be written with letters that occur in both the Cyrillic and English alphabets.”
Before anyone can comment further on options for hacker aliases, Alex looks up from his phone and says, “Okay, I should hear back from Muhomor shortly. Now, let’s all just relax for a minute.” Holding on to the bottle, he walks over to Nadejda. “May I take care of the lady?” Without waiting for anyone to reply, he pours her a shot of vodka and asks, “Can I get you more chicken liver pâté?”
Nadejda looks at him as though he’s about to harvest a liver from a chicken that’s sprouting from his head. Then, to my utter shock, she smiles as coquettishly as her formidable frown lines allow and says, “Maybe a little.”
“Such chauvinistic behavior,” Ada comments.
“You’re reading way too much into it,” Mitya objects. “It’s a Russian dinner table tradition for the gentleman to—”
I don’t read the rest of the exchange because I notice how my cousin is looking at Alex, who’s blissfully adding morsels of liver pâté to Nadejda’s plate. His stare reminds me of the ice ball special move the character Sub-Zero enjoys throwing in the Mortal Combat games. In a voice as cold as his stare, Joe says, “We didn’t come here to relax.”
Nadejda, who must know Joe well, turns white, but I have to hand it to Alex. He doesn’t flinch and just calmly says, “I understand and respect your position, Joseph Abramovich. The problem is there isn’t much I can do. Muhomor is very eccentric. He’ll take as long as he wants to reply. Also, I might as well warn you that it’ll take even longer to set up a meeting with him.”
“Will it?” I ask as Alex puts the blin—Russian crepe—that Nadejda refused into his own mouth. “Care to explain why?”
“Take it easy,” Ada warns me in the chat. “Your voice shows an unusual amount of irritation.”
“Well,” I mentally type, “Joe is on the verge of either choking or torture-shooting our host to get answers, and that would be a bad move in this well-defended facility, no matter how tempting it might be.”
Alex swallows his food and glances at his phone. Apparently seeing nothing on it, he looks up again and says, “Muhomor likes to include puzzles in his dealings, and that crap usually takes time to crack.”
“So let’s work with someone else,” Gogi says, and I can tell he’s also worried Joe might act out his displeasure.
Alex shakes his head. “He’s the only such person I know,” he explains. “Perhaps there’s something we can do in the meantime? Did you want to change your clothes after your long trip? Or take a bath?” He looks longingly at Nadejda. “Or anything else?”
“We could use some weapons,” Gogi says, and his unibrow does a jig on his forehead.
“That would be nice,” Nadejda agrees and smiles widely, revealing a golden crown on her left canine tooth.
Alex looks like he’s about to refuse, but then Joe stands, fists clenched and eyes set on homicide.
“Okay,” Alex says a bit too quickly. When Joe unclenches his fists, our host smiles weakly, his relief apparent, and looks at Nadejda. “How can I resist, Nadechka?” he says in a smarmy tone. “Come, let me show you my armory.”
To my utter shock, Nadejda lets Alex get away with the diminutive form of her name, and she’s the first one on her feet, following him out of the Lounge. She walks next to him, eagerly chatting him up about something I can’t quite hear. The rest of us follow with less enthusiasm.
“I’ll disconnect now,” my friend says from the telepresence robot behind us. “Don’t worry about me.”
No one shows the slightest hint that they heard Mitya as they continue through the maze of corridors after our host.
“It’s in here,” Alex says as he opens the large door to his left.
Gogi enters first and whistles loudly.
“It’s bad luck to whistle in the house,” Nadejda says, but then she whistles too. Even Joe looks pretty impressed, and with good reason.
The room reminds me of that iconic scene from The Matrix, when Neo is asked what he needs and he says, “Guns. Lots of guns.”
The shelves in the hangar-sized space are overflowing with weapons of varying degrees of destruction. Some of these items look so deadly I suspect even the NRA might not want them in civilian hands. I estimate that about ninety-eight percent of these weapons are illegal in Russia and seventy percent would be illegal in the most gung-ho states in America. To my New Yorker eyes, these guns are obscenely shocking yet fascinating—like a porno scenario you think is sick but can’t stop watching.
I walk through rows of plastic explosives, rifles, shotguns, and rocket launchers. Finally, I stop next to a few rows dedicated mostly to handguns, figuring I might as well pick one up while I’m here.
“I don’t think you should get a gun,” Ada says, appearing as an angel on my shoulder.
“If you’re against him using a gun, why did you help me with the gun app?” Mitya asks, appearing in his devil form. “I think he totally should get a gun, maybe even a few. I recommend one of those 9mm Glocks.” He points at the nearest shelf. “That one right there is something only cops and soldiers can have in the US.”
