by Marc Cameron
She reached across the table to touch his hand. “Want to go back to my apartment after this?”
“I want to,” Huang said. “But there’s something I have to do first.”
A television over the bar showed a smug President Ryan walking across the White House lawn to a waiting Marine One. Ryan wasn’t a bad-looking guy, she thought. Just evil.
David followed her gaze over his shoulder to the screen. “Look at the way he salutes. You can tell he wishes he was in the military.”
“He was a Marine,” Chadwick said automatically. She’d made it a point to know everything about her opponent. He could never run for President again, but he was powerful, and would surely try to shove someone he wanted down the country’s throat.
“A Marine.” Huang grunted, turning so he could get a little better view of the screen. “It’s no wonder he tries to start wars all over the world. What wouldn’t you do to bring him down?”
“You’ll get no argument from me,” Chadwick said.
Huang turned back around to fully face her, taking her hands in his on top of the table. “Really?”
“Really what?”
Huang’s playful demeanor turned to stone. “Would you do anything to bring Jack Ryan down?”
Chadwick drew her hands away, hackles going up.
“Why are you asking me that? You know how I feel.”
“Don’t be that way,” he said. “I just mean, you know, he’s a problem that needs to be fixed.”
She gave a skeptical nod. “I want him out of office.”
“And we can help with that.”
The way he said “we” made her shiver.
“Let’s talk about something else. I’m not comfortable with where this is going . . .”
“Nothing has changed,” Huang said. “But I do think it’s time we take the next logical step.”
He reached beneath the table and produced a cell phone, wrapped in the wires of a set of earbuds. He pushed it toward her.
“There is something you have to see.”
“I don’t have to do shit,” Chadwick snapped. She wanted to get up and leave, but something about the way he looked at her kept her rooted in place. The look in his eyes said he would feel really, really bad if he had to kill her.
“I’ll concede to that,” he said. “You do not have to see it, but you should.” He nudged the phone a little closer. “Please. Take a look for me.”
Chadwick groaned. She unwound the cord and tilted her head, pushing back her hair so she could insert one of the earbuds.
Huang reached across and punched a code into the phone, quickly, so she couldn’t follow what it was. “Now watch until the very end.”
Chadwick slumped in horror as a video of the two of them in her bedroom began to play. She yanked out the earbud and shoved the phone at him. “Seriously?” she said. “Revenge porn? I don’t have to watch this. I was there. Remember? How did you get a camera in there, anyway?”
She slid sideways to get out of the booth. Huang kicked her hard under the table, the edge of his shoe sliding down the front of her shin. It was the kind of injury that brought nausea instead of screaming. Tears filled her eyes. Five minutes earlier she would have probably married the guy if he’d asked. Now he was kicking the shit out of her. It took her a moment to compose herself after something like that.
“What . . . What do you want?”
He slid the phone toward her again, his handsome face passive, as if he’d not just driven his shoe into her leg. His words were quiet but viperlike, potent with implied threat. “I want you to watch until the end.”
And she did, every sickening moment of it.
Thankfully, there was only three minutes of video—cut from several hours, no doubt.
Trembling badly by the time it was over, she sniffed, trying in vain to keep her chin from quivering as she spoke. “Go ahead and put it on YouTube,” she said, attempting—and failing—to feign an air of defiance. “Voters have sex. Hell, I heard there are like fourteen thousand people doing it at any given moment. I’m a single woman in Washington. No one will care what I do in my own bedroom. I may even sponsor a revenge-porn bill and get the sympathy vote.”
Huang gave a slight nod toward the phone. “Keep watching.”
A man appeared on the phone’s screen, backlit so Chadwick could make out only the dark silhouette. The blood drained from her face when she realized it was not a prerecorded video but a live call.
“Hello, Senator Chadwick,” the man said, a slight accent in his voice. “You may be interested to know that you have been sleeping with, and, in actuality, conspiring with, an agent for the government of the People’s Republic of China. Evidence suggests that you and he are conspiring to oust the sitting President of the United States.”
“I have done no such—”
Huang wagged his finger, motioning for her to stay quiet and listen.
She found it impossible to breathe. Her normally icy demeanor turned to slush. “What . . . What could you possibly want?”
“We want you to continue doing what you have been doing,” the silhouette on the phone said. “Help us with the work that is necessary.”
Chadwick cupped a hand over her earpiece. Her rational brain said no one in the restaurant could hear the conversation, but she couldn’t help but feel like this treason was being broadcast over a PA.
She looked up at David through tears of anger and betrayal. “How could you do this?”
