“Almost too bizarre, but cyberspace has always had a disproportionate share of brilliant crazies.”
“When are you going to video link with her? Soon, I hope.”
Lana checked her watch. “In less than thirty minutes.”
“We want you to do it in your office. Keep it as normal as possible, plus there’s no telling whether she’s already seen your office.”
An allusion to remote activation of computer cameras, though Lana had as much security protecting her system as anyone up to and including the President.
“I doubt she’s seen my office, but I’d prefer to do it there for the reason you first stated, keeping it nice and normal. With your flowers in the background,” she added. Delivery of the deputy director’s weekly bouquet had not been stopped by the crisis.
“We’ll have our voice analysts and psychiatrist present. I want to keep the group small, though. Everybody will have a chance to go over the recordings of both Bortnik and Dernov later.”
“I don’t see how the Russians can play innocent after this,” Lana said. “The video was embedded in FSB files, for God’s sakes.”
“They’ll say he’s a great hacker and messed with their files, and then they’ll make a big deal of saying they’ll arrest him as soon as possible. But that won’t happen until they finish whatever business they have planned with those missiles. That’s what they want,” Holmes added matter-of-factly, “to sit on top of the world, no matter how damaged, as long as they’re number one.”
Lana agreed. It was as if many powerful Russians shared dreams of empire and would sooner take possession of the planet, no matter how damaged, than squat further down the food chain in a healthier world.
She reminded herself that past performance was often the best predictor of future behavior. And past performance with the Russians now included a nuclear missile strike and dangerously rising seas.
“The Chinese ambassador contacted me this morning to say he’s received approval to send over more than a hundred of their top cyberspies.”
“Does anyone outside this office know we’re going to be working with them?”
“The President, of course, his chief of staff, the secretary of state, the joint chiefs, and the heads of the various intelligence agencies along with their chief deputies. Only people with the highest security clearances. Absolutely nobody on the Hill. Not even the chairs of the intelligence committees. They’ll be screaming.”
“Let them,” Lana said, unable to hide her contempt.
“Even so, there’s always a risk it’ll leak.”
“The Chinese might even find a leak in their interest,” Lana noted.
“McGivern says they’re much more intent on stopping the damage to their principal ports and cities.” McGivern was NSA’s chief China expert. Holmes went on: “We may not know the meaning of bipartisanship in Congress, but we do with one of our chief economic and military rivals. Go figure.”
“That would take much more time than we have,” Lana replied.
Holmes nodded. “You should probably get ready.”
Lana checked her watch. Indeed.
As she headed to her office, she wished she’d had the time to actually study Dernov’s video before linking to Galina. Lana’s takeaway, based mostly on hearing him — and a few glances at his imperious facial expressions while she was driving — was that he was a control freak, perhaps to his own detriment. Going after Galina right now, with all that he had in motion, did not appear to make sense, unless Galina was truly in a position to torpedo — perhaps in the most literal sense — his whole operation. In any event, Lana was anxious to catch the psychiatrist’s take on Dernov.
She’d already performed cursory research on the Russian mastermind. He was a son of a plutocrat: Dernov père was an oil, gas, and minerals magnate. She’d found nothing in a quick search on Dernov senior to indicate that he was anything more than a moneymaking machine who had achieved prominence, along with so many Russian plutocrats, by plundering state-owned companies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Still, that was more than she was able to unearth about Galina in FSB files, just as the woman had warned. She’d done no better trying to dig any deeper about the younger Dernov.
She messaged Jeff Jensen and added Galina and Dernov’s father to his research tasks.
After studying the Dernov video, she saw that she had about sixty seconds before she was scheduled to link to Galina and her six-year-old. She was beginning to wonder whether Holmes and his team were going to show up on time, when they strode into her office.
At precisely the scheduled moment, an exhausted-looking woman with a hollow-cheeked child appeared on a large monitor mounted on Lana’s wall. It was almost shocking to see the girl, who appeared so genuinely ill that Lana regretted asking Galina to put her through this. The child also had a dark bruise on her face.
Emma had been a lean girl by that point in her life, but strong. Alexandra was curled up on her mother’s lap like a three-year-old.
Galina herself had stylishly cut black hair that came to her chin. Clearly, a woman who had taken care with her appearance — until she’d gone on the run. Now her hair hung limply. Some of it stuck to her round cheeks, as though she hadn’t had time for a shower and shampoo in days. And her eyes, large and round, had dark circles under them that were only accentuated by the lousy lighting of video sessions.
Lana would have bet her career then and there that mother and daughter were not poseurs.
“Did you see his video?” Galina asked.
“I did,” Lana replied.
“He’s not as crazy as he seems in that. Don’t underestimate him and think he’s just nuts. He’s not.”
“Were you intimately involved with him?”
“Yes,” Galina answered without pause. “Until recently. He is not Alexandra’s father. Her father died recently.” She said it in such a way that Lana knew Alexandra’s father had not died of natural causes — and that Galina wanted to shield her daughter from that news. “I was asked a lot of questions about his passing,” Galina added.
“I understand that you and your daughter might have been accosted as you drove south from Moscow.”
For a blink, Galina looked worried that Lana had mentioned the direction; she hadn’t reacted to “accosted.” Then Galina recovered and nodded: “It was terrible. She witnessed it.”
More than witnessed it, Lana thought with another glance at Alexandra’s face.
“Was this, in your view, an assassination attempt?” No way to dance around that question. Lana simply hoped the English word meant nothing to the Russian child, who gave no indication that it did.
Galina nodded again. “It failed because Oleg’s father gave me a small but powerful gift.”
“And you were able to use it?”
“I had no choice. A man was going to—” Galina stopped herself from adding any details, though surely the child had sensed the threat to her own life as well as her mother’s when Galina had used the “powerful gift.” But the child also looked fragile as an ancient ceramic doll.
“You must see that there is very little time for me. They have reason to arrest me now. They will give reasons for doing more than that.” She looked purposely at the back of Alexandra’s head, as much as to say, “and to her, too.”
“You know the means we’ve used in the past to communicate?” Lana asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“We will return to that now,” Lana said. Holmes was nodding. Nobody in the room seemed to need to go longer — and they all knew there was a risk of interception. The signal could even be traced. Better to keep it to minutes.