“Mmm.”

  “So . . . my operation may be infected,” Step said. “I’m clean, so far, nobody’s come at me. This house is clean, I’m not so sure about the main house. I’m shutting down my export operation for now, until I can find out what is going on. What can I do to help you?”

  “You can tell us everything you know. We may still need your help, but we will direct the operations against these people. The train hacking can’t happen again, not now. He himself . . .” He pointed at the ceiling, meaning Vladimir Putin, “is watching.”

  “I understand,” Step said. “And you must understand my capabilities have been reduced. But I will do what I can. On my honor.”

  Twenty-One

  Nowak was gone.

  Big decisions were being made in Washington and she wanted to be there, both to contribute and to be seen. She ignored a perfectly good shuttle and was picked up by a limo at the front door and disappeared toward LAX. All the way down to the ground floor, in the elevator, she had urged them to gather what they could of Ordinary People and get them working on a train hack.

  Before leaving, Nowak had made calls to somebody in Washington, who had made calls to the SkyPort, and the hotel provided them with two suites to be used as communal workrooms, and a block of ten additional rooms that would become available during the day, all on the same floor, no questions asked.

  “We’re gonna need space,” Baxter said. “If we can get these guys in here . . . I hope Able hasn’t gone to Vegas . . .”

  “Vegas is what, five, six hours from here by car?” Cartwright said. “Shouldn’t be a problem. But what do we tell them?”

  Baxter looked at Letty, then back at Cartwright. “I’m thinking . . . we really can’t tell them the truth. Because of the SlapBack hack. Hackers are basically about moving information, and any information they have will get out. If SlapBack found out the NSA was behind their hack, there’d be a shitstorm.”

  Letty: “You’re right. But: these people are big brains. We’ll probably not fool them forever, but as long as they don’t know where we’re located in the government . . .”

  “They could tell us to fuck off,” Baxter said.

  Letty: “We have those chips. Able knows somebody who’ll buy them. We could pay them. Pay them quite a bit, and they’d be doing a good thing that fits with their politics and gets back for Loren Barron and Wolfe and Delph.”

  Cartwright had crossed her arms, usually a sign of resistance, and was wandering around the room, stopping to look out the windows. They had a clear view of jets taking off and landing at LAX, and they’d all spent time watching.

  Letty and Baxter waited for her to say something, and she turned and said, “Another possibility: we’re working for a Ukrainian lobby group in DC. We tell them that we got picked up by the feds after the shooting on the dock. They know it was self-defense, but they’ve got a rope around our necks if they need to yank on it. On the other hand, the feds have agreed to look the other way on the shooting if Ordinary People help us pull down the Russian trains.”

  Letty: “And we pay them. The hackers. We offer to do both things.”

  Cartwright: “You know what? It’s your call, Letty. I’m the consultant, not the boss of us.”

  Cartwright and Baxter stared at her, waiting, and finally Letty said, “I’ll call Sovern. See if he can get here. We’ll lay it out for him, like you said, Barb. We got picked up by the cops after the shooting on the dock. We tell them that we don’t know what government agency is involved, but it’s got a lot of clout. Maybe the Defense Department, maybe the CIA or DHS. Anyway, that agency got us cut loose. The FBI would prefer to put all of us in jail, including him and all the other train hackers, and let the Ukrainians deal with their own problems.”

  “That’s a plan,” Cartwright said. “Don’t know if it’ll work.”

  “Have to refine it a little . . . but it’ll still sound like bullshit,” Baxter said.

  * * *

  Sovern had done what Letty had half-suspected he might do: he’d left the marina that he was in, and had immediately motored to another, owned by a friend, where he’d gone bow-first into a slip so the name of the boat couldn’t be read from the dock. He’d also taken down the wind turbine on the stern, which was distinctive. Of course, the boat itself was distinctive, but only to the knowledgeable; a survey of docks by street cops shouldn’t pinpoint it.

