by D. F. Bailey
“Not if both our leaders sign the INF Treaty next week.”
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Malinin sneered at the mention of it. Everyone suspected that the cold war detente marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan seduced Mikhail Gorbachev with money, power and a California surfer tan. His charms seemed irresistible, especially to the leaders of the Potemkin village that the Soviet Union had become.
Whitelaw and Malinin spoke quietly in front of the hospital windows, and then Malinin experienced something that could only happen in America. A squad of reporters burst into the day room and began an on-the-spot interview with the senator. Photographers took dozens of pictures, their flashbulbs popping like small-caliber handguns.
“Senator, how are they treating you?”
“Just fine. It was touch-and-go up in the Ozarks when my appendix burst, but once I arrived here I knew I was getting the best medical care in the world.” His hundred-watt smile lit up the room. “And my friend here, Alexei Malinin from the Soviet Embassy, might say the same. Alexei?”
Caught off guard, Malinin turned away, then thought better of it. Whitelaw was playing a gambit of some sort. Just how good a chess player was he?
“Yes, good. The staff has been helpful. Almost comparable to Soviet medicine.” His face contracted as a new bolt of pain flew through his belly.
Still smiling, Senator Whitelaw turned to the photographers. “Want to see my scar?”
“Absolutely!” The media chorus was loud and enthusiastic. Some of them recalled President Lyndon Johnson displaying his scar following his gallbladder operation in 1965. It made for good politics and Whitelaw knew it.
The senator lifted the drape of his gown to display the row of tidy sutures below his ribs. More flashbulbs ignited.
“How about you, Alexei? Show ‘em your scar.” Despite the long reach across the two wheelchairs, the senator wrapped an arm around Malinin’s shoulder to demonstrate their camaraderie. “I’d say this gives east-west detente a whole new meaning. Don’t you think?”
Malinin’s face bore a worried look. “Did you arrange all this?” he whispered and waved a finger at the paparazzi who were still laughing at the senator’s joke.
“An hour ago,” the senator mumbled through his clenched smile.
Malinin knew that he could not back down. He lifted the edge of his shirt to reveal the crater of torn flesh above his liver. Again, a barrage of flashbulbs blazed through the room.
A reporter leaned toward Malinin and pressed a microphone to his mouth. “And what was the nature of your surgery, comrade?”
Comrade. He smiled. “To repair damages from a butcher knife thrust into my liver.”
The reporter gasped. He seemed to have no idea how to continue.
“I was attacked by several homeless negroes. Blameless victims of hunger and want,” he continued. “All of them citizens of your so-called Great Society.”
He notched a smile onto his lips and grinned at Senator Whitelaw. Malinin turned toward the senator’s ear as the photographers took a final series of pictures of the two scarred bellies propped side-by-side in the wheelchairs.
“Checkmate,” he chuckled, the smile still on his lips. “Let us keep in touch, senator. Yes?”
※ — FIVE — ※
AROUND EIGHT-THIRTY on Thursday evening Will Finch climbed the staircase to the eXpress office. He knew most of the staff would have shut down their computer terminals and shuffled off to their homes. Jeanine Fix the eXpress copy editor and web master would likely be putting the last edition to bed. And one or two of the unpaid interns might linger to impress the managing editor Wally Gimbel, but only if Wally himself remained at his desk.
As he turned the corner into the office, Finch made a cursory sweep of the reception area and the “wire room,” where Jeanine and the tech staff designed and published the internet pages. He then turned toward the board room and Wally Gimbel’s private office. Except for Jeanine, the premises appeared to be vacant.
More good luck, he whispered to himself when he saw Jeanine mesmerized by some task on her computer screen. He waved to her from a distance. When she failed to return his signal he walked into the bog, where the staff writers toiled in their cubicles during the day shift, and along the row of empty cubicles to Fiona Page’s desk.
