As Dunne listened to the pious tones, spoken by a voice he recognized, he exploded with an anger that had been building for months.
“Shut the fuck up,” shouted Dunne.
The voice stopped.
The shopkeeper knocked on the door of the apartment from which the sound of the chanting had come, and then opened it. A tall, gaunt man peered through the opening and walked out slowly, gazing curiously at his visitors.
Dunne wasn’t sure at first that it was Jason Howe. He was as thin as before, but he had shaved his head. He was dressed in a long linen shirt, matching linen trousers, and a pair of sandals, the sort of simple garb a mendicant monk might wear, or a college kid traveling in Asia for his summer vacation. There were deep circles under his eyes, and stress lines on the face that Dunne didn’t remember.
Howe stared at the muscular, red-haired American. It took him a moment to recognize Dunne. He put his palms together meekly and addressed Dunne.
“I’m sorry,” said Howe. “I was meditating. It’s the great compassion mantra.”
“You prick,” said Dunne. His body instinctively tensed to swing a punch at the man who had put him in prison for a year.
Howe bowed again submissively. There was an odd smile on his face, the opposite of fear. More like relief.
“I knew you would come,” said Howe. “I prayed for it. I am happy to see you.”
Dunne took a step back.
“Why are you happy, you shit? You tried to destroy me. Why would you care if I’m alive or dead?”
“We need to talk. Too much bad karma. You’ve got this upside down.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” snarled Dunne. “There’s a big part of me that wants to kill you.”
Howe bowed again, and then put up his hand gently in caution and protest. “I understand. But you are chasing the wrong person. I have been trying to help you.”
“Bullshit. What are you talking about?”
“Sit down. You’ve come a long way. I can help you. This is satori. It’s why you came.”
Dunne took a seat on the wicker couch, and Howe dropped his thin, gangly form into a chair alongside.
Alton Chen kept his composure amid these loud voices, standing against the rear wall of the balcony.
Dunne glared at Howe, cheeks red, eyes still flashing. “Do you have any idea what you did to me?”
“I am very, very sorry for what happened. But it wasn’t me. That’s why I wanted you to find me. That’s why I sent you the letter when you went into prison, because I felt so bad about what happened.”
Dunne cocked his head. His back quivered. He shook his head.
“What are you talking about?” pressed Dunne. “What letter?”
“The one with my contact info. I said I was a Paladin, a righteous avenger. I said it was from a ‘Lemon Squeezer,’ to look like one of your pals. I thought that if I contacted you directly, you’d send the cops after me. Or they would…”
Howe’s voice trailed off. He didn’t explain what he meant by “they,” and Dunne for the moment didn’t ask.
“You’re the ‘Lemon Squeezer’?” asked Dunne, his voice rising. “Are you kidding me? Where did you learn to talk tradecraft?”
“I found it on the Internet. That’s how I know everything. I wanted you to come and find me, when you got out of jail, so that I could tell you.”
“You could tell me what?”
“That I didn’t do it. I’m not the guy who wanted to publish the dirt on you and your wife. That wasn’t me. They were cutting me out already by then.”
* * *
Dunne closed his eyes. Sometimes when you first consider that a story may be very different from what you had believed, you feel a sense of disorientation, as if waking up from a dream and sensing, but not being quite sure yet, that what had seemed so vivid wasn’t in fact real.
Dunne muttered, under his breath, a groan that expressed his recognition.
“Who took my life apart, then, if it wasn’t you?”
“The boss. The owner. The board of directors. I don’t know. I was exiled from the inner circle of the Quark Team after you came to see us in Italy. But I was always fronting for other people, I knew that much. I didn’t buy all those GPU clusters you saw in Urbino, that’s for sure.”
“It wasn’t you,” said Dunne, affirming to himself what he had just heard.
“No.”
Dunne stood up. Alton Chen was standing quietly by the wall. Dunne walked to the edge of the balcony and peered over the rail. The shopkeeper was in the front part of the store, evidently minding her business, but Dunne didn’t feel secure. He was in a location where he had no operational control, talking about the most sensitive issues in someone else’s space.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said to Howe. “You and me. We need to talk where I’m sure people aren’t listening.”
“Okay. No problem. Let me put on some shoes.” He went back into his room and returned wearing a pair of Chuck Taylor All-Stars with the laces undone.
Dunne turned to Alton, his unofficial minder.
“We need to get out of here, somewhere outside where we can talk. Is that cool?”
Alton gave half a nod, respectful but not quite giving permission.
“Let me check with my dad. To make sure you will be safe.”
Alton took out his cell phone, turned toward the wall, and dialed his father’s private number. He began speaking quickly in Mandarin Chinese, relaying the situation and waiting for instructions.
“My dad says it’s permissible. The policeman will stay here, but I must accompany you while you walk. Not close, I’ll leave you alone, but my dad says that to make sure you are both safe, I should come along. Is that acceptable?”
“That’s fine,” said Dunne. “Keep ten yards back. If you see something you don’t like, come grab us.”
* * *
Dunne and Howe departed the hutong and crossed a busy street toward the park that ran along the bank of the Tamsui. Alton stood back respectfully, just as he had promised, protective but not intrusive.
