Morgan Stone: The Russian Factor

“Oh, I get it, and just where did this mysterious person post from?” Asked Gavin.

“Nizhny Novgorod. It’s an ancient city east of Moscow.”

“Spare me the tourist info, sis. Whose IP address is it?”

“It’s owned by a big engineering and construction firm. The kind that gets all the government contracts at the highest bid. As in, a syndicate business interest, as far as I know.”

“Uh huh, and what syndicate might that be?”

“Menchikovskaya.”

“Shit!” Blurted Gavin. “This has something to do with that craziness in Kazakhstan. You just won’t let that go, will you? Well, count me out, I won’t have anything to do with it.” He grabbed his motion sensing sprinkler and started for the stairs.

“Kazakhstan?” Sandy asked, thinking he was gone. “What’s this got to do with Kazakhstan?”

“Don’t get involved in anything to do with Kazakhstan, Sandy.” Gavin bellowed from the bottom of the stairs. “Believe me, you’ll regret it!” The slamming outer door punctuated his warning.

Sandy and I sat for a moment in stunned silence. “Well, I’m afraid it has rather caught my interest,” she said. “If you don’t mind my using machine translation and posting through a proxy server run by my cousin, Ben, who lives in Germany, I’d like to try to get this woman talking.”

“Hey, I had no idea you had a cousin with access to a proxy server! Germany? Could be useful, if he doesn’t mind. I wonder what else you’re hiding. Just kidding — sort of. Really, that would be great, Sandy, but this is way off your job description. Before you decide, there’s something you should know about Kazakhstan.”

I told her about the Menchikovskaya crime syndicate and how I had been investigating their isotope export business. How something had gone wrong that got Jack killed. I didn’t fill in the details and I worried about getting the energetic, probably naive, young woman involved in a business even I couldn’t disentangle from. An occupation, a sideline — hell, there’s no way to describe intelligence contracting . For me it was something that just happened, starting with threads, then strings, then ropes, until I was hopelessly entangled.

Sandy was surprisingly intrigued by my interest in the syndicates. More than likely it was what I did to keep track of them. She knew I was reluctant to let her in too deep and standing up, promised me that all she’d do was make a connection with Anna Ku Klux Klan and learn more about the Orange Revolution.

The building was quiet. Street lights were on. Smokers huddled under an awning beside the bar’s entrance across the street. Nervously, they sucked in every last milligram of highly taxed nicotine before bolting for the door and their non-smoker friends inside. I wandered into my office, dropped into my chair and instinctively keyed my workstation to life. The lack of anything new reminded me that we didn’t exactly have an overabundance of clients.

“Don’t forget the coffee maker, Jess.” Sandy called up the stairs on her way out.

Whether it was too much coffee or the day’s events stirring up my gnawing obsession with the Kazakhstan incident, I didn’t feel like leaving. Instead, I pulled a cheaply framed photo from my bottom drawer and, using my sleeve to wipe the dust from the glass, gazed at Jack with his favorite plane, the Storch, beaming back at me in stark black and white.

At the office, a few days later, Gavin and I were arguing about implementing an impenetrable network without bankrupting ourselves or the client, when Sandy called out, “That’s it! I’ve got her on email.”

“What? Who’s on email?” I shouted back.

“Anna Ku Klux Klan. We’ve been chatting back and forth on the democracy forum. She just sent me her email address.”

Gavin threw up his hands. “Have I suddenly gone invisible? Maybe I’ll just let you two work this out. We’ll deal with the paying clients whenever you’re ready.” He stormed out.

“Sorry, is this a bad time?” Sandy’s face appeared in my office door.

“Not anymore.” I said, mostly for Gavin’s benefit. “Come in. Close the door.”

Sandy filled me in on how, over a couple of weeks, a back-and-forth dialogue had taken shape between her and the enigmatic Anna Ku Klux Klan.

A glance at the site statistics showed me that about half of Anna’s visits had been from the Menchikovskaya syndicate’s IP address. Always the same network, supposedly in whatever bricks and mortar structure housed the monster engineering and construction firm. With Sandy peering over my shoulder, I dug a little deeper in the stats. The rest of Anna’s logins to the democracy site came from a public Internet service provider in Nizhny Novgorod. The pattern made sense for an employee, two distinct yet reoccurring Internet access points — home and office.

Outside local office hours, Anna’s logins to the democracy site originated from a public Internet service provider. I looked the provider up. Their tacky website touted several dial-up service plans and prepaid cards for blocks of access to the Internet via telephone modem.

“Well Sandy, unless we can get the telephone records there’s no way to know where these logins came from,” I mused.

“They still use dialup?”

“From home they do. This is Russia. They’re lucky to have electricity, let alone broadband anywhere outside of Moscow.”

“Anyway, do phone records matter? You’ve got one location.” Sandy said.

“My hunch, although I can’t confirm it, is that the other logins all came from the same phone number. If it’s a land-line, it would give me a hard address, probably a home address. Also, someone using the same number wouldn’t be someone trying to hide their tracks.”

“She’s given me her email address. Does that sound like someone trying to hide their tracks?” asked Sandy.

“Not as much ‘hiding their tracks’ as maybe trying to come across as someone they’re not. Then again, she could just be incredibly naive, considering where she’s logging in from. My guess is she’s an employee there, if she’s legit, that is.”

“Well, I’ve only been chatting with her to generate those IP address records,” Sandy pointed at my screen, “but she seems to be quite enjoying our chats. I wanted to get your okay on this, because if you want to know more about this woman, I think I have a good chance of continuing our connection.”

I decided to let her give it a try — dig herself in deeper. We set up an email address on a Russian-based webmail provider. I worried about security. “They’re going to be tracking, just like us. You know that, right?”

“Of course, I’m not a kid.” Sandy countered. “I’ll use Ben’s proxy server.”

“Choose a completely disposable name. No personal info. Nothing…”

“Not a kid, Jess.”

“No photos. Text only.” I tried to think of something else.

Sandy stopped me. “Yes, mom. I’ll be good.”

“I’m serious. These are not nice people.”

She laughed and leaving my office, Sandy vowed to keep me updated. It did nothing to allay a nagging feeling she was taking on her new project with a little too much reckless abandon, something I myself was more than guilty of.

Gavin and I had always been fairly close. Our parents, however, weren’t and finally divorced after years of discord. Each eventually re-married, but Dad just kept on drinking himself to ruin, wiping out what was once a brilliant career in medical research. Predictably, his next marriage failed and he finally drank himself to death a few years ago. Lawyers and his ex-wife pretty much picked the estate clean, but left just enough to afford Gavin and I each a house of our own. I got myself a 1912 craftsman bungalow in Vancouver. Gavin chose a nondescript ’60’s affair in Coquitlam with a huge yard and good exposure for his ever evolving adventure in urban agriculture. His place also housed a workshop I liked to refer to as the Computer Museum .