“I don’t believe that shit,” Sanders sneered. “So many of the Soviet Wunderwaffen had been fake news. You’re shitting your pants for nothing.”
“Well, all presidents since the older Bush believed it. That’s all that matters to Langley. This harmless self-employed consultant was marked as the biggest threat to mankind since biblical times for a reason.”
“For a stupid reason,” Mark hissed again.
“For a valid reason,” Hardy hissed back. “You’re lucky that you’re not getting sun-dried in Gitmo together with the Al-Qaeda towelheads. That’s where the Langley boys wanted to put you.”
Hardy got up from the bench. “Don’t be stupid, I warn you again not to use the bomb,” he said and left.
Sanders watched him walk down the trail, wave his bodyguard along, and pull out his smartphone. After a few seconds, the two vanished from Mark’s sight.
‘John Smith says thank you’ Mark typed into his TLKS app and hit the send button. Then he thought and typed one more message ‘And his real name is Thomas Hardy. He says’.
✽✽✽
General Witold Bilinski put down the receiver of his desk phone. He had a hard time believing what the Berlin Chief of Station of the CIA had told him earlier in the day. One of his sources was the origin of the warning calls. The man or woman he called Defiant, apparently was some sort of hacktivist. He or she had taken matters into his or her own hands and infiltrated some lower-level system that GRU and other Russian agencies use for BOLOs.
It was hard to believe, and he did not entirely trust the information. Even though he respected Thomas Hardy and even though the Americans were their closest and most vital ally, he would want confirmation from a second source. His renewed outreach into the intelligence community had cost him all day, yet brought no information to contradict Hardy’s version. He had called his contact at the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German foreign intelligence service. Horst had been in his office near Schlossplatz, unlike Hardy who had apparently been taking a walk in a park.
The fifty-something German could not do more than speculate. Over the phone, he had described something that remotely matched Kryska’s napkin drawing before he said that while in theory it, was simple, in practice it would be impossible since nobody could penetrate GRU’s systems in the first place. The BND cyber warfare group had tried and failed over and over again.
There might be a better hacker out there who found a way in, Bilinski had thought to himself and hung up.
“Kurwa mać,” he shouted banging his fist on the desk in front of him. Now, he remembered Kryska saying the exact same thing. If the captain was right and Hardy told the truth, then the CIA’s source was that better hacker, and he or she was volunteering for the Polish cause.
✽✽✽
“So you’re saying, we are winning again,” Kamila Berka asked the General Chief of Staff over a drink in Kraków’s Sheraton Grand Hotel. Poland’s first lady had asked the General to explain to her more of what he had earlier reported to Sebastian Berka.
While the president went to bed, the woman behind the man wanted more detail. She did her best to help her husband work with the foreign heads of state that had called for a video-conference. It was still two days away, but Kamila was very anxious about the results. Either a broader coalition would help them free their country from Russian occupation or the existing alliance would break apart. There was no middle case, it was all or nothing.
“That was the short version, colored pink for your husband’s benefit, Pani Berka,” Pułaski sighed and looked at his sto gram, his hundred grams of vodka. “Yes, we are progressing again now that more of our stay behind operators evade capture. Some even managed to ambush raid squads successfully. They are back to operating at almost the expected levels.” He took a hesitant sip from the ice cold glass. “That’s the good news. The bad news is we have no idea how long this streak will last. We rely on intelligence from a source we do not control, and we might be back in the dirt tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.”
“What source?”
“Bilinski, you need to know that he is my best man, he says that some CIA source has developed an initiative without talking to his case officer first. They call this source Defiant, for a reason, it seems. That created some confusion in the intelligence community. CIA’s Berlin station have caught up with their agent, and they vouch for his loyalty but refuse to share more. They say we should be happy to get any help we can and that we may trust the information to a quite high degree.”
“Quite high degree? What does that mean? Can you trust it or not?” Kamila Berka inquired.
“If only it were so easy as black or white. See, in the world of espionage, everything is gray. I know, it’s hard to understand. For me it is, anyway,” the general said and took another small sip from his glass. His fingers left large prints on the fogged glass. “Intelligence analysts grade sources and their information a bit like you would grade a student’s homework. They grade it in classes from one to five with one being the best class, five the worst. CIA grades this source as a one minus, which is highly reliable.”
“Why the minus?” Kamila asked back.
“These finer grades are usually added by the case officer himself, not an analyst. A minus might mean that the source is somewhat incorruptible. While he is not suspected of giving false information, he might be unresponsive or refuse cooperation if the aim of the effort goes against his personal interests or his moral principles,” Pułaski explained. “To me, personally, the minus sounds more like a badge of honor than a sign of defect.”
The first lady grunted and then asked more detailed questions about the military operations. For a school teacher, she was highly interested in and well informed about all things military. The general let her know that best case, he would be able to present a decisive win before the video-conference with the European heads of state in two days. This would depend largely on the stay-behind army continuing to operate behind enemy lines.
✽✽✽
Bravlin, as Anatoli Yevgenievich Smagin was codenamed in GRU, worked until late that night. Just before 0100 hours, he had put together his evidence and a proposal how to proceed.