  Then he settled in to wait for news, monitoring incoming emails from other members of Ordinary People, but not replying to any of them. The other members had all been linked to reports of the death of Loren Barron and Brianna Wolfe, as well as the suspected death of Daniel Delph. They were frightened. There was some talk of fighting back, but against what? And who?

  He was cleaning the vanes on the wind turbine, in preparation for storing it out of sight, when Letty called.

  “We need to meet with you,” she said. “Seriously. About something we haven’t talked about. Are you on the water? Can we pick you up somewhere?”

  Sovern considered the question, then said, “You can’t pick me up, but I could come to you.”

  To get to the SkyPort, he said, would take two hours. “I have an Uber driver I can call and pay in cash, so there’s no credit card record. How bad is it?”

  “Talk about it when you get here,” Letty said. “We’ve got the FBI flying around and they’re pissed off. With this kind of stuff, I hate to talk on cell phones.”

  “That’s wise. Two hours,” Sovern said.

  * * *

  Baxter went to his laptop. Letty and Cartwright walked around the hotel. The place was built for travelers, not vacationers; some would have their own cars, but most would be laying over between flights at LAX. Many of them were airplane crew. The place smelled of swift passages and fast food. The walls were covered with beige vinyl wallpaper, the kind easily cleaned; the carpet was deep red, also an easily cleaned synthetic.

  Letty and Cartwright looked at the stairways, calculated the time it took for an elevator to arrive, and then, outside, walked the surrounding blocks, checking for cover, concealment, escape and approach routes. The hotel itself was an undistinguished chunk of concrete and glass, but it was big, and by its very bigness provided some cover. Cars were parked in a three-floor garage at the base of the hotel.

  Letty hadn’t done that kind of reconnaissance before, not with Cartwright’s thoroughness.

  On the street, Cartwright said, “Always make sure you check up high, even higher than you think is necessary. Everybody has hands-free cell phones, and a spotter up high can kill you if he’s talking to somebody on the ground. Nowadays, you’re not fighting in two dimensions; in the cities, you’re fighting in three.”

  World War I pilots, in open planes, she said, wore silk scarves as a kind of anti-chafing lubrication because they were trained to constantly turn their heads, looking for enemy aircraft in all directions, back, forward, above, and below. “In a serious threat situation, you sorta have to do that, without being too obvious about it.”

  “Got it,” Letty said. She later realized that she kept forgetting to do it; the difference between understanding the theory and putting it into practice.

  * * *

  Sovern showed up at the hotel three hours after the phone call, an hour later than he’d predicted, because his Uber contact had been busy. Letty, Cartwright, and Baxter were all impatient for the talk and the wait had them snapping at each other. Sovern called Letty from the lobby, asking for the room number, and when he stepped off the elevator, Letty waved him down the hall.

  He was dressed in a green tee-shirt under a nylon rain jacket, with neat olive-drab nylon cargo pants and boat shoes with non-marking white soles. Inside the suite, he looked around, then said, “You don’t look like the types who’d pay for suites.”

  “We’re not,” Letty said. “A government’s paying.”

  “You’re feds?”

  Letty shook her head and began unloading the story they’d been working on. “Barbara and I work for a security company in Washington. The company does work for a lobbying firm. And the lobbying firm has Ukraine as one of its clients . . . They’ve been in the news a little, you could look them up.”

  “Uh-oh,” Sovern said.

  “Yeah. Ukraine is paying,” Letty said hastily. “We rounded up Paul here; he works as a freelance programmer in the DC area, and we were sent out to find you guys. Ordinary People. Ukraine would like you to mess with the Russian trains again, if you can.”

  Sovern nodded: “I thought it might be something like that. Especially after I looked at her, down at the marina.” He nodded at Cartwright. “Though I thought she might be a fed.”

  Letty: “You don’t think Paul and I look like feds?”

