by Peter Telep
Nadia was wearing a strong perfume that stood out sharply, and the Snow Maiden reached another intersection where for a moment she thought she’d have to rely on only her sense of smell until a slight thump to the right set her off again toward two more intersections.
They were staging another ambush. She could feel it.
Suddenly, dead silence, only her footfalls.
She stopped, waited, then shifted to the wall and crouched down, slipping her phone into her leather jacket’s inner breast pocket. She let her eyes readjust.
With both hands, she clutched her pistol and aimed for the intersection.
Still nothing . . .
Back in the car, on the way here, Boris had been smoking a cigarette and asking why they called her the Snow Maiden. She’d never worked with him before, and it’d been interesting to explain it to him, even as she was plotting his death.
Snegurochka was the Snow Maiden in Russian folklore. In one tale she was the daughter of Spring and Frost. She fell in love with a shepherd, but when her heart warmed, she melted. In another narrative, falling in love transformed her into a mortal who would die. In a third story she was the daughter of an old couple who created her from snow. She leapt over a fire and melted.
Major Viktoria Kolosov felt a special attachment to the character that stemmed from something deep in her subconscious. Never warm your heart? In this business, maybe so.
She was holding her breath now, thinking about the single round left in her magazine, the spare six-round mag still tucked in her hip pocket, and the bodyguard’s Grach pressing against the small of her back. She should change guns now but feared making even the slightest movement.
The shadows seemed to collect on the left side of the intersection, and then she saw the silhouette of a head peering around the corner.
She fired, a spark leaping off the wall, damn it. There wasn’t even time to curse. She was already rolling across the floor while reaching into her waistband for the Grach. By the time she came out of her roll, she had the pistol and was raising it while the bodyguard returned fire, three rounds booming and stitching across the floor, extending from her ghost to her current position hunkered down at the opposite wall.
Going asymmetric in a gunfight was not a technique for amateurs or veterans turned bodyguards, men too often married to their conventional tactics. She proved that to this oaf by sensing his pause to check fire.
She sprinted straight up the tunnel in the pitch darkness, spun right, and caught the whites of his eyes as he was just lifting his gun.
Simultaneously, she grabbed his pistol and shot him in the head.
Not a half second later, she dropped to the floor as the guy behind her, the guy whose curse of surprise had given him away, fired above her head.
With her chin buried in her chest, the pistol down low near her knee, she squeezed off two rounds that sent him staggering back.
But he didn’t fall, and the shots must’ve gone high or wide, striking him in the arm or shoulder. She fired once more and he finally dropped.
Thump. Silence again.
She was panting and wincing over the stench of gunpowder. Her ears rang from all the close-quarters gunfire.
Shuddering over how much time she’d wasted here, she sprang up, ejected and pocketed the magazine from one of the bodyguards, then tugged free her phone, its narrow beam now lighting the way.
The last bodyguard would present the greatest challenge. She had to eliminate him without inadvertently killing Nadia, the spoiled little rich girl who, of course, was a research student at ETH Zurich’s Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, CSCS. ETH was considered one of the finest schools in Europe, and daddy had footed the entire bill. Poor baby was having a bad day, wasn’t she?
The Snow Maiden snorted and raced up the tunnel for some thirty meters where it terminated at another T-shaped intersection. Straight ahead hung a small hatch cracked open. She shone the light on the door’s hinges, the rust freshly caked off. She hustled through, emerging into a much broader tunnel at least six meters wide where piles of old railroad ties rose several meters and pieces of track lay in dusty piles. At the far end of the conduit was another opening, the hatch removed from the doorway and propped up against the wall. She assumed that the final bodyguard would want to keep moving, no doubling back to ambush her, so the Snow Maiden picked up the pace. She practically blasted by the doorway and followed the tunnel to the right, where at the far end, some fifty meters away, a faint cry echoed off like a dying bird.
And there it was again. That perfume.
