Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

V adisk looked at Montana and Dahlia's grim faces and seriously considered pulling the plug on this operation. Right now, the most likely suspect for their blackmailer was the Minister of the Interior and head of the Crimean Security Force.

Nikolett had just sent him information on the Crimean Security Force, which Vadisk had asked her to research after their confrontation with the soldiers.

"Tell us," Dahlia said. "I assumed that our primary suspect being a government official was a bad thing, but your reaction says I don't understand exactly how bad."

"I called my admiral…" Even though there was a chance Nikolett wasn't his admiral anymore. "After those soldiers came, I called and they got me more information on the Crimean Security Force."

Montana shook his head. "I looked into it too. There isn't a ‘Crimean Security Force'."

"Not recognized by any other country, no, but practically, they're a militia operating as a national police force. Many of them are volunteers whose primary focus seems to be hunting down non-Russians."

"Racist vigilante volunteers. That always goes well." Dahlia sighed. "That somewhat explains those soldiers from the other day though. Why they behaved like…"

"Like amateurs and civilians," Vadisk agreed. "Anyone with training would have handled that far differently. But Sinaver Abduramanov is also the Crimean Minister of the Interior."

"So he really is a government official," Dahlia said.

Montana didn't look surprised.

"Yes. And more than likely, he oversees immigration and border security."

There was a beat of silence after Vadisk's words.

"He would have complete access to the records of anyone who entered Crimea." Dahlia's gaze was unfocused as she worked through it. "That would make it really easy to decide who to blackmail. He'd know who had money and…" She trailed off. "That wouldn't tell him who was in a poly relationship, or who was a member of either the Trinity Masters or the Masters' Admiralty."

"But he'd know when three non-Russian visitors entered the country on the same day and could have them watched to see if they looked or behaved like a trinity."

"Maybe we should redo last night, but Dahlia and I can be on the balcony while V gives directions from inside." Montana's eyes tracked down Dahlia.

"I like taking direction more than I thought I would," she all but purred.

Vadisk had a quick dirty fantasy about the two of them fucking on the balcony while he hid inside, watching them through the glass and whispering orders into a phone that fed into earpieces they both wore.

"He has that look," Montana said.

"Yes," Dahlia breathed, "he does."

Vadisk snapped back to reality, staring at his spouses' eager expressions. He tried to frown but ended up grinning. "I have an idea. Maybe later."

"Something to look forward to," Dahlia said.

In silent agreement, they all rose, taking a minute. Vadisk got some tea, Dahlia went to the bathroom, and Montana disappeared into the bedroom. Probably needed some alone time to have a conversation with his dick to make it go down. Vadisk had spotted his hard-on when he stood.

Once they were all back and seated, Vadisk cleared his throat. "We have two possible blackmailers. I think we should rule out the masseuse."

"I ruled her out," Montana said. "I looked into her, and though her family had to leave Crimea after the resort was closed, they had extended family in Russia they were able to go to who helped them. They didn't really suffer, not the way other families who didn't leave suffered."

"When did you do all this?" Dahlia asked.

"While we were at lunch."

Vadisk looked at Montana but didn't say what he was thinking. Montana moved like he could hold his own in a fight, and he was a military man, but that didn't mean he was good at this kind of intelligence work. Vadisk wasn't either, but he knew who to ask for help. He was planning to call Nikolett or Grigoris Violaris, the security minister whom he should technically report to as a security officer, and ask them to look into it.

"I think we all agree that Sinaver Abduramanov is who we need to focus on," Dahlia said. "I'm going to request a meeting with him."

"To interview him for your show?" Vadisk asked.

"Yes."

"No way he would agree," Vadisk said. "Plus, it's too dangerous."

Dahlia dismissed that argument. "Being here is dangerous. But we're here to find the blackmailer and figure out how he knows who we are. The best way to do that is to talk to him."

Vadisk scowled. "We do that, and he'll know we're here hunting him."

"No, he wouldn't. That's a massive leap. No one would look at what we've been doing since I got here and think anything but what we've told them. I'm here filming episodes of ‘Don't Follow Me,' documenting Crimea because most of the world will never have the chance to come here. It won't be the first time I interviewed a local official on camera."

