Second Strike

CHAPTER 8

^MOSCOW,

^{AUGUST 15, 3:44 A.M. MSK}

Piotr Egorshin should not have been nervous.

Piotr Egorshin was a star, and stars shouldn’t get nervous, or, on the rare occasion when they might, it should not be noticeable.

Yet it was painfully apparent to Egorshin’s driver that his boss was nervous, if not downright fearful. Though he appeared to be reclining comfortably in the expansive back seat of his Kortezh limo, his driver, looking in the rearview mirror, could see his body was tense, his fingers drumming rapidly on the armrest.

Not only was Egorshin a star, but his stardom was on the ascendancy, with no apogee in sight. At age thirty-eight he had rocketed through Russian military intelligence, the head of a special cyberwarfare unit within the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU. The unit sat at the pinnacle of Russia’s vast cyberwarfare apparatus, an apparatus that transcended government agencies, coordinating cyberespionage, counterintelligence, degradation of foreign information services, distributed denial of service attacks, and other informational war capabilities among an array of military, intelligence, business, and cybercriminal networks.

The unit had no name, purposely so. The West had not even heard rumors of its existence, though its effects were spectacular.

Because there was scant daylight between military cyberwarfare efforts and those of the highly sophisticated Russian cybercriminal syndicates, it was staggeringly difficult, if not impossible, for the cyberforensics of Western intelligence services to attribute, if not trace, cyberattacks—whether inconsequential or devastating—to the Russian government. This permitted the GRU to engage in all manner of mischief with near impunity.

Egorshin’s operation was assisted by a familial connection in the SVR, Russian foreign intelligence, who had, over the course of several decades, succeeded in planting agents within the US National Security Agency—the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world. Egorshin’s uncle, Sergei, had run a string of NSA mules for the KGB beginning in the early 1980s. US intelligence believed they had rolled up all such moles during Operation Global Story in 2010, but most of the SVR agents arrested in the operation were mere decoys. The SVR agents who remained within the NSA relayed information on the Five Eye encryption to Sergei, who relayed such information to his favorite nephew. Consequently, Russian military intelligence was able to monitor much of the West’s most highly sensitive communications in real time.

Egorshin’s family had been among the Soviet and Russian elite for decades. His grandfather had been a confidant of Kosygin and his father an associate of both Brezhnev and Andropov. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Egorshin family had prospered in business through its connections with powerful former KGB officials. Piotr, considered the most talented of the four Egorshin siblings, studied at both Harvard, where he acquired an air of privilege, and Oxford, where he cultivated a patina of unflappability.

So Colonel Piotr Egorshin had every reason to be calm, even arrogant. But as his car navigated through the surprisingly warm Moscow night, the closer it drew to the Kremlin, the faster his fingers drummed.

And that was because of one man: Aleksandr Stetchkin, head of the Twelfth Chief Directorate of the Ministry of Defense. Stetchkin was perhaps Russian president Yuri Mikhailov’s closest associate. Stetchkin, like Mikhailov, was former KGB. And Stetchkin was second only to Mikhailov as the most feared man in all of Russia.

The basis for the fear was not hypothetical. Beyond the rumors that inevitably surrounded high-level Russian officials, there were sufficient documented cases of Stetchkin’s ruthlessness that it would be unreasonable not to have a degree of trepidation meeting with him.

It didn’t help matters that the meeting was called for four A.M. Nothing mundane happens at such an absurd hour, thought Egorshin.

Two other facts conspired against Egorshin’s remaining calm: This was his first meeting with Stetchkin since the latter had become Egorshin’s direct supervisor, if not officially, then functionally.

Ivan Uganov, Egorshin’s former boss, had been removed from his position for indeterminate reasons, although reports circulated that Uganov’s offense was to have questioned Stetchkin’s intelligence. The hyperactive rumor mill of the Russian intelligence community suggested that he now resided somewhere deep in the bowels of Penal Colony Number Six of the Federal Penitentiary Service—the infamous Black Dolphin Prison. Consequently, the second-most feared man in Russia now would be scrutinizing Egorshin’s every move.

But a far more important reason was that Russian history—world history—was scheduled to change in less than ninety hours. And Colonel Piotr Egorshin, whose vehicle had just arrived at one of the most imposing edifices in the world, was at the fulcrum of that change.