In for a Ruble tv-2

by David Duffy

  “You look like hell, but I think you’re feeling better,” Foos said.

  “Does that mean I can use the Basilisk?”

  “Patience.”

  “I can blame both you and Leitz for the way I look. I’m not sure getting pummeled by a guy who takes obvious pride in his work is on the AMA-recommended heartache recovery program.”

  “What are we going to tell Leitz?”

  “Deliver the Repin. My job was to show how to get access to his computers. Not my fault someone else got there first.”

  “If I know you, you’re not leaving it there. Not after the beating you took. You could’ve told the vampire look-alike the truth about what you were doing and walked away.”

  As usual, he was right. I wasn’t leaving it there. But, equally, I wasn’t certain how far I wanted to take it. I’d completed the job, and Leitz’s hedge fund and TV bid were his problems. That said, Nosferatu tugged as hard as he punched. I didn’t like being beat up in my adopted town. I liked less the idea that it could be done with impunity. I liked less still the idea there was someone out there with ready access to what should be either classified or well-buried information about my past.

  “What’s Leitz going to want to do?” I asked.

  “His first impulse will be to protect his data.”

  “He’s behind the curve.”

  “Yeah. But he’s gonna be plenty pissed, so you’re applying logic to an irrational situation.”

  “So?”

  “Once he calms down, I think we can convince him to chase the fox, if that’s what we want to do, and we send the fox in an unexpected direction.”

  “Maybe, except I think this fox is a bear.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I took the subway, which was a mistake. The rush hour train was fish-can jammed. Every jostle and bump felt as though Nosferatu had hit me again.

  Force of habit, I suppose. The Moscow Metro is the only transport I use when I’m there. It’s efficient (not a ubiquitous Russian trait), and the stations contain better art than most museums. I used public transportation wherever I was stationed with the Cheka—New York, San Francisco, Washington, London—because it was one way to connect with the local populace. I’ve always tried to fit in, a legacy from the camps where one lived among multiple factions who didn’t always get along. I was a kid without formal allegiance—getting along was one way to make it through the day. I happen to like cars—I own two—but they do cut you off from your surroundings. They also provide cushioned seats and a steel wall of protection—more to the point this morning.

  I’d awoken aching all over. Shots of pain stabbed my back and chest when I moved. I get up at six, a lifelong habit, and I have an exercise regimen I follow most mornings—either a five-mile run or three miles followed by a half hour of weights at the gym. I spent my childhood deprived of just about everything, food included, and I eat more than my share now to make up for lost time. I stay in shape on the theory that the average life expectancy of a Russian male is only sixty-five years at last count, and my upbringing already took its toll on mine. Pain trumped theory this morning.

  My torso was painted purple and blue. My face was red, blood clotting along crisscrossing scratches on one side, black-and-blue bruises on the other, a shiner around the right eye. The colors extended well above the hairline I didn’t have. Overall, it wasn’t as bad as the beating Lachko’s thug had given me six months earlier, but I didn’t want to run into Nosferatu again anytime soon. Unless I was carrying a shotgun.

  I made breakfast with extra coffee and logged on to Ibansk.com, the creation of a man known only as Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, a muckraking impresario with a fondness for breathless hyperbole, who produces the most widely read blog in Russia. His supercharged collection of fact, insider rumor, speculation and high-heat opinion (his) gives readers—denizens, in his parlance—a seat at everything from top-secret Kremlin conferences to oligarch’s private rooms at the latest, hottest Moscow (or London or Paris or New York) nightclubs, as well as more intimate settings. He’s fun to follow and, more to the point, accurate in his barbs. I know because I know the list of people who’d like to see him executed. It starts at the top of the Kremlin and includes many of the men I used to work with.