"He won't agree to it," Vadisk repeated, his muscles tight with anxiety at the idea of Dahlia interviewing Sinaver, who was dangerous even if he wasn't the blackmailer.

"We won't know until we ask," Dahlia insisted.

"We ask, and he'll start paying attention to us."

"He's already paying attention to us. If he's head of the Crimean Security Force, those two men were his people. And if he controls the borders, he's known Montana and I were coming for months. He's had your name for a week. Talking to him won't give him more information than he already has."

"He'll wonder why you want to talk to him."

"And Izolda Ivanova will tell him that I'm interested in the history of tourism in the area and the impact it's had, both past and present."

"It's too dangerous."

Vadisk tried to stare Dahlia down, leaning forward a little. All she did was stare back, then slowly raise one eyebrow. Fuck. Why couldn't he have a nice meek wife? Not that he actually wanted that, but he was not going to let her do something this fucking dangerous.

"What are our other options besides talking to him?" Dahlia asked, her tone making it clear she thought there were no other options.

"I'll have people in my territory research…" Except they had researched. Not only did Hungary have people looking into it, Ottoman had been working on this for months, since it was three Ottoman members who'd been blackmailed after staying here. Plus, he was sure the Trinity Masters had tried a digital investigation before moving on to plan B and sending Montana and Dahlia here in person.

Now they had a name they could give the investigation teams, but he knew that, given the severity of the situation, they would have already combed every digital record they could get their hands on for mention of either society. If Sinaver had digital blackmail files, they would have found it, even without first knowing his name.

"I doubt that would uncover how Sinaver knows about the Masters' Admiralty and Trinity Masters," Montana said. "Or how he's identifying members."

It was exactly what Vadisk was thinking, but hearing it out loud irked him.

"Then we bring someone in and shoot him from a distance." Rome had one of the world's best snipers, a woman who just happened to be married to the admiral.

"We cannot simply kill people," Dahlia said.

Vadisk and Montana both looked at her, and, oddly, Montana winced.

"Killing him might stop the blackmail," Montana finally said, "but it doesn't tell us how or where he's getting his information."

"But you two would be safe." The words were out before Vadisk could think better of them.

Montana shook his head. "I don't need you to protect me."

"Yes, you do. You both do."

"No. I don't. We don't. We were planning to come here without you and handle this ourselves," Montana insisted.

"That would have been fucking stupidly dangerous."

"Enough," Dahlia started.

Montana pushed to his feet. "Your options are either do nothing, or murder?"

Vadisk shrugged, fighting like the devil to appear casual. "Better than going in person to try to question a government official who could easily disappear all three of us."

Montana threw his hands up. "That won't happen. We won't ask any direct questions, but a meeting with him will give us opportunities to?—"

"To do what?" Vadisk cut in. He felt almost frantic that he couldn't make them see how dangerous this was or how at risk they were.

He couldn't lose them.

His fear for them, the frantic feeling that he was watching them walk into danger and helpless to stop them, made him lash out.

"What were you going to do, Montana? You don't speak the language, you're former military, but you aren't an intelligence agent. What the fuck were you going to do? Why are you here?"

Montana clenched his fists, fighting to control his temper. Typically he was mild-mannered, his fuse burning long and slow. Vadisk, king of fucking control freaks, brought out the worst in him.

Unfortunately, he knew the cause of this argument was his fault. He had only shown Dahlia and Vadisk bits and pieces of who he was, hoping that would be enough…because he'd been desperate to hide the blacker parts of his soul from them. In his mind, he'd never intended to tell his spouses this part of his past. But it was becoming clear he needed to come clean.

Either that, or engage in a nice long round of hate fucking.

God, that was more tempting than it should be, but in the end, he dismissed it. They'd already taken a huge risk last night with their joint masturbation game, and he didn't want to touch either of them in anger.

So that only left…

Him.

Telling the truth.

Fuck. The truth was bad. Really bad.

It was easy to think he could keep the past hidden away when his future spouses were nameless, faceless people he didn't know. Now that he'd met Vadisk and Dahlia, now that he'd spent time with them and was starting to genuinely care for them, keeping this secret felt as bad as the secret itself.

