Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  “Okay, okay, I get it. He’s real popular among you nerdy folks,” Mark interrupted.

  “Yes, but my gut says it will spread,” she insisted. “A few guys in Moscow and St. Petersburg are organizing rallies for tonight. More and more people will join, I’m willing to place quite a substantial bet on that.”

  “He’s a valid candidate, that’s for damn sure,” Mark conceded and balanced another forkful of Spaghetti into his mouth. He chewed a little and said, “We need to find him.”

  “Oh please, what kind of role model are you for Sasha? He sees you talk with a full mouth, he’ll do the same,” Svetlana complained.

  “Yes, dear.” Mark chuckled. “But seriously, how do we talk to him. He kinda went off the grid, right?”

  “Not really. Yes, he’s living a nomadic life, and he places a lot of importance on his privacy. Yet, sometimes he speaks at public events,” Svetlana said.

  “Right, I saw him speak at this TechCrunch event last year in London. Do you think that’s where we can find him?” Mark finished his question and put another forkful into his mouth.

  “Well, sometimes he speaks at events in London and sometimes he just walks into C-Base and hangs out for a beer or two,” she said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Ghoul wouldn’t shut up about it three weeks ago. He swears it was Dernov toying around with the 3D-printer and the soldering equipment for an hour or two, then having a Hefeweizen at the bar. After that, he walked back out as if it was the most normal thing to do.”

  “It would be more than convenient if he was in Berlin,” Mark speculated.

  “I believe he’s still here,” Svetlana said. “Berlin has the kind of subculture and vibe he digs. Pretty girls, hackers, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Everything a billionaire hacker craves.”

  “I thought he only got a measly two-hundred million for his Russian Facebook-clone?”

  “Measly? Who are you to call two-hundred mil measly? Whatever. He put a lot of that into Bitcoin while it was still hot and pulled it out before it imploded,” Svetlana explained. “He was smart and bold enough to make money even as a sucker in the Ponzi scheme of the millennium. I’m telling you, he’s our guy.”

  “You seem awful interested in that man. I mean for someone generally not so much interested in men,” Mark wondered out loud.

  “Gosh, he is a nerd and a billionaire, I could overlook whatever uninteresting parts he has between his legs. We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl,” Svetlana sang her explanation to Madonna’s melody.

  Mark chuckled and rolled the last of his spaghetti on the fork. “Let’s go and talk to him then,” he said.

  “I’ll see what I can do, Svetlana over and out.” The line went dead with a beep.

  Mark enjoyed his last forkful and then asked Domenico for a little bread to soak up the remnants of the delicious white sauce and parmesan.

  ✽✽✽

  “Public support for the president is at the lowest level since the school incident,” the chief of staff of the presidential executive office screamed.

  Kuvayev, Bortsov, and the colonel general heading GRU stood silently in a row and looked at their feet like a gang of children in the principal’s office.

  The president’s Rottweiler walked up to the GRU chief first. “Remember how Kuvayev here got into office at GRU? We don’t want you to suddenly get sick like his predecessor, do we?”

  GRU said nothing.

  Then he faced Bortsov. “Seriously, get your shit together and clean up this mess. Otherwise I will send someone to help you clean the windows in your apartment. He’ll hold your hand while you lean out to polish the glass from outside. Got it?”

  Bortsov said nothing.

  “Kuvayev, you will help Bortsov clean up the mess he made. We’ll see if your proposal to reunite FSB and SVR into one agency will be in favor with the president when the job is done.”

  “Yes, Gospodin Ministr,” Kuvayev said.

  Bortsov looked at him with a mix of disgust and astonishment.

  The GRU man stared at the wall.

  “Dismissed,” the chief of staff said, and the three intelligence men silently left the oak-paneled office.

  ✽✽✽

  Xandi had gotten some formula and took a peaceful post-lunch nap. Mark felt the effect of his carbohydrates-and-fats cocktail, too. It was nicely balanced by his excitement for the Dernov story, so he sat at the table with the red-checked cloth for a little while longer.