  “You look like you get carded everywhere you go, and Paul doesn’t exactly fit my image of a combat-ready law enforcement officer,” Sovern said.

  “I’m not,” Baxter said. “I do have that PhD from Florida. I kill on machine control software, but I don’t jump out of airplanes.”

  “I know about the Russian train hack, but from what I’ve heard, everything was done by remote control,” Sovern said, not ready to admit anything. “No fingerprints on anything. The hackers were very, very careful. Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge. The question now is, what do you want? Will it get any more of us killed? The dead people were my best friends.”

  “Everybody needs to sit down,” Letty said. They all sat. She said, “Here’s the truth: the FBI wants to arrest us, and you, and your friends, if they could find a way to do it . . .”

  She went on to spin the story about a powerful agency in Washington interfering with the FBI; about being held by the Oxnard cops, about her security agency getting in touch with the powers in Washington, about the FBI showing up to interrogate them, and about being kicked free with the implicit deal that they all go after the trains.

  “If we do that, we’re good. You’re good. Nobody will come after us. The FBI will be told to shut up and sit down, because we’d all have a story to tell, about how the feds let us go specifically so we could mess with Russia. The feds don’t want anyone saying that. Especially not, like, in a courtroom, with our attorneys subpoenaing Washington power brokers.”

  Cartwright: “Bottom line, what they want is to stop the trains in Russia when Russia invades Ukraine.”

  “Is Russia going to do that? For sure?”

  “Yes. Sometime very soon,” Cartwright said. “I thought it might be today, but it’s already evening in Ukraine and nobody’s moved.”

  “Somebody here in the U.S., we’re told, probably the CIA or the NSA, has been looking down Putin’s chimney and he’s made the call,” Baxter said. “They’re going in and Ukraine will fight back. Best estimates are that Kyiv goes down in a week. One U.S. general thinks it might take the Russians a month to swamp the whole country.”

  They laid out everything that Nowak had told them, along with a few suppositions. Letty concluded with “Your friend Loren Barron was from Ukraine and that may be why they killed him. They killed Brianna Wolfe because she was with him and a witness. The Russians were worried that even after they’d paid, Loren would go back after the train system again, because he was Ukrainian.”

  Sovern, sitting on a bed, was nodding. “Going after the trains will be complicated. After the big hack, they probably reworked their whole control system . . .”

  “They couldn’t,” Baxter said. “Too much legacy hardware is involved. They would have had to pay billions to upgrade it and Ukraine sees no sign that they’ve done that. What they would have done is put more security controls on the software you hacked. Might be hell getting through that, but still—with that legacy hardware, there are limits to what they could do.”

  Sovern looked at Baxter: “Right. You’re machine controls.” He rubbed his face, popped his knuckles, then asked, “What are you proposing?”

  “That you get the train-hacking people together again, here in this hotel, and you hack the Russian trains in a way that doesn’t look like it came from an official U.S. source. Maybe make it the ‘Loren Barron Memorial Hack.’ Make it look like it’s revenge for killing Barron.”

  “The people are scared,” Sovern said.

  “That’s why Barb and I are here,” Letty told him. “You saw that on the dock.”

  “You shoot people,” Sovern said.

  Cartwright: “We can. We’ve got two suites up here as a workspace, and a bunch of rooms and good wi-fi. You bring in the team that did the trains. Go in for another look, see what can be done.”

  “I’d want a room of my own,” Sovern said. “Computer people can be messy and I have a hard time with that.”

  “Done,” Letty said.

  “I’ll start making calls,” Sovern said. “I need seven people. I’m not sure all of them will be willing to go along, but I need them. I need Paul to work with us. One of the women I need is fluent in Russian and a decent coder, too. If I can’t get her, we’ll have to find another Russian speaker.”

  “I’ll call my agency,” Letty said. “With our Ukraine contacts, shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Sovern slapped his thighs, stood up. “Nothing will happen before tomorrow or the next day, when we get the people here with their computers and we talk ourselves through the approach and start fiddling around with the Russian systems.”

