Plague War (14 page)

The night was frigid, especially on this third-†oor balcony. Ulinov was exposed to the breeze, but the main doors of the hotel were locked and he hadn’t even considered trying to get into the courtyard. Hardly anyone was allowed outside after curfew. Leadville had hunkered down until sunrise, with only a few windows glowing here and there.

“No signal,” whispered the shadow beside him, holding a cell phone in the dim light. “Still no signal.”

Ulinov nodded curtly, wondering at the white slash of teeth on Gustavo’s face. Some of that grin was fear, he thought, and yet there were also equal amounts of de‚ance and self-con‚dence. Gus had tricked the Americans before. He swore he could do it again.

Gustavo Proano was a thin man and no more than average height, but Ulinov was still learning to remember their size difference. In zero gravity, it hadn’t been so obvious, and Gustavo had been his communications of‚cer during their long exile in space, left aboard the ISS to appease the Europeans.

Gus had a big mouth and busy hands. Ulinov had warned him twice to stay quiet and yet Gus still commented on the obvious as he tapped at his phone. His free hand rustled and scratched at the back of his wool cap. Beneath it, he had a bald spot that he liked to rub as he worked.

Ulinov was calmer, even melancholy, motionless except for his thumb on his pistol. The sidearm had not been hard to come by in this war zone. Four days ago in the mess hall, the pistol had found its way from the gun belt of a weary Marine into the folds of Ulinov’s sweater.

“This damn thing,” Gustavo muttered, holding himself awkwardly to re†ect what light there was onto his keypad.

Acquiring a phone and a PDA was easier. The Americans seemed to have saved many, many millions more of their fun little gadgets than they had of their own people. Nearly everyone was connected to their grid by cell phone, iPhone, Bluetooth, or Blackberry. Again, Ulinov had stolen a phone, while

Gustavo traded outright for several more.

“Shall we stop?” Ulinov asked, almost smiling himself.

“I can get in,” Gus said.

“If they shut down the entire network—”

“Let me try another phone.”

Ulinov shrugged and nodded and made certain his smile did not show. It seemed to him that the Americans had missed a good bet with Gus. If they’d trusted the man, he could have been a signi‚cant asset. If nothing else, Gus was a familiar voice to survivors everywhere, but the Americans had more radiomen than radios and Gus was a foreign national.

After con‚rming access and control codes to the space station, they’d left Gus unemployed. It was a problem he’d anticipated. The Americans had wanted all of Ruth’s ‚les and the entire backlog of Ulinov’s surveillance work. They wanted the use of the cameras and other instruments. Even empty, the ISS made a valuable satellite—and Gus, like Ulinov, had reprogrammed his computers long before they disembarked, knowing it might be useful to leave open a few back doors.

Gus had deliberately created a bug that only he could correct, blaming the problem on the avalanche of data relayed through the ISS in the past year, not all of which was clean. “Fixing” the bug gave him two days to send code back and forth from the station after the Americans got frustrated. Two days to study. Two days to rig his patches.

Ulinov had always planned to act alone in his mission, using the ISS databases to store, send, and receive messages. The Americans agreed that he could still access the station to provide photos and weather reports for the Russian defenses, which gave him every excuse to transmit complex ‚les—but the Americans watched too closely. They recorded every keystroke. They made sure they had experts on hand to “help” him, combat engineers and meteorologists who were unquestionably CIA computer techs, no matter how competently they discussed demolition efforts or high pressure fronts.

Ulinov’s only transmissions to the secure database had been a weather report and then a duplicate of the same report, a clear signal to his countrymen that nothing else was safe.

His next message, however, was a short burst of text via wireless modem, reestablishing contact. Gustavo had three ways to pirate into the local system, delay-and-relay programs that attached packets of data to larger transmissions. Whenever the Americans uploaded commands to the ISS, which was constantly, Ulinov’s notes leapt into the sky as well.

Gustavo had shared this trick with Ulinov for reasons that Ulinov never fully trusted. For friendship, yes. And to keep busy. And yet he knew that Gus had been cooperating with American intelligence almost from the start of their twelve months in orbit... surely on orders from his own people...

What game were the Italians playing?

