“You have to agree that Vasily Vasilovich was right.” said Petrov. “It has been a huge success. There is a good chance the sanctions will be lifted.”
“You are wrong, Sergei. In the end, it will backfire.”
“Admit it, what upsets you the most is that it is Alexei Abramovich, getting credit for it.”
“He is a turd!” Borovik spat onto the ground and turned to face Petrov. “A corrupt, lying piece of shit.”
Ivanov knew better than to respond, but he and everyone else close to Borovik also knew that what infuriated Artyom the most was that General Abramovich had once been his son-in-law. He’d dumped Borovik’s frumpy daughter and their two children five years ago for a leggy, blond Russian model who seemed to have been born behind the wheel of a jet-black Maserati.
“Vasily Vasilovich may once have been a great KGB officer, a true patriot.” Borovik continued. “But he has become like the rest of them. He could not bear to stand by and watch all the other sharks tear away their pieces of our country. Vasily Vasilovich had to get the lion’s share for himself, billions and billions. He is one of the richest men in the world today.” Borovik’s voice rose with indignation. “And you and I stood by and watched. We were honest fools.”
Reflexively, Petrov put a finger to his lips and looked around them. “You know how dangerous it is to talk this way, Artyom. Especially a man in your position. Me, it does not make any difference, but you have got a wife, a family.”
Borovik wasn’t listening. “Did you see Alexei Abramovich just bought a dacha in the Rublevka for sixty million rubles? And that’s not to mention his ski chalet in Sochi and his waterfront mansion in Palm Beach. Everyone knows about this. Where in God’s name does he get such money? And that is nothing beside the wealth of our other kleptocrats. And it is all done in the open – they, with their supermodels and Ferraris and mansions all over the world.”
Petrov took a seat on a moss-covered log, extracted a couple of pills from his chest pocket, and swallowed them with water from the thermos he was carrying. “I know. My wife is always reading the gossip pages about the new trendy Moscow nightclubs and restaurants. Imagine! One is even called Siberia! All the incredibly expensive new fashions – all the coming and going – it is obscene.”
“Now with Stokes in power in the U.S.,” said Borovik, “there is no limit to what they can do, the deals they can make. Their fortunes will become even more outrageous.”
“But neither I nor you can do anything about it,” said Ivanov wearily. “We can only sit and watch the rot. The press is silenced. The opposition leaders have been bought off or murdered or imprisoned. And the others…”
“Everyone is too scared to move,” said Borovik. “It’s like the Americans who know what is going on with Stokes. They are also sitting and watching and letting Stokes have his way, just like we’re doing with our own crooked leader. But I am not going to just sit and watch.”
“What else can you do?”
Artyom paused, considering whether to confide in his friend. “This is obviously not to be told to anyone else,” he finally said.
“Agreed,” said Petrov, “though I’m not going to be around much longer to talk to anyone about anything.”
“I have established a very small group of computer experts on my staff, hackers – two men and one woman, responsible only to me. They are all very good, all very upset with what is happening. They are using their talents to, shall we say, map out the wealth of our rulers: their real estate interests, their companies, their bank accounts, their offshore holdings.”
“And what will you do with this great prize?” asked Petrov. “Who will pay any attention?”
“I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to use it,” said Artyom quietly. “Right now, it would bring nothing. Vasily Vasilovich and his people control the courts and the investigators and…”
“If he ever found out what you were doing,” said Petrov, “you would be a dead man, liquidated along with all your evidence.”
“But I have to do something. Keep gathering this information, keep my head down, watch, and wait. I may not be able to undo what is done, but that does not mean I have to accept everything until our homeland is totally destroyed.”
Petrov smiled with thin gray lips. “The only blessing from my illness, Artyom, is that I will never live to see that day.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
Manhattan
Outside in the skies above Manhattan, there was the crack of thunder, and the storm that had been threatening all day finally struck. Inside, sitting in his office, Charlie Doyle heard the wind and rain beating against the window. A half-filled glass of single malt stood on the desk. The nimble fingers of Charlie’s left hand were drumming to the beat of Kendrick Lamar’s latest rap. A pile of back issues of the hacker’s favorite, 2600, were on the floor under the desk.
In front of Charlie was a cluster of three thirty-two inch monitors. The current on-line edition of Hack! was on the left screen. On the right, the website of Kane & Levin, a prominent Manhattan tax law firm whose offices were about one hundred blocks away on 57th Street. On the center monitor was the computer screen of Geraldine Brail, a leading partner in Kane & Levin. Charlie’s computer was mirroring every one of Brail’s key stokes. In San Francisco, on the other side of the continent, Steve Penn was patched in to the same transmission. This might be pay dirt, he thought: Kane & Levin were the tax attorneys of President Walter Stokes.
Using a sophisticated encryption app, Deep Strike had begun discussing strategy as soon as Steve returned to the U.S. with his new identity. Stokes tax returns were the obvious target. The president had to be concealing disgraceful acts. Why else would he categorically refuse to make public his returns? But how to get hold of them?
“I could hack into the IRS at some level,” said Charlie “but to actually get Stokes’s tax returns, that’s something else.”
“If that were doable,” said Steve, “they’d have been hacked by now. Every investigative reporter in the country is after them.”
“Security at the IRS is tighter than a drum,” said Charlie. “Believe me, I’ve checked them out more than once. They went ape-shit a few years ago when several hundred thousand returns got hacked, but they’ve really tightened up since.”
“What about the possibility of someone in the IRS going rogue?” asked Steve. “Someone high up who has been canned by Stokes and would be pissed off enough to help us?”
“Possible,” said Charlie, “but if anyone in the organization goes digitally anywhere near those files, it sets off alarms all over the system. The hard copies are kept in a vault. Also, the penalties for revealing data from the IRS are enormous. So yeah, we might spend a few months at it, but we’d probably be wasting our time.”
“So let’s go directly after Stokes’s tax attorney,” said Sarah. “He prepares the returns, so he must have copies.”
“Maybe,” said Steve. “In any case, their security can’t be as solid as the IRS.”
“Surprising no one has already done it,” said Charlie. He’d always thrived on such challenges. Early on, he’d hacked into the Pentagon and the NSA, but he became legendary among hackers when he took over a 737 in flight, hacking into its controls via the electronics of the entertainment box beneath his economy class seat. Later he claimed he’d warned the airline in advance about the dangerous gap in security.