Twenty-Nine Cozy Bears

16

International Airport, Tehran, Iran

Alek became the center of attention as he was paid to do. The Man pondered this as he exploited Alek's talent to fade from their attention, moving toward his gear which was unpacked from the camouflage of the lumber cord. With the shipping container now between him and the Iranians, he focused his attention on his gear. Three of the bags were his. He pulled them over, used the container as a bench and commenced checking that the important objects existed, and were initialized for use.

He disliked carrying weight, especially dead weight. He did not mind carrying a weapon, which is what he initialized. Now he would not mind carrying his weapons to where ever they intended to stash them.

Alek had the Persians interested in 'False Friend' words between languages. False Friends are a bane to those who learn multiple languages.

A 'False Friend' occurrence is when two words from different languages sound the same or close enough to be mistaken often: example — The German word for "poison" is Gift. The word for "poisonous" is "giftig." Alek was entertaining their hosts with the False Friends between Russian and Persian.

To a Persian, the Russian word for Faculty sounds like their word for deceitful, or crafty. College, sounds like imposter. University sounds like chaos or disorder. Exam, is torment. Diploma chimes as double-dealing. Professor is often confused in Persian for bragger.

After thinking about that last, the man could understand the confusion for that one.

Alek mentioned two others but had turned away and spoke too low for the man to understand at the distance.

A few minutes passed before Luca wandered back to join in checking their gear. They would check Alek's for him, since he was working.

They booted their laptops, and ran system scans, but kept their WiFi off.

In Russian Luca said, "I tried that missing port."

"Yes?"

"Doesn't exist, like you said," Luca confessed, "A waste of time."

The man raised an eyebrow in reaction to this, "A waste of time? And how would you know that if you didn't actually try to make it work?

Luca glanced at him without turning, keeping his focus on his laptop screen, but then in a mono tone of self-chiding, "What is so important? You sound angry." 

"Because you are to good for me. I can't challenge you and you need to be challenged. I am tempted to order you to figure it out, to make it work, and punish you if you give up."

"Sounds unfair. What is challenging about that?" Luca sulked.

"Have you not figured it out yet?" he asked, turning his full attention to the younger man. "That's our job description."

"What is?"

"Being wrong." The man waited a beat, and then said, "When you are creating a new malware or virus or worm for us, how often do you get it right the first time?"

Luca grinned, "Every time. We're Russian."

The man waited, finding this too important to get distracted from. After a empty pause, Luca's grin faded, and he shrugged, "Never. It usually takes anywhere from ten to twenty versions before the right idea and design are figured out. Then maybe four or five major alterations before true form is discovered. How often do you make mistakes?"

He was turning back to his luggage when Luca asked him this, and he froze with incongruity narrowing his eyes, "Mistakes? None," he said, "but I get it wrong thousands of times.. Thousands an hour. In fact, that's really all I do, is sit at my desk making wrong decisions. Over and over and over. And when I finally do get it right, we access the network, lay your wares and traps and then back out making it look ike we were never there." His eyes flicked up and to the right, "That takes, what? Half hour? Maybe? Weeks and months filled with hours of failure for thirty minutes of success before we choose our next target."

He finished turning back to his equipment, "But I don't make mistakes. I mean to perform every attempt, and every rendition of every idea."

Luca eyes showed his doubt, perhaps shy of getting caught in some elaborate hazing — which wasn't paranoias, just good sense. "Major, with all due respect, I think you are just playing at semantics."

"Huh," he grunted, while putting his equipment back in the bags, "Anti-semantic bustard."