Authors: Tom Grace
Quantum (20 page)
Pine River, Michigan
Leskov completed his inspection of the grounds surrounding the remote hunting cabin where he and his men now took refuge. The cabin, which belonged to a business associate of Victor Orlov’s, sat near the southern edge of a six-thousand-acre parcel of marshy forestland. The northern border of the property abutted the Ogemaw State Forest; along the southern border lay Saginaw Bay. The nearest homes along the shoreline to either side were miles away.
The isolated location and marshy terrain made the property ideal for holding hostages. The approaches to the cabin by either the narrow dirt road or the bay were easily defended, and an airdrop of any kind was too hazardous to be considered by anyone attempting a rescue.
As he approached the cabin, Leskov saw the dark muscular form of Josef on watch outside.
‘Josef, how are our guests?’
‘We have made them comfortable. They aren’t giving us any trouble. I was pleased to see the kitchen was stocked for our arrival.’
‘I’m sure our hosts wish to remain in good standing with Orlov. How are communications?’
‘Everything is fine. The satellite phone is working well. We should get word from our eavesdroppers if they pick up anything on the police frequencies. I’ve also confirmed that two new men will make their way across the Canadian border tonight.’
‘Good. Now we settle in and wait.’
‘Are we going to interrogate the old woman?’
‘Not yet. At this point I think it would be counterproductive. She’s tough, and we don’t have a lot of leverage with her.’
‘Do you think it was wise to take these women hostage?’
‘Taking hostages was the only reasonable choice open to us. If Kilkenny has the ring, he will trade it for the women.’
‘I still don’t like it. In the old days, we went in, we killed, and we got out. If we had to snatch some Afghani chieftain, we did the job and dropped him off for interrogation. We never trained for baby-sitting jobs.’
‘It was simpler in the old days, my friend,’ Leskov agreed. ‘But remember, our paychecks were a lot smaller back then.’
‘And rarer, too,’ Josef said with a brusque laugh.
‘Has the video clip been sent off to Moscow?’
‘Da. Misha took care of that fifteen minutes ago. Moscow acknowledged receipt, and they are satisfied.’
‘Good. Now Orlov can start his negotiations.’
Dexter, Michigan
Cal Mosley brought the rented Taurus to a stop beside Grin’s faded microbus. As he and Bart Cooper stepped out of the car, two overly friendly yellow Labradors ran up to greet them. They heard a loud whistle from the front porch of the farmhouse.
‘Buckley, Babs! Get over here!’
The two dogs bolted toward the porch, coming to rest at the feet of Martin Kilkenny.
‘Thanks,’ Mosley said, then introduced himself and Cooper as they approached the porch. ‘We’re looking for Nolan. He’s expecting us.’
‘Indeed he is. Go in the side door of the barn, there. Take the stairs up to the loft – that’s where you’ll find him.’
Mosley led Cooper into the massive renovated barn and up the spiral staircase to the loft. Nolan and Grin sat amid a field of debris from their all-night assault on Wolff’s encryption algorithm. Neither took notice of the other men’s arrival.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Mosley called out. ‘I believe we had an appointment.’
‘Morning, Cal,’ Nolan said as he rose stiffly from the floor. ‘I assume this is Bart Cooper.’
‘A pleasure,’ Cooper said as he shook Nolan’s hand.
Nolan then completed the introductions. ‘Can I get you guys something to drink? I’ve got a pot of coffee going or some juice.’
‘Coffee would be fine. Black,’ Cooper replied.
‘Same,’ Mosley added.
‘I could use a reload myself,’ Grin said as he slowly ambled into the kitchen. He filled his mug and the two that Nolan had set on the counter.
‘Judging from those dark circles under your eyes,’ Cooper commented, ‘I’d say you two have been at it awhile. What are you working on?’
‘We’re decrypting Wolff’s notebooks.’
‘You’ve cracked the code?’ Mosley asked, surprised.
