She wiped it down with a cleaning wipe before answering: “Go ahead.” The tone of her voice and the look on her face suggested she didn’t know who was calling.
“I’m closing in on Popov’s headquarters here in Moscow.”
“What?!” She held the phone away from her and yelled, “Buzz! Angel!” She waved the men toward her and put the phone on speaker.
“Whatever Popov hit in Vegas gave him a massive info dump. He’s got a data center set up staffed by hackers that are evaluating the information. Information he can sell for billions,” said Kit.
“Billions?” asked Buzz.
“And he pinched it during a blackout,” said Angel.
“What did you say?” asked Jen.
“I said he pinched it, which means he stole it.”
“A ‘pinch’ means something else to telecom people. Kit, give me a second, I might know what they hit.” Jen’s fingers flew over one of her keyboards.
“Jen, what is it?”
“This is not good,” she said scanning her monitors. “America has two main fiber-optic trunk lines that go coast-to-coast, maintained by AT&T. Buried underground all the way across the country, in trenches that are anywhere from fifteen to thirty feet deep. But the trunks, which are literally as big around as a tree trunk, have to come up into facilities nicknamed PICs—repeater stations—you know, like a huge relay switch to keep the information going. I didn’t realize it, but the southern trunk runs right through Las Vegas.”
“What kind of data is on these trunk lines?” asked Kit.
“The cream of the crop: government agencies, including three-letter agencies, the big global banks, stock exchanges, investment houses, credit unions—I mean, we’re talking all of Wall Street and some of the most sensitive stuff coming out of D.C., including the White House and their hotwires.”
“Jeez Louise,” said Angel.
“But AT&T must monitor the signals closely so bad guys can’t tap in,” said Kit.
“They do. And I don’t think it’s possible to intercept all of that traffic simultaneously. There are something like thirty thousand fiber-optic strands that make up one trunk. AT&T has good system scans. A bad guy would have to physically splice in to each and every fiber-optic strand, one at a time, and if that happened, an alarm would go off at AT&T.”
“If they did the splice during a blackout?” asked Buzz.
“No alarm.”
“What if Popov figured out how to splice into the whole trunk—all thirty thousand strands—during a blackout?” asked Kit.
“He’d have the whole enchilada!” said Angel.
“Yes and no. If Popov is somehow intercepting the contents of the entire trunk, there would have to be equipment in the PIC right now. But they couldn’t know which of the thirty thousand strands had the golden data, because ninety percent of the traffic on the trunk would be of no resale value. It would take time to find the ten percent, the three thousand strands that have high-dollar or intelligence value.”
“But I thought you said they might have intercepted the whole thing?” asked Angel.
“Even if they have, how could they transmit out what they’ve spliced into? They’d have to have thirty thousand fiber-optic strands to send the information to Moscow, and they don’t have that. They could only be transmitting out and examining the contents of a few strands at a time at most. At most.”
“How much time does it take to examine each strand, Jen?” asked Kit, rubbing his temples.
“Fifteen minutes or so is my guess. Maybe less if there is a lot of data traffic on it.”
“Where in Las Vegas is the PIC?”
She zoomed in the map on her laptop screen. “South Las Vegas Boulevard, just a few miles from us. The Russians will be set up in some kind of basement room where the fiber-optic trunk comes up out of the ground and runs into a huge relay switch, then goes out the other side and back into the ground on its way to the next repeater station.”
“Recon the PIC first. The Russians might be watching it. And think about how they gained access—I mean, how could they be set up in there without the AT&T technicians knowing it?”
“Sounds like we need to get in there, pronto,” said Buzz.
“While you’re doing that, we’re going to hit Popov’s hackers here.”
“Who is we?”
“Yulana and me.”
“That’s suicide!” protested Angel.
“Kit, be reasonable,” said Buzz. “Let us hit the PIC first. If the Russians are there, we grab them and we’ll all be heroes. Then the Company can help you take down Popov’s HQ.”
“You’re forgetting the CIA tried to wipe me at Nellis, Buzz. But even if they loved me, in a million years, they would not go in hot to take down a target in Moscow, a block from Red Square. It’s up to us,” said Kit emphatically. “Jen, how many strands could they have intercepted so far?”
Jen did the numbers, then took on a sober tone. “I’d say about five hundred.”
Kit shook his head. “That just reinforces to me that we have to hit them right now. How do we know the data they’ve gotten so far will be in the computers at Popov’s headquarters? Couldn’t they have sent it elsewhere?”
“Yulana could confirm that,” said Jen. “There will be a separate room for the computer servers. I’ll explain it to her. But you will need to destroy the servers.”
“I know.”
“You got a plan, boss?”
“You know my plan, Angel. The aggressive-queen, no-strategy strategy.”
“We forgot to tell him about Staci!” said Jen.
Buzz had heard through his Metro PD contact about the shoot-out and rescue at Siegel Suites. The press were playing along and had withheld Staci Bennings’s name. Jen had even managed to speak to Staci briefly on the phone.
“I didn’t forget,” said Buzz.
Angel and Jen both looked at him quizzically. “Forget Yulana. Kit is going to try and take down Popov’s headquarters by himself. It’s great news about Staci, but if we told him, it would have taken some of his edge off. And right now he needs all of the edge he can get.”
CHAPTER 49
Yulana offered vodka, but Kit shook his head in refusal. He got up from the couch and crossed to where his Fender Stratocaster rested in a stand. The guitar had been given to him by his mom, Gina, when he was in junior high. So he picked it up and held it, maybe for the last time. Holding the Fender brought back lots of memories, almost all of them good. Holding it also brought him pain from the gunshot wound to his upper arm. He could feel it bleeding again, probably as a result of the scuffling he had had to do with Sergei Lopatin before the man died.
“You can play guitar?” asked Yulana.
“Badly,” he said as his gaze shifted to the table where all of the weapons and other gear were laid out. From being lead guitarist of a high school blues band, to having been raised with privilege and love and financial support and opportunity, the twists of fate that comprised his life had lead him to this very night, standing in a Moscow safe house full of exotic weapons of death, with his future, his very life and the lives of others near and dear to him, on the line. What a long strange trip it had been.
He held no regrets, since you can’t change the past, making regrets a waste of time. So he gently put down the guitar and crossed to the table, where he began to methodically check each piece of equipment, stuffing them into pockets, pouches, and packs. He eased a futuristic-looking, sound-suppressed, P90 submachine gun into a special large shoulder holster, then put on a light jacket to cover it. He’d culled together a nice, sophisticated arsenal but held little hope he could actually penetrate Popov’s HQ and free Kala. He gave himself a 30 percent chance, especially if the migraine hit; his migraines could be incapacitating—blistering pain, vomiting, and vision affected to the point he could barely see.