Rise: Luthecker, #2

by Keith Domingue

  “No, no, I have pictures, I...”

  “I’ll back it all up on a stick beforehand, don’t worry.”

  “I’ll buy you a new laptop,” Chris said.

  Masha looked at Chris after he made the offer. She looked away and swore in her native Russian tongue to no one in particular. “Maybe it would be better if I never meet you two in the first place,” she muttered, looking at Chris and Yaw, before she reluctantly handed her MacBook Pro to Nikki.

  “Thank you,” Chris said.

  Masha rolled her eyes at him.

  Chris watched with amusement as Masha fumed over having to relinquish her laptop. She had a way about her, Chris realized, a perpetual state of controlled impatience mixed with the right amount of cynicism and humor to make her alluring. It gave her an edge, Chris thought, and he chalked it up to survival skills, part of which required that Masha always be three steps ahead of everyone. She must keep a smile on her face while waiting for everyone to catch up. To be this way obliged both intelligence and discipline. He found it all quite sexy.

  “How long is this going to take?” Winn asked, his words interrupting Chris’ thoughts.

  “I won’t know until I look around a little bit,” Nikki replied. She placed the laptop on the long-abandoned receptionists desk and plugged it into a recently-installed hard line. She opened the laptop and looked for something to use as a chair. Yaw looked behind him and saw a large paint bucket. He picked it up and handed it to Nikki.

  “We can’t stay here for very long. We have to help Alex,” Winn added.

  “I know. This won’t take long. I want to poke around the city’s electronic infrastructure first, hack into whatever it is that Lucas Parks is up to, and find a weakness.” She turned to Winn. “Trust me, we’re not leaving here without Alex.”

  Immediately after incapacitating Semyon and his men in the alley next to the nightclub, the group had split up, with Masha agreeing to meet the others at the end of Kitskany Street in twenty minutes. Winn, Yaw, Chris, and Nikki, careful to avoid Russian soldiers on their tail, had gone back to the hostel to pick up their belongings. There was no intention of returning to the hostel—they knew if they were going to evade capture and rescue Alex, and get out of Trans Dniester alive, it would have to be in the next twenty-four hours.

  They had snuck into the hostel building using the back entrance, taking care not to be seen by the hostel manager or guests. Once they got to their room, Yaw and Chris had gathered their backpacks and made sure that their passports and travel documents were in order while Winn wrapped and taped Nikki’s ankles and right knee. Part of their plan included being able to move and move quickly, and in less than ten minutes they were packed and ready to go. Winn did a final once over of the room before they opted for a window exit—they’d witnessed Russian soldiers coming in the front entrance.

  More than anything, Masha wanted out of the heels and dress. She had quickly made her way to her cramped one-bedroom apartment, a third floor unit in a large complex of one hundred and fifty identical units, just six blocks east of the nightclub. Like most pretty women who worked long hours expending energy and socializing during the evening, her apartment was a complete mess. The scratch-covered hardwood floor in the living area was littered with shoeboxes, underwear, T-shirts, bras, Coke Zero cans, and various DVDs. Masha took off her shoes and dress immediately, literally walking out of them without breaking stride, and she began searching the floor and small couch that acted as a clothes hanger for her favorite pair of jeans, a proper bra, a decent top, and a pair of Nike tennis shoes. She found her jeans and bra on the couch, with sneakers and socks in a small pile on the floor next to the television set. She took one last look around her small apartment and realized that she may never return.

  Goodbye and good riddance, she thought.