‘It’s a lot easier when you have the key,’ Grin replied.
Nolan then explained how he acquired a copy of the ring inscription from the jewelry store.
‘How are you coming with the decoding?’ Mosley asked eagerly.
‘We’re making slow progress. Grin, give the man a demo.’
‘Sure thing, boss.’
Grin walked over to Kilkenny’s computer.
‘Gather ’round,’ Grin said, ‘but fair warning, this is not the prettiest piece of programming ever written. It’s downright crude compared with Wolff’s method, but it does get the job done.’
With Mosley and Cooper watching over his shoulder, Grin enlarged the decryption program window to fill the entire twenty-one-inch monitor on Nolan’s desk. The screen displayed two blank windows placed side by side.
‘I’m going to pick page six out of Wolff’s first notebook. We’ve already decoded the first five.’
The top window filled with a wide column of apparently random symbols and characters. After the encrypted text was loaded, the program highlighted the first row of text and the cursor changed from an arrow into a tumbling hourglass.
‘Wolff deliberately used a column format in recording information in his notebooks because it helped keep the information ordered in his mind. You see, he was using matrices, but in a multidimensional way like nothing I’ve ever seen. I am still floored that this guy could do in his head what Nolan’s top-notch computer is struggling with.’
The decrypted version of the first few characters began appearing in the window on the right side of the screen. The characters came in bunches, with the time between each character’s appearance being randomly shorter or longer.
‘Why is it so jumpy?’ Cooper asked.
‘It’s just the way our program was written,’ Nolan replied with a yawn. ‘The method Wolff devised to encode his notebooks is an offshoot of the mathematics that he invented for his research. How a piece of data is processed by this algorithm is governed by probability.’
‘What? You lost me, Nolan,’ Mosley said.
‘Don’t feel bad. Grin and I went round and round on this one until the fatigue set in and we suddenly caught a glimpse of how this thing really works. Most codes rely on some form of one-for-one substitution – A becomes Q, or Z or fourteen – whatever the method, the readable text gets transformed from one thing into another. It’s a very black-and-white kind of process.’
‘I’m following you so far,’ Mosley said.
‘Quantum reality is shades of gray. A can become Q, Z, and fourteen all at the same time. Effectively, each character has an infinite number of simultaneous possibilities. It then falls to probability to discover the answer you’re looking for.’
‘Thankfully, Wolff devised only a simple quantum algorithm – something he could do in his head,’ Grin added. ‘We were able to cobble together a very crude conventional program to simulate Wolff’s method – a lot like rescoring a Mozart symphony for a washtub bass and a kazoo. If we had a working quantum computer, it would’ve been done with a whole notebook by now.’
‘Why don’t you get one?’ Cooper asked.
‘A quantum computer?’ Nolan replied. ‘They haven’t been invented yet.’
Grin rapped a knuckle against Nolan’s computer. ‘For the time being, this is as good as it gets.’
Mosley and Cooper watched the first few strings of deciphered text emerge in the window on the monitor’s right side. Then he noticed the small stack of printed pages on the desk. ‘This the part you already finished?’
‘Yeah, have a look,’ Nolan offered.
Cooper put on a pair of reading glasses and picked up the loose pages. ‘It’s in German, which makes sense. It was Wolff’s native tongue. Unfortunately, that’s about all I recognize. Science was never one of my strong suits.’
‘I don’t think anyone in this room can truly appreciate Wolff’s work,’ Nolan remarked. ‘We’re all going to need someone to spoon-feed us on this stuff.’
‘Well, this is definitely beyond me,’ Cooper agreed, setting the pages back on the desk.
‘Enough about the notebooks,’ Nolan said. ‘What’s the latest on our kidnappers? Do we know who we’re dealing with yet?’
‘To answer your first question, we don’t have a fix on the hostages. I’ve been in contact with the FBI, and we don’t believe they’ve been taken out of the country. I also think we’ve confirmed that Elli does not have the ring with her.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Nolan asked.
