4
REACQUISITION
It had been worth the wait.
Knox sat spellbound as a slideshow fit for a Senatorial subcommittee flashed across his NetMeeting window, telling the tale of an agency known as CROM.
The initials turned out to stand for Critical Resources Oversight Mandate. On its face, that fit right in with the parent Energy Department’s mission statement. But the title was just more misdirection: The “critical resources” CROM oversaw weren’t oil reserves or plutonium stockpiles, they were ... people.
Specifically, scientists of the former Soviet Union, with the occasional Pakistani or North Korean thrown in for good measure. Scientists working in the so-called WMD disciplines — the old nuclear, chemical, biological Weapons of Mass Destruction mavens.
CROM was the little Dutchboy with his proverbial finger in the dike, trying to stem a brain drain of death-dealing expertise. Trying to keep privation-weary Russian and Third-World researchers from selling their souls and their secrets in the worldwide mass-destruction marketplace. Yet another silent struggle on the darkling plain of the war against terrorism, a war without victory or boundary or end.
None of which explained why some CROM operative was out there electronically impersonating consultants. But Knox thought he knew how to find out.
“Mycroft, great job. You really outdid yourself.”
“My pleasure.” Mycroft beamed back from the small face-to-face frame in the corner of the widescreen. “Will that be all, Jonathan?”
“Not quite.”
Knox hesitated. Normally, he’d have known better than to ask at all. Not this time: “When were you going to tell me how to find this CROM outfit’s backdoor?”
“Backdoor? Jonathan, let me assure you —”
“Never bullshit a bullshitter, Mycroft. You didn’t just cobble that presentation together on the spur of the moment. Every frame in the deck carried a DOE watermark.”
“Um, yes, well, I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that, actually. Those electronic signets are the very devil to remove without degrading the image itself. And given the time constraints ...”
“Save it. Where’d you get it?”
“Are you sure you want to know this, Jonathan? Plausible deniability, after all.”
“It’s hereby waived. Just tell me how to follow the breadcrumbs, I’ll take it from there.”
Mycroft blinked but said nothing.
“I don’t think you understand. I need to get into that site!”
“Want to hold it down a little, Jon? People are trying to sleep.” That one came not from the videoconferencing window, but from the corridor outside his office.
“Huh?” Knox looked up to see Richard Moses hulking in his doorway. “Oh, hi, Richard.”
Most mornings, the Archon CEO’s round, pleasantly plain face could be counted on to be wearing a puckish grin. That helped counter the initial impression conveyed by the crewcut, broken nose, blocky torso, and ham fists. Richard didn’t really fit the somatype for a systems analyst; without the grin he looked more like a prizefighter gone to seed.
The grin wasn’t there today. Richard kept his expression carefully neutral as he glanced back into the corridor and said “He’s right in here, Ms. Bonaventure. I’m sure Jon didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long.”
Knox sighed. “Richard, I’m right in the middle of something.”
“Kill it.” Richard drew an index finger across his throat. “Big client here to see you.”
Back to work then. Knox turned back to Mycroft. “We’ll pick this up later.”
Mycroft frowned. “If we must. In the meantime, the primary site lists some external links that might merit a follow-up, once I break the encryption.”
“Whatever, just so’s you tell me how to track down my email spoofer.” Knox terminated the session and said to himself “God, do I want to nail the bastard that pulled that stunt!”
Knox turned to face Richard again. He wasn’t there. Instead, a young woman stood in the doorway. The same young woman last seen cooling her heels out at the reception desk.
Now that he could see her in the flesh, Knox revised his initial estimate. She was not striking. She was drop-dead gorgeous. A goddess in Gucci business casuals. Tall — at least five foot eight — with a figure more lithe than voluptuous, catlike almost. A mane of glossy dark hair framing the finely-chiseled features of her pale face: dark eyes, a straight, slightly upturned nose, and that mouth! A swelling red bow beneath, complemented above by a perfectly sculpted, slightly everted upper lip. A small moist highlight shimmered on that exquisite lipline.
And, behind those dark brown eyes. Something of an edge there. What would that be about?
“Mr. Knox? Marianna Bonaventure.” When she spoke her name in that husky voice it was a poem. She held out her right hand and flashed an ID in her left. A holographic picture ID with the initials C.R.O.M. emblazoned across the top.
There was the merest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of Marianna Bonaventure’s perfect lips. “I’ve got a feeling I’m that bastard you wanted to nail.”
