She’d meant every word of that when she verbalized such concerns to her American handlers. They'd ignored her. Not to be trusted. She had meant them, however, even if expressed with a tad over the top emphasis, when she added them as a cautionary section in Martin’s white paper. Apparently it had evoked the desired effect in Tel Aviv. They didn’t want it for themselves. And they wouldn’t want any version thereof Sasha would concoct. Because they also did not trust her.
As for the version of the paper that had reached Tehran—Sasha had no clue what additional edits Chana and team had injected. Hopefully enough to get them to bite.
Sasha stood up and turned around. For a few seconds she looked over her shoulder to check out how the pants fit her around the back, or to avoid Chana’s gaze—she couldn’t tell which. She tugged down on the pants, but it didn’t help. These would go back on the hanger and stay there.
Chana’s eyes met hers with a glint of a smile. “Are you sure you don’t want me to pick something out for you?”
“You’ve picked plenty. Thank you.” Sasha didn’t like the way her voice sounded, and rushed to self-correct, “I mean that. Thank you. You’ve done enough for me.” She didn’t like the way that sounded either, but at least it acknowledged a slice of truth. Chana had done a great deal. To get her out of Iran as a little girl. To put her through school. Even if that generosity came with ulterior motives, she couldn’t resent Chana for that.
Chana stepped up and lowered her voice. “They’re about to contact you. Actually, they’ve been trying for a couple of days.”
Sasha turned to her purse, half-expecting it to buzz. Except it wouldn’t, not when she’d kept their burner phone disconnected for over a month.
She interlocked her gaze with Chana’s. “I’ll deal with them.”
“Carefully, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Tehran has developed a taste for what you can offer.” Chana turned toward the door of the dressing room area. Though Sasha couldn’t see it, no doubt one or two of her henchmen stood out there, dissuading customers from coming in.
At the door, Chana turned back. “Just get us the key to this code. Get us that, and we’ll make sure it’s well-handled.” She grinned. “And if you get us hooks into Tehran, lots of bonus points.”
Sasha saw her go before she stepped back into her changing stall. In there she went over it in her mind one more time. What she had to do to get out and stay out. She got back into her clothes and left the rest of it wadded up or hanging. Before she exited the dressing room, she reassembled the burner phone. She waited for it to come on. It started buzzing as soon as the booting sequence completed.
Sasha made the call from inside Dr. Tsai’s computer closet. Door closed. Everyone gone. After hours. Routine maintenance. Out there, a car with Cynthia’s henchmen sat, somewhere, recording Sasha’s coming and going.
In here, she ran a scan. Nope. They hadn’t tapped her. She hadn’t expected them to. Too easy for her to detect. Were they tapping the lines remotely? Probably. It wouldn’t help them, though. Her encryption would see to that. Though they’d tried to keep her away from it, she’d seen enough information at InfoStream about how the good guys decrypted things. Everything got decrypted eventually. Her stuff would too. Fifty years from now, by her estimations, if present-day high-speed computers ran non-stop to process her data. On the way out data transactions looked like nothing more than insurance billing requests, and on the way back, claim rejections.
Using her burner, she made the call.
The preliminaries proved as tense and terse as she expected. Just as well. Tension would only work in her favor. She stayed calm and gave them the cover story she’d concocted—the one she was about to back up with real world evidence, the experiential kind.
“You think I’m stupid.” The voice came over the line gruff and resolute. Not one of those geeks they’d sent to get her code the first time.
“I will very much think so if you refuse to listen to reason,” she replied. “Actually, I’m already thinking it. Have been thinking it for months, recalling how you and your goons dropped me into the hands of the Americans.”
“They threw you in jail, turned you, and now you’re offering us your help. A heads up, as you say.”
She waited a beat, let her voice drop in volume. “I couldn’t contact you until now without risking detection.”
“We will need proof.”
Yeah, and she was about to give it to them. “They know about my code. They know it infected your systems. They are about to use the vulnerability it presents. Unless—”
“Why haven’t they done it until now?”
“Coordination with the Israelis.”
That took him aback, as she’d anticipated when she manufactured the trump card.
“And how would you know that? I’m supposed to believe that they would let you in on that?”
“They didn’t. I overheard.”
“You overheard.” His tone mocked her.
“Yes, overheard. Right place and right time. As in I got myself into the right place at the right time. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be done?”
“And how exactly did you go about that?”
“The same way they’re about to overhear everything you say and transmit, etcetera.”
He grumbled something she couldn’t make out. Garbled background noise came through the line. Perhaps he was consulting with someone else.
“What are you offering?” he asked in a clearer voice.
With a soft, silent caress, she pressed the Enter button. “They’re attacking tonight. Perhaps even now, as we speak.”
“They told you this also?”
“Any minute now.”
She heard muffled voices in the background. A rattling click-click-clack came next. He shouted something at her, but it became garbled in the digital voice stream. Then the line went dead. They were down.