‘The FBI has Elli’s house under watch, and they spotted a couple of guys snooping around. They ran the plates and found that a high-level boss in the Russian Mafiya owns the car. That tells me Orlov is still looking for the ring. Given that, I’m sure Kelsey and Elli are fine – they have to be, or Orlov doesn’t have anything to bargain with.’
‘Who’s Orlov?’ Nolan asked.
‘The man who’s responsible for this whole mess. Let’s have a seat, and Bart and I will walk you through what we’ve come up with.’
Nolan cleared an empty pizza box from his dining table, and the four men took their places around it. Cooper pulled a file from his briefcase and set it on the table.
‘First of all,’ Mosley began, ‘our people confirmed Grin’s trace of that E-mail you forwarded to me. It originated from an Internet server owned by a corporation named VIO FinProm. This corporation is based in Moscow and serves as a holding company for a widely diversified collection of financial and industrial businesses. FinProm is short for
finanzava promuchistva
, which is Russian for “financial-industrial”.’
‘And the VIO?’ Nolan asked.
‘Those are the initials of the owner of this business empire,’ Cooper replied as he laid a photograph on the table. ‘Victor Ivanovich Orlov.’
Cooper then placed another photograph next to the one of Orlov, this one of an attractive brunette in her mid-forties.
‘The woman is Oksanna Zoshchenko, an assistant director of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Shortly after the body of Johann Wolff was found, Zoshchenko and I both, independently, requested a search for information about Wolff from the old KGB archives at Lubyanka. I found this coincidence odd, until Cal told me about his investigation. A further check on Zoshchenko revealed two very interesting facts. First, she was in Ann Arbor this spring as a guest of the university. Apparently, one of the regents brought her to a MARC board meeting, the one where Ted Sandstrom made a presentation.’
‘So that’s how they found out about Sandstrom,’ Nolan said.
‘She even signed a nondisclosure agreement, not that she kept that promise. The second thing I learned about Zoshchenko is that she’s supplementing her income by providing consultation services to Orlov. This kind of arrangement would be considered a clear conflict of interest here, but it doesn’t appear to be a problem in Moscow.’
Cooper then laid a third photograph on the table. It was an enlarged headshot of a man with blond hair. ‘This guy is Dmitri Leskov. Currently, he’s Orlov’s fixer; he handles the dirty jobs, the wet work. Leskov’s a former captain in the Spetsnaz – Soviet Special Forces.’
‘A real bad-ass, I take it?’ Grin asked.
‘That’s putting it mildly. Leskov is a highly trained and very capable mercenary. You don’t want to underestimate him. My contact in Moscow and I ran some checks on border crossings, and we found arrivals and departures that put Leskov and four other Russian nationals in the U.S. at the time of the attack on Sandstrom’s lab.’
‘Nolan, you ever see this guy before?’ Mosley asked.
‘Yeah.’ Nolan seethed with anger. ‘He led all three attacks.’
‘Of the four other individuals who entered the U.S. with Leskov on that first trip,’ Cooper continued, ‘only one made the trip home.’
‘I took out the other three,’ Nolan offered matter-of-factly, his voice displaying neither pride nor remorse.
‘I gathered as much from the police report,’ Cooper said. ‘None of those bodies have been found, and I don’t expect they ever will be. Interesting thing about one of the men you dispatched’ – Cooper thumbed through the other photographs until he found what he was looking for – ‘this one is Pavel Leskov, Dmitri’s younger brother.’
‘That’s bound to piss off his big brother, Nolan,’ Grin said, looking at the dead man’s photo.