The goddess drove as if possessed by a divine madness. As if the New Jersey Turnpike had been designated her own personal Indy 500 for the duration of this Wednesday afternoon.
Knox had a pet theory that some people became cops just so they could do the things cops put other people in jail for doing. Marianna Bonaventure might not be a cop, not exactly. But she seemed to take the same characteristic delight in crossing over the line, in throwing her weight around in ways that would have had a mere civilian up on charges.
As she had done back at Archon. In short order, Knox had found himself conscripted, requisitioned, whatever the fuck the bureaucratic term was for it. And Richard, that wuss, had gone along with nary a peep of protest.
“Good of the firm, Jon,” he’d said, “Don’t want to go eyeball-to-eyeball with the feds here, Jon,” and “This’ll get us on DoD’s preferred-vendor list for sure, Jon.” Not for the first time Knox was reminded that Richard Moses looked on him, along with the rest of the consulting staff, not as personnel, but as product. And CROM had anteed up the sticker price.
Now, a scant three hours later, Knox was motoring through the Turnpike’s lunar landscape toward Newark Airport, a new assignment, and an uncertain destiny, with a madwoman at the wheel and no clue as to what he was supposed to do!
Not that the last part was so unusual. Over the past fifteen years, Knox had grown used to the rush of inferential uncertainty — “Why this?”, “Why me?” — that inaugurated every new client relationship.
One thing seemed certain: if all this “CROM” wanted was another lifer specialist, they’d have hired one. Instead, they’d opted to pay top dollar for a generalist, a card-carrying member of corporate America’s homeless elite. There had to be a reason.
A reason that doubtless had to do with a little matter of identity theft.
Knox turned to Archon’s new “big client,” if that’s what she was, and gave it one last try. “I don’t suppose you’d consider telling me what you were doing screwing around with my email the past couple days?”
She made a face — on mere mortals it might have passed for a pout. Gauging how much to tell him, no doubt. Then she sighed, and, without taking her eyes from the road, began rummaging through her carrybag.
She pulled out a photo and handed it to him. “Do you know this person?”
A careworn blonde in a washed-out summer dress peered blankly out at him, nondescript cityscape wavering in the heat behind her.
“Who’s she supposed to be?”
“Interesting turn of phrase,” the client said, “She’s supposed to be Galina Mikhailovna Postrel’nikova.”
Try as he might, Knox couldn’t map the image of this tired, middle-aged woman onto the vibrant girl he had known so long ago. The shot was blurred by the speed of the drive-by vehicle, but — could that be Galya? Had two decades of Soviet and post-Soviet privation so leeched the spirit out of what had once been a vivacious eighteen-year-old Wunderkind? Only a year or two separates a devushka from a babushka — a girl from a grandmother — as the saying goes. Still and all ...
He frowned and tried to jog memories from half a lifetime ago back to life. The first time he had seen Galina Mikhailovna Postrel’nikova — Galya, for short — she had been standing on the escalator of the Oktyabrskaya Metro station, comforting a frightened child.
... A child Knox had borrowed for the day.
Stevie Schumacher was four years old and cute as a button. Perfect for purposes of storming the bureaucratic barricades.
And three weeks into his year as a stazhyor, or exchange student, at Moscow State University, Jonathan Knox had just about had his fill of those barricades. Soviet officials were grand masters of red tape and procrastination, and those in the university Registrar’s Office were no exception. Their whole purpose in life seemed to lie in devising new roadblocks to Knox’s proposed program of archival research.
But the bureaucracy had a soft underbelly, and Knox had tumbled to it. Like most Soviets, its functionaries were suckers for little kids.
Knox was never quite sure why Soviet society, not otherwise renowned for its humanitarian proclivities, was so universally child-friendly. The political theorist in him guessed it had something to do with the regime’s concept of the child as ideal citizen: dependent, obedient, infinitely malleable. His sociologist side saw it rather as a carryover from the extended parenting endemic to Russian village life.
Whatever the reason, Knox saw an opening and dove for it. Gary and Anne Schumacher were pleased, if somewhat nonplussed, by the offer of free babysitting from a friend and fellow stazhyor. They never realized they could have charged Knox by the hour for the privilege.
Because bringing Stevie along on his rounds worked like a charm. Hardened Soviet timeservers softened and melted when Knox showed up with the tyke in tow. Small cellophane-wrapped hard candies magically materialized out of vest pockets and desk drawers. More to the purpose, administrative obstacles impeding Knox’s access to TsGAOR, the Central Archive of the October Revolution, vanished just as miraculously.
