Last updated on 2024-12-12
Chapter 20: Worth Robbing Banks For?
The next night, Rudy was standing in his apartment, at his bookshelf, his copy of collected stories of Zoshchenko in his hand, when Vitaly knocked and announced himself. Rudy unlocked the door and drifted back to the bookshelf. Vitaly followed and placed a hand on the yellow-greenish binding of the book Rudy held. Rudy surrendered the book to him. Vitaly flipped through the pages, pausing at the pencil-sketched peasants and proles. “Simple humor in hardest times. Laughing when we cannot cry.”
Rudy limped to the sink, filled his teapot, and set it on the gas burner. “Any word?”
“Yesterday was their word. Broad daylight. They need say no more. Galina Filipovna has sent an extra payment. They’ll leave us alone for a couple weeks.”
Rudy waited until the kettle’s first pip to speak again. The noise made his head hurt worse. He turned down the gas and reached for two white cups on the shelf. “We can’t complain. We can’t sue. We can’t fight.”
“This occurs to you now, and not three days ago?”
Rudy had already set one cup on the counter. With difficulty, Rudy resisted the urge to smash the second cup. He set the cup down next to its mate on the counter and dropped into each cup a round, silvery infuser filled with black tea. “And if you had seen him pawing Galina Filipovna?”
“I’d be limping around with broken ribs.”
Rudy poured hot water, set the kettle down, and carried the cups to the table. He and Vitaly sat facing each other, eyes on their cups, steeping their tea.
Rudy watched the water darken. “I could leave.”
Vitaly’s hand slowed. “You could. You could have left any time. But you haven’t. For two years. Why not?”
The bell tower might have asked the same question. Rudy still felt that pull, felt he could slip again, disappear like dust carried away by wind and rain, go and never stop. Even in Irkutsk, he hadn’t quite stopped. He ventured out every weekend and on weeklong excursions whenever work permitted, on motorbike spring summer and fall, on bus or train in the long winter, never exhausting the roads and trails leading from Irkutsk to lake, mountain, forest, grassland, river, desert. He took in all he could, every solitudinous trail and peak and valley he could find, every moment and hour and afternoon with not another human in sight. He thrilled to know there was always more, another trail to take next time, and next time…
…but for two years, two years and then some, longer than he’d stayed at any previous job, he’d kept coming back to Galya’s Kremlin. He’d wear himself out traveling around Lake Baikal and farther out in the Irkutsk oblast and into Buryatia and Tyva, content that the attention he had to pay to the road and its curves, to rocks and potholes, and to the bearings he kept in the wilderness with sun, moon, and compass crowded out claims other memories and aches tried to make. But then he’d return, without second thought, to Irkutsk. His work at the Institute provided as much inexhaustible exploration as the geographical wonders that consumed his off-time. He was learning, fixing, making the Institute better. He found no end of work to occupy his hands and his mind… and all toward Galya’s Kremlin, this Institute itself already a bastion of learning and optimism and Russia’s future, and toward Galya’s dream, the Ring…
“You haven’t left. Why not?”
Rudy couldn’t tell if the question repeated from Vitaly’s lips or in his own mind. He could tell he hadn’t answered right away. He answered now. “I enjoy the work. It matters. If I get in the way of the work, I should leave.”
“Reasonable,” Vitaly said. “Arguably noble. But maybe now the work includes knocking the Dmitris and their bosses on their asses.”
“No, that’s not our work. We can’t sustain that. I can’t beat men up every day.” After percolating all day in his aching head, the idea of running away was gaining appeal… largely because he couldn’t think of any other remedy. “If I leave—”
“If you leave, what? Thugs like the Dmitris soon forget who is gone. They concern themselves only with who and what are here. They will always want their share, and their share will always grow.”
“But it’s not their share! How can they do this to us? How can there be nothing for us to do? How can this whole god-damned country leave us at the will of such criminals?”
Vitaly flinched, and Rudy regretted his words. Vitaly saw that regret and shook his head. “You see the problem. We all do. We don’t believe in ourselves. We let the iron hand rule. We let it punish us, as we deserve.”
“And the Dmitris? They deserve what they take?”
“No. They deserve what we give them.”
Tea in hand, Vitaly stepped to the window and scanned the street. Then he pulled the small curtain closed and said in a low voice, “I want to show you something.” Vitaly took a sip, then set his cup on the kitchen table and retrieved his briefcase from the bench by the door. He fished out his computer, tapped in two commands, and set the opened laptop on the table, facing Rudy. The monochrome screen was filled with code, neatly formatted.
