Chapter 45: Breakout
Rudy guided his motorcycle through the heart of Moscow. The sun had been fighting through the clouds since noon. Whether or not the clouds would return for another rainy night, Rudy wanted to be out in the open. He didn’t need subway anonymity; he needed the familiar growl of his own engine, and the option to get away from Black Crane, as fast as possible, down any street, straight out of the city. He wanted to travel under his own power.
He couldn’t say the ride relaxed him. He couldn’t relax, not while he headed toward his first face-to-face confrontation with gangsters since his scuffles with the Dmitris. And Black Crane’s bosses weren’t Irkutsk small fry. These were Moscow bosses, criminals with billions of rubles’ worth of assets, the technological resources to build an artificial intelligence, and lots of guns, which they used regularly on their rivals. Preparing to meet Black Crane required something very different from relaxing. It required getting into a mindset of total focus, seriousness, intensity, readiness for anything.
The ride through Moscow traffic helped Rudy find that mindset. He listened to the bike, listened all around. He changed lanes and turned corners with absolute confidence, with total awareness of the speed and direction of every vehicle in his circle of action, every fish truck, every police car, every phone-engrossed pedestrian. He admitted no daydreams, admired no sights, took in only the moving threats and the signs that would get him to Black Crane’s office and would guide him back to Ismailovsky… assuming he got out of the meeting alive.
He’d get out alive, Saran told him, if he projected the same confidence he showed when he swung the cable deal in Kyzyl. “Look around, listen, find out what they need, show them you’re the man who can deliver.”
“I just calculated,” Rudy said to her at the apartment door. “You sealed the deal. Sure you don’t want to come with?”
Saran reached up, grabbed the back of his neck, and pulled his forehead down to touch hers. “Absolutely I want to come with,” she whispered fiercely. “I want to send you back to Irkutsk and go in your place. But Galya wants you to talk to Black Crane. So focus up, come back alive.”
Volodya came to the entryway from the living room. He had his pistol in his hand. Rudy started to pull back, but Saran kissed him on both cheeks. “Come back alive,” she repeated.
Volodya held up his gun, hand over the barrel, grip pointed at Rudy. “Yours if you want it,” Saran’s husband said, barely moving his lips.
Rudy tried to imagine how he’d carry the gun, how he’d draw, how many men he’d have to shoot to get out of a negotiation turned to firefight. He didn’t get past a vision of the motorcycle hitting a pothole and the gun bouncing out of his belt and cartwheeling across the pavement. He shook his head. “I’ll be fine. You keep her safe.”
Volodya stared at Rudy for a second, then holstered his gun and put his arm around Saran. “Always do. Be careful.”
Look around, listen, be confident, be careful…
Rudy parked on a side street, walked around the back of the Oktyabrskaya Station, and headed down the block to the front entrance of Black Crane’s headquarters. He wore a new suit from a store Saran pointed out, black, fitted, expensive, only the second suit he’d worn in Russia, and shiny black shoes with fresh scuffs from the kick start and shift.
The walk from the side street to the front of the shiny glass office building unnerved him in a way that his secret climb through the guts of the building had not. When he had climbed the utility shaft, he had known exactly the tasks he would perform. As he climbed the black and silver steps, he knew only one specific action: press the call button on the black box by the door, wait for an answer, and speak the password Galina had received from Black Crane. He had no idea what would happen next, or what he would do.
Find out what they need, show them we can deliver.
The door clicked and buzzed. “Enter,” a voice said over the speaker. Rudy went in two sets of heavy glass doors. In the lobby—more dark marble on the floor and walls—a woman flanked by two men approached. The woman, with straight black hair slick and tight to her scalp and a suit almost the same cut as Rudy’s stopped three meters away. The two men stepped past her, big men, one crew-cutted, one bald, and crowded Rudy. Rudy thought he recognized the bald man as Mr. Rabbit, the man who’d peeked up through the ceiling tiles and almost caught him in the crawlspace. Mr. Rabbit and Crew Cut patted Rudy down and fished his belongings out of his pockets—keys, wallet, Blackberry, notepad, pen. Mr. Rabbit handed the wallet and phone to the woman. She weighed the phone briefly, then flicked through the ruble notes and cards and forged ID in the wallet, evidently more interested in seeing if he’d hidden a blade or a poison pouch than in reading his name. She nodded to her men, handed back the items, and turned toward an elevator. Mr. Rabbit and Crew Cut gave Rudy back his belongings and made clear without touching him that he should follow. Rudy re-equipped his pockets and followed the trio into the elevator. The four stood in a diamond, she front and center, facing the door, Rudy in back, the two guards to the sides facing him, ready, he assumed, to grab and wishbone him if he blinked wrong. Rudy stared past the woman’s short black pony tail and kept his hands frozen at his sides. He resisted the urge to scratch his nose or tug his shirt cuffs.