It was a long shot, he was not sure if it would work, so he decided to sleep on it. He had the time, he had promised to present his conclusions in the morning at 0800.
Enough time to get a few hours of shut-eye and rework his presentation.
Thirty-Eight
“The insurgents use encoded TLKS messages to communicate,” Captain Smagin of the 6th Directorate started his second presentation of the day.
General Kuvayev, the director of Russian foreign intelligence, listened to his explanations silently and attentively. The Colonel General who succeeded Kuvayev at the top of Russia’s military intelligence also sat in front of his screen listening and faking interest. For the video-conference Smagin had a few privates clean up the messy office next to the shop floor turned vehicle garage. A new glass pane had been inserted into the connecting door.
“I could establish a pattern of self-destroying messages that preceded the ambush on our raid squad on ulica Wilcza,” Smagin lied. “While the messages were self-destroying, I could retrace some data packets from the TLKS domain on the network nodes,” he backed up his lies with more lies hidden behind tech gibberish he hoped would remain unquestioned.
His experience with people who came up in the military was that they were only interested in results, not technological details. He was betting his life on this experience. If, against all odds, Kuvayev were a nerd he was screwed. If, which was entirely possible, he called for a second opinion he was equally screwed. But there was no turning back now. Colonel Popov and Sergeant Major Krug, Shashka, had bought his stories. It was unfortunate that they wanted to run the analysis and the proposed action plan by their superior, who in turn wanted to share the burden with his predecessor and now his opposite number in the civilian SVR.
When Smagin was finished,
Kuvayev began with the Q&A. “So basically the Poles are using TLKS as a communication network which we allowed them to use when we brought the communications networks back online,” he started.
“Indeed, Comrade General,” Smagin interrupted the recap with a confirmation.
“At the same, maybe you out there in the field are not aware, we have massive protests from the so-called Mothers’ Solidarity Committee here in the rodina. They also organize themselves via TLKS. The service has grown to almost fifty million Russian users, and it continues to gain traction.” Kuvayev took a deep breath before he continued. “So why do we allow this? The service has been started by a Russian, Pyotr Alekseyevich Dernov, with Russian money. Money we had allowed him to earn from the sale of his social networking company. Why don’t we get access to the messages from him or his directors under threat of shutting him down? Or worse consequences, maybe,” Kuvayev floated his ideas hoping for constructive feedback and a technical opinion from Smagin.
While the 6th Directorate nerd was usually overconfident, especially when technical topics were discussed, he ducked away from the discussion and tried to first see to where the tide would turn before sticking his neck out with an opinion.
The GRU general proposed to decapitate the TLKS network. First, use the network filters they had developed to completely block the service in the Russian sphere of influence. Second, if the blocking failed for whatever reason, have FSB raid the offices and arrest the owners and managers. Some tax fraud charge could easily be made up. They had done it before, and they had been successful at it.
Kuvayev waited for Smagin to say something. When Smagin did not, he asked him directly for his professional opinion.
The hacker conceded that blocking TLKS was an option.
Then Kuvayev concluded the meeting and announced that he would propose a ban of TLKS to the president. Smagin should keep himself available to support the effort on the ground in Poland.
As the screen went black, Smagin breathed out with relief. He had pulled through his stunt. He was still alive. Yet, he lived on borrowed time. Blocking TLKS was difficult, especially if users started using Virtual Private Networks, VPNs, to circumvent the censorship. It had already happened in Iran before, it would probably happen in Russia, too.
If the Polish insurgents were savvy enough to roll out a VPN across all their fighters it was tough luck. Then he would have to find yet another way to regain his masters’ favor. He decided to let tomorrow handle tomorrow’s problems. For the time being, he was content with being alive and relatively unharmed. He left his office to get chow in the mess hall across the railroad works yard.
✽✽✽
Mark Sanders sat in his kitchen with a pair of Weißwürste, a pretzel, and a Hefeweizen he had bought on the way back from Dr. Fiedler’s practice.
As expected, the pediatrician said he should be glad his boy was sleeping so well. If his wife wanted to know more, he would be happy to take her call. Xandi sat in his high chair with a sippy cup. He had eaten his steamed carrots and rice without complaints, and now he enjoyed his apple juice just as much as his father enjoyed his Bavarian beer.
When Mark raised his glass for the first swig of his cold beer, a TLKS call from Svetlana disturbed the tranquility of the moment. He accepted the call and put her on speaker.
“Hey, there, do you mind if I eat while we speak?” he asked.
“I do mind, but go ahead. I forgot you Dad’s have a strict meal schedule to follow,” she half-apologized for calling at lunchtime. “I wanted to share something odd. We had zero calls going out last night. I spent most of the morning backchecking my Trojan and the rest of the setup. Everything’s fine, couldn’t find anything unusual.”
“Huh,” Mark thought for a moment. “Maybe they stopped.”
“Wouldn’t know why. We certainly didn’t kill their whole op with our thirty-four calls,” Mlada countered.
