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Sovern turned over his wrist to look at it, pretending to look at a watch that wasn’t actually there, and said, “According to moles on my wrist, maybe tonight. We gotta get a little lucky. There’s a lot of military material heading down toward Kyiv, and a lot already there. We know, though, that the Gomel computer can talk to the computer in Voronezh, in Russia, which is east of Kharkiv,which is in Ukraine on the border with Russia. Voronezh is another big train center feeding military material toward Ukraine. So that’s good: we should be able to screw up both of them.”
“Push it, stop fucking around,” Letty said. “The war is on and it’s not looking good. Let’s take the fuckers down.”
“Not fucking around, we’re busting our balls,” Sovern said. He started to turn away, and then frowning, turned back and said, “Something strange is going on with the Russians. We’re talking to people in the train stations, and they say the Russian troops in Belarus don’t seem to know they’re heading into combat. They don’t seem to have much... stuff. You know. Ammo and food. Fuel. It all seems really disorganized, thrown together.”
“Good. Let’s disorganize them some more,” Letty said.
She went back to bed, only to wake up again when Cartwright came in an hour later. “Sorry about the noise,” Cartwright said, as she sat on the second bed and started pulling off her shoes. “The war is nuts. We were watching it on TV in the supermarket. It’s everywhere. Craig says we’re making good progress toward screwing up the Russian trains.”
“I heard,” Letty said, sleepily. “You get all the food?”
“We cleaned out the store’s microwave section. We got so much food that Kaiser made me stop at an appliance place and buy another microwave.”
“Gotta eat,” Letty said.
“Emmy’s boyfriend up in Belarus downloaded the whole hard drive on his computer. Their master program wasn’t designed by rocket scientists; Craig says it’s actually based on an old program used by Union Pacific,” Cartwright said. “One of the guys recognized it. It’s thirty years old and it’s full of security holes. We’ll own these guys by tonight.”
“Faster the better,” Letty said. “Ninety percent is better than one hundred percent, if it gets us out of here before dark. After that...” She shrugged.
Cartwright crawled into her bed. “Sleep as long as you can,” she said. “If we can’t push the button today, until after dark, and if they really do know where we are...”
“See you tonight,” Letty said.
Bad dreams.
Flashbacks to her childhood, to the disaster she’d witnessed and fought through in Pershing, Texas, the year before, to another gunfight, as a teenager, with out-of-control drug dealers... All colorful, the color being blood red.
For three or four hours at midday, she was restless, kicking around the bed, before finally falling into a deeper sleep. When she woke up, she sensed something different about the room. Momentarily disoriented, she rolled on her side, toward the window that looked toward the front parking lot. She reached over and pushed a curtain aside, and immediately recognized what was different: it was dark outside.
She looked at her phone: it was almost seven o’clock. She muttered, “Holy cats,” and rolled out of bed; she’d been more or less asleep for nine hours and felt reasonably sharp, but with the sense of running late.
Cartwright had already snuck out: her bed was empty and her shoes were gone. Moderately embarrassed, Letty limited herself to a one-minute shower, brushed her teeth, put on the same set of clothes that she’d been wearing that morning, and hurried down the hall to the yoga room.
She could hear a lot of talk; Kaiser and Cartwright were standing just inside the door, and Kaiser said, “We decided to let yousleep,” and Cartwright added, “Craig says we’re about there. We’re ready to put our code into the central computers.”
“Then we’re done?”
“Not quite. They want to watch it work for a while. But, we’re close.”
“No big alarms during the day?”
Cartwright looked at Kaiser, who tilted his head to one side, and said, “Patty says we’ve been cruised. Starting around three o’clock, she thinks we were cruised a half-dozen times, three different cars. Jane’s still up on the hill, Patty’s still down on the road. You need to get a bite to eat, and then you and Barbara really ought to get back outside, relieve Patty and Jane.”
“Microwave burritos,” Cartwright said. “Mmm, mmm.”
“Burritos are good,” Letty said. “Listen. Let’s turn on every light in the motel that we can. Outside and inside. There are some guests who aren’t with us, but let’s get the lights on in all of our rooms and all the empty rooms.”
Cartwright frowned: “Why?”
“So that people moving in on the motel will stand out against the light, if we’re behind them. We should let them go by us, unless they’re coming down right on top of us. Once they’re by us, they’ll be better targets—and if they’re looking into the lights and then turn to look for us, in the woods, they’ll be night-blind.”
Cartwright nodded: “What you said.”
Letty ate her burritoin the yoga room. The hacker combine was leaning on Sovern and the man Letty knew only as Jack.
Jan and Michele had determined that some of the codes on the sides of the railcars indicated military priority shipments. Working with the central computers, they thought it likely that they couldscatter those boxcars across western Russia. They could even send some of them across Belarus to Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, all of which were opposed to the war, but had the same rail gauge as Russia, and Russian trains crossed those borders without detailed checks.
“Gotta get it done, gotta get it done,” Letty told William, who was working his way through a pack of Twinkies as he stared at a computer screen. “C’mon, you guys. Push the button. Any button.”
