Zero day code, p.22
Zero Day Code, page 22
part #1 of End of Days Series
“If you’re off duty, of course,” he teased.
“I am,” the Sheriff confirmed. He held up two fingers. Jonas assumed for two beers, but the waitress produced a single shot glass from beneath the bar and poured out a double bourbon.
“Another pale ale, stranger?” she asked Jonas.
“Sure,” he said. It didn’t seem like Sheriff… Muller. His name tag read MULLER, and it didn’t seem like he was here to give Jonas any grief. He could take that second beer, but it would be his last tonight. He was still a fugitive and he could not trust these people. Especially not one wearing a badge.
“I know Albert has paid for your dinner, Mister Murdoch,” Sheriff Dave said, holding his bourbon up as if to contemplate it for a while. “But I’m gonna insist the Sheriff’s Office picks up the tab. Wouldn’t do to have Mister Morena’s attorney make a meal of the fact that Al paid for your dinner tonight.”
“Morena?” Jonas said. “That’s the… dude who attacked Big Al?”
Muller scoffed, confusing him a little.
“Ain’t nobody calls him Big Al,” he explained. “That’s just the name of the bar. He’s Albert to us, and I am personally grateful for your intervention today, son. I had my hands full with all this other nonsense. I fear things could have gone poorly if you had not stepped up. Turns out Mister Morena has a long and colourful record.”
“No doubt,” Jonas said, committing nothing more to the conversation. Somebody plugged a dollar into the juke box and Bob Seger struggled manfully to be heard over the uproar.
“Before you head out of town,” Muller said, “I’ll need your particulars so we can get you back for the trial. That gonna be a problem?”
“Nope,” Jonas replied, as innocently as he could. He was a practiced liar and that was more than innocent enough for this backwoods rube.
“Good to hear,” Muller nodded, finally taking a sip of his liquor. “Hell of a day, son. I could do with fewer complications in my life.”
“Couldn’t we all, Sheriff.”
“Indeed. If it helps motivate you to stay in touch, turns out there was a reward out for the capture of Mister Morena. Hope you don’t mind the liberty but I’ve put your name forward. Morena was on the run from the marshals for skipping bail on a heavy drug charge down in Texas. You could be in line for twenty-five grand.”
“Whoa seriously?” Jonas said, unable to stop himself doing a double take. He’d never had that much money to his name, never once in his life. Not even when he was still working as a lawyer. But his initial surprise and delight didn’t last more than a single heartbeat. He was a fugitive now. Lawmen didn’t come looking for the likes of him to hand over a reward.
“The Texas rangers?” Jonas asked, playing for time to think. He had to raise his voice over the music and the noise.
“No. United States Marshals Service. It’s good federal money you’re after. Get some of your taxes back.”
Jonas lifted his chin towards the TV behind the bar. Long lines snaked out of a bank in a big city.
“Don’t suppose I could get that reward in gold bars.”
“Oh, this’ll pass,” Muller said, but he frowned as his did so.
“Pass quicker if they locked up a couple of bankers this time,” Jonas countered. His mind was already turning over what little of use he recalled from his brief career in Florida, most often repping for guys like Morena. Was there any case law on criminals claiming rewards for the capture of other criminals? There had to be, surely. Probably hundreds of cases. Guys like Morena might die rather than give up their own, but they’d turn on a rival without a second thought.
Oblivious to Jonas’s sudden anguish, Muller went on, his frown deepening, “Ain’t like the last time. Back in ’08. From what I hear this was the Russians or maybe the Chinese playing games on the internet.”
His lifted his shot glass to the screen and a small amount slopped over the rim. His hand was shaking.
“So you’re serious. About the reward money?” Jonas asked. He had to shout to be heard.
“Hell yes,” Muller said, finishing his drink in one swallow and raising two fingers for another round. The barmaid nodded but held up her own hand to indicate she’d be a moment fixing his order. Half the town seemed to have crammed into Big Al’s and the serving staff were run ragged trying to keep up with the demand for hot food and cold drinks. Jonas marvelled at the scene, wondering if he was the only one who thought it resembled the frantic revels of the condemned. He’d read a Stalin bio for a history class when he was at college. The only thing that stuck with him from that class was a memory of the orgies of the Russian oligarchs when they knew their doom was near.
He sipped at his ale and pushed the thought away. No doubt a stolid, unimaginative normie like Sheriff Dave would simply put it down to folks needing some company at the end of a hard day. And it wasn’t important. Not like the sudden prospect of twenty-five grand dropping into his lap.
“I’ve already put the paperwork into the marshal’s offices in Seattle,” Muller said as his second drink arrived. He had a way of projecting his voice so that Jonas had no trouble hearing him over the crowd. “Just wanted you to know is all. I was mighty grateful today. Got my re-election coming up later this year. Wouldn’t have done to let a hoodlum like Morena have the run of the streets. Not with all this going on.”
He raised his glass to the TV screen again where an infographic screamed of massive losses on the stock market. Apple had lost nearly half of its value at the close of trading. Dozens of banks had sought government protection, but the government seemed to be crippled as much by the evacuation of the Executive to ‘a secure and secret location,’ as it was by a massive cyber-attack.
