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Letty: “You keep asking, but we already know the answer to that. I just hope I’m not, you know, what do you call it?” She looked at Cartwright.
“Collateral damage?”
“Yeah, that’s what you call it.”
Sovern said, “When you’re done with the repartee, we need three heavy-duty office-quality printers, preferably Canon, but we’ll take HP. Plus two ten-ream cartons of printer paper, and three cartons wouldn’t be a bad idea. We’ll need backup ink for all the printers, because the starter cartridges last for about fifteen seconds. We need it all now.”
Cartwright to Letty: “At least one of us has to stay. Be better if both of us stayed.”
Letty: “Paul has a credit card and a truck.”
Sovern said to Baxter, “You might need a dolly to move it all if the hotel doesn’t have one. That’s heavy stuff. Don’t be fussy or cheap, though. Buy good quality. I’ve got a seven-hundred-and-fifty-page document that I need to print immediately and I’ll need at least eight copies, one for everybody.”
“I’m on it,” Baxter said. Turning to Letty, he said, “Let’s get Able and haul your drums and the chip boxes out of the truck. I’ll need the space. Able can come along to help carry the heavy stuff.”
When the drums and chips were in Able’s room, and Baxter and Able were on their way to an office supply store, Letty went back to the work suites, where the hackers and their friends had gathered.
The coders were both articulate and argumentative, and sitting around the suites, waiting for direction, didn’t restrict themselves to talk about an attack on the Russian rail system. They talked about the morality of the attack, who would win the British football championship, about Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. Chrome, about abortion rights, about zero-day attacks, about whether Antifa actually existed, about computer kids exploiting phony TikTok links to get nude photos of other kids in their schools.
A middle-aged woman named Emilija—Emmy—a longtime friend of Sovern’s and a native of Lithuania, not only spoke perfect Russian, but was expert at both the social engineering of Russian males and spear phishing. She had worked closely with Loren Barron on the original attack on the Russian train system.
Ordinary phishing—“This is to alert you that your Wells Fargo bank account has been suspended as a security measure. You shouldimmediatelysign on to your account at the link below, using your current username and password, and change your password. The new password should contain at least nine letters, numbers, and symbols...”—involved sending out thousands of fake emails in the hopes that certain numbers of people would sign on to what they thought was their Wells Fargo account but was actually delivering their name and password to a hacker.
Spear phishing, on the other hand, usually involved a singlevictim, or a very small group of victims, carefully chosen and researched, in an effort to get specific bites of information. Emilija would be spear phishing members of the Russian rail bureaucracy, looking for entries into the computer system.
“Getting information was easy the first time. I don’t think it will be so easy this time, with the war,” Emilija said. “Fucking Russians.”
“Then what are you thinking of?” Sovern asked Emilija.
She shrugged. “Many of these trainmen... they have bad work shifts. Lonely. In the dark, by themselves. Nothing but aPenthousemagazine. They might be interested in talking with attractive young women. Especially if they’re naked.”
“Could they be that naïve?” Letty asked.
Emilija rolled her eyes. “These might be men working in switching stations. This is not a job for geniuses. What harm can there be in talking to a naked young woman who only wants your friendship? Not even your money?”
“Where do we get a naked woman?” Letty asked.
“There are several possibilities in the group here,” Emilija said. “Including you. I could talk in the background...”
“No. Nope. Not even to stop the war,” Letty said.
Emilija shrugged. “Another possibility, we could phish for a Ukrainian working with the trains—there are many of them. You would need a Ukrainian speaker. I’m not one. Russian and Ukrainian are similar, but not the same.”
Sovern turned to Letty: “Call up your lobbyist and tell him to get a Ukrainian out here.”
“I can try,” Letty said.
“A Ukrainian con woman,” Emilija said. “Naked would be good.”
Letty called Nowak, who said she’d see what she could do, butthought it would be best if they limited their contacts over the next few days. “We all know where we’re at, but a minimal back-trail would be good. People are a back-trail, including your unlikely naked Ukrainian.”
Cartwright, who’d listened to the conversation, said, after Nowak had rung off, “They’re starting to worry about what will happen if somebody has a problem with all this—the hacking. It’s the denial thing again, with a twist. They want to be able to deny knowledge of what we’re doing out here, if they have to.”
Letty tried to call Senator Colles about it, but his executive assistant, Claudia Welp, said Colles was on an airplane and was out of touch for a while.
“We’re on our own,” Cartwright said. She looked around the suite, where the hacks were poking at laptops, arguing with each other, eating salads that somebody had gone out for. “Don’t tell anyone.”
When Baxter and Able got back, the male coders trooped down to the lobby to help unload and haul the boxed printers, paper, ink sets, and loose packages of USB cords, report covers, Post-its, three-ring hole punchers, ink-gel pens, and a microwave oven.
