The Mandarin Code

by Steve Lewis

  And if Lin had locked it with keys that only he possessed?

  That might take weeks.

  Once opened, the file would have to be translated, although that would pose little trouble for Dancer who’d been stationed for several years in Beijing. Prior to his posting, he’d studied Mandarin at the RAAF School of Languages at Point Cook and graduated R4S4, the highest levels of reading and speaking.

  Dancer had a particular passion for China and its rich and painful history. It was something he’d shared with Kimberley Gordon, a former security analyst with the Defence Signals Directorate whose death eighteen months ago had left a searing wound.

  Kimberley had been DSD’s shining light, a gifted agent who had risen to the top of a naturally paranoid organisation, despite the fact that she, in her early forties, had transformed from a man to a woman. Ben Gordon had become Kimberley without missing a beat in his/her career.

  Dancer had envied her courage in resolving her sexual confusion because it had been very different for him. As a teenager in a strict Baptist home, Charles had fought the attraction that he felt for men. Denied it and himself. He could never admit it to his parents and his father’s words still haunted him.

  All mankind is depraved, sinful and lost.

  He had quit his family’s stern religion as soon as he left home. But it clung like a cancer on his soul. Dancer loathed himself and his homosexuality. He had grasped at relationships with women, but they ranged from the awkward to the embarrassing.

  Eventually he had given in to his desires but only when he was far from home. Even in his late forties, he had never had a long-term love.

  Until he met Kimberley. Then he was besotted. She seemed to offer an answer. Outwardly female, bodily male. For a while, they revelled in each other, liberating each other’s lustful yearnings. But, in time, Dancer’s doubts and his loathing returned. Kimberley had fought to maintain their special bond, to try to get him to find peace with himself. But the relationship was doomed.

  I pushed her away.

  They avoided each other for more than a year before Kimberley had sought his help with a difficult job. He had been thrilled to hear from her. Tried to help her. To point her in the right direction.

  And then she was killed.

  More than once, Dancer had caught himself muttering ‘For you, Kimberley . . .’ as he set about some onerous task, trying not to douse himself in self-pity and blame.

  Now, on a summer’s day promising to soar into the high thirties, Dancer began to run the first pass of a decryption program over the USB. A nervous twinge whisked down his left arm, the anticipation of stumbling onto something big.

  An hour later Dancer had extracted a few shards of information from one of the hundreds of files on the memory stick. The lines of the decrypted code did not disappoint, confirming that Wade was right to be suspicious of the Chinese claim that the dead man, Lin An, was a labourer.

  The first file was a dossier on Lin.

  My my my . . .

  Dancer had seen enough secrets in his time that he could usually cover his excitement with a studied indifference. It was something he practised, even in the isolation of his own home.

  But this file showed Lin was attached to one of China’s most dangerous institutions: Unit 61398. The unit had been the subject of cables from Beijing and knowledge of it had even spilled on to the internet. It was an arm of China’s People’s Liberation Army, and its headquarters had been tracked to a twelve-storey building in the middle of Shanghai. Unit 61398 was the nerve centre of China’s hacking empire, home to hundreds of cyber-warriors who’d launched assaults against corporations and even countries.

  Dancer had read top secret files blaming China for infiltrating key assets in Australia. Rumour had it that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s Director-General, Richard Dalton, believed China was responsible for stealing the building plans of the new spy HQ on the edge of Russell’s Defence complex, a stone’s throw from Lake Burley Griffin.

  Dancer’s mind was racing. The fact that a Chinese cyber-warrior was here in Canberra confirmed his worst suspicions about the real nature of the new embassy being built on the opposite side of the lake – and within cannon shot of Parliament House.

  He weighed his options. Of course, he would present the information to his superiors. But that was no longer enough. He had watched with alarm as each warning issued by intelligence chiefs about the growing threat of China went unheeded by this appalling government.