Jonas grunted noncommittally.
Twenty-five grand was a hell of a payday. Enough to give him pause in his headlong flight. Certainly enough to get him set up in his new digs when he stopped running. He could buy a computer, a microphone, all sorts of cool shit.
But how was he ever going to collect without getting jammed up for what he’d done back in Seattle?
Jesus!
This was so fucking typical. He finally got a break, and he might’ve already fucked himself right out of it.
He downed all of his second beer before realising he’d been necking it to cool his mounting fury at the injustice of it all.
He ordered another beer, and remembering Muller, asked if the sheriff wanted a nightcap.
“Nope. Figure tomorrow will be just as bad,” he said. “Remember we’ll need a forwarding address, if you’re taking off again. Do drop by the station, Mister Murdoch.”
“No problem,” he said. “Call me Jonas. I’ll come by before I leave.”
But Jonas Murdoch wasn’t going anywhere until he figured out how to get his hands on that twenty-five grand without having to answer for any bullshit back in the city.
Interlude
At sixty years old, hawk-faced and rake thin, Sebastian Yuriev did not much look like anybody’s idea of a computer hacker. But nor did he present as a ‘glue machine tube repairist’, the occupation listed on his current identity card.
His name was not Sebastian Yuriev either, but as a former US Defence Secretary once famously observed, you go to war with what you have, and what the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation had this morning, was the loyal service of a man calling himself Sebastian Yuriev.
The glue machine repairman currently known as Yuriev, hastened down Savushkina Street in the exclusive Olgina district of Saint Petersburg, once upon a time a dacha village where the likes of lowly tube repairists might fear to tread. Even though summers had been growing noticeably longer and warmer the last few years, summer in Saint Petersburg was all too short. This morning the weather was glorious and the hard menace of winter far removed. Yuriev wanted to enjoy the brief pleasure of the sun on his face and a chance to breathe in the sweet fragrance of the rose bushes and the bright white flowers of the wayfaring trees which so beautifully ornamented this block of Savushkina Street. It might be some time before he was able to enjoy them again. Perhaps not until next year. Winter would come, as it always did, and to be honest that was no bad thing in Yuriev’s opinion. The Russian soul, after all, was hard and frozen.
He was early, but it would not do to delay his business for the indulgence of a personal comfort. Working for an ostensibly private company known as Glavset or, in western media reporting, the Internet Research Agency, Sebastian Yuriev had before him the prospect of a great and terrible responsibility. Glavset had come to unfortunate and unwanted prominence as ‘the trolls from Olgina’ who had interfered in the so-called democratic processes of the West. American presidential contests, British referenda, French and German parliamentary elections, Glavset had done its best to subvert them all. But today the trolls had another mission.
Yuriev paused for a moment to contemplate the exquisite perfume of a mock cherry tree. He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and allowed his thoughts to stray, just momentarily, from duty and service. The two heavyset men trailing him a discrete distance away also stopped and waited for their principal to resume his morning walk.
Yuriev sighed.
He could not abstract himself from the dire necessity of what must come next. He had but a small role, yet it was vital. Putting aside all indulgence, he turned on his heel and marched the few final steps to the bright yellow dacha converted some years ago to a bespoke data management centre by his engineers. The bodyguards followed. Most of Glavset’s thousand-plus employees—most of its trolls, for in truth that’s what they were—laboured at their computers another mile further on, at the company’s headquarters in a modern, four storey building of steel and glass. But the two dozen specialists employed here at 198 Savushkina Street were men and women of a different ilk. They were true engineers, and although employed by the Agency, they all held officers’ ranks within the reserve military forces of the Russian Federation.
Yuriev did not have to present his thumb to the digital reader embedded in the doorbell of number 198. The blue painted oaken door clicked and swung open as he climbed the front steps. The young, conservatively dressed man who held open the door bowed his head ever so slightly, but with obvious deference to the newcomer. His nod to the trailing bodyguards was more perfunctory. They nodded not at all, but they followed their charge into the dacha.
“You are early, General,” the young man said. “But everybody is here and awaiting your direction.”
He helped Yuriev out of his expensive suit coat, carefully placed it on a wooden hanger and hung the jacket in a hallway cupboard. As he reached up into the closet, his own suit jacket fell open to reveal a Makarov pistol in a shoulder holster. Yuriev released his two bodyguards to the kitchen. Like him they had been up since early morning and he knew they had not eaten. The men thanked him and excused themselves.
The young man led Yuriev along the main hallway into the suite of offices at the rear of the building. The dacha had been extensively remodelled inside and they turned left into a large, open place space where more than a dozen men and women, most of them decades younger than Yuriev, worked diligently at three long, common tables.
“Attention!” Yuriev’s escort shouted. Everyone in the room sprang to their feet and snapped out rigid salutes.
Yuriev straightened his own back and returned the salute.