‘Leskov’s reputation says he’s a coolheaded professional. Whether something like this is going to affect how he deals with Kelsey or you is unknown. I just thought I’d let you know in case Leskov has an agenda outside Orlov’s game plan. The rest of these’ – Cooper laid out a series of grainy pictures – ‘came in with Leskov last week. This is the crew that hit the library and snatched Kelsey and Elli. All are Spetsnaz veterans who either served with or were trained by Leskov. It’s a handpicked crew.’
‘Two of these guys are in the morgue, right now,’ Nolan added. ‘What about the man who’s holding Leskov’s leash?’
‘Victor Orlov gets as much press in Russia, both good and bad, as someone like Bill Gates does here. His wealth gives him access to the highest levels of the Russian elite. For every friend, he has a bitter enemy. When communism fell, this guy was a nobody. Now he’s one of the richest men in the world, and the road that got him there is littered with dead bodies.’
‘I take it you are not speaking metaphorically?’ Kilkenny asked.
‘No, I am not. Orlov’s not a sociopath; to him, murder is just another business tool. If putting a bullet in a rival’s head gets him what he wants, that rival ends up dead. Moscow has received a lot of bad press about car bombings and the assassinations of Russian businessmen – most of what you heard is attributable, in some way or another, to Orlov.’
‘Do you think he’ll kill his hostages?’ Nolan asked, respecting Cooper’s experience with such people.
‘Truthfully, Nolan, if he feels that killing them is in his best interests, then that’s what he’ll do. This whole situation is like a chess match for Orlov, and at this point in the game, I don’t see what value killing Kelsey and Elli will bring him. Orlov wants the key to Wolff’s code, and the women are his best means of getting it.’
‘Changing the subject,’ Mosley interjected, ‘we think we’ve ID’d the author of that mysterious E-mail that came out of VIO FinProm.’
‘My contact,’ Cooper continued, ‘says a-v-v is a woman named Lara Avvakum, a physicist with the Russian Academy of Sciences. She’s currently on loan to VIO FinProm for an industrial research project. Orlov and Zoshchenko pulled Avvakum out of a Siberian research facility and set her up in one of Orlov’s buildings in Moscow.’
‘If she works for Orlov, why’d she send the E-mail?’
‘Avvakum’s relationship with Orlov is barely three weeks old. Prior to that, she was so far out of the loop that I doubt she’d ever even heard of him. Zoshchenko is the connection between Avvakum and Orlov; her position in the Russian Academy of Sciences allowed her to locate a bright young underpaid physicist to continue Sandstrom’s work to the point where Orlov could file patents and become father of a new industry.’
‘So Avvakum’s just a means to an end,’ Kilkenny concluded.
‘That’s our take on it. She’s just a specialist hired to do a job. I think she wrote to you because Orlov didn’t tell her where her project research came from. Orlov surely had the files he stole from Sandstrom sanitized, but something must have been missed that allowed Avvakum to identify Sandstrom and you. I think she’s the one person on Orlov’s team that we can trust.’
‘Why?’ Kilkenny asked.
‘She took the job not knowing what kind of man she was working for. According to my contact, I think she now knows. Avvakum appears to be under house arrest in that building where she works. Orlov paid her a visit yesterday and left a big ugly man to keep her company. My guy over there tried to send her an E-mail; it was returned as undeliverable.’
‘Makes sense,’ Nolan said. ‘She’s become a security risk, so they cut her off.’
Grin shook his head. ‘If Avvakum’s a threat, why didn’t Orlov just have her killed?’
‘Simple, Grin,’ Nolan answered. ‘Orlov still needs her. She’s a skill player. If he kills her, he’s got downtime until he can get a replacement. Better to put Avvakum on a short leash and keep her working until he finds a new physicist for the job.’
‘Then she gets whacked,’ Mosley added.
A small window appeared in the corner of Nolan’s monitor, and a voice announced the arrival of a new E-mail message. Nolan got up and walked over to his desk. He didn’t recognize the sender’s E-mail address, which was a string of random letters and numbers. The subject of the message read:
Trade two for one, Kilkenny?