Blacklist Aftermath

5

Fisher took another long pull on his cup of coffee, then rested his palm on the back of Charlie’s computer chair. “Anything else?”

“Well, I thought I got past the virus Kasperov used to infect the security camera systems, thought it was an old spaghetti code variation — some old-school trick — but it must’ve been on a timer and just shut itself down. Interesting. Looking at Kasperov’s duplex now; it’s in a gated community bordering a park in Moscow.” Charlie raked fingers through his short black hair, then pointed to a satellite map shimmering on one of his screens. He zoomed in to a 3-D view showing the buildings. The screen to the left was the black-and-white security camera feed, with a half dozen men posted outside the main entrance. “Looks like the police are getting their party on at Kasperov’s house. Same deal at his headquarters. They’re moving all the hardware into trucks, confiscating everything.”

“You thinking about going in there?” Briggs asked from his station opposite Charlie’s.

“Be a waste of time,” Fisher answered. “Like Charlie said, he’s planned this well, wiped all of his hard drives. There’s nothing to find there.”

Grim lifted her voice from the SMI table. “I’m sure if he’s left the country they’ve got the SVR looking for him, but they’ll take it one step further and bring in Voron.”

Fisher looked at her. “I was thinking the same thing. And if that’s the case, we’ll play our ace in the hole.”

Voron, which meant “raven” in Russian, was a clandestine group within the SVR whose existence was known only by a select few within the government. They were tasked with sabotage, corporate theft, and “talent extraction,” as well as other tasks from which even the SVR wanted to distance itself. Fisher had initially classified the group as a mirror image of the old Third Echelon, but more recently, when 3E’s assets went dark all over South India, Fisher and Grim realized that Voron had gone fully rogue and had access to Third Echelon’s intel — a frightening thought. Still, the team hadn’t been without leads. Fisher knew a former Voron operative who’d become a valuable asset, a man left for dead but who was now very much alive.

Mikhail Andreyevitch Loskov, whose code name was Kestrel, had run a joint operation with a Splinter Cell known as Archer; however, Kestrel was betrayed by Tom Reed, Third Echelon’s corrupt leader. Shot in the head and left for dead, Kestrel was destined to live out his days as a prisoner in Russia, placed in a medically induced coma, and would only be awakened when the men controlling him needed something, such as intel on Third Echelon’s operations or other Federation secrets Kestrel might know. It had been up to Fisher and Briggs to rescue the man — and they had.

Consequently, Fisher had made a deal with Kestrel. Once he’d learned what Kestrel had given up to Voron, he released the man. Kestrel said he was returning to Russia. He planned to settle the score with those who’d been using him and who’d forcibly extracted that intel.

Kestrel owed his life to Fisher and Briggs, but he was not a man who could be owned by guilt or gratitude. He’d suffered a lot of hardships in his life, had lost his parents in a terrorist attack, and had watched his army teammates being tortured and killed by Chechens. He was a stubborn Russian bastard, but he’d vowed to keep in touch with Fisher, even offered to sell him information when he acquired it. The last time they’d spoken, Kestrel had said he was “freelancing” in the Federation, ever prepared to exact his vengeance.

“Any luck getting us into the SVR?” Briggs asked Charlie.

“Are you kidding? Kasperov helped design their firewalls. It’ll be the hack of the century. But I’m not giving up. Some files are air gapped, but I may have found a backdoor that actually takes us through a front door, then it lets us sit there through a rootkit application.”

“Tell me more about this backdoor,” Grim said, raising a cautious brow.

“Oh, you don’t want to know.”

Grim cleared her throat. “Excuse me, I need to know.”

Fisher leaned closer to Charlie and said, “Play nice.”

Charlie alternated his gaze between Grim and Fisher, then finally sighed. “All right, so the SVR’s pumping tons of cash into R&D with a focus on social media networks like VK and Facebook. They’ve got a three-tiered program for the future of the Internet. They call these tiers Monitor-3, Dispute, and Storm-13. That last one, Storm, involves an army of spambots that’ll flood social networks with propaganda to influence public opinion.”

“So how does that get you inside?” asked Fisher.

“Well, there’s a double connection here. Kasperov’s boy genius, the guy named Kannonball? He was tagged as the lead programmer on this project.”

“So he was working for the SVR and Kasperov?” asked Briggs.

“Yeah, sure, it’s like the SVR is a client. What’s more interesting, though, is that after he created their spambot army, he was tagged by the SVR as being a member of a hacktivist group known as Redtalk. They’ve been leaking secrets about corruption within the Russian government and military.”

“Like another WikiLeaks,” Fisher concluded.

“Yeah, but smaller and more specific. They probably didn’t touch Kannonball because he was so close to Kasperov.”

