by Chan Ho-Kei
“Will those girls be able to get free of him?”
“Let’s hope they get help, after what they suffered.” N paused for a moment. “You let Violet To off, but I bet you’re not going to ask me to show him mercy, are you?”
“Scum like that should be locked up for the rest of his life,” said Nga-Yee. She knew she couldn’t really blame Siu-Man’s death on Sze Chung-Nam, but if he hadn’t assaulted her, none of the other stuff would have happened. Violet and her brother had many complex reasons for doing what they did, but Sze attacked girls only for his own animal gratification.
As they talked, the car went through the underwater tunnel and returned to Hong Kong Island.
“Oh yes, you used another man-in-the-middle attack, didn’t you?” Nga-Yee said suddenly.
“What?”
“I mean in real life, when you were pretending to represent an investment firm to fool Sze Chung-Nam and his boss,” said Nga-Yee. “Rather than making up an investment firm from scratch, I bet you took an existing one and intercepted their communications so you could pretend to be one of their directors. Sze Chung-Nam’s no fool, like you said. If you’d invented a company, he’d definitely have seen through that, wouldn’t he.”
“Hmph. Well you’ve seen me use this trick often enough. If you hadn’t realized that’s what I was doing, I’d worry you were mentally deficient.”
Despite N’s studied indifference, Nga-Yee congratulated herself on having seen through him for once. The car pulled up at the parking lot near his apartment.
“Get out, clever clogs,” he ordered.
He seemed a bit annoyed, probably because she’d guessed what he was up to and stolen a bit of his thunder. She had no way of knowing that he actually wasn’t unhappy at all, but putting up a front so she wouldn’t guess what he was feeling.
*
In N’s eyes, Nga-Yee’s case was very special. He’d encountered plenty of stubborn clients determined to get their way, but no one had ever been as persistent. She’d even managed to surprise him a few times, such as when she worked out why Mr. Mok had come to visit him, or the way she’d pushed back on his made-up reasons for complaining when she tidied his apartment. When he said she was sometimes bright and sometimes asked moronic questions, given his sky-high standards, that was actually rare praise. And he’d meant it when he said that she, like himself, was a natural-born loner. That’s why he’d let her play such a big part in the operations, partly because he was intrigued by this odd woman, partly because he’d found a bird of a feather.
Yet even though N had willingly revealed many of his trade secrets to Nga-Yee—tricks of investigation, methods of fooling people—he would never give up his final secret:
Szeto Wai was his actual identity.
Back when he was establishing himself in America and setting up Isotope Technologies, N was already a hacker. Work took up most of his time, and that was the only reason he never got involved in shadier business. He was a skilled negotiator, able to tell a person’s character from the tiniest of details, which made him very persuasive, and he secured plenty of contracts for Isotope soon after it was established. He hated having a job that consisted mostly of bargaining, and this strength of his began to seem like a curse. Then came SIQ, and his wealth grew even further. At the age of thirty-three he’d already earned more money than he could spend in this lifetime. The more successful SIQ became, the hollower this success seemed.
After a certain incident, N made up his mind to bury his real name and return to the land of his birth, where he would carry out an off-the-books investigation and revenge business. He’d always been a lone wolf, and his value system wasn’t the same as most people’s. By his lights, delicacies worth thousands of dollars weren’t necessarily that different from a bowl of wonton noodles from Loi’s, and fine wine worth tens of thousands wasn’t as good as a beer in front of his computer with Chet Baker crooning over the speakers. The satisfaction he chased was not sensual, but something of the spirit, far harder to grasp. N had nothing against selfish individuals, but if they bullied the weak, if they cared about no one else and thought they could do as they pleased, he took great pleasure in cutting them down.
Yet N was a principled person; he believed that actions have consequences.
