Price of Duty

TWENTY-NINE

Sergei Tarzarov maintained a small office just down the hall from Gennadiy Gryzlov’s more extensive suite. Unlike the president’s elaborately furnished chambers, the chief of staff’s working space was plain, almost Spartan in its simplicity. He made do with a metal desk, a single chair, an old-fashioned desktop computer, and a secure phone with direct links to the president and other major key players in the government. There were no decorations, no knickknacks, mementos, or personal photographs — nothing that might suggest he had any hobbies or interests beyond work or any weaknesses that potential rivals could exploit.

Now he sat alone at his desk, with the door firmly closed, moodily contemplating the mystery of Igor Truznyev’s sudden disappearance. When the first police report of the bomb attack on the former president’s limousine came in, he’d assumed Truznyev was dead, killed with his bodyguards. That had prompted him to order an immediate high-priority investigation by the FSB’s counterterrorism section. He’d also embargoed all news accounts of the incident. Until it was clearer why someone had murdered Truznyev, there was no point in feeding a speculative frenzy by domestic and foreign journalists.

But now it was clear that Igor Truznyev had not been inside his S-Class Mercedes when it was blown to hell. Surveillance camera footage retrieved from his office-tower garage showed him being accosted by a woman in uniform. After a brief conversation, he’d left the building in her car, followed moments later by his own bodyguards in the Mercedes.

Unfortunately, the security cameras weren’t equipped to record audio — apparently the result of a deliberate specification by Truznyev himself, as part of his own anti-eavesdropping precautions. Nor had the FSB’s lip-reading experts been able to piece together anything useful from the footage. The angles were wrong, they said. The intelligence service’s photo-interpretation experts were more certain they could extract information from the one grainy screen capture they’d made of an ID card shown to Truznyev by the mysterious woman. They were methodically working on the project, digitally enhancing the image over and over until it was clean enough to make out details.

Privately, Tarzarov doubted that would help much, if at all.

Preliminary searches through every Russian military- and intelligence-service database had failed to turn up a match. Whoever she really was, she was not on the books for any government agency. And the license plates on her sedan were faked. While the sequence of numbers and letters on them matched those reserved for official cars, that particular number had never been issued. Effectively, barring some lucky break, the FSB’s investigative team had reached a dead end.

In the meantime, Truznyev himself had vanished completely. Checks at every airport, train station, and border crossing point were still in progress, but so far no sign of him had turned up. It was as though he’d been snatched off the surface of the earth by aliens.

Damn the man, Tarzarov thought. Was this disappearing act part of one of Truznyev’s private spy games? The murder of his bodyguards made that seem unlikely.

Was it possible that he’d finally pushed one of his shadier rivals or even a onetime business partner too far? His Zatmeniye consulting firm certainly had its fingers in any number of different enterprises — many of which were not even remotely legal. And Russia’s organized-crime syndicates were even more violent and unforgiving than their Sicilian or North American counterparts. If so, it was unlikely anyone would ever see Truznyev again, alive or dead. Permanently disposing of an inconvenient corpse was no great challenge for the Russian Mafiya, with its ready access to factory blast furnaces, cement mixers and construction sites, and vast stretches of empty wilderness.

Sergei Tarzarov’s high forehead furrowed in sudden worry as he contemplated a far less appealing prospect. Truznyev dead was no great loss. Yes, the former president’s services, political and diplomatic advice, and occasional tidbits of intelligence had been useful, but they were not vital. But what if he were still alive? And not only alive, but somewhere outside Russia — either as a prisoner or, more probably, a defector?

He grimaced. Truznyev dead might not be a problem. But Truznyev alive and spilling his guts was a potential time bomb. At their last rendezvous, the former president had made it abundantly clear that he knew far more than he should about Russia’s top-secret cyberwar operations and infrastructure. And it was no secret that he hated and despised Gryzlov, the man who’d replaced him as president. What if he had decided to disappear, leave Russia, and then sell his information to the highest bidder?

Tarzarov’s frown deepened. If that was the other man’s plan, he would find no shortage of buyers with very deep pockets — ranging from the Poles to the Americans to the Chinese. Could Truznyev have arranged the murder of his own bodyguards to make it look as though he’d been kidnapped? It was perfectly possible, the older man decided. No man in Russia rose to such heights without being willing to sacrifice even his most loyal subordinates if necessary.