  He had always worked in the shadows and his natural instinct was to keep secrets. But as the Toohey Government forged ever closer ties with the Chinese, the danger to the nation grew. He knew his masters shared his concerns and believed the Australian people would too.

  If only they knew.

  The people needed to know how serious the threat was. If they did they would be horrified. And that would force the Toohey Government into making the right decisions. To act in the national interest.

  The best way to influence public opinion was through the mainstream media. Despite the rise of online news, tweeting and blogging, Dancer wanted to leak this information to the outside world the old-fashioned way.

  First he had work to do. Dancer saved the material from the USB onto a portable hard drive, then put it into a safe hidden behind an early Mapplethorpe. Next he uploaded a few lines from the document he had opened onto another memory stick, editing the raw data to ensure that it offered no more than a tantalising taste.

  Dancer had a low regard for journalists, but there was one he trusted, the press gallery veteran Harry Dunkley. They’d met eighteen months ago, after Kimberley’s death, drawn together by a deeply ironic intersection of work and their mutual affection for her. Just days after the funeral, Dancer had ‘outed’ himself to Dunkley as his Deep Throat on a story that had struck at the very heart of the Toohey Government and eventually forced the resignation of Defence Minister Bruce Paxton. Dunkley, displaying the cynicism of a seasoned reporter, had been cool, even hostile, at first.

  His anger had eventually dissipated and he and Dancer had shared the odd bottle of wine as balm for their common grief. Not that Dancer considered himself the sentimental type.

  He flicked on his mobile and scrolled through an impressive contact list. Six rings later, a gruff voice answered.

  ‘Well, well. Look who the fucking cat’s dragged in . . .’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  The steel door slid open with a sound like air rushing from a tyre valve and Matthew Sloan stood transfixed as it revealed a scene drawn from a childhood fantasy.

  The chair of Australia’s Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security had stepped onto the bridge of a spaceship that was immediately, eerily, familiar. The skin on Sloan’s scalp tightened and his arms tingled with goose bumps.

  The circular room was built on two levels. He’d stepped onto the upper deck where the focal point was a single high-backed chair on a raised platform. It looked towards a massive plasma screen displaying a satellite image of the world, with the United States dead centre, that arced from floor to ceiling across both levels of the bridge. Also on the top deck, just below and in front of the captain’s chair, was another command module where two senior crew sat monitoring a bank of computer screens. Three sets of stairs ran down to the lower deck where more crew clustered around duty stations of monitors and keyboards dotted around the outer circle.

  The bridge was alive, pulsing with energy. An electronic wonderland.

  So, it was true. The US National Security Agency’s Intelligence and Security Command’s ‘Information Dominance Centre’ at Fort Meade, Maryland, had been designed as an exact replica of the bridge of a Constitution Class starship. To be specific, the USS Enterprise.

  In the late 1960s, like so many Australian kids, Sloan had tuned in avidly each week to watch Captain Kirk and his crew go boldly where no man had gone before. Now he was one of a very privileged few to ven
ture here. The Labor MP swelled with pride. He had been assured he was the first Australian parliamentarian to be invited into the beating heart of the most sophisticated signals intelligence operation on Earth.

  The main chair swivelled and an athletic-looking military man rose to greet him. Sloan had not previously met four-star general Dick Hargreaves, but was intimately acquainted with his formidable career. Hargreaves was the longest-serving leader of the NSA and the inaugural commander of US Cyber Command, which included the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force and the Second Army. From this bridge he listened to the world’s secrets and battled shadowy adversaries.

  ‘Mr Sloan, I presume.’ Hargreaves spoke with a gentle southern drawl. ‘I am delighted that you could join us.’

  ‘General, the pleasure and honour are mine. Please call me Matthew.’ Sloan glanced about the impossible room. ‘This is . . . extraordinary.’