Soft ding—out at the sixth floor, two floors above where he’d spent Wednesday afternoon snooping. The corridor was dark stained wood, almost black, with recessed lighting strips along the ceiling. They marched straight to double doors, smoked glass, floor to ceiling. The woman touched a shiny, featureless black pad left of the door. A tiny green light blinked above her finger and clear-lacquered nail. The men pulled the doors open, and the woman directed Rudy in with her eyes. Mr. Rabbit and Crew Cut stayed in the hall.
More dark polished wood and glass, and a ring of six chairs, silver frames, black leather cushions. No table. Four men occupied the seats left and right. The chair nearest and the chair opposite were empty. The woman who had brought Rudy in crossed the center of the room, between the seated men, to the window that spanned the wall, where another woman stood. The men were all looking at him. The woman at the window was looking outside at the turbulent sky made grayer by tinted glass. She could see the city; no one outside could see her. The men were dour, anxious faces and hands poking from dark suits merging with the dark décor. Rudy saw a shoulder holster under one man’s jacket; he suspected they all were armed. Against the glass, the two women were silhouettes. Rudy’s escort reported quietly; the woman who stood waiting, her suit narrower, fitted at her bare ankles, above thin-strapped black heels, listened, nodded, then gave quiet directions—Rudy caught, “Keep trying.” The subordinate stepped away and beelined through the center of the room again, straight past Rudy without a look, out the door. The woman in charge remained at the window. She rested one hand on the glass and leaned on her long fingers. Rudy got the sense that something bigger than this meeting was happening.
But then the woman in charge turned, and Rudy recognized Ksenia.
Her dark auburn hair hung to her shoulders, not long enough for the braid she wore Sunday morning in Galich and tied with his red bandana. Her blue eyes shone through the dim lighting of the room, lighter than he remembered, older, icier. But she was Ksenia (our Ksenia, he heard Yulia echo in memory from last weekend) facing him across the board room of Black Crane.
Later Rudy would compare that recognition to other moments when his world turned upside down. Watching the television at the gas station on the north edge of Suzdal, he’d tumbled into shock and despair that scrambled his sense of time and reason and will. Those minutes disappeared, and he never could clearly picture the time that had passed until instinct pushed him back onto the road. Seeing Ksenia beside him outside the bookstore in Astrakhan had worked a lighter blinding magic, those minutes (more than one? could it have been? did they have that much time?) lost in each other’s arms were circumscribed by the rigid schedule of his supplier meeting and her unstated business and the hours he attentively counted to dinner at the Berlin.
No fog or fancy clouded this instant. Ksenia locked her eyes on Rudy’s and spoke before he could react. “Thank you for coming. We are Black Crane. We don’t have much time. Sit.”
Four steps, two seconds, and she was in her chair, giving Rudy an intense, burning look that said, Don’t say it.
Even without her silent warning, Rudy wasn’t sure he could say it, or anything else. He followed her lead and took the last chair.
“We understand that you have been developing an artificial intelligence system,” Ksenia said, “and we understand that your system somehow failed, catastrophically, last week. Have you been able to explain the failure?”
Nonplusment upon nonplusment—hows and whys piled together. He managed the simple truth—”No”—but then had to ask: “How do you know about our AI?”
The men glanced at Ksenia. Unfazed, she answered. “We developed our own artificial intelligence. We recognized similar patterns in global data streams, and our AI was able to trace them to Ring Group operations. Our system recommended contacting yours… but it was erased, or stolen, before we could attempt contact.” The men remained silent but looked uneasy.
Rudy was also uneasy; Ksenia was saying Black Crane had the Ring Group’s most secret operation under surveillance. How many times had Black Crane’s operatives crawled around in the ceilings at the Ring?
But Rudy couldn’t divert; Ksenia went on. “Whatever happened to your AI appears to have happened to ours as well, at the same time. These simultaneous failures raise suspicions, so we want to assure you that we had nothing to do with your failure. Black Crane did not attack the Ring Group. We have never sought to engage your group in any way, before this meeting. Do you understand?”
Rudy understood. His knowing Ksenia was the most deadly secret in the room. If his thoughts of Ksenia and Galich and Astrakhan and my god, how are you here? burst out, if these men knew their boss had any connection with the Ring Group representative they’d allowed into their office, these men would draw their guns and kill them both.
