Morgan Stone: The Russian Factor

“Seventeen minutes and there’s even a post. Yeah, this could be it.”

“So, do I get the rest of the day off?” Sandy teased.

In my glorified storage locker of an office, I punched my workstation to life and logged in. The usual light smattering of email graced my screen. Nothing important, except to the senders. Contracts had become noticeably scarce since the disastrous events in Kazakhstan the year before. It was may fault. I just couldn’t muster interest in anything that wouldn’t lead me to Jack’s killers. I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t move on, and it was taking a toll on the business income. How much longer we could hold out, stress-testing the occasional network, was anyone’s guess.

Yaletown hadn’t been hip when Gavin and I set up an office in the corner of a long abandoned warehouse. Back then, it was a cheap place tech start-ups, like our two-person Internet security firm, went to get off campus. We didn’t know or care that someday the exposed brick and dangerous wiring would become all the rage.

Gavin and I are not just business partners. He’s my kid brother which makes me his big sister. But at well over six feet and astonishingly fit, my little brother is technically bigger than me. We had both garnered Masters Degrees in computer science in spite of the various distractions and detours we took along the way. As a kid, I’d liked puzzles, riddles, mazes and deceptions. I still do. In university, that passion led me to specialize in combinatorial algorithms and encryption. It sounds complex but is really all about creating complexity by combining simple equations. It gets fun when it’s used for hiding stuff in secret codes and puzzles. In a grown-up world it’s all about security and secrecy.

My brother’s formative years were spent taking things apart. Sometimes he would even put them back together; unless he had learned all he wanted, or decided the thing he dismantled was better off in pieces, like the lawnmower, for instance. His proclivity for down and dirty hands-on mucking with stuff led Gavin into a field of Computer Science pretentiously called, Very-Large-Scale-Integration. To everyone but those in that particular field, it’s pretty much hardware design .

We’d been raised in a wealthy and prestigious family with a brilliantly successful but violently alcoholic and womanizing oncologist father. Mother was an enabling, social climbing ex-nurse — whom I consider self-absorbed and aloof, but of whom Gavin has always felt protective. We survived by looking out for each other as best we could, then and even now. As business partners, despite some interpersonal tension and our very different outlooks on life — or perhaps because of them, we actually work effectively together. Our skills have proven complementary, and there’s the fact that neither one of us has fared well as employees . Thus, we started our little business and had somehow managed to pay most of the bills.

I pulled up the data that triggered Sandy’s 3:00 am text and skimming, found what I’d been waiting months for. An Internet address I traced back to the Menchikovskaya syndicate had suddenly become active. The user had logged on to a particular political chat site from a Menchikovskaya address then spent seventeen minutes putting up a post. It had me wondering if it was a lure or just someone within the syndicate-run business naive enough to visit or post on websites sure to be watched by western interests. Also suspicious was the fact that the Menchikovskaya network people hadn’t blocked this particular website.

Feelings like suspicion and hope are not only useless but dangerous in my line of work; a direct route to screw-ups. Best I could do was drag myself away for coffee before I did something stupid, like bring up the Menchikovskaya IP address on my own computer. At the very least, pouring and consuming a cup of coffee provides time to think things through. Besides, a hit of caffeine sure couldn’t hurt after the previous night’s interrupted sleep.

In the gap between my office and Gavin’s workshop-office, the coffee maker stood, plugged in, the crackling brown remains of last week’s coffee baked onto the pot. “Anybody think of unplugging this thing before heading off?”

“You were the last one out.” Sandy replied from the thrift-store desk Gavin and I had crammed into the hall for her.

I noticed her iconic paper cup from the coffee shop downstairs. “I guess that explains the Starbucks brew.”

“It does. Besides, coffee’s not my job.” Sandy mumbled without looking up from her computer.

“How much longer is your work term anyway?” I asked, seriously wondering what we could assign our work-study student to do next.

“Six weeks.” She focused on her monitor, hit a few keys. “I know machine translation is unreliable, but this really is crazy. Have a look. It seems to be something about oranges.”

That’s when it hit me. She was reading the post from the Russian political forum, having translated it into a rough facsimile of English using a web-based translation service. “Hey, don’t you have some kind of real work to do?”

“No, nothing. I finished those test results for Gavin last Friday. What’s with this Russian thing, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I’m not sure if I mind. I’ll think about it and let you know after I’ve had coffee. If Gavin shows up, tell him I’m downstairs.”

“See you. I guess I’ll try to clean the coffee pot.”

“Not your job. Google the Ukrainian Orange Revolution and see if you’re still interested in that Russian thing.” I said on my way out.

I sipped my way through a black venti dark roast and a front-to-back scan of the Vancouver Sun without really seeing it. That message, too weird for analysis, had me hooked. Someone in Russia was encouraging Ukrainians to fight the Russian corruption of their democracy movement. Referring to the Ukrainians as freedom fighters and Orange Revolutionaries, using the Russian word for the color orange, not the citrus fruit, made the poster sound pretty informed. I decided to risk the remote possibility it could be a syndicate lure and take it further. If it turned up something of interest to western organizations monitoring the criminal syndicates in the former USSR, it might result in a contract for me. Of course, my primary interest was far more focused. The message had come from an address owned by the syndicate that killed Jack. A morsel of intelligence I wouldn’t likely divulge to a potential employer.

Summitting the stairs, I noticed the office coffee maker sparkling clean and gurgling its way to a fresh pot. Sandy was gone. On her desk, she’d left my cell phone and a note saying I’d forgotten it — yet again — and that she’d be at the library. Gavin’s workshop-office was, as usual, unoccupied — apart from all the clutter.

Alone on a Monday, I had to focus on the paying clients. This was no mean feat, given that nebulous syndicate contact. Writing up network security reports just couldn’t get my attention the way getting closer to Jack’s killers could.

Streetlights were coming on by the time I heard Gavin arrive downstairs. I wandered from my office to intercept him and refill my coffee. He clumped up the stairs with an arm load of cable, electronic components for his security testing gizmos, and a newfangled motion-sensing wildlife-repelling sprinkler. Some designer had given it a goofy looking bird face. The packaging featured a startled Canada goose taking a point-blank blast from the thing. “Hey, where’s Sandy?” He asked.

“Probably gone home for the day.” I poured the dregs of the coffee into my cup and yanked the plug on the coffee maker.