He drew in a slow breath, then unclenched his hands, rubbing his palms against his thighs nervously because this wasn't something he liked to relive, not even in the darkest corners of his own mind, so to admit what he'd done aloud…

"Vadisk, that's enough." Dahlia rose to her feet too. "Montana's relative is the one who paid ransom for forty-five?—"

"That's not why I'm here," Montana said quietly. "That's why I care about this, but it's not why the Grand Master sent me."

Dahlia froze. Montana was squared off with Vadisk, but he could see Dahlia out of the corner of his eye.

He gritted his teeth, aware he had no choice but to forge on. Unfortunately, it became obvious that he had the skills they were going to need if they had a snowball's chance in hell of completing this mission. Part of him—a large part—had hoped it wouldn't come to this. "Ask me what I did on the submarine."

Vadisk stared at him. "What?"

"Ask me what I did."

Vadisk's gaze sharpened. "What did you do?"

Montana rubbed his forehead wearily, crossing the room to glance out the window. "I was stationed on a Florida-class submarine."

Dahlia and Vadisk stared at him blankly.

"I was ground forces," Vadisk responded. "I have very little knowledge of America's naval forces."

"I think the U.S. military is being used like a puppet by private companies to suck money out of the federal government," Dahlia said. "So I'm not a big military industrial complex enthusiast."

Well, that sucked some of the drama out of his revelation, and also made it harder. Because for people who knew, his words would start sounding an alarm.

Montana forced himself to turn and face them. "Technically, there's no such thing as a Florida-class submarine. The tech on board was so classified, they're basically trying to hide the existence of it, at least from the general population. Sometimes we got support from carriers, so we became a military ghost story, started by seamen on one of those ships. ‘Hey, do you know what we're doing? We're escorting a top-secret sub with super-weapons.'" He paused, swallowed. "A state-of-the-art nuclear submarine capable of doing unimaginable damage."

There was a beat of silence as everyone absorbed that. "What did you do on the sub?" Dahlia repeated the question, leaning forward.

"On paper, I was a software engineer."

Vadisk studied him. "But really you were building nuclear bombs?"

"What? No. Nuclear subs run on nuclear power. This sub wasn't a bomber. I was, am, a software engineer, but from the time I was sixteen, the U.S. military realized what I could become, and like a good soldier, I became what they needed." He licked his suddenly dry lips. "The dangerous tech on a Florida-class submarine? It's not a weapon. It's Cyber Ops. People. People like me."

Montana started to turn away from them again, but Dahlia held her hand out to him. "Come sit with us."

Rather than join her on the couch, he reclaimed the chair he'd just vacated.

Dahlia studied him. "What happened when you were sixteen?"

"I won a Capture the Flag."

Vadisk looked confused, but Dahlia cleared her throat. "Montana, honey…"

"A CTF, a Capture the Flag competition, is a hacking competition. I'd always been good with computers, and my parents were supportive. Got me great tutors and special classes. When I was sixteen, me and some people I met at a computer summer camp entered a CTF in Switzerland. It's a white-hat hacking competition. We won."

"Hacking?" Dahlia let out a low whistle.

"Don't whistle indoors," Vadisk said absently.

"My first year in the Naval Academy they put me on the NCX team. The NCX is a competition run by NSA for all the military colleges. The NSA trains you for a year, and at the end of it, the competition is essentially cyber war games."

Dahlia was slowly straightening, and he could see the dawning realization in her eyes.

"That year, the Naval Academy won NCX. We were able to break through multiple systems, take them over, and not just take them down but maintain control of them. Think of it like someone else having a keyboard and mouse that connect to your computer. One minute, everything is fine, the next, your keyboard and mouse don't work, but on the screen, you can see someone clicking and typing." He swallowed. "Except it's not just a computer. We're talking about entire networks."

Both Dahlia and Vadisk were watching him. Montana had never told anyone his story. Not like this. It was both terrifying and freeing.

"I technically did four years at the Naval Academy, but during my third and fourth years, I was actually in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, interning for Raytheon."

He was ready to explain who and what Raytheon was and how, no matter what it said on paper, they were in reality the U.S. government's weapons factory, but Vadisk looked grim, and Dahlia was now sitting up ramrod straight.

They knew what Raytheon was.

"I spent those years learning how to hack into systems. They said it was all CDX—cyber defense exercises—though what I was doing was attacking. They said I was one of the best white-hat hackers they'd ever seen. And that to know how to build defense systems, I first had to understand what the attacks would look like."

