Threat Vector

small felt bag the size of his fist into his jacket pocket, and he zipped the pocket closed.

After this came dark gray socks and his black Brooks running shoes, and he put thin Under Armour gloves over his hands before heading out of his room.

In moments he was outside the hotel, jogging to the south in a cool light rain.

For the first kilometer of his run he jogged in the grass along Tupolevova, and he saw not a soul in the dark around him other than a couple of delivery vehicles that rumbled past on the street.

He turned west on Krivoklatska and kept his pace leisurely. He noticed that his heart was beating harder than usual this early in the run, and that surprised him somewhat. When he worked in London he would run ten kilometers through Hyde Park most mornings, and he barely broke a sweat except during the warmest months of the year.

He knew he wasn’t as fit as he’d been in the UK, but, he suspected, his marginal health was not the reason for his thumping chest.

No, he was nervous this morning because he was back in the field.

Even though Valentin Kovalenko had risen to the rank of deputy rezident of the United Kingdom in Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, a person in that position does not customarily undertake actual field operations; brush passes and dead drops and black-bag jobs are the work of men lower on the espionage food chain. No, Valentin Kovalenko did most of his work as a spymaster from the comforts of his office in the Russian embassy or over beef Wellington at Hereford Road or perhaps ox cheek with watercress, bone marrow, and salsa cooked in a Josper oven at Les Deux Salons.

Those were the good old days, he thought to himself as he slowed his jog a bit to try to control the heavy thump in his chest. Today his work would not be particularly dangerous, though it would be considerably less highbrow than his life and work in London had been.

He had done his share of grunt work for Russia, of course; no one could make deputy rezident without coming up the ranks. He’d been an illegal, an operative working without official cover status for Russia, in many postings across Europe, as well as a brief stint in Australia. He’d been younger then, of course, just twenty-four when he worked in Sydney and still under thirty by the time he left operations for desk work. But he enjoyed the duty.

He turned on to Beranovych, heading north, following a route he’d been running for the past two mornings, though today he would divert from the route, but for only a few minutes.

The rain picked up a bit, soaking him but giving him better cover than the darkness alone could provide.

Kovalenko smiled. Spies loved the dark. And spies loved the rain.

He felt good to be performing this task, though as far as he was concerned this was a weird little op, and whatever his minders hoped to achieve with it, Valentin thought the probability for success was rather low.

Just a few dozen meters after turning onto Beranovych he looked both left and right, and then back over his shoulder. The street was clear, so he darted quickly to the right. He knelt down at a small iron gate in a whitewashed wall and quickly picked the simple lock. It was a residential gate, and the lock was a cinch, but it had been so long since he’d tested his lock-picking skills he allowed himself a brief smile as he put the picks back in his jacket.

In seconds he was in the front garden of a two-story home, and he ran forward, black clothing on a black morning, moving to the right of the house and then passing through a wooden gate that separated front yard from backyard. He ran past an aboveground swimming pool that was closed for the year, and he made his way between a potting shed and a storage shed to a back wall that ran along the eastern property line of the private home. In seconds Valentin Kovalenko was over this wall, dropping down into wet grass, where he found himself exactly where his research on Google Maps told him he would be.

He was now past the walls, exterior lights, and guard shacks surrounding the Science and Technology Park VZLU.

Kovalenko’s new minder, the English speaker named Center who communicated via secure instant messaging, had not told him the point of today’s exercise, or even much about the target itself other than the address and the marching orders of his mission there. But the Russian did his own research, and from it he learned that VZLU was an aerospace research and test facility, and the work here focused on aerodynamics, aircraft engines, and helicopter rotors.

It was a large campus comprising many buildings and different test sites.

Whatever Valentin’s employer wanted here, it would not be up to Valentin himself to get it. Instead he’d been ordered to simply breach the physical security, and to leave some items behind.

Under cover of darkness and rain he knelt down in the first small parking lot he came to, and he took the bag out of his jacket pocket. From it he pulled a matte gray computer thumb drive and, against his better judgment, he simply laid it down in a parking space. The device was labeled “Test results,” but he was careful to leave it facedown.

Kovalenko was no fool. He was certain this thumb drive did not contain any test results, or no real test results, anyway. It would contain a computer virus, and if Valentin’s employer was any damn good, the virus would be disguised and built to execute as soon as it was attached via a USB port to any computer in the network here. The plan was, it was clear to Kovalenko, that someone would find the drive and put it into their computer to see what files it contained. As soon as anything was opened on the drive, some sort of a virus would infect the computer, and then the network itself.

Valentin had been instructed to place only one drive outside each building in the facility so that the ruse would have a better chance of success. If a half-dozen techies all walked into the same building having just found a mysterious device in the parking lot, it would be more likely that two or more of them would bump into each other and red flags would go up. It was still likely that most people who found the drive would have suspicions but, Kovalenko knew through his own research about the facility, the network connected the different divisions together, so only one successful infection of a client machine, anywhere inside the VZLU, would affect the work of them all.

Just like a phishing e-mail, Valentin Kovalenko himself was an attack vector.

It wasn’t a bad plan, Valentin admitted, but he did not know the details of the mission that would convince him it would be a success. He wondered what would happen once it became clear to the IT department of the science and technology concern that two dozen similar or identical thumb drives had just appeared on their property. That would tip them off that a client-based hacking attempt was under way, and that would probably cause them to shut their network down to search for the virus. Valentin did not know much about computer espionage, but he found it hard to believe that the virus would not then be detected and wiped clean before any major compromise of the system had taken place.

But again, Center had not seen fit to include him in the planning of the operation. It was somewhat insulting, really. Kovalenko assumed he was working for a corporate espionage outfit; this guy and his goons would know Kovalenko had been a high-ranking intelligence operative, trusted to a crucial posting, in one of the greatest espionage concerns in the world, the SVR.

As he crawled on his hands and knees between two small utility trucks parked in the lot near the property’s small grass-field airport, on his way to drop another thumb drive onto the wet concrete, he wondered just who the fuck these industrial spies thought they were, using him as their errand boy.

He did have to admit, though, that this beat prison, the risk was low, and the pay was good.

FOURTEEN

The second meeting between President and General Secretary Wei Zhen Lin and Chairman Su Ke Qiang took place in Zhongnanhai, the government compound in central Beijing. Both Su’s and Wei’s offices were here, as well as Wei’s living quarters, so an evening private meeting was arranged between the two in the study off Wei’s private bedroom.

Wei’s secretary was present, as was Su’s second-in-command, much as they had been a week before at the Beidaihe resort on the coast. This evening would be different, however, because this time Chairman Su would be the one making the presentation.