  On his iPhone he tried to find some news on the TLKS blockage. DIE WELT and other major papers had no stories out yet, the more tech-oriented online outlets did.

  TechCrunch cited a blog post by Dernov that TLKS had been under a ban by internet access providers in Russia following an order of Roskomnadzor. The reason was his refusal to provide encryption keys to the Russian security agencies. The article continued to cite Dernov’s post in which he gave a promise of privacy to his users, some personal stories of people Dernov had met during the years who had struggled with the lack of free speech in Russia. The article closed with praising the audacity of the TLKS team who were scattered across the globe on a mission to bring a safe and private way of communication to the people, even under pressure of authoritarian regimes.

  Mark decided to read the original blog post by Dernov and see if he could find any clue on his whereabouts. The post was cocky, Dernov clearly did not have any self-esteem issues. Some people might even say his language hinted at a narcissistic personality. Sanders was no shrink, so he ignored all that and instead tried to filter out hard evidence pro and con Dernov as their ally and hints at where to find him. He sent a link to the post to Svetlana, maybe she could do some magic.

  Beyond the language, Mark found hints of all the qualities that he looked for in an ally. Dernov was not in it for the money. Actually, he had donated millions to causes that support the use of encryption technology by civil-rights groups. He had written that he wanted to ‘bolster the resilience of internet infrastructure against state attempts to control access’. He called for ‘a decentralized movement standing for freedom and progress globally, a Digital Resistance’.

  Svetlana answered back after less than a minute. Her text read ‘Already seen that one, thanks. The IP address of the poster is impossible to trace, I stopped looking when it said Sudan after China, Brasil, and Serbia’. Another text followed, it read ‘Better look at this’ followed by a link to a Russian blog.

  Mark opened the link, and the first thing he saw was a picture of a street protest. A young man held something above his head that looked like an Orthodox icon. The Google translation of the caption told him that young people took to the streets everywhere to support Dernov and TLKS. Mark zoomed in on the picture. He realized that the icon was in fact Pyotr Dernov’s face artfully photoshopped onto some saint’s body.

  “I’ll be damned,” Mark mumbled to himself.

  “Hey, everything okay?” Domenico asked as he came out of the door.

  “Yeah, the Carbonara was delicious. Thank you. Can you get me a Hefeweizen, please?” Mark said. He felt in the mood after the workout, and he felt he had a reason to celebrate.

  Just as Sanders wanted to go back to reading, he noticed the blond, bearded hipster sitting in the café two houses down Lychener Straße. The same guy he had seen earlier outside Jan’s studio and before when he had met Hardy in the park. He tapped the frame of the window he was sitting at and shouted, “Domenico, please make it a non-alcoholic Weizen. I forgot I have to drive.”

  “Certo, nessun problema, Mark. I will bring it to you right away,” Domenico shouted back across his bar.

  Auric Goldfinger’s famous words resounded in Mark’s head, “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago. ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.’” And this was already the fourth time he had seen the lumbersexual.

  Berlin was some sort of village sometimes, but it sure was not that sort of vi
llage.

  Forty

  Mark Sanders read more about the new protests that were triggered by the Russian government’s failed attempt at blocking the service. Every twenty seconds he glanced up, to his left, and to his right. He kept an eye on the hipster who seemed to enjoy the sun and his coffee. He also watched out for other uncomfortably familiar faces.

  The more he read by Dernov and about Dernov, the more was convinced that they had identified a true dragon-slayer. Pyotr Alekseyevich Dernov had made a considerable amount of money, some two hundred million dollars when he exited the social networking company he had founded as a Russian answer to Facebook.

  With hundreds of millions of daily active users in Russia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet states his network had been a media powerhouse. At some point he could reach more people, on a daily basis than all other media outlets in Russia combined.