  I’d been keeping a close eye on Ivanov because I’d been a firsthand witness in December to what bore all the signs of the outbreak of Ibanskian gang warfare. After dinner with Sasha, I’d left him at the Pushkin Square metro station and decided to walk the mile or so down Tverskaya, one of the city’s oldest thoroughfares, known as Gorky Street in Soviet Times, to my hotel. I stay at the Metropole, a marvelous old place halfway between the Kremlin and Lubyanka, where many of the original Bolsheviks lived in the early days of the revolution. A mosaic on the façade still calls on the proletariat of the world to unite. The restaurant may be the most opulent room in Moscow. The ironies of Russian history captured in a single building.

  A clear evening, not too cold. I was enjoying the winter air as I came up on one of the many restaurants/nightclubs/casinos that cater to the desires of the newly rich by giving them flashy, overpriced venues to show off their leggy girlfriends while trying to spend more on Champagne and caviar than the oligarch at the next table. A phalanx of Mercedes roared down the wide avenue and pulled into the Ibanskian equivalent of the VIP parking lot—the sidewalk in front of the club. Not the easiest thing because the sidewalk was already crowded with a dozen other Mercedes, BMWs, Bentleys, and Range Rovers. Several bodyguards, not bothering to hide their weapons, emerged from the new arrivals. Some rules are just common sense—never try to break up a dog fight, never walk voluntarily into a group of drawn weapons. I waited for a break in the traffic to cross to the far sidewalk.

  About the time I got there, two more Mercedes roared up Tverskaya from the opposite direction, traveling too fast, not uncommon in Moscow, but something about them flashed trouble. I ducked behind a parked Lada as they screeched to a stop. Four men leapt out, fire spurting from the muzzles of their machine guns.

  The bodyguards were slow. Three fell in the first barrage. Others got their guns up, and a firefight was on. I heard more than I saw as I knelt behind the parked car, hoping thin Russian steel was up to the task of stopping lead Russian bullets. The RATTA-TAT-TATTA-TAT-TATTA of gunfire filled the night. Slugs ricocheted off stone. The street shook as a car exploded. Flaming metal flew overhead and bounced off the building behind. Cars skidded and crashed. The gunfire ebbed, then resumed in intensity. When it finally stopped, as suddenly as it had started, I didn’t move for a minute before peeking through the Lada’s blown-out windows.

  Carnage everywhere. A dozen cars sprawled across the avenue at all angles, riddled with bullet holes. Few had window glass left. The bodies of three drivers lay collapsed over their steering wheels. A lone horn blared under the weight of one, a heavyset woman in a blue coat. She could no longer hear it. She was missing the back of her head. On the far sidewalk, where I’d been walking a few minutes before, fallen fighters sprawled across pockmarked metal and concrete. I counted six, there were probably more. The exploded car burned full bore. The first police sirens whined in the distance.

  In the center of the slaughter sat one Mercedes, fatter and heavier than the rest, the paint peppered but the glass intact. Armored. As I came around, the back door opened. A dark-haired young woman in a backless dress emerged from the car, as if stepping out. Except she wasn’t stepping. She wasn’t moving. She was supported by the man behind her. Three ugly red holes perforated her pretty skin. Her torso straightened for a moment before he let her drop on the pavement. She’d been attractive in life—fine skin, good figure—but the heavy makeup she’d applied for her evening out now functioned as a death mask, freezing her last instant of fear and pain. It also froze her age, which couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

  The man who dropped the corpse climbed out after her. He was tall, in his fifties. He wore a suit and was the only person or thing unmarked by the attack. They
must have just been exiting the car when it started. She’d been first and taken the bullets meant for him.

  The man looked straight at me as I approached. He blinked once, and I had the sense of a mental photograph being recorded.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he said, the voice calm, annoyed and full of authority, as if I were trespassing on his property.

  “A passerby. I saw…”

  “What did you see?”

  I pointed around. “Hard to miss.”

  “Forget all about it,” he said. “Walk away and forget it.”

  “But there may be wounded…”

  “Everyone will be taken care of. I will make sure of that. Go now.”

  The next question was a mistake, but curiosity is a lifelong affliction.

  “Who are you?”

  He blinked again, another photo taken, before reaching inside his jacket. I thought he was going for a gun. Instead he came out with a wallet and held out a wad of ruble notes.