"Wait… Submarines need cyber defense? Aren't they…underwater?" Dahlia raised a brow.

Montana's lips twitched, and both Dahlia and Vadisk seemed to relax when he smiled.

"You're right, a submarine doesn't need a full-time Cyber Ops chief there to defend its systems."

"I guess we're back to the original question. What did you do on the submarine?" Dahlia asked.

"I attacked. It wasn't until I was on the submarine with no way off that it was clear no matter what was said during my training about defense, I was an offensive weapon." Montana hadn't talked about this aspect of his military career with anyone, shame keeping him silent.

"Why were you on a sub instead of locked in some top-secret computer room?"

Vadisk stroked his beard, considering his own question. "Was it because you had to get close to the places?"

"No. We didn't have to be close to the physical locations of our targets, only to subsea cables."

Dahlia frowned. "To what?"

"The world's internet is connected by physical cables, most of which run along the floor of the ocean."

"Just a big cable? What if a ship drops an anchor on it?" Vadisk asked.

Montana shrugged. "Then half a continent loses internet, and not just public internet, but SCADA systems that control facilities like airports, infrastructure like water treatment facilities, and industrial processes."

"They need to put the cables in a box or something," Vadisk muttered, eyes wide.

"There are countless undersea cables providing internet connection to Europe, Africa, and Asia. The longest one goes all the way from Hong Kong to France," Montana explained.

"Wait, wait, wait." Dahlia was doing that thing she did where she looked at nothing as she put pieces together. "You're saying that this submarine got close to the cables and used them to access online systems to launch cyberattacks."

"Incredible," Vadisk mused. "You really are fucking brilliant."

Montana was uncomfortable with that praise. He didn't deserve it.

"When I got my orders, I remember being so proud. I was on a top-secret submarine, the first of its kind, which, of course, fed into my arrogance. All of that faded away, however, when the reality of what I was doing sank in." Montana gripped his knees tightly, hoping the actions would hide the slight tremor in his hands.

"Tell us the rest of it," Vadisk urged.

"I wasn't happy when I realized what I was going to be doing, but it was willfully stupid of me not to figure it out. And there wasn't anything I could do. When you're on a sub, you're stuck and you're isolated. We were at sea for months at a time. Voice transmission is impossible because of the narrow bandwidths, and because of the top-secret nature of our missions, we worked exclusively at radio silence. You have no idea how isolated we were down there, cut off from everything and everyone. I…" Montana bowed his head. "I put my head down and didn't think about the larger picture of what I was doing. It was just more CDX, and it was easy to get lost in the code, in putting all the pieces together to create what, in my mind, were masterpieces or works of art."

Dahlia rose from the couch, kneeling before him and taking one of his hands in hers. "What happened?"

"A couple of years into my deployment, I was home on leave. As I said, I'd had no contact with my family, no access to the news. I'm not proud to admit that the first few times I was on leave, I purposefully didn't search for information that might be related to some of the ops I'd done while submerged."

"You checked to see if it worked," Vadisk said rather than asked.

Montana nodded. "I wanted to see if I could find any trace of my work. I needed to know if my chaos had succeeded, if our missions had been successful."

"What did you find?" Dahlia whispered.

"Some good things." He was a coward for doing this, trying to soften the blow of his crimes by starting with the things he'd done that were arguably good. "Have either of you ever heard of Stuxnet?"

They both shook their heads.

"It's a computer worm that attacks the SCADA system."

"The one you said controls things like airports."

"And industrial processes. Cyberattacks rarely make the news—I mean the big ones, not things like credit card numbers for private citizens—but there's a Stuxnet attack that's famous. Hearing about it was one of the things that got me really interested in computer software and coding.

"Stuxnet was used to attack the Iranian nuclear program. The worm got in, gathered information, and then took control of the system's programmable logic controllers and made the centrifuges they were using to refine uranium tear themselves apart."

Vadisk's eye was twitching. "A computer virus?—"

"Technically worm."

"—made a physical piece of machinery destroy itself?"

"Yes."

"Could something like that be used to tell a plane to fly into a mountain?" Vadisk demanded. "How the fuck do you defend against that?"

