Second Strike am-2

by Mark Abernethy

  Pushing into the cool dimness, a brass bell rang as Mac clocked computers, servers and laptops arranged down the sides of the store, some of them running. A young local with a Metallica T-shirt slouched behind a glass cashier desk, reading a PlayStation magazine.

  ‘Richard Davis here for Charlie, thanks,’ said Mac, giving the bloke a wink.

  Stretching, the youth walked to the beaded curtain and yelled something at it. By the time someone had yelled back at him, the youth was slumped back on his stool, investigating SmackDown! vs Raw.

  A face appeared behind the beaded curtain, paused for a second and then pushed through. He was in his late thirties, round-faced and had all his hair, with a pair of sunnies pushed up into it. Glancing over Mac’s shoulder, he jerked his head sideways.

  ‘Macca, how you doing?’ asked Charlie, giving Mac a palm-grip handshake after they’d passed through the curtain.

  ‘Can’t complain, Charlie, you know how it is.’

  ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Sure,’ smiled Mac. Charlie was big on food and any invitation to dine with him was an experience.

  ‘We’re sitting down for lunch,’ said Charlie, easing into a torrent of Bahasa and then a bow. The Javanese were ritualistic about inviting people to eat in their home and offi cially inviting a guest was a part of the process.

  They ate in the backyard, under a thin tarp, Charlie on the barbecue cooking a special octopus recipe from his mum in east Java. Charlie’s wife, Marika, rolled her eyes as she poured tea for Mac. ‘Charlie think his mum makes best cooking,’ she said to Mac conspiratorially, ‘so I say, Fine – go and live with Mum, but if you live in Marika house, you get what Marika cook! ‘

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ yelled Charlie from the barbecue as he waved smoke away. ‘She don’t cook anyhow.’

  Charlie had been a whiz-kid at BAIS and one of the fi rst intelligence people Mac knew of who had tried countering the Chinese in cyberspace. At a time when the Aussies, Poms and Yanks thought the internet was for war-gamers and propeller-heads, Charlie had found what the Chinese were using the internet for and was taking the ball up to them. He was so far ahead of the curve that when he pulled a stunt of opening a couple of dam gates on the Yangtze River hydro system, the Yanks took notice and seconded him into Langley.

  Like many spooks, Charlie had walked away when he’d had kids.

  But he still did a lot of contract work for the Indonesian intelligence services, which was what Mac was after when they adjourned to Charlie’s offi ce after lunch.

  ‘What’s up, Mr Mac?’ he asked, leaning back in his leather executive chair.

  ‘Need to defeat a password key. What are you charging these days?’

  ‘What have you got?’ asked Charlie, lighting a smoke.

  Pulling out his cash, Mac made a quick calculation of what he had in his hand. ‘Four fi fty, fi ve hundred US?’ he said, putting the cash on the desk.

  ‘Sounds fair,’ said Charlie, exhaling smoke at the open window that looked over the backyard.

  Mac told Charlie about the Apple laptop on Grant’s desk at the Lar, and how much he wanted to get in there, have a nosey-poke.

  He handed over Alex Grant’s business card and Charlie looked at it, turned it over and made a face. Then he put it on his desk, turned forty-fi ve degrees to his keyboard and screen, and tapped a key. The screen lit up and he looked back at the business card.

  ‘So, what have we got here? A website – a dot com, that’s always a good start. And an email address, a business domain address.’

  ‘That good?’ asked Mac.

  ‘It’s not good that this person is staying at the Lar. They have a government-level VPN – a virtual private network – and people sweeping it, looking for people like me.’

  ‘So it’s not just marketing?’

  ‘No – Shangri-La hotels are owned by the Kwok family and they use the same contractors that embassies and politicians use. Very paranoid. But fortunately, I know how to defeat most VPN walls,’ added Charlie, pointing to lines of white code on a black screen. ‘See, here are some rooms – ports – that are open and connected, and others are not.’

  Mac leaned over, saw the code with the room number down the left-hand side of the list. ‘Where is this?’

  ‘Systems. We’re in the server that runs the hotel’s backbone and VPN. It’s the heart.’

  ‘Okay, let me think,’ said Mac, shutting his eyes for two seconds.