Vitaly spoke slowly, softly, as Rudy scrolled through the code. “A technologist friend in Petersburg freelances for financial institutions. In the course of his work, he began developing this code. He asked me to help. Can you see what it does?”
Contrary to good practice, the code on the screen had no comments, no annotations identifying modules or functions. It was complex code. Vitaly’s programming skills had evolved from hobby to integral part of his job. Rudy could install updates and maintain the network, but his focus was hardware; Vitaly was writing bigger and bigger programs from scratch. But Vitaly was teaching Rudy enough to be useful and dangerous. After a minute, Rudy could make sense of the primary routine. “Your friend robs banks.”
“Well, not yet. For now, he settles for showing the banks how they may get robbed. That’s his part. Keep reading for my part.”
Rudy kept reading. The code was lengthy. “You frame others for robbing banks?”
Vitaly gave him an innocent look. “We don’t rob banks. Dmitris rob banks. They rob the bigger fish, the bigger fish turn and eat them, and we quietly reclaim and reinvest what is not eaten, what was ours at the start.”
Rudy looked at the code again, then at Vitaly. “You’re saying—”
“I’m saying this code can track the bank accounts of every local gang, including the Dmitris. We combine what we know from the street with an analysis of their cash flow and reserves. We move ten, twenty million from, say, Leonov’s gang to the Dmitris, let Leonov discover the evidence that the Dmitris hacked their accounts, and Leonov puts the Dmitris out of business. We raid the Dmitris’ accounts before Leonov can recover his funds.”
“And the Dmitris, Leonov, whoever—they don’t realize we’re behind it?”
“No one in Irkutsk, no one in Russia realizes. My friend says Petersburg gangs are moving into this field, but our local boys—Neanderthals, no sense of information technology. They will catch up, but we have a window—months, maybe a year, longer if we study and innovate—in which we have a local monopoly on technological talent and resources. Our network security is the best in the region. If we press our advantage, we can throw the Dmitris and the other local gangs off balance. We give ourselves breathing room to reinvest, expand our technology department, and develop even better network defenses.”
“Robbing banks, starting gang wars—sounds more like offense.”
“Offense, defense—I won’t quibble about terminology. But this is how we defend the Institute. This is how we defend the professors and students who come to think and learn and invent. This is how we defend Galya. This is how we get what we deserve and the Dmitris get what they deserve.”
Rudy bobbed the steel mesh ball in his cup. “We know the Dmitris lack the technological expertise to pull off such a heist; won’t Leonov know, too? Won’t Leonov look around for a thief with such expertise, and won’t he come looking here?”
Vitaly nodded over his mostly full cup. Neither of them had drunk much yet. “We face that risk. But Leonov, or whoever we target, will have to think relatively hard to reach the circumstantial evidence of our talent through the concrete evidence of our utter vulnerability and their money sitting in the Dmitris’ account. We don’t look the part. The Dmitris do.”
Rudy looked at his curtained window, then leaned over his tea, as far as his aching ribs would allow. Vitaly met him, his face just inches away. Rudy asked, “Do we dare play this game?”
“If you don’t want to play, why did you make the first move?”
Vitaly’s eyes, so close, were not angry, but they were demanding. Why? Why?
“Because Russia can be better than this. Because this school can make Russia better.”
Vitaly snorted. “We shall rob banks for such epic goals?”
Rudy bowed his head over his tea. He cradled the cup snugly with both hands, soaking all the warmth in his palms. “Because Galina Filipovna should never submit to lesser men.”
Vitaly laid a hand on Rudy’s arm, then raised his cup. “Now you’re talking. To Galya.”
Rudy lifted his own cup. “To Galya,” he whispered. They clinked cups and drained their tea.
* * *
For a week after he and Vitaly decided to become bank robbers, Rudy played ghost. He slept on his cot in the FIZIKA basement. He barely set foot upstairs, let alone outside the Physics building or off campus, and when he did, he took the steam tunnels. He went back to his apartment twice, by car, once with Vitaly, once with Kolya, who’d finished his dissertation in the spring and now did research under Galya. Rudy left his bike locked in the garage. He usually jogged two or three mornings a week before work, but he left his running shoes on the door mat at his apartment. His ribs ached less, but they weren’t going to take that kind of jostling. The less he traveled the better. And he didn’t want to be seen on the street.
Rudy kept odd hours, following Vitaly’s directions, installing and testing Vitaly’s software and countermeasures, shadowing financial transactions, identifying the accounts they would target, drain, and spoof. He downloaded information about financial networks and protocols, doing what he could to check whether Vitaly’s St. Petersburg friend had accounted for every possible trap and alarm.