The situation in the Alps was not much better than in the Middle East. There were multiple battlefronts, a patchwork mess of alliances and counter-invasions, with Italy holding on to a few small shards of land against the French, Germans, Brits, Irish, Dutch, Poles, Greeks, Czechs, Belgians, Swedes, and Slavs. Ulinov had to trust Gustavo’s resentment. The whole world wanted to bring the Americans down a few notches to better their own chances of begging or buying help, but Ulinov was also aware that Gus could win favor by exposing him. The Italian spy agency, SISMI, had surely tried to copy all of Ulinov’s messages. If they’d succeeded, by now they must have broken the simple encoding.

The relay through Gus was never more than a short-lived chance to update and con‚rm contingency plans. Gustavo would betray him. Perhaps it had already happened. The Russian leadership must know this, and yet twice in the past twenty-four hours they’d alluded to their envoys to the Chinese. They’d also instructed Ulinov to demand the nano weapon, making certain the Americans learned of his deceit.

He was a tool that had been sacri‚ced, but to what purpose? Why did they want him in trouble and how did they want him to act? To try to minimize the problem? Make it worse?

“I’m in,” Gus said, beckoning for him to move closer.

Ulinov reluctantly took his hand from the pistol inside his heavy jacket. His bare ‚ngers tensed in the breeze as he accepted Gustavo’s phone. He had never felt so vulnerable.

“Thank you,” he said.

Gus nodded and grinned. He stepped away to give Ulinov a margin of privacy and Ulinov forced himself not to stare after his comrade. His enemy. It wasn’t that he expected men to crash into the room behind them, shouting, like a drama on American TV. Not yet. How did they say it in their Old West? They would hand him enough rope to hang himself.

Ulinov stabbed his ‚nger expertly over the tiny face of the cell phone, holding it and his PDA in his left hand, using his right to enter his own codes now that Gus had keyed him into the Trojan database across town. He needed the PDA to remember his passwords and to encode and decode his messages, even though the cipher was very basic, substituting numbers for the Cyrillic alphabet. Again, it was only meant to keep the Americans guessing for a few days.

He used shorthand and abbreviations, perhaps three words in a row without most of the vowels, then one fully written out. He ran the numbers together so that 25 might as easily be a 2 and a 5. Also, the number substitution began arbitrarily, 1 for
R
—but only for messages transmitted on Sunday. The number representation shifted forward and back depending on the day of the week.

Ulinov was good with data, but he couldn’t instantly make sense of a hundred numerals squeezed together. Composing his reports wasn’t any easier, encoding a hundred letters after deleting vowels at random. He needed to organize his messages ahead of time, then key them into the phone as he read off of his PDA. Likewise, when he received text he transcribed it into the PDA as rapidly as possible and only later worked through it.

Even before he’d returned from talking with Kendricks, the Americans had disturbed his few belongings in the thin private area that was his living space, the back part of a suite that had been walled off with plywood. It wasn’t much, blankets and a mattress on the †oor, two spare shirts, underwear. And they hadn’t searched too hard. They’d moved things just enough to show they’d been there—to see what he would do, if he would panic—but Ulinov had stashed his contraband elsewhere in the old hotel. He’d found a small slot behind the exposed studs of the wall in the second-†oor stairwell where the paneling had been removed for ‚rewood.

The gun was not to kill Gustavo, nor himself nor anyone else. It was not for ‚ghting at all. There was no chance for Ulinov to escape Leadville, nor any reason. He intended to use the weapon to destroy his PDA and the pitiful few ‚les he’d created and received, no matter that the Americans might already hold copies of most. Let them think there were more. Let them worry there were real secrets.

I can make everything worse,
he thought, glancing out at the night again and the muted white points of the stars. Much closer, he saw the red beacons of a comm/radar plane returning from patrol.

Ulinov believed the Russian leadership was using the link through the Italians to create confusion and fear. He believed it was a backhanded test of strength. They were pushing in order to be pushed back. They wanted to be slapped down. They wanted the Americans to feel con‚dent, and that meant . . .

It meant a double cross.

The idea was so dangerous that he tried to move it out of his head completely, but the signs were all there. He’d never expected to go home again anyway. Not
home
, that was impossible, but he’d always understood he had little chance of rejoining his people no matter where they ended up. His duty was here. That was acceptable as long as he succeeded in doing his part.

Were they selling their loyalty to the Chinese after all? Something different?