He settled in her chair and studied the surroundings. He’d sat here, beside her, dozens of times over the past year when Parson Media launched their internet news feed, the San Francisco eXpress, on the third floor of the building, just above the offices of their print edition, the San Francisco Post. But the transition from print to digital publishing required a corporate slight-of-hand. To staff the new internet news feed, Wally Gimbel poached six journalists from the Post. Fiona Page and Will Finch were his first recruits.
Whereas in the past Finch barely noticed the trinkets and do-dads that decorated Fiona’s cubicle, he now studied them carefully. A dozen pencils and pens pointing tip-up in a ceramic coffee cup with a broken handle. A framed photograph of Fiona and her son Alexander in the bleachers at a San Francisco Giants baseball game. A clipping of her first front-page story from the Post: “Record-Breaking Drought Squeezes Bay Area Dry.” A stained-glass mobile suspended from the retractable arm of her desk lamp. A coffee mug (“World’s Best Mom”) with a barely visible lipstick smudge. Bingo. Finch slipped a pencil through the handle, carefully tipped the mug into a baggie and eased it into his courier bag.
He opened the drawer under her telephone stand and scanned for more personal items. Thumbtacks, a stapler, paperclips, erasers, highlighter pens. More pencils. Ah, a pair of tweezers. He held this to the light for a moment and wondered if it might provide an eyebrow hair or eyelash. Nothing. The second drawer held more promising prospects. A compact and mirror. An open tube of Lypsyl. He slipped the lip balm into another ziploc and leaned over the open drawer. Ah, here: a bamboo hair brush from the Body Shop. He lifted the brush in his hand and examined it carefully. Woven between the rows of teeth lay a knotted web of Fiona’s hair. This would do it, he told himself and tugged the snarl of hair from the brush and dropped it into the ziploc baggie and placed it next to the first sample in his shoulder bag.
As he headed toward the exit he checked to see if Jeanine was at her desk. Her lamp was still on, but she’d disappeared. Had she seen him? Then again, it didn’t matter, especially now as Wally Gimbel rolled into the office with a grim expression on his face.
“Will — surprised to see you here.”
Finch shook his head with a disorientated frown. “Me too, I guess. Just trying to sort out some thoughts about Fiona. I figured if I sat at her desk, I might find something.”
“And?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah, it’s beyond horrible. Worse, I haven’t heard anything from the police. How about you?”
“They haven’t even contacted me.”
“Maybe they got everything they need from the others.” He swept his hand toward the empty room. “Look, you got another minute?”
Finch followed his boss into his private office and closed the door. They both sat. Wally looked at the ceiling as if he had to prepare what he was about to say.
“I just had a meeting with the Parson brothers. The Brethren.” He let out a long sigh. “Working with them is like trying to eat soup with a fork.”
Will studied the editor’s round, heavy face. Was he expected to interpret a special meaning from this?
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it. Effective tomorrow, they are shutting down the print edition.”
“What?”
“The last edition of the San Francisco Post is being printed as we speak.”
Finch glanced away. This was news he’d expected for almost three years. But hearing it now, he felt as if he’d been shoved over an invisible cliff. “Tonight?”
He nodded. “After a hundred and twenty-three years. One-two-three. Simple as
that.”
“What about us?” Will’s gut tightened as if he were now about to smash onto the rocks below. “What about the eXpress?”
“Safe.” He shrugged. “For now, anyway. Parson Media is giving the eXpress another six months to break even.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Try to sell us, I imagine. But they didn’t commit to anything.”
“They couldn’t sell the Post?”
Wally gasped — a cynical laugh at his star reporter’s naïveté. “That’s like asking if Henry Ford sold his last horse. Or simply shot it.”
Wally stood up and washed his hands over his face. He looks ten years older, Finch thought. Completely exhausted.
“Anyway, don’t say anything until tomorrow. I’m calling a staff meeting first thing.”
“It’ll put the fear of God into everyone.”
“I know.” He looked away, studied a fleck of dirt on the wall. “It’s like we’re all one step away from the abyss.”
