by Tom Clancy
Adam passed his entire billfold over to the officer who requested it, and he stood quietly while the man looked it over.
“What’s all that in your car?”
“That is my job.”
“Your job? What, are you a spy?”
Adam Yao laughed. “Not quite. I own a firm that investigates intellectual property theft. My card is right next to my license there. SinoShield Business Investigative Services Limited.”
The cop looked the card over. “What do you do?”
“I have clients in Europe and the U.S. If they suspect a Chinese firm is manufacturing counterfeit versions of their goods over here, they hire me to investigate. If we think they have a case they’ll hire local attorneys and try to get the counterfeiting stopped.” Adam smiled. “Business is good.”
The cop relaxed a little. It was a reasonable explanation for why this guy was sitting in a parking space taking pictures of the comings and goings next door.
He asked, “You are investigating someone at the Tycoon Court?”
“I’m sorry, officer. I am not allowed to reveal any information about an ongoing investigation.”
“The security office over there called about you. Said you were here yesterday, too. They think you are going to rob them or something.”
Adam chuckled and said, “I’m not going to rob them. I won’t bother them at all, though I wish I could sit in their lobby and enjoy the air-conditioning. You can check me out. I’ve got friends at HKP, mostly in B Department. You could call and get someone to vouch for me.” The Hong Kong Police B Department was the investigative branch, the detectives and organized crime force. The officers, Adam knew, would be A Department, the division under which the patrol cops worked.
The officer looking Adam over took his time. He asked Yao about some B Department police he knew, and Yao answered comfortably until a connection was made.
Finally satisfied, the two policemen headed back into their patrol car and left Adam by his Mercedes.
He climbed back inside his car and slammed his hand on the steering wheel in frustration. Other than tag numbers that would probably lead him nowhere, it had been a wasted day. He’d learned nothing about the counterfeiter and his activities he had not already known yesterday, and he’d been compromised by some damn security guard at a condominium tower.
Adam was once again, however, greatly appreciative of his fantastic cover for status. Running a private investigation firm gave him a ready-made excuse to be doing just about anything he could imagine being caught doing while in performance of his clandestine duties for the Agency.
As far as CIA nonofficial-cover “white side” jobs were concerned, Adam Yao’s SinoShield Business Investigative Services Ltd. was as solid as they came.
He drove off, down the hill and back toward his office near the harbor.
TWENTY-FOUR
Jack Ryan, Jr., woke next to Melanie Kraft and immediately realized his phone was ringing. He had no idea of the time at first, but his body told him it was well before his normal internal clock’s wake-up call.
He grabbed the ringing phone and looked at it. 2:05 a.m. He groaned. He checked the caller ID.
Gavin Biery.
He groaned again. “Really?”
Melanie stirred next to him. “Work?”
“Yeah.” He did not want her to be suspicious, though, so he followed that with: “The director of the IT department.”
Melanie laughed softly and said, “You left your computer on.”
Jack chuckled, too, and started to put the phone back down.
“Must be important, though. You should take it.”
Jack knew she was right. He sat up and answered. “Hello, Gavin.”
“You have got to come in right now!” said a breathless Gavin Biery.
“It’s two a.m.”
“It’s two-oh-six. Get here by two-thirty.” Biery hung up.
Jack put the phone back on the nightstand, fighting off a very strong urge to hurl it against the wall. “I’ve got to go in.”
“For the IT guy?” Melanie’s tone was incredulous.
“I’ve been helping him on a project. It was important, but not ‘come in the middle of the night’ important. But he seems to think this warrants a two-thirty a.m. meeting.”
Melanie rolled over, away from Jack. “Have fun.”
Jack could tell she did not believe him. He sensed that a lot from her, even when he was telling her the truth.
—
Jack pulled into the parking lot of Hendley Associates just after two-thirty. He came through the front door and gave a tired wave to William, the night security officer behind the front desk.
“Morning, Mr. Ryan. Mr. Biery said you’d be staggering in looking like you just woke up. I’ve got to say you look a lot better than Mr. Biery does during normal business hours.”
“He’s going to look even worse after I kick his ass for dragging me out of bed.”
William laughed.
Jack found Gavin Biery in his office. He fought his mild anger over Biery’s intrusion into his personal life and asked, “What’s up?”
“I know who put the virus on the Libyan’s machine.”
This woke Jack up more than the drive from Columbia. “You know the identity of Center?”
Biery shrugged dramatically. “That I can’t be sure of. But if it’s not Center, it’s somebody working for or with him.”
Jack looked over at Biery’s coffeemaker, hoping to pour himself a cup. But the machine was off and the pot was empty.
“You haven’t been here all night?”
“No. I was working from home. I did not want to expose the Campus network to what I was doing, so I did it from one of my personal machines. I just got here.”