Gritting her teeth and tucking her arms close to her sides, she ran a marathon up that tunnel, the light bobbing wildly, the ceiling suddenly rumbling from a train passing overhead. Dust and debris flitted down as she gasped, wondering if the entire tunnel might collapse.
The next passage bore to the right, the walls closing in like a compactor, just wide enough for one person now. She slowed and held her light high above her head like a lantern—
And there they were, twenty meters ahead. The bodyguard was helping Nadia off the floor from where she’d fallen. Her jeans were torn at the knee and bloody, and her dirty blond hair hung down in her face, just like her father’s.
The bodyguard spotted her light, shoved Nadia forward into a side tunnel while at the same time opening fire.
The Snow Maiden crouched as two rounds pinged at her shoulder, the sparks on her periphery, the bullets so close she felt their wind.
Damn, it’d be a bitch to die here. She was just a few months away from marrying Nikolai Antsyforov, a physician ten years her senior who’d not only swept her off her feet but who appreciated her job, her position, her strength. At the moment he was in Paldiski, Estonia, treating workers involved in a reactor accident. He was fresh out of medical school, and his passion, like hers, knew no bounds.
Remembering all she had to lose was wrong and weakened her. She was better than this, better trained. She blinked away the thoughts and burst forward, crossing to the opposite side of the tunnel. He fired again, this time hitting the floor not a finger’s length from her boot.
Just as he doused his light, she hit the ground again, heard their footfalls. They were making another break.
She reached the side tunnel and hunkered down. She peered around the corner and saw them charging away, the bodyguard shielding Nadia.
Holding her breath, the Snow Maiden came around the corner, raised the gun with both hands, and took aim.
The pistol cracked, and the single round struck the bodyguard in the right thigh.
Good enough. She charged like a pole-vaulter ready to launch herself into the air.
As he collapsed and then rolled back to fire, she dug her right boot into the side wall, then flew forward, the bodyguard trying to get a bead on her before she collided with him.
Together, they fell back onto the floor—which abruptly collapsed, this entire section reinforced with rotting wooden beams that she noticed at the last second. Nadia, who’d been just behind the bodyguard, fell through the hole as well, and all three of them plunged some five meters into yet another tunnel, this one flooded with inky black water rushing up around them.
Never losing her grip on the bodyguard, the Snow Maiden felt the concrete bottom slam into him. As the impact reverberated into her arms, she kicked out and realized she could stand, the water barely more than a meter deep. With Nadia coughing and screaming behind them, the Snow Maiden wrapped her gloved hands around the stunned man’s throat, then drove him back into the water. His hands locked around her own wrists. He tried to kick with his one good leg, the other still bleeding profusely from the gunshot wound.
The Snow Maiden raged aloud, her own cries echoing down the tunnel. The bodyguard was twice her size, twice as strong, and he was beginning to tear free of her grip—when he suddenly went limp. She screamed and shoved him back into the water, where he floated, inert.
She spun around to face the crying college girl, who stood the
re, trembling. She was barely visible in the faintest of light from their smartphones shining down through the jagged hole above.
“What do you want?” the girl managed.
“You,” the Snow Maiden snapped.
“My father has a lot of money. He’ll take care of you. Okay?”
Narrowing her eyes on the girl, the Snow Maiden started toward her. Nadia shifted a few steps back, sloshing through the water, but the Snow Maiden kept coming.
“Please, you obviously know who I am. We can settle this right now. I’ll pay you whatever you want. Just get me to the airport. Whatever it is you want, no matter how much, we’ll give it to you.”
Lifting her hand and shushing the girl, the Snow Maiden approached and said, “You haven’t worked for a thing in your entire life, have you?”
“That’s not true.”
“You think you can buy your way out of anything.”
Nadia’s lip quivered. “You police are all corrupt, aren’t you?”
“I’m not the police. I’m much worse.”
“If you do anything to me, my father will find you. He’ll find you, and your family, and everyone you care about.”
The Snow Maiden couldn’t help but grin. She drew a little closer, then suddenly clutched the girl by the throat with both hands. “Where money speaks, the conscience is silent.”