※
Eve and Will sat together examining the articles he’d retrieved from Fiona’s cubicle and the loot they’d stolen from Justin Whitelaw’s apartment.
That should do it,” Eve said. “I’ll take everything to Leanne tomorrow. Depending on how busy she is in the forensics lab, it could take some time.”
“Sure.” Will knew that Eve couldn’t hurry things along. Like a dozen other women who worked in the SFPD, Leanne Spratz maintained fierce loyalty to Eve and she provided discreet forensic services to her friend whenever Eve asked for a favor. A few years earlier, Eve had publicly exposed the “chilly climate” — a euphemism for pervasive sexual harassment — towards women in the force. Like most whistle-blowers, Eve had been demeaned and then terminated. More determined than ever to redeem her reputation, Eve won a wrongful dismissal case and the SFPD was forced to implement new gender policies and training for all staff. To everyone’s surprise, a new era seemed to dawn in the SFPD. To the women who remained, Eve Noon became Saint Eve.
As he studied the objects in silence, a maze of dreams and fears crisscrossed through Will’s mind. So strange to think that these few items were all that remained of Fiona. After a minute or two, a light tapping at the door interrupted his somber reverie.
Grateful for the relief it provided, Finch pulled himself from the sofa and opened the door. Before him stood Sochi. Between his thumb and index finger, the redheaded cryptologist presented a memory stick as if it might be a magic crystal glowing in a beam of light.
“Ah, Moscow, you’re home! I present to you a Russian doll, or the digital equivalent thereof,” he said, his voice rising in poetic loftiness. Moscow, Finch’s nom de jeste, had been embraced by all his house mates in Mother Russia.
“The flash drive contains one hundred and twenty-seven files, a website link and three executable programs,” Sochi continued, “all of which are themselves locked and password-protected. In other words, the vault is open, but inside we find more locked repositories.”
Finch stared at the flash drive, unsure how to respond. “Sochi. Come in,” he said. “Let me introduce you to Eve Noon.”
“Greetings.” Sochi shook Eve’s hand and as he sat in the wingback chair, Finch noticed that he’d woven six pea-sized wooden beads into strands of his beard that hung below his chin.
“So what does this mean?” Eve asked.
Sochi glanced at Finch, eyebrows raised with a look of doubt. “She knows what this is about?”
“Actually, the thumb drive belongs to me.”
Finch nodded. “It’s true. You can tell her everything.”
Sochi leaned forward, his elbows perched on his knees. The data drive lay in his soft, pink palm. “Okay. First, whoever put this together is no amateur. As I said, access to the drive itself is protected by a thirty-two character password which I’ve printed for you.”
He handed Finch a yellow sticky bearing a code printed in tiny but perfectly clear script: H4-nv34&9_Ee98<-Fi2trJA,
“Hang onto it, but don’t stick it on your computer monitor.” He laughed as if this should be hilarious to anyone with a sense of humor bent in the just right direction. “But as I said, that password will only open the drive. All the files and programs inside are also locked.”
“What kind of files are they?”
“All but four are data files. One of those is a password manager program.” He tugged at the beaded strands of hair on his chin. “The second is a bitcoin wallet. The third looks like a software program, something called GIGcoin. The last one is a link to a site in the dark web. Which, by the way, is not encrypted.”
A moment of silence enveloped them.
“All right … so where to begin?” Eve said. “First, what’s a bitcoin wallet?”
“Think of it as a digital purse that can hold any number of bitcoins.” Finch said.
“Very good,” Sochi tipped his head to Finch. “That’s a start. It’s also a program which can send and receive bitcoins in encrypted transmissions to other bitcoin wallets anywhere in the world. At about thirty-two megabytes per second,” he added with another burble of laughter that suggested the device contained magical powers. “But once the transmission is completed,” he cautioned and held a finger aloft, “it cannot be recalled. Although the transactions are all confirmed and verified in a global block-chain ledger, the bitcoin wallet holders can remain anonymous. Finding an open bitcoin wallet today is the equivalent of stumbling over a pile of gold nuggets a hundred years ago. Who does the loot belong to? To whoever finds it. So if you lose the wallet, or forget the password…. Well, best not to dwell on such gloomy prospects.”