  ‘Yes, Matthew, the great folks at Imagination in Hollywood helped us put it together. Our idea was we’re going into a new area – information warfare and cyber – so how do we build esprit de corps and help the army think about this in a new light? We’ve got to get people energised about carrying out this mission set. We’ve got to have them be creatively inspired to bring disparate data together to help secure our nation.’

  ‘Forgive me for asking . . .’ Sloan was still gawping, ‘. . . but is it true that the number on your car space here at Fort Meade is 007?’

  Hargreaves laughed. ‘That’s correct. It shows you that the folks at NSA have a sense of humour. But I drive a Chevy pickup, not an Aston Martin. And I’d rather be remembered like an Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies. My daughters would be much more impressed!’

  Both men chuckled and Sloan, knowing his time here would be strictly limited, moved to the main game.

  ‘General, the reason I requested this meeting is so I might give my committee a proper feel for how you work. We’re particularly interested in trying to replicate your cyber-war capabilities. We want America’s assessment of the threats.’

  ‘Sure, come join me on the bridge, I’ve pulled up a chair for you.’

  As the two men sat, the general pressed a button on a console in the armrest of his chair. The giant screen flicked to a flow chart headed ‘NSA Operations’.

  ‘NSA has two main tasks. First, it collects, decodes, translates, analyses and disseminates foreign signals, or communications, for intelligence and counter-intelligence purposes and to support our military operations. Those signals are transmitted over many mediums including copper, fibre, radio, satellite and other wireless channels.

  ‘NSA’s second job is information assurance. That is, to prevent adversaries from gaining access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets – our government’s intellectual property, so to speak.’

  The general punched the button again and the screen flicked to another diagram.

  ‘Cyber Command’s mission is three-fold: first, to defend the nation from cyber-attacks; second, to operate and defend the Defence Department’s information networks; and, finally, to support our military combat commanders with the cyber-capabilities they need, including conducting full-spectrum military cyberspace operations, when directed, in order to enable our military actions across the air, land, sea, space and cyber domains. In short, Cyber Command’s task is to ensure the military has freedom of action in cyberspace – and to deny the same to our adversaries.’

  Sloan was already across a lot of the theory. What he wanted was an idea of how it worked in practice.

  ‘So does all this help in a real-world war zone?’

  Hargreaves shifted forward in his seat and Sloan could see this keeper of secrets was enjoying the chance to boast about his work.

  ‘One of my proudest moments is how we responded in Iraq in ’05 and ’06. The casualties were mounting with a dozen allied soldiers being killed or wounded daily, driven by a surge in roadside bombings.

  ‘We started collecting a much broader range of insurgent communications and then, crucially, compressing the time it took us to get actionable intelligence back into the hands of the end users. We successfully reduced that disconnect from about sixteen hours down to around one minute. We saved lives.’

  Sloan wanted to talk about another kind of war. One waged in bits and bytes in the ether. One Australia was ill-equipped to fight.

  ‘General, how serious is the threat of cyber-war?’

  ‘Matthew, I believe the rise of globalisation has made the world a more dangerous place. What keeps me awake at night are terrorist and cyber-attacks, for both your country and America. Those are the two threats where adversaries can reach far into the homeland and really hurt populations. Those risks are growing, and we need to be out in front of them.’

  ‘What are the risks?’

  ‘What we’re seeing is more folks testing boundaries with mounting numbers of state-on-state cyber-probes and sometimes cyber-attacks. So the main risk is miscalculation. Assume one country believes it can hit your nation with a cyber-attack, and that it won’t lead to physical conflict.

  ‘But in launching that cyber-attack, suppose they actually knock down your stock exchange or temporarily disable your banking system, which is a very real possibility. And if you extend those attack vectors to take out power grids, transport systems and other infrastructure, they can have devastating effects.

  ‘Your government then feels it has to retaliate. Then we have an unpredictable chain reaction that could lead to outright war. In the virtual world no one knows where the red lines are.’

  Sloan felt uneasy listening to a new doomsday scenario. Now he understood why the spooks he knew were paranoid, always glancing at the shadows in search of an enemy that may or may not exist.