  “Beat it.”

  “I don’t need money.”

  I left him there and picked my way through the wreckage still looking for anyone who needed help. I found only corpses. The body count pushed a dozen.

  The sirens grew louder. Another rule—don’t get involved with Russian police unless you’re still an active Chekist. I hustled down Tverskaya, passing a posse of police cars headed to the scene. At the bottom of the street, the cops sealed off the street at Manege Square. No one stopped me, no one tried to ask questions. As horrific as the massacre had been, it was far from a rarity in the New Russia—Ivanov’s Ibansk. It would be dealt with accordingly.

  I walked the last block to the Metropole and went up to my room, where I logged on to Ibansk.com. Not half an hour had passed since the shooting. The sirens still whined. Ivanov was on the case. And he had the name of the target of the attack, the one man left standing, the man I had spoken to.

  Efim Konychev.

  Tverskaya Terror

  Ibansk Alert! Warfare erupts! A calculated attack this very night outside Tverskaya’s White Nights Club. The target? One of Ibansk’s biggest oligarchs and one of the powers—some say, the power—behind the Baltic Enterprise Commission, the scourge of the Internet, the hoster of choice for evil online.

  Efim Konychev survived. How is surely an Ibanskian miracle. A dozen others did not. Who organized the hit? What was the reason? Who’s the shapely number who bought the agricultural cooperative someone had picked out for Konychev to purchase?

  Rumors have reached Ivanov in recent weeks of dissention in the ranks of BEC management. It’s never been a comfortable partnership, more an amalgamation of headstrong hoods. The riches that rolled in during the boom years helped paper over differences and dislikes. Setbacks in recent months—Ivanov hears rumors of system crashes, cash flow interruptions and client defections—may have turned up the heat under already simmering tensions. Accusations of cheating and double-cross ensued. Surprise! This is Ibansk. Ivanov surmises one BEC power decides another is to blame—and goes about settling the score in the one way Ibansk knows best.

  It appeared I’d witnessed an opening salvo in a battle over the future of the Baltic Enterprise Commission, a shadowy network of Web-hosting servers across the old Soviet Bloc, the go-to resource for anyone looking for a safe place on the Net from which to spam, scam, phish, hack, steal, or purvey porn, especially porn featuring kids.

  Konychev was a favorite subject for the chronicler of Ibansk, probably because he was as good a personification as one could find of the unbridled capitalism, Kremlin control, and often crooked undertakings that define the New Russia. I’d been following the news via Ivanov’s posts since returning to New York, which mostly dealt with growing clashes within the BEC and the unknown whereabouts of its boss. According to the latest post, earlier today:

  Once thought impregnable, the BEC is in disarray. Disagreements over expansion into new, higher risk lines of business—hacking for hire, industrial espionage, anyone?—have opened fissures among the already fractured federation. Ivanov hears the premier hoster of hackers has itself been hacked—although whether this was simple vandalism or invaders with more insidious purposes is thus far unclear.

  The big question is Efim Konychev. Where has he been fiddling while his empire burns? He hasn’t been heard from since the attack on Tverskaya. Reports of infighting among the bosses and beneficiaries of web sleaze abound. That’s one reason he may be lying low. Another could be the identity of the young—and Ivanov does mean young—lovely who was with Konychev the night of the Tverskaya attack. She took three slugs in the back, cut down in her pre-prime. Her identity is a mystery even Ivanov cannot unravel. He can only presume that’s because Konychev wants it that way.

  Foos called just as I was finishing breakfast.

  “That weird shit on Leitz’s network I saw last night? I spent some more time looking around after you went home. He’s got someone inside working something outside. Guy, maybe gal, goes out through a couple of zombies, accesses data, brings it back, but only to his hard drive, doesn’t touch the servers, and he covers the route pretty well—though not quite well enough.”

  Zombies are sleeping computers left online that cyber-crooks borrow when they don’t want to leave a trail, usually for spamming or denial of service attacks, but no reason they can’t obscure other trails.

