by D S Kane
The bay was empty where the hard disk should have been.
Panicked, he rushed to the living room and checked his other computer, the print server with a RAID array backup.
“Damn.” The server also bore gaping holes.
Someone had stolen his clients’ data. Every client, every secret. What would those clients do to him if their secrets became public? His heart fluttered.
Despite the cutouts he’d always employed as intermediaries to maintain his safety, someone had managed to penetrate his false identities. Someone knew where he lived and who he was. Someone with very powerful skills. The thief had to have come from a small, select group. To survive this, he’d need to find out who it was, and then destroy the intruder and their client.
He scanned the ceiling. Holes in the plaster where he’d placed the camcorders showed that all ten had been ripped out and were gone, even the dummies.
Each of the missing cams used self-contained storage. Everything they’d recorded was also gone. He cursed.
But there was still a chance he could identify the intruder. The Chinese Cyberwar Technology Lab had gifted him with an alpha test unit of new technology. An undetectable video cam was sewn into the tablecloth on his kitchen table. It was made from fiber optic microfiber thread, and used the apartment’s many wall-mirrors to reconstruct video from various points where the threads crossed. The cloth cam transmitted a wireless signal at 805.13p, outside the range of detection by any consumer wireless device.
He pressed another button on the jammer-scanner and the tiny display flashed the letters “OK.” He walked to one of the mirrors and moved his hand while he watched the scanner. A wavy line on the screen indicated it was recording his movement. The nanotech cloth cam worked. He looked up and saw his reflection in the mirror, pudgy and short. The mirror! Not just a mirror. He took another look at the tablecloth. Despite their best efforts to avoid leaving their images behind, the interlopers hadn’t realized they were still being recorded.
Wing rushed from the apartment to the laundry room in the basement. He produced a bump-key set taped behind the sink and popped open the utility closet door. He’d attached the receiver under the closet’s bottom shelf using duct tape. He pressed a button, and the unit beeped, transmitting a series of video and audio files to his smartphone.
As he waited for the elevator, he pulled the gold fountain pen he’d stolen years ago from his father out of his pocket and rolled it in his fingers.
Did the theft have to do with the trip to Beijing? Late last year, his father had called William to demand he return to Beijing. William had been reluctant but met with his father, now a tottering old man.
William had helped the government search for the source of several hacks into the CSIS servers, ironic since it was what had got him thrown out of China.
He’d lied to his father about the source of the hacks, saying the Americans had done it. But he’d discovered it had been the Mossad, the employer of his friend, Jon Sommers.
The Chinese government was desperate for the skills of major league hackers to manage their Technology Development Department and its subunits, the 6000s. His reward from his father was to make him an officer in the Chinese cyberwar unit, and his father had welcomed him back.
To William, it was the ultimate punishment.
He’d presented his report on their mainframe server vulnerabilities face-to-face with the leaders of the Ministry of Security’s Cyberwar Development Division. He remembered how much pride his father showed as William completed his slide show. And how confused its leaders were in the aftermath. Before he arrived, they’d been confident their systems were safe.
His father had ordered him to stay in Beijing. William had argued and left with just the major’s badge as a compromise.
What a joke. He’d been living in Hong Kong for more than a decade. He’d never wanted to return. And now his father wanted him back? Officer status in the Chinese Army would create endless problems for his freelance hacking business. He thought communism was a terrible joke. Almost as bad as democracy. All governments were nothing more than the lies the rulers used to control their people. And his father embodied all that William distrusted.
Had his father sent the intruders? Or worse, had one of his father’s competitors sent them? He shook his head and paced in a circle. By the time the elevator doors opened again, he was hyperventilating.
William reentered the apartment. He connected the huge television to his smartphone and wiped the perspiration from his glasses.
He pressed a button on the remote and stared at the screen, his lips compressed. The time and date stamp on the video indicated the theft had taken place midmorning yesterday, when bright sunlight scoured the room. He stared at the interloper’s face, covered by a ski mask. Brown eyes, with no folds around them. She was Caucasian. She had the narrow hips and tiny breasts of a thin and athletic woman, slinking around like his cat, until she paused in front of his bedroom computer. When Mousey Tongue jumped onto the couch behind her, she’d turned in a swift move, her palm heel ready to strike whatever she found.
When he saw her shift toward his cat, his hands formed fists. She’d stopped herself in mid-swing and when Mousey Tongue froze, she’d continued the move, grabbing and petting his kitty. His rage turned to confusion.
She was lightning fast. The woman placed the cat back onto the couch and moved into the bedroom, where she caressed the computer’s rear, then pulled a screwdriver from the front pocket of her cargo slacks and removed the hard drive in seconds.
When she turned and faced the kitchen, he paused the video. Brown stringy hair peeked from beneath her ski cap. About five-foot-seven, and probably less than one-hundred-thirty pounds. He watched her steal the hardware containing all his computer files. William pounded the coffee table.
He let the video run and noticed how, after she’d removed the other computer’s hard drive, she’d scanned for each video cam and found them all within seconds. Except for the new cloth cam.