  “Sooner the better,” Letty said. “We’re running out of time.”

  “Do it as fast as I can, but we won’t know how fast that will be, until we get the people here,” Sovern said. He looked over at Cartwright: “In the meantime, when I’ve done what I can today . . . Barb, you want to go out for a drink or two tonight? You know, before the trouble starts?”

  Letty: “Hey, wait a minute . . .”

  Cartwright: “Yeah, I could do that.”

  * * *

  They showed Sovern his room and gave him a key; Letty kept one key for herself without mentioning it. He set up his laptop, opened a file, and began making phone calls. They left him to it.

  Baxter wanted to go back to his laptop and left for his own room. Letty said to Cartwright, “So you got a date tonight. You’re what, taking care of him? Making sure he’s not up to something?”

  Cartwright said, “I’m pretty sure he’s up to something, but it doesn’t have anything to do with computers or the Russians. In the meantime, I gotta run out. I’d like at least one outfit that’s, you know, datable.”

  “Ah, God. Barbara . . .”

  “You know how long it’s been since I’ve been out with somebody who’s really good-looking and smart and who wasn’t carrying three guns and a switchblade? I’m gonna have a good time. You think he dances?”

  “He’s a computer nerd, so probably not,” Letty said. “But you’ll take three guns and a knife with you?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  * * *

  Delores Nowak arrived in Washington and called Letty from the airport: “Progress report?”

  “We have Sovern here in the hotel. He wants to bring in seven people in addition to Rod, to do the work.”

  “Stay in touch,” Nowak said.

  Cartwright talked Baxter into giving her a ride to where they’d left the Hertz rental. He did that, and she drove away to find something that didn’t come in camo or khaki, and shoes not made for running. Baxter returned to his laptop.

  Letty spent the time worrying, then found out she could stream the old Justified series on the room television and sank into a chair and vegged until Sovern knocked on the door.

  “I got all seven. I had to sell them a little, but we’ve got our Russian speaker and six more criminals willing to help.” He smiled. “Makes me happy, working together again. We can do this.”

  And he looked around the room: “Where’s Barb?”

  “She went to find something she called a ‘datable outfit,’ and isn’t back yet.”

  “Great. Hope she dances,” Sovern said.

  “She hopes you dance,” Letty said. “It’s kinda disgusting.”

  “Dancing, or dating?”

  “Both, while I sit here and watch old TV shows,” Letty said.

  “Well, you could come along,” he said. “We could all dance and then come back to the hotel and make a Sovern sandwich.”

  “That’s disturbing,” Letty said. “Go back to your room. I don’t want to look at you.”

  Sovern left. He really was disconcertingly good-looking, Letty thought.

  * * *

  As Cartwright was shopping, Baxter browsing the Internet, and Letty vegging on streamed TV shows, Tom Boyadjian was working on his putting stroke on an eight-foot-long practice green/rug at the back of his office in Century City.

  Boyadjian was fully aware that a half-dozen of his best clients were criminals, Eastern European or Balkan. Another thirty or so were legitimate corporate accounts, where his operators looked into a variety of corporate-based mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance. He referred more complicated problems, like international corporate espionage, to a larger firm, for a modest kickback on the eventual fee.

  When the FBI came through the door, late in the afternoon, and in unnecessary numbers, he was ready. The receptionist, to whom he was married, though she kept her maiden name, hit six keys and Enter on her computer as soon as she saw them at the locked glass doors, and was slow to open them.

  As soon as the alarm came in, Boyadjian, whose office was at the back of a deliberate rat’s maze of smaller offices and rooms, went to his computer, called up an executable file, and executed it. Encrypted warnings were automatically sent out to clients who would not be calling him again unless he called them first, and their contact information was erased. The file then erased all connections to a specific subscription to the Microsoft cloud, which backed up everything in the computer.