Eagle Station

Thirteen

The weirdly twisting Evolution Tower soared more than eight hundred feet above the right bank of the Moskva River. Its odd, DNA-like double spiral was created by a slight, three-degree offset of each floor from the one below it. High up on one of the eastward-facing spirals, the large suite of offices leased by Tekhwerk, GmbH occupied a substantial share of the building’s forty-second floor. From here the company’s senior managers had sweeping views of Moscow’s crowded city center. The shattered ruins of the Kremlin were plainly visible, as was the roof of the Lubyanka, just three and a half miles away.

Only a tiny handful of those working out of these offices understood the irony of the views they enjoyed. The vast majority of Tekhwerk’s staff believed they were employed by a legitimate export-import company. And, in fact, well over 90 percent of its day-to-day operations were perfectly legal, or at least winked at by the ruling authorities. A byzantine web of holding companies and investment firms completely concealed Scion’s ownership of the enterprise. As far as Kevin Martindale was concerned, it was icing on the cake that Tekhwerk’s profits — largely derived from Russian government contracts — funded so many of Scion’s covert-action and intelligence-gathering operations.

Zach Orlov was one of the few in on the secret. Supposedly a native Russian Tekhwerk information technology specialist, he had actually been born in the United States and he was one of Scion’s top computer hackers. From his émigré parents, one a brilliant mathematician and the other an accomplished musician, he’d picked up perfect fluency in Russian. Gifted with high intelligence and focus, he’d been so bored in regular school that he’d spent most of his teenage years systematically and illegally breaking into every computer network he could access. If Martindale hadn’t recruited him into Scion, it was probably a coin toss whether he’d have ended up behind bars — or working for the U.S. government’s National Security Agency.

Unlike most of those on the forty-second floor, his office had no windows at all. Secure behind a keypad-controlled electronic lock, the room looked much smaller than it was — largely because almost all the available space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling racks of computer hardware. There was just enough room for a desk, chair, and a very large wastebasket usually full of crumpled paper coffee cups and takeout containers. Whenever Orlov was immersed in a complicated task, he rarely took any time off to sleep or eat… or even to change his clothes.

Right now, wearing a wrinkled polo shirt and dirty jeans, he sat hunched over a keyboard. While Sam Kerr and Marcus Cartwright were out in the field at Kansk-Dalniy, he’d been following a lead gained from hacking emails exchanged between a high-ranking Russian Space Forces officer and a production manager at Voronezh’s KB Khimavtomatika (KBKhA), the Chemical Automatics Design Bureau.

KBKhA was one of Russia’s leading high-tech companies. Its factories turned out everything from liquid-propellant rocket engines to nuclear space reactors to high-power lasers. That strongly suggested the company was somehow involved in Leonov’s spaceplane program — most probably in advanced engine development. And several of its senior engineers and executives had been specially invited to the Firebird demonstration, which only made the connection seem more certain.

But what had really caught Orlov’s attention was a cryptic reference in one of the emails to something called Nebesnyy Grom, Heaven’s Thunder. He was willing to bet that was a code name for the high-powered hybrid turbofan-scramjet-rocket engines any real single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane needed. Once their engines entered production, Russians usually slapped on dull-as-dishwater numbers, like the RD-0150… but nothing stopped them from indulging in a little romance while a project was still classified.

Since then, he’d been chasing down every possible reference to Heaven’s Thunder. Most of them had dead-ended, but a few had led him to a top secret Russian Defense Ministry database. He was pretty sure it contained critical files pertaining to the Firebird Project. And for hours and hours, he’d been digitally prowling around its outskirts, looking for a way inside.

Unfortunately, this was as close as Orlov dared get. Whoever had designed its security firewall had done one hell of a job. From what he could tell, this database was essentially guarded by the computer equivalent of motion sensors, IR detection gear, radar, land mines, barbed wire, machine guns, flamethrowers, and heavy artillery — with a side order of nuclear weapons thrown in for good measure.

“Fucking Q-boys,” he growled under his breath, taking his hands off the keyboard. He was pretty sure Q Directorate’s specialists were the ones who’d sheathed this database in so many layers of digital death. Their coding work wasn’t exactly discreet. It was more like they’d slapped on a bunch of garish neon signs blazing, “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Hack Here.” Then again, he admitted to himself, their computer security work didn’t have to be discreet, just effective.

Orlov shook his head in dismay. Short of Sam Kerr using her feminine wiles to charm the necessary passwords out of some lust-stricken Russian officer, there was no way in hell anyone from Scion was going to get a peek at those classified files. Not even an all-out, brute force hacking attack would break through those defenses.

Yawning, he sat back and rubbed at his tired eyes. They felt raw, like someone had been scraping them with sandpaper. No surprise, there, he thought blearily. The clock readout in the lower right corner of his monitor showed that he’d been working this angle for nearly twenty hours without a real break. Maybe it was time to punch out, grab some sleep, and come back at the problem fresh another day.

Still yawning, Orlov started to push back his chair… but then he froze in place, staring at his screen.

A red-outlined box had just flashed into existence: warning. intrusion attempts detected. intrusion attempts are ongoing.

He felt cold. Someone out there was trying to hack into Tekhwerk’s own computer network. And whoever it was had just tripped hidden warning subroutines he’d buried very deeply in what would otherwise look like an ordinary corporate security firewall. Shit. Shit. Shit. Had his own reconnaissance of that special Defense Ministry database set off alarms he’d missed?

