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A waiter came over and Step pointed at Boyadjian’s Bloody Mary and said, “One of those. Bring some salt and pepper.”
When the waiter had gone, Boyadjian said, “Your job has me seriously screwed up. I got the FBI like fleas, they’re looking for the boys who were watching those shooter girls.”
“I’m moving my business,” Step said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Too bad,” Boyadjian said. “This whole railroad thing turned out to be a killer.”
They talked about business damage and the possibilities for recovery, then the waiter returned with the Bloody Mary and packets of salt and pepper, which Step sprinkled in the drink. That done, the waiter gone, Step took the envelope out of his jacket pocket and pushed it across the table. “Twenty-five thousand, cash. That will pay all of my bills, with ten thousand extra.”
Boyadjian nodded, put the money in his own jacket. “You’re a good man, Arseny. I hate to see you go away.”
“I’ll be back. New name, new company, same Victoria,” Step said. “But... I know that some of your employees are not carried on your books. I was wondering if you still connect to them. If they might be interested in a good-paying surveillance job.”
“What have you got?”
“We’re hunting the same people. We know where they’re at, the hotel, but not the rooms, not how many, we don’t know about protection or movement, where they might go, what they’re doing.”
Boyadjian leaned back, took a sip of the Bloody Mary, licked his lower lip, said, “Something might be done. We’d have to be very careful. Be expensive.”
“Paid in cash, you know I’m good for it,” Step said.
Boyadjian took another sip, said, “I know a woman who does real estate in Dallas. Used to be a cop. I could bring her out on a business trip, check her into the hotel...”
“Have to be soon,” Step said.
“Probably get her here tonight,” Boyadjian said.
Step held up his hands: “Do what you need. I will drop you the cash.”
They nodded, sipped their Bloody Marys, looked at their Rolexes.
Letty and Cartwright patrolled.They saw nothing. The coders were getting antsy, didn’t want to spend all day cooped up in the hotel, but Baxter and Sovern talked them down. The television continued to show videos of destroyed apartment buildings in Ukraine.
Letty asked for a brief, English-language description of what the hacks were doing and Sovern tried to explain.
Russian boxcars, he said, all had individual identifying numbers. The numbers were contained in transponders on the side of each car. Destination rail yards, and switching yards, had trackside readers, which read the numbers from the transponders as each car passed the reader. The numbers were then sent electronically to a central switchyard computer.
The boxcar numbers were matched with computer records of what each car contained, and its destination. The incoming boxcars were then made up into new trains that would take them to another intermediate or final destination.
The original hack had gotten into dozens of the trackside readers and had reprogrammed them to add a single random digit in the car designation. The railroad managers no longer knew what was inside any given car, or where it was supposed to be going.
“We looked at attacking the central computers last year, and we could have, but they could be taken offline and replaced fairlyquickly. Then, they’d start getting good numbers again from the trackside readers,” Sovern said. “That’s why we went after the readers. When we reprogrammed a reader, numbers were wrong from the start, from those readers. But some of the readers still gave good numbers, and it was really hard to figure out which was which, and there were thousands of readers. But, we didn’t know what was on the cars either, or where they were going. It was as big a mystery to us as it was to the Russians.
“Now we’re looking at the central computers again, because we want to pick out specific groups of cars that are coming from Russian logistics centers and heading for terminals near the Ukraine border. We want to slow those down, turn them around if we can, scatter them. Unlike the deal last time, this time we need to know what’s in the cars.”
“Didn’t you say that the Russians could take the bad computers offline and...”
“We’re working on that,” Sovern said.
In another development,their Lithuanian social engineer, Emilija, had downloaded Russian railroad employee payroll lists, looking for spear-phishing targets. She had discovered that employees with names spelled in the Ukrainian style had apparently been furloughed or sent on vacation.
“The common name Ivanoff in Russian is spelled with a Y instead of an I in Ukrainian. Y-v-a-n-o-f-f, instead of I-v-a-n-o-f-f,” Sovern told Letty. “If you’ve got a Y in your name, apparently, you’re sent home. At least temporarily.”
“Damnit. Some direct contacts, friendly contacts, people on the railroads, they could be valuable,” Letty said. “If not right now, sometime later.”
“Yes. She’s still looking for lonely Russian trackmen who might be willing to talk about how complicated their jobs are, working with all that mysterious computer gear, that maybe she could help with,” Sovern said. “We’ll see what comes of that.”
The coders were distributedthrough the two suites, working at laptops, talking with each other, reading the red book of last year’s hack, watching YouTube videos.
