Jerome Preisler: Net Force--Attack Protocol

He got out of the car, inserted the nozzle, and stood there stretching his back in the gray afternoon cold. His drive from New York had thus far taken four hours, almost a full hour longer than it would have if he was using the toll roads. But he wanted to avoid the plazas and their E-ZPass and license-plate readers.

Grigor was confident of his documentation and tags and knew they would hold up under close scrutiny, even in a traffic stop. The police could run a hundred different identity checks and find nothing suspicious. In their databases, he was Stephen Gelfland. But he believed in being careful. He did not intend to give anyone a way to track his movements across four states.

Stephen Gelfland.

Thirty-two, a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, and graduate of New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx. Single, no children. Two months earlier, he’d been hired as a boarding agent trainee at CloudCable’s corporate headquarters in Weston, Massachusetts, starting salary $75,000 a year. One essential condition of employment had been that he agreed to relocate to New Hampshire within thirty days of his hiring. Another was that he was able to spend a minimum of a hundred twenty days at sea each year, each stint lasting three to four months...

In an abandoned barn in the Jersey Pine Barrens, the Gelfland who had interviewed for the position in early November had been reduced to biological sludge in forty gallons of clear, concentrated sodium hydroxide solution. The night before Thanksgiving, when he’d returned from grocery shopping, Grigor had waited in the darkness outside his home, slipped up behind him, and shot him twice in the back of his skull, point-blank, with his Walther .22. He’d then undressed the body, wrapped it in a tarp without leaving any traces of blood or fingerprints, and brought it to the barn in the trunk of a rental car.

Grigor had used a hacksaw to prepare his corpse for the acid bath. The head, torso, limbs, hands, and feet went into the plastic drum separately. It was an easier fit than an intact body and allowed for faster liquefaction. As an added measure to prevent identification of the remains, Grigor severed all ten fingertips at the DIP joints, burning them along with Gelfland’s clothes, using gasoline and a match, at the back of the barn. He had placed the charred fingertips in the drum with the rest of the body parts, and stuffed what was left of the clothing in a compostable plastic bag. Later, he buried it in the deep woods, far from any campgrounds.

By now the original Gelfland was long gone. Within twelve to eighteen hours of his drum immersion, the hair and soft tissues—flesh, cartilage, and muscle—would have dissolved into a thin, oily fluid the color of weak coffee. Bones took longer and didn’t altogether disintegrate but reduced to a white puttylike residue of slaked or calciferous lime. It was a gentle and complete biocremation that left no trace of DNA or RNA.

Grigor hung the nozzle back on the pump and slid into the car. He was thinking his work was nothing if not tidy and efficient...which suddenly brought him back to his meeting with Sergei Cosa the night he had done the job. Anyone else would have lived to regret the suggestion, however veiled, that he was less than scrupulous with the Waleks and the garage attendant. It had bordered on insult.

Grigor had almost walked out of his Chelsea den that night. Told him to find someone else for the present assignment.

It was not that he needed or wanted praise. He knew his worth, and so did the almighty Cosa. Whether or not Cosa believed his own myth—the Deathless One, indeed—that shaggy bear was only flesh and blood. But in the end, his attitude was of no consequence. Grigor’s true loyalty was to the SVR. They had literally made him who and what he was. Engineered and educated him at the naukograd , the secret city, a process that began under Nikita Khrushchev generations before he was born. He would see they got a full return on their investment.

He pulled onto US-1 again and drove north, continuing to follow the toll-free route. Soon the strip malls were behind him, and he was back on winding side roads, surrounded by tall New England pines and dunes of plowed white snow.

The rest of his trip took under thirty minutes. He turned west outside Portsmouth, drove along the January grayness of the Piscataqua River for about three miles, then jigged left onto a two-lane blacktop called Schooner Road and designated partial restricted usage on the printed map he had memorized before leaving New York—GPS being easily traceable by law enforcement and therefore dangerous. Through the tree trunks on his right, Grigor glimpsed water and, roughly up ahead, the tall structural masts that mounted communications arrays above the decks of modern ships.

The road terminated in a high gate with a guardhouse out front. Coming up to it, he saw a sign that read Employees Only, Visitors Must Have Identification .

He slowed down, passed over several speed bumps, and pulled up to the booth, lowering his window to show the security man his driver’s license.

“I’m Stephen Gelfland,” he said with a smile. “Here for the orientation.”

“Thanks, sir. Be right with you,” the guard said pleasantly. He fed the license into a scanner and watched a tablet on a swing arm.

After a moment, Grigor saw the man nod to himself. He hadn’t sweated the computer check. The Wolf’s hacking team at Okean-27 would have ensured that all Gelfland’s online records were modified, replacing the originals’ likeness with his own on every archived facial and biometric scan. One of the reasons Gelfland was chosen for his new identity was that he had been a loner who shunned social media, leaving only a LinkedIn photo to be switched.

The guard leaned out of the booth to return his license.

“Here you go, Mr. Gelfland,” he said. “They have everything set for you. I’ll have your badge ready in a second.”

Grigor waited. A small card printer in the booth issued an ID with his photo, Gelfland’s name, and a bar code. The guard inserted it into a clear plastic holder with an attached lanyard and handed it out to him.

“Welcome to CloudCable,” he said. “If you follow the road you’re on, you’ll see the administrative building up on the right. You can pull into any available slot out front. Someone from the project director’s office will meet you at the reception desk.”

Grigor slipped the lanyard over his neck. Then a thought came to him. He’d glanced at his dash clock while waiting and seen that he was about half an hour early for his appointment.

“I noticed a ship while driving in,” he said. “Big masts.”

The guard nodded. “That’s the Stalwart . Your home till May or thereabouts,” he said. “They’ve been doing her refit and resupply in the yard.”

“Any chance I can take a closer look?”

“Well, you can’t go right up to the boatworks without clearance. Security requirements. But if you hang a left instead of a right, you’ll be on Granite Harbor Lane. Take it about a quarter mile, and you’ll get to a turnaround. There’s a nice view of the ship. All four hundred fifty feet of her. Which happens to be the exact same length as Noah’s ark, if you like trivia.”

“Is that so?”

“Yep,” the guard said. “In the Bible, they measure in cubits. Some historian figured out that’s from the elbow to the fingertips and then worked it out in feet. But seems to me it’d depend on whether someone’s got a long or short reach.”

Grigor looked at him. “Tells you navy mapmakers didn’t write the Bible,” he said. “They say an inch can make the difference between success and disaster.”

The guard chuckled. “I guess people can either trust the Bible or the experts.”