  When Facebook had similar user numbers, it was valued at roughly ten billion dollars. Ceteris paribus Dernovs twenty-something percent share in the company should have made him between two and three billion instead of the ‘measly’ two hundred million that a Kazakhstani billionaire with strong ties to the Russian president had paid.

  The gentleman from Astana had acquired the share in the company and then integrated it into his online media empire. Afterward, user numbers slowly faded as Facebook and other sites gained more popularity. Financial Times had called the acquisition a bad investment. Serves the fucking kleptocrat right, Mark thought.

  Dernov’s blog posts sounded revolutionary in a radically libertarian way. In one post, he called it his manifesto, he laid out ten steps to completely transform society, especially in Russia. Apart from a radical increase in taxes on raw materials and complete exemption from taxes for the information economy and private citizens, he also advocated electing judges and law enforcement officials instead of appointing them. He demanded to abolish ‘rudiments of feudalism’ like military conscription. Laws and restrictions on business in his opinion spawned corruption and should be radically thinned out. He wrote ‘In the 21st century, the best legislative initiative is its absence’. He also demanded autonomy for the Russian regions.

  One idea in his manifesto struck Mark as especially brilliant, epic, and radical. He demanded that uninhabited regions in Russia should be leased for a hundred years or more to private organizations to create mini-states that organize themselves in a radically liberal way. This was not a man of small ideas.

  He was sold, he was one hundred percent convinced that Pyotr Dernov was the freedom fighter, the dragon slayer, he and Svetlana were looking for. He had the attitude, the stamina, the reach, and a flawless image. In Mark’s experience, it was seldom good to shop for alternatives for too long. With time being of the essence, getting to this result in such a short time was a good thing.

  Mark looked up from his phone as part of his twenty-second routine. The hipster was gone. Mark was not sure if that was a good thing.

  ✽✽✽

  “So when we started out intending to block those some hundred thousand IP-addresses of the TLKS service, we actually blocked thousands of other websites instead?” Kuvayev asked Bortsov, he tried to keep calm.

  Bortsov cleared his throat and started to explain. “Yes, Roman Konstantinovich. Those internet protocol addresses on our list were blocked by access providers all over the country. Of course, we expected TLKS to move their service, and our standard algorithm tracks those moves, adds more IP-addresses to the register, and blocks these. This routine continues.”

  “Until they run out of servers or money or both. Got it,” Kuvayev interrupted mid-sentence.

  Bortsov nodded. “What we didn’t expect is that Dernov uses a technique called domain fronting. This technique basically hides TLKS data traffic as the traffic of another service, let’s say the RN network’s.”

  “And this actually misled us to block pretty much everything but TLKS?” Kuvayev asked.

  “Yes, the little asshole found an exploit in our processes that he could use against us,” Bortsov said.

  “Our next step would normally be to raid their offices, arrest their people, and take control of whatever we get our hands on,” the FSB man said. “But Dernov thought of that long before. According to border police data he has not set foot in the Russian Federation since 2014. He also encouraged his team to move abroad. They wanted to open an office in Berlin, which met some difficulty when they couldn’t get residence permits. They moved around the world for a while, according to their blog Dubai, Brasil, Canada. Since 2017 there are no more mentions of locations on any of their social media accounts. They seem to have scattered around the globe.”

  “You stopped the blocking of IPs?” Kuvayev asked.

  “Yes, we are currently undoing everything.”

  “Alright, let’s stop making fools of ourselves and get to the root of the problem,” the SVR director said. “We need to apprehend the people behind TLKS and shut them down old school. Since they are outside the country, this falls into my purview.” Kuvayev looked for a reaction on his rival’s face.

  Bortsov kept a neutral look.

  The SVR director continued, “I will ask GRU for assistance. Their agent network in the West is denser than ours. If they are in Canada, France, or Great Britain, or wherever GRU will have an officer or an asset able get to them in a few hours time.”

  “Thank you for taking this off my hands, Comrade General,” Bortsov said, now with a little resignation in his voice.