“Stop . . .”
It took everything she had not to kill this little bitch with her endless supply of rubles, a girl who had no idea what squirrel meat tasted like because her father’s business was hurting, who’d never shivered at night under four blankets because her house had no heat.
The Snow Maiden tightened her grip. “Now tell me. Where is your father?”
Before the girl could answer, shouts came from above. That’d be the garrison, drawn by all the gunfire. The Snow Maiden glanced up the hole, then back to Nadia.
She shoved the girl back into the water, then lifted her fingers to form a gun. “Bang, bang, bang—just like that you die. So where is he?”
Nadia trembled violently. “I don’t know.”
5
FISHER took another long pull on his cup of coffee, then rested his palm on the back of Charlie’s computer chair. “Anything else?”
“Well, I thought I got past the virus Kasperov used to infect the security camera systems, thought it was an old spaghetti code variation—some old-school trick—but it must’ve been on a timer and just shut itself down. Interesting. Looking at Kasperov’s duplex now; it’s in a gated community bordering a park in Moscow.” Charlie raked fingers through his short black hair, then pointed to a satellite map shimmering on one of his screens. He zoomed in to a 3-D view showing the buildings. The screen to the left was the black-and-white security camera feed, with a half dozen men posted outside the main entrance. “Looks like the police are getting their party on at Kasperov’s house. Same deal at his headquarters. They’re moving all the hardware into trucks, confiscating everything.”
“You thinking about going in there?” Briggs asked from his station opposite Charlie’s.
“Be a waste of time,” Fisher answered. “Like Charlie said, he’s planned this well, wiped all of his hard drives. There’s nothing to find there.”
Grim lifted her voice from the SMI table. “I’m sure if he’s left the country they’ve got the SVR looking for him, but they’ll take it one step further and bring in Voron.”
Fisher looked at her. “I was thinking the same thing. And if that’s the case, we’ll play our ace in the hole.”
Voron, which meant “raven” in Russian, was a clandestine group within the SVR whose existence was known only by a select few within the government. They were tasked with sabotage, corporate theft, and “talent extraction,” as well as other tasks from which even the SVR wanted to distance itself. Fisher had initially classified the group as a mirror image of the old Third Echelon, but more recently, when 3E’s assets went dark all over South India, Fisher and Grim realized that Voron had gone fully rogue and had access to Third Echelon’s intel—a frightening thought. Still, the team hadn’t been without leads. Fisher knew a former Voron operative who’d become a valuable asset, a man left for dead but who was now very much alive.
Mikhail Andreyevitch Loskov, whose code name was Kestrel, had run a joint operation with a Splinter Cell known as Archer; however, Kestrel was betrayed by Tom Reed, Third Echelon’s corrupt leader. Shot in the head and left for dead, Kestrel was destined to live out his days as a prisoner in Russia, placed in a medically induced coma, and would only be awakened when the men controlling him needed something, such as intel on Third Echelon’s operations or other Federation secrets Kestrel might know. It had been up to Fisher and Briggs to rescue the man—and they had.
Consequently, Fisher had made a deal with Kestrel. Once he’d learned what Kestrel had given up to Voron, he released the man. Kestrel said he was returning to Russia. He planned to settle the score with those who’d been using him and who’d forcibly extracted that intel.
Kestrel owed his life to Fisher and Briggs, but he was not a man who could be owned by guilt or gratitude. He’d suffered a lot of hardships in his life, had lost his parents in a terrorist attack, and had watched his army teammates being tortured and killed by Chechens. He was a stubborn Russian bastard, but he’d vowed to keep in touch with Fisher, even offered to sell him information when he acquired it. The last time they’d spoken, Kestrel had said he was “freelancing” in the Federation, ever prepared to exact his vengeance.
“Any luck getting us into the SVR?” Briggs asked Charlie.
“Are you kidding? Kasperov helped design their firewalls. It’ll be the hack of the century. But I’m not giving up. Some files are air gapped, but I may have found a backdoor that actually takes us through a front door, then it lets us sit there through a rootkit application.”
