The square was more crowded now. Barrel fires burned, and in their flickering light and the last purple of the sunset, I saw a lot of flimsy homemade armor.
“You guys are in so much trouble.”
“Why?”
I pointed at a young dude who was handing out painter’s masks. “Because those masks won’t do shit against tear gas or pepper spray.”
“I know.” She did fatalistic really well.
“Well?”
She shrugged in Boris. “It makes them feel like they’re doing something.”
“Feeling isn’t enough,” I said. “Maybe in the past, in the Vaclav Havel days or whatever. Back then you had these basket-case Borises who ran their secret police on vodka and purges and relied on their own engineering talent to make listening devices the size of refrigerators that needed hourly repairs and oil changes. Now, spooks like Litvinchuk can fly to DC every couple years for the Snooper’s Ball trade show, where the best-capitalized surveillance companies in the world lay out their wares for anyone to buy. Sure, they’re all backdoored by the Russians, the Chinese, or the Americans, but they’re still about a million times better than anything Slovstakia is going to produce on its own, and they will peel you and your friends like oranges.
“Not just surveillance, either—you should see the brochures from the less-lethals industry these days. Melt-your-face pain rays, pepper spray and nerve gas aerostats, sound weapons to make you shit your pants—”
“I know, I know. You tell me this all the time. What do you want me to do? I try to be smarter, try to make my friends smarter, but what can I do about all these people—”
I could feel the heat rising through my body. “The fact that you don’t have a solution doesn’t mean that you don’t need to find one and it doesn’t mean that one can’t be found. You and your seven friends aren’t going to change shit, you need all these people, and you know something they don’t know, and until they know it, they are going to get creamed.” My hands shook. I stuffed them in my pockets. I shook my head, cleared out the screams ringing in my ears, screams from another place and another time. “You need to be better because this is serious and if you’re not better, you’ll die. You understand that? You can run from these jokers, hide with Paranoid Android and Faraday pouches, but you will make mistakes and the computers they run will catch those mistakes, and when they do—”
There was doner kebab coming up my gullet, and I couldn’t talk anymore without puking, or maybe sobbing, and I couldn’t tell you which would be worse. I’m not an idiot: I was talking to myself more than I was talking to her. Having a day job where you help repressive regimes spy on their dissidents and a hobby where you help those dissidents evade detection is self-destructive.
I get that.
But tell me that you don’t do anything self-contradictory. Tell me that you don’t find yourself dissociating, doing something you know you’ll regret later, something you know is wrong, and doing it anyway, like you’re watching yourself do it.
I just have a more dramatic version is all.
Kriztina must have seen something in my face, which I hated. It wasn’t her business what was going on in my heart or my head.
But she took me in a big hug, which Borises also specialize in. It was a good hug. I snuffled the snot back in, willed my tears away, and hugged her back. She was tiny underneath all those layers.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We know you’re only trying to keep us safe. We will do our best.”
Your best won’t be good enough, I didn’t say. I took her hand. “Let’s stroll.”
The protest crowd was big now, throngs, really, and some of them were singing folk songs in rounds, deep voices and then the high, sweet ones.
Kriztina sang along under her breath. The song floated across the square and it changed the rhythm of the night, made people stamp their feet in time with it, made them lift their heads to the police lines. Some of those cops nodded along with the singers. I wondered if they were the same guys who’d agreed to let the neo-Nazis get through their lines and smash the parliament.
“What do the words mean?”
Kriztina’s eyes were warm when she turned to me. “Most of it is nonsense, you know, ‘Slovstakia, our mother, on your bosom we were fed,’ but the good parts are very good, I think, ‘all of us together, different though we are, will work together always, strong through understanding, invincible unless we forget who we are and attack our brothers—’”
“No way.”
“Seriously. The words were written by a poet in the seventeenth century after a terrible civil war. I modernized it a little in the translation, but—” She shrugged. “It’s our old problem, this kind of infighting. Always someone who wants to build himself a little empire, have ten cars and five mansions, and always the rest of us in the square, fighting about it. Spending blood. But from what you say, maybe this time we lose, no matter how much blood.”
I looked at the police lines, the milling crowds. It was full dark now and there were huge steam clouds sweeping the square, pouring off the barrel fires, lit by the huge LED banks that shone out from behind the cops, putting them in shadow and the protesters in full, photographable glare. Their support poles glittered with unblinking CCTV eyes. The police vans ringing the square sported small forests of weird antennas, ingesting all the invisible communications flying around the square, raiding phones for virtual identity papers at the speed of thought.
“You guys are pretty much fucked,” I said.
Kriztina grinned. “You sound like a Slovstakian.”
“Ha ha. The truth is that it’s a lot harder to defend than it is to attack. If you make one mistake, Litvinchuk and his goons will have you. You have to be perfect. They need to find one imperfection.”
“You make it sound like we should be attacking.”
I stopped walking. Yeah, of course that was what we should be doing. Not just playing around at the edges, pitting one adversary against another with false-flag emails—we should be doing a full-court disruption to their whole network, shutting down their comms when they needed it the most, infecting their phones and servers with malware, making a copy of everything they said and did and siphoning it off to a leaks site on the darknet that we’d unveil at the worst possible moment.
I checked my phone. Nearly fifteen minutes had gone by.
“I think you should,” I said. “But once you do, the game will change. Once they know that you’re completely inside their network, they’ll have two choices: turn and run or crush you like bugs. I think they’ll go for option two.”
“Masha.” My name sounded weird and natural at the same time when she said it. It was a Russian name, once upon a time, and there were Borises in my ancestry stretching back to the Ashkenaz diaspora. Not just Jews, either: in the old photos, my grandmother looked like a Cossack in drag. Cheekbones like snowplows, eyes tilted like a Tolkien elf. I turned to stare at her. “Masha, we are not inside their network. You are.”
Oh.
“Oh.” It was true, of course. I’d taught them a little (“teach a woman to phish…”) but if I packed up and left, as I was scheduled to do in two weeks, they’d be sitting ducks.