Then Orlov shook his head. That wasn’t very likely. He’d been operating at arm’s length through a linked series of zombie computers — machines he’d infiltrated months ago and now secretly controlled. Even if he’d triggered an alarm, there should be no way anyone could have traced him back here through all those cutouts. Not this fast, anyway.

Another series of alerts popped up. Now digital tripwires he’d planted in government and financial industry databases in both Russia and Germany were sending up flares. He swallowed hard. The people probing Tekhwerk’s business activities were casting a very wide net.

For people, read Q Directorate, Orlov thought edgily. The hairs on the back of his neck rose… and he had to fight down a sudden urge to get up and run. In the shadowy internet world of binary 1s and 0s, he was used to being the hunter… not the hunted.

Acting on a sudden hunch, he opened a back door he’d planted in the Aeroflot computer reservations system and pulled up the Russian airline’s ticketing and reservation information for Sam Kerr in her Lieutenant Colonel Katya Volkova persona. Sure enough, the hidden access counter he’d installed glowed bright red.

“Okay, this is bad. This is really bad,” Orlov muttered to himself. Someone besides him had secretly reviewed those files within the past hour. And this wasn’t just a routine Aeroflot query about passengers on its evening flight out from Krasnoyarsk’s Yemelyanovo International Airport. Anyone using an official Aeroflot log-in wouldn’t have triggered his counter. Which meant Sam’s cover was blown.

A quick check of Marcus Cartwright’s ticketing information showed the same thing.

Any hope Orlov had that Scion’s Moscow-based intelligence team could just hunker down, play innocent, and ride out this sudden Q Directorate probe disappeared. Russia’s security services weren’t just mildly curious about Tekhwerk and its activities. They were actively prosecuting a full-on espionage investigation, and somehow they’d already tied both Sam and Marcus to the company… despite their carefully created cover stories and perfectly forged identity papers.

For what seemed like an hour, but couldn’t really have been more than a minute or two, he sat motionless — mentally running through his options. Then he shrugged helplessly. In the end, there weren’t many. This was basically an intelligence operative’s nightmare. His priority right now was to try to minimize the damage. And then to get his ass safely out of Russia if at all possible. Like all Scion field agents, he had an escape and evasion kit, complete with new false papers and credit cards, and enough cash to bribe his way across the border if that proved necessary.

Orlov pulled out his smartphone. First, he needed to clue in Scion’s upper echelons back in the United States. Quickly he connected to a special number and texted a two-word emergency code phrase: red dawn.

There was a short pause before the reply came back: confirm red dawn.

Rapidly, he tapped in a reply, using the special alphanumerical code that confirmed he was acting on his own volition and not under enemy control: bravo zulu six. red dawn confirmed. Any other combination of letters and numbers would have signaled that he was acting under duress.

This time the reply came faster: clearance level possible?

Orlov contemplated that. Understandably, Martindale wanted to know how thoroughly he could “sanitize” the Moscow offices — destroying or removing any information that might compromise Scion operations and sources. A lot depended on how much time he had before Q Directorate gave up on breaking into his computer network and sent in the FSB goon squads. He shrugged. There was no easy answer for that question. Which, he decided, meant it was far better to be safe now, rather than sorry later inside a Lubyanka torture chamber. In answer, he typed in level two only.

His office equipment included an industrial-grade shredder, so he could destroy his computers’ solid-state hard drives as fast as he could strip them out of the machines. But there was no way he could completely sterilize the whole office complex, wiping away fingerprints and potentially incriminating DNA fragments. Not on his own. Doing a thorough job would have required the services of a whole specialist cleaning crew and at least a full day.

level two clearance approved, Martindale texted back. good luck. this contact number terminates now.

You could practically see the man metaphorically washing his hands, Orlov thought sardonically, just like Pontius Pilate. He supposed it went with the territory. Spymasters who saw their agents more as people than as pieces on a chessboard probably didn’t stay sane long.

Without wasting any more time, he moved on to his next task. He dialed another number on his smartphone.

“Yes?” a lilting Welsh voice answered immediately.

“Davey, it’s Zach. Listen carefully. Both Kerr and Cartwright are blown. So is the office here. I don’t know how, exactly. But I’m bailing out ASAP, per orders. I suggest you do the same. Because as far as I can tell, you’re still in the clear.”

Scion field agent David Jones, currently stationed in Krasnoyarsk as the backup man for the Kansk-Dalniy operation, was silent for a moment. “Are Sam and Marcus in enemy hands?”

Orlov shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. But if they aren’t already in custody, it’s gotta be because the Russians have them on a string, waiting to see where they go and who they contact.”

“Right then,” he heard the other man say slowly. “Well, you’d best be off, Zach. I’ll follow along after I do a bit of checking up on this end. With luck, I’ll see you back in the States soon enough.”

Orlov sighed, hearing the ironclad determination in Jones’s voice. “You’re not going to ditch them, are you? Even though getting out fast and on your own is the smart play?”

He heard the short, slender Welshman laugh softly. “Look, boyo, no one ever said I was terribly bright. See, Sam and Marcus and I have been in many a tight spot together over the years. So I owe it to them not to just cut and run. Not until I’m sure there’s no hope at all of shaking them loose.”

“You be careful, then,” Orlov said quietly.

“As ever I can be,” Jones agreed.

Sadly, Orlov tapped his phone, ending the call. He had a bad feeling that he would never hear from David Jones again.