To keep that secret, Ksenia was being stunningly open with Black Crane’s internal intelligence. He wanted to reciprocate, to build trust. But he couldn’t spill everything. He thought through his discussions with Vitaly, the evidence Vitaly’s team had pieced together since Wednesday, and weighed his words carefully. “Yes. Our analysis so far agrees with your statement. We see no sign that Black Crane or any other organization hacked our system. Our strongest theory so far is that the failure originated in the system itself.”
“Did you receive a message when the failure happened? We are not for you; we are not to be?”
“Yes.”
“So did we. If the failure was internal, who sent that message?”
Rudy’s mind whirled through everything he knew: the mechanics of the Ring Group’s unstated incursion, the data Vitaly and Alenka had shared with him from the Ring supercomputer logs, his interactions with the SR1…
If we find another system… would we destroy it? …Fight or flee….
Two systems, Black Crane’s and the Ring’s, engaging, disappearing…Rudy’s mind leapt. “Could it be the systems? The AIs, yours and ours, working together?”
The men looked aghast; Ksenia remained intent, holding Rudy in place with her eyes, focusing him on her questions. “You think the systems did this? Connected? Spoke to us? Without prompts?”
“I do not know the details of your system,” Rudy said. “But you say your system recognized ours. Ours recognized yours, and made the same recommendation, to make contact. Maybe—” Rudy tried not to stumble on his omission “—the systems found a way. Our logs show enormous processing, without prompts from our side, faster than any human users could have input commands. Maybe the systems prompted each other and produced their own results, their own response to both of our groups… and their own deletion.”
“And subsequent failures? Have you been able to restore your system?”
Rudy had volunteered one bit of information; now Ksenia was asking for more. His goals were to win trust and get out alive; aside from keeping quiet about Wednesday’s physical incursion, the best tactic seemed to be cautious openness. Rudy could not think of any harm that would come from sharing this information: “No. Every back-up seems corrupted. When the data interactions reach a certain volume… it’s as if some ghost shuts off the machine.”
“No more outputs? No more unexplained messages?”
“Besides repeats of that initial message, we are not for you…none.”
Ksenia looked down at her hands. Rudy followed her eyes to her bare, loosely interlaced fingers. Her nails were short and polished clear, like her lieutenant’s.
“Is the Ring Group willing to share data with our AI team, collaborate to determine what went wrong with our AIs and how to restore them?”
“If you are formally proposing a joint project, I will propose that to our executive committee. I will advocate for it. Our IT team, and Ring Group’s leadership, would welcome collaboration.”
Rudy meant every word. Immediately he thought about the merits of seeing the server room from inside. Did they really house all of their AI processors in that room, or in this building? How did they handle cooling in this smaller space? The blueprints didn’t show—
But distraction upon distraction—he had to focus on finding out what Black Crane was after. “Will our collaboration include work against our ‘common enemy’?”
Rudy hoped his question didn’t sound like a demand. The men shifted in their chairs. Ksenia remained cool, motionless. “Yes,” she said, “and on that front, we must move quickly. The state is impatient. According to our intelligence—” at these words, the smallest and most visibly nervous of the four men, the thin man immediately to Ksenia’s right, leaned forward and twitched a hand, but Ksenia immediately waved him back “—the state wants control of AI research. It is aware of our efforts and yours in that area. If the state cannot acquire and control such assets, the state wants to eliminate them.”
To assuage the thin man’s concerns that Ksenia was giving away too much, Rudy replied, “That fits our intelligence. Intel-Tech communicated its interest in our AI this winter. We’ve been stalling them. The state lacks the skills to cause the failures we’ve experienced, but we worry they will think we are just hiding our systems and use that as a pretext for some unwelcome action.”
Ksenia spoke now to the thin man and her other colleagues. “We labor under similar concerns. Black Crane and Ring Group have good reason to work together.”
Rudy heard a faint buzz from Ksenia’s jacket. She checked her phone, read a message, and started tapping out a lengthy response. Still working on her phone, she got up to look out the window again. The men waited silently.
“Gentlemen,” she finally said, “I want to speak to our guest privately. Go to Valentina on the third floor. She has directions for our response to… the evolving situation.”
The men rose to leave. Rudy stood as well and met their eyes. Each of them glared back with varying mixes of distrust, fear, and preoccupation. Ksenia remained at the window, back to them all. The doors clicked shut.
“Rudy,” she said sharply, clenching her fists. She turned, crossed the room, and stopped just a meter away. She inhaled deeply. “Rudy,” she repeated, making sure her voice carried no farther than his ears. “I didn’t know the Ring Group would send you.”
