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One man lay flat on the floor with his lower legs on an armchair, eyes closed, his laptop on his chest, wearing earphones, apparently blissed out on a Shostakovich concert. As Letty checked back from time to time, she never saw him move; Sovern explained that “Jack works best at night.”
Cartwright was working the streets, staying in touch with one of the handsets.
As the sun sank below the horizon, and lights came on, the man who’d been lying on the floor got up and began circulating, updating himself on who was doing what, ate a microwave burrito, and eventually got to work.
At eight o’clock, Kaiser and Longstreet checked in, Kaiser carrying a fifty-pound equipment bag; an hour later, Patty Bunker arrived.
And Catherine Shofly arrived from Dallas, Texas. She called Tom Boyadjian on a burner number: “I’m on site, checked in and looking around. I’ll get back.”
Twenty-Four
Longstreet, Bunker, Kaiser, Cartwright, and Letty gathered in Letty’s room.
“I really don’t know what the heck I’m doing here—we’ve never had a Ladies action before,” Longstreet said. She was dressed in what Letty had come to recognize as female combat clothing, a dark green blouse worn loose, to accommodate a sidearm, with black Lululemon yoga pants and running shoes. “Somebody tell me what I’m doing—what all of you are doing.”
Letty explained: trying to keep a group of hackers alive to attack Russian trains, off the government books, but with secret government support.
“Any reason to believe that they’re going to be attacked?” Longstreet asked.
“There are already three dead, murdered... two for sure, one probable, another narrowly avoided,” Letty told her.
“Where’s the FBI?” Longstreet asked.
“Too bureaucratic—we can call them if we get desperate, but if we do, the word will get out.”
Bunker, a round intense woman with thick dark hair, said, “I’m good for all of that, as long as I get paid. I’ve been in one awful gunfight in my life and killed two people. That got me in the Ladies, but I’m not really a gunfighter like you people. My specialty is tech. I have more in common with these hackers than I do with you combat dudettes.” She looked at Kaiser. “And dudes.”
She had brought with her, in addition to her handguns, a sack full of miniature cameras the size of quarters, supposedly adopted from the wide-angle lenses on iPhones. They came with sticky backs and could be mounted unobtrusively in the hallway outside the workrooms.
“They look like spy stuff, like they came out of the CIA’s basement, but you can get gear like it on Amazon,” she said. “They call it home security equipment, if you ever need it.”
Bunker had already walked the hallway and found she could mount the cameras on fire alarms. They looked, she said, like part of the alarm tech. They would ping her on her iPhone when there was motion in the hallway, and she could see on the phone who was creating the ping.
Kaiser had been roaming restlessly around the room, looking out the windows, listening to the women talk. He stopped at one point, as Bunker was talking, and said, “That is really useful, those cameras are,” and he asked Longstreet about her weapons.
“Two Beretta 92s, one on my belt and a backup,” Longstreet said. She produced one as if by magic, Kaiser nodded, and it disappeared like magic, beneath the green blouse.
Kaiser: “I gotta tell you, I hate the fuckin’ Russians. I ran intothem in Syria on my last tour. They were responsible for killing some of us, though they blamed the Syrian government. Everybody knew it was bullshit, but we let it go. I’m wondering if you guys have the same motivation to get into this... because if we’re fighting GRU operators, they’re gonna be tough, and some of us could get killed.”
They all looked at him for a moment, then Longstreet said, “Okay. Now you’ve made it sound interesting,” and all four Ladies laughed.
Then they got into it. Kaiser, they agreed, should stay close to the work suites, as a kind of last-gasp defense if a Russian shooter should break through. He’d brought an automatic weapon, an M4, as well as a twelve-gauge shotgun, and body armor in his equipment bag.
Longstreet also had body armor.
Kaiser would carry one of the diminutive radios supplied by Colles, Bunker another one, and the street patrollers the others.
Kaiser: “Right now, as far as you know, the level of opposition is these Russian gangsters...”
“For now,” Letty said. “But we are messing with their army, so we could run into the GRU...”
“Then it gets serious,” Kaiser said.
“Then it gets serious,” Letty agreed, “except that we have no reason to think they know where we are. Ordinary People were scattered all over the LA basin, and some of them were hiding in Las Vegas and San Diego. They might want to shoot us up, but first, they’ve got to find us.”
“If you’ve got a bunch of people poking holes in Russian software, and they spot it, can they determine your location by backtracking?” Kaiser asked. “I really don’t know much about this stuff.”
They all looked at Letty, who shrugged. “Something to ask Sovern or Baxter.”
