Chapter 40: Riding to Moscow
“That’s the worst idea we’ve ever had.”
Rudy, Vitaly, Saran, and Galina Filipovna were sitting alone in Margarita’s Kitchen. The sun was down. The tall windows reflected the mostly empty dining hall. Everyone else had gone home. Big Maksim walked past the patio outside every few minutes; he put in extra hours for Saran now and then, patrolling the compound on weekends. He told Rudy he was saving up for a big investment. Maksim was the only other person they saw around the admin building this April Saturday evening, and he stayed outside, so no one else heard the worst idea ever.
Vitaly nodded in agreement. “I know. We’ve stayed away from Black Crane and Moscow. We’re really poking the bears.”
“Rudy,” Saran said, “I’ll go to Moscow first. I’ll get all the blueprints and utility schematics. I’ll find you a safe way in and out. I’ll be right there in Moscow with you. But I don’t have your technical skills. And Vitaly, he’d do it, but he has to run the coding and the transfer here. If we’re going to hijack Black Crane’s AI, we have to have someone inside, doing the physical hack.”
Such was the conclusion of two months of analysis and simulations by the SR1. The “dark gravity”, as Galya had called it in Vitaly’s apartment Christmas night, was coming from market interventions driven by a second AI operating from a bank of black IP addresses in an office building in Moscow. The IPs and the building belonged to separate shell corporations, both of which Saran traced to Black Crane, now one of the top three mafia syndicates in Russia. Black Crane was using AI to cheat global stock markets, not just investing as the Ring Group did but damaging certain corporations with disruptive buying and selling. The gang’s AI was guiding other forms of economic sabotage and pre-emptive strikes designed to harm rivals and benefit subsidiaries.
The plan was not to stop Black Crane from waging its economic warfare. The Ring Group wasn’t going to play Interpol. The plan was to hijack Black Crane’s AI. SR1 would suck all of the Black Crane AI’s data and recommendations into its own model, erasing the dark gravity. The hijack would not only restore SR1’s predictive capability but enhance it. Two heads are better than one, but linking the two AIs would give the Ring Group eight, sixteen times more power to project market trajectories and future human and institutional behaviors. Black Crane’s AI would continue operate as usual; its users would see nothing different. But the analysis they would receive would come from a mere subroutine, a shadow of the exponentially more powerful SR1 hybrid that Vitaly would control from the Ring.
“And it’s just once,” Vitaly said. “You go in, tap the primary line, monitor the power and data flow, then get out. Once SR1 injects the code, the hybrid system takes off, does the work we want, maintains an open line, and hides it all from Black Crane, no matter what security they put up.”
“We don’t need Black Crane’s AI to operate the Ring,” Galya spoke up. “But their AI could help us keep the Ring. We’d have a clearer view of the Kremlin, power to model and manipulate budgets and agency staffing, maybe even orders from the Kremlin itself. We could make Intel-Tech forget about us and spend its time chasing other ghosts. Our bogus report may hold Putin off for weeks; this new hybrid system could hold them off for years.”
Rudy rotated an empty tea cup in his hand. “How do we know Black Crane won’t notice our system and try to hijack it? How do we know they haven’t already?”
Vitaly shook his head. “We know what to look for. It’s not happening here. But Black Crane could notice us and come after us. That’s one more reason to act now, before they get the idea, too, before their system can see a threat like this coming.”
Rudy set the cup upside down next to a basket of paper napkins. “Moscow. Moscow?” He looked around the table. Saran, Vitaly, and Galya each met his eyes with uneasy looks that told him he at least was not alone in his fears.
Then Rudy thought of getting there. “Can I take the bike?”
“We’d rather you did,” Saran replied. “I’ll drive out this week, gather the documents and tools we need. You’ll follow when I’m ready, no plane ticket, no train ticket, off everyone’s radar.”
“Oh, well, breaking into a mafia stronghold, hacking their network, risking my life, that’s nuts. But cross-country bike ride, I’m totally in.”
They shared strained smiles, but no one laughed.
“It’s still a bad idea,” Rudy said. He took a deep breath and let it out in a gust. “But it’s not the first time. I’ll do it.”
* * *
Saran left the next day, driving with her husband Volodya to Moscow in her black Land Rover. They drove hard in shifts on little sleep and lots of dark Mongol tea and got to Moscow late Tuesday evening, after midnight Irkutsk time. But Rudy stayed up until he got her text saying they’d arrived.
Mapping the site took three weeks, in part because Saran couldn’t just go to the site and start mapping. She had to watch for watchers, Black Crane guards, cameras, anyone who might pick her out of the crowd as a recurring visitor paying too much attention to their building and the doors and windows and alleys and cars parked around it. Same at the municipal zoning and utilities offices: she go right in Wednesday morning and ask for plans for that one building and the power and water lines running to it. She had to request multiple plans, multiple buildings, multiple sites around the city. She had to make her interest in Black Crane’s building look incidental.
