Caine and Sean had abandoned Tiao’s truck a few towns past Huagu. He didn’t want to take the chance of police pulling over the stolen vehicle. Instead, they caught a bus in another small, nameless town a couple hours down the road.
They were the only Westerners on the vehicle. The passengers that boarded in the other towns along the way gave them curious looks and glances. But after a few hours, they hit a long stretch of open road, and no new passengers came onboard. They kept to themselves during the long trip. Caine stared out the window, and Sean slept in short, restless bouts.
Finally, the dust and empty roads had given way to busy freeways. Towering apartment buildings surrounded the outskirts of the massive city. Then the futuristic Lujiazui skyline of the Pudung district came into view. The gleaming buildings formed a dense cluster across the rippling water of the Huangpu River.
The late afternoon sun glinted off the spheres of the Oriental Pearl Tower. The sleek, angular slab of the World Financial Center pierced the hazy sky like a blade. Both buildings were dwarfed by the elegant lines of Shanghai Tower. Its mirrored form twisted in a mobius-like curve as it rose over two thousand feet into the air.
Caine couldn’t help but marvel at the city. The bus drove along the Bund, a riverside route that curved around the scenic view. Sean began to stir. He rubbed his eyes, looked out the window for a moment, then turned towards Caine.
“Pretty wild, huh? Biggest city in the world; over twenty million people live here.”
As they drove closer, Caine noticed dozens of yellow and red construction cranes scattered through the city. Hundreds of feet tall, they perched between the massive buildings like birds pecking for scraps. The towering structures that surrounded them made the cranes look tiny by comparison.
“The buildings are impressive all right," he said. "Looks like they’re just getting started. There’s even more construction here than Beijing.”
Sean nodded. “Yeah, some people call this place Construction City. I read an article that said over seventy percent of the world’s construction cranes are in China. And half of those are here, in Shanghai.”
Finally, the bus pulled to a stop in front of a low, sprawling mirrored building. Massive red Chinese characters hung from the roof. An English sign read “Shanghai Long Distance Bus Station.” They disembarked and made their way to the taxi line. Caine instructed Sean to keep his head down to avoid any security cameras.
Twenty minutes later, as the late afternoon sun hung low in the sky, Caine and Sean sat in plastic chairs outside a tiny street-side cafe. Caine picked up a triangular sliver of Cong You Bing, a fried pancake stuffed with scallions, and slipped it into his mouth. The pastry had a crispy, pan-fried outer layer. Inside the dough was chewy and satisfying. The strong onion flavor exploded across his taste buds. He was grateful that he had enough cash left to fill their stomachs after the long trip.
“One thing you gotta love about China,” Sean said. His mouth was full of Rou Bao, a fluffy white bun filled with salted pork and cabbage. “The street food is good, and cheap.”
Caine kept his eye on the rundown apartment building across the street. He grabbed one of the white buns from the circular bamboo steamer that sat on the table, took a bite, and nodded. “Cheap is our only option at this point. That was the last of our cash,” he said after washing down his food with a swig of cold green tea.
The apartment building was a tall green and brown slab, the last in a row of five similar towers. Its paint was faded and peeling, and a few of the windows were cracked. Battered air conditioners, covered with filth and dust, sprouted from each unit. Wet laundry hung from metal pipes mounted next to each window. A web of humming power lines crisscrossed between the building and its closest neighbor.
A vast field of tiny houses spread out beyond the building's eastern perimeter. The minuscule, sagging dwellings were little more than shacks and hovels. The houses closest to the building had been razed to the ground, leaving behind a barren patch of dirt.
A cavernous foundation pit had been cut into the earth only a few feet away from the apartment building. Construction was already underway on a new structure. Steel girders and scaffolding sprang up above the foundation. Large dump trucks roared out of the pit, clearing out loads of rocky earth and debris.
Caine wiped his hands on a napkin and stood up. “You sure this is the place? I would think a hacker could afford better housing.”