The word he hated most in the world was “justice.” Which wasn’t to say he didn’t know the difference between good and evil—but he understood that rather than simplistic morality, most conflict in the world arose from differences of opinion, with both sides raising the flag of justice and claiming to be on the side of reason. This allowed them to justify the most underhanded means as “a necessary evil” to defeat the other side—the law of the jungle, essentially. N had a deep understanding of this. He had money, status, power, and talent, so he could do pretty much whatever he wanted and other people would see him as an avatar of “justice”—but he knew that keeping others down in the name of justice is another form of bullying.
He was clear-eyed about the vicious methods he employed. Even if the people he threatened were triad leaders, even if those he deceived were devious businessmen, he would never let himself believe he was on the side of justice. This was merely fighting evil with evil, turning them all into feral animals.
Because he understood this, he was able to restrain himself.
Whether he was working for a client or just being a busybody, he seriously considered what methods to use and how to dispense punishment proportional to the crime. It was simple to destroy a person. In his eyes, human beings were inferior products, full of cracks and flaws for him to control or manipulate. But too many people enjoyed playing God, and he wasn’t going to be one of them.
When someone came to him with a revenge case, he carefully considered the potential client’s background and the full details of what happened before deciding whether to accept. N specialized in turnabout, visiting on the perpetrator what they’d done to the victim. When carrying out such commissions, he felt almost carefree—he was no more than a tool, and the enmity belonged to other people. When he interfered of his own accord, though, he had to calibrate his actions more carefully, and was sometimes forced to use cumbersome, roundabout methods in keeping with his ethical system.
While dealing with Sze Chung-Nam, though, he’d encountered a difficulty.
After confirming what Sze had done, N wanted to free his victims, leaving them a chance to seek revenge. He wanted to see this man locked up. He wanted him to suffer the unique torments meted out to sex offenders in prison, so he could live in fear as those girls had every single day. The trouble was, N couldn’t find any information about them on Sze’s computer, just some photographs with their heads chopped off.
According to Ducky’s findings, Sze Chung-Nam had two cell phones—one for daily use, and one for hunting. He got in touch with his victims over the second phone and turned it on only when he needed to speak to them. Otherwise he kept it in his briefcase, powered off. There were no apps on this phone, and he didn’t use it for anything except photos of his prey.
Ducky was able to turn up the identities of two of the girls Sze Chung-Nam had been with, but what N wanted was a list of all their names. The picture he’d found online made it clear that there was more than one victim, but he had no idea what the total was. He did know that everyone Chung-Nam targeted would have a similar personality: not bold enough to make a fuss. Even if news of his arrest was reported, they wouldn’t necessarily come forward. They might never have learned his real name, nor realize that the person threatening them was the same one in the news—especially if the papers didn’t print his photo.
There were many ways for this to go wrong. If Sze ended up getting convicted of the lesser offense—indecent assault—and did only a month or two in prison, he’d be even more brutal and dangerous, and those girls might end up worse off, not to mention all the new victims he was sure to find. Just a year earlier there’d been a terrifying double murder: a foreign financial consultant who was int
o certain fetishes tortured and killed two South Asian sex workers while high on drugs, then kept their decapitated corpses in suitcases under his bed until he eventually surrendered to the police. This high-stress city could make these sorts of criminals double down on their behavior. N decided that he would strike only when he was assured of success—he wouldn’t act against Sze Chung-Nam until he was certain of putting him away for ten to twenty years, so there would be no repercussions for his victims.
“Should we hack into his phone remotely?” Ducky had asked at the time.
“No, too risky. You said he turns that phone on only when he wants to contact his targets. It won’t be easy to lure him into this trap, and he’s a clever bastard—if he senses something wrong, we’ll scare him off and all our work so far will go to waste. I’ll think of another way.”
When he was looking into Sze Chung-Nam’s background, N had noticed that his firm was a part of the Productivity Council’s investment program and was seeking a VC. He weighed the risks and rewards and decided to meet Sze using his real identity. Nga-Yee was right—this was a man-in-the-middle attack in real life—except that N actually was the chairman of SIQ, and it was only his motives he was concealing. Everyone at SIQ knew that Szeto Wai was semiretired, but few were aware that he was in the Far East rather than on the East Coast of America—and not even Kyle Quincy knew about his double life in Hong Kong. Whenever they met over Skype, N put on his Szeto Wai getup.
