No. Not even Kharlamov and Ortega combined were wealthy enough for what Sophie suspected. Like she said, it had to be a nation-state.
Like Russia. Could Anya be a double agent for the Kremlin? No, that made no sense: Russia’s president was scheduled for execution with the rest of the G8.
… Although he was just a figurehead. The real power lay with their prime minister. And losing their own president would add credibility to claims of innocence after the attack.
It occurred to me that if I were a former KGB agent turned Russian prime minister, and I was planning an all-out military assault on the United States, one level of deniable catspaws wouldn’t be enough. I would want an intermediary to reach out to Ortega and orchestrate all the details. A powerful and visible backup scapegoat who no one would connect to the Kremlin. For instance, a billionaire who had famously been exiled from Russia and very publicly nearly assassinated by the Russian government.
What if all that had been a deception, to put Kharlamov beyond suspicion?
Russians were everywhere in this mess, now that I thought about it. Ortega’s pet hacker, Dmitri. The hackers he said had brought him the Axon designs, Shadow and Octal; also Russian. And then there was Anya.
Anya who had begun to date Jesse, Sophie’s ex-boyfriend, shortly after Sophie published her first Axon paper; who had helped him to create the secret but powerful Grassfire network, whose tentacles reached seemingly everywhere; who had funded Convoy and thus won direct access to Sophie and her work; who in Haiti had been full of questions about the US military’s anti-drone capabilities; and who had demanded the secret override sequence within hours of my arrival in London, and seemed profoundly relieved and triumphant when she received it.
“Oh my God,” I said aloud.
Had I just given the enemy the one thing that might have stopped the attack? Had that whole notion of using Argus to find Ortega’s drones just been misdirection, to lure me into surrendering our sole secret weapon? Was she out there right now not to hunt them down, but only to verify what I had told her?
It was just supposition, I reassured myself, as I rushed back to the skylit studio. We didn’t even know Sophie’s apocalyptic scenario was true. The only evidence was circumstantial at best. And even if someone had smuggled a massive drone armada in to the USA, that was only the first step. They needed people to move them around the country, distribute them, warehouse them, hide them, reprogram them with new releases, arm them, launch them. That meant a vast and secret conspiracy, scores if not hundreds of people, an entire hidden network.
Like the KGB. They were called the FSU nowadays, of course, the name KGB had gone out with the cold war. The cold war that maybe had never actually ended. Russia was ruled by former KGB agents, and they were no less resourceful, no less capable, and no less dangerous than in the bad old days. Only weeks ago I had read about a dissident Chechen gunned down outside his Dubai apartment by masked assassins.
But even if Sophie was right, even if the Russians were planning to attack America, surely I was just being paranoid about Anya. The handwriting was coincidence, not evidence. She was on our side. Soon that would be clear again, soon this sick feeling of overwhelming guilt, like I had just accidentally condemned all my friends to death, would go away -
The MacBooks in the corner studio displayed starfield screen-savers. I sat down at one and swiped impatiently at the trackpad. A login screen popped up. I stared as if it was a pet dog unexpectedly replaced by a rabid wolf. Those machines had not demanded passwords before.
I decided to call Jesse on the land line. Just to check in with him. Just to see what was going on. There would be no harm in it, and just then I really needed to hear him tell me that I had not just damned the USA to bloody destruction.
There was no dial tone. I pushed 9, but nothing happened.
“Can I assist?” a man asked.
He had appeared as if by magic at the door, dressed in the black-and-ivory uniform of Kharlamov’s servants, but it didn’t seem to quite fit. His eyes were hard, his nose was much-broken, and his Russian accent was harsh and thick; but more than that, he didn’t disappear into the background like Kharlamov’s other liveried men. This was a man you couldn’t ignore. He didn’t seem like a servant. He seemed like a soldier.
“Just need to make a phone call,” I smiled apologetically, “what do I dial to get out?”
“Phones are down.”
“I need to make a phone call.”
He said nothing, just watched me, with those cold flat snake’s eyes.
“Never mind.” I replaced the phone, tried not to panic. It was all true. I had no proof except my instincts, but I was suddenly horribly sure of it. “Maybe I’ll go for a walk.”
“Not outside,” the man said blandly. “House is sealed off. Security threat.”
“What kind of threat?”
“From Moscow. From Kremlin.”
I stared at him.
“For security we all must remain in house, sir.” His face and voice were utterly expressionless. “Perhaps you should return to your room.”
“Yes.” I could hardly hear myself. I felt like I was falling through the floor towards the molten centre of the earth. “Yes, of course.” There would have been a keylogger and a screen snapper on the computer I had used to chat with Sophie. Now they knew that we knew. Because of me, again.
The well-dressed thug smiled at me politely. Former Russian Special Forces? Maybe. Or maybe a highly trained and deadly FSU agent. Just like Anya Azaryeva.
Chapter 60
I lay on the luxurious bed with its thousand-thread-count sheets and tried to tell myself that this couldn’t really be happening. Anya had not played us like Mata Hari. She and her billionaire uncle – or was he really either? – were not secretly employed by the Russian government to cripple America with thousands of Sophie’s drones. I was not being held under mansion arrest, incommunicado.
I had to tell someone of my suspicions, had to try and get out, or at least to find some way to communicate with the outside world. But there was no way. There were no elegant hacks available to me here, no drones, no computers. Nothing to work with, and no way out.
Wait. No. There was a computer in this room. The iPod Touch on the dresser, the one filled with Jesse’s favourite music. Had he loaded it with his favourite apps, too?
He had. Including WireShark, a tool for breaking into poorly secured wireless networks. There were several Wi-Fi signals within range. They could seal me into this mansion, but they couldn’t keep out London’s dizzying array of wireless networks. And while all were secured, one used the deprecated WEP protocol, vulnerable to WireShark’s predations.
I sat back on the bed, cradling the iPod Touch in my hands, breathing a little easier as WireShark did its thing. All was not yet lost. At least I could communicate.
Once in, I called up GChat and reconnected to Sophie. I had to type with one finger, so her text spilled onto the screen first:
SW: lotek and i have been doing some investigating. last month a shipping container was sent from dubai to one of ortega’s front companies in london. same import/export company has been sending a lot to venezuela, too. hard to be sure, all the paperwork’s in cyrillic, but our guess is ortega outsourced drone manufacturing and chip fabrication to a russian-owned facility in dubai.
I winced at cyrillic and russian-owned. There still wasn’t any hard proof, but the circumstantial evidence was growing mountainous.
JK: we have a major fucking problem.