Sean nodded. “Yeah, this is it. The Monkey King and I, we hung out here a few times.”
Caine raised an eyebrow. “Monkey King?”
“That’s his hacker name. His real name was Huang Ju … I think. I just called him Monk. Anyway, the state-sponsored hackers have money, sure. Those guys get bounties for breaching American and European tech firms. They steal patents and state secrets. Or they work directly for the government, in one of the Cyber-Warfare units. But Monk and the rest of the Jade Enclave, they’re not just in it for themselves."
“Jia told me about them. She said they help Human Rights groups. Warn them about government crackdowns, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah. They're trying to make a difference.”
"She also said they were under investigation for murder."
Sean shook his head. "No way. Not their style. They're trying to make things better. And they take a lot of risks to help groups like HRN."
Caine scanned the street outside the building. He didn’t see anyone that stood out, no one that pinged his inner radar. But after the events at the black jail, and the bloodshed on the train, just being here was asking for trouble.
“We’re taking some pretty big risks too," he said. "Let’s move.”
They crossed the busy street and entered the building.
The lobby was a dim, medium-sized room with a low ceiling. A frayed couch and chair surrounded a chipped coffee table. Old magazines covered the table's surface. The black and white tiles of the vinyl checkerboard floor were peeling up at the seams. A set of frosted glass doors was the only other exit from the room.
A middle-aged man with glasses and slicked back gray hair sat behind the front desk, reading a magazine. Caine examined the area, noting an ancient security camera mounted in the corner of the room. He doubted it still worked, but he moved in front of Sean and kept his head down, just in case. The horizontal bars of a steel security gate ran along a track above the desk. The gate was half-closed.
The man behind the counter looked up as they approached. He reached forward and raised the gate up a few inches to get a clearer look at them.
“Baoqian, sorry,” he grunted. “Gate broken. Won't stay open.”
“Uhhh … Ni you wo de dongxhi,” Sean said in halting, broken Chinese.
The man gave them a quizzical glare over the rim of his glasses. “Huh?”
“Huang Ju, he left me a key?”
The man nodded. “Ahhh, uh huh. Other men came, you know. And police.”
Caine leaned forward and stared at the man with his piercing green eyes. “The key, please.”
The man blinked. He turned and began to rummage through a series of drawers behind the desk. “Shi a, sure. I have it somewhere. Ah, here.”
He handed Sean a key ring with a single key, and a tag with a number.
“Xie xie,” Caine said. “We’d appreciate it if you kept this quiet.”
The man looked at Caine for a moment, then sighed. “I get paid to run desk. Not to chat.”
Caine smiled. A chill seemed to run through the man. He muttered something in Chinese and began gathering his things from the desk. “You go now, I locking up soon.”
Caine and Sean walked towards the opaque glass doors.
“How do you do that?” Sean asked.
“Do what?”
“You put the fear of God into that guy with just a look.”
“He won’t call the cops right away, but that’s about as far as it goes,” Caine muttered. “If the government or the Triads push him, trust me, he’ll sell us ou
t in ten seconds flat.”
“You’ve got some serious trust issues, you know?” Sean replied as they pushed through the doors.
“It’s called life experience, kid. Call me when you get some.”
The apartment was on the sixth floor, in the eastern corner of the building. A dusty, cracked window at the end of the hall looked out over a fire escape. Beyond that lay the massive construction project next door. The sounds of jackhammers and truck engines vibrated the pane of glass and echoed down the hall.
Caine watched the other apartments as Sean slipped the key into the unit's deadbolt lock. No one looked out from the identical green doors that lined both sides of the musty hallway. Sean turned the key, and the lock clicked. The door creaked as it swung open.
Sean whistled. “Jesus … this place is a disaster!”
“Wait here.” Caine stepped past him into the apartment, keeping close to the wall. His eyes darted across the corners of the dim living room. He continued moving sideways along the wall. Sean was right, the room was a mess. Overturned furniture, shattered glass, scattered clothes … someone had searched the apartment thoroughly, leaving the place a shambles in the process.