  “This connected or unconnected to Nosferatu’s bug?”

  “Unconnected, it appears. Only happens a few times. Three in August. Then again in November. Then December thirtieth. That’s it.”

  “How much should we tell Leitz?”

  “He’s your client,” he said and hung up. That’s Foos.

  * * *

  If Nosferatu had anyone watching 140 West Forty-eighth Street, I wasn’t going to spot him or her in the morning crowd that filled the block, so I walked straight to the door of Leitz’s building, head down. The lobby guard asked my destination, checked my New York driver’s license, grimaced at my battered face and dispatched me to the forty-second floor. A pretty twenty-something receptionist sent me up a staircase to conference room A. She didn’t do any better job of disguising her unease.

  The conference room overlooked the trading floor, which at a few minutes after nine, appeared fully staffed by some forty men and women with an average age of thirty-two, all in various stages of undress. Midwinter, but they were all wearing T-shirts, tank tops, capri pants, some in gym shorts. A few wore shoes. The Gillette company wasn’t making much money on razor blades. Paper plates holding the remains of breakfast, more fruit and bran than bacon and eggs, littered the desks. The heat was on high. I took off my jacket as the door opened behind me.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Leitz’s voice boomed from behind. “Everybody does. Fact is, there’s more pure brain power on that floor than eight Manhattan projects combined.”

  “Brain or bran?”

  He laughed his big laugh. “Both. I hire brains not suits. I feed ’em, I don’t care what they eat. Coffee?”

  “Black.”

  I turned as he went to the sideboard to pour. He was dressed in the same cashmere sweater, corduroys, and handmade shoes as the other day. Foos leaned against the door jam, grinning. He’d got there early to soften up his friend, I hoped.

  Leitz handed me a mug. “Foos said you took some heat at my expense. I see he wasn’t exaggerating. I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting anything like that.”

  I shrugged. “Neither of us were.”

  “I’m sorry, in any event. Foos also says you have news.”

  Foos and I had discussed how to break this news last night, before I stumbled the two blocks home to my apartment. We agreed the direct approach was best—or least worst. I was still prepared to go with the plan but, remembering the warnings about the temper, I took my coffee to a chair on the far side of the table.

  I said, “I bugged your computers last night. We’ve had access to your entire network for the last twelve hours.”
r />   The big face turned red. “Not possible.”

  “Not only possible, but easy.”

  Two big hands balled themselves into fists the size of cantaloupes. Eruption was a spark away.

  “NO! You’ve only had… I don’t believe it!”

  I tossed some pages across the table. “Here are e-mails you sent this morning. Behind those are the spreadsheets one of your branny brains was working on at seven fifteen. You’ve got some interesting trading positions too. I printed it all for easy reference.”

  “He’s telling it straight,” Foos said.

  Leitz glanced at the papers just long enough to see they were what I said. He threw them aside, and the fists pounded the table, which was granite and had to weigh several hundred pounds. It shifted on its stand. He turned to Foos.

  “GODDAMMIT! You told me…”

  “I told you the perimeter was secure and it is,” Foos said. “You weren’t hacked.”

  “Then… WHAT?” Leitz swung his glare back to me. The jowls shook, the eyes fired. I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of the half-clothed mathematical geniuses reporting a losing trade to this boss. Something about the needlessness of the rage made me want to rub it in, but that also could have been getting beat up, not to mention my overall frame of mind.

  “Pedestrian. I bribed a member of your cleaning crew. He put a wireless recording device on a box on your trading floor. That gave us access to everything.”

  “Cleaning crew?”

  “Simplest way in. I could have used a half-dozen others.” Leitz’s fists rose again but stopped in midair. He stood and went to the phone on the sideboard. Foos was looking unusually uncomfortable.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “DON’T WHAT?”

  “Don’t call whomever you’re calling to tell them to fire the cleaning crew. The next one will be just as easy to penetrate. All it took was a thousand dollars—and I probably overpaid since it was your money.”