"Technically, yes, and you have to have system defenses."

"Is that what you did? Stopped someone from refining uranium with one of your cyberattacks?" Dahlia asked.

"Yes, actually. The other Cyber Ops guy on the sub and I built a worm a lot like Stuxnet." The fact that they'd done it themselves, while underwater, was seriously damned impressive. It had taken dozens of people from two different governments to build Stuxnet. He wasn't going to tell Vadisk and Dahlia that, though, because he already felt like enough of an asshole.

"I found the news report about a ‘malfunction' in a nuclear facility that set the country's nuclear program back twenty years. And one about a banking system in Southeast Asia going offline while their currency was collapsing. The system stayed offline for two days, just long enough for the U.S. to secretly prop up the economy and stop a government collapse."

"Let me guess, they're a U.S. ally and we have bases there?" Dahlia asked with a sigh.

"Yep."

"Could you make a computer explode? Could you assassinate someone by making their computer blow up while they're sitting at their desk?" Vadisk was gripping his head with both hands.

"No. There's nothing explosive in the hardware of a computer."

Vadisk relaxed, muttering to himself in Ukrainian. The poor dude was just now realizing how very vulnerable everything and everyone really was. He could keep his mouth shut and not stress Vadisk out any more…

"I could probably make the computer catch on fire," Montana said.

Vadisk's head jerked up. "What?"

"Turn off the fan, max out the CPU so it runs hot. Depending on what kind of computer it is, and the casing, that would start a fire that could spread."

Vadisk made a sound that was almost a whimper. Dahlia reached over and patted his knee, but she was watching Montana.

"You stopped nuclear development and a currency collapse, but neither of those is what upset you, is it?" she asked.

He shook his head and looked at the floor. "There was an attack on the capitol in Sierra Leone. My order was to take the government networks offline until the government took back control of the building. I think it's because our government didn't want the terrorists to access information about stores of this mineral rutile that were waiting to be exported to the U.S."

Dahlia closed her eyes, exhaling slowly. "What happened when you took the government network offline?"

"Their airline computer systems were housed in that building. Air traffic control, radar, and the airport computer network all went offline. Planes went down. Basically what I did was build something to tell the VM—virtual machine—that controlled the server to turn itself off, and I overwrote the commands that would automatically turn it back on. Someone was supposedly standing by on site to input the code and turn the system back on the instant they had control of the building. But the loss of radar and guidance systems means planes crashed. Planes carrying civilians. Not enemy soldiers, not corrupt politicians, not bad guys. Just…innocent people."

Dahlia squeezed his hand. "Montana?—"

"Did you know when you launched the virus that would happen?" Vadisk asked.

Montana knew where Vadisk was going with this but answered anyway. "No. When I was given system information, it looked like I was taking down the servers that controlled the government network, not infrastructure. Just administration."

"The person who gave the order, do you think they knew and hid it from you?"

Montana shrugged. "Probably. It was pretty clear by that point I had ethical concerns."

Vadisk raised his hand as if he'd made his point. "So they hid the information from you so you'd do it. You were just following orders."

"That's not an excuse."

"It's not," Vadisk agreed with a sigh.

Montana pulled his hand free from Dahlia's grip, lifting both up, palms out. "I have the blood of innocent people on my hands, and the worst part is…I don't know how many lives I've taken. No faces, no names. I'm no better than a mass murderer."

"Stop," Dahlia demanded. At the same time Vadisk said, "Look at me, Montana."

Montana's gaze was lowered again, his eyes locked on the floor at his feet. Even though Dahlia was right there in front of him, he refused to face her.

"Look at me," Vadisk repeated sternly. "Now."

Montana forced his eyes to meet Vadisk's, expecting to see…well, he didn't know what. Maybe disgust, censure, disapproval?

Instead, Vadisk simply looked at him like a man who understood. "You were a Naval officer and you were taking orders. You weren't the one making the decisions about who or what was targeted."

Montana knew that was the truth, but admitting it or allowing that to ease his conscience felt like a cop-out. It would be simple to push the blame onto someone else, but that didn't change the fact that he was the one who wrote the code responsible for so many deaths.

Dahlia tapped on his knee, drawing his attention to her. "Vadisk is right."