Moving to the nearest doorway, he ducked through and listened. He heard no sounds other than the construction work outside.
“Sean,” he called as quietly as possible. “Come in, close the door.”
Sean entered the apartment. Caine repeated his quick series of movements through each room.
Finally, he emerged back into the living room. "Place is clear," he said, looking around at the mess. Sean stood in the center of the room, staring at the clutter that spread across the scratched and pitted floor.
“What the hell happened in here?” he asked.
“What do you think happened? Someone searched the place. Looking for the same thing we are, most likely.”
“I was hoping Monk … Huang … would be here.”
“Sean, if Fang really is Triad, and he got to your friend …”
Sean nodded. “I know, I know. It doesn’t look good. I was just hoping.” His foot crunched over some broken glass. He bent down and picked up a shattered picture frame laying on the floor. The torn picture inside showed a young Chinese couple. The man was rail-thin, with a short, spiked haircut. The girl was pale and tall. Large pink glasses obscured her face.
Sean smiled. "That's Monk."
"Who's the girl?" Caine asked.
"It's his girlfriend, I think. She was a hacker too, but I never met her. They were fighting. Monk was kind of a player, liked the ladies a little too much, you know?" He dropped the frame back on the floor.
Caine looked around the room and took a deep breath. “Well, if Fang is after you, then that tells us something. Either he didn’t find what he was looking for here, or you know something he doesn’t want to get out. What did Huang tell you about this information he found?”
“Nothing. He just said to lay low for a while, and that he’d explain everything later. Then I got arrested. Oh, I checked my email on the train. He sent me a file, but it made no sense.”
Caine turned his attention from the scattered debris to Sean. “What do you mean? What kind of file?”
Sean walked over to a toppled desk in the corner of the room. A pile of smashed electronics surrounded the battered furniture. “It was just a song. C-pop, Chinese top 40 stuff. Monk hated that kind of music.”
“It might be some kind of code, or signal. Can you play it?”
Sean kicked at the cracked screen of a computer monitor. “Not on this … they destroyed all his computer stuff.”
“If there’s nothing here for us, we should leave.”
Sean narrowed his eyes and glanced around the room once more. “Wait … I don’t see his laptop.”
“Maybe they took it?”
“You said yourself. If they’re still after me, they haven’t found what they’re looking for.”
“I said that was a possibility.”
Sean walked into the bedroom. The mattress hung off the bed at an odd angle. It had been slit open from top to bottom, and scraps of foam littered the floor like a thin layer of snow. The rest of the bedroom furniture was smashed to pieces, the same as outside.
The walls were bare, save for a framed poster. It was pushed aside, as if someone had looked behind it. The image on the poster was a pretty Chinese girl in her twenties, dressed in tight colorful clothes. She was winking at the camera, and a sly smile stretched across her young, flawless face. Rainbow-colored Chinese characters filled the bottom of the poster.
Sean pointed at the picture and shook his head. “No way. No way did Monk put that up. That’s Wuchi Wu. She’s the singer on the song he sent me. He hated C-Pop music, said it was all state-approved propaganda for tweeners.”
“Then he knew you’d recognize it as wrong. He was trying to send you a message,” Caine said. “It’s called steganography. Hiding something in plain sight. The audio file, and this poster, were clues for you.”
Caine tapped on the wall. His knuckles struck the surface with a loud, solid thunk. Then he tapped on the blank space behind the poster. A hollow, empty knock rang out.
“There’s a space behind this wall,” he said, as he glanced around the room. He picked up the splintered leg of a chair. “Stand back.”
Sean took a step backwards, as Caine slammed the piece of wood into the wall. The smooth, white drywall tore open like paper and a confetti of dust and plaster fragments rained to the floor. Caine smashed the wall a few more times, then used his hands to clear out a large hole.
