His assistants got busy. One of Popov’s shell corporations had long ago leased space on two of the strands on the southern trunk. Data was now being copied, without anyone’s knowledge, from randomly selected fibers to Popov’s leased fibers. It would take the geeks back at Popov’s facility in Moscow about ten minutes to determine what kind of data they were looking at and from which company or institution it came from.
Ten minutes to check two strands meant one hour to check twelve strands, and there were thirty thousand strands. It might take weeks or months to find all of the dedicated strands of the big banks, the big brokerage houses, the global corporate behemoths, POTUS, and other supersensitive government entities, but chances are they would be found.
Technicians rarely inspected the room where Alex and his coworkers now sat. Once a month, if that. So with an inspection having just recently been performed, Alex comfortably concluded they could obtain the data from over eight thousand strands in the coming four weeks without fear of interruption.
And since Popov’s men had the AT&T site under close surveillance, Alex would have plenty of time to pull his gear and retreat back into the tunnel without a trace if an inspection team showed up. Once the inspectors left, the Russians would have to engineer another blackout before they could splice in again.
The problem with doing so was that any blackout that was location specific to the PIC would result in AT&T reinspecting the facility pronto. But with tonight’s chaos from the e-bomb and the cascading blackouts all over town, AT&T technicians would be busy for many weeks dealing with a host of critical issues elsewhere.
Although it frightened him to possess such knowledge, Bobrik knew more then he was supposed to know about the deceptions. His lips formed a smile just thinking of the brilliant audacity of the plan: the theft of a half-billion dollars’ worth of diamonds was merely a feint, a smoke screen for the real theft, which was now transpiring unnoticed. What brilliant maskirovka! It made the deceptions employed by Vladimir Putin to annex the Crimea appear clumsy.
Alex marveled at the possibilities he had just presented to Popov’s hackers. They could not only steal data, they could change data! Or intercept or override communications! Stock market manipulation, anyone? Now that was real power. One was only limited by imagination in terms of what damage could be done by changing data. The economic and intelligence implications were staggering.
Since there was also a massive amount of garbage data on the thirty thousand lines—from universities, cities and townships, countless state government agencies, entertainment and news organizations—it might take some time for Popov’s Moscow team to hit real pay dirt.
And although he wasn’t privy to the whole operation, Alex assumed the Mafia kingpin had buyers standing by, ready to shell out billions for certain information. If Popov could sell data that would enable a crooked enterprise to scam $20 billion from Bank of America, well, paying him only $1 billion for the info, plus a 10 percent—$2 billion—commission was a good deal. Or perhaps Popov himself would scam the $20 billion.
Calculating conservatively, Alex concluded that this deception, in a very short period of time, would make Viktor Popov the richest person in the world.
Georgia Anderson sat at her workstation in the AT&T Global Network Operations Center in Bedminster, New Jersey. The tempo of activity in the massive room seemed normal, but Georgia was right now running down information on something very abnormal. Las Vegas was being rocked by cascading energy blackouts, and that didn’t happen every day.
She had checked very carefully and was certain there had been no indication that the southern fiber-optic trunk line had been compromised. Since the severing of the northern cable, she and three other employees had been tasked specifically to closely monitor any and all issues related to the southern trunk. She could order the immediate inspection of any PICs in the blackout areas, but the radio traffic she’d monitored suggested that the AT&T crews were already shifting into emergency mode and had their hands full.
So Georgia Anderson sent an e-mail requesting an inspection of the AT&T facility on South Las Vegas Boulevard, “as time permits.”
Her brain told her that was the sensible thing to do, since she could see from the log that the building had just recently been inspected, but her gut didn’t like the Vegas event coming on the heels of what happened in Wyoming. There had been nothing in the press or on TV news, but scuttlebutt ran rampant that terrorists had blown the northern trunk. A massive effort to make repairs ASAP was under way, and upper management was supposedly conducting a top-to-bottom reevaluation of how to better secure the fiber-optic trunk lines.
Georgia thought about that as she tasted her lukewarm hazelnut-flavored coffee. She had lots of ideas about making the thousands of miles of trunk lines more secure, but it would cost big bucks. Meaning her ideas were nonstarters. So she just stared at the huge monitor depicting the map of the entire trunk line and looked for anomalies as she sipped her coffee.
Bobby Chan and Ron Franklin stood in one of the laundry rooms at the Siegel Suites complex on West Tropicana. An open window allowed the sweet smell of hashish to waft into the dirty room, which needed new linoleum, paint, counters, and machines. Other than that, the laundry room was fine.
JoAnn Lennox, the friend of the front-desk clerk, wore tight stretch pants in spite of being about fifty pounds overweight. Chan wasn’t exactly a poster boy for a weight-reduction program, either, but he tried to hide his obesity behind a sport coat. Lennox flaunted her flab with a come-and-get-it-boys insouciance. Chan and Franklin waited as she studied the 8x10 photo of Staci Bennings.
“No, never seen her. Cute, though,” she said, exhaling cigarette smoke.
“So tell us about the blonde in three-fourteen,” said Chan.
“I try not to smoke in my place, so I step out onto the walkway in front of my unit to light up. Or I’ll sit at the open window and blow the smoke out. Anyway, the blonde smokes, too. She must go outside twenty times a day to have a smoke.”
“Ever talk to her?”
“I gave up trying. She’d see me, but look away. Made it clear she didn’t want to talk.”
“So you never heard her speak?”
“Well, one time I had my window open and she was smoking and then started to pace a little as she talked into her cell phone. She was talking some kind of gibberish.”
“Gibberish?”
“A foreign language.”
“Russian?”
“Don’t know. I never had a Russian man.”
“What about the guy with her, Gregory?” asked Franklin.
“Never seen him.”
“Do they have a routine? You know come and go at certain times? Or could she be hooking, bringing guys into the room?”
“Nobody goes in and out except her, from what I’ve seen. She don’t look happy, that’s for sure. She leaves the complex three times a day to buy food, that’s it. McDonald’s in the morning, tacos for lunch, In-N-Out Burger for dinner.”
“All those fast-food joints are within a block of here.”
JoAnn nodded. “Usually within an hour after she’s brought the food back, she puts a trash bag outside the door.”
“She leaves it there?”
“Until the next time she goes down the stairs.”
“Was there a bag of trash outside her door just now when you came down?” asked Chan.
“Sure was.”
CHAPTER 40
Popov intended to fly over the Strip and skirt to the north of McCarran Airport as he headed east. He didn’t even care that the airspace over the Strip was Class B airspace, the most restricted category. He was flying low, and the R66 was such a small bird, he doubted the McCarran radar had been painting him since he took off from Mainichi Auction House. A van was waiting for him at a large plot of barren land off of Boulder Highway. He would then be ferried to Perkins Field in Overton, Nevada, an uncontrolled public airstrip where the Citation XLS sat fueled and ready. The Citation would fly him into Mexican airspace and embark on a hopscotch journey back to Moscow.