by Dale Brown
Q Directorate, Federal Security Service (FSB) Headquarters, the Lubyanka, Moscow
That Same Time
For more than one hundred years, the Lubyanka had been the center of state terror in Russia. From its maze of identical corridors and cryptically numbered offices, the secret police, whether called the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, or FSB, waged a never-ending clandestine war against foreign spies and anyone else unlucky enough to be declared an enemy of the state. It was a brutal conflict fought without pity or remorse. Those dragged inside the Lubyanka for questioning rarely left its dank, bloodstained cellars alive.
In recent years, however, the old ways of extracting information desired by the Lubyanka’s masters—physical torture, truth drugs, and sleep deprivation—had been supplemented by more subtle means. Q Directorate’s skilled programmers and supercomputers were among the most important of these new weapons. Originally organized to conduct offensive cyberwar and computer-hacking operations, the directorate was now also expected to defend Russia’s critical industries and computer systems against foreign espionage and sabotage.
It carried out this vital work from a highly secure facility built into the very heart of the Lubyanka. Thick walls, floors, and ceilings with interwoven layers of metal paneling, wire mesh, acoustic fill, and gypsum wallboard protected its offices from electronic eavesdropping. The rooms themselves were utterly plain, devoid of anything but desks, chairs, and masses of ultramodern computer equipment. There were no windows. And the only way in or out was barred both by armed guards and rigorous biometric screening procedures.
The Spartan décor of Major General Arkady Koshkin’s private office matched those of his subordinates, with only a small sideboard and silver samovar for making tea as obvious luxuries. At first glance, Koshkin’s physical appearance was equally unimposing. He was a short, slight man with a high, wrinkled forehead and thick spectacles. Anyone passing him on the street would have mistaken him for a minor functionary in some unimportant ministry.
All in all, the head of Q Directorate was a textbook example of how first impressions could be deceiving, Marshal Leonov thought approvingly. Only Koshkin’s eyes, gleaming with ambition and intelligence, gave him away.
In an odd sense, the man sitting beside Leonov in front of Koshkin’s desk was an illustration of the same principle. Though tall and powerfully built, Minister of State Security Viktor Kazyanov was a physical and moral coward, fit only to be a toady and yes-man for those who were stronger and more ruthless. Gennadiy Gryzlov had kept him on as head of Russia’s intelligence services for precisely those reasons. Now Kazyanov’s weaknesses served Leonov’s own purposes. Through Kazyanov, he could exercise effective control over the nation’s secret police and foreign intelligence operations without unduly alarming the other government ministers who unwisely imagined they were still his equals.
The sleek computer on Koshkin’s desk chimed once. “Well?” Leonov demanded.
“We have a match for one of our two suspects,” Koshkin said evenly. He turned his flat-panel display so that the others could see the image it displayed. The broad-featured face of a very large man filled the screen. “According to his identity papers, this is Sergei Kondakov—a mid-ranked official in the Ministry of Industry and Trade.” His thin smile never reached his eyes. “And if we were relying only on the personnel records of that ministry, we would believe him to be exactly who he says he is.”
“Because those records have been hacked,” Leonov said dryly. Koshkin nodded. “So who is he really?”
“Probably an American. And almost certainly an agent for Scion.” Koshkin touched a key, bringing up a new picture. This one showed the same man, only this time wearing a far more stylish business suit. “But for the past several years, we have believed him to be a German national named Klaus Wernicke, a senior executive for Tekhwerk, GmbH.”
Leonov’s eyes narrowed. “How . . . interesting,” he ground out.
“Indeed,” Koshkin said flatly. Tekhwerk, GmbH was supposedly a jointly owned German and Russian import-export company specializing in advanced industrial equipment. Since its operations helped Russia evade Western sanctions, Moscow’s law enforcement and regulatory agencies tended to allow it wide latitude, often turning a blind eye to its occasionally irregular business activities. If, as now seemed likely, the company was actually a front for Scion’s spies operating on Russian soil, that had been an unforgivable error.