A frame of wooden beams was sunken behind the plaster, leaving a six-inch gap between it and the wall. Resting on one of the beams was a small, rectangular package wrapped in plastic. Caine grasped it and pulled it out of the jagged hole. He swept a light covering of plaster dust off the bundle with the back of his hand. “Your friend was pretty resourceful,” he said.
“He was the Monkey King,” Sean said with a sigh. “Master of mischief.”
Caine tore the plastic away, revealing a sleek, silver laptop, a bundled power cord, and a USB thumb drive. He set the device on the ground, plugged it in, and flipped open the top. A black screen and some glowing white Chinese characters greeted him. A cursor blinked in silence, waiting for the correct input.
Caine slid the machine over to Sean. “I assume you know the password?”
“No password,” Sean said. He looked into the webcam and placed his thumb on the trackpad. “Biometric security. Iris scan and thumbprint. Monk said he added me to the white list, so this should do it … bingo!” Sean smiled as the black security screen disappeared and the machine began to boot up. After a few seconds, they found themselves staring at a blank LINUX desktop.
“That’s weird. He wiped this machine … there’s no apps or files left at all. Wait, hold on. Here’s a folder.”
Sean moved the cursor to the lone folder and clicked it open. “Okay, we got a browser, and some kind of audio app called ‘Deep Echo.’” He tapped the keys again, navigating the browser to his email account. Within a few seconds, he downloaded the audio file to the desktop.
“You’re pretty good with a computer,” Caine remarked. He peered out the window at the street below.
“Lots of alone time and lots of video games,” Sean said as he dragged the audio file into the Deep Echo sound app. The waveform of the audio file scrolled across the screen as the song played. The bright, electronic ballad filled the room as the singer wailed the mournful refrain. “Wo dui ni de ai ranshao, my love for you burns!”
Sean winced. “God, this song sucks.”
The song played to the end and stopped. The only sound in the room was the distant clanking of jackhammers outside.
“That’s it … There’s nothing else in the file.”
Caine peered over his shoulder. “If he left this computer here for you to find, there must be something useful in this app.” His eyes ran over the various menus and functions of th
e programs. “Good thing this is in English. There …” He pointed to one of the menus on the screen. “LSB decoding. Try that.”
“What the hell is LSB?” Sean asked as he ran the file through the processing filter.
“Least Significant Bit. It’s another form of steganography. This song is a digital file, made of bits, tiny pieces of digital information. Some audio bits are more significant than others. LSB encoding replaces the least significant bits of the song with bits of a coded message. Your ear can barely hear the difference when you play the song. The message is hidden throughout the file. It’s just spread out, so you can’t put it together without software like this.”
The computer finished the decoding process and beeped. The image of the waveform faded from view.
“Hey, you’re right! It worked!”
A dense mass of computer code filled the screen. Row after row of numbers and letter scrolled in front of Sean's confused face.
"Well," Caine asked. 'What is it?"
Sean bit his lip. "I have no idea. Some kind of file, but it looks like gibberish to me."
Caine glanced at the laptop for a moment. "He must have left you the USB stick for a reason as well. Copy the file, then pack it up. We're leaving."
“Wait, where are we going?”
“There's nothing more left to find here. We can't stay any longer. Fang and his men obviously know about his place; they may have it under surveillance.”
Sean slammed the laptop shut pulled out the USB drive. He followed Caine as they stepped back out into the living room.
“We’ll lay low until I hear from my contact, and then we get the hell out of this country. Maybe they can help decode this file. Got it?”
Sean took a long look around the disheveled apartment. He handed the memory stick to Caine. “Yeah,” he said in a quiet voice. “I got it.”
Caine eyed Sean and sighed, as he slid the drive into his pocket. “I'm sorry about your friend. But we have to keep moving. It’s the only way we’ll get out of this.”
Sean nodded glumly, and they stepped out the door. “Is that more of your life experience talking?”
Thomas Caine series Boxset Page 54