But she got what Rudy needed. Each night she sent Rudy a new report by their secure channels. She sent scans of the office blueprints with photos and infrared scans from the street and neighboring buildings. Rudy used the power, data, and ventilation schematics to identify the center of the fourth floor as the computing center he’d have to access. And Saran found the utility corridors that would get him from the street to the heart of Black Crane’s building without being seen.
Rudy pulled some tools from the Ring shop and gave Saran a list of special gear to acquire in Moscow. On May 20, a Sunday, he tore his bike apart and put it back together, checking and cleaning and retightening every bolt and cable and connection. He rode around Goryachiy Klyuch slowly, listening, feeling closely for any hiccup or shudder that 5,280 kilometers could turn into a wreck. But it still felt like the best machine he’d ever used, maybe the best machine ever made in Russia.
And now he was going to ride that machine to the heart of the beast.
* * *
Rudy woke easily at 4 a.m., the strange, bright early dawn of late spring. He showered, dressed, and ate. He checked his email—Saran, Vitaly, Galya, each wishing him a safe trip—before locking his laptop and stowing it in his backpack with his tools. Clothes, rain gear, tent, and camp mess kit were already in the saddlebags.
And one more package: five small notebooks. Ken’s dnevniki, his journals, in their usual watertight sandwich box. Rudy usually took them for reading and company. On this ride, for the first time in 20 years, Rudy would see the road from Vladimir to Moscow, the Kremlin, St. Basil’s, MGU, things he’d seen with Ken. Maybe he could compare notes. Maybe he could see things Ken had seen and see how they had changed. Maybe after the incursion, there’d be time to swing down to the old monastery south of Moscow. Maybe on the way back, he could take time to see Suzdal, and if Suzdal, why not…?
Jacket and helmet on, he shouldered his backpack and saddlebags, picked up his tightly rolled sleeping bag, and stepped out onto the porch of his dacha. The bike sat under cover on the wooden planks, chained to one of the porch posts. He walked the bike off the porch, an easy bounce down the few-centimeter step to the gravel path in front. He secured his gear and kicked his bike to life at 5 a.m., just in time to catch the first sunlight over his shoulder, over the hills beyond the Ring compound. For half a minute, he was the loudest thing in the village. Then, he was gone, down the highway, headed west, alone.
By 8 a.m., he was nearly half way to Tulun, a sixth of the way to Krasnoyarsk, and a thirtieth of the way to Moscow. If he rode nonstop, if his tank held infinite gas and his stomach a camel hump’s worth of water and fat or maybe just Saran’s black tea, he could ride into Moscow in time for supper Wednesday. Such were the numbers that floated through his mind as he rode across the vast steppe of Siberia.
Other numbers interwove:
—This ride to Moscow was 16 times the length of his first ride, from Suzdal to Galich.
—Current kilometrage on the bike was 186,000. Rudy had to add the one, as the odometer showed only five digits. He’d rolled it over on the way to Astrakhan, ten years ago. 160,000 of those kilometers, 100,000 miles, belonged to him.
—When he got back to Irkutsk, he’d have increased the distance he’d covered on the bike by 6%.
—In 20 years, he’d put the equivalent of 500 trips to Galich on the motorcycle. But he had never been back to Galich, or to Suzdal, or to Moscow. He’d seen so much else of Russia, but he’d never seen again the first parts of Russia he’d seen, the places he visited with Ken and Brenda and Marty, the place where he met Ksenia, the places she took him.
—His gear weighed maybe a quarter of what Ksenia and her pack weighed.
He carried with him the impression of Ksenia on the back of the bike, hanging on, leaning into turns with him. He imagined her into this ride as he had at various points in every other long ride into terra incognita, pointing out landmarks and deer and oddities. Ksenia’s abrupt departure in Astrakhan should have made him abandon her imagined company, but he couldn’t shake her. Their few minutes together—a minute on the street, not more than 15 at the restaurant—had mingled new images of her face, impressed but not creased by experience, darkened just a touch but still radiant and ready until those last moments before she walked away for reasons he couldn’t bring himself to firm into any hypothesis. He accepted Anna Nikolayevna and Pavel Pavlovich’s assurance, and that acceptance made room for everything before that last minute in Astrakhan to surge back undimmed: the bookstore window, the morning in Galich, the midnight at the lake, the Saturday on the highway, the cooked potatoes (another midnight!) at the hill campfire, the decision and Fanta in the memorial park, and concrete rubble and timbers all day, four days. He rode to these wide open spaces to be alone, but often, and especially now as he rode to Moscow, being alone just made more room for Ksenia, for his memories of her. After twenty years of a life he would not trade or regret, taking Ksenia home to Galich still felt like the best thing he’d ever done. As beautiful as every mile of this ride and every ride was, as much as he loved the steppes and forests and river valleys and the freedom he felt riding alone amidst them, he still had to color those miles with the persistent impression of Ksenia riding with him, as if to pin all these rides into one, into a single Saturday stretching forever that he was sharing with her.
