She told herself to look, really look at that sub. Hacking it, hijacking a nuclear missile, had been almost inconceivable — until it happened. Just as it had been difficult to comprehend the atomic bomb before Hiroshima, or the most virulent hate before the Holocaust. Or any number of other mass deaths.
She also kept the sound muted for the sub. Just look, she told herself again. She didn’t want to be distracted by the white noise coming from a submarine that had become a submerged crypt.
The only person she saw alive was First Class Petty Officer Hector Gomez, who had moved back into frame.
What are the odds, she wondered, that the man in charge of the Missile Control Center had survived? The very officer who knew the intricacies of launching the missiles.
Yes, she was aware he’d been vetted thoroughly since the hijacking, but she called Jensen anyway and told her CyberFortress VP to join her at NSA. She’d always made sure he was available full-time to run the show at her security firm, but if they didn’t stop this madness quickly, there would be no CF or much else of value to save.
He arrived looking graver than she’d ever seen him, and that was saying quite a lot about her Mormon right-hand man with his rock solid beliefs in a family-filled afterlife.
She pointed to the screen.
“Poor guy,” the navy veteran said. “Can you imagine being down there, still alive?”
“That’s why I want you to check out Gomez every which way from Sunday. I know DOD did that, but I’d like you to do it one more time. Come in cold. Don’t take any of the routes DOD did. Treat Gomez like a blank slate in that regard, the tabula rasa of cyberspace.”
“You sure you want me to take time for that now?”
Jensen had been helping Lana with the link analysis and network profiling to figure out just what was going on in that apartment building in Moscow.
“Yes, this is your priority.”
He looked dubious, and she could hardly blame him. But she was in a “fire all guns” mode, and that included questioning even the putative heroics of a sailor like Gomez.
Besides, she’d begun to worry the hacker she’d been communicating with anonymously had detected Jeff’s fingerprints analyzing the metadata from the apartment building, light to invisible though she believed them to be.
She returned to that data bulge on her own, keeping a satellite feed of the Moscow building in the corner of one of her screens. She wasn’t sure why. She’d had the impulse so she’d put it there. A reminder of the hacker’s essential humanity, perhaps? His or her habitat? Sometimes her instincts paid off, so she left it there.
In the next hour she came across emails to an Oleg Dernov. Those provided the first concrete information beyond the large-scale communication patterns. It was so easily unearthed that Lana was suspicious. More so when she found Dernov was a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and the son of one of Russia’s wealthiest plutocrats.
“I’ve been handed this,” Lana said aloud to herself. Set up? she wondered. Disinformation had long been the coin of the realm for so much of the spy trade. Why would it be any different in cyberspace?
Or?
The hacker, for whatever reason, wanted to give Dernov to her.
Hmmm. Lana stared at the IRC page on her screen that she shared with the hacker in that building, glancing at the satellite feed once more. At least she hoped it was shared only by the two of them. She typed a message:
“I’ve found a man’s name. Prominent. Did you give that to me?”
She wondered how long she’d have to wait for an answer, imagining the seas rising a foot or two before the hacker deigned to respond.
Not much more than a second, as it turned out: “Yes.”
“Why?”
“You are too intelligent not to know.”
Or I’m too stupid not to see that I’m getting set up here. Worked, as it were, by a twenty-first-century barker in a cybersideshow who likely wanted to lure away her attention and keep her busy with worthless distractions.
She decided to hold off on a response, searching the metadata for more easily accessed emails. She found the hacker had all but put a welcome mat down for her, starting with several emails to a pediatric oncologist named Dr. Kublakov. That was when she learned that the hacker whom she’d been communicating with might be an individual named Galina Bortnik. Also—possibly—that she had a six-year-old daughter named Alexandra with leukemia.
Personal facts, now, served on a platter?
More to the point, what does she want from me?
Could this be the hacker’s version of the classic honey trap, but instead of seducing with sex the hacker preyed upon the vulnerable emotions of a mother with a daughter?
Lana’s skin suddenly went cold.
Could she know that as well?
Don’t be stupid, Lana chided herself at once. Of course she could. Or they could, if the hacker were part of a group, as she’d originally presumed. Lana’s cover had been revealed after last year’s attack and her counterattack. Her identity in the real world was clearly known. The question, though, was did “Galina” have the technological wherewithal to have determined that Lana Elkins was the person she was speaking to in cyberspace? If the answer was yes, Lana realized that she might have met her match. The very thought produced a deeply uncomfortable and wholly unfamiliar feeling.
“Let’s come clean with each other,” Lana now wrote back.
“How do I know it is you?”
This gets convoluted, Lana thought, because the answer to that question depended on who the hacker thought “you” was. Lana could hardly answer without knowing that.
“We need to talk.”
“On a phone.”
“Yes,” Lana replied, excited, wary, heart pounding, yet bone weary from so little sleep for so many nights.
“Good.”
Here we go, Lana thought, sensing a riptide of events about to sweep her far from familiar shores. “Do you want me to call you?”
“No. Give me a secure line to call. If it is not secure, I will know and you will never hear from me again. That would be a great loss to the world.”
Now the hacker was trying too hard to lure her. Or perhaps too earnest for her own good?
Already accepting the female pronoun.
Lana thought about giving her the number for her secure NSA office landline phone, then shook her head. If she’s really good, I’ll never hear from her. So instead she gave up her cell number, which was as secure as the President’s. The hacker left the message board an instant later.
Given the pace of their back-and-forth messaging, Lana thought it likely that her phone would ring posthaste. The world had come to expect everything now. She was no exception, especially at this moment.
It didn’t ring. She looked at her phone. “Come on, damn it.”
“What was that?” Jensen asked, hurrying into her office.
Almost two and a half hours had passed since she’d redeployed him.
“Nothing,” she replied. “What do you have?”
“Almost eighteen months ago Gomez — whose real name is Grisha Lisko, and is no more Mexican American than I am — became a member in good standing of the U.S. Navy, with goodness knows how-much help from his friends just across the Russian border. I say that because he’s Ukrainian by birth.”
“So he’s a sleeper agent.”
“That’s right, and he’s finally awake.”