“I cannot be certain that this is the correct course, minister. We never have such knowledge. But I can say: This is the course of action that I would take.”
“And you will keep this secret?”
“I have no other loyalty but to you, and China.”
They shook hands. Li Zian turned off the scratchy sound of the tape recorder and walked into the Ministry. His aides greeted him anxiously. His chief of staff giggled nervously. Li told him to confirm the travel plans for this month that had been made provisionally and to move up his departure for the next day.
Li went upstairs to his office and entered the shower stall of his private bathroom, where he composed and encrypted the personal message to his agent, Rukou, telling her when and where they would meet.
36.
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Denise Ford had a gold bracelet that her father had given her, the year she came back from Paris. He knew what she did for a living; it was a source of pride for him that his daughter was part of the secret world. When she put the bracelet on her wrist, it was as if her father were holding her hand. He had told her before he died that she was part of a “great chain of being,” a Hoffman family tradition of independent, strong-minded public service. If he were still alive, would he understand that she was doing the right thing? Would he see that when her idealism had been blocked in one direction, she had found another? Would he forgive her for what she was about to do?
What would her Uncle Cyril say to her now? He had died of a heart attack two years before, after having been fired from a senior position in another intelligence agency. Cyril had at first been inconsolable, but Denise had cooked for him, read to him, shared gossip. She spent weekends at his big house in Great Falls, walking in his fields and gardens, listening to him sing arias from Philip Glass across his tomato plants. He had warned his niece, more than once, to quit the intelligence business. He said it was like a company in liquidation. She had nodded, but said no more.
Ford’s bracelet clinked against her dressing table with that bright, hollow sound of pure gold. She arched her neck proudly as she looked at her face in the mirror. She clasped the bracelet to her chest and headed out the door.
Ford steered her Lexus up the George Washington Parkway toward her late Uncle Cyril’s house in Great Falls, which was now occupied by a cousin. From a locked shed, she retrieved her transmission device. She signed on using a password generator that she had hidden in the fence behind the shed and prepared a message that could be sent to the person she described to herself as her “special friend” in Beijing. She pointed the communications north-northeast, to a precise compass heading, and sent a short-burst transmission to a well-hidden relay device a few miles away, which sent it on to a Chinese satellite in geosynchronous orbit.
It’s done, she told herself. I’m gone.
John Vandel followed Ford’s movements from the operations room in the basement at Langley. The surveillance was invisible but seamless. He knew the FBI would have wanted to arrest Ford the moment she sent her message, if they’d had the chance. But Vandel had talked to Miguel Votaw, the FBI deputy director. He agreed that Vandel’s plan for a sting abroad trumped law enforcement.
The NSA was able to capture the encrypted signal, but a few hours later, a liaison officer reported to Vandel that the Chinese cipher was unbreakable, at least in practical terms. A brute force attack could take months or even years, given existing computing capabilities. A quantum computer could break such an encryption scheme someday, in theory, but not now.
Vandel was tired of hearing that “someday” refrain, but he could guess what Denise Ford had transmitted: She had told Beijing that she was coming out and that she was bringing a defector with her. What he badly needed wasn’t the outgoing transmission but the return message from Beijing that would specify details about Ford’s meeting point abroad. Knowing the city and day wasn’t enough: He wouldn’t have operational control if he couldn’t arrive first at the rendezvous point chosen by his adversary. Vandel might be a gambler, but he was also a card counter.
Vandel was working out in his basement that night when an idea fell into his head. He recalled the man’s round, earnest face. The name didn’t come to him at first, but then he remembered it: Jason Schmidt, the man who claimed to have captured the quantum holy grail. Other computer scientists doubted him, but he had insisted to Kate Sturm and his other intelligence community handlers that his super-cold computing architecture could solve problems that were beyond any other existing machine.
Vandel dismounted his treadmill and walked to his secure phone. If not now, when? The chief executive of QED was busy in the lab and couldn’t be located at first, but eventually he was summoned. He started off by apologizing, assuming that he had done something else wrong, but Vandel cut him off.
“I need help decrypting something, Mr. Schmidt,” he said.
“Ask the NSA,” responded the scientist. “That’s not our department, yet. We’re still in beta.”
“NSA says it’s impossible. They say the only way to factor an encryption string this long is with a quantum computer, which doesn’t exist. But then I thought, wait a minute: I know somebody who says he has already built a quantum computer. So I was thinking, maybe you could try your baby on my decryption problem.”
“Technically, it’s not a quantum computer, Mr. Green. As I have told you and many, many of your colleagues, it’s a quantum annealing machine. It solves optimization problems; it finds minimum values. It recognizes patterns. It’s not Nirvana.”
“Listen, I don’t care about the technical shit. I just want to know if you could run an encrypted message into your machine and, I don’t know, optimize it. So that I could read it. Or part of it. The message will be transmitted soon. I need this really fast. I’m in a jam. What about it? Can you do it?”
There was a long pause on the line, as the computer scientist turned the problem over in his head.
“How long will the message be?”
“Short, maybe five hundred characters. But it will be seriously encrypted. My guys said forget it. What do you think?”