* * *
The weather mostly held, just spitting showers east of Novosibirsk, then a long rain west of Omsk, though it was trucks kicking up great clouds of gritty roadsplash that soaked him more than the falling moisture. He camped each night. He found one organized campground west of Talitsa—that night, Thursday night, was the only night he spent within sight of anyone else. The other evenings he found gravel roads that took him away from the highway, sometimes into forest, sometimes to small groves and shelterbelts, but always someplace his bike and tent would be out of sight. He’d cook kasha and sausage over a small fire, eat an apple, spend an hour or so on the computer (fully charged after a day plugged into the charger he’d added to the bike) reviewing specs from the Moscow target and email updates from Saran and Vitaly and the rest of the team (the latter he retrieved by satellite; not until Saturday night would he sleep anywhere with terrestrial cellular signal).
Then Rudy would usually walk a bit in the lingering twilight. The night after Omsk, the sky stayed cloudy, and after riding in that day’s rain, Rudy just wanted to sleep, but every other night the skies were mostly clear, and he could track the moon running against the spin of the Earth and swelling from new to robust crescent. Walkable light lingered past his sack-out time and greeted him when he opened his eyes each morning. The bugs weren’t bad yet; half the nights he didn’t bother to put up his tent, just rolled out his mat and sleeping bag and slept under the stars that fought their way through the northern month-before solstice glow that made Russians a little healthy-mad every year.
In those not-full darks, Rudy was keenly aware of his smallness and exposure. Vitaly, Galina Filipovna, almost everyone who kept him safe was increasing hundreds, thousands of miles away. In Moscow he would have only Saran and Volodya. Here he was alone again, with Russia in every direction (well, Kazakhstan quite near one night). Every night, he felt himself back in the Suzdal bashnya, seeing the vastness calling him into minusculity.
Was that it? Did he want to be small, tiny, nothing? Or did he find somethingness in the embrace of the expanse, the boundless, the inexhaustible roads and trails, the great mash of entropy and life where there was always something to fix?
He moved freely in this vast, shabby empire. He hated to see Putin imposing greater control over it all. Everywhere he rode, Rudy got the strange sense that Russia was built on the exact opposite of control, on a presumption that the land and space and time and fate where all too vast to subdue to human design and machine and make regular. The roads, the farms, the houses, almost all of the artifacts of technological civilization—none of it seemed as crisp and forceful and striving toward endurance as back in the States. Russia, Siberia, the expanse was too big to pave and mechanize and futurize. The Russians seemed to strike a cease-fire with entropy: they’d fight decay just hard enough to get what they needed, but they would not presume that their strivings could reverse the inevitable decline. The more room they left for things to fall apart, the less vigorously the Second Law of Thermodynamics worked to tear them apart.
It was paradoxical, then, that rulers like Putin and Stalin and Peter Velikii and Ivan Grozny would rise out of such an entropic cease-fire and exert themselves so mightily to establish empire. How could such strivers arise in such a milieu? How could anyone think they could exert lasting control over this infinitude? But maybe those few grasping outliers arose specifically because of the cease-fire. Maybe their compatriots, in their acceptance of a world constantly at work against them and their restraint in fighting against that erosion lest they hasten it, viewed the iron hands as just another expression of that entropy, an inevitable destructive force that would do less destruction if not opposed.
Rudy could not reconcile himself so fatalistically to such entropic dictatorship. After all, here he was, riding to Moscow to risk his life on the worst plan he’d ever heard on the faint chance that he might help his friends hold back the latest iron hand. There had to be a way to keep the wolves from exploiting the entropic cease-fire. If the anarchy of the 1990s was unsustainable—roads needed fixing, cities needed policing, hospitals needed electricity and water—there had to be some other path than the march back to authoritarianism, some middle ground that would keep Russia livable yet free.
Rudy smiled grimly at the notion that he was trying to conceive of a social order that would make it easier for good guys—and he, Vitaly, Saran, Galya, and the rest of the Ring Group were still the good guys, right?—to live by crime. Was that the best they could do in Russia, carving out niches for science and scholarship by out-pirating the pirates, manipulating the markets, and dodging and bribing the state?
Maybe the problem was not the state, but himself. Maybe all of his work with the Ring Group only hastened their demise, their capture by the iron hand and entropy. Maybe he had taken his own path from freedom to control. Maybe he now was working on too great of a Tower of Babel, something bigger than he could repair and reinforce against forces that would inevitably tear it down. Maybe he needed to go back to the woods, back deeper into the wilds, chop wood, read and pour his meager energies into nothing greater than keeping one motorcycle in perfect running order.
But Rudy had cast his lot. He’d gotten on the bike. He was riding to Moscow. He’d heard his friends’ worst idea and said, I can make that work. Regardless of the odds and the risk, he would stick with them and do all he could to keep their machine running. He would keep working for Galina Filipovna’s great vision… but he wondered, as he weaved along the Volga, as he closed in on Moscow, how much of that vision remained attainable in Putin’s Russia.