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The senator was talking with two federal officials who looked almost identical to each other—office pallor, upper-level navy suits, glasses with tortoiseshell frames, carefully coifed dark hair at eight o’clock in the morning. Well-buffed black shoes. They would have been hard to tell apart, Letty thought, if one hadn’t been female and the other male, and if one pair of shoes hadn’t had stacked heels.
Colles pointed at Letty and said, “Sit.” She sat in a visitor’s chair as the two suits looked her over. Colles said, “These folks are from the National Security Agency. Don’t tell anybody.”
Letty: “What’s up?”
The woman said, distantly, as though Letty weren’t sitting six feet from her, “She looks right.” And she asked Colles—not Letty—“Does she have any tattoos?”
Colles said, “I haven’t looked. If I tried, she might whack me. Whack, like inThe Godfather.”
“I don’t have any tattoos,” Letty said. “I’m not getting any.”
The woman said, to the man, “Jeff Toski.”
The man nodded. “Yes. She wouldn’t be in long...” He looked back at Letty and said, “Fake tattoo. Good for a week to fifteen days, depending on how often you shower and how hard you scrub it. My daughter had one for a while. It was convincing. For a while.”
Letty nodded: “I’d go for a fake.”
The woman: “You killed three people in Texas, and two more, years ago, in St. Paul. How do you feel about that?”
“If you’re asking if I’m suffering from PTSD, the answer is ‘No.’ If you’re asking if I enjoyed it, the answer is ‘No,’ ” Letty said. “I have no urge to kill anyone, but I’m willing to, if pushed into a corner.”
Now the woman said, “Huh. Do you think that makes a difference in the world? Killing people?”
“Of course it does. We’d be living in a lot different world if John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King hadn’t been murdered. On the other side, if you could kill any one hundred people in the United States, right now, think about what the country could be like without them.”
The other three stared at her for a moment, then the man said, “You could be a very dangerous woman.”
“Fortunately, I’m neither crazy nor a murderer,” Letty said. She turned to Colles: “What’s going on? You’ll have to tell me sooner or later. You might as well tell me now.”
“If we tell you, and you talk about it, you’ll go to prison,” the woman said.
“Probably not,” Letty said, looking back at her. “If it’s that kind of deal and I talked about it, you’d all be running for cover.”
For the first time, the man smiled: “You nailed that. We probably would be.”
The woman said to Colles, “She’ll do.”
Colles, behind his desk,steepled his fingers, then said, “There’s a company in Sunnyvale, California, called Pastek Cybernetics...”
“I’m familiar with it,” Letty said. “Does machine control software. Not real big. Revenues of, what, a half billion a year?”
The woman asked, “Why would you know about Pastek?”
“I went to Stanford, as I’m sure you know,” Letty said. “The place is lousy with computer people. I don’t know a lot about Pastek, but I’d heard the name.”
The man nodded. “All right.”
The woman said, “We’re now going to talk about severelyclassified material. Senator Colles has assured us that you can keep your mouth shut when necessary.”
“I can,” Letty agreed.
“Three years ago, Pastek was the victim of a ransomware attack. You know about those.”
“Of course. A hacker takes over your computer system and locks you out,” Letty said. “You no longer have control of what your system does, or the files inside of it.”
“You wouldn’t think a software company would be vulnerable, but Pastek was, in one particular segment of their business,” the woman said. “A Russian hacker group calling itself DarkVenture, one word, capital V, got into their machine control servers and locked Pastek out.”
Pastek had become desperate, she said. The company not only provided software, but also maintained it, and upgraded it, and adapted the software to any changes in the machinery for which they provided controls.