All of which left Knox, his paper-chase completed in the record time of seven hours, with only the one last chore of delivering Stevie to his father at Lenin Library in central Moscow. Since the bureaucratic scavenger hunt had led far out on the Sadovaya ring road, their best route back to town lay via the Metro station in nearby Oktyabrskaya Square.
Rush hour was still ten minutes away when Knox and Stevie walked through the double doors into the station’s mezzanine, but a line had already formed in front of the ticket-checker. Knox gave the hall’s ornate vermilion-and-white marble appointments only a cursory glance: once you’d seen one People’s Palace, you’d seen them all. His attention was directed dead ahead, at the escalators. He’d been through Oktyabrskaya once before.
“We ride the train to Daddy now, Uncle Jon?” Stevie tugged on Knox’s hand. Knox wasn’t sure what accounted for all the enthusiasm — seeing Daddy or riding the train.
He chose the likelier of the two. “Yes, Stevie, we’re going to ride the train.”
“Goodie!” Stevie began jumping up and down.
He kept on jumping all the time they stood on the line. The abnormally slow-moving line. The ticket-checker, seventy years old if he was a day, was being a prick, officiously checking for anyone who’d forgotten to renew their monthly Metro pass now that September had started. A glance at the lengthening queue in front of the ticket booth made Knox glad he’d remembered.
“Stay with me now, Stevie.” Knox retightened his grip on his still-hopping charge. Lord knew, even a grown man could find a trip down the Oktyabrskaya escalator somewhat, well, daunting.
At more than three stories below street level, the Oktyabrskaya stop was one of the deepest stations on Moscow’s old Southwest line — sunk so far underground that workmen had died of the bends building it back in the 1930s. The depth was deliberate: In the pre-atomic era it had still been possible to hope that a metropolitan population might survive aerial bombardment, given enough air-raid shelters. And that’s what Moscow’s subway system was: a network of enormous air-raid shelters masquerading as rapid transit.
The escalators were the giveaway. They could all be re-geared at a moment’s notice to run in one direction: straight down. The shafts the escalators plunged through were pitched at a dizzyingly angle to the vertical. And they all ran at extremely high speed. Conveyor belts, in other words, to shunt as many Muscovites as possible into the safety of the Metro’s subterranean caverns if and when the sky rained death.
In peacetime, it still made for a scary high-velocity ride, like stepping off the edge of a cliff and plummeting down, down into the bowels of the earth. Even veteran straphangers sometimes blanched at the brink of the Oktyabrskaya escalator. And this was going to be Stevie Schumacher’s first time.
Preoccupied by what lay ahead, Knox paid scant attention when it finally came time to flash his pass at the wizened blue-capped checker. He and Stevie were halfway to the escalator when an outraged croak came from behind. Knox felt the pluck of arthritic fingers at his sleeve and turned to find himself face to face with the ticket-checker again.
The old man was mouthing a stream of rapid-fire, spittle-punctuated Russian at him. Something about his ticket.
Hadn’t the geezer seen it? Knox retrieved the little cardboard booklet that held the monthly transit pass and flipped it open again. This only incensed the old man further. Glancing down, Knox saw why: the pass he held was for August. He must have forgotten to swap it out when he bought the new one yesterday. Did he have the September pass on him? He patted down his pockets distractedly. Where he could have left the damn thing?
Three stories below, the 4:54 screeched to a halt at the platform.
“Train!” Stevie cried out joyously. Suddenly his little hand had wriggled free from Knox’s grasp and he was gone.
Knox watched in stunned disbelief as Stevie dodged between legs on a bee-line for the shaft. His paralysis lasted only an instant. Then he shoved the ticket-checker out of the way and took off in hot pursuit. A whistle blasted behind him, not half so shrill as the little boy’s first screams. Stevie was on the escalator!
“Stevie!” he yelled. He couldn’t make out Stevie’s small form in the crowd, but he could tell from the shrieks echoing up the shaft that the child was already some distance down and moving away rapidly. If he should fall on the racing stair —
“Stevie, hang onto the rail!”
Knox elbowed through the line and flung himself onto the crowded escalator. Now he could see as well as hear Stevie, maybe halfway down the long shaft, still screaming at the top of his lungs. And he could see something else as well:
From the platform far below a young woman in a jeans jacket, hardly more than a girl herself, had run onto the down escalator. Pushing and shoving through the homeward-bound commuters, ignoring their oaths and imprecations, she was working her way up against the tide.