“Good morning,” he said. “It gladdens me to see the finest of the Rodina ready to serve her in this the hour of our peril. Do you duty to the motherland, and she will always remember you.”
He nodded and they sat down with a sound of scraping of chairs and a few scattered mumbles of ‘thank you’ and ‘yes, General.’
They all had work in preparation for the mission.
All except Yuriev.
He had but to wait.
The market in Rezekne, a small Latvian town, forty miles from the Russian border, was already busy when Svetlana Bykov pushed her bicycle past old man Degtyarev’s turnip stand. He had the best position, as always, the old bastard, and his baskets of dirty, misshapen tubers spilled out into the common paths blocking her way.
“Degtyarev, you fool! I will kick your worthless turnips into the river if you do not move them. They are as shrivelled and useless as the nasty little turnip in your pants!”
“Witch!” Degtyarev shouted back at Svetlana. “You should pray I ever let you taste my turnip, you repugnant crone.”
But he whipped his nephew, the gormless Rafik, into movement, and the idiot boy created a path for Svetlana into the crowded chaos of the marketplace.
Her bicycle, nearly as old and as creaky as her, was not easy to manoeuvre through the heaving crush of sellers and buyers. A handbag merchant, she had hundreds of pocketbooks, satchels and old leather pouches all bundled up in a giant hessian net, which she balanced precariously on a makeshift wire frame fixed to her bike instead of a seat. Svetlana never rode the bike. There was never anywhere for her to sit.
Her usual place in the market, next to Nazar Bazhenov’s salvaged tractor parts carrel, remained unoccupied, an hour after the first stall holders had begun to set up. Nobody would dare usurp her claim on the spot. Ruslan Alekseyeva had tried that once, some nine years ago, and still the whole of Rezekne whispered of the grim fate that had befallen his prized flock of long-haired goats.
Svetlana untied her giant collection of old handbags and dragged the load from the back of her bicycle, like a fisherman hauling in a giant catch of herring. Bazhenov barked at his mongoloid child Simyan to help her, but she shooed the imbecile away. His help was more trouble than it was worth. She unfolded her dusty, mottled tarpaulin and painstakingly laid out each bag and a dozen pairs of shoes she had acquired cheaply from Tibor, the Armenian over in Griskani. Setting up her display was the slow work of a long hour. There was no guarantee she would sell a thing. It was rare now for the Latvians or the Latgalians to show themselves and their money in the overcrowded labyrinthine of the town’s Russian market, and unfortunately they were the only ones who had any money. Rezekne’s Russian speakers, stateless ghosts since the break-up of the old Soviet Union, grubbed along selling old clothes or car parts or patched up household appliances. They lived in a shadow state.
Not all of them, naturally. Old man Degtyarev was lucky. Everyone needed turnips and, with the weather having grown so much warmer these last few years, the dirty devil had more turnips than one man could hope to eat or even sell in a lifetime. Oh, what wealth he lorded over them, and none of it earned by anything more than dumb luck. The injustice and despair of it was a greater pain to Svetlana than the grievous cramps and spasms in her back as she laid out her wares.
It was a rare day when she went home from the market with more coins in her purse at the close of business.
No Russian Мамка would be so stupid as to loosen her family’s purse strings for a bag she did not need, and it was many weeks since any foolish tourist had journeyed all the way from Riga to waste their money on Svetlana’s ‘genuine Soviet accoutrements’.
She laid out the final pieces of her display, a time-worn female Red Army officer’s purse and a genuine medic’s bag from the emergency at Chernobyl. Simyan the mongoloid boy, seeing she was finished, hurried over with the wooden crate on which she daily sat while waiting in vain for custom, and Svetlana lowered herself onto it with a groan of relief. She thanked the boy, of course, for it was only good manners which cost her nothing and might yet offer an improving example to him. She would have to get up again soon enough, lest her legs fall asleep and refuse to ever wake up, but for now she could rest.
Svetlana Bykov unscrewed the cap of her battered stainless-steel flask and poured out a long, hot measure of steaming black tea. Some of the younger ones, like the idiot child Rafik, whined for cold drinks and sugar water in the summer, but Svetlana knew what all Russians knew, that hot tea was a nigh magical elixir which warmed the body in winter for sure, but cooled it too in these increasingly warm and beastly summers by the simple trick of opening the pores to sweat.
She sipped her tea and sat, watching the life of the market around her.
It was a shame, she thought, how things had gone between people here. Rezekne had been a better place for everyone when Russians and Latvians and even the difficult Latgalians had all mucked into together. Now it was the same tired faces, all of them Russian, every day.
She sighed and took the last sip of tea she would ever enjoy.
The huge improvised explosive device that had been hidden in a box of broken carburettors at the back of Nazar Bazhenov’s tractor parts stall exploded, and hungry crimson light, searing and strangely silent, enveloped Svetlana, her handbags, and the whole of the world that she knew.
The man known for now as Sebastian Yuriev received notice of the terrorist attack he had ordered a minute after the IED detonated, killing more than two hundred Russian-speaking occupants of the former Soviet republic of Latvia. He did nothing.