N had quite a few accomplices: con artists, hackers, fighters, jacks-of-all-trades, and he could summon ten or twenty of them at a moment’s notice, though only Ducky and Doris knew he was Szeto Wai. In this operation, Doris had been in charge of staying in touch with Kenneth Lee, while Ducky kept tabs on Sze Chung-Nam and searched for his victims.
This is our director of technology, Charles Sze.
On his N’s first visit to the GT Net office, he’d left a strong impression on Sze. Five foot three and shaped like a barrel, Sze Chung-Nam was not pleasing to the eye, but he was articulate and full of self-confidence, and he seemed determined to show that there was more to him than shallow people might surmise from his appearance. During their brief conversation N gained a handle on his personality and worked out a strategy for dealing with him. He’d initially planned to “bump into” Sze in the street after this meeting, but now he formulated a bolder plan.
He would lure Sze into seeking him out.
Sze had seemed enthusiastic, so N threw out a difficult question, and sure enough, Sze jumped in to answer when Kenneth Lee fumbled. That revealed how interested Sze was in Szeto Wai. And so, while making small talk, N made sure to mention his fake address, adding that he’d be attending a concert at the Cultural Centre. Sze was enterprising enough not to pass up an opportunity like this.
What N didn’t predict was that Nga-Yee would go off-piste.
That day, when he’d returned to Sai Ying Pun from Sze’s office, he’d been surprised to find Nga-Yee sitting on his staircase, grimly scrolling through a phone, having left work early. The new information from Siu-Man’s phone forced him to turn his attention back to this side of the case. When Nga-Yee insisted on spending the night in order to get an answer as quickly as possible, that put even more pressure on him. He was going to the Cultural Centre the following night to reel in his fish, but Nga-Yee was taking up all the time he’d meant to use for preparation. After the phone call to Miss Yuen on Saturday morning, Nga-Yee finally left, and N summoned an accomplice to act as his date for the evening, then caught up on several hours of sleep. He could go without rest in the course of an investigation or stakeout, but now he was to appear in person, he needed to be fully alert and prepared. If he said so much as a word wrong and aroused Sze’s suspicions, it wouldn’t just be this foray that blew up, but possibly the entire plan, leaving Sze to get away scot-free.
Sze Chung-Nam hadn’t been able to spot Szeto Wai during the concert for a simple reason: N was never there in the first place. Ducky kept watch and told him the appropriate moment to slip into the foyer to engineer their “chance meeting.” There, N bumped into a banker he’d met many years ago at a Silicon Valley conference, and he decided to use their acquaintance to make his own deception more convincing. Sze surely had no idea that while he was spouting his nonsense about the orchestra and soloist blending well, N’s comments were made up too, pieced together from reviews and past recordings.
For the next week, N burned the candle at both ends, continuing to investigate Siu-Man’s classmates while closing in on Sze Chung-Nam. When Nga-Yee bumped into Mr. Mok at Loi’s and charged up to N’s apartment to confront him, he’d been preparing for his dinner with Sze the following evening. Nga-Yee kept disrupting his workflow, and unexpected developments kept happening on the Sze front, but N managed to keep things going.
The main reason N wanted to take Sze to dinner was to steal his cell phone.
Not “steal” in the conventional sense, of course. What N was after was the data on the phone: the contact details of his victims, the pictures and videos he’d taken, and so on. If possible, he also hoped to create a back door to his phone, which would give him twenty-four-hour access and perhaps allow him to stop Sze from harming those girls even before the operation was over. Sze being a tech expert meant that he might spot a remote attack, but as long as N had access to the phone, he’d definitely be able to infiltrate it undetectably.