“I only did the code review for that app.” Ada tugs at her Mohawk. “That’s far from actually helping, and it certainly doesn’t mean I approve of gun use.”
“I’m sorry, Ada,” I type into the chat, “but I have to side with Mitya on this one.” I pick up a gun for the second time in my life—the first time being when I went
to a gun range in New Jersey about a decade ago.
“Does this mean the app is done?” I type into the chat. The app in question was the lowest priority on the list I specced out for them before flying out, and with all the other awesome software, I completely forgot about it.
“It’s done,” Mitya says. “I just sent it to your AROS.”
A little 3D gun icon shows up in the air in front of me. The idea behind the app is to assist with aiming, so even a novice like me can actually hit a target. Since I now have access to a gun, I launch the app and grab a Glock to see how it’ll all come together.
“Enter the gun model and make,” a window asks, and I do.
“The app is querying several good gun databases,” Mitya says as though he can see what I’m doing. “If it doesn’t recognize the make and model, choose another gun.”
“No, it has it,” I say as the window spits out the exact data on my gun and disappears.
Faint lines appear and crisscross the gun, slowly zoning in on the rear and front sights. Eventually, a narrow line materializes in my vision. It comes out of the gun’s barrel and goes straight into the floor where I’m currently pointing the weapon.
I wave the gun around, and the line moves with it. The theory is if I want to aim at something, I just need to point the tip of the line where the bullet should end up.
“We can market this to the army one day,” Mitya says. “We’ll call it Augmented Reality Aim Assist, or something.”
“Great,” Ada says sarcastically. “Our work will be used to take lives.”
“Someone will come up with this anyway,” Mitya says. “I think you’re letting your angel avatar go to your head.”
“How is this better than a laser sight?” I type into the chat, partly to stop them from bickering.
“Laser sight isn’t perfect and only works up to a certain distance. This optimizes your accuracy at any distance,” Mitya explains. “Plus, only you can see the AU sights, so it’s stealthier as well.”
Making sure the gun isn’t loaded and that the safety’s on, I aim the Augmented Reality pointer at Alex’s head, who’s about twenty feet away.
The line makes aiming ridiculously easy, and if the bullet really did fly down that path, the app would indeed make a marksman out of me.
“Hey, Alex,” I shout as I close the distance between us. “Do you have a holster I can use?”
“And a couple of duffel bags,” Gogi says.
“And a rucksack,” Nadejda adds.
“I’ll go ask Anna to locate whatever you need,” Alex says, a little too eagerly, and leaves the room.
I take in the others’ weapons. With my one Glock, I almost feel naked. Everyone else looks like they decided to star in an action movie, especially Gogi, who appears ready to singlehandedly start a small war.
Seeing that I’m armed, Gogi approaches me and gives me a few pointers so that I, in his words, “don’t shoot his left nut by accident.”
Alex returns and hands me a shoulder holster, telling the others, “Anna will bring the rest of your items shortly.”
“Don’t go near that,” I whisper to Mr. Spock after I cover the gun with my jacket. “If I reach for it in a hurry, I don’t want to end up grabbing you instead by accident.”
Pink eyes glint from inside my jacket, and I get the feeling that if the rat could speak, he’d say, “Got it, boss. What am I, a Guinea pig?”
In the distance, Alex resumes his conversation with Nadejda. He tells her she’s the quintessential Russian woman, straight from ancient poetry. He goes as far as quoting a verse from Nekrasov that roughly translates to, “A Russian woman can stop a galloping horse and enter a burning hut.”
His flirting is interrupted by his phone’s very nostalgia-inspiring ringtone—a line from the Russian cartoon Nu, pogodi!, the Soviet answer to Tom and Jerry, only with a wolf and a hare.
“It’s Muhomor,” Alex says after a brief glance. He then frowns. “As I feared, he’s sent another one of his dumb hacking puzzles.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Alex angrily presses a couple of keys on his phone and says, “I sent the puzzle to a team of experts on my payroll. It usually takes them a few hours to crack Muhomor’s assignments, though last time it took a whole day.”
Joe slams a fresh magazine into a ginormous black gun. I take it as a bad sign and say, “You mentioned puzzles before. Can you elaborate?”
“Sure, though there isn’t much to explain,” Alex says. “Muhomor never tells you the meeting location. He encodes it using a different method each time. Once, I got a cryptic text that was encoded; another time, he sent me a username and a server in Turkey to log in to. Though the details vary, the basic premise is the same. He wants you to do some work before he meets with you.”