  Masha had come to Trans Dniester from Russia with motivations similar to others who had immigrated here—the hope of work. She had started out as a waitress in several nightclubs and small restaurants before meeting Semyon. The two had hit it off immediately, and before long, they began seeing one another, and that is when Semyon approached her with an opportunity. Ivan Barbolin and his family ran the entirety of Trans Dniester, from the gas stations to the police departments to the restaurants. Most businesses acted in some capacity as a front for his illegal enterprises, but a cut of all profits (regardless of what business) made their way to the Barbarian. And the closer you were to the Barbarian, the better you were paid. By working for Semyon directly, spying on the activities of locals, Masha was only two degrees from the Barbarian, and she had been paid well. But it came at a steep moral price. She had witnessed, first hand, the brutality of the Barbarian’s regime against any who crossed him, particularly on locals she had reported on, and she had been looking for an out ever since. She knew she was taking a big risk by trusting the Americans, but her gut instincts told her to take the chance, in part because she knew she could never escape the clutches of the Barbarian on her own. In the end, she decided to trust her instincts because it was her only choice. She prayed she wasn’t making a mistake.

  The woman that Semyon was chasing and that Chris carried out of the club, the one they called Nikki, was apparently a computer expert, and before they left the alley she had asked Masha if she owned a laptop. Masha said yes, but only because of the way Chris had looked at her, with those irresistible blue eyes. Masha swore at herself, remembering the last time her attraction to someone got her in trouble, namely her relationship with Semyon. She speculated whether or not her attraction to the young American was clouding her judgment, and in a moment of doubt, she wondered if she truly understood what she was getting into. “Fuck it,” she said out loud to her doubts, before she grabbed her keys and headed for the door.

  She was about to shut the door behind her when she realized that she had to go back and get the laptop.

  Masha stepped out of the small sterile lobby of her apartment building and made her way toward the street where her car was parked. Masha’s 1995 Subaru Impreza WRX was her baby. Even though the car was never garaged and had over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer, she had kept the five-speed stick shift in top running condition, and the 260hp weather-faded grey four-door sedan with the hood scoop and baby whale tail was a very quick little machine. She had named it “Uyti Devochku,” or “Getaway Girl,” not knowing that that name would prove to be a precursor to the car’s very purpose. Although she kept the engine well maintained, the interior of the vehicle was just as cluttered as her apartment. She opened the passenger door and picked up two makeup kits off the seat, moving them, along with several pairs of boots in the foot space, to the trunk. She then cleaned several McDonald’s bags out of the backseat before she finally shut the doors, got behind the wheel, and started the car. She turned the key in the ignition and the engine roared to life. Masha pushed down the clutch and threw the WRX into gear, pulling from the curb and turning the vehicle around before heading to the end of Kitskany Street.

  She saw her new American friends standing in the shadows away from the street, downshifted, setting the engine’s RPMs spinning loudly, before pulling alongside the curb. As they approached the car, Masha put the odds at 70/30 that Chris would take the front seat next to her.

  “Nice,” Chris said, in reference to the car as he sat next to Masha in the passenger seat. “Is she fast?”

  “Fast enough for you.” Masha smiled and locked eyes with Chris for the appropriate length of time. Then she looked into the rear-view mirror to see Yaw, Winn, and Nikki scrunched close together in the backseat of the small compact sedan. When she heard the final passenger door close, she revved the engine and pulled the WRX away from the curb, just fast enough to chirp the tires.

  “Where are we going?” Chris asked.

  “Warehouse row, just outside of Tiraspol. There are many abandoned buildings there. I know one that has power and Internet. Even if Semyon’s men will think to look there, it will take them all day t
o find us.”

  Day was appropriate, as the sun was beginning to peek up over the horizon. Masha drove her Subaru down Kitskany Street and toward the outskirts of Tiraspol as the last of the evenings activities began to quiet down.

  No one spoke as Masha drove along several back roads, the fatigue caused by getting no sleep over the last twenty-four hours beginning to take a toll on everyone. Less than ten minutes outside of the well-kept tourist areas, the condition of Tiraspol’s roads changed, becoming more hostile with potholes, and the Soviet-era architecture began to show increasing signs of decay.