Almost of its own volition, his hand drifted to the secure phone on his desk, hovering over the button that would connect him directly to Gennadiy Gryzlov. If there were any possibility that Truznyev was selling their cyberwar secrets to a foreign power, it was his duty to give the president the bad news.

But then his hand drew back.

Think carefully before you leap into the unknown, Sergei, he thought. Decades spent up to his neck in Kremlin intrigue had imparted a very basic lesson: bearers of bad tidings were rarely rewarded. There were other considerations too. Briefing Gryzlov would necessarily entail revealing more than might be wise about his dealings with Truznyev. Russia’s president, while supremely self-confident, was also deeply paranoid. How would he react to learning that his trusted chief of staff and closest confidant had been holding clandestine meetings with the man he’d deposed? Would he see the value derived from maintaining such contacts? Or would he see them as evidence that Tarzarov might be plotting against him?

Without hard evidence of Truznyev’s real fate, it made no sense to take such a risk now, he decided. If allegations made by the former Russian president started showing up in the Western press, they could easily be dismissed as the disgruntled ravings of a failed leader. In time, any effects on international opinion they produced would fade — buried by the news of some pop star’s drug overdose or another petty scandal.

The chance that Truznyev’s information might be used for military purposes was a more serious threat. If the former president really had defected, he certainly knew enough to allow his new masters to pinpoint Russia’s buried cyberwar complex. But even with that information, could anyone really hope to launch a successful attack so deep into the Motherland’s territory? It seemed unlikely to Tarzarov. Not unless they were willing to send so large a strike force that it would represent an open declaration of all-out war against Russia. And not even the Poles were that crazy.

Besides, he reminded himself, Gennadiy was supremely confident that the defenses around the Perun’s Aerie complex were impregnable. Under the circumstances, Tarzarov concluded, wisdom dictated a course of waiting to see precisely how events unfolded.

Intelligence analyst Kristin Voorhees came back from lunch and entered her cubicle. The first thing she noticed after sitting down at her computer was that someone had futzed with her ThinkGeek Firefly magnetic word set. Clipped to one of her cube’s partitions, the board came with an assortment of words and suffixes used in dialogue from the cult-classic science-fiction series, and she was fond of arranging and rearranging them while noodling with complex database problems.

In and of itself, the futzing wasn’t a problem. She’d made it clear that her colleagues were welcome to reset the board whenever the spirit moved them. Many of them did, especially during those all-night shifts during a major international flap — when it seemed like every U.S. intelligence agency and administration senior executive was screaming for more satellite imagery and analysis.

No, it wasn’t the fact that the words had been rearranged while she was gone that caught her attention. It was what they now spelled out: Gorram wobble-headed doll caper.

Her breath caught in her throat. She’d been activated.

Years ago, while Voorhees was still just a computer-science postdoc interviewing to join the NGA, she’d been recruited by Scion as an unpaid sleeper agent. She’d never regretted her decision. Where so much of the U.S. intelligence community seemed bogged down in bureaucratic sloth and political infighting, former president Martindale’s private military and intelligence outfit had been out fighting the good fight — relentlessly opposing the enemies of the United States and the whole free world.

Then again, she thought wryly, feeling her heart pounding in her chest, as a sleeper agent, she’d never been asked to take any risks. Not until now. Her Scion handlers had only expected her to do the best job possible for the NGA, earning promotions and steadily working her way up into positions of higher and higher responsibility.

And now here she was, one of the agency’s data stewards charged with maintaining its huge archives of highly classified satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence information. Her post gave her high-level, read/write access to those databases, and now it was time for her to use that power on behalf of Scion.

For a moment, Kristen Voorhees was tempted to shuffle the words on her Firefly board back into random patterns and pretend the activation signal had never been delivered. That would be the safest course. If she were caught and convicted, the lightest prison term she could probably expect was something on the order of the two-year sentence handed to another government intelligence analyst caught passing classified satellite photos to Jane’s Defence Weekly back in the mid-1980s. But given President Barbeau’s long-standing feud with Scion and Kevin Martindale, her fate was likely to be a lot worse.

Deep in thought, she pulled off her glasses and absently polished them with the untucked tail of her blouse. Doing time in federal prison was not an appealing prospect. She was pretty sure that convicts weren’t allowed access to computers for anything but e-mail.