Montana had anticipated condemnation, so their compassion felt like a gift he didn't expect to receive. The problem was, he didn't think he deserved it.

"I understand I had to follow orders, but I was the one who willfully believed the very obvious lies about what I was going to be doing when I graduated from the academy. I walked into that field willingly."

"Montana, you said it yourself. You were sixteen when this started. Which of us had a fucking clue what the world was about at sixteen?" Dahlia asked. "I sure as hell didn't."

"I appreciate that, but I wasn't sixteen when I followed those orders, when I…" Montana rubbed his temple wearily.

"Did you go back to the sub?" Vadisk asked.

"Yes."

"What happened then?"

"Things were different. I was different. I even considered going AWOL, but in the end, I didn't. I continued to follow orders, to do the work I was assigned, but I pushed back. Hard. I demanded online access so I could check for myself what was going on and prevent collateral damage. Always in the back of my mind, I wondered and worried that I'd missed something and my bits of code were killing people. Sleep eluded me, and then I started to feel trapped, imprisoned."

"Oh." Dahlia cupped Montana's cheek. "The claustrophobia."

Montana grimaced. "It was triggered by my guilt. It wasn't bad at first, just the occasional tightness in my chest, some trouble breathing. By the end of my assignment, well…it was just as I told you outside the grotto—tachycardia, chills, trembling, the constant feeling of choking."

Dahlia sighed sadly. "It sounds horrible."

"It was." Montana lifted her hand and kissed her palm, encouraging her to stand, certain it couldn't be comfortable kneeling all that time.

She smiled and ran her hand through his hair fondly, before reclaiming her spot on the couch.

"Your Grand Master sent you here because of your hacking skills," Vadisk mused aloud.

"She did," Montana confirmed. "She wanted to have all the bases covered since this is essentially a locked-door mission. There's no backup coming if shit goes sideways, so we have to be able to handle whatever arises in Crimea on our own. Between Dahlia's connections, your security background and ability to translate Russian and Ukrainian, and my computer skills, the Grand Master hoped we'd be prepared for whatever comes our way."

"Smart," Vadisk muttered, suddenly looking at Montana quite differently than he had before when he'd questioned his presence on the mission. "Montana. I'm sorry."

This time, Montana's smile came easily. "No harm, no foul. I would have asked the same question if I was working with the limited details."

"Even so, I shouldn't have… I behaved badly."

Montana discovered another way he and Vadisk were alike. They were both hard on themselves, unable to accept forgiveness easily. "It's forgotten."

"Why didn't you tell us all of this before?" Vadisk asked. "When you told us about the claustrophobia?"

Montana forced himself to look his husband in the eye. "I was afraid it would make you think less of me."

Vadisk chuckled, though the sound was pure misery without a hint of humor. "You were worried about what I would think?"

"Of course." Montana couldn't understand why Vadisk would even question that.

Vadisk scoffed, running a hand through his hair. "That's nice of you, considering I've been an asshole since the moment we met."

"Welllll," Dahlia drawled, her eyes sparkling with mirth. "Not the entire time."

Vadisk chuckled, despite his misery. "Very funny, Sonechko ."

She tilted her head. "I don't know what that means. Do I want to?" she asked playfully.

Montana wasn't sure, but he could almost swear Vadisk blushed slightly when he translated it for her. "It means little sun."

Dahlia drew in a short breath, her smile suddenly giving the sun a run for its money on brightness.

"I think we need some time to regroup," Vadisk suggested as he stood. "Take a breather from…all of this."

Montana agreed. Between the interview, the argument, and the confession, he was done in. "I might go for a swim."

Dahlia nodded. "I was thinking of taking a look at the footage I've captured so far. We missed our tour of Vorontsov Palace today."

They'd postponed their filming when they were granted the interview with Izolda.

"Before you do that, do you mind contacting Sinaver?" Vadisk clearly didn't like making the request, but at least he'd realized that was their next logical step.

"Of course," Dahlia readily agreed.

"We'll do the palace tomorrow and pick up with the rest of the itinerary as needed," Vadisk said. "It's important that we keep up the pretense until we hear from Sinaver."

None of them seemed to be holding out much hope for the meeting. Montana wasn't sure what their next move was if the man denied them an audience because, as of right now, Sinaver was their one and only lead.