“Galina girl, you have come back to nest in the FSB files. I wonder why you are doing that. I wonder if you are betraying your own country now. But of course you are. Do you know that by betraying Mother Russia you are betting your own blood, and your daughter’s, on an act so terrible it can only fail? I wonder, most of all, if you know the price of betraying me? I will have you again. That is the price. Yes, in the midst of so many responsibilities, of so many great historic achievements — of literally changing the face of the earth — I am also on your trail. Why? Because you must and will be stopped. I could be outside your door right now. That would not even be a small achievement for a man who has accomplished what I have in the past few days. Why don’t you take a look? I really might be there.”
Galina paused the video and looked up. She couldn’t help herself. It was as if she suddenly believed in ghosts, or the idea that a bloodthirsty killer could be hiding under her bed. Or outside your door, she thought. After all, the rational side of her knew what Oleg was suggesting — that he was actually doing all this in real time only feet away — was supremely unlikely, but not impossible. That was what made her so uneasy.
She stared at the door, genuinely frightened that it would swing open and he’d storm in. No, she told herself. If he wanted you, he’d have grabbed you by now. So that made no sense. But neither did this:
“That’s right, Galina. I know you so well. You are wondering where I am, and if I can get you. The answer is yes, but how am I going to do it?” He smiled, so genuinely that it raised the hairs on the back of her neck. “That’s a secret you can’t hack. You’ll know that’s true when I put my hands on you and Alexandra. There can be only one reason you have disappeared: you betrayed me.”
He raised a big knife. It looked like a blade a hunter would use to slay a boar. He ran the shiny tip across his cheek to just below his eye, pressing the flat side against the very bottom of the socket. So close to his eyeball that she flinched.
“You are blind to what you are doing, Galina. You’ll never get across a border. A short, twenty-six-year-old woman with a sick, six-year-old daughter? Good luck. I’d like to see you hack your way through that.” He turned the blade till it reflected the light.
“And when you are caught, guess who you’ll be delivered to? Me, because you are my responsibility, just like Alexandra is yours. You will see that you have betrayed your little girl’s trust. Everyone who means anything to you in the coming days will also suffer. Good friends. Your former colleagues at Greenpeace. We’ll get them all. That has been made clear to me, so it is only fair that I make that clear to you.”
He waved good-bye with the knife, letting it catch the light again. She wondered how long ago he’d posted the video. She worked for several minutes trying to determine the answer before deciding she had bigger priorities.
She also wondered what the posted video would mean to Lana Elkins. Would she believe her now, if she actually saw it? Or would she consider it an elaborate orchestration?
Galina still wanted to hack her files for Elkins, but when she finally worked her way past Oleg’s video, she found they were missing. Completely removed. After all that, she had nothing to offer Elkins. Why would the NSA star ever believe her now?
Oleg was not outside her door, but he was nearby — on a hilltop overlooking Voronezh. He wasn’t certain Galina was in the city that spread out before him, but Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov had been murdered on the main highway heading south — and so ruthlessly that Oleg was appalled, even offended, that a man working for him had been treated with such cruelty. A bullet and a Bic pen? He still could hardly believe it.
He thought Galina might have braced herself to backtrack through Moscow, when she most wanted to leave that city—and for good reason, he chuckled to himself — but he doubted she’d have the stomach for that. Which would mean that if she were heading south she would have to pass through the city before him.
Pass through? Maybe not.
She might have been so tired, so stressed-out by the time she arrived with her cancer kid that she would have been eager to rest. Made sense. That was when an almost feral presentiment told him that if he were to just look, really look around Voronezh, he’d find her.
He gazed, once again, at the city. His eyes roved left to right.
Then again, he thought: intuition was one thing, Google was another.
“Places of interest.” He found a literary museum built in the eighteenth century. How quaint. Named after a poet Oleg had never heard of. A house bearing the name of an agronomist. A city square. A monastery.
None of it aroused his instincts, so he googled “Places to stay.”
An art hotel. He groaned. Holiday Inn. He gave his phone the finger. A hostel. Possibly, even likely before Galina became a mom, but not with a sick child. And the monastery again.
It had come up twice, like a slot machine with two cherries. Galina could be the third. The thought first amused, then intrigued him.
From where he stood on the hill, he should be able to see the monastery; according to what he read online, it had been carved from a mountain so it would always be prominent to the faithful. He certainly considered himself faithful to the mission of finding — and killing—Galina.
He was trying like hell to pick out the monastery when Numero Uno texted him.
Until now, he had always welcomed hearing from Uno. But the Ukrainian hacker had been badgering him for the go-ahead for the second Trident II, reminding Oleg that the missile was ready for launch.
“I am going to bury it in the ice sheet this time before it explodes,” he added. “That will melt even more ice and send a tsunami all the way to Asia.”
“Not yet. No means no,” he texted Uno back. It was like dealing with a two-year-old.
Oleg had his own people to answer to, and they thought there was plenty of flooding in the world right now, with terrific results: Canada, Norway, Denmark, and, of course, Russia, were pulling their ships out of the Arctic region. The only stubborn nation was the U.S., which was ruled by idiots. They were like bad poker players trying to raise the ante with the worst possible cards. The Russian President was known to be laughing at his pathetic rival in Washington.
So there was no need to launch the twenty-three missiles that were left. How much radiation do we really want, Uno?
But he could see that Uno was intoxicated with the power of being the man with his finger on the button. And Oleg understood that: with the coordinates fixed on the Smith Glacier, just south of Thwaites, Oleg felt twitches of envy over Uno’s chance to play nuclear plenipotentiary.
“Not now,” Oleg insisted in a postscript. “Wait as I have instructed you.”
“I don’t want to wait. Waiting is a mistake,” Uno replied with unmitigated gall. “Waiting makes us look weak and fearful.”
What was Uno really saying? Oleg wished he’d actually met the Ukrainian in person at some point. You can be in nearly constant contact with someone for three years, as he and Uno had been, but that was still not knowing him.
While Uno had done exemplary work with Grisha Lisko, the only reason the pair had actually been able to pull off the hijacking of the Delphin was the tomes of research by Russia’s own cadre of hard-core FSB hackers who had made countless incursions into the U.S. Navy’s command center for the Atlantic fleet in Norfolk, Virginia.