  ‘Room twenty-two-oh-two.’

  Charlie scrolled down the lines of code and shook his head. ‘He’s not connected, not much we can do.’

  ‘Can’t you wake up his computer or something?’

  ‘Not in this hotel. You’re thinking about the old American phone network that let you do that. Besides, I don’t think our target is even plugged in.’

  Mac nodded. ‘You’re right, he unplugs his computer when he fi nishes.’

  Standing, Mac made to go. Investigating Naveed and the true ownership of NIME was going to have to happen the hard way.

  ‘I can’t take this, Mac,’ said Charlie, nodding at the cash.

  ‘Have it,’ said Mac, his mind now elsewhere.

  Charlie dragged on the last of the cigarette, stubbed it in the ashtray and leaned forward with enthusiasm. ‘You say this Mr Grant has an Apple, right?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Mac.

  Charlie typed on the keyboard as he looked at the business card.

  ‘What’s up, Charlie?’

  ‘Had an idea.’

  Walking around the desk, Mac looked over Charlie’s shoulder.

  ‘There’s another way?’

  ‘If he’s got a Mac, then he might have a. mac account for his personal email, and his business mail might be linked to it when he travels.’

  Charlie clicked on the browser and found a website that searched for email addresses. A whole list came back and he scrolled down through the various incarnations before he got to one that said alex. grant@mac. com and then Sydney, NSW, Australia.

  ‘Is that our guy?’ asked Charlie, jiggling his leg.

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Mac. ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘If he has a. mac email address then he probably has an iDisk account.’

  ‘What’s an iDisk account?’ asked Mac, watching as Charlie downloaded an application called iDisk Utility for Windows.

  ‘It’s Apple’s backup servers in California,’ said Charlie. ‘You subscribe to the service and you can back up into those servers from anywhere in the world and only you can access it. Your target might be backing up emails and documents to iDisk, especially when he travelling in Indonesia, yeah?’

  When it was downloaded, Charlie double-clicked on iDisk Utility and input alex. grant into the username fi eld.

  ‘Now comes fun part,’ smiled Charlie, pulling out a drawer by his right thigh, withdrawing a black steel object the size of a cigar box, and plugging it into a USB port. A pale blue box came up on screen and Charlie typed some words into the boxes which were arranged in a list.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Password defeat,’ said Charlie, lighting a cigarette and slamming the lighter on the desk. ‘We put in what we know. You know his date of birth?’

  Squinting, Mac tried to remember the fi le on Alex Grant. ‘He was born 1953 and I think it was November. Yep, November 1953, but I can’t remember the day.’

  ‘Kids? Pets? Wife? Phone number? Street address?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘You won’t believe this, but that’s what most passwords come down to.’

  He couldn’t remember any other numbers associated with Grant, so he just added what he could. ‘Put in Bennelong and Thomas and Systems and Technology, okay?’

  Charlie did, asking if there was anything more. Mac shook his head and Charlie clicked on the ‘run’ box to the right of the boxes where he’d typed in the information. A wheel spun in the middle of the pale blue box, stopping after just seven seconds when a red box sprang up with the
white letters b e n n e l o n g arrayed along it, and the words defeat successful blinking above.

  They were in. Alex Grant’s iDisk was a listing of about thirty folders and Mac asked Charlie to scroll the list. In the ‘N’ section they found one labelled NIME and another labelled NAVEED.

  Mac’s heart rate escalated as he turned to Charlie. ‘That’s it? He uses Bennelong as his password?’

  ‘Yep. Remember it and you’ve got open access to Alex Grant’s iDisk.’

  CHAPTER 33

  The Shangri-La’s room service guy brought a tennis racquet to the door and Mac tipped him, just as Diane emerged in her tennis shorts and blue tank.

  He wanted her out fast so he could check on the Grant iDisk before seeing the Bennelong team at the lagoon bar at fi ve, but he sensed that she needed something from him, and he hoped that it was just friendship. There was a haughtiness and hardness to Diane, but vulnerability showed itself in small fl ashes. Beautiful women were pigeonholed at an early age and they had to fi ght to be taken seriously.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t think any less of you for doing the charm offensive on Vitogiannis.’

