“Yes, you Americans are good at torture now. I’ll never go with you. You say they’ll kill me in Moscow? No, you are the one who should worry about dying, you stupid bitch. I know who you are. Big hero last time. Not such a hero now.”
Red squatted in front of him. “Oleg, you’re in handcuffs. Think about that. She’s giving you the best offer you’ll ever get.”
“Come live in America,” Oleg singsonged. “You think you can always play that trump card: ‘Come live in America.’ I’d rather die on this stinking fishing boat than go live in your country. And I’m not giving you any codes.”
“I think we’ve got them,” Galina called from the cabin.
“You realize that right now Galina’s sharing everything she ever learned from you with the NSA via satellite,” Lana said. “Nothing’s going to end the way you wanted.”
“Yes, it is. There’s one more surprise you have coming, I assure you,” he told her.
Lana wanted to swear, but kept an impassive expression. “Listen to me, you’re going to die if you go back. We’ve been intercepting communications between your President and his staff, and they’re making one thing abundantly clear: you’re expendable. There’s a chopper coming for you. If you don’t cooperate, you’ll be getting on it and you’ll die.”
“What, are they going to fly way up into the sky and throw me out like you Americans do?”
Lana grabbed his face and made him look into her eyes. “It’ll be worse than that.”
“You can’t scare me. And I don’t believe you because if I were in your shoes, I’d be saying the same thing and it would all be lies.”
“But I’m not you, you’re not in my shoes, and I’m not lying.”
Oleg shook his head.
Disbelief is denial’s first ally, Lana thought.
A helicopter flew toward them. Oleg smiled at her. “Fuck you. I’ll be eating caviar at the Kremlin before the sun goes down.”
“You stupid son of a bitch,” she said.
“It’s his call at this point,” Walker said. “We’ll be keeping the deals we made.”
“I know all about deals,” Oleg said to them. “Russians take care of their own.”
“Yes, you do have a long history of that,” Walker said, smiling when a man was lowered from the helicopter on a steel cable with a double seat.
“Who’s that?” Oleg demanded when he saw that his rescuer was Chinese. “See, we take care of people who help us, too,” Red told him. “And since you’ve decided your future is short, I’ll let you in on something. Our Chinese friends call themselves Magic Dragon, and they were instrumental in blocking radio signals on the high seas, when others might have warned you that we were coming to take you. They also provided a terrific amount of cyberexpertise tracking down your tight network. Now they’re going to use you to pay their debt to someone you know very well.”
Veal and the Chinese man seized Oleg and strapped him into a seat.
“What is this shit?” Oleg said. He sounded unsettled for the first time. “What’s going on?”
“Come with us,” Lana said.
“It’s too late,” Red said softly, barely above the sound of the chopper.
“But I’m going to Moscow…” Oleg’s voice trailed off as he and his escort were lifted up into the helicopter’s cabin.
The first thing Oleg noticed was that the bird was being flown by a Russian crew. But the cabin itself held four other Chinese men.
“What are they doing here?” Oleg yelled at the pilot, who ignored him. With his headset on, the man might not have heard Oleg.
“Do any of you speak English or Russian?” he asked the Chinese men.
“I do,” replied the man who’d brought him aboard.
“Who do you work for?” Oleg asked.
The man smiled. “An oil and gas company.”
“That asshole. PP’s saving me?”
“PP? No, we call him Mr. Dernov. He is a partner of our country. Saving you?” The Chinese man shrugged and smiled even more broadly.
A horrible flood of anxiety swept through Oleg. He remembered the video PP had played for him of Dmitri and Galina down in that goddamned museum with its medieval… devices, and how fortunate he’d felt when he raced his Maserati away from his father’s estate.
This wasn’t a rescue. This was retribution.
CHAPTER 26
Lana sat in the trawler’s cabin holding Oleg’s computer on her lap with all the care she would have given to a Fabergé egg. Galina was perched by her side, working on her own device, but she nodded at Oleg’s.
“It’s all going to be in there,” she said. “And on these.” Galina held up the thumb drives. “He was a control freak. He wouldn’t have surrendered the freedom to launch to anyone else, no matter what he might have told them.”
Lana’s own laptop lay on a small navigation table feet away. Red was piloting the ship. With the boat pitching from stern to bow in the unsettled sea, Lana was finding it awkward to work her keyboard. She noticed that Galina was facing the same challenge.
Less than ideal work conditions, but with stubby black antennas protruding from all three computers, they did have vital satellite links to the NSA — and that meant stateside support from Jeff Jensen. Even so, Lana was running into one computer security defense after another: “I can’t even get into Oleg’s trash,” she growled.
Lana was frustrated, but still grateful the cyberbeast hadn’t tossed his laptop overboard. She figured he was too arrogant to have believed there would ever be any call for such an extreme action. But for all the progress Lana was making hacking the device, it might as well have been jettisoned.
She had just resorted to dumpster diving, a hacker term that held the same meaning for them as it did for the hungry homeless: plundering someone else’s trash. But again she’d failed to penetrate Oleg’s access controls.
“I put a keystroke logger on him two weeks ago,” Galina informed her, “when I first started to worry about what he was doing. If it worked, we should have a record of everything he’s done since then. But we need deciphering software to read out the results superfast.”
“I have that,” Lana said, leaning forward so her fingers could fly over her own keyboard on the navigation table. “But he could have used a virtual keyboard to prevent the capture of his keys, or even changed his character encoding.”
They hadn’t kept Oleg on board to try to coerce his cooperation because Lana knew he could have led them right into a cyber self-destruct payload, which, as the name suggested, could wipe out the data they wanted.
Complicating matters more was a message that had just come in from Jensen that he’d found data streams from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine that he thought might prove fruitful. The data had been submitted to the Black Sea — most likely to Oleg — and the southern Atlantic Ocean, most likely Lisko.
Did the data to Lisko contain an alert about Oleg’s capture? That was what worried Lana most.
The data streams all but confirmed that Oleg had been working with more than one far-flung conspirator. If one or both of those men didn’t already know he’d been taken into custody, she wondered how soon they’d find out their mastermind had been forcibly removed from their attack plan. What contingency had they planned in that case? Plus, Oleg might even have buried a heartbeat signal deep in his software to launch the missile — or all twenty-three of them — if he went incommunicado for a specified period of time.