  After twenty minutes on the road, Masha turned off the main street onto a dirt road that led to an angular horizon of large buildings lining the banks of the Dniester River. The Impreza kicked up dust as it made its way into the industrial park, and Yaw, Chris, Winn, and Nikki looked over the abandoned structures, noting that the rust and decay looked similar to photos they had seen of the manufacturing ghost town that used to be Detroit, Michigan. The morning sun began to illuminate everything from broken and boarded up windows to rusting hulks of machinery seemingly tossed about at random. There were desks overturned in high grass. Rust streaked commodes on the side of the road. Abandoned vehicles were scattered about, both military and civilian. And Cyrillic graffiti tagged nearly every surface. Masha slalomed around several structures and a few rotting transport trucks before taking a hard left turn, parking the Impreza behind a large rusted water tank.

  “In there,” Masha said. She pointed to a small single-story building with a faded brick edifice that looked to be an administrative office attached to a much larger manufacturing facility. The front door had been ripped off and tossed onto the sidewalk.

  “I have friends who do not like their online activities monitored. A very difficult proposition in Trans Dniester. They have set up access here.”

  “Perfect,” Nikki said, before Masha led them inside.

  “What is she doing?” Masha asked, as she watched Nikki, seated at the dust covered receptionist’s desk in what looked to be an abandoned reception lobby.

  “What she does best,” Chris answered.

  “The two of you…?”

  “No. She’s with Alex.”

  “Your other friend we must rescue.”

  “Yes.”

  Satisfied with the answer, Masha stood next to Chris, and all four of them stood behind Nikki, watching as she sat on the overturned paint bucket and rattled her fingers across the keyboard. She typed in a long alphanumeric web address that was an encrypted porthole into something known as the “Deep Web,” a section of the Internet that was unknown to most and untraceable by even the most sophisticated spyware. The Deep Web was considered a lawless cyber-country, a potentially dangerous place where only the most sophisticated hackers dare tread. Completely unregulated, the Deep Web occupied an enormous amount of cyber-real estate, estimated to be a whopping five hundred times the size of the surface-net. The size was estimated because, in fact, no one knew for sure exactly how big the Deep Web was. It was known that the Deep Web is where the Internet itself originated, a below the surface cyber-world where there were vast expanses that remained empty and unused, along with other addressed areas that were teeming with far more life than the everyday Internet, albeit rendered a little stranger and far more intense. There were even “abandoned neighborhoods” known as the “Dark Web,” sites and addresses gone dormant, the web addresses formerly used by the military during the Internet’s early days as Darpanet that now led nowhere, as well as addresses and links previously used by credit card scammers and/or other illegal crime syndicate enterprises that had been abandoned in order to avoid detection. All of the world’s self-proclaimed revolutionaries, such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous were organized within the murky depths of the Deep Web, allowing them to operate with near impunity. One of the most feared aspects of the Deep Web—by both government agencies and corporate entities—was that it could also access back door entrances into nearly every surface net system, regardless of security protocols, with all of the activity, for the most part, untraceable. The Deep Web was considered one of the largest threats to national security, so much so that the NSA had recently dedicated an entire computing facility in Bluffdale, Utah—an enormous complex that held several acres of underground computer systems with a previously unheard of amount of computing power—with the sole purpose of indexing the entirety of the Deep Web, which was all but impossible. In short, there was simply too much data, and it was growing every day. It was a flawed strategy by design. As one hacker framed it, it is easier to know what fish in the sea you were looking for, than it was to try and track every fish in the sea. In other words, it was better to have a system that could navigate the deep and mysterious waters of the Deep Web than trying to catalogue its contents.

  It was better to have a software program like PHOEBE.