She used his kitchen chair and the screwdriver to pry the cams from the ceiling, each one in a few seconds. Then, scrutinized each drive to see if there was a transmitter on any of them. When she’d determined that each had self-contained memory chips and none contained a transmitter, she stuffed all she stole into a backpack and swept out his door like a cool breeze.
He checked the time stamp. She’d taken less than five minutes to rip him off and destroy his life.
He watched the video for the fifth time. William knew everyone who competed in the hacker challenges. He thought of each of his contacts in the CSIS, the Chinese intelligence agency, and the Mossad, and concluded she wasn’t anyone he knew of. Was she a covert for some intelligence agency he’d never worked with?
He regretted his failure to secure his office, his home.
But among all his feelings, what won out, what grew huge and nested itself within his gut was a grueling fear of this woman. What if she returned? She’d already bested his security measures once. He was sure nothing he could do would keep her out. Dread of her grew within him, cutting a wide swath in his self-confidence. If she had wanted to, she could easily have murdered him.
He paced, shaking his head. He was a hacker, not a soldier. He’d been successful avoiding danger for twelve years. Until now. What luck to be visiting his father and out of his apartment while she was ripping him off.
What if she made his stolen files public? He found him self shivering again. If CSIS found out his biggest client was the Mossad, they’d kill him. If the Israelis found out he was now a major in the Chinese army, they’d terminate him. And if either knew this woman had stolen their secrets from him, they’d hunt him down wherever he went.
If she told anyone he lived in Hong Kong, they’d be able to find him. And if she could find him here, he wasn’t safe anywhere he went. Flight wasn’t an option. He paced the room. I’ll never be safe.
Yes, it was well past time for him to learn how to defend himsel
f. Not in the traditional, ordinary sense. No, William wouldn’t buy a gun or take a martial arts class. He smiled and felt a tiny bit safer. He’d improve his electronic security and set traps around the apartment. Traps that would kill an intruder. Traps only he would know how to disarm. He picked up Mousey and stroked the cat. Traps no cat could trigger.
He fingered the fountain pen in his pocket while he spent a few more moments thinking.
What had she come here to steal? In seconds, he was sure. It must have been the work products he’d stolen from a defense contractor in California last month for Yigdal Ben-Levy. What was the company’s name? Stillwater Technologies. He thought of calling Jon Sommers or Avram Shimmel, but one or both of them might have had something to do with this. Who could he trust? There was always Betsy the Butterfly, but the female hacker abhorred danger even more than he did. In the end, he decided the answer was to trust no one. Sommers had told him last year it was the first and most important of the spy bible’s rules, the Moscow rules.
Ben-Levy. What had the spymaster at the Mossad neglected to tell him? What had he gotten himself into?
Chapter Three
Waiting area outside the Oval Office, White House, Washington, DC
June 18, 4:38 p.m.
A man in a business suit touched Gilbert Greenfield’s shoulder. “He’ll see you now.”
Greenfield walked into the gilded office and nodded at the man behind the desk.
“Gil, good of you to come.”
Greenfield waited in the center of the room. When the President extended his hand, he shook it.
“Have a seat at the couch. I’ll get us some coffee and cookies.” He tapped the intercom. “Irene, bring the snacks now, please.”
It was all Greenfield could do to keep from chuckling. The most powerful man in the world was addicted to oatmeal cookies. The President seemed distracted, shifting his gaze from Greenfield to the corners of the room. Greenfield sat and opened the red folder. “Mr. President, I brought the status report for the new spy tool.”
The President sat next to him. “Good, good.” He reached out his hand and Greenfield placed a single sheet in his grasp. “So, what’s here?”
“Mr. President, what if we could reduce the federal deficit to zero?”
The President looked like a startled bird. “Have you gone crazy?”
Greenfield patted the file. “There are more than four million people with security clearances. More than 6,900 companies doing covert work for us, and about 1,200 governmental agencies run some form of spy service as part of their work. It’s expensive, and no one can manage that much of an empire. Their work-products are often faulty. What if we could eliminate espionage and black missions forever?”
The President’s mouth formed a big O.
Greenfield nodded. “On a lark, I asked our weapons division at DARPA to request research and development on a new tool,” he said, referring to the Defense Department’s agency for advanced research projects. It’s called ‘Bug-Lok.’ I think it it’s the spy-tool equivalent of the atomic bomb, a major trump card for us. It hooks up with ECHELON, but for the most part makes that old signal-intercept system obsolete. It also interfaces with the NSA’s identity tracking systems, and there are nearly forty of those. The report in your hands contains some preliminary results.”
The President scanned a few of the pages. “I don’t have an engineering background.” He handed the page back to Greenfield.
The spymaster put it back into his attaché case. “Since you decommissioned DARPA into a project management office to save us money, we currently get everything developed by the Mossad’s R&D weapons development facility, the Ness Ziona in Herzliyya.”
“Yeah, yeah. So?”