She reached the terrified child, scooped him up in her arms and hugged him tight.
Stevie flung his arms around her neck and collapsed with a sob. Together the two rode the rest of the way down to the safety of the platform below.
To Knox, still shaking with reaction, the sight bordered on the beatific: With her backlit honey-blond hair, the glowing serenity of her face contrasting with the concern in her emerald eyes, the young woman seemed an icon of the Madonna come to life there in the depths of the Moscow Metro.
Galina, the way Knox had first seen her, the way he would always remember her: Galya, holding a child.
Marianna took her eyes off the rear end of the minivan she was tailgating just long enough to check on her latest acquisition, her resource and last resort. No change; Jon Knox was still sitting there in the TransAm’s passenger seat, not moving a hair, not saying a word. Other than the occasional sharp intake of breath in response to one of her road-warrior maneuvers, she hadn’t heard a sound out of him since she’d handed him the picture of Postrel’nikova maybe five minutes ago. He’d spent all that time just sitting there, gazing at the image with preternatural intensity.
That gaze, she’d learned, could look right through you. The hooded gray eyes lent an air of uncanniness to an otherwise presentable enough face.
More than presentable. Pretty good-looking actually, in an older-guy kind of way. A nice smile, a kind smile, the little she’d seen of it — he’d been sort of grim since she’d acquired him. He looked fit enough, too, considering he spent his days behind a desk. Oh, and those socks didn’t really go with his slacks. Most likely hetero, then: The straight guys she knew all seemed to dress in the dark.
“You okay?” she said.
“Hmm? Yeah — or I will be if you’ll keep your eyes on the road!” he added in a tight voice.
Marianna swerved to avoid the eighteen-wheeler. “You got so pensive there.”
“I guess. It’s just I’m having a real problem figuring out why Galina, of all people, should have shown up on CROM’s radarscope.”
“I’m really not at liberty to discuss —” Marianna began, but the Archon resource wasn’t listening.
“Lord knows she’s smart enough,” he went on, half to himself, “— Brilliant, even. But all her research was in MHD, magnetohydrodynamics: stellar magnetospheres, fusion power generation, that sort of thing. Nothing with a military application. Nothing that could hurt people ...
“... Nothing that could hurt children.”
He wasn’t staring at the picture any more. He was staring at her, as if trying to read an explanation in her face.
“So, I guess I’ve been sitting here,” he said quietly, “trying to figure out how just about the kindest, most loving person I ever met could have become the target of a counterterrorist witchhunt.”
“Counterterrorist?” This was getting too close for comfort. “What gave you the idea —”
“Counter-proliferation, then,” he cut her off, his voice not so quiet now, “Whatever you call it, it’s insane. Ask anyone who knows her: Galina would die before she’d sell blacklisted technology to the monsters. And there just isn’t any other way she could’ve wound up in Reacquisition’s crosshairs, now is there?”
Marianna swallowed. He wasn’t supposed to know any of that. None of it yet, and some of it never. What was it about this case? Each time she started getting it back on track, it blindsided her from a new direction. Now even the Archon option was spinning out of control on her.
“You are Reacquisition, aren’t you?” he asked, “Not Interdiction?”
“If I was Interdiction,” she snapped, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation!”
“That’s something, anyway.” He sounded as if he understood what turning the case over to Interdiction would mean: Don’t make any long-range plans — like, for the weekend.
“So,” he continued, “that would make you one of Aristos’s direct-reports. His second-in-command, maybe?”
“Listen, I don’t know how you came up with this stuff, but it had to involve violating the National Defense Security Act seven ways from Sunday.”
“Actually, you handed me that one yourself, when you had your daemon forwarding email to reack-2. And while we’re on the subject of culpability —” He showed her his smile again; it didn’t look so kind now. “— you’d best be packing a warrant or two. You could be looking at maybe five counts of wiretapping and mail fraud, not to mention assorted breakings and enterings. Uh, back in lane, please.”
She crossed back over the white line in plenty of time to keep the frantically honking semi from rear-ending them.
Look on the bright side, Marianna told herself as she nosed out a BMW to make the Newark Airport exit: The Archon resource was definitely living up to his advance billing. Maybe what Pete persisted in calling her crazy scheme had a shot at working after all.