“There’s always a correct answer and a real answer. The correct answer is no, it’s impossible. The real answer is maybe. If I can find a way to set it up as an optimization problem, so that it would collapse to a minimum value that was the answer, then it would work. Maybe.”
“I’ll take the real answer. Make it happen, Mr. Schmidt. Please. I’ll have someone send you the encrypted message as soon as we get it. Give it a shot. That’s all I ask.”
That night, as Vandel was dozing off, he was awakened by the ODNI watch officer. He reported that at 10:30 a.m. Beijing time, one of the National Reconnaissance Office’s low-orbit satellites over the Chinese capital had captured images of two men walking outside the Ministry of State Security compound.
The analysts believed that one of them was the principal target of their surveillance, Minister Li Zian; the other appeared to be Wang Ji, the chief of the American Operations Division of the Ministry. Beijing station had attempted to intercept their conversation in the garden, using close-in collection systems that were already in place. This effort had been unsuccessful, because of counter-surveillance efforts by one of the men, who appeared to be carrying a sound generator to cover his voice.
Vandel asked the watch officer if they had any other means of close surveillance. The Beijing station chief came back fifteen minutes later and apologized that they had no real-time access to Li’s offices.
Vandel waited through the night for Minister Li to upload his message to a Chinese satellite for transmission to his agent on the ground in Washington. The transmission came just after 1:00 a.m. It was hidden in a stream of random signals, but the NSA analysts were able to detect the familiar addressing protocol, even though they couldn’t decrypt the message itself.
Vandel ordered the watch officer to send these new signals to someone he described as a contractor with an experimental decrypti
on technique. When the watch officer questioned sharing such sensitive information with green badgers, Vandel overruled him. “They’re all I’ve got,” he said, hanging up the phone.
Harris Chang awoke repeatedly through the night. He hadn’t had an unbroken eight hours in several weeks. His father always teased him when he was a boy that he was addicted to sleep. The other youngsters in Flagstaff might smoke dope or drink too much beer, but Harris’s secret vice was that he liked to sleep as long and as often as he could.
“You are moyunga! A lazy boy!” his father had said to him more than once, trying to get him up for church on a Sunday. When they got to church, he would often doze off again.
But now, when he waited for rest and release, it didn’t come.
Why was Harris Chang anxious? It wasn’t really that he was afraid of Vandel or the FBI investigators who had been following him, listening to his phone calls, reading a lifetime of his messages. The investigation was an insult, but he knew it would go away, and even if it persisted, he didn’t care: A good lawyer would untangle this mess in court if necessary. No jury would convict him of espionage, whatever Vandel might threaten.
And it wasn’t fear about the operation that lay ahead, either. The danger of kidnapping was real; so was the danger of a botched meeting that would end in gunfire. His friend Mark Flanagan had already been murdered, and a bad death, too, wracked by fever, his organs failing one by one.
But physical anxiety wasn’t keeping Chang awake. As an Army officer in Iraq, he had thought more than once that he wouldn’t survive a firefight or a suicide bomb attack. He had discovered that when it came to physical fear, his circuits went cold instead of hot as real danger approached. He believed in himself and his mission and, to the extent that anyone can be prepared to die, he was unafraid.
What had destroyed Harris Chang’s tranquility was something else. He had lost faith. Serving his country had been his only dream growing up. West Point had been a kind of liberation, giving him an identity that wasn’t racial or cultural. His service truly had been perfect freedom, as a chaplain had said to him one long night at a forward operating base. This identity had been shattered, and it couldn’t be reassembled simply by Vandel’s promise of rehabilitation.
The reason it had been so easy to voice the defector’s script with Denise Ford was that it expressed what Chang had begun to believe. He had been betrayed. He didn’t trust Vandel or the agency. He had fallen out of love.
Toward noon, as an early snow dusted Washington, Denise Ford posted a note on the CIA employees’ classified “swap-mart,” advertising to sell her 2014 Lexus Hybrid SUV. She said that she had purchased the vehicle in Amsterdam, and that it had just two thousand miles on the odometer.
Kate Sturm saw the message just after it was posted. She called Vandel, who was asleep on a couch in his office.
“They’re meeting in Amsterdam,” she said. “The day after tomorrow. What do you want me to do? Should I contact Support in Amsterdam Base?”
“God no,” said Vandel. “Don’t tell them anything. The Director would have a fit. Just get me on a black G-5 overnight tonight. You’re coming, too.”
“No way,” said Sturm. “I have stuff to do here. Why bring me?”
“Because you know how to shoot a gun. Just get us on a plane, together, tonight.”
Vandel called Harris Chang, who had just seen the swap-mart message himself and was already collecting his alias identity documentation.
“You’re on,” said Vandel. “She just posted.”
“I saw it. I’m booking a KLM flight tonight from Dulles, in alias. Do we know where the meeting place is in Amsterdam?”
“I’m working on it,” said Vandel.
“You mean we don’t know yet?” asked Chang. The question hung in the air a moment.
“Working on it,” repeated Vandel.
“Shit,” muttered Chang. “Well, when she tells me where, I’ll message you. If she tells me.”