The computer chimed again. Two new images appeared—the first showing the attractive, blond-haired woman the Defense Ministry’s digitized personnel files identified as Lieutenant Colonel Katya Volkova of the Aerospace Forces. The second showed what was unmistakably the same woman, only in this photo she wore elegant civilian business clothes and her hair was a dark red color.
“And this one?” Leonov asked grimly.
“She is also supposedly a German national.”
Leonov snorted. “Who is also employed by Tekhwerk?” he guessed.
“Yes,” Koshkin said. “According to her passport, her name is Erika Roth. Nominally, she’s a corporate accounts executive—though based in Berlin, rather than here in Moscow.” He sat back, looking pleased with himself. “It appears that the glittering lure of the Firebird’s magical feathers has worked just as we hoped.”
Leonov nodded. Besides helping create the illusion of a serious Russian program to develop its own version of America’s spaceplanes, the Firebird test was also a trap. Q Directorate specialists had created two initially identical lists of those authorized to witness the Kansk-Dalniy demonstration flight—one protected by a tough, but hackable, security firewall, and the other, the real one, sheltered behind impenetrable barriers. A cross-check of both lists several hours ago had immediately revealed evidence of tampering . . . and the false identities being used by the two imposters.
Armed with that information and using concealed cameras rigged at various points around the airfield, Koshkin’s experts had easily obtained a number of high-resolution photographs of “Lieutenant Colonel Valkova” and “Sergei Kondakov.” These pictures were then fed into one of Q Directorate’s supercomputers. Sophisticated facial recognition software first developed by a leading American high-tech company for the People’s Republic of China made it possible to cross-check them against a large number of government and industry databases in near real time . . . yielding these more accurate identifications of the two Scion agents.
Leonov discounted the possibility that Wernicke and Roth were operatives for the CIA or one of the other Western intelligence services. The boldness and skill with which these two spies had infiltrated what was supposedly a top secret flight demonstration had all the hallmarks of a Scion operation. Government-run espionage organizations were far more cautious, hobbled by bureaucratic and political restrictions that inevitably reduced their effectiveness.
More information scrolled across Koshkin’s screen. “Both agents arrived at Krasnoyark’s Yemelyanovo International Airport this morning on a flight from Moscow,” he reported. He smiled wryly. “Like everyone else genuinely invited to Kansk-Dalniy, they have tickets on a return flight to Sheremetyevo leaving this evening.”
Leonov snorted his own amused understanding. Apparently, no one from Moscow would willingly spend an hour longer in a Siberian rural backwater than was absolutely necessary. Not even a couple of enemy agents.
For the first time, Viktor Kazyanov spoke up. “I can have an FSB team ready to arrest these spies at Sheremetyevo when they land,” he suggested hesitantly.
“Absolutely not! Don’t be an idiot!” Leonov snapped. He saw the other man’s face turn gray with anxiety and sighed. Useful though Kazyanov’s timidity was to him, watching him act more like a mouse than a man could still be extremely irritating.
“Look, Viktor, there’s no point in spooking the Americans now,” he explained patiently. “Remember, we want Wernicke and Roth to pass on the false information we’ve just fed them.” He shook his head decisively. “No, we
’ll give these Scion agents plenty of room for the moment.”
“While we dig deeply into Tekhwerk and all of its operations?” Koshkin suggested.
“That’s exactly right, Arkady,” Leonov agreed. He looked at both Koshkin and Kazyanov. “Understand this: I want a very thorough, but also extremely careful, investigation, gentlemen. Q Directorate will handle the cyber end of things, while the FSB does the physical legwork. But before you move in to make any arrests, make sure you’ve learned just how far this Scion front company has burrowed into our military and defense industry infrastructure.”
He stabbed a finger at Koshkin’s computer screen, which now showed new live pictures of the two foreign spies. They were standing side by side, looking up at the sky as the modified Tu-160 made its final approach back to the airfield. “Of themselves, those two are nothing. But if we play our cards right, they’ll lead us right where we want to go. And when the time comes, I want Scion’s whole Russia-based espionage network in the bag. Here. In the Lubyanka’s basement cells . . . singing like birds while your interrogators work them over. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear, Marshal,” Kazyanov said quickly. Koshkin merely nodded.
