Rasputin's Shadow

11

An hour after leaving Federal Plaza, I was in Newark, New Jersey, seated in a booth at a bright and cheerful IHOP, facing a leviathan of a man, still amazed that he’d managed to lever himself onto the double-seat bench.

He hadn’t been too happy to see me when I’d showed up at his place-well, his mom’s place, technically-and told him I needed a powwow. An invitation to join me for a bite-I use the word purely figuratively here-helped lower his defenses. Cheap trick, I know, but hey, I’m a firm believer in taking the path of least resistance whenever you can. And who doesn’t love IHOP?

The triple-XL Weyland Enterprises T-shirt stretched against the folds of his wobbling flesh as he grabbed the menu and started eating the entire thing with his eyes. I’d said it was my treat and he was obviously going to take me at my word as he waved the waitress over and started to order. About halfway through his list I realized I could probably eat too, though I normally went out of my way to avoid the cholesterol-and-sugar slamdown of a pancake-fest. I interjected a garden omelet and let him go back to what was fast appearing to be some kind of record attempt.

Kurt Jaegers was thirty-two, weighed at least three-hundred-and-fifty pounds, and lived with his mother, a divorced psychotherapist who worked from home and specialized in addiction. That was cute enough. But Kurt was also number seven on the FBI’s cybercrime watch list. Kurt fascinated me. In his dreams, he probably had a string of glamorous girlfriends and a large yacht, Kim Dotcom-style. The reality was probably online porn and his mother’s beat-up Volvo whenever he could heist the keys. But for some reason, I liked him. He had an inner honesty that I found weirdly admirable. And right at the moment, I didn’t really care what his domestic arrangements or louche hobbies were. I just needed his help, which is why I decided to play nice.

“I said whatever you like and I meant it, but I may need to leave you after the first couple of rounds.”

“No worries, dude.” He’d finally finished ordering and sent the waitress on her way. “You must try the stuffed French toast. It’s incredible. But you’ll need to order some of your own. I only got two.”

“I’m good, Kurt. But thanks anyway.”

His expression turned quizzical. “So… you’re going to give me a get-out-of-jail-free card? Is that for real?”

“Something like that. Unless you’re really naughty-NSA or NCIS or even NASA for that matter, anything with an ‘N’ or an ‘S’ in it and you’re on your own.”

He chuckled. “Hey, no sweat. JWICS is tight as a cat’s butthole since Bradley Manning downloaded the whole enchilada. Even Anonymous have mostly packed up and gone home when it comes to SIPRNet. There’s no more fun to be had with those guys. I spend most of my time playing WoW nowadays.”

Clearly, my face telegraphed what I was missing.

“World of Warcraft, dude. You don’t know that?”

I shrugged. “I’m a Neanderthal, what can I tell you.”

He waved it off. “I’m really into my female Pandaren at the moment. She’s called Chiaroscuro. Cause she’s black-and-white, you know? Lately, though… I think I want to do her. I know it’s wrong, I mean she’s a fucking panda, right? That’s like zoophilia or something.”

“It’s something all right, I’m just not sure I want to think about it.” My head was already spinning, and the plates hadn’t even landed yet. “At least, it’s good to hear you’re playing safe these days.”

Kurt drank some coffee and grinned. “There’s fun to be had. Like sometimes, I’ll add extra items to Mom’s credit card bill just to mess with her. Last week, she spent an hour trying to work out how she’d bought sexy lingerie from a store in Paris.”

“Well, that’s the kind of blowback I can help you with.”

“Understood, dude.” His eyes took on a sad countenance. “I know you’re mocking me in your head, but… thanks for not throwing it back at me. I appreciate people who can keep it off their face.”

I shrugged. “Come on, Kurt. We’re all screwups in our own way. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit I’ve done.”

“Don’t say that, dude. Now I’ll have to hack your file.” He smiled, then laughed nervously and started to rearrange the first wave of dishes that our waitress was delivering to the table. “Joke, man. Joke.” He looked up, finally happy with the positioning of the plates. “So what do you need? And I assume it’s you personally, otherwise you’d be talking to one of your in-house cyber squads or-shudder-the stormtroopers from DC3.”

He was referring to the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center down in Linthicum, Maryland. These guys knew what they were doing, and they knew Kurt. They had forensic, counterintelligence, and training divisions and were on tap to us and to all the other law-enforcement agencies. We’d crossed paths a couple of years back, when Kurt had slipped inside the United Nations’ server farm, which was how I’d first met him.

I took a bite of my omelet and decided to come right out with it.

“I need to find someone. Someone who doesn’t want to be found.”

His eyes widened with interest. “Where’s he hiding?”

“Some file locked away in Langley.”

Kurt sputtered on a mouthful of French toast and raised his hands defensively. “Whoa, dude. I’m not going there. Not for any kind of free pass.”