At first they would panic. Things would look grim enough to justify it. After a couple of hours things would stabilize, like fever breaking, but leaving them weak and sweaty. They would need her then.
They still wouldn’t trust her, so they would give her access to one of the collateral, lower level infected systems. She’d go in and clean it up. Even better, she’d install a new and improved firewall.
Another supposed attack by the Americans would follow. Only that collateral system would stand. They’d see the value in her work then, granting her access to a few more systems. She’d do to those systems what she did to the first, and those phantom pesky Americans would follow up with a third attack. Do-loop until all her hooks grabbed on.
At least that was Sasha’s plan, anyway. She knew enough about plans to anticipate a few alterations. She was ready for those.
As reassuring as her self-talk sought to be, she felt a pain rise in her chest. It pressed there and rose up her neck, constricting, strangling. She lowered her head and cried.
26» Visualizations
It had taken two weeks for the process to complete. Whenever she wasn’t manning her laptop, Sasha watched it all unfold from her chair in the InfoStream control room. Irony of ironies, the Americans watched the whole thing with glee, without a clue as to who was pounding the Iranians. The Israelis, perhaps? No, “they had given assurances” that wasn’t the case. In any case, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to make it look like the Americans—their allies, and so on, etcetera—had performed the attack.
The glee subsided when one by one Iranian systems came up. The glee turned sour when sporadic attacks directed at key American installations followed. These had to come from the Iranians, of course, though no one could tell for sure. Glee gave way to cautious satisfaction when Martin’s deployed code fended off the attacks with relative ease. To avoid escalation, however, the team received orders from on high to disable all counter-punching.
“It worked,” Martin whispered to Sasha. “It totally worked.”
“You sound surprised,�
� she whispered back.
“I expected… real world problems.”
“I’m sure if you dig into the data you’ll see lots of opportunities for improvement.” She didn’t like the way she said that. Her words came out as if strung on a haggard breath.
He turned to her with a frown of concern. “You OK?”
“I’m tired.”
“You look it.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s not what—” He shifted in his seat. “You should get some rest.”
She lowered her voice. “Will you rest with me? Preferably in the same bed? So I can help you celebrate your big triumph?”
He grinned. “You know that’s not—”
“Sure it is.”
He shook his head. Sasha shrugged. It was just as well. She had things to do at home, by herself. No sense in entangling herself with Martin tonight. She stood up.
“I best get going.”
He got up, too, but from the uncertain way he stood, as if teetering to regain his seat, she could tell. He had no intentions to walk her out.
Too bad, Martin thought to himself as he saw the control room’s main door close behind Sasha. Too bad he’d already agreed to have dinner with Cynthia. He’d much rather spend the time with Sasha. Things had gotten a little tense with Cynthia. She hadn’t taken well to Sasha getting more leeway to participate in the project. Cynthia’s sole dissenting voice had more or less drowned in all the promise and measures of success.
But he sensed something additional. Cynthia knew something—was holding back something. In the way she looked at Sasha, he saw more than suspicion now. Sympathy, perhaps? An understanding? Or just resigned acceptance?
More troubling was the way Cynthia looked at him now. That he couldn’t even begin to decipher. Regret, maybe? A measure of caring concern? But over what?
Martin figured her call earlier that morning to ask for some time to chat over coffee formed an overture to smooth things over. He’d accepted, except he’d insisted on dinner. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he felt bad for Cynthia. He shrugged. No maybe about it. He did. She’d spoken her mind, and they’d set her aside. Her father had more or less dismissed her, shut her down. However he felt about her, and Martin knew he still needed to sort that out. No one deserved the way they had pushed her to the margins. Not when they were trying to do their level best to do their job.
As he cleaned up his workstation and got ready to go, he pre-visualized how it would go between them. He liked doing that. While studying photography, a hobby of his he didn’t get to enjoy often enough, he’d read a book by Ansel Adams. He’d learned how the master visualized a photograph before he even arrived at the location to snap the frame. Martin realized he could apply that to any part of life: to his inventions, to an upcoming job interview, to a tough conversation with a colleague. Imagine how it will go, envision all possible ramifications, and even when things get tough, you’ll do alright. You might not get exactly what you envisioned, but you’ll have a better chance to get as close to it as you can.
He did that now, starting with how he’d greet Cynthia at the lobby, where they’d agreed to meet. He would offer to drive. No, insist on it. He would take her to a restaurant a local co-worker had recommended. He’d study her reaction when he told the maître d that they had reservations for two.
The rest would follow, the parts he couldn’t quite visualize because they depended in large part on what she had to say—on the agenda or reason for wanting to get together with him. Still he visualized himself patching things up with her. Smiling. Toasting to recent successes. Him being magnanimous, assuring her she still had a place if she wanted it. They’d have to discuss it more, see whether security at InfoStream wasn’t a better fit for her than the financial side of the house. That might get a little awkward, but he’d defuse it with some wine, maybe, and more smiling.
