“Good morning, sir,” Pasternak said, sweeping her long dark hair off her shoulder. “The eight o’clock meeting is convened and waiting for you. And I know you have important business to discuss with the ministers, but, sir, I recommend you interrupt the agenda and instead start the meeting by bringing in Executive Director Vinogradov of the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications, the Mininformsvyazi.”
Vostov stopped in the hallway, halfway to the elevator. “Why?” he asked simply.
Pasternak smiled. “Sir, have you ever owned a dog? In particular, a retriever?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “My uncle had a golden retriever. When I was a boy, I’d play with him in the summers. How, exactly, is that relevant?”
“Sir, if you hold a tennis ball up, a retriever will look at you with a big smile on his face while he bounces up and down on his front paws. The moment you throw the ball, that retriever becomes a streaking bullet to get the ball. He’ll drop the ball at your feet, smile at you and keep bouncing on his front paws.”
Vostov smiled, remembering the dog he’d played with as a youth. “Go on,” he encouraged Pasternak.
Pasternak smiled sweetly. “Sir, the executive director of cyberwarfare of Mininformsvyazi s is waiting in your outer office. And he’s bouncing up and down on his front paws.”
Vostov laughed. “My, my, Tonya, you do have a way with words.”
She gave him an arch look. “I have a way with a lot of things, Mr. President, which you’d find out if you’d just ask.”
Still smiling, Vostov began walking to the elevator. “I shall bear that in mind, Tonya.” In the elevator, he felt aware of the young woman, sensing her faint perfume. He realized he was no longer anything to look at. In his mid-sixties and shorter than medium height, his hair long gone for two decades, Vostov wouldn’t gather a second glance on sidewalk on a sunny day in Moscow. It wasn’t he himself Pasternak was throwing herself at, he reminded himself, it was his power. His station. He indulged himself with a brief thought of what it must feel like to get female attention like this if there were no element of power involved.
At the conference table, a luxurious tigerwood brought in from Indonesia, the ministers were already seated, standing as Vostov entered. He waved them back to their seats. “Morning, gentlemen.” Pasternak brought in his Turkish coffee, for which he’d gained a taste on a long-forgotten mission in Turkey in the first decade of the century. He took a long pull of the scalding brew, the aroma of it making him feel more alert already. “Well, I’m of the understanding that we have a senior visitor from the Ministry of Information Technologies. Shall we hear him out?”
Pasternak ushered in the executive director, a rumpled short and portly older man in a brown suit, with long, disheveled white hair, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses, holding a laptop and a folder of papers. He bowed slightly to Vostov, then to the ministers. Pasternak introduced him, then withdrew to the outer office. Vostov smiled to welcome the man and set him at ease. He knew the director had a presentation for him, but Vostov wanted to cut to the bottom line, without making the director feel slighted.
“You have a presentation for us, Director Vinogradov?”
“Sir, yes, I do. Did you want me to project it or look at paper copies?”
Vostov smiled. “Sit down there, Vitalik.” He pointed to the empty chair directly opposite his on the long side of the table. “Let us pretend it is Christmas dinner, and you are telling the family about the juicy secret that is in your dry presentation.”
Vinogradov nodded and hurried to the seat. “Well, Mr. President, ministers, Mininformsvyazi has generated a worm to counter the Medved’ Grizli worm that was inserted, presumably, by the Americans, and which still has much of our forces grounded.”
“Go on,” Vostov encouraged the director.
“We call it chernaya vdova pauk, Mr. President. Black widow spider. It will do the same thing to the American military that their Medved’ Grizli did to our forces. Their aircraft avionics and engine control computers will brick. Their military air traffic control computers and radars will all refuse to switch on. Their radios will simply stop working. Their ships’ navigation, communications and propulsion plant controls will all fail in the powered-off mode. And if you direct, we can make their cell communications towers fail near the military bases, as a little extra instead of responding exactly in kind to their worm.”
“This is brilliant, Director Vinogradov,” Vostov said, smiling. “But don’t execute the cell tower part of the plan. I just want their air forces and ships to stop working and be unable to talk to each other.”
“It will be done as soon as you order it, Mr. President.” He gave Vostov an eager look. Pasternak was right, Vostov thought. The man was bouncing on his front paws.
“But only their surface ships. You have to engineer this worm to leave their submarines unaffected.”
“Yes, Mr. President. The submarine tenders and torpedo retrievers will be shut down hard, but their submarines themselves will be untouched.”
“Good. So, how will you get this black widow spider into the American systems?”
Vinogradov smiled. “The American Secretary of State, Seymour Klugendorf, keeps a secure server rack in the basement of his Annapolis house. He had it installed so he could work from home more, he claimed. The commute to the State Department in Washington makes the man carsick. In our explorations of the American networks, this server was found to be lacking certain defenses the rest of the State Department has routinely installed. Either he missed an upgrade or a cyber patch, or they installed an obsolete system. In any case, it is vulnerable. We’ve been extracting emails and diplomatic cables from it for three months.”
Vostov frowned. “This could be another Pueblo Pipeline,” he said. “Or an Aldrich Ames Corrupted Conduit operation.” American intelligence agencies over the last hundred years had realized that the Russians never believed anything printed in the mainstream media, considering it all propaganda. Russians only believed what they spied for, the harder won the information, the more trust it was given. But that had become a vulnerability in the First Cold War, when several so-called intelligence victories by the KGB just turned out to be methods of the Americans to plant fictional and false information into the Kremlin, information that was trusted without verification.
Like in the 1980s, when stolen communications revealed that the American “Star Wars” missile defense shield worked perfectly and that the USA was immune to any Russian nuclear attack, and that plans had been initiated for an American surprise nuclear first strike of the Soviet Union. The back-and-forth about the timing and content of the American nuclear attack had gone from the mundane to the terrifying. The messages about the exact tactics involved even mentioned then-President Gorbachev by name, targeting a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb for the exact location of his dacha. The intelligence harvest had prompted Gorbachev to come to the bargaining table and agreeing to haul down the Soviet flag and to effectively surrender to the Americans. So it was, when the Mininformsvyazi stated they’d won an intelligence victory, Vostov remained deeply skeptical.
“Director Vinogradov,” Vostov said, “let me remind you of how, twenty years after the ending of the Soviet Union, we found out that all the information magnificently harvested from Pueblo and Ames had been completely false. The so-called Strategic Defense Initiative—Star Wars—had never worked and it still doesn’t. All those messages about test results had been fabrications. And there had never been any plans for a nuclear first strike against Russia. It had been an elaborate hoax, planted in Soviet planners’ minds by evil American intelligence agencies. Our recovery took decades and is still ongoing.”