“And you say the bitcoin wallet itself is locked. Can Rasputin unlock it?”
“Good lord, have you two joined a cult?” Eve shifted on the sofa. “Who is Rasputin?”
“Moscow, I wish you hadn’t mentioned Rasputin to her.” Sochi shook his head and his lips pursed together, almost invisible under his mustache.
“And why are you called Moscow?”
“ … It’s my code name.” How to explain this kind of nonsense? Finch shrugged with a look of self-consciousness.
An embarrassed silence followed, then Sochi broke into laughter again. “All right. I can tell you about Rasputin, but not before you’re initiated into Mother Russia,” he said to Eve and waved a hand to suggest the entire building was an outpost of pre-soviet nostalgia. “Let’s see. What’s a suburb or a special part of Moscow?”
“Arbat,” Eve offered. “Everyone knows it’s the shopping district.”
Sochi’s eyes widened. “Perfect. And the most beautiful part of the city. Architectural gems throughout.” He made the sign of the cross above her head in a summary christening. “Okay, Arbat, it is. Now I can tell you.” His face appeared to soften as he glanced from Will to Eve.
“Rasputin is a quantum computer software tool I’ve created to mount what are known as brute force attacks to crack passwords on locked files and devices like this.” He handed the thumb drive to her. “However, Rasputin is quite the sophisticated gentleman. He doesn’t care for the term ‘brute force.’ Thinks it’s beneath him.”
Eve examined the drive and then looked from Sochi to Finch. “So. Can you — I mean, Rasputin — open the bitcoin wallet?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But it might be smarter to open the password manager first.” He leaned back in the chair, wove his fingers into the mane of hair draped from the back of his head and pondered the options. “Think a minute. If you were putting all these files and a bitcoin wallet on the thumb drive, and you had to lock them all, each with a unique password, then you’d store them all in the password manager, right?”
“Right.” Finch and Eve nodded in unison.
“So our first step should be to unlock the password manager,” Eve continued. “And once we’re in, we can unlock all the other files.
“Now you’re thinking like a Ruskie!” Sochi snapped his fingers at Eve. “And we should explore the suspicious
link.”
“So can you do that? I mean, can you ask Rasputin to do it?” Eve glanced at Finch with a shrug as if to ask, Is this how you play the game?
Finch chuckled to himself and smiled.
“Maybe. It can take a long time. Weeks. And I can’t promise anything. But for you, Arbat, I will try. I can begin exploring the dark web link today.”
“And the dark web is?…”
“The vast majority of internet sites that aren’t indexed, or illuminated, by Google. Most of it is garbage. But some of it is truly dark. Full of drug trafficking, sex, child porn, murder for hire.”
“So. You can handle this for me?”
“Good question. One which brings me to a business proposition. You are in possession of X, an unknown quantity.” Sochi pointed to the thumb drive in Eve’s hand. “I possess the means to quantify it and maybe — just maybe — I can access everything on it, too. If I can do that, then I’d like ten percent of the value of whatever is on the drive.”
“That includes getting the key, or whatever it is, from the dark web?”
He smiled. “It includes everything needed to access all the contents of the thumb drive.”
Eve glanced through the French doors leading onto the balcony. Then she looked at Finch before turning to Sochi. “We should put a time limit on this. How much do you need?”
Sochi shrugged. “Three weeks. If I can’t break this open by then, nobody can.”
“All right. Deal.” She shook hands with Sochi. One pump: signed, sealed, delivered.
They all stood up and Eve passed the thumb drive back to Sochi and thanked him. A moment later he exited the apartment and they listened in silence to his heavy feet thunking along the hallway carpet to his condo.
A moment later Eve burst into laughter. “I can’t believe you’re living in the same building as this guy. It’s like he’s from the lost land of magic mushrooms. He’s an elfin genie.”