“But why would he do that?” Gogi asks. “I thought he owed you a favor?”
“I have no clue,” Alex replies a bit too defensively. “Maybe it’s his way of making sure it’s me he’s communicating with, or maybe he’s just weird.”
“He could be using you to hack stuff he’s too lazy to hack himself,” I suggest. “That Turkey thing sounds like it.”
“Whatever the reason, I’m as annoyed with this as you guys are. Probably more so since I have to go through this more often.” Alex glances nervously at Joe.
“Can I take a look at the problem he sent you?” I ask. “I’m good with puzzles.” In my mental chat window, I add, “At least I hope I am, thanks to my brain boost.”
“Sure,” Alex says. “What’s your email?”
“It’s [email protected],” I reply.
Alex has me spell out the email and then plays with his phone some more.
I look at his message on Precious, mostly for appearance’s sake, since I’d rather do it through the AROS interface in my head.
All the email contains is a picture of an attractive and very typically Russian girl with blond hair and blue eyes.
Now that they saw me look at it on my phone, I figure it’s safe for me to close my eyes, so I do. I bring up the same image and maximize it in the AROS interface. When the face is nice and big, I apply the face recognition app to it. According to the results, her name is Lyuba Trupova. She has no criminal record, and most of her data comes from her Vkontakte social media account.
I forward the pic and my meager findings to my friends, and in my mental chat, I type, “Check your emails if you’re willing to help me with this puzzle.”
“I’m already trying some common passwords to get into her Vkontakte account,” Mitya says.
“Good,” I say. “Try things like her boyfriend’s name, followed by a one or a zero.”
“I just tried that,” Mitya says. “I also tried ‘password,’ both in Russian and English, as well as ‘god,’ ‘Minsk’—her city of birth—and ‘Belorussian State University,’ the school she attended.”
“Try ‘letmein,’” Ada suggests. “As well as ‘love’ and ‘money.’”
“She wouldn’t use love,” I say but try it anyway to no avail. “Her name, Lyuba, is short for Lyubov, which means ‘love’ in Russian.”
“Hey, that’s actually a good clue,” Mitya says. “Notice her last name is Trupova, which sounds like trup—Russian for corpse.”
Even before Mitya has finished his sentence, I try “necrophilia” as a password and get in. Alex wasn’t kidding when he said Muhomor was eccentric.
“Now that I’m in her account, I can see her email. It’s [email protected],” I mentally type. “But I can’t log in using the same password.”
My friends suggest some very clever guesses for this new password, both based on their research into statistically common passwords and in a more targeted form by trying to backward engineer what someone with Lyuba’s social connections would use. None of it pans out, though.
As we chat, the picture of the girl keeps staring at me, and I eventually notice something odd about it. “Guys, do you see something blurry or pixelated abo
ut this image?” I say. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but—”
“You’re right. I think it’s steganography,” Mitya interrupts. After a pause, he adds, “Here’s what I get when I remove all but the two least significant bits of each color component and perform a normalization. Check your email, Mr. Grandmaster.”
Confused, I open my mental inbox. He sent me a picture of a chessboard with pieces arranged around it, which explains why Mitya called me a grandmaster. When I was a kid back in Russia, I belonged to a chess club for a few years, and I’ve made a habit out of beating Mitya in chess.
The board setup is oddly familiar, and after I stare at it for a few seconds, I remember where I’ve seen it. That makes me wonder for a second if Ada’s brain boost is aiding my memory, but I decide that’s unlikely.
A quick mental Google search confirms my recollection, and I type into the chat, “This is the next to last position of the conclusive match between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov in the World Chess Championship game in 1985. We covered it in the club ad nauseam. I bet the password is ‘horseD4.’ Horse is what the knight piece is called in Russian, and D4 is where the knight ended up during the finishing move of the game.”
I then try the password, but it doesn’t work.
“Maybe it’s Kasparov?” Mitya says. “I just looked up that game, and that’s who won.”
I try Kasparov, then Kasparov with horseD4 before and after it, but it doesn’t work. I then try a bunch of variations on the same theme, including the color of the last piece, black, and using the English word knight instead of horse—all without any luck.
“Wait a minute,” Mitya writes in the chat. “Could he have done this again? The email was skazka, Russian for ‘fairy tale.’”
“You’re a genius,” I type back. “Karpov comes from the word karp, Russian for—not surprisingly—carp, which means the password probably contains something along the lines of golden fish or maybe goldfish.”
I try my earlier permutations again, adding the word goldfish into the mix, and when I try goldFishHorseD4, I finally get in.