52

Monday, March 1, 2021, 9PM Moscow Standard Time

The President stared at the screen on his desk, transfixed.

“Bozhe moi,” he whispered.

The President had received the terminal that same morning from Antonov. Normally he avoided technology like the plague. Even before the full extent of the perils of computers had been demonstrated by “Operation O Face,” he had sensed that they boded little good and much ill. And he had heard that they could be a tremendous waste of time. Thirty years after their introduction, and almost as long since they had become a status item among the oligarchs of his nation, he still had never used a cellular telephone. Phones and computers were for people carrying out orders, and television was for sheep.

But he had never understood the seductive power of “Reality TV” until this moment. Of course, what he was watching was essentially a cable television channel available only to himself. He had tried to pull himself away, and through his usual iron will, he had succeeded in turning the damned thing off for most of the day. But even as he took care of his regular business he had remained distracted by what he had seen. At a meeting to plan the legislative agenda, his deputy had leaned over to him.

“Everything okay, boss?”

“Yes, Sergei Borisevich.”

Antonov had been correct in his assumptions. Like himself, the President – the other one, that is – never used a computer.

Unlike himself, the American President was almost literally never without his smart phone.

And it was his private line. He and almost everyone else in his administration, according to Antonov, blithely used their personal phones and computer systems regularly for official public business; this had made hacking into them quick and easy. Even after all the screaming about how his opponent in the 2016 election had destroyed America’s security by using a home email system for public business – screaming that had certainly helped him win the election – he did this.

When you win by that small a margin, as Antonov had said, any of a dozen factors could have, and really, did, win the election for you. The screaming about her private phone and email fell into that category.

As did numerous activities of the Russian government. Nothing was provable, of course, and no one in his government would publicly admit anything, on pain of some very bad outcomes. But their smirks, which were very much allowed, said it all. The Olgino Trolls had certainly had an effect. The margin in the three critical states was almost certainly smaller than the number of votes swayed by those pimple-faced social undesirables in St. Petersburg.

The President began to laugh quietly to himself now. The previous Democratic candidate’s home email server turned out to be the only one that his intelligence services had been unable to crack. The allegedly secure government servers were child’s play. It was the private server in her suburban basement that his hackers had proven unable to breach. Many had tried; a fair number were no longer around because of their failure.

But this – this was different. No one in this American administration seemed to give a damn about security. They either did not care that Russians (and presumably Chinese and many others) were vacuuming up all of their communications, or else they were some combination of oblivious and arrogant. Maybe they were so sure of the loyalty of their voters that they did not need to concern themselves with either the blatant hypocrisy of their actions, or the fact that real enemies of the United States were profiting from them. Their voters would blame Okomo and the Democrats for everything anyway.

***

The Federation President had had an intimidating (but technically adept) flunky standing by as Antonov brought the device into his office.

“Mr. Antonov,” he had said.

“Yes, Gospodin Prezident?”

“There are no cameras or microphones in this device?”

“No, Gospodin Prezident.”

“You are very sure?”

“Yes, Gospodin Prezident.”

The President had motioned to his flunky.

“Open it up.”

Antonov betrayed no nervousness as the thick-neck deftly wielded a tiny screwdriver and opened the laptop in a few seconds. The flunky examined the contents, pulling a few parts out and examining them through a jeweler’s loupe. After a minute or two, he reassembled the contents and screwed the laptop shut again.

“Clean?” the President asked.

“Clean, Gospodin Prezident.”

“Good,” the President said. He turned to Antonov. “You understand we cannot be too careful.”

“Yes, Gospodin Prezident.”

“And you understand the consequences if there ever were to be something like that discovered in this thing.”

“Yes, Gospodin Prezident.”

“Very good,” the President said. “We understand one another.”

After a few pointers on how to operate the machine, he had dismissed Antonov, with strict instructions to make himself available for instant communications with Sergei Borisevich at any time of the day or night. Then he had dismissed them all. Waiting a decent interval, he then had turned the machine on again. A menu allowed him to choose from the devices of several dozen American politicians. But there was one and only one that interested him. With a grimace he quickly passed over the Senator whose activities had scarred his corneas a few weeks earlier, and found the link to the one he had wanted: his counterpart’s phone.

He had, of course, talked to him several times, in side meetings at global summits. But now he was able to watch him in his home, on a triple split screen showing the pictures for both the forward and the “selfie” cameras, as well as what the target would see looking at his screen.

After watching for close to an hour, he was dumbfounded.

This man did almost nothing but eat buckets of fried chicken, drink diet soda, excrete the results, read newspapers while on the toilet, watch Wolf News (and its allegedly more liberal rivals), and Toot about perceived slights, quoting various fringe lunatics who had posted opinions supporting him or insulting his domestic enemies.

What struck him were two things, and then one bigger thing.

First, this man did nothing productive, or as close to nothing as a human being could get. Had he done anything today that had anything to do with his job, with actual policy, “faithfully executing the laws?” Nothing.

Well, if you distorted the meaning of that phrase, he had. He had made several phone calls demanding that certain functionaries be fired for doing things in the normal course of their jobs that he felt had made him look bad.