  ‘You don’t?’ she sparked up.

  ‘No, mate. Any more than you think I’m a sleazy little weasel for sneaking into people’s lives.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Hmm, now you mention it, that is pretty sleazy.’

  They both laughed, and an uneasy silence hung between them.

  Mac had been so focused on his own hurt after Diane betrayed him with Peter Garrison – the CIA rogue – that he had missed the whole marriage thing. It wasn’t until the previous night that he’d seen how it must have been for her to have a man lying in her bed telling her how he had been about to propose marriage, but had decided not to.

  He didn’t hate her. ‘Diane, it takes more than looks to do this job.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I -‘ he started.

  ‘Yes? Come on,’ she interrupted, moving closer, crossing her arms.

  ‘Well, there were always good sorts hanging around, but with you it was really about the laughs and the company, you know?’

  Her expression eased, the hardness draining from her eyes. She looked at her feet, mouthed the words thank you and moved towards the door.

  The fi rst thing Mac got from the Grant iDisk was Naveed’s name: Syed Ali Naveed, better known as S.A. Naveed.

  Then he found a fax that Alex Grant had scanned into a PDF. It named Naveed’s organisation as Ocean Technologies Company, which had a Kuala Lumpur address. The fax referred to agreements and verifi ed the meeting in Jakarta on 13 December 2008. A Saturday

  – today: the lunch meeting that was making Grant and Vitogiannis so antsy.

  The top of the scanned document caught Mac’s attention. It was a fax number, stamped along with the date. Squinting at it, he deciphered the prefi x numbers, +971 4: Naveed was sending his faxes from the United Arab Emirates, Dubai to be exact. There was something else beside the number, but the scanning to PDF had taken defi nition out of it. Enlarging the document, the fax stamp came alive.

  It said Gulf Precision Metals.

  He gulped. Gulf Precision Metals was one of the front companies under the umbrella of Gulf Technical Industries, a Dubai company used right up till 2004 to ship electrical cabinets and voltage regulators from Turkey, hi-tech furnaces from Italy, vacuums from Germany, but particularly P-2 centrifuges, uranium hexafl uoride and other enrichment technologies from Pakistan. Their ultimate destination?

  Libya, Iran and North Korea, to help create clandestine nuclear weapons programs for those countries.

  Gulf Technical Industries was used by Dr A.Q. Khan to run his network of illicit uranium-enrichment technologies. Khan’s government-funded organisation, KRL, made the centrifuges that enriched uranium to weapons-grade. Khan sold the centrifuges, thousands at a time, to places like Iraq and Libya, and Khan had even sold the stolen plans of a Chinese nuclear bomb to North Korea.

  Mac rocked back in his seat, a little freaked. The scariest thing about the A.Q. Khan network was the support it had received not only from the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus, but also from the United States. Even after the 9-11 massacre in 2001 and the Bali bombings a year later, the US State Department had refused to issue sanctions against the Pakistanis for the illegal nuclear trade. When American spy satellites had discovered Pakistani planes loading missile components into cargo planes outside Pyongyang – widely thought to be in exchange for their latest shipment of Pakistani enrichment centrifuges – the US administration had refused to act.

  By December 2001, while the World Trade Center was still cooling, Khan’s business partner, B.S.A. Tahir, signed an order from Malaysian company SCOPE for $13 million worth of aluminium centrifuge components. Hidden as oil and gas drilling parts, they were shipped to Dubai and then to Libya via the various mini-fronts under Gulf Technical Industries, of which Gulf Precision Metals was one.

  Moving down Grant’s documents, Mac found one fi lled with Track Changes. It was the acquisition manifest and sale document for Bennelong’s sale of the naval C and C systems and the Type-3 enrichment algorithms not to NIME, but a Dubai company called Desert Enterprises. The manifest had all the technology in it and the fi nal sale document increased the price from US$8 million to US$60 million, provided Bennelong sold the whole parcel to Desert Enterprises.

  The sale document mentioned today’s ‘physical handover’.