Greenfield had worked hard to get the man his party’s nomination, knowing how easy it was to direct him. He’d convinced the powers running the party that this man would be their tool, not a free thinker. It had worked and now Gil, the man behind the throne, was the most powerful person on earth. He took a deep breath. “I commissioned the Jews to produce a device which, when swallowed or injected, will provide tracking signals for its target for up to six weeks. Last year they completed the blueprints and we had them build it. It worked. A good start.”
This was not entirely true. Not only had every test subject died, but worse, one of the corpses had disappeared from the test facility before the device could be removed in autopsy by the head Israeli scientist, a man named Lev Robinson. Greenfield refocused. “This year I asked them for something more powerful. The upgraded version is smaller than the head of a pin. It attaches itself to a neural bundle in the target’s medulla oblongata, records what the target sees and hears, and transmits the target’s exact location. The device records and transmits the data real-time via satellite link to a collection computer.”
The President’s face went blank. “We can do that?”
Greenfield nodded. “Not only that, but the device contains a micro-chamber holding a lethal dose of a new ricin derivative, so we can terminate the target if we so desire, before the device is eliminated as body waste. We just use a remote ‘kill’ switch and it transmits to the Bug-Lok’s receiver. After death, the device dissolves. Sir, I’m ready now to have them complete development.”
The President settled back in his seat. Seconds passed and he tapped a pen against the desk. “Remote assassination, huh? This is an ethical minefield, even worse than drones. Do I really need to know any of this? Can’t you just get it done without placing me in the loop? Don’t I need ‘deniability’ for this?”
Greenfield nodded. “Absolutely, sir, but I’ll need funding to complete the project. There may be a problem with the tech.” Greenfield hesitated for a few seconds.
The President remained silent, rose and paced his office.
When he sat, his face was set in a pout. “What? What’s the problem, for Chrissake?”
“The Jews claim the device is unreliable. According to them, some of the test subjects died within minutes after ingestion.”
The President pointed his forefinger at Greenfield. “I knew I’d find myself in a mess.” He shook his head. “Okay. Who’d they use? Who were the test subjects they murdered?”
“They have a few thousand suspected imprisoned terrorists as their test population. But, you see, sir, I don’t believe them. We have a mole in the Ness Ziona and we obtained their proof-of-concept test results. Nineteen out of twenty five insertions worked. The subjects survived for at least three days.”
“So they lied to us.”
Greenfield nodded again. “Yes. But we have another problem. A hacker stole the plans and test results from the Ness Ziona, and then broke into our servers and deleted our copies. We don’t know who the hacker works for. Probably the Chinese, but it could be the North Koreans or the Saudis. The Mossad is investigating. So I arranged to have the plans stolen from the hacker by another one of ours. We used one of Mark McDougal’s contractors.”
The President frowned. “What if the Mossad finds out about our hacker? They’d seek some kind of reprisal. Israel is our only reliable ally in the Middle East. Shit, Gil. What can we do to protect ourselves?”
“Sir, the hacker is an independent contractor, so any connection would be tenuous. And what we’re doing with the Israelis is our reprisal. They’ve stolen from us many times. Remember? Plans for the NSA’s ECHELON, and the hydrogen bomb. We’ve stolen from them. The Stuxnet computer worm, for example. Turnabout is fair play.”
“Yeah. So this is a political morass as well as an ethical one. Okay then. Do we have the plans now?”
Greenfield shook his head. “Sir, I know this is confusing. But after our hacker completed the assignment, the plans simply disappeared with the cash we advanced the hacker. Probably stolen by one of the Mossad’s yahalomin. The Mossad must have been able to backtrace the theft to our hacker’s computer IP address. We had a different hacker reacquire them, but we’re not sure if the Jews altered the formulas and pl
anted fake plans to give us non-working models. I’ve scheduled Mark to test them. Within a month, I’ll know if they work.”
The President shifted on the couch. “Shit. Spy-versus-spy stuff.” He shook his head. “What if news about this hacking escapade leaks?”
Greenfield nodded. Sooner or later, everything leaked in Washington. “It would be a disaster. Every superpower on the planet would want its own version. We must keep this black forever.”
“Can we? What about Israel?”
Greenfield waved a hand. “Members of their Knesset are on our payroll. As long as they remain in place, we’re okay.”
“That’s still a big risk. Their government changes with every election.”
This time Greenfield remained silent. He thought about the truth, so different from what he’d just told the commander-in-chief.
He’d had Lee Ainsley, one of Mark McDougal’s hackers, steal a copy of the original plans. But before Ainsley could deliver them, someone deleted them from Ainsley’s computer. McDougal hired an independent contractor to re-hack the plans. This hacker was someone they hadn’t used before. From their correspondence, McDougal thought it was a woman. She delivered the plans to Greenfield’s weapons manufacturer in San Jose, a company called Stillwater Technologies. But the plans they received were flawed. Either the Ness Ziona had failed to produce what the contract called for, or the hacker had picked up plans that were nothing more than disinformation.
