They found a restaurant in the southernmost part of the city. Galina donned a scarf and told Alexandra to stay in the car. With dark glasses, despite the setting sun, she walked inside and ordered potato latkes.
When she came out, her daughter said she had to go to the bathroom. Galina drove her to a park they’d passed; it had been built for the Olympics. Now the grass was overgrown and the concrete paths cracked. But they found a bathroom. When Galina flushed the commode for Alexandra, it roared and raised a brown geyser that made them run like refugees under fire.
Still breathing heavily, they hurled themselves into the Macan. The night was darkening. It was the only cover Galina could find for them.
Gratefully, she started driving, but after twenty minutes realized she was lost. She didn’t dare go online to check maps, haunted, as always, by Oleg’s desire to track her down.
She found a car park and shut off her engine, thankful for the anonymity of darkness, but haunted by every pair of passing headlights.
CHAPTER 19
Lana was ready to leave for Fort Meade after less than five hours of sleep, yet she wasn’t tired. Fatigue had been overwhelmed by urgency. Just one more thing to do, but she was certain it would be the hardest task of the day: She had to say good-bye to Emma, even if the girl was asleep, because Lana was all but certain she would soon be deployed to a coastline somewhere in Russia. Regardless of the reservations that she and Holmes and the White House itself had about letting an “asset” as valuable as she enter Russian territory at a time like this, she expected to be airborne in a matter of hours. Holmes as much as said so in a message only minutes ago: “You’re our best bet.”
Our only bet, Lana had almost volleyed, which she considered less an egotistical comment on her skills than the dearth of leads available to the intelligence services.
She left her travel mug of coffee on the kitchen island and hurried upstairs to where Emma lay next to Tanesa on the foldout futon in Lana’s large bedroom. Her daughter’s eyes were closed, her breath scarcely a whisper. She had her arm draped over Tanesa’s side. They looked like they’d known each other all their lives.
In a way, they have, Lana thought, if the most important measure of a full life with someone came only after surviving a near-death experience with them. Those two had certainly endured that — and more — together.
At least Emma and Tanesa weren’t in direct peril this time. But another mother and daughter were: Galina and Alexandra Bortnik. Six thousand miles away, or thereabouts, Lana guessed. Who knew where they really were? Near a coastline. That was all Galina had revealed to her.
While it was true that Russia did not have the world’s most significant coastal cities threatened by rising seas, Galina’s hint could mean that she and her daughter were in any one of hundreds of small towns, cities, and ports from Russia’s northern seas to the Baltic and Black Seas in the west and the Caspian Sea in the south. Just thinking of the thousands of miles of shoreline — and all those radiating possibilities — made Lana realize she could be gone for a while.
No, Lana corrected herself: You could be gone for good. If she’d learned one truth since the attack on the grid, it was that there were no guarantees you’d return. God knows, so many hadn’t back then.
She kissed Emma’s forehead, thinking she’d slip away without waking her. Daylight was only now easing past the blinds. But Emma gripped her mother’s hand even before her eyes blinked open.
“You’re leaving?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m going to Meade.”
“No, I mean you’re leaving the country. I know you are. You’re going somewhere.”
Lana felt caught in the crosshairs of her own conscience. Had she been too blithe last night in assuring Emma that she wasn’t leaving? Too quick to reassure her one more time? Had Emma detected the same cosseting tone that she’d heard her whole life whenever her mother had sought to soften the toughest stories for her?
“Mom?” Emma said, demanding an answer.
“I’ll let you know if I have to go.”
Lana expected a volley of furious complaints, a temper tantrum even, though Emma hadn’t thrown one of those in a long time. Instead, her daughter shocked her: “Be safe, Mom. I want you back. And don’t lie to me anymore. I know what you do, and I know why. Someday I’m going to do it, too.”
Lana kissed her again, choking down a flood of emotion, some of it pride. Most of it, though, was barely repressed grief at the fear of dying and never seeing her daughter again, just when her deadbeat dad came back into her life. The irony would be almost piercing.
“How will I know if you’re gone?” Emma asked.
If I don’t come back, Lana thought. But she promised to let her daughter know, “no matter what.”
“For real this time?” Emma asked.
“For real.”
Lana made excellent time driving out of Bethesda. Commuter traffic had thinned considerably as social chaos affected work schedules as much as shipments of goods and the delivery of vital services.
As she drove, she received a message from Galina explaining that Oleg Dernov had left a threatening video — and pillaged Galina’s FSB files. Then, just as Lana wondered who the devil Dernov was — and whether she’d missed a message from Galina — the woman dropped a bombshelclass="underline" Dernov was the superhacker who’d been “running” Galina and the entire operation.
Galina added that Dernov was not officially FSB — a contention Lana would have Jeff Jensen chase down — and attached a copy of Dernov’s threatening video.
Lana turned it on as she merged easily onto the Beltway, glancing at her laptop on the passenger seat just long enough to catch Dernov’s smirk. She knew that she, along with many others in the nation’s intelligence services, would need to study the video closely, but she wanted to hear the gist of his message as soon as possible.
In a word, it was creepy. Dernov’s standard-issue charge that Galina had betrayed her country was one thing, but what snagged Lana’s attention much more was when he said, “I wonder, most of all, if you know the price of betraying me?” Making it personal in a way that was the very antithesis of cyberwar with its calculating, almost clinically cold cunning. His threats then went further: “I could be outside your door right now… Why don’t you take a look? I really might be there.”
Megalomaniacal, too, by claiming that tracking her down would be a “small achievement for a man who has accomplished what I have… literally changing the face of the earth.” Lana had met many men and women with ample egos in the cyberfield, but Dernov appeared to be in a class of his own, which she guessed he’d relish hearing.
His efforts to intimidate Galina included a hint at real violence when he unveiled a large, gleaming knife. Even though all Lana could do was glance at the screen while she drove, she still squirmed when he pressed the shiny tip of that blade just below his eye and told Galina that she was “blind” to what she was doing.
But what Lana took personally was Dernov’s vow that Galina and her daughter would never get out of Russia.
We’ll see about that.
Lana hurried directly to Holmes’s office. He looked up as she entered and, before he could ask, she lifted her laptop, as though in victory. “I’ve got it right here.”
He watched the video in silence. When it ended with Dernov’s threats to Galina’s erstwhile Greenpeace colleagues, Holmes shook his head: “Amazing that he’s the face of the enemy.”