I felt like the fairy who curses Sleeping Beauty out of spite when she thinks she hasn’t been invited to her christening, except that this was a wedding and not a christening. Oh, and they invited me, of course.
But I had work to do. Hey, I’d sent a thoughtful gift, even if I totally upstaged their stupid nerd chic wedding. Shoulda had a nerdier wedding, if they didn’t want to get upstaged.
I was still hungry and now it was getting to be time to head out to the square. Room service at the Sofitel sucked anyway. I’d get a doner kebab. Hell, I’d get a sack of them and bring them along.
* * *
The vegan café where my pet revolutionary cell met was called the Danube Bar Resto, and they could always be found there before the night’s action, because fuck opsec, why not just make it easy for the secret police to round you all up somewhere far from a crowd? I despair.
Kriztina was already there, chowing down on something that had never had the chance to breathe and live and run and play. I cracked open the crumpled top on my sack of kebab and let her smell the meaty perfume. “Save room,” I said.
She laugh-choked and gave me a mouth-full thumbs-up as I sat down next to her. There were eight of them in Kriztina’s little cell, a couple of graphic designers, two webmonkeys, a poet (seriously), and the rest didn’t even pretend to be employed. Few under-thirties in Slovstakia were, after all.
“You want drink?” Oksana always had spending money. I’d pegged her as a snitch when I first met her, but it turned out she just made good money working for a law firm that did a lot of western business and didn’t mind having a trans girl for a paralegal. Once I’d satisfied myself that she didn’t appear anywhere in Litvinchuk’s master lists of turncoats, I’d come to like her. She reminded me of some of the women I’d known in the Middle East, brave fuckers who’d managed to look like a million bucks even as their cities were being pounded to gravel around their pretty shoulders, fearless beneath their hijabs and glamorous even when they were covered in dust and blood.
“Sure.” It would be something with wheatgrass and live microbes and probably twigs, but mostly orange juice and mango pulp. The guy who ran the place liked to talk about how the chlorophyll “oxygenated” your blood—of course chlorophyll only makes oxygen in the presence of sunlight, and if you’ve got sunlight in your colon, you’ve got big problems. Even if you could get grass to fill your back passage with oxygen, it’s not like your asshole has any way to absorb it. I get my oxygen the old-fashioned way: I breathe.
“Tonight—” Kriztina started. I held up a hand.
“Batteries or bags,” I said. Everyone looked embarrassed. Those of us whose phones had removable batteries removed them. The rest of them put their phones into the Faraday bags I’d handed out when I first started hanging out with these amateurs.
“Before we talk about tonight, I want to walk you through some new precautions.” They groaned. I was such a buzzkill. “First: running Paranoid Android is no longer optional. You have to get the nightly build, every night, and you have to check the signatures, every single time.” The groans were louder. “I’m not fucking around, people. The Interior Ministry now has a network appliance that gets a fresh load of exploits three times a day. If you’re not fresh, you’re meat.
“Second, make sure your IMSI-catcher countermeasures are up to date. They just bought an update package for their fake cell towers and they’ll be capturing the unique IDs of every phone that answers a ping from them. The app your phone used last week to tell a fake tower from a real one? Useless now. Update, update, update. Check every signature, too.
“Third, make sure your smart-meters aren’t sneaking back online. After Minsk, the Interior Ministry’s really looking for a chance to pull the same trick, turn off heat in the middle of February for anyone they suspect of demonstrations.
“Finally, everyone has to wear dazzle, no exceptions.” Again with the groans, but I got the tubes out of my bag and passed them around. The dazzle was super-reflective in visible light and infrared and anyone who tried to take a picture of someone wearing it would just get a lens flare and jitter from their camera’s overloaded sensors. It had been developed for paparazzi-haunted celebs, but the smell of the stuff and the greasy feel it left on your skin—not to mention persistent rumors that it was a powerful carcinogen—had doomed it to an existence as a novelty item used only by teenagers on class picture day and surveillance-haunted weirdos.
I slurped the green juice Oksana had just handed me and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it tanged unmistakably of tequila. She winked at me. Oh, Oksana, you are a hero.
“Get to it,” I said. “Update before we leave. Remember, opsec is a team sport. Your mistake exposes all your friends.”
They got to it. Kriztina and Oksana and I checked everyone else’s work, and then each other’s. Friends don’t let friends leak data. We also smeared each other with dazzle, and they made jokes in Boris about the smell, which I could almost follow, though my Boris was a lot worse than everyone else’s English.
“Nazis tonight,” Kriztina said, looking at her phone. She knew people who knew people, because Slovstakia was so small that everyone was someone’s cousin. That meant that when someone’s idiot skinhead cousin and his friends started boozing and heil-ing and getting all suited and booted, which meant telescoping steel rods (the must-have neo-Nazi fashion accessory of the season) and brass knucks. The neo-Nazis were someone’s useful idiots; they’d come out to the demonstrations and shout about bringing down the government, and then they’d start giving those one-armed salutes and charging the police lines.
It wasn’t that they lacked sincerity—they really did hate immigrants, especially refugees, especially brown ones; as well as Russians, Jews, Muslims, queers, vegans, the European parliament, and every single member of the national congress, personally. They may have even come by those views organically, by dint of their own intolerant knuckleheaded generalized resentment. But these characters also had money, a clubhouse, a source for those nifty telescoping batons, and someone had given them workshops on how to make a really effective Molotov, without which they would surely have removed themselves from the gene pool already.
I’d been inside Litvinchuk’s network for a month, ever since I landed in-country to backstop the sales team that was working him, feeding them URLs of pastebins where hackers dumped sensitive data they’d pulled out of his data-centers, data we also trickled to his political rivals, making him look worse and worse and making the case to give us a shitpile of reserve-currency dollars better and better.
So I knew what his theory was on the skinheads: he blamed the Kremlin. He blamed the Kremlin for everything. It wasn’t a bad strategy—Moscow certainly did like to meddle in the affairs of its former satellite states. But I had figured out which personal accounts his own senior staff were using, and done some digging there, and I thought that maybe the skinheads were actually unwitting skirmishers in the civil service empire-building that Borises excelled at. Which didn’t necessarily mean the Kremlin had clean hands; maybe they were backing one of Litvinchuk’s lieutenants in the hopes of destabilizing things and replacing their canny adversary with someone dumber and more biddable.