Jack sat down. It was sounding more and more like Biery had had a very good reason to call him in after all.
“What have you been doing from home?”
“I’ve been hanging out in the digital underground.”
Jack was still tired. Too tired to play twenty questions with Gavin. “Can you just fill me in while I sit here quietly with my eyes closed?”
Biery had mercy on Ryan. “There are websites one can visit to conduct illegal business in cyberspace. You can go to these sort of online bazaars and buy fake IDs, recipes to build bombs, stolen credit card information, and even access to networks of previously hacked computers.”
“You mean botnets.”
“Right. You can rent or buy access to infected machines around the world.”
“You can just put in your credit card number and rent a botnet?”
Biery shook his head. “Not your credit card number. Bitcoin. It’s an online currency that is not traceable. Just like cash but better. It’s all about anonymity out there.”
“So are you telling me you rented a botnet?”
“Several botnets.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“It’s illegal if you do something illegal with them. I did not.”
“What did you do?” Jack found himself playing twenty questions with Biery again.
“I had this theory. You know how I told you the string of machine code left on the Istanbul Drive could lead us to whoever the culprit was?”
“Sure.”
“I decided I would reach out in the cyberunderground, looking for other infected machines that also have the same lines of machine code that I found on the Libyan’s machine.”
“That sounds like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Well, I figured there would be many machines out there with this virus. So it’s more like looking for any one of a bushel of needles in a haystack, and I did what I could to make the haystack smaller.”
“How so
?”
“There are a billion networked computers in the world, but the subset of hackable machines is much smaller, maybe a hundred million. And the subset of machines that have been hacked is probably a third of that.”
“But still, you had to check thirty million computers to—”
“No Jack, because malware that good isn’t going to just be used on a couple of machines. No, I figured there were thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of nodes out there with this same remote-access Trojan on them. And I narrowed it down further by only renting botnets of machines using the same operating system as the Libyan machines and high-quality processors and components, because I figured Center wouldn’t fool around with any old machine. He’d want to break into the machines of important people, companies, networks, et cetera. So I just grabbed botnets of high-caliber players.”
“They rent out botnets of different quality?”
“Absolutely. You can order a botnet that is fifty machines at AT&T, or one that is two hundred fifty machines from offices of the Canadian Parliament, or a ten-thousand-node botnet of Europeans who have at least one thousand friends each on Facebook, twenty-five thousand computers that have industrial-quality security cameras attached to them. Pretty much any variable can be purchased or rented.”
“I had no idea,” admitted Jack.
“When I found botnets for sale possessing all the attributes I wanted, I just cast as wide a net as I could afford, rented them, and then ran some diagnostics on the hacked machines to pare them down further. Then I wrote a multithreaded program that took a peek at that location in each machine to see if that line of code was present.”
“And you found a computer with the Istanbul Drive code on it?”
The IT man’s smile widened. “Not a computer. One hundred twenty-six computers.”
Jack leaned forward. “Oh my God. All with the identical piece of malware you found on the Libyan’s drive?”
“Yes.”
“Where are these machines? What physical locations are we talking about?”
“Center is . . . I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but Center is everywhere. Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia. All inhabited continents were represented in the infected machines.”
Jack asked, “So how did you find out who he is?”
“One of the infected machines was being used as a relay to the command server. It was pushing traffic from the botnet to a network in Kharkov, Ukraine. I penetrated the network servers and saw that they hosted dozens of illegal or questionable websites. The sickest porn imaginable, online marketplaces for buying and selling fake passports, card skimmers, stuff like that. I hacked into each of these sites easily. But there was one location I could not get into. All I got was the name of the administrator.”
“What’s the name of the administrator?”
“FastByte Twenty-two.”
Jack Ryan deflated. “Gavin, that’s not a name.”
“It’s his computer handle. No, it’s not his Social Security number and home address, but we can use it to find him.”
“Anybody can make up a handle.”
“Trust me, Jack. There are people out there who know the identity of FastByte Twenty-two. You just have to find them.”
Jack nodded slowly, and then he looked at the clock on the wall.
It was not even three a.m.
“I hope you’re right, Gavin.”
TWENTY-FIVE
CIA nonofficial cover operative Adam Yao leaned against the entrance of a shuttered shoe store on Nelson Street, in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district, eating dumplings and noodles with chopsticks from a cardboard bowl. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening, the last of the day’s light had long left the sliver of sky between the tall buildings that ran down both sides of the street, and Adam’s dark clothing made him all but invisible under the shadow of the doorway.
The pedestrian crowd was not what it was during the day, but there was still a good bit of foot traffic, mostly coming to or going from the nearby street stall market, and Adam welcomed the crowd, because he felt his chances of avoiding detection were higher with more people strolling about.