Nikola Ulinov turned his eyes to the pockets of light in this cold, small, overcrowded city, his pulse beating with guilt and conviction at the same time. First he tried to access new messages, but either there were none or the Americans had intercepted them. Then he began his text with his authentic sign-on,
Charlie
, perhaps someone’s idea of a joke. It had been given to him months ago by the Russian foreign intelligence agency, SVR. Broken down into English, his message would be ominous, and his leadership would realize he was playing along.
No bargain yet on ntech but U.S. pressed hard by rebels. Suggest you download all ISS ‚les. Make offer to
—

He interrupted himself, breaking the connection as if the cellular system dropped him or his phone had failed. Let the Americans make a mountain out of that. Ulinov could sell them enough bullshit in the meantime to keep them occupied.

Something awful was going to happen.

Helicopters thudded in the darkness and Ruth crawled into the †at tire of an Army truck before she was awake, scraping her cheek and forehead against the lug nuts.

“Here,” Cam said. “Over here.”

She moved to his voice, shuf†ing in the dirt. They’d left the highway to make camp, settling down against an old troop carrier that had gone no more than four hundred yards before bogging down. The vehicle’s nose canted into the earth, which had been mud at the time. Now the con†icting angles of the hillside and the truck added to Ruth’s disorientation. She bumped into Cam. He held Newcombe’s ri†e in both hands but leaned toward her for an instant, like the beginnings of a hug. She pushed against him, needing more physical contact.

The helicopters were far away and seemed to going farther. Ruth glanced wildly into the night, not believing it. Then a man’s silhouette blocked out the stars and she †inched. The scattered light was mirrored in the lens of Newcombe’s goggles. “They’re headed south,” he said.

The noise echoed and slapped against the foothills, fading. But there was a new sound, the hammer of guns. It was barely audible, a
tat tat tat tat
against the larger drumbeat.
Tat tat tat
. Assault ri†es.

“Oh shit,” Ruth said with sudden clarity. She and Cam jumped to their feet beside Newcombe, staring into the dark. There was nothing to see. The ‚ghting was too distant. They probably wouldn’t have heard the clash at all in a living world. The sound carried for unknown miles.

“They got Young and Brayton,” Newcombe said.

Cam shook his head. “You can’t be sure.”

“There’s no one else down here.”

It changed everything. In her mind, Ruth had already quit, and she didn’t know how anyone could blame her. She’d done her best. She’d decided to tell Newcombe in the morning.
Let’s call your people. I can’t hike any more.
Now the safety net was gone. She wasn’t able to hold on to the hope that Captain Young and Todd Brayton would spread the vaccine themselves. Leadville had the nanotech, and Ruth knew exactly what the president’s council intended to do with it.

One world. One people.

What would humanity look like if they succeeded? Most of the survivors in the United States were white. The immigrant and minority populations across North America had lived on the coasts and in the inner cities. Los Angeles. New York. Toronto. Detroit. It was the heartlands that had survived—and to a certain mind-set, this purity would increase the appeal of claiming the entire Earth. Leadville would share the vaccine only if they needed to expand their labor force, permitting foreign populations to come down from the mountains as farmers and slaves.

What if one of her friends had gotten away? Captain Young might have covered Todd as he ran from the choppers...No. Ruth was through fooling herself. The responsibility was hers. It had always been hers. She glanced at the stars again, ‚ghting tears. Then she clenched her ‚st and held on to the grinding ache inside her cast.

It’ll be light soon,
she thought.

She walked to her sleeping bag and began to pack up.

* * * *

It took them seven days to cover eighty-‚ve miles, the last twenty-‚ve away from any roads. Newcombe was afraid that Leadville had dropped motion detectors or even a few soldiers on every peak in the area, equipping small squads with radios and rations and then ordering them to wait. Cam pointed out how many islands there were throughout the nearest ‚fty square miles, and Leadville had no way of knowing they’d gone north out of Sacramento, not south. There would be countless acres of safe ground on the plateaus of Yosemite. Much closer to their real position, around Lake Tahoe, were dozens of high mountains and ridgelines. Even if Leadville only targeted the major highways that branched up toward elevation, they would need to commit hundreds of troops. Still, the chance existed, so Ruth, Cam, and Newcombe had bypassed the largest islands within reach and hiked toward a smaller line of bumps instead.