Cloud had hacked into Aeroflot many years before, but altering the plane’s signals to the Moscow tower was the opposite of what he needed to do. Right now, he needed to fool the Aeroflot pilot, not the control tower.
“State ATM,” said Cloud, referring to the agency that controlled Russia’s airspace, similar to the FAA. “Have you ever attempted to penetrate it?”
“No,” said Sascha. “But I know someone who did.”
“Is it someone you trust?”
Sascha considered the question, then shrugged.
“Yes.”
“I need a trapdoor into ATM. I need it immediately.”
68
MISSION THEATER TARGA
LANGLEY
Polk hung up his phone after getting the update from Carter, his Minsk chief of station. He looked around the operations room.
“Brainard got blown. They stopped him at the airport.”
Polk was seated at a workstation inside the dimly lit command center. The room was half empty. In front of him was a carton of chicken fried rice, which he hadn’t touched. All he could do was stare at the screen on the front wall of the room. It showed a digital map tracking Tom Fairweather’s flight from Poland to Moscow.
“Ten minutes out,” said a case officer. “They’re on the final approach.”
“Check activity at the airport,” said Polk. “FSB and Customs. See if there’ve been any threat elevations.”
“No Customs flags in the past two hours, other than the one on Dewey. Ditto with FSB.”
Polk nodded, then picked up a bottle of Gatorade and took a sip.
“Come on, Tommy,” he whispered.
Brainard getting stopped by Belarus Customs angered Polk. Having a hacker inside the Agency was like running a race with a thousand-pound weight tied around your neck. Though no evidence existed, it was clear that Cloud had been behind Brainard’s removal from the Belavia flight. Polk had already spoken twice to the U.S. ambassador to Belarus about getting Brainard out of jail. Fairweather was different, and Polk felt more confident. The passport Fairweather used was purchased from a corrupt GRU administrator, its numbers clean and designed to withstand a so-called database back-pull at the Russian border.
Polk stood up, clutching the bottle of Gatorade. He stepped to the front of the room, just a few feet from the screen, watching as the flashing red dot—Aeroflot Flight 43—drew closer and closer to Moscow.
“Thirty seconds, sir.”
Polk adjusted his glasses. He knew the radar could sometimes show inaccuracies, and yet what he was seeing made a cold shiver run through his body.
He turned back to the case officer.
“They’re coming in low,” he said. “Are they too far left?”
The case officer highlighted the flight path. Suddenly, the plasma screen view zoomed close up. Lights on the plane’s wings became visible against the dark ground below. Digital numbers—representing speed and altitude—scrolled above the plane in bright red.
“They’re not going to make it, sir.”
* * *
Fairweather was asleep when the plane’s alarm went off. It was a piercing, high-pitched siren that shrieked so loudly it caused him to lurch involuntarily forward.
Then came the recorded words of a woman, first in Russian, then Polish, repeated over and over: “Emergency. Assume crash position.”
Screams engulfed the jet. Several passengers stood up, desperate to run somewhere, to escape, even though there was no place to go. Panic and terror consumed the plane. A man ran by Fairweather for the front of the plane. Several people opened overhead bins, grabbing their belongings.
Fairweather tried to remain calm. He looked out the window. They were flying just barely above a residential neighborhood. The lights of one home were so close he could see the colored movement of a TV show in an upstairs bedroom.
His eyes scanned. In the distance, at least half a mile away, he saw the airport’s strobe lights pulsing halogen into the night.
As the siren continued to wail, as the recorded voice repeated its warnings, as screams seemed to reach a crescendo, he felt a hand on his arm gently touching him. He turned. A young woman was clutching her child, her face stricken with fear.
“Is it going to be all right?” she whispered, in Polish.
Slowly, Fairweather nodded.
“Yes,” he said, willing himself to smile as he heard the sound of treetops brushing against the fuselage. “Everything is going to be fine.”
69
LANGLEY
Gant stepped through one of several back doors at CIA headquarters, swiping his badge. Rather than return to his office on the fourth floor, he went straight ahead and entered the Agency’s day-care center.
A woman was seated in a cubicle across from the glass-walled nursery, which was filled with children.
On seeing Gant, she stood up.
“Hello, Mr. Gant.”
Gant looked at her badge.
“Anne, is there an empty office where I can make a phone call? I don’t have time to run upstairs.”
“Of course,” she said.
She led Gant to an empty office down the hallway.
“Perfect,” he said.
He shut the door, then dialed.
“Senator Furr’s office.”
“It’s Josh Gant.”
“Yes, Mr. Gant. Please hold.”
Gant reached up and pushed his glasses higher on his nose.
“What is it?” asked Senator Furr.
“You need to cool down on the thing we’ve been working on.”
“Andreas?”
“Yes.”
“I just had my fucking counsel prepare a laundry list of requests—”
“There’s blowback, Senator. It will come back to bite us. Trust me.”
Furr was silent for several seconds.
“I can’t just—”
“Kill it,” said Gant.
70
SHENNAMERE ROAD
DARIEN, CONNECTICUT
Katie knocked on the door to the library.
“Can I come in?”
“Yes, yes. Of course.”
Katie stepped into the library. She had on green running shorts with yellow piping, a white tank top, and high-heeled leather sandals, all of which showed off her long, tan, muscled legs and arms. As she entered the room, Igor was staring at the computer screen.
She had two Starbucks cups. She stepped to Igor’s side and placed one of them on the desk.
Slowly, without taking his eyes off the screen, Igor reached for it. As he did, he accidentally touched Katie’s hand, which she had yet to remove from the cup. Igor looked at her fingers, then his eyes traced her tan, sinewy arm all the way up to her shoulder. Then their eyes met.
“Any luck?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I found something.”
Igor pointed at the screen. On it was a block of computer code.
“This is the attack code that enabled Cloud to penetrate a Langley switch outside of Madrid,” explained Igor. “The penetration occurred fourteen months ago. He broke the encryption algorithm. It’s called a cold boot attack. He, or someone working for him, actually went to Madrid, found the switch, shut the power to it, then sucked the memory onto a USB. Once he did that, all he had to do was break the key, which he quickly did. He was inside within a week of the Madrid attack. Here’s the amazing thing. He didn’t alter the CIA encryption algorithm. Instead, he embedded a virus in the actual physical unit of the text. The virus was like a little spy, hiding in the physical representation of the text. It’s poetic, if you think about it. Spying on the spies. What appeared to be a relatively innocuous switch failure was quickly closed out and sanitized by Langley’s defense systems, its malware and other such useless things. In closing it out, it was, in fact, initiated.”
“That’s how they got inside the CIA?” asked Katie.
“Getting in was the easy part,” said Igor. “That code is how they remained, and how they did so without being noticed.”
Katie nodded.
“I’m impressed,” she said.
Igor looked up.
“Thank you.”