Chang knew that by the time Ford informed him where their clandestine defection would take place, it might be too late to make preparations. They would go to the meeting with Li blind, without operational control. What would happen then? That was unscripted. Maybe Chang would wake up in Beijing, or not wake up ever again.
“Keep cool,” said Vandel. “We’ll break that message.”
“Un-huh.”
“And listen, Harris, one thing to remember about Amsterdam. If you get stoned, don’t fall into the canal.”
Despite himself, Chang laughed. CIA officers never really had to grow up. Before he could respond, the line went dead. Chang removed his alias passport and credit card from the safe and booked the 5:50 flight for the Netherlands.
The analysts monitoring signals from Beijing confirmed that the Minister of State Security was readying his personal plane for overseas travel. A flight plan had been filed listing Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam as the initial destination, followed by Zaventem Airport in Brussels and Gatwick Airport south of London.
Minister Li’s limousine had been tracked traveling to the headquarters of the Central Military Commission and back to the Ministry. Perhaps Li’s enemies were surprised and happy to see him leave the country when his ministry was in such danger. Li was playing for table stakes, too.
Vandel called Jason Schmidt in Seattle to see if he had made any progress with the cipher. Vandel apologized for the pressure but said he needed the quickest possible decryption of the time-sensitive message Schmidt had been given. If it couldn’t be broken in twelve to twenty-four hours, its value would disappear.
“Get off my back, please, Mr. Green,” said the exasperated computer scientist. “Pressure from you is making this work more difficult. It’s a technical problem, and it has a technical solution. But this isn’t a classic computer. I can’t just encode an algorithm. I have to tune the qubits so they’ll yield the least-energy solution to my problem. It’s like composing a piece of music. You can’t make it better by trying harder. The way to set this up may come to me, but not if I keep having to answer the phone from Washington.”
Vandel apologized. He couldn’t help himself. He told Schmidt to take the time he needed.
“I’m asking the impossible,” he said, knowing that this would be another incentive.
Schmidt tinkered at his whiteboard, writing formulas and then wiping them off as new programming steps occurred to him. Factoring a number could be an annealing problem, couldn’t it? It was a set of unique, minimum values. His machine just had to tunnel through the landscape of numbers and let the solution reveal itself. Schmidt poured himself a Diet Coke, then a coffee, then a Red Bull. He played Rodgers and Hammerstein on his Sonos system, as he scribbled equations and notes and ran off to tune his machine.
Late into the night, he found himself thinking about the pictographs people used to illustrate the paradox of quantum computing. Things can be in two places at once. The coin is both heads and tails. The cat is alive and dead. A bit is zero and one. It’s only the act of observing these phenomena that collapses their ambiguous state. Schmidt had spent his career behaving as if he understood this imponderable nature of matter, but did he? He wrote on his whiteboard in big, block letters the famous dictum of physicist Richard Feynman: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
Schmidt fell asleep at his desk. As he dozed, his mind charted equations and code on the border of consciousness. “I am awake and asleep,” he said to himself in the dream. Numbers formed in his head, the digits spinning like the rotor wheels on a code machine. They stopped at a particular value.
Schmidt bolted upright. He walked quickly to the whiteboard and began scribbling notations he had half-seen in his dream state. He looked for the puzzle pieces that had straight edges, which formed the borders of his problem. He looked for ways to tease out repetitions that might exist in the plaintext message before it was encrypted.
He simulated. His annealing machine might no
t be a quantum computer, but at very low temperatures, when electrons spin both ways at once, it was capable of quantum effects. He spooled up the logic threads and then unspooled them as instructions to his qubits and couplers. When the sun came up over Lake Washington, Schmidt thought that maybe he had begun to make a little progress.
A clean Gulfstream G-5 was ready at the Signature Air terminal at Dulles. It had been rented by a CIA proprietary from a time-share company. The tail numbers had never been used operationally. The crew wanted to file the flight plan. The pilot had just called the office of the proprietary in Rockville to ask for the names and passport numbers of the passengers.
Kate Sturm called the proprietary back and gave the supervising officer the alias that Vandel would be using on the passenger manifest and her own. She had decided that Vandel was right: He needed backup, and it was true that very few people at the CIA could shoot as well as she could.
Vandel had one last task before he left for the airport. He asked the ODNI watch officer at Liberty Crossing to request from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s military attaché in the Netherlands the name and contact details of the most senior Chinese PLA officer in Amsterdam. Vandel asked that this information be prepared in a restricted-handling channel and waiting for him when he arrived at Schiphol the next morning.
Vandel composed in his mind the message he would send to General Wu Huning’s operative, the representative in Holland of the PLA’s Second Department. He was confident that it would be believed: The PLA and the CIA shared a common enemy.
Denise Ford carefully composed a note on her personal stationery. The thick sheets of paper were the color of clotted cream. She put the note in an envelope and addressed it to her former French teacher at Yale, and she mailed it at the corner box before she left for the airport. The Office of Security cleaned the box later that afternoon when they secured her town house. They put the letter in a plastic envelope and sealed it for later. The letter read:
The Quantum Spy Page 30
