Prologue – Kirill
Four Years Ago
The Ritz-Carlton’s grand ballroom shimmered like a fever dream—crystal chandeliers refracting light across mirrored walls, casting prismatic shadows that danced with the deep-house bass thrumming through the floor. Moving through the crowd with practiced ease, I nodded at investors whose faces I’d forget by morning, accepting congratulations I didn’t need. This was my event. My tech gala. My carefully crafted stage where Moscow’s elite pretended to understand blockchain architecture while nursing champagne.
I inhaled deeply, grounding myself in the familiar scents: champagne bubbles bursting like tiny promises, cologne mingling with the sharp tang of ambition, and beneath it all, that clean, electric coolness that always emanated from server rooms. That last scent was home. The rest was theater.
I drifted between illuminated booths, watching attendees feign comprehension as they gazed at holographic displays of encryption protocols they’d never use. A woman in a blood-red dress laughed too loudly at something a venture capitalist whispered in her ear. A cluster of developers argued in hushed Russian near the champagne fountain, their hands gesturing wildly as they debated something I couldn’t be bothered with.
I was reaching for another glass—more to occupy my hands than from any desire to drink—when I noticed him.
He stood next to me as if he’d materialized from the shadows themselves. Thick-rimmed glasses. Slight build. The kind of person who blended into backgrounds, who made you forget they were there the moment you looked away. But his eyes—sharp, calculating—belied the harmless aesthetician his appearance suggested.
“Kirill Petrov,” he said, extending a hand. His Russian carried a faint accent I couldn’t quite place. “Douglas Maclanden. I’ve been hoping to catch you alone.”
I shook his hand, noting the firm grip, the calluses on his fingertips. A man who typed for a living. “You’ve caught me. What can I do for you?”
“Your Lurk detection module.” He adjusted his glasses, and I caught the gleam of genuine interest in his expression. “The one you demoed last month in St. Petersburg. I’m curious about the behavioral analysis component. How are you differentiating between legitimate remote access and malicious control?”
Finally. Someone who actually understood what I’d built.
“Pattern recognition,” I said, warming to the subject despite myself. “Most malware follows predictable pathways when it establishes C&C connections. Lurk’s clever because it mimics legitimate traffic, but there are always tells. Packet timing. Data bursts during odd hours. The module doesn’t just look at what’s happening—it looks at when and why.”
Douglas’s eyes lit up. “And the crypto wallet integration? I read the white paper, but the implementation details were sparse.”
We fell into conversation like old colleagues, the party fading into white noise around us. He asked questions that revealed deep understanding, about secure wallet architecture, about infecting legitimate websites without triggering browser warnings, about social engineering tactics that could trick even sophisticated users into downloading malicious payloads. We discussed credential harvesting, remote PC control, the elegant brutality of a well-executed APT.
It had been months since I’d spoken with someone who truly understood the architecture of digital warfare. In the Bratva world, I was the tech guy—useful, necessary, butultimately just a tool. Here, with Douglas, I was having a conversation with an equal.
“I’m new in Russia,” he said as our discussion wound down, his tone casual but his attention focused entirely on me. “Looking to invest in tech. Build something real here. I need someone who understands both the technical side and how business actually works in Moscow. Someone with connections.”
The flattery was transparent, but I didn’t care. I was already running calculations—what partnerships might look like, what doors I could open, what innovations we might build together.
“Come by my place,” I heard myself say. “Tomorrow evening. We’ll talk properly.”
His smile was warm, genuine. “I’d like that.”
Three days later, Douglas stood in my Soho-style penthouse, admiring the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Moscow’s glittering skyline. He moved through the space as if he belonged there, commenting on my collection of vintage motherboards mounted like art on the exposed brick walls, nodding appreciatively at the custom-built server rack that hummed quietly in the corner.
“Ukraine and Dubai,” he said when I asked about his background. “Consulting work. Mostly financial sector cybersecurity. Made enough to know what I want to do next.” He poured himself vodka from my bar with the ease of someone comfortable in luxury spaces. “Which is why I need someone like you. Technical brilliance means nothing without execution. And in Russia, execution requires…understanding.”
Understanding. The Bratva word for connections that could make problems disappear and opportunities materialize.
“What kind of investment are we talking about?” I asked.
“Start with crypto infrastructure. Build from there. Legal on paper, profitable in practice.” He raised his glass. “To partnership?”
I clinked my glass against his, ignoring the small voice in my head that whispered I was moving too fast. “To partnership.”
The months that followed felt like finding a brother I hadn’t known I’d lost.
Douglas became a constant presence in my life. Late nights dissolved into bourbon-soaked conversations about the future of encryption, about building systems that could weather government scrutiny, about the beautiful elegance of code that did exactly what you told it to do—nothing more, nothing less. We shared playlists, argued over whether Radiohead or Massive Attack better captured the aesthetic of digital isolation, and ordered pizza at three in the morning while debugging protocols that most people would never understand.
He teased my inventions with the familiarity of genuine friendship. When I showed him my latest firewall architecture, he’d poke holes in it just to watch me scramble to defend my work, then laugh and offer solutions I hadn’t considered. We fell into an easy rhythm—his business acumen balancing my technical obsessions, his social intelligence compensating for my preference to communicate through screens rather than faces.
I trusted him.
God help me, I trusted him completely.