But she knew she couldn’t really just walk away. Not in good conscience. Anyone who followed the news knew that Russia was on the march again in Eastern and central Europe — using cyberwar weapons and terrorism to brutalize the small democracies America had turned its back on. Whatever Scion was interested in had to be related to that ongoing battle.

She sat up straighter and put her glasses back on.

Resolutely, she turned back to her keyboard, logged in with her access codes, and then entered a single, short command — a command that triggered a small piece of code buried long ago in the primary database operating software. In turn, this subroutine opened a tiny back door, a secret way into every NGA archive that could be used remotely by Scion intelligence operatives. For the next six hours, Martindale’s agents would have free, virtually undetectable, entry into every agency database. After that, the subroutine would erase itself until its next activation, sealing the back door and deleting any record of what she’d done.

At least that was how it should work in theory, she thought. But no one knew better than she did that systems as large and complex as those used by the agency had peculiar, little quirks all of their own. It was entirely possible that this Scion foray would leave traces the agency’s counterintelligence people would spot on their next security sweep. And if that happened, Kristen Voorhees was going to be neck-deep in trouble with a capital E, as in “violation of the Espionage Act.”

With a sigh, she turned back to her list of regular assignments and started work again. If they did come to slap the cuffs on her, she could at least try to make life a little easier for her successor.

“Da, Mr. President!” Colonel General Valentin Maksimov said into the phone. “I understand. My forces will be ready for any eventuality.”

He hung up and looked at his senior military aide, Major General Viktor Polichev. “The president has ordered us to prepare for the likelihood of limited air and missile hostilities along our western and northwestern borders.”

The other man raised an eyebrow. “Based on what? Our intelligence reports show no signs of increased combat readiness by the Poles or their allies. Or by any of the NATO powers, for that matter.”

“The president did not see fit to share his reasoning with me,” Maksimov said with a wry smile. “But I suspect he thinks the recent assassination attempt on President Wilk may have consequences.”

“Yes, that seems likely,” Polichev agreed. “It is a pity that our FSB and Spetsnaz colleagues were so clumsy.” He frowned. “What exactly does the president expect us to do? Put our air-defense forces on full alert?”

“Fortunately not,” Maksimov said.

Polichev looked relieved. And for good reason. Raising the alert status of their fighter squadrons, radar units, and SAM regiments would set off alarms in defense ministries across Europe and even in the United States. Of itself, that was no real problem. However, in the aftermath of the crude attack on Poland’s president, going on high alert could trigger an unwanted sequence of actions and reactions from both sides. Like many Russian Aerospace Force officers itching to avenge their combat losses last year, Polichev had no problem with fighting the Poles. But that didn’t mean he wanted to blunder into a shooting war by accident because some trigger-happy pilot or missile officer got careless. “Then what are your orders?” he asked his chief.

“Have your couriers finished distributing the new target-acquisition-software upgrade for our S-300 and S-400 forces?” Maksimov wondered.

“Deliveries to our units in the Eastern and Central Military Districts are continuing,” Polichev said. “But all our SAM regiments in the Western and Southern Military Districts have already been upgraded.”

Maksimov nodded in satisfaction. Those were the regions most vulnerable to attack by enemies equipped with “netrusion” technology and stealth drones. The Chinese did not possess such weapons, at least not yet. “I want you to schedule a rotating series of battle drills at the regimental level starting tomorrow, Viktor,” he said firmly. “That should help our missile troops shake off the cobwebs and learn the ins and outs of these new programs.”

“Yes, sir,” Polichev said. “Should I inform the various foreign military attachés?”

Maksimov thought about that. To avoid unnecessarily raising international tensions, it was standard practice to brief other governments on major military exercises. “Go ahead. But, Viktor?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Make sure no one says anything about the software improvements we’ve made. And keep them well away from any of our command centers,” Maksimov cautioned. “As far as our foreign friends are concerned, we will say these are simply routine drills to check equipment readiness. Let them draw their own conclusions about our real intentions.”

Polichev nodded. It was all part of the complicated game of diplomatic and military signaling so common in relationships among the great powers. By announcing its series of SAM drills in advance, Russia was acting as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. But at the same time, the short notice with which those same exercises were called also sent a message that Russia’s armed forces were alert and able to defend their country if attacked.

If all went well, they would make the Poles and their American mercenaries think twice about seeking revenge. And if not… well, Russia’s air-defense forces in the sectors most likely to be attacked would be ready and waiting.