“Madam, it’s our policy—”
“Good, we can discuss the policy in the morning. Good night.”
I felt her eyes burning into my back from the closing elevator doors as I dragged Kriztina toward my room door. She wasn’t going to evict me in the middle of the night, not with all the cops busy somewhere else. I was willing to bet that if I were a dude coming back to the Sofitel late at night with a couple of underage hookers, no one would bat an eye, state of emergency or no state of emergency. But let a lady try and show some sisterly solidarity, and suddenly it was ENFORCE ALL THE POLICIES. Fuck that.
Speaking of which.
In the room, door closed, I kicked my shoes, coat, hat, and gloves into a pile at the bottom of the closet, then peeled out of my thermal tights down to the regular tights underneath them. Kriztina stood in the doorway, leaning against the hotel-room door. She was stare-y and shaking. Mild shock. I got her a cola out of the minibar, wrapped her hand around it.
“Drink, then get some layers off. It’s been an intense night.” I waited until she’d swigged, then took the can from her, set it down, and helped her get her coat off. “Boots, too, don’t want slush on my carpet.” She bent and took them off because her mama raised her right. I sat her on the end of the bed and put the can back into her hand. “Let’s see what Litvinchuk made of all that, shall we?” I got my laptop out of my bag and sat next to her, turning my body to block her view when I typed my passwords. Litvinchuk’s emails were a mix of English and Boris and I speed-read them with Kriztina over my shoulder. They’d taken forty-one cops into custody, and there had been more than fifty arrests of demonstrators as we left the square. The IMSI catchers had conducted a census of all the phones in the neighborhood that night and the back-end had opened tickets with the Ministry of Communications to pull all the calling records to produce a social graph and mark out highly connected nodes, then run an information-cascade analysis: that was a cute machine-learning trick that tried to identify leaders—formal or informal—by looking at people whose communications produced “cascades” of activity: Alice calls Bob, who then calls Carol and Dan and Eve and Faith, so Alice is the boss and Bob is her lieutenant and love-slave.
The best part of these information cascades was that they produced “actionable intelligence”—go and round up all these Alices and you’ll seriously disrupt your adversaries. And since Alice may not even know that she’s the boss—she might just be a “highly connected thought leader” whose words inspired her minions without her having formal authority, you could never prove that you had the wrong gal, which meant you could assume you had the right gal, which meant that companies like Xoth could show that they were adding value to your little authoritarian basket-case republic.
I searched through the records for my number, Kriztina’s, and then the numbers for her radical cell. The anti-Stingray wares we were running should have been able to spoof the IMSI catchers and send back random identities that passed checksum verification so that software wouldn’t be able to tell straight off that the idents were faked. It seemed to have worked: the countermeasure gave a random IMSI to anything it thought was a spoofer, and generated new random numbers for each interaction. Of the tens of thousands of numbers the cops had captured that night, hundreds would be fake.
I paged through the arrest records quickly, letting Kriztina scan the names. She sucked air between her teeth a few times, as she recognized some of her pals who’d be rotting in police dungeons by now, or maybe getting a cattle-prod enema, this being a favored tactic of Litvinchuk’s human intelligence specialists. It was a rough world out there—the sooner young Kriztina learned to compartmentalize, the better.
I resolved to give her some training.
I folded down my laptop and stuck it on the desk, then turned to face her.
“Kriztina, your side could have been slaughtered tonight. You know that, right?”
She looked away.
“Come on, kid, stay with me. That could have been a bloodbath. You said it yourself, without me you won’t be inside their networks anymore.”
She glared at me, an angry Slavic elf. “So what do you want? I can’t become a superhacker in two weeks.”
“No, you absolutely can’t. That’s why you and your little group need to stand down.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” When she was upset, her accent got stronger. “Fuck” became “fahkh” with a throat-rasp at the end.
“I’m talking about facing reality. The reality is that Litvinchuk and his friends there are in a dangerous state. On the one hand, a single good push could knock them over, you saw that tonight. On the other hand, they know how close they are to collapse and they’re not fucking around. The struggle doesn’t need you. Find somewhere to go, deep underground, another country, I don’t care. Wait—six months, a year—and the government will fall of its own accord.”
She went from confused to furious in an instant and started shivering harder than she had out there in the cold.
“And who will push it over?”
“Someone else.”
“What will become of them?”
I shrugged, feeling like a Boris. “If they’re lucky, they’ll survive.”
“Why them and not me?”
“Because you’re smarter than that.”
She glared at me and then slowly, deliberately, stood and began to dress, putting on her layers.
“Where are you going?”
“My friends are out there. They need help. When someone needs help, I go to them. I don’t run away.”
I wasn’t going to beg. Go ahead, I thought. Not my trouble. I put her in a compartment.
The door closed behind her.
The phone rang.
I yanked it out of the wall. It would be the desk clerk, pissed off about Kriztina still, and she could go fuck herself.
My phone rang.
It was in do-not-disturb mode, but there was a small number of phone numbers it was programmed to override on. Embarrassingly, one of those was Marcus Yallow’s. But it wasn’t him, of course. He didn’t even have that number (but if I ever gave it to him, I wanted to make sure he could get through, because I’m an idiot).
“Masha, we have to talk. Lobby in five minutes. A car is coming.”
Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, can turn on the ice water on demand.
I ran a washcloth under the tap and did a bits-and-pits wipe-down worthy of any Frenchwoman, yanked out the drawer where I’d stuffed all my clothes and dumped it onto the bed, found underwear, a clean T-shirt from a tech conference in Qatar, jeans. My thermal tights were too gross to bother with and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be logging any outdoor hours.
I compartmentalize, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t aware that something terrible was about to happen. Truth be told, I’d been expecting that call for months, since the first time I’d done a surveillance appliance installment and then walked straight to the first group of dissidents I could find and explained how to defeat it. Quoting 1984 in my line of work is a ridiculous cliché, but George Orwell always got me with this line, “You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.” I’d known since day one that it would end with someone like Ilsa, over something like this.