  Grant and Vitogiannis had folded immediately when faced with so much money. This wasn’t a joint venture spin-off, it was a buy-out of enrichment algorithms, probably signed off hours ago. Mac assumed the enrichment code was now gone – probably burned on CD – and it would become an international tracking exercise to see where it ended up. It was one thing to have the centrifuges for uranium enrichment, but it was the computer systems that ran the ‘cascades’ of centrifuges. The cascades in Libya and Iran had ten thousand centrifuges operating in union and you needed serious systems to make them work properly. The Pakistanis had just bought such a system, from Australia. It made Mac sick.

  There was too much in the iDisk for Mac to investigate on his own but he knew who would make sense of it, so he plugged in a USB hard drive and downloaded all of the relevant folders straight into it.

  After closing the iDisk Utility, Mac entered the ASIS intranet to send a secure email to Davidson. He was fairly confi dent of its security

  – Australia had led the world into government PKI, or public key infrastructure, which essentially created concentric bands of access to departmental information via websites. The ASIS one required two layers of ID, the fi rst of which was as long as a credit card number.

  He made the message short: told Davidson that the company behind NIME was Malaysia-based Ocean Technologies Company, and the principal was Syed Ali Naveed, who appeared to be operating from two A.Q. Khan front companies in Dubai: Desert Enterprises and Gulf Precision Metals. He noted that the concerns shown in Canberra about what was happening to Bennelong Systems’ Type-3 enrichment algorithms was probably correct because it was highly likely their sale had been fi nalised earlier that afternoon at the Shangri-La Hotel. Mac concluded with a note about how to get into the Grant iDisk and sent it, then got on the phone to get more info on Naveed from Davidson.

  The call rang out and Mac left a voicemail message telling Davidson to check his email. Trying another number, Mac got through to an ASIS landline in Perth that was answered, ‘Good afternoon, Albany Trading Asia – how may I help you?’ and asked for Davidson by his cover name. Davidson wasn’t in his corporate offi ce, so Mac left a voicemail message there too.

  Stowing his laptop in his backpack, Mac left the room. With Davidson not responding, he was getting into the paranoia zone and he wanted to fi nd Freddi Gardjito and run the Naveed name by him.

  Mac would bet Sydney to a six-pack that the name Hassan Ali was on Naveed’s list of known associates.

  He made for the
elevator bank but changed his mind at the last minute, and went for the fi re stairs. As he bounded down two at a time, he wasn’t thinking about Alex Grant or Michael Vitogiannis or NIME. He was thinking about old scores and new information, a boy stolen, a girl shot and left for dead. He was thinking about Sumatra

  ‘02, about Hassan Ali and Gorilla, and how Naveed was going to lead him to them.

  CHAPTER 34

  The lobby was quiet as Mac came around from the side and cased it for eyes, his instincts on full alert. The Naveed-Khan connections had spooked him. What had started as Mac’s return to the game in an economic team was spiralling upwards.

  Fronting the desk, Mac asked for Freddi. The girl said she’d never heard of the bloke, so Mac started talking loudly about the intelligence guy from BAIS. Freddi still didn’t appear, so Mac assumed he was in one of the plenary sessions, checking out who was fl irting on the edges of Indonesia’s burgeoning public infrastructure scene.

  ‘Look,’ said Mac. ‘Can you tell him that Richard Davis, from room nine-oh-two, needs to talk to him urgently, but I’ve had to duck out for a couple of hours?’ he said, handing over his card.

  The girl typed a message into the system, then looked up, perplexed. ‘The room service you order just going up, Mr Richard.’

  ‘Must be a different guy,’ said Mac, preoccupied.

  The girl looked at the screen, then called something over her shoulder. The male desk guy moved beside her and looked at the screen. ‘Yes, Mr Davis,’ he said. ‘I just saw the room service porter and I ask him and he say he going to room nine-oh-two – Davis.’

  Mac’s neck crawled with fear. Something was wrong. He turned from the desk without another word and rushed across the enormous marble lobby, aiming for a side door and shooting out to where the lagoons and palms formed a sort of oasis.

  Sprinting around the pools, he searched for the tennis courts, praying that Diane was safe. As he raced past the picnic tables on the far side of the lagoon pool, he heard two shots, then screams and then several more shots, one after the other. He sped across the lawns, through the palm trees and then took some steps three at a time to the tennis court complex.