And that was the key, the second insight. He supposed he had suspected this from the first time he had seen this President on television decades ago, long before he had entered politics, and watched him stumble from bankruptcy through scandals through broken marriages, all accompanied by press conferences. It was all about his personal image. Nothing else. The entire federal government of the greatest and most powerful nation in the history of the planet, the organization that had won two world wars and a Cold War, put human beings on the moon and brought them all back, invented the Internet and most computing technology, was now almost exclusively devoted to gratifying the ego of a damaged petulant child.

He remembered several years before the other President had been first elected, when there was supposed to be a beauty pageant in Moscow, and this man had Tooted something about hoping to meet him and become his “new best friend.” At the time, he had told his aides to make very sure that he was kept very far away from him for as long as he was in the country.

There was no grand strategy. This other President was not “crazy like a fox.” He had no plan, other than to wake up, see who might be attacking him, and then go on-line and bewail his fate. It couldn’t even be called infantile. Infants occasionally smiled, laughed, showed affection. This man never laughed. People called Vladimir Vladimirovich cold and humorless and a murderous dictator, and he had to admit that was not unfair. But even he laughed on occasion. And he most definitely had a plan to Make Russia Great Again, though some people disagreed with his means, and most of those people met bad ends.

But this President? “Make America Great Again?” Substitute his name for “America,” and “Flattered Again” for “Great Again,” and you had everything about this man. There was nothing else to him. No plan, and therefore no predictability beyond the moment-to-moment certainty that he would viciously attack those who said or did anything that he thought was “mean,” sicking his 70 million Tooter followers, some of them deranged and heavily armed, onto them. He hated people who were “mean” to him.

But that wasn’t quite it either. And that was the third insight. He didn’t even care if the publicity was bad. In fact, he seemed to prefer insults and slights. They allowed him to wallow in his favorite activity: whining that the entire world was against him. “No President has ever been So Persecuted,” he whined in one of the grammatically challenged Toots Vladimir read. Six presidents had been shot, four of them fatally, but this one, who had been handed the most powerful job in the world after having done virtually nothing to merit it, was the most persecuted?

It all boiled down to this: The American President could not abide not being the center of attention for the entire world. Whether for good, bad, or other reasons, he had to dominate every news cycle. If a day went by without him being at the top of the headlines, he would do some disruptive act to return himself to what he saw as his rightful place: monopolizing all the oxygen in the global mediasphere for him, him, him.

This neediest, most narcissistic baby in the world had gotten exactly what he wanted: the full attention, at all times, of the entire world. In a way, it was almost beautiful, thought the Russian President. What were the odds that such a profoundly psychologically crippled human being should luck into a world that so completely pandered to his every whim? He was like an orphan baby born with no arms or legs who had found himself carried wherever he wanted, and supplied with all needful things as he grew, by the normally deadly wild animals surrounding him. And as a result, he grew up with an arrogant assumption that he was owed these services by all around him, and he owed them nothing but tyranny and further demands.

And it had all worked out! At no point had he ever been refused anything; well, except as a young child, when he must have been abused by his wealthy father, of course; that’s obviously the person on whom he had modeled his entire misanthropic, miserable modus operandi. But of course, since that point, he had never reexamined his lazy, egotistical, abusive approach. Why should he change something that had never failed to work for him?

He, the Russian President, had led an austere, disciplined, ascetic life, thinking that only in this way could he achieve the highest level of power. But someone who had led a dissolute, disheveled, slapdash, self-indulgent, completely undignified existence, crying and complaining and picking fights with nonentities, a man who had simply been handed everything his entire life, had arguably achieved greater power.

He stared out of the other President’s phone. He had to admit, it was mesmerizing. In the background he heard some television propagandist saying flattering things about the other President. The President seemed to coo in response. He heard the propagandist complain about some criticism being made of the President by some political rival. This got a real reaction. He heard the President utter an unearthly groan and begin swearing at the television. More fried chicken in bed. Another visit to the lavatory seemed in the offing. Vladimir Vladimirovich shut the computer.

Merely watching this man was disorienting. The Russian president did feel he had gained a visceral understanding of where America had gone wrong, but he also felt as though simply observing this creature was somehow contaminating his brain and causing him to feel slightly mentally unbalanced.

He had gained access to the not-so-secret lair of his world rival, and what had he found there? A vacuum. A black hole of self-absorption where knowledge and taste and thought and logic and national greatness – all higher things – were simply crushed out of existence. And snorted? There was all that sniffling.

He had seen enough. It was time to harvest the gains from this unexpectedly successful experiment. He got on the phone to his deputy.

“Yes, Gospodin Prezident?”

“Sergei,” the President said. “I think our friend in Washington is now more of a liability than an asset. I think it is finally time, as I foretold to you years ago, for us to twist the knife the other way. Release the dezinformatsiya about the Baltic leaders, and get the generals to work on operational plans for annexing the territories we discussed. Prepare to leak the information on all the money our people have given the Republicans. And release anything we have on this President and his party.”

“I will begin the execution of the plan immediately, Gospodin Prezident.”

“And Sergei?”

“Yes, Gospodin Prezident?”

“Send someone to destroy this computer. Incinerate it.”

“Srazu, Gospodin Prezident.”

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian