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Sovern nodded: “I thought it might be something like that. Especially after I looked at her, down at the marina.” He nodded at Cartwright. “Though I thought she might be a fed.”
Letty: “You don’t think Paul and I look like feds?”
“You look like you get carded everywhere you go, and Paul doesn’t exactly fit my image of a combat-ready law enforcement officer,” Sovern said.
“I’m not,” Baxter said. “I do have that PhD from Florida. I kill on machine control software, but I don’t jump out of airplanes.”
“Iknowabout the Russian train hack, but from what I’ve heard, everything was done by remote control,” Sovern said, not ready to admit anything. “No fingerprints on anything. The hackers were very, very careful. Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge. The question now is, what do you want? Will it get any more of us killed? The dead people were my best friends.”
“Everybody needs to sit down,” Letty said. They all sat. She said, “Here’s the truth: the FBI wants to arrest us, and you, and your friends, if they could find a way to do it...”
She went on to spin the story about a powerful agency in Washington interfering with the FBI; about being held by the Oxnard cops, about her security agency getting in touch with the powers in Washington, about the FBI showing up to interrogate them, and about being kicked free with the implicit deal that they all go after the trains.
“If we do that, we’re good. You’re good. Nobody will come after us. The FBI will be told to shut up and sit down, because we’dall have a story to tell, about how the feds let us go specifically so we could mess with Russia. The feds don’t want anyone saying that. Especially not, like, in a courtroom, with our attorneys subpoenaing Washington power brokers.”
Cartwright: “Bottom line, what they want is to stop the trains in Russia when Russia invades Ukraine.”
“Is Russia going to do that? For sure?”
“Yes. Sometime very soon,” Cartwright said. “I thought it might be today, but it’s already evening in Ukraine and nobody’s moved.”
“Somebody here in the U.S., we’re told, probably the CIA or the NSA, has been looking down Putin’s chimney and he’s made the call,” Baxter said. “They’re going in and Ukraine will fight back. Best estimates are that Kyiv goes down in a week. One U.S. general thinks it might take the Russians a month to swamp the whole country.”
They laid out everything that Nowak had told them, along with a few suppositions. Letty concluded with “Your friend Loren Barron was from Ukraine and that may be why they killed him. They killed Brianna Wolfe because she was with him and a witness. The Russians were worried that even after they’d paid, Loren would go back after the train system again, because he was Ukrainian.”
Sovern, sitting on a bed, was nodding. “Going after the trains will be complicated. After the big hack, they probably reworked their whole control system...”
“They couldn’t,” Baxter said. “Too much legacy hardware is involved. They would have had to pay billions to upgrade it and Ukraine sees no sign that they’ve done that. What they would have done is put more security controls on the software you hacked. Might be hell getting through that, but still—with that legacy hardware, there are limits to what they could do.”
Sovern looked at Baxter: “Right. You’re machine controls.” He rubbed his face, popped his knuckles, then asked, “What are you proposing?”
“That you get the train-hacking people together again, here in this hotel, and you hack the Russian trains in a way that doesn’t look like it came from an official U.S. source. Maybe make it the ‘Loren Barron Memorial Hack.’ Make it look like it’s revenge for killing Barron.”
“The people are scared,” Sovern said.
“That’s why Barb and I are here,” Letty told him. “You saw that on the dock.”
“You shoot people,” Sovern said.
Cartwright: “We can. We’ve got two suites up here as a workspace, and a bunch of rooms and good wi-fi. You bring in the team that did the trains. Go in for another look, see what can be done.”
“I’d want a room of my own,” Sovern said. “Computer people can be messy and I have a hard time with that.”
“Done,” Letty said.
“I’ll start making calls,” Sovern said. “I need seven people. I’m not sure all of them will be willing to go along, but I need them. I need Paul to work with us. One of the women I need is fluent in Russian and a decent coder, too. If I can’t get her, we’ll have to find another Russian speaker.”
“I’ll call my agency,” Letty said. “With our Ukraine contacts, shouldn’t be a problem.”
Sovern slapped his thighs, stood up. “Nothing will happen before tomorrow or the next day, when we get the people here with their computers and we talk ourselves through the approach and start fiddling around with the Russian systems.”
“Sooner the better,” Letty said. “We’re running out of time.”
“Do it as fast as I can, but we won’t know how fast that will be, until we get the people here,” Sovern said. He looked over at Cartwright: “In the meantime, when I’ve done what I can today... Barb, you want to go out for a drink or two tonight? You know, before the trouble starts?”
Letty: “Hey, wait a minute...”
Cartwright: “Yeah, I could do that.”