They walked beneath a six-lane expressway, traffic humming on the concrete above, and through a grove of trees to the grass-lined sidewalk by the quay. Dunne waited until they were in the park before he began quizzing Howe in earnest.
“You owe me,” Dunne began. “I need information in a hurry. Even the stuff that doesn’t seem important. So, take me back to the beginning. How was the Quark Team put together? Who was the founder?”
“Before we start, Mr. Dunne, I need to ask you something. Can you get me out of here? Because I’m in danger.”
“I’ll try. But right now, I found you, and I own you. Just talk.”
Howe nodded. In a sense, this debriefing was what he had wanted when he had reached out to Dunne, guilt-laden, back in Paris. But we never know just what it will feel like, when we get what we want. Howe didn’t look like a Buddhist novitiate, but a scared guy on the run.
“You want the whole story of how we got to Urbino?”
“Everything that matters.”
“We were just some nerd-balls at the start,” Howe began quietly. “Geeky kids at Brookline High School. My dad taught at MIT and he was always at the lab; he and my mom had just gotten divorced, so I had lots of time and nothing to do. And I was pissed off. So, I started programming, and then a few months later I started hacking into university computers and met other people like me, and by junior year in high school I was seriously good at it. I started making money for a hacking group that operated out of Europe, or at least that’s what they said.”
“What was the group? How did they pay you?”
Howe scratched his shaved head and shrugged his stooped shoulders.
“They were just, you know, hackers. They were anarchists. They liked to rip shit off and make trouble. Like me. They wanted to send me money through PayPal but I said forget it. It was a kick. We didn’t really have an ideology, except the Internet should be free and governments we
re bad. We liked pulling people’s chains. That was the beginning of the Quark Team. Smart kids who wanted to raise hell using computers.”
“Where did Fallen Empire come from?”
“That was Dmitri’s idea. He was my best friend at Brookline High. His parents had emigrated from Russia. He thought America was getting like the Soviet Union, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, pushing people around, and letting rich crooks steal everything from other people. I decided he was right. We both got into Stanford and began doing serious computer science stuff, but we started doing Fallen Empire posts, too. And then politics began to get crazy in 2015. I was pissed off about Snowden. You know all that crap.”
“What happened to you and Dmitri?”
“Dmitri got hired by Google. He said it wasn’t about the money, but I didn’t believe him. He had all the chicks he wanted, and coke, and pills. I thought that was bullshit. Everybody I knew at Stanford was on a money-and-death trip. So, fuck it, I dropped out and went to Europe. I had met Jake Rosenberg at Stanford. He thought I was cool, so he dropped out, too.”
“You sound like me when I was twenty.”
“Probably everybody is like that when they’re twenty.”
“What did you do, when you dropped out?”
“I had these hacker friends, like I told you. I went to live with them. First in Berlin, which is, like, hacker paradise, and then in Italy, we began to form this Quark Team thing, in addition to all the trolling we were doing with Fallen Empire.”
“Did you move to Urbino then?”
“Not right away. We started in Milan. There were some super-smart hackers there. The number-one guy was Ricci. He was like the alpha hacker. He’d been at Georgia Tech, published a lot of articles. Very, very smart dude.”
“I remember him from Urbino,” said Dunne. “And guess what? I just saw him less than a week ago.”
“Say what?”
“I’ll tell you later, maybe. Keep going with your story.”
“Ricci had a cybersecurity business, on the offensive side. He’d been running it for a couple of years when I met him, and he wanted me to help. Do you really want to hear all this, man?”
“Absolutely. Every word. What was the business?”
“Ricci understood cell phones. I think he had worked for Apple for a while. He realized that people were just stupid with their phones. They said anything they liked, they took pictures of their dicks, and fucked around with each other. It offended him. He was a very bourgeois guy, really, despite all the hacking lingo. He figured out ways to get inside people’s phones. Tap their cameras; use the microphones to listen in on them. And he began selling his little phone-cracker malware back in 2014.”
“Who were his customers?”
“He didn’t care at first. Private security. Women who wanted to find out if their husbands were cheating. Whoever paid him. But eventually people found out what he could do with iPhones and, boom, everybody wanted to be his customers.”
“Like who?”
“Governments. They wanted to use this stuff to spy on people they didn’t like. Ricci didn’t care. He had contempt for people, really. I mean, he had rules, but they were crap: People had to sign agreements saying they were using his software for ‘lawful purposes,’ to ‘catch criminals’ and ‘prevent terrorism,’ but who was he kidding?”
“Who was on the Quark Team, besides you?”
“He began hiring people who had worked for government agencies in Russia and Israel. But not America. He thought the CIA and NSA would try to control everything. He said that I was the only American he trusted, because I was such a flake. He let me play with Fallen Empire, as long as I helped him with the Quark Team stuff.”
“That sounds like a devil’s bargain.”
“I guess. Kids are stupid. I had this badass idea of myself as a bandit, robbing people to help humanity.”
“Kids are stupid,” Dunne assented.