During the dinner at Tin Ding Hin, N realized that Sze was even more capable than he’d thought, and very observant too—although SIQ wasn’t actually opening a Hong Kong branch office or making inroads into Asia, these were valid conclusions from the fake clues N had provided. That evening, N had several opportunities to grab Sze’s phone, but in the end he decided to leave the hook in the water a little longer before reeling him in, not only to give his target more chances to take the bait, but also to wait till he was exhausted and couldn’t fight back. Later, what he heard from Ducky would validate this judgment call.
“The bastard spotted me on the MTR platform,” Ducky said on the phone.
“Not you too? How bad is it?”
“Not awful. I gave up tailing him at Mong Kok. Don’t think we spooked him too much.”
“Just be careful. Wear a disguise if you need to. This guy’s sharp.”
After this, Ducky kept a good distance from Sze, staying out of sight whenever possible. The surveillance had been going on about twenty days now, and N had already found one of the victims. During this time, Sze was constantly on the hunt for new escorts, at the same time forcing the ones he already had under his thumb into sexual service. The weekend that N was preparing for his second visit to Enoch School to expose Violet’s true nature, Ducky witnessed Sze inviting a girl to Festival Walk, after which they went to a hotel. When they emerged, Ducky followed the girl, and once he had her address, he was able to ascertain that she was the “third little slave.” He also spotted Sze’s coworker Hao nearby and briefly wondered if they were up against a criminal syndicate rather than a lone criminal, then decided that Hao was probably just there by coincidence.
Even with one victim’s information in his hands, N didn’t change his strategy. His plan from the start had been to get a full list of names, and he wanted to get hold of the unpixelated photos for evidence. The main strike against Sze took place on July 2, the night at the bar.
After taking on Nga-Yee’s revenge case, N was forced to continue on both fronts at once. Even as he staked out Violet To’s home, he was preparing to grab Sze’s phone. Earlier on the day of Nga-Yee’s first visit to the mobile unit on Broadcast Drive, N and Ducky had swapped duties, so Ducky kept an eye on Violet while N became Szeto Wai again and visited the bar in Lan Kwai Fong with Sze.
We’re here. You can leave your briefcase in the car.
It’s okay, I’ll bring it with me.
N had been hoping to separate Sze from his briefcase, which contained the cell phone, but Sze declined because he needed to hang on to the report he intended t
o spring on Szeto Wai. N wasn’t flustered—he had a backup plan, and he was working with more associates this evening. Not only were the bar owner and servers among his people, he also had two beautiful women to act as bait: Zoe and Talya. Unlike Doris, these two didn’t know what the overall plan was, and they didn’t ask questions—they knew it was safer to know as little as possible.
Zoe and Talya’s job was to distract Sze Chung-Nam from his briefcase. While he was in the bathroom, another associate took the phone and brought it to another room to hack into it.
The phone security was another headache—it was fingerprint-protected. N had planned three methods to get what he needed: lifting Sze’s prints off the car door handle; swiping the glass that Sze drank from; looking for prints on the phone itself. In the old days, this would have meant making a mold, but now even a high school student with the right materials can become a first-rate hacker. N was prepared. One of his associates got the print, scanned it into the computer, inverted the image, and printed it on photographic paper with special electrolyzed ink that the device read as an actual fingerprint. In just a few minutes, they were inside Sze’s phone.
After obtaining all his data and installing a backdoor Masque Attack, it wasn’t too difficult to get the phone back to him, because all his attention was on baby-faced Zoe. Even though this was a setup, N wasn’t willing to let Sze have too good a time, and he made sure to ostentatiously cockblock him, after which Talya could find some reason to further humiliate this “director of technology.”
The only mistake that evening took place after N parted from Sze. The associate who was monitoring communications between Sze and his victim accidentally blocked their messages, so the text that Sze sent couldn’t reach his “third little slave.” Only after N had swung the car around and regrouped with his associates did they realize the error and resend it; luckily, Sze didn’t pay much attention to the five-minute outage, and he forgot all about it after the girl replied. After all, he was preoccupied with the takeover. N knew that Ducky would never have made such a mistake, but unfortunately, Ducky had been needed to continue the stakeout on Broadcast Drive.