  PHOEBE, for all practical intents and purposes, was a greatly expanded version of code-breaking software. Designed by Nikki while she was at M.I.T., the program was originally purposed for two things—looking for patterns in large data sets using the nearly unlimited memory capacity of the collective hardware and clouds plugged into the system, and second (and perhaps more importantly), to learn from its own actions. By design, PHOEBE grew in both its ability and capacity. And after Nikki had used PHOEBE to hack into the Coalition Towers’ top-of-the-line security systems not too long ago, she knew that the surface net was no longer a safe place for her software life form to inhabit; so Nikki took her off-surface and into the Deep Web, choosing to hide PHOEBE among the detritus sections of the Dark Net, and only summoning her up from the depths to interact with the surface when absolutely necessary. The more PHOEBE grew in scope and power, however, the harder it was for her impact to go unnoticed. The expert renegade hackers that trolled the Deep Web couldn’t help but feel the ripples caused by PHOEBE’s movements, and they had recently nicknamed her “The Wraith.”

  “I’m going to start with cell phone numbers,” Nikki said as she typed at a furious pace. The screen of the MacBook Pro started scrolling through numbers at an unwatchably fast rate. Nikki turned to the others while she waited for PHOEBE to finish searching.

  “I’ll listen to cell phone calls. I’ll have PHOEBE triangulate on the local cell towers and get me the phone numbers and carriers of every single call that has either originated from or come into Parks’ castle since he arrived here. Once I have those numbers, I can get into the carrier’s phone records through back door channels and listen to every conversation that they’ve had in the last forty-eight hours. I’m sure within those conversations we can find out exactly what he’s planning to do with Alex.”

  “You, you can do that…?” Masha asked.

  “All cell phone calls are recorded by their carriers and held for a minimum of forty-eight hours, per the NSA. If any word in the conversation is tagged as a security threat, it’s put into storage, along with the identity of the parties, for future cross referencing. In case you didn’t notice, privacy died a long time ago,” Nikki answered. “Once I know who Parks is talking to, and what it is that they are talking about, and how Alex is involved in all of this, we can better assess his situation.”

  “Can’t you just spring the locks like you did last time?” Yaw asked.

  “Parks’ castle is old; the cells are bars and mechanical locks, like they have been for centuries. There’s nothing that can be done that way. I was there, I know. Shutting down their power would only let them know we’re here. Not to mention they have emergency generators on site. We’re going to have to get him out the old-fashioned way.”

  “You need to find a way out of Trans Dniester,” Winn said.

  They all looked at him.

  “We will go get Alex.”

  “Okay. If that’s how you want to go with this,” Nikki answered. “I can get us an out of here. I can make this place the Walking Dead if I want. And we can use the chaos as a backdrop for our exit.”

  “H
ow can you do that?” Chris asked.

  “By shutting down the power grid of the entire city if I have to.”

  33

  Prep

  “We’re just not ready yet sir,” the man with the crew cut dressed in pristine overalls said to Doctor David Boal. The man’s name was Michael Calleri, and he was the lead ground technician for the SR-73 model M2 prototype.

  “It needs to be ready to fly by this evening.”

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “The payload.”

  “Is there a weight concern?”

  “There’s a “what the fuck is going on?” concern. Sidewinders, David? On a bird like this? That’s insane. The only reason someone would want to use the AGM-122A Sidearm missile is because they’ve been around forever and about half of the planet has bought them from us, which makes them nearly impossible to trace. And at the speed this thing can go, no one’s going to know what the hell happened. Do you want to tell me what the people in the Ivory Towers are thinking?”

  Boal didn’t answer.

  “Let me guess—it’s classified.”

  “No. Classified implies Department of Defense involvement. That is not the case here.”

  “But we’re still not allowed to know.”

  “Trade secrets.”

  “Plausible deniability.”

  “This is a private sector matter that falls under corporate jurisdiction, therefore it is proprietary; and that is the reason for the nondisclosures that everyone on your team needs to sign.”

  “Proprietary, classified, it’s all the same bullshit.”

  “No it is not. It’s very important to make the distinction. Michael, the only thing that matters is that we do our jobs, no questions asked. Is that understood?”