“It doesn’t matter now. I was delusional. But back then I thought we were serious about doing good. Even when they began to put all those new GPUs into Urbino, I still thought it was okay. And then, blam! Everything blew up.”
“I’m listening,” said Dunne. “And keep your voice down.”
34 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
The clouds over Taipei were thickening with the moisture that would become the afternoon rain. Taiwanese kids were skimming along the path on bicycles, and occasional knots of people were gathered at benches. Michael Dunne and Jason Howe walked slowly down the riverside path, followed by the discreet shadow of Alton Chen. A bridge over the Tamsui loomed a quarter mile ahead, where the quay ended.
Dunne looked at his watch. Time was running out. At some point, Chen’s magic with the authorities would disappear. But there was too much Dunne didn’t understand yet. He grabbed Howe’s arm and steered him in the opposite direction, back upriver. Chen, still ten paces behind, made the same maneuver.
“I still don’t get it,” said Dunne. “Help me out. What were you doing with all the fancy computers, anyway? That didn’t make any sense when you showed them off in Urbino, and it still doesn’t.”
“Man, you are a lamer. How did they ever let you in the CIA? This whole thing was a phreak. We were building a world made of Astroturf.”
“That’s not responsive. Be specific. And, honestly, you’re not the person to call me lame. You would piss in your pants if you tried some of the stuff I’ve done. So, cut the crap and explain what you were doing.”
Howe laughed for the first time. He liked pulling Dunne’s chain. He leaned closer and continued his narrative.
“Ricci and I agreed on one thing, which was that politics was bullshit, no matter where. It was all lies. And we realized that with the Internet we had this theater where we could create whatever effects we wanted, so we just let it rip. That was our thing, back in 2016, before you showed up.”
“Were you working with the Russians?”
“Hell, no. We watched the Russians, for sure, with their troll farms and websites and agitprop. They were obvious, if you had friends in St. Petersburg, which we did. And at WikiLeaks, which we did. We saw the Russian hacks going down, and it was lulz, for sure, but it was so basic, and then the Democrats went nuts. It was a goof, basically.”
“What did you do that was fancier than the Internet Research Agency and the GRU?”
“We took it to the next level. Instead of posting fake-news sites, we started creating fake events and putting them online. And guess what? Nobody could tell the difference. That’s how fucked up politics is. People traded on our information on the stock market. They referred to it in news stories. We started trolling companies just for fun. And Ricci had this pet project to defang all the malware the Russians and Americans had installed. He was pumped about that.”
“Why? What did he get out of it?”
“Advertising. And just to show he could.”
“Why did you help? He’s the kind of person you should have hated.”
“I thought it was cool bandit stuff, for a long time. I finally realized that, for Ricci, it was just business.”
Dunne thought about some of the fake events he’d watched online back in Geneva, when he was preparing for his trip to Urbino. He thought of poor Pia Zimmerman, and the created image of her lips around the penis of a man she’d never met. Zimmerman’s Saudi tormentor had purchased the deceptive imagery from someone, and now it was evident from whom.
He saw the image in his mind, too, of his wife Alicia. His arm twitched and he felt a gag in his throat. He made himself think about something else.
“You started selling this technology to other people,” said Dunne, barely audible.
“Ricci did. He and his partners were ready to sell one-offs to anyone, so long as they kept the technology in-house. They were doing some very creative things. People call this stuff deepfakes, but that doesn’t do it justice. Technically speaking, it’s sweet.”
“It’s sick. How do you make it look
so real?”
“The technical term is ‘generative adversarial networks.’ GANs, we call them. That’s how you create a believable fake. You have one cluster of graphical processors that’s programmed to create images from all the video and photos you can upload. And then you have another GPU cluster that’s programmed to detect fake images, by seeing anomalies and blips. And then you feed the glitches back to the first cluster, so it can fix the flaws and make a better image, and then you test that one, and it’s back and forth like that until you have an image that is so good your mother couldn’t detect the real one from the fake.”
“And Ricci sold this stuff?”
“He was just starting to, when you visited. He was playing with the technology, to see what it could do. He created fake events about the weather, drug trials, earnings reports. Anything that would move markets. And then he began selling ‘trading opportunities’ to hedge funds. Little market-timing moments, where he knew something would happen but never told his customers why he was so smart. He loved that. He’s been tinkering these last two years, getting ready.”
“Ready for what?” asked Dunne. “What’s he planning now?”
“Something big. Ricci and his friends don’t tell me much anymore. They have new partners who don’t want a leftie Buddhist wannabe like me around. They put me on ice. First I was in this big old apartment in Paris with nothing to do. Then they stashed me here in Taiwan. Out of sight, out of mind. Until you showed up, that is. Satori.”
“You said that word before. What does it mean?”
“Sudden awakening. Comprehension. Understanding.”
Dunne nodded. He studied the landscape as Howe talked, thinking about how he might extract him from Taiwan without putting others in danger. Even a small island had hiding places. Across the river was New Taipei City, a commercial district, unfashionable and anonymous. To the south were miles of rugged hills, dotted with parks that most Taiwanese were too busy to enjoy. But before he thought about escape, Dunne had to know more.
The Paladin Page 21