“Didn’t know…?” Didn’t know? What does she know? How? She was multiple mysteries, and Rudy couldn’t work out which to investigate first.
Ksenia pre-empted his questions. “Thank you for holding yourself together. I know how hard it is. No one can know… about us, not my people, not yours, not yet. I’m asking a lot after… everything…but…trust me?”
A million concerns weighed on Ksenia’s expression. She was planning, bracing for something awful. But through that, he recognized a familiar glimmer in her eyes—Ksenia in the bookstore, on first sight; Ksenia when they said goodbye in Galich; Ksenia as they poled the raft to the island, each time they got back on the bike at the confluence forest and Sudislavl and Kostroma and chai-babushka… Ksenia when she said yes to his proposal in the memorial park.
Rudy nodded. “What is happening? Can I help?”
“I’m not sure anyone can. Things are going to fall apart, quickly.”
Ksenia briefed him on Black Crane’s intelligence gathered from operatives across Russia—in the government, in Irkutsk, everywhere. Putin and the Kremlin were launching a purge to consolidate power and liquidate the opposition, no longer just the political opposition, but the money opposition and the criminal opposition. Rub out the leaders of the top organizations, put heads on pikes to cow the second-tier gangs into submission, confiscate assets, and fold criminal operations into federal revenue streams and foreign counterintelligence.
“I want your people to know Black Crane did not steal your AI. We are not attacking you. The Ring Group is the smartest organization in Russia. If we work together, we might escape what’s coming, or salvage… something. Will you tell your leaders that? Right now?”
Rudy took out his phone. “And warn them?”
“They may already know. My women in the Kremlin went silent this afternoon. We have seen freezes applied to several accounts, in our organization and yours. It’s starting. But yes, tell them everything I have told you.”
Rudy steadied his nerves and pressed his speed dial to Galina Filipovna. She answered after one ring. “Rudy! You are alive!”
He knew he had no time to dwell on the suggestion that Galina had expected a worse outcome. “I am at Black Crane, with their leader. She tells me we are all in danger, and she wants to work with us.”
Rudy sketched what Ksenia had told him. Ksenia herself stood by, monitoring messages on her phone.
“She is right,” Galina said. “We are seeing alarming activity across the financial web. We’ve seen some assets blocked; we’re moving others. Tell her we can—”
The call dropped. The office lights went out. Ksenia tapped her own phone. “No signal,” she said. “Power outage?”
“Only a citywide outage would knock out all the towers in range,” Rudy said striding to the window. There was still an hour or so of daylight left, but the clouds had darkened, and rain was near. Lights and TVs glowed from apartments on nearby blocks. A few street lamps had awakened. Traffic signals blinked dutifully below. “No, this is…local interference—”
Black vans and military trucks appeared from three directions on the streets below and converged in front of the building. The floor shook from two concussive blasts below them. There were several bursts of gunfire, muted through the thick glass. Pedestrians below scattered.
“FSB!” Ksenia snarled. She started for the door. “Come with me.”
Rudy had no escape plan. He’d assumed he’d either come and go through the front door or Black Crane would kill him. For the moment, running whichever way Ksenia, the boss, told him to run was his best bet, his only bet. At her side, he’d only be the target of the invaders, not the defenders.
They left the office and dashed down the dim hallway, following the emergency lights along the floor. They passed the silent elevators and went to a stairwell. “Down, basement. Valentina will have a car for us. I can get you out of the building.”
“And past the army line outside?”
Before Ksenia could answer, as they passed the fifth floor, they heard gunshots far below, then boots thudding up the stairs. “Already?” Ksenia seethed. She stopped, weighing options.
Then Rudy recalled the building schematics. “Server room,” he whispered. “Next floor, right?”
“Yes? Why?”
The boots were maybe three floors down. “Hurry!” Rudy pulled her along down one more flight and burst through the fourth-floor door. Stairs at the corner of the building, server room in the center—Rudy oriented himself and moved quickly, silently, toward the server room, making sure Ksenia was still behind him.
In the server room, a single emergency light shone at the center of the ceiling. The processors were all humming and blinking on their back-up power source. One man was seated at a terminal; he did not get up when Rudy and Ksenia hurried in and slammed and locked the door. The technician glanced away from his three screens only briefly, then continued to type in commands. “Ksenia,” he said, his voice tight and low. “I am wiping the databanks as directed.”
Rudy identified the data trunk at the center of the room. He hopped up on the technician’s workstation, trying not to kick any of his monitors. Rudy popped out a ceiling tile and peered up into the crawlspace. Not enough of the emergency light came from below to allow him to make out the far walls.
