DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [30]
Despite all the new information, there was still nothing Crabb could do about Script. He was in the Ukraine – unlike Maksym Kovalchuk, who was arrested with his wife for the Autodesk fraud in a Bangkok milk-bar three months after Roman Vega had been picked up in Nicosia. Just as Vega was extradited to California from Cyprus, so Kovalchuk headed to the West Coast from Thailand.
Script had no intention of leaving his home country and, to protect himself further, he announced on CarderPlanet in early 2004 that he was resigning his authority and would be leaving the site for good.
As always, Script had a plan. He had made sufficient money from those carding activities, which he had memorably described as ‘guilt-free’, and now he wanted to invest in legitimate businesses. Perhaps he was hoping to head off future unpleasantness. Perhaps he had ambitions beyond the cybersphere. He made his dramatic announcement on CarderPlanet – he would be handing over the administration of the website to a trusted consigliere and would no longer tread the Planet’s boards.
Script, it seems, was going straight. But there was one thing he hadn’t bargained for.
Revolution.
8
SCRIPT REWRITE
Boris Borisovich Popov called his office to say that he was feeling under the weather. The doctor had told him he would have to take it easy for a few days, he explained. Some colleagues were surprised. Boris Borisovich’s slight build and adolescent features occasionally resembled those of a sickly child, but he was probably the most industrious and most disciplined man among them. ‘Working with him was a pleasure,’ one of them remarked later, ‘you couldn’t find anyone better in the whole service.’
Despite crying off work, Popov did not take to his bed, but – fit as a fiddle – walked out of his apartment, hailed a cab and made his way to Kiev’s Borispol airport, where he checked in for a flight to Odessa. Originally from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine and with Russian as his mother-tongue, his presence down south would not arouse suspicion provided he kept his wits about him.
On arrival in Odessa, he took a bus into town. It was a hot July day. The temperature was in the low eighties, but was made pleasant by a cheerful breeze coming off the Black Sea. Before long, Popov had found the private apartment he had rented. Within hours his three teammates had turned up – Natasha Obrizan and Messrs Grishko and Baranets. ‘We couldn’t stay in a hotel,’ explained Boris, ‘because we didn’t trust the local police.’ Only one other person in the whole country knew they were in Odessa: the Minister of the Interior.
Six months earlier Ukraine had undergone a dramatic convulsion – the Orange Revolution. This exceptionally fertile country, with the potential to provide the continent of Europe with more or less all the food it needs, was no stranger to drama. Twentieth-century regimes included extreme nationalism, autocracy, communism and fascism, each responsible for visiting their own brand of terrifying violence on the country’s population: civil war, mass starvation, genocide, deportation and widespread poverty.
The most enduring domestic legacy of this chaotic history has been the division of Ukraine into two geographic and two Slavic language camps: west and east; Ukrainian and Russian. The capital Kiev sits between the two like a wobbly bridge, hoping to reconcile the sometimes hostile traditions. In the darkest days of the twentieth century the west of the country became linked in some people’s minds with fascism and Germany, while the east was regarded a bulwark of communism and Muscovy.
This split is not always so clear – pockets of Ukrainian speakers are found in the east, while pro-Russian candidates often pick up unexpected votes in parts of the west. Nonetheless, it is a useful rule of thumb. Since independence,