“I guess this is the long explanation of how you intend to get into their computers,” said Briggs through a yawn.

Charlie grew more animated, waving his peanut butter fork at Briggs. “Kannonball’s already hacked in, and he’s left his signature on some of the code for the social media spambots. In fact, I have to study it some more, but he may have left more clues there.”

“You mean like passwords to get in?” Fisher asked.

“Exactly. That’s Redtalk’s MO. That’s our front door into the SVR.”

“Or we could just call Kestrel,” Fisher said with a smile. “Old-school wins again. Grim? Find me Kestrel.”

“Will do.”

Charlie snickered. “You’re a real thread killer, Sam. I was on a roll!”

“I know. And still, there’s no guarantee the SVR or Voron are doing any better than we are right now, but we need to keep tabs on them.”

Grim raised her voice. “Charlie, I want to see everything you’re doing to get in there. Don’t make a move until we’re both sure they can’t track us.”

Charlie nodded, then lowered his voice and turned to Fisher. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Fisher nodded and Charlie rose, leading him out of the command center, down a narrow hall, and toward the living quarters. He opened a small hatch and invited Fisher into his tiny room, replete with narrow bed, notebook computers, and a few posters for alternative rock bands that Fisher had never heard of. Charlie shut the hatch and quickly said, “If you want to find this guy, you gotta cut me loose. I can’t work with her breathing down my neck.”

“She’s not breathing down your neck.”

“Are you deaf?”

“Look, you know where she’s coming from.”

He rolled his eyes. “It was hard enough taking the job in the first place, knowing she’d be here.”

“I thought you guys were getting along.”

“It’s nothing that interferes with the job, but—”

“But you have a problem with authority figures. I get that. So do I.”

At twenty-five, young Charlie Cole was still grappling with remaining calm under fire — especially when the incoming came from Grim. During the time he and Fisher worked together at Vic’s old agency, Fisher had learned a lot about the kid, learned why he had the attitude and why he’d become a hacker. Charlie had lost his father when he was just eleven, and his mother remarried a man who ruled with an iron fist and had ridiculous expectations for him. He buried himself in his room and retreated into computers. While his mother supported his interest, by the time he was fourteen, his stepfather had shipped him off to Choate Rosemary Hall, the prestigious boarding school in Connecticut, where he’d terrorized administrators with his hacking exploits. They forced him through the program because it was easier than kicking him out. He was a classic genius underachiever. He went on to the Rochester Institute of Technology because his grades wouldn’t get him into MIT like the rest of his friends, and after that, some of his online exploits had caught the attention of the NSA and he was quickly rolled into Grim’s R&D group at Third Echelon.

He didn’t last long. He was immature, had an uncompromising vision for what the SMI should be, and Grim summarily fired him. That he’d flipped her a double bird on the way out didn’t help. He’d tried a few scrub jobs, even moonlighted for two weeks as an IT temp under false credentials, until some of the people he’d hacked in the past came looking for him, including members of a Mexican drug cartel he’d once helped expose, or “dox,” by revealing all of their personal information online.

Vic’s private security firm had rescued him from all that, literally saving him when the Mexicans had sent two hit men to teach him a final lesson. Vic took him under his wing, and Charlie helped support some deftly executed operations for private clients. Despite his youth, his defiance of authority, and his often brash and animated demeanor, Charlie possessed a rare combination of go-with-your-gut instincts coupled with a cunning and always up-to-date knowledge of complex computer systems and code.

And if you wanted to get deeply psychological about it, you could say that he’d become all of these things because he was searching for his lost father, wanting answers for why the man had left him so long ago.

Charlie rubbed the corners of his eyes and nodded. “Grim’s intense. I get that. But sometimes she’s gotta back off. I’m afraid to say anything — because I know you’ll take the heat for it.”

“You just do your job. She’ll keep you honest.”

“I got the feeling that when you first came on board, you didn’t want her around.”

“This was her initiative, nonnegotiable with the president.”

“So why didn’t you walk away?”

Fisher steeled his voice. “Because they need us. The country needs us. Remember that.”

“Hey, Sam?” came Briggs’s voice from the hallway. “Got something else here. Apparently, the Russian government just pulled Kasperov’s license. His company is officially shut down. At least for now.”

Fisher met up with Briggs and followed him back to the command center with Charlie in tow.

“Sam, we’re still analyzing all the flights out of every airport around Moscow at the time Kasperov might’ve bolted,” said Grim. “The radar distortion has made that tough.”

“So did any of Kasperov’s jets take off?”

“Well, not according to the flight plans, but I’m sure he didn’t file one. And he probably didn’t take his own plane. Maybe a friend’s with falsified docs.”