“Tell me more about this backdoor,” Grim said, raising a cautious brow.
“Oh, you don’t want to know.”
Grim cleared her throat. “Excuse me, I need to know.”
Fisher leaned closer to Charlie and said, “Play nice.”
Charlie alternated his gaze between Grim and Fisher, then finally sighed. “All right, so the SVR’s pumping tons of cash into R&D with a focus on social media networks like VK and Facebook. They’ve got a three-tiered program for the future of the Internet. They call these tiers Monitor-3, Dispute, and Storm-13. That last one, Storm, involves an army of spambots that’ll flood social networks with propaganda to influence public opinion.”
“So how does that get you inside?” asked Fisher.
“Well, there’s a double connection here. Kasperov’s boy genius, the guy named Kannonball? He was tagged as the lead programmer on this project.”
“So he was working for the SVR and Kasperov?” asked Briggs.
“Yeah, sure, it’s like the SVR is a client. What’s more interesting, though, is that after he created their spambot army, he was tagged by the SVR as being a member of a hacktivist group known as Redtalk. They’ve been leaking secrets about corruption within the Russian government and military.”
“Like another WikiLeaks,” Fisher concluded.
“Yeah, but smaller and more specific. They probably didn’t touch Kannonball because he was so close to Kasperov.”
“I guess this is the long explanation of how you intend to get into their computers,” said Briggs through a yawn.
Charlie grew more animated, waving his peanut butter fork at Briggs. “Kannonball’s already hacked in, and he’s left his signature on some of the code for the social media spambots. In fact, I have to study it some more, but he may have left more clues there.”
“You mean like passwords to get in?” Fisher asked.
“Exactly. That’s Redtalk’s MO. That’s our front door into the SVR.”
“Or we could just call Kestrel,” Fisher said with a smile. “Old-school wins again. Grim? Find me Kestrel.”
“Will do.”
/> Charlie snickered. “You’re a real thread killer, Sam. I was on a roll!”
“I know. And still, there’s no guarantee the SVR or Voron are doing any better than we are right now, but we need to keep tabs on them.”
Grim raised her voice. “Charlie, I want to see everything you’re doing to get in there. Don’t make a move until we’re both sure they can’t track us.”
Charlie nodded, then lowered his voice and turned to Fisher. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Fisher nodded and Charlie rose, leading him out of the command center, down a narrow hall, and toward the living quarters. He opened a small hatch and invited Fisher into his tiny room, replete with narrow bed, notebook computers, and a few posters for alternative rock bands that Fisher had never heard of. Charlie shut the hatch and quickly said, “If you want to find this guy, you gotta cut me loose. I can’t work with her breathing down my neck.”
“She’s not breathing down your neck.”
“Are you deaf?”
“Look, you know where she’s coming from.”
He rolled his eyes. “It was hard enough taking the job in the first place, knowing she’d be here.”
“I thought you guys were getting along.”
“It’s nothing that interferes with the job, but—”
“But you have a problem with authority figures. I get that. So do I.”
At twenty-five, young Charlie Cole was still grappling with remaining calm under fire—especially when the incoming came from Grim. During the time he and Fisher worked together at Vic’s old agency, Fisher had learned a lot about the kid, learned why he had the attitude and why he’d become a hacker. Charlie had lost his father when he was just eleven, and his mother remarried a man who ruled with an iron fist and had ridiculous expectations for him. He buried himself in his room and retreated into computers. While his mother supported his interest, by the time he was fourteen, his stepfather had shipped him off to Choate Rosemary Hall, the prestigious boarding school in Connecticut, where he’d terrorized administrators with his hacking exploits. They forced him through the program because it was easier than kicking him out. He was a classic genius underachiever. He went on to the Rochester Institute of Technology because his grades wouldn’t get him into MIT like the rest of his friends, and after that, some of his online exploits had caught the attention of the NSA and he was quickly rolled into Grim’s R&D group at Third Echelon.