Facing a black screen, he nodded to himself. Yeah, that would go well.
He turned and stood, and he saw her, standing by the main door. A faint smile broke on her lips as their eyes met. He hadn’t visualized that. Time to adapt and reroute.
He approached her.
“We should talk before we go,” she said.
He checked his watch. “Let’s talk as we go.”
“It’s sensitive.”
Which meant, they could only talk about it in here. In the vault.
“Twenty, thirty minutes tops.”
He checked his watch. He did the drive time math in his head. That might work. Fancy restaurant, middle of the week. They would hold the reservation for him for at least thirty minutes.
He gestured toward the door. “Show the way.”
Martin leaned back in his chair and looked around the small, scantily furnished office. He checked his watch. Ah, to hell with that. Who wanted to go blow some hard cash on an over-priced dinner now?
“Is that what this is about? Money?” he asked.
Cynthia smiled. “Isn’t it always?”
“So first you said she was lying about who she worked with on the Chinese hack. Then she showed us otherwise. So let’s pull the thread some more and go digging on her previous hack.”
“She’s deep into this project, Martin. Her trustworthiness is of crucial importance.”
“To whom? To the ITAA? To—” He stammered, but he had to go there. “To Robert Odehl? Or to you?”
Her eyes grew cool. Her smile vanished. “I’m not doing this on my own.”
Yeah, of course she wasn’t. They’d painted for him a pleasant façade. No tension here. He and Sasha should just keep at it, work things out, spin that lovely magic of theirs. No worries about past indiscretions. His or hers. All was forgiven, or overlooked, or tabled, or back-burnered. Whatever word picture helped him visualize it so he could keep working free of pesky distractions.
“You do know how this ends, don’t you?” Cynthia said.
“I’m sure you’ll be glad to tell me.”
“This can’t go much further. Not with her. Her background investigation is a mess, Martin. Every time we think we have all the mud catalogued in our silver buckets, smellier stuff splatters out of some hole.”
That was very clever of her, saying it like that without saying anything specific. Here’s the hook, Martin. Tasty. Come and bite into it.
He said nothing.
“We’ve learned she has family ties in Iranian intelligence.” She said it with a level, almost monotone voice. Her eyes remained cool. Matter of fact. Deal with it, Martin.
“But if she turns over all the money she skimmed with her first hack, all’s forgiven?”
“Don’t you think it’s important she come clean about that?”
“To what end? Are we cash-strapped all of the sudden? Don’t tell me that’s where we get the venture capital Mr. Odehl promised.”
“Do you really buy that these… Ukrainians snatched her cash?” She cocked an eyebrow. “All of it?”
He paused. Should he spill Sasha’s theory about her hacked Bitcoin account? Fire away, he decided. “How’s this for an idea? We did. The home team grabbed it to fund InfoStream. As an applicant for the CFO position you ought’a know that.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“Where did you get this?” She put out her hand. “Oh, wait. Silly me. A little nighttime story, by Sasha Javan.”
“Tell me where the money came from, then.”
“Oh, listen to yourself Martin. From a million places. There are no shortages.”
He mulled that over, deciding he’d pushed that noodle as far as it would slide. “OK, so you think she’s stashing it somewhere. Like a rainy day fund.”
“We’ve only been able to trace about half going to the charities she mentioned. We’re leaving that alone. We’d like to know what happened to the rest.”
“Which means you have no clue, yet here you are, making accusations you cannot prove.” He slapped the back of his right hand on the palm of his left. �
�Facts, data, logic. Put up, or shut up. Unsubstantiated assertions are nothing but… well, nighttime stories, as someone put it.”
“She needs to come clean, Martin.”
“She says she has. You say she hasn’t. Sounds like classic she said, she said right there, doesn’t it?”
Her lips closed into a tight little line.
“We done here?”
“You need to know where she stands.”
He clapped his hands in front of him twice before resuming his reclined position. “Consider me in the know.”
“She hasn’t told you anything—”
“No, this isn’t going there. I’m not playing operative for you. I’m not pumping her for info. She and I work on code together, and nothing else.”
“Nothing else?” She put up a hand. “OK, my bad.”
He stood up. “No worries. There’s lots of bad to go around. How about I go and see if we can do a little more than nothing else.”
“Martin—”
He walked out of the office and slammed the door. Not that he thought that would keep her in there any longer. Any moment she’d come chasing after him, trying to talk some sense into him.
He’d walked halfway toward the elevators when he realized she wasn’t coming. Fine, he told himself, even if the edge of regret cut into his anger.
The RFP, or Request for Proposal, arrived the next day. Martin, Stan Beloski, Robert Odehl, Dennis, and a couple of the most senior members of the technical team spent the better part of the morning going through the language in detail. It boiled down to little more than Martin’s white paper flipped into contractual and legal language, with a few extras here and there. It all seemed in order as far as Martin was concerned.
Feral: An Our Cyber World Prequel Page 18