“Ksenia! Flashlight?”
“Pasha?” she asked. The man at the computer opened a drawer and grabbed a big black flashlight, heavy and solid as a police baton. The technician kept typing with his left hand while he passed her the light with his right. Ksenia handed the light to Rudy, and he scanned the crawlspace. The metal track was right beside him, with all the marks he’d left in the dust, undisturbed since Wednesday. Despite his effort to obscure his tracks, the marks he’d left still concentrated along a trial to the utility shaft hatch.
Rudy extended a hand to Ksenia. “Come on. Utility shaft. The steel grate will hold us; the tiles and grid won’t.”
Ksenia did not hesitate. She climbed onto the table—Igor leaned back and around, keeping his eyes on his lines of code—and pulled herself up through the ceiling with a boost from Rudy. Rudy handed her the flashlight and jumped up after her, pushing past to obscure his Wednesday tracks from her view.
Ksenia wasn’t looking at the escape; she was looking back down into the server room. “Pasha! Come with us!”
“No!” came Pasha’s voice from below. “I will finish the protocol. We will all be safer.”
“You’re a good man.”
“Go!”
Rudy crawled ahead, shuffling through the dust, and pull the hatch open. The hatch monitor showed no lights—no power, no connection to the server room’s back-up supply, nothing to tip the FSB troops storming the building.
He shone the light back toward Ksenia. She was putting the ceiling tile back in place. She crawled his way. “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked.
He flicked the light to the open hatch. “Down,” he said. “Long climb.”
Rudy smelled smoke, heard shouting in the hallway below—”FSB! We will shoot! Come out, hands up!”
Ksenia didn’t stop. Rudy let her crawl out first and get a good grip on the ladder. Then he squeezed out beside her, pulling the hatch shut and securing the lever. He shone the flashlight down past Ksenia to look at the rungs. The beam disappeared past her smooth-soled heels into nothingness. The new shoes he’d bought weren’t much tougher, but they at least had a little rubber grip. “Hold tight—I’ll go first.” He tucked the flashlight under his belt and squeezed carefully past her. “In case you slip.” He pushed his jacket back and tilted the flashlight so the beam shone up but away from Ksenia’s eyes, onto the shaft wall to reflect and illuminate the rungs. “O.K., let’s go.”
Ksenia’s shoes tapped the metal rungs just above Rudy’s head. She stepped tentatively at first, then got the sense of the spacing and kept a regular pace. No smoke or sound filtered into the shaft. He hoped that meant the troops in the chaotic building could not hear their steps behind the wall. But neither Rudy nor Ksenia dared speak.
Rudy skipped the service hatch to the building basement—whatever back doors it led to would be guarded—and went deeper to the mechanical room. The power was out down there, too. The keypad was dead. The lock had cycled open. Rudy waited for Ksenia to join him on level ground, then swung the door open. The hinges whined. The mechanical room was dark and silent. The only light was the dim red beacon over the exit to the collector and a smaller red light on the keypad. The power remained on outside the building, through the collector. That hatch remained locked, and Rudy didn’t have the swipe card from his break-in kit.
Ksenia pushed past him and held her phone up to the collector lock. She entered numbers, a latch clicked, and the lock light switched to green. “Come on,” she said, “outside the perimeter.”
The collector was well-lit. Rudy shut off the flashlight but still held it like a club. They ran together through the clean white collector, following the same path Rudy had taken four days ago—metro access point, service door, both opened by codes Ksenia transmitted through her Blackberry, escalator, but then at ground level deviated to a service door…
…and they were outside, on a side street. Clouds covered the sky, and it was starting to rain. A firetruck blocked the street to the south.
Before he could orient himself, Ksenia tugged his arm. “How did you know that way out?” Ksenia asked.
Rudy looked at Ksenia and at the smooth glass of the back of her building a couple blocks away. The firetruck’s blue strobes flashed across the windows. “We both have a lot to explain. But at the moment—”
Two trucks roared by the end of the block, sirens blaring. Rudy and Ksenia both looked that direction.
“Is that—?” Ksenia pointed. A few cars away stood Rudy’s bike. Rudy’s mental map spun into place. He ran to where he had parked. Ksenia kept up, close to his side. Rudy handed her his helmet. Two well-dressed moskvichi on a motorcycle in the rain weren’t exactly inconspicuous, but the visor would hide Ksenia’s face. They would be just two more elites, living their own perfume commercial.
Rudy got on and started the motorcycle. Ksenia hopped on behind him, hips tight to his, arms around his chest, and Rudy rode into the rainy Moscow evening with Black Crane’s chief on the back of his bike.