The Russian Deception

CHAPTER 17

Stephanie sat at the wide console that controlled the enormous power of the Crays lined up behind her, staring at the lines of code filling her monitor. The room was cold with the air conditioning that kept the computers happy.

The chill Stephanie felt went far deeper than the number on the thermostat.

A cup of coffee cooled on her desk, forgotten. The lines of code displayed in front of her might as well have been written by aliens from Mars for all the sense they made to her at the moment.

She couldn't stop thinking about the ambush that had almost killed her and made her lose the baby. Physically she was healing but the unseen effects were another story.

It would be Christmas soon. She thought about how she would have been in her third trimester, shopping for a baby that now would never come. The doctors had told her she could have another, that there was no damage to prevent a healthy pregnancy. The words were meant to comfort her but were a poor substitute for the child she'd lost.

She'd been in surgery for more than six hours. For a while afterward the pain and the drugs the doctors gave her kept her from thinking clearly. She'd been numb, unable to embrace the reality of her loss. Then the dam cracked and the emotions had flooded in, a dark mix of anger, frustration, grief and guilt. It was a tossup as to which one was the strongest.

Her anger could find no outlet. The men who had violated her were dead. The man who had sent them was dead. There was no one left to go after, to punish. No one to take out her frustration on, no way to satisfy her desire for justice. She'd never seen the men who'd shot her, never seen their bodies. One minute she'd been happy, riding into town with the man she loved to have dinner with her friends. Then there'd been noise and pain and fear and darkness.

She'd woken in the hospital to the certainty of loss. She'd known the baby was gone before they told her. Over the next few weeks she'd struggled with mood swings and the hormonal changes that came from having the baby ripped from her body before its time. She'd swung back and forth between rage and grief, between helplessness and the urge to strike out at someone, anyone.

Thank God for Lucas, she thought.

Without Lucas it would have been worse. He'd shown patience she hadn't dreamed he possessed. They had grieved together. When she lashed out at him for no reason he took it calmly. When she cried, he didn't try to tell her that everything was going to be all right.

As soon as they could handle the physical stress, they'd both immersed themselves in work, Lucas in his job as Director of National Clandestine Services at Langley and Stephanie here at Project headquarters. Work was the only way she could think of to prevent what happened to her from happening to someone else. The man who had caused her so much grief was dead but there were many others like him. Men who cared about nothing. Men who lacked basic human empathy. Men who had to be stopped.

Before the ambush that had been her job. Now it had become her mission.

She felt the grief waiting and pushed it away.

Come on, Steph. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Stephanie forced herself to look at the monitor. She was writing a program to penetrate the sophisticated cyber security protecting China's satellites. The Chinese were very good at what they did with computers. They had succeeded in hacking into millions of Washington's restricted files, even into the White House. But they were not quite good enough to get into the Project files. She had blocked several attempts to bypass her firewalls, most of them coming from Beijing. Cyber espionage was a constant game of offense and defense, played by a small group of world class hackers who stood above everyone else. Every advanced nation had one or two. Stephanie was part of that elite company.

She picked up the cold coffee and set it back down. Elizabeth came into the room.

"I brought you a fresh coffee."

"You must have been reading my mind. I was just going to make a new pot."

Elizabeth handed the cup to Stephanie. There were deep shadows under Steph's eyes. She looked as if she was a mile away.

"What are you working on?" Elizabeth asked.

"I'm designing a program to get through the firewalls the Chinese have built around their satellite servers. If it works like I think it will, we could take out any of their satellites anytime we wished."

"The Pentagon would love that."

"Beijing has been trying to break into our servers for months," Stephanie said. "It seems fair that I return the favor. Besides, it makes me feel like I'm doing something to fight back."

"Fight back?"

"Against all those evil bastards out there who want to mess things up for everyone. When someone tries to break my firewalls it feels personal. It makes me want to get back at them. In this case it's the Chinese."

Steph's voice was hard, angry.

"It's not really about the Chinese, is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean, Steph."

"No, I don't."

"I know you don't want to hear this but hiding out down here in your cave isn't the answer."

"I don't think I want to have this conversation."

"We've been friends for a long time," Elizabeth said. "If your friends can't tell you what you need to hear, you're in trouble. No one blames you for being angry or feeling like you want to retreat. But isolating yourself isn't the answer."

"How would you know? It wasn't your baby."

"I was pregnant, once," Elizabeth said.

Stephanie looked at her, surprised. "You were? I didn't know that."

"Not many people do."

"What happened?"

"I miscarried about six months after I'd gotten married. In hindsight it's just as well, given what happened later with the jerk I thought was the love of my life. But at the time I thought I'd never be all right again. I thought it was my fault, that somehow if I'd done something different everything would've been okay. But the truth was that there was nothing I could have done about it. Just like there was nothing you could've done about those people who shot at you."

"It's not fair," Stephanie said. Her eyes filled with moisture.

"No, it's not."

Steph took a tissue from a box on her console and dabbed at her eyes. She blew her nose.

"I haven't been sleeping well," Steph said. "I have nightmares. Sometimes I'm back in that car and there's blood and glass and screaming. At first I don't know who's screaming, then I realize it's the baby."

"Oh, Steph."

"Then I realize it's me," Stephanie said, "and I wake up and my face is covered with tears and the bed is soaked with sweat and Lucas is saying my name…"

"Oh, Steph," Elizabeth said again. "I'm so sorry."

"Lucas wants me to see someone."

"It might be a good idea."

"I'm not sure if it is."

"Well, you don't have to decide right now."

"I don't think I can decide much of anything right now."

"Come upstairs and we'll have lunch," Elizabeth said. "Bring your coffee. We need to talk about what's happening in Macedonia."

"You heard from Nick?"

"He called in about half an hour ago. Things are getting complicated over there."

Stephanie smiled, the first time Elizabeth had seen her smile in a week. "Why doesn't that surprise me?"

"I don't think anything Nick comes up with would surprise me at this stage of the game," Elizabeth said.