Adam was on the job, conducting a one-man surveillance on Mr. Han, the counterfeit-chip maker from Shenzhen. After he took photos of the plates on the SUVs that picked Han up at Tycoon Court earlier in the week, he’d called a friend at the Hong Kong Police B Department and talked him into running the tags. The detective told Adam the owner of the vehicles was a real estate company in Wan Chai, a seedy neighborhood on Hong Kong Island. Adam looked into the company on his own and found it to be owned by a known Triad figure. This particular personality was a member of 14K, which was the biggest and the baddest Triad in HK. That explained the origin of the security goons protecting Han, but Yao found it very curious this high-tech computer manufacturer would involve himself with the 14K. The Triads as a whole kept their crime dirty—prostitution and protection rackets and drugs mostly—and the 14K were no more refined than the rest of the Triads. Any criminal operation Han would be involved in, on the other hand, would necessitate high-tech equipment and personnel.
This guy coming to HK and hanging around the 14K made no sense.
Once Adam knew Han was getting picked up each morning by gangsters, he spent the next few days moving around 14K-owned restaurants and strip clubs frequented by the vehicle’s owner, until he found all three gleaming white SUVs parked in a covered lot outside a hot-pot restaurant in Wan Chai. Here, with an abundance of skill derived from working in two separate jobs that required such a technique, he slapped a tiny magnetized GPS tracking device under the rear bumper of one of the trucks.
The next morning he sat in his apartment and watched while a blinking dot on his iPhone moved across a map of Hong Kong, first up to the Mid-Levels to Tycoon Court, and then down into Wan Chai. The dot disappeared, which Adam knew meant the SUV was traveling under Victoria Harbour through the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.
Adam ran outside and leapt into his Mercedes, knowing where Han was headed.
He was going to Kowloon.
Yao ultimately tracked the SUV here, to the big office building that held the Mong Kok Computer Centre, a several-story-tall warren of tiny storefronts selling everything from knockoff software to brand-new original high-tech motion-picture cameras. Anything electronics-related, from printer paper to mainframes, could be purchased here, though much of it was counterfeit and much more of it was stolen.
Above the Computer Centre were two dozen more floors of office space.
Adam did not go inside the building. He was a one-man band, after all, and he did not want to reveal himself to his quarry this early in the investigation. So he sat outside this evening, waiting for Han to leave, hoping to get pictures of everyone who came and went at the entrance of the building in the meantime.
He had attached a remote miniature camera with a magnet to the outside of a closed magazine stand on the sidewalk, and he had a wireless device in his pocket with which he could pan and zoom the lens and snap off rapid-fire high-quality pictures.
So he sat just up the street and watched, slurped noodles and dumplings from his bowl, and took pictures of all activity at either the front of the building or a side alley entrance right next to him.
For three consecutive nights he had photographed more than two hundred faces. Back in his office he ran the images through facial-recognition software, looking for anyone interesting he might link with Mr. Han or the sale of military-grade computer equipment to the United States.
So far he’d come up with nothing.
It was boring work, for the most part, but Adam Yao had been doing this for a long time, and he loved the job. He told himself that if he were ever moved into an embassy position with the CIA’s National Clandestine Service he would leave the Age
ncy and start his own company, doing just exactly what his cover organization did, business investigations in China and Hong Kong.
Operating undercover in the streets was exciting, and Adam rued the day when he would be too old or too settled down to worry about anything more than his mission.
Four men appeared out of the dark alley that ran alongside the building that housed the Mong Kok Computer Centre. They passed close by Adam, but he looked down at his bowl and scooped dumplings and noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks. After they passed his position he looked up and immediately pegged three of their number as Triad soldiers. They wore open jackets on the warm evening, and Adam suspected they would be carrying small machine pistols under them. Along with them, a fourth man walked; he was slighter than the others and he wore his long hair spiked and gelled. He was dressed oddly, a tight purple T-shirt and tight jeans, a half-dozen bracelets on his arm and a gold chain around his neck.
He looked less like a Triad and more like a punk rocker.
It appeared to the American in the dark doorway that the three Triads were watching over this kid, much like the detail that protected Mr. Han.
Adam stuck his hand into the pocket of his slacks and found the remote control for the camera affixed to the magazine stand, and then he looked down to his smart phone and the image from the camera’s lens. He pushed a tiny control stick on the remote, and the camera rotated ninety degrees, more or less centering itself on the quickly moving punk rocker. Adam depressed a button all the way down on the control box and, at a range of only two meters, the camera started recording high-definition images, four per second.
The pictures clicked off automatically, but Yao had to pan the camera via the control stick to keep the subject in the frame. In seconds the four men had moved up Nelson Street and out of range, and then they turned left on Fa Yuen Street and disappeared from Adam Yao’s sight.
He had no idea if they would be returning tonight. He pushed himself back in the doorway to wait for Han, but as he sat back down with his noodles he decided to take a quick look at the images he had just recorded.