The odd hours and quarters, the work, the food (Vitaly brought bread, cheese, soup, cucumbers, pryaniki, cartons of Mongolian noodles to the basement, but Rudy ate sporadically)—everything seemed to compound into a headache that overtook the lingering ache in his ribs as his main distraction. He’d push through the pain as long as he could stay focused, but too much was at stake. He couldn’t delay, but he also couldn’t get sloppy. Aspirin, nap, maybe eat, code, test, review… repeat every four, five, six hours.
Galina Filipovna caught Rudy at the end of one of those cycles. His head throbbed from squinting through query after query; he was hitting colons instead of semicolons; it was time to take another aspirin, lie down gingerly, and sleep off the sharpest pain. But down came Galina, with Vitaly in tow. “Stop what you’re doing.”
“Sure,” Rudy groaned, yawning and cracking his neck but failing to relieve the deeper tension. “I need a rest.”
“I mean stop-stop.”
Rudy felt the blood drain from his face. He thought that should have made his head feel better, but the dread that replaced it was worse. He glanced over her shoulder to Vitaly, who looked cowed. The jig was definitely up.
“Galina Filipovna, our plan—”
“Don’t Galina-Filipovna me.” It was her strictest snap-to-attention tone. Rudy cringed as surely as an undergrad caught misaligning equipment. “Are you determined to kill yourself?”
That was not among the questions he expected.
“Never mind whether your plan with Vitaly will work and for how long. You may not survive putting it together to see who comes to kill you first. Vitaly was right—you look terrible. You haven’t recovered from your first beating. You need to stop and rest so you’re ready for the second.”
Rudy rubbed his eyes hard. He imagined pressing them back into his brain, where they might dissolve like painkillers and bring him some relief swaddled in darkness. Galya was probably right about his physical condition. But… “The Dmitris are coming Wednesday. Our deadline is Monday. We’re almost done. I can keep going. I just need to rest a bit, every few hours.”
Galya laid her hand on his forehead, turned his face to the dim bulb above, and pried open each eye for a look. “You need to rest, period. Vitaly, find Kolya, have him take Rudy home. I will send Dr. Armanyak in the morning. Rudy, you will not work or get out of your bed until the doctor and I say you can.”
Rudy barely had the strength to rise from his chair, let alone argue. But he had to ask. “Vitaly, if I leave, can you—”
“Vitaly cannot.” Galya still cut him off with the same determination, but she lowered her voice, as if recognizing the impact of each sharp sound on Rudy’s aching head. “Not alone. But we will finish.”
Rudy stared, frightened, at Galya, then at Vitaly. His friend shrugged. “Save your breath,” Vitaly said. “She’s already dismissed plausible deniability. She demanded all the details. She says she can do your work.”
“It’s not rocket science,” Galya said. “And I can do rocket science. Your code is an engineering problem. I am an engineer. I hire you to do this work because I have more important problems to solve. But this problem is now most important. The Dmitris threaten you. They threaten the Institute. Before, their demands were bearable. Now their demands grow unsustainable. This is my problem. You two have proposed a solution. I will help Vitaly carry out the first application. You will go home and recover… because we will need you all the more for the second application, and the third, and everything after.”
Rudy could not sort out if he was more relieved that Galya was letting Vitaly continue or more alarmed that she not only knew about but was taking a principal role in their criminal plot. He let his head fall into his hands and waited while Vitaly went to fetch Kolya.
Galya waited with him, sitting on the spare stool next to the workbench. She scrolled through the computer screen, occasionally tapping a couple keys, already correcting and refining his code. She spoke quietly, slowly, between long silent pauses as lines flicked by her eyes. “I wasn’t the first to build a kremlin here. We build and rebuild. Wood. Brick. Concrete. Books. Now data.”
Tap tap. Tap. Then she turned to Rudy. “I should have thanked you last week. I’m ashamed that I didn’t. I am sorry. Thank you.”
Before Rudy could respond, the basement door squeaked open and Vitaly clopped down the steps. “I found Kolya. The buses aren’t running; he’ll bring a car to the back door. Galina Filipovna, do you want Kolya to bring you anything back?”
The smartest woman in Irkutsk stared doggedly into the computer screen. “No. Just get Rudy to his door and into bed. Good night.”
Rudy staggered with Vitaly up the steps and out to the back courtyard. Rudy was surprised to find the campus lights on, the sky dark. Kolya pulled up in one of the campus service cars, a Korean model, and took Rudy home.