“Good.” Leonov stood up. His jaw tightened. “Because it’s high time we cut this damnable cancer out of the Motherland. Now get to it.”
Thirteen
Evolution Tower, International Business Center, Moscow
A Couple of Hours Later
The weirdly twisting Evolution Tower soared more than eight hundred feet above the right bank of the Moskva River. Its odd, DNA-like double spiral was created by a slight, three-degree offset of each floor from the one below it. High up on one of the eastward-facing spirals, the large suite of offices leased by Tekhwerk, GmbH occupied a substantial share of the building’s forty-second floor. From here the company’s senior managers had sweeping views of Moscow’s crowded city center. The shattered ruins of the Kremlin were plainly visible, as was the roof of the Lubyanka, just three and a half miles away.
Only a tiny handful of those working out of these offices understood the irony of the views they enjoyed. The vast majority of Tekhwerk’s staff believed they were employed by a legitimate export-import company. And, in fact, well over 90 percent of its day-to-day operations were perfectly legal, or at least winked at by the ruling authorities. A byzantine web of holding companies and investment firms completely concealed Scion’s ownership of the enterprise. As far as Kevin Martindale was concerned, it was icing on the cake that Tekhwerk’s profits—largely derived from Russian government contracts—funded so many of Scion’s covert-action and intelligence-gathering operations.
Zach Orlov was one of the few in on the secret. Supposedly a native Russian Tekhwerk information technology specialist, he had actually been born in the United States and he was one of Scion’s top computer hackers. From his émigré parents, one a brilliant mathematician and the other an accomplished musician, he’d picked up perfect fluency in Russian. Gifted with high intelligence and focus, he’d been so bored in regular school that he’d spent most of his teenage years systematically and illegally breaking into every computer network he could access. If Martindale hadn’t recruited him into Scion, it was probably a coin toss whether he’d have ended up behind bars—or working for the U.S. government’s National Security Agency.
Unlike most of those on the forty-second floor, his office had no windows at all. Secure behind a keypad-controlled electronic lock, the room looked much smaller than it was—largely because almost all the available space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling racks of computer hardware. There was just enough room for a desk, chair, and a very large wastebasket usually full of crumpled paper coffee cups and takeout containers. Whenever Orlov was immersed in a complicated task, he rarely took any time off to sleep or eat . . . or even to change his clothes.
Right now, wearing a wrinkled polo shirt and dirty jeans, he sat hunched over a keyboard. While Sam Kerr and Marcus Cartwright were out in the field at Kansk-Dalniy, he’d been following a lead gained from hacking emails exchanged between a high-ranking Russian Space Forces officer and a production manager at Voronezh’s KB Khimavtomatika (KBKhA), the Chemical Automatics Design Bureau.
KBKhA was one of Russia’s leading high-tech companies. Its factories turned out everything from liquid-propellant rocket engines to nuclear space reactors to high-power lasers. That strongly suggested the company was somehow involved in Leonov’s spaceplane program—most probably in advanced engine development. And several of its senior engineers and executives had been specially invited to the Firebird demonstration, which only made the connection seem more certain.
But what had really caught Orlov’s attention was a cryptic reference in one of the emails to something called Nebesnyy Grom, Heaven’s Thunder. He was willing to bet that was a code name for the high-powered hybrid turbofan-scramjet-rocket engines any real single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane needed. Once their engines entered production, Russians usually slapped on dull-as-dishwater numbers, like the RD-0150 . . . but nothing stopped them from indulging in a little romance while a project was still classified.
Since then, he’d been chasing down every possible reference to Heaven’s Thunder. Most of them had dead-ended, but a few had led him to a top secret Russian Defense Ministry database. He was pretty sure it contained critical files pertaining to the Firebird Project. And for hours and hours, he’d been digitally prowling around its outskirts, looking for a way inside.