An alert screen flashed in the upper right corner of the SMI’s main screen. Grim dragged and dropped a new data window into the center of the display then opened it. “Well, it can’t be this easy, can it? We’ve just confirmed that one of Kasperov’s private jets did take off from Vnukovo Airport, actually just after the radar interruption. Flight plan indicates that the jet’s bound for Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Says there’s three passengers on board, along with two crew members.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Charlie. “Again, he wouldn’t use his own plane and wouldn’t file a flight plan.”

“I agree,” Grim answered.

“Decoy?” asked Fisher.

“Hard to say. Maybe a decoy to buy him time? Divert forces away from him?”

“Yeah, he’s a smart bastard, because he knows that jet’s a decoy we can’t ignore. No matter what, we have to check it out.”

“I’ll see what assets we have in Georgia, get some people to Tbilisi before that plane arrives.”

“I’ve got the rest of the flight plans for that bird,” said Charlie. “Looks like his daughter, Nadia, was on board, flew back home from school in Zurich a few days ago.”

“Maybe that’s not his escape route but hers?” asked Fisher.

“Why wouldn’t he cover her exit as well as he covered his own?” asked Grim.

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll have to follow that plane.”

Fisher nodded, then crossed over to Briggs. “You dig up anything else?”

“His girlfriend was born and raised in Orlando. She attended the University of Central Florida. She’s got parents and a brother still living near there in a place called Winter Springs. We’ve got eyes on the house, and the NSA’s got the comms covered.”

“Any other possibilities?”

“In one of his gazillion magazine interviews, he spoke very highly of one of his old teachers from encryption school, a Professor Halitov. He retired in a little town called Peski, southeast of Moscow.”

“So if he went there, he’s hiding right under their noses.”

“Yeah, but you know if we found it this easily, so did they. We’ll keep an eye on it, though.”

“Hey, Sam?”

Fisher ventured back to the SMI table and stood opposite Grim. “What do you got?”

“A crazy thought. What if this whole thing’s a hoax? What if Kasperov staged this event with the government’s help? They’re in on this together.”

“For what purpose?”

“The company’s in bed with the FSB. Maybe there was a breach, and they staged this to contain it.”

“Well, if that’s the case, we’re taking the bait.”

“Or maybe there is a Mayak connection and this is their first stage in dealing with it.”

“Hey, excuse me, but Nadia Kasperov has a VK account,” Charlie said. “I hacked it and her last post was her saying good-bye to Moscow.”

Fisher cocked a brow. “So she bolted, too. If we find her, maybe we’ll find him.”

“Holy shit.”

That expletive had come from the SMI table, where Grim was bringing up Keyhole satellite surveillance footage, along with imagery captured by the U.S. Army’s latest Vertical Take-Off and Landing Unmanned Aerial System dubbed the “Hummingbird.”

Fisher reached the table and scanned the schematics of the drone, displayed on a data bar to his right.

Equipped with the ARGUS array composed of several cameras and a host of other sensor systems, the Hummingbird and her systems were capable of capturing 1.8 gigapixel high-resolution mosaic images and video, making it one of the most capable surveillance drones on the planet.

At the moment, the UAV had her cameras and sensors directed at a rugged, snowcapped mountainside with a long pennon of black smoke rising from it.

“What?” asked Fisher.

“That’s Dykh-Tau,” said Grim. “It means ‘jagged mount’ in Russian. It’s about five klicks north of the Georgia border, and it’s the second-highest peak in the Caucasus Mountains.”

“That’s a pretty big fire down there.”

“That’s not just a fire. Kasperov’s plane just crashed.”

“Was it shot down?” asked Briggs.

“Don’t know,” answered Grim. “No reports of aircraft scrambled, nothing on radar.”

“What’s our ETA over that site?” asked Fisher.

Grim brought up the maps, worked furiously on the touchscreen, and then the SMI drew the line and displayed the data bars. “If we divert from Incirlik right now, it’ll be eighteen minutes at top speed.”

“The Russians will send in some S&R crews. Think we can beat ’em?”

Grim consulted the SMI and pinpointed the locations of the nearest military bases and local authorities equipped with air power. “That location’s pretty remote. You’ve got a shot. But the sun doesn’t set for another two hours, and if you HALO jump right in there, they’ll spot your descent.”

“I know. I’ve got a work-around.”

“What about getting out?”

“That part always gives me a headache. You mind calling us a cab or something?”

Grim rolled her eyes. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Fisher hustled away from the table. “Briggs? Come with me. We’ve got a lot of prep and no time.”

The man rose from his station. “Sam, you mind if we make sure our extraction plan’s in place before we…” The young man drifted off, and wisely so, because Fisher was already ignoring him—

But he did turn back and fix Briggs with a hard look. “Is there a problem?”

“Uh, no.”

“Good. Because the jump alone might kill you. Let’s go.”