“True. What else could it be? Maybe it got dangerous. The Poles have a certain aggressive streak. If you mess with them, they mess with you back. Maybe the Russians got some heat during their raids,” Mark speculated while balancing a fat slob of Bavarian sweet mustard toward his mouth on a pretzel stub.
“Anyway, it’s nothing tech related,” Svetlana said.
The mustard dropped on Marks white shirt. “Shit,” he hissed.
“What?” Svetlana asked.
“No worries, just dropped something,” he said. “I agree, it’s probably some other thing. I will see if I can get something out of Hardy. It did sound to me that the Poles know what to do with our warnings. So, it’s absolutely possible that instead of running they’re fighting.”
“Okay,” Svetlana got to the hanging up ceremony. “Svetlana over,” before she could say ‘out’, Mark interrupted her.
“Wait, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.” He gave Svetlana a chance to say something which she didn’t. “I’m starting to believe we should activate the bomb,” Mark said.
“Okay,” the hacker said very slowly. “And then it’s the end of the world as we know it?” she sang like R.E.M sang the song.
“I don’t think it’s going be that bad, still not buying the horror stories,” Mark said.
“Me neither, but this is one of the things I really wouldn’t want to wage a bet on. I’d want to be a hundred percent sure,” she insisted. “Plus, we need a, how did you call it, a delivery system for the bomb.”
“Yeah, we need a way to bring the information to the people. A trustworthy way.”
“Well, mainstream media didn’t do it for us last time we tried. I mean, Vitus did a great job, and some peoples’ eyes opened thanks to the Panama Files. But in the end, it wasn’t enough,” Svetlana reminisced. “Should have started with the big fish, like I said,” she teased Mark.
“Yeah, you were right,” he answered.
“My favorite three words. Thanks, boss.”
“Well, apart from the fact that the Russian fake news machine has reduced public trust in the media to almost zero, we also need to reckon that nobody in the media will touch a Panama 2.0. They’re all too afraid of the Kremlin since Salisbury and Nemtsov and the five journalists that fell out of windows or tripped in front of buses last year,” Mark reminded himself of how the Russian government handles its problems with free speech.
“Our newly elected Russophile politicians at the extreme left and right would go nuts to protect their buddies in Moscow. Even if we published the good stuff, they would call it fake news. And that’s in Western Europe. In Russia, nobody would even get to see it. Our mighty bomb would make only a small puff. It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world but the end of our struggle. Not in a good way, though.”
“So true, Mark,” Svetlana sighed. “So true.”
Both said nothing for a spell.
“The only people Russians still trust are their friends, their real-life friends,” Svetlana broke the silence. “So we need to think this grassroots, make it go viral, from the bottom up.”
Both stayed silent again for a few seconds.
“Yeah, viral,” Mark sighed. “If only that were so easy. Most viral marketing is heavily budgeted and spread by professionals, influencers, agents, mainstream media outlets even,” the experienced entrepreneur explained. “We would need a super-influencer, someone who is beyond reproach, someone who can reach out to millions of Russians and who gets heard.”
“In other words, a saint, like the Dalai Lama?” Svetlana shook her head. Mark sensed it over the phone.
“Better than the Dalai Lama. We need someone like St. George, someone who can slay the dragon and be the hero of our story.”
“We Russians love our St. George,” the hacker said enthusiastically. Possibly she meant it ironically, Mark could not tell.
“The bomb is only the lance. We need to find our George, give him his lance, get him to slay the dragon,” Mark said. “Easy, right?”
“Right,” Svetlana said. “Let me think it ov
er, and maybe I’ll find our holy warrior.”
✽✽✽
“Khorosho, let’s give this one more try,” Bravlin mumbled as he finished his latest meme picture for the benefit of the Polish insurgents. He had taken the TLKS profile pictures of all his Spetsnaz comrades’ confirmed kills and put them on a black background. Like before, he added a hidden command to the file that downloaded his version of the AnMyth RAT, a trojan allowing him to access infected phones remotely. The caption read ‘To our fallen heroes, we will avenge you’ in white capital letters.
Again, he hoped his social engineering would work, and the picture would be shared among insurgents and sympathizers. If all worked well, he would have enough targets to feed Shashka’s thirst for blood for as long as TLKS was down. That is if the SVR and FSB could bring it down at all.
This was the first part of his plan to regain favor, the second part entailed looking at the routes the insurgents’ phones had traveled more closely. He found it more and more odd that someone could travel from Germany through unoccupied territory into occupied territory and then end up killed by a raid squad.
✽✽✽
Kamila Berka opened the door of the presidential suite on the Kraków Sheraton’s top floor. She could tell by the sound of the knock that it was her daughter Agnieszka. She resided across the hall in a smaller suite. The whole floor was closed off to other guests. Some suites had been converted into offices for the presidential staff, some into meeting rooms, in some others staffers took the occasional nap between their fourteen- to sixteen-hour shifts.
“Cześć, mamo,” Agnieszka said glumly.
“What is it, kochanie, darling?” her mother asked.
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