Unfortunately, this was as close as Orlov dared get. Whoever had designed its security firewall had done one hell of a job. From what he could tell, this database was essentially guarded by the computer equivalent of motion sensors, IR detection gear, radar, land mines, barbed wire, machine guns, flamethrowers, and heavy artillery—with a side order of nuclear weapons thrown in for good measure.
“Fucking Q-boys,” he growled under his breath, taking his hands off the keyboard. He was pretty sure Q Directorate’s specialists were the ones who’d sheathed this database in so many layers of digital death. Their coding work wasn’t exactly discreet. It was more like they’d slapped on a bunch of garish neon signs blazing, “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Hack Here.” Then again, he admitted to himself, their computer security work didn’t have to be discreet, just effective.
Orlov shook his head in dismay. Short of Sam Kerr using her feminine wiles to charm the necessary passwords out of some lust-stricken Russian officer, there was no way in hell anyone from Scion was going to get a peek at those classified files. Not even an all-out, brute force hacking attack would break through those defenses.
Yawning, he sat back and rubbed at his tired eyes. They felt raw, like someone had been scraping them with sandpaper. No surprise, there, he thought blearily. The clock readout in the lower right corner of his monitor showed that he’d been working this angle for nearly twenty hours without a real break. Maybe it was time to punch out, grab some sleep, and come back at the problem fresh another day.
Still yawning, Orlov started to push back his chair . . . but then he froze in place, staring at his screen.
A red-outlined box had just flashed into existence: warning. intrusion attempts detected. intrusion attempts are ongoing.
He felt cold. Someone out there was trying to hack into Tekhwerk’s own computer network. And whoever it was had just tripped hidden warning subroutines he’d buried very deeply in what would otherwise look like an ordinary corporate security firewall. Shit. Shit. Shit. Had his own reconnaissance of that special Defense Ministry database set off alarms he’d missed?
Then Orlov shook his head. That wasn’t very likely. He’d been operating at arm’s length through a linked series of zombie computers—machines he’d infiltrated months ago and now secretly controlled. Even if he’d triggered an alarm, there should be no way anyone could have traced him back here through all those cutouts. Not this fast, anyway.
Another series of alerts popped up. Now digital tripwires he’d planted i
n government and financial industry databases in both Russia and Germany were sending up flares. He swallowed hard. The people probing Tekhwerk’s business activities were casting a very wide net.
For people, read Q Directorate, Orlov thought edgily. The hairs on the back of his neck rose . . . and he had to fight down a sudden urge to get up and run. In the shadowy internet world of binary 1s and 0s, he was used to being the hunter . . . not the hunted.
Acting on a sudden hunch, he opened a back door he’d planted in the Aeroflot computer reservations system and pulled up the Russian airline’s ticketing and reservation information for Sam Kerr in her Lieutenant Colonel Katya Volkova persona. Sure enough, the hidden access counter he’d installed glowed bright red.
“Okay, this is bad. This is really bad,” Orlov muttered to himself. Someone besides him had secretly reviewed those files within the past hour. And this wasn’t just a routine Aeroflot query about passengers on its evening flight out from Krasnoyarsk’s Yemelyanovo International Airport. Anyone using an official Aeroflot log-in wouldn’t have triggered his counter. Which meant Sam’s cover was blown.
A quick check of Marcus Cartwright’s ticketing information showed the same thing.
Any hope Orlov had that Scion’s Moscow-based intelligence team could just hunker down, play innocent, and ride out this sudden Q Directorate probe disappeared. Russia’s security services weren’t just mildly curious about Tekhwerk and its activities. They were actively prosecuting a full-on espionage investigation, and somehow they’d already tied both Sam and Marcus to the company . . . despite their carefully created cover stories and perfectly forged identity papers.
For what seemed like an hour, but couldn’t really have been more than a minute or two, he sat motionless—mentally running through his options. Then he shrugged helplessly. In the end, there weren’t many. This was basically an intelligence operative’s nightmare. His priority right now was to try to minimize the damage. And then to get his ass safely out of Russia if at all possible. Like all Scion field agents, he had an escape and evasion kit, complete with new false papers and credit cards, and enough cash to bribe his way across the border if that proved necessary.