  Kuvayev looked at the FSB director, said nothing, turned on his heel, and left.

  ✽✽✽

  Sanders called Mlada to share his impressions and see if she had any leads, yet.

  “Nothing,” the hacker sighed. “I can’t get a track neither on him nor anyone else on his team. We’ll have to find him some other way.”

  “Old school,” Mark said.

  “What’s old school,” Svetlana asked a little surprised.

  “We do what detectives have done since Sherlock’s times,” Mark explained. “We look for leads, follow them, and we’ll find our man.”

  “I’ll start at C-Base,” Svetlana suggested.

  “Agree, that’s our best starting point right now.”

  “I’m on my way,” Svetlana said. “They’ll probably tell me more when I’m alone. Somehow, these guys still think they can impress me.”

  “Okay, good idea,” Mark agreed. Poor bastards, he thought with a chuckle.

  Sanders went back to researching Dernov. In the meantime, quite a lot of news outlets had caught up on the story. They also covered the protests without much mention of Dernov. In St. Petersburg ten thousand mostly young people had taken to the streets within hours. Apparently, they were a wild mix of civil rights activists, LGBT groups, sympathizers of Pussy Riot, and the Mothers’ Solidarity.

  Just as he took the last sip of his non-alcoholic Weizen, a text disrupted his thoughts. Svetlana wrote ‘Riot police cracks down hard on protesters, 3 dead’.

  ✽✽✽

  Ukraine enjoyed little international attention at the time. The separate peace with Russia held, even though the country was in turmoil over the effects of the forced peace treaty. While formally the referendum on splitting the country in two was still ongoing, there was little doubt that the Russian initiative would find a majority vote.

  Most ethnic Ukrainians had already voted with their feet and moved west. The country was struggling to deal with its internally displaced people but found little support by the European or other neighboring countries. The shooting war in Poland took precedence over everything else.

  In the afternoon of this summer day, the European heads of state joined a video-conference, their most important task of the day. The American secretary of state also joined. For him, it was the first task of the day with Washington being six hours behind most European capitals.

  All had been briefed by their staff on the current state of the war in Poland. The Fehmarn Belt
and the Øresund remained closed to non-allied, non-military traffic, the Baltic Sea could not be accessed by Russians or anyone else. Polish military had regained the upper hand, and they were gaining territory fast. Szczecin had been liberated by Polish and British troops. Now, the city’s port was the allies’ most important supply route into the western part of the country. Polish mechanized divisions stood at the gates of Warsaw.

  Russian resupply routes through Belarus had been cut off effectively by special forces units. Also, Russian attempts to cross the river Bug with vehicle-launched or pontoon bridges failed, partly due to the marshy ground on the Polish side, partly due to nightly guerrilla attacks. Russian resupply was now limited to the ports of Kaliningrad, Gdańsk, and Gdynia.

  Chief of the General Staff Pułaski’s primary objective for this virtual meeting was to win over Germany to allow materiel and troops to transit through.

  His hopes that the Bundeswehr would join the fight were not very high. His aides had let him know that the German government’s delegation had made that abundantly clear in the preparatory talks. Bundeswehr participation would not be picture changing anyway, the Germans had already publicized the fact that they are not able to assist in a large scale land war. But a lot would be won if the Americans and British NATO divisions could move their tanks and vehicles directly into Poland instead of being airlifted or going through Czech first. The time saved would translate directly into winning the war faster.

  The Polish side was represented by General Pułaski and President Berka. Kamila Berka sat, invisible to the other participants, right next to the president. She held his hand and from time to time stroked his thigh under the table.

  “In conclusion, we can end the conflict with a concerted offensive. We push back the Russian troops and allow them to retreat into Kaliningrad. From there, the Russian government will sure find ways to bring their troops home by air or sea. We seek no vengeance, our objective is merely reinstating the status quo ante bellum. Thank you,” Pułaski said, and his picture shrank back to the same small size as the other twenty-nine pictures.