Gus was a familiar voice to survivors everywhere, but the Americans had more radiomen than radios and Gus was a foreign national.
After con‚rming access and control codes to the space station, they’d left Gus unemployed. It was a problem he’d anticipated. The Americans had wanted all of Ruth’s ‚les and the entire backlog of Ulinov’s surveillance work. They wanted the use of the cameras and other instruments. Even empty, the ISS made a valuable satellite — and Gus, like Ulinov, had reprogrammed his computers long before they disembarked, knowing it might be useful to leave open a few back doors.
Gus had deliberately created a bug that only he could correct, blaming the problem on the avalanche of data relayed through the ISS in the past year, not all of which was clean. “Fixing” the bug gave him two days to send code back and forth from the station after the Americans got frustrated. Two days to study. Two days to rig his patches.
Ulinov had always planned to act alone in his mission, using the ISS databases to store, send, and receive messages. The Americans agreed that he could still access the station to provide photos and weather reports for the Russian defenses, which gave him every excuse to transmit complex ‚les — but the Americans watched too closely. They recorded every keystroke. They made sure they had experts on hand to “help” him, combat engineers and meteorologists who were unquestionably CIA computer techs, no matter how competently they discussed demolition efforts or high pressure fronts.
Ulinov’s only transmissions to the secure database had been a weather report and then a duplicate of the same report, a clear signal to his countrymen that nothing else was safe.
His next message, however, was a short burst of text via wireless modem, reestablishing contact. Gustavo had three ways to pirate into the local system, delay-and-relay programs that attached packets of data to larger transmissions. Whenever the Americans uploaded commands to the ISS, which was constantly, Ulinov’s notes leapt into the sky as well.
Gustavo had shared this trick with Ulinov for reasons that Ulinov never fully trusted. For friendship, yes. And to keep busy. And yet he knew that Gus had been cooperating with American intelligence almost from the start of their twelve months in orbit… surely on orders from his own people…
What game were the Italians playing?
The situation in the Alps was not much better than in the Middle East. There were multiple battlefronts, a patchwork mess of alliances and counter-invasions, with Italy holding on to a few small shards of land against the French, Germans, Brits, Irish, Dutch, Poles, Greeks, Czechs, Belgians, Swedes, and Slavs. Ulinov had to trust Gustavo’s resentment. The whole world wanted to bring the Americans down a few notches to better their own chances of begging or buying help, but Ulinov was also aware that Gus could win favor by exposing him. The Italian spy agency, SISMI, had surely tried to copy all of Ulinov’s messages. If they’d succeeded, by now they must have broken the simple encoding.
The relay through Gus was never more than a short-lived chance to update and con‚rm contingency plans. Gustavo would betray him. Perhaps it had already happened. The Russian leadership must know this, and yet twice in the past twenty-four hours they’d alluded to their envoys to the Chinese. They’d also instructed Ulinov to demand the nano weapon, making certain the Americans learned of his deceit.
He was a tool that had been sacri‚ced, but to what purpose? Why did they want him in trouble and how did they want him to act? To try to minimize the problem? Make it worse?
“I’m in,” Gus said, beckoning for him to move closer.
Ulinov reluctantly took his hand from the pistol inside his heavy jacket. His bare ‚ngers tensed in the breeze as he accepted Gustavo’s phone. He had never felt so vulnerable.
“Thank you,” he said.
Gus nodded and grinned. He stepped away to give Ulinov a margin of privacy and Ulinov forced himself not to stare after his comrade. His enemy. It wasn’t that he expected men to crash into the room behind them, shouting, like a drama on American TV. Not yet. How did they say it in their Old West? They would hand him enough rope to hang himself.
Ulinov stabbed his ‚nger expertly over the tiny face of the cell phone, holding it and his PDA in his left hand, using his right to enter his own codes now that Gus had keyed him into the Trojan database across town. He needed the PDA to remember his passwords and to encode and decode his messages, even though the cipher was very basic, substituting numbers for the Cyrillic alphabet. Again, it was only meant to keep the Americans guessing for a few days.
He used shorthand and abbreviations, perhaps three words in a row without most of the vowels, then one fully written out. He ran the numbers together so that 25 might as easily be a 2 and a 5. Also, the number substitution began arbitrarily, 1 for
Ulinov was good with data, but he couldn’t instantly make sense of a hundred numerals squeezed together. Composing his reports wasn’t any easier, encoding a hundred letters after deleting vowels at random. He needed to organize his messages ahead of time, then key them into the phone as he read off of his PDA. Likewise, when he received text he transcribed it into the PDA as rapidly as possible and only later worked through it.
Even before he’d returned from talking with Kendricks, the Americans had disturbed his few belongings in the thin private area that was his living space, the back part of a suite that had been walled off with plywood. It wasn’t much, blankets and a mattress on the †oor, two spare shirts, underwear. And they hadn’t searched too hard. They’d moved things just enough to show they’d been there — to see what he would do, if he would panic — but Ulinov had stashed his contraband elsewhere in the old hotel. He’d found a small slot behind the exposed studs of the wall in the second-†oor stairwell where the paneling had been removed for ‚rewood.
The gun was not to kill Gustavo, nor himself nor anyone else. It was not for ‚ghting at all. There was no chance for Ulinov to escape Leadville, nor any reason. He intended to use the weapon to destroy his PDA and the pitiful few ‚les he’d created and received, no matter that the Americans might already hold copies of most. Let them think there were more. Let them worry there were real secrets.
Ulinov believed the Russian leadership was using the link through the Italians to create confusion and fear. He believed it was a backhanded test of strength. They were pushing in order to be pushed back. They wanted to be slapped down. They wanted the Americans to feel con‚dent, and that meant.
It meant a double cross.
The idea was so dangerous that he tried to move it out of his head completely, but the signs were all there. He’d never expected to go home again anyway. Not
Were they selling their loyalty to the Chinese after all? Something different?
Nikola Ulinov turned his eyes to the pockets of light in this cold, small, overcrowded city, his pulse beating with guilt and conviction at the same time. First he tried to access new messages, but either there were none or the Americans had intercepted them. Then he began his text with his authentic sign-on,
He interrupted himself, breaking the connection as if the cellular system dropped him or his phone had failed. Let the Americans make a mountain out of that. Ulinov could sell them enough bullshit in the meantime to keep them occupied.
Something awful was going to happen.
10