“I’m not going to ask you to, not directly anyway,” I said. “I know you need to be careful and so do I. Thing is, I only have a cover ID for this guy. And yes, it’s personal. Deeply personal.” I held his gaze for a breath, then I added, “I just want you to find someone on the inside that I can lean on. Someone with the necessary clearance. Someone who works there and who I can visit in person and,” using his parlance, I went with, “convince of the righteousness of my quest.”

Kurt held up his hand as he finished devouring plate one of his syrupy odyssey. Finally, he swallowed.

“What’s his game? The guy you’re looking for. It’s a guy, right?”

“It’s a guy. And I’ve got some threads to pull on. DEA, Black Ops, Mexico, South America. I’m sure there’s a lot more besides.” I had already decided not to mention MK-ULTRA. It was important that I at least appeared to be the sane one in this relationship.

“You’ll need someone with at least a Level Two clearance, no lower than a 2-C.” He thought about it for a moment. “There’s got to be a few hundred CIA staffers with that level of clearance. A couple hundred of those are analysts.”

“So find me one who’s not the fine, upstanding citizen he or she appears to be.”

His mouth widened into a grin that was disturbingly juvenile. “Now, that could be fun.” His mind was almost visibly churning through various scenarios. “I could go in through a government employee database. Health care, pensions maybe. Cherry-pick the departments we want. Cross-reference that with clearance-levels data sitting on a black-hat site I use. Should be able to get you name, gender, age, address, Social Security, time on government’s payroll, pension, medical, dental, disciplinary, sexual orientation-”

I cut him off with, “I get it.” Too harshly, maybe. But listening to him, I was starting to wonder if I was taking the whole thing too far. Delving into the personal lives of people who had nothing to do with me or Alex and never would.

“Don’t be squeamish, dude,” he said, reading me. “Information wants to be free.”

“Unless it’s the identity of hackers.”

He chuckled. “Touché. But let’s try not to dwell on that particular contradiction. Anyway, difference is we’re not meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations or monitoring every single action performed by the citizens of a supposed democracy.”

I wanted to hit the ball back at him, but I didn’t have time to get into a big Orwellian debate, so I just took another bite out of my omelet, slid the plate across the table, and followed it with a big sip of coffee instead.

I put the mug back on the table. “Okay. Good. Get me all that. Then go deeper and do your thing and find me stuff that doesn’t stack up. Anything I can use to apply pressure.”

“You got it, dude. In my limited experience, the more upstanding you appear, the more screwed-up you are behind closed doors. At least I appear screwed-up.”

I couldn’t help but smile at that. He knew himself pretty well, but that still didn’t stop him from diving into a plate of blueberry pancakes.

I dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table, then slid out of the booth. “Call me when you have something.”

“Sure. It’ll be from a VPN’d fake Skype account billed to an entirely random Japanese woman’s credit card. You sure you don’t want to get yourself a burner?”

“One phone’s enough. Just keep it short and vague.”

“Wilco, my friend.” Then he paused the trajectory of fork to mouth, and his face took on a rare, serious sheen. “Must have been something bad for you to be doing this. Like, risking your career and all that. You sure you don’t want to just let it go?”

I shook my head. “Funny how everyone keeps telling me that. But if I was going to drop it, I would have already done that. I guess we’re the same in that way. Neither one of us knows when to stop.”

He shook his head, smiled, and deposited a mini-stack of syrup-drenched pancakes into his mouth. “Yeah, but at least this stuff tastes great.”

At least, I think that’s what he said.

AS I DROVE BACK into the city, two interesting tidbits landed on my phone: a face, and a license number.

The face I didn’t recognize, but I didn’t expect to. It was the blow-up of the guy from the YouTube clip. They were running it through facial recognition software at that very moment. The license number was from his car. Again, no hits. The car was a maroon Ford Escape that was leased to a New York LLC. Records were being tracked down to find out more about the company, and a tristate-wide APB had been put out on the car, with both Aparo and me, as well as Detectives Adams and Giordano, listed as investigating officers.

I thought it might be interesting to ask Ms. Tchoumitcheva if the YouTube guy’s face rang a bell, but I decided to wait until I had a bit more to go on-a name, or a Russian link to the company that had leased the car-before I made that call.

My thoughts glided back to my meeting with my favorite hacker, and thinking about it imbued me with a mixture of low-level fear and energizing satisfaction. I knew the balance of power between the hackers and the military-industrial complex was close to shifting dramatically in the favor of the latter. The next-generation encryption we’d been briefed about was supposed to be all but impossible to break into. Which meant that hackers like Kurt would find it increasingly difficult to boldly go where they weren’t welcome. But at the moment, one geek with limitless time to burn and no sense of privacy other than his own could still beat the best firewalls out there. Which suited me fine. Finding the names of a few analysts shouldn’t be too much of a problem for him-not yet.

Of course, the whole thing could blow up in my face. But then again, when did that ever stop me from doing anything?