AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I knew the charges against you were fabricated. I knew you wouldn’t turn on your nation.”
To this, she said, “I did turn on my nation, Dyadya.”
He looked at her a moment. “Extenuating circumstances, I’m sure.”
Zoya had been framed to take the fall for an operation gone wrong, and a kill order had been placed on her head by the Russian government. She then shot a senior Russian foreign intelligence operative who’d tried to kill her, and she defected to the Americans.
“All sorts of extenuating circumstances,” she said softly, thinking about everything that had happened to her in the past few years.
The older man in the fedora said, “That’s not why I’m here. No one is here but me. You have my word…over the grave of your dear father who, as you know, I loved like my own brother.” Zoya’s father had been head of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and Borislava Genrich’s close friend.
Zoya looked around again. “If Moscow knows where I am, why aren’t they here?”
“I’m sure you watch television. Russian foreign intelligence operations have been crippled by the release of financial records from a Swiss bank. Everything is a shambles now for Moscow.”
Zoya didn’t have to watch TV to know something about this, because she had been one of the people who had safeguarded the information so that it could see the light of day to damage Russian intelligence.
But she made no mention of her involvement. Instead she said, “If foreign ops are crippled, then why are you here?”
“Because I’m not from the intelligence services. I was army: plain, vanilla, army. Not like your father. I retired, then started a private company. I’ve been working on certain…commercial endeavors.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I work in the private sector, helping acquire technology.”
“Military technology?”
“Not necessarily…but sometimes.”
“And you sell it to Russia?”
“Not necessarily…but sometimes.”
Zoya gave him an icy stare. “And you live with yourself? What does Olga think about what you are doing?” She ordered another margarita from a passing server, then looked back to the Russian man.
Calmly, he said, “Olga died nine years ago. Cancer of the liver.”
Zoya exhaled a little. “I’m sorry. She was…she was always nice to me. You both were.”
Slava shrugged. “And as to my sleep…my sleep is troubled, but it is troubled from what I did in Afghanistan, in Chechnya, in Dagestan. Not for what’s happening now. I did no fighting in Ukraine. I did no planning for this terrible war. I live in the West. I find out what new tech is being developed by private industry all over the world, and then I find ways to get the plans, the blueprints…sometimes even the brainpower itself, and I sell it to other companies, occasionally to private concerns in Russia, but often to other third parties.”
She rolled her eyes. “Look, you might not be in the intelligence services, but what you’re doing sounds a lot like espionage.”
“Industrial espionage,” he corrected with a wave of his hand.
“And this brings us to what you want from me.”
“It does.”
FIVE
Borislava Genrich leaned forward even closer, his linen suit straining with the movement, and he spoke so softly Zoya could barely hear him.
“A Russian computer software engineer is holed up in an apartment in Mexico City. He claims to have information about a new artificial intelligence weapon that’s about to go live.”
“What kind of artificial intelligence weapon?”
“He only knows coding. He’s a software guy, as I said. He doesn’t know the platform the software is going to be used on. It could be a pilotless aircraft, a missile with the capability to learn about its target’s defenses while in flight, a robotic tank. Whatever it is, he’s stolen a portion of the code, and he’s certain the weapon is just weeks, or maybe days, away from going online.”