  ‘So how do we protect ourselves?’ the MP asked.

  The general’s eyes wandered over his gleaming twenty-first-century war-room.

  ‘When you think about success on the battlefield, you say your artillery has to be the best. Your armour has to be the best. Your infantry has to be the best. The same logic applies in the cyber-domain.’

  Sloan had worked his way towards the one question that was keeping him awake at night.

  ‘So who should Australia fear the most?’

  The general caught Sloan’s gaze and didn’t miss a beat: ‘China.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You matter to China. You’re a reliable source of the resources it needs for it to rise as the next superpower. But it sees you as tied to us, the current superpower, through ANZUS. That presents a problem. No matter what you say in public, in China’s mind you can’t straddle that divide forever. One day you’ll have to make a choice.

  ‘So China needs to know your deepest thoughts. The relationships at the heart of your leadership, right down to who is literally fucking whom, if you’ll pardon my French. That’s why they opened up your parliamentary communications systems. When we found out about it we warned you. But we believe that they had access for a year.’

  Sloan’s heart sank. He was well aware of the damage. ‘Yes, it was like a fucking open-cut mine.’

  ‘Indeed, and right now there’s a warehouse full of Chinese analysts poring over every line of what they took, looking for weaknesses.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ Sloan shook his head.

  ‘And since our President decided to muscle up to China on its currency manipulation we’ve been recording attacks on our systems every day that are off the charts. You could be in the line of fire, too.’

  ‘Why? What have we done? If anything our government is doing too much to appease China.’

  The general frowned. ‘Yes, we’ve noticed that. But in the end, you’re our ally. You have access to all this.’ Hargreaves swept his right arm across the bridge. ‘So that makes you a target.’

  Suddenly the general rose from his chair. The audience was over. The spymaster had real work to do, but he had one last message to send. He leaned in close to deliver it.

&nbs
p; ‘Matthew, if there is one thing that you should tell your government, back in Canberra, it is this: the enemy is already through the gates.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Canberra

  Harry Dunkley rolled out of his double bed, the remnant of a dream already fading. It was nearly 7am and the press gallery veteran rubbed an ache in his hip, a reminder of too much rugby in his reckless youth.

  The soft early morning light cast a glow over the sleeping Celia Mathieson. She seemed to shine from within and looked younger than her thirty-two years. Her beauty and their fledgling relationship still astounded him.

  They’d met in October when Mathieson, back in Canberra after eight years overseas, was hired by The Australian as a ‘data journalist’. Dunkley had rolled his eyes when told of the new position, assuming it was something dreamed up by Gen Y backoffice types.

  Mathieson was the only daughter of one of Canberra’s most senior mandarins, the fearsome Roger Mathieson – AO and all-round shit. Mathieson snr had bulldozed his way to the top of the public service, serving as deputy secretary in half a dozen agencies. Perhaps it was to escape from her father’s long shadow that Celia had taken off overseas soon after graduating with honours in Advanced Computing from the Australian National University. She’d only returned when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

  A month after she’d started at the Oz, Dunkley had enlisted her help to trawl through the entitlement records of every MP and senator. She’d taken her time completing the task but Dunkley had been astounded by her computer skills. He’d shouted her a joint byline on the subsequent story and asked her out for a drink after she’d given him a tantalising ‘thank you’ kiss that lingered a tad too long.

  Their relationship had blossomed from spreadsheets to bedsheets, and now, as Dunkley watched his sleeping angel, he felt the guilty lust of a man who couldn’t quite believe his luck. He shook his head in wonder. What does she see in me?

  He headed to the bathroom, splashing his face to wash the sleep from his eyes before examining last night’s damage. He tried to convince himself he was still handsome despite the creased face that looked all its fifty-five years and offered a little too much history. Still, the first flourish of grey added a certain Clooney lustre, he thought.