The man on the phone spoke again, firmer now. “Stop being maudlin. We are not asking you to assassinate Jack Ryan. You need only to get close to him. We want someone in his inner circle, to learn what he plans—”
Chadwick laughed, drawing side-eyes from the diners seated at a nearby table. “That’s rich.” She scoffed. “He doesn’t like me any more than I like him. He’s not about to let me hang out in the Oval Office and see what he’s up to.”
“On the contrary,” the man on the phone said. “I believe you will find that President Ryan is a dreamer. You need only appeal to his sense of hope. If you tell him that you wish to work together, he will find himself quite unable to resist. There are few friends closer than a former enemy.”
The man directed her to get the rest of her instructions from Huang.
“And what if I don’t play along?” Chadwick asked. “You’ll kill me?”
The man on the phone chuckled softly. “We are not monsters,” he said. “There would be no need. Your own country will charge you with treason and put you in a very dark hole for the rest of your life. I hear the maximum-security prison in Colorado is . . . What do they call it? A clean version of hell? In truth, I would prefer a quick death. But that is just me.”
The dark man ended the video call with a smug farewell—as if they were friends.
Completely undone, Chadwick pulled the earpiece out of her ear and glared across the table at David Huang.
“How do I know you won’t just release this tape after I’ve done what you want me to do?”
“Oh, Michelle,” he said, looking slightly hangdog. “You have my word. We only—”
“Your word means shit to me,” Chadwick hissed.
“I know,” David said. “But you have to think about this logically. Why would we bring down someone who wants the same thing we do?”
“But,” Chadwick stammered, “I don’t want to spy on my own government.”
“And we’re not directing you to,” Huang said. “Your job is to help us destroy Jack Ryan.”
11
Major Chang replaced the handset in the cradle of his secure telephone and swiveled his chair sideways behind his desk.
Sliding his butt down in the mesh cushion, he stretched his legs all the way out in front of him. The cuffs of his green uniform slacks hiked up to reveal a band of pale skin above each saggi
ng black sock. With his hands clasped together, index fingers extending, he toyed with his top teeth as he thought.
He’d had more time to study her now.
Calliope was more advanced than anything Chang had ever seen. Her code was infectious, but not indiscriminate. WannaCry—malware with which Chang was intimately familiar—had infected hundreds of thousands of Windows operating systems around the world. It was an extremely successful outbreak, but largely uncontrollable by the instigators once it began. The worm used a leaked NSA-installed back door called Eternal Blue to move laterally and quickly, replicating itself and encrypting systems, burning through networks over the course of four days.
Effective but broad. A kill switch had been discovered, out-of-date systems were patched, and normal life resumed.
Major Chang imagined a more focused attack. Widespread carnage was well and good, but he was certain Calliope could be used differently. Her task would be simple, easy for something as smart as she was. Little could be more simple than “take that hill.” Chang saw her much the way her developers saw her, as an NPC, a non-player character in a game. This game was real, he was the player, and Calliope was his AI agent, working through her missions independently in the Cloud toward the goals he’d assigned.
After almost two weeks of testing, he was not one hundred percent certain what she would do once she was uploaded onto a system, other than whatever she pleased. So far, the outcomes had all been in line with Chang’s original goals, but the routes Calliope took were impossible to plan for.
Chang continued to slouch at his desk for well over an hour, clicking his teeth and intermittently passing gas, while others in the lab came and went. He needed to learn her language. That was all. Perhaps he did not trust her enough. Maybe he was placing too many constraints on her, not giving her enough freedom.
Chang’s initial attempt to begin FIRESHIP had failed—at least in part.
Calliope had made the jump from a Cassandra personal data assistant to a cellular phone, exactly the way she’d been programmed to do. But there she stayed, failing to jump from one device to the next—the phone that was his actual target all along. Chang was enough of a scientist to not believe in such fantasies, but it seemed as though Calliope was angry with him, as if she had become sullen and refused to budge out of spite. She was bright—no, intuitive might be a better word. A command to take a certain figurative hill did not require specifics, only general directions and parameters. Game, mission, Calliope did not recognize a difference. She would come up with the plan of action—using information she gleaned from running scenario after scenario, playing through the steps of the game tens of thousands of times. With great statistical reliability, she was able to predict the end before the game began. It was as if a biological virus had mutated to infect only redheads—and then decided on its own that it would infect only specific redheads who were known to belong to clubs of other redheads, thus maximizing its chances to get more redheads in a shorter span. Redheads did not stand a chance.
The idea he’d proposed to General Bai was lofty but plausible, as long as he could get Calliope under control.
To retrieve the prize, FIRESHIP would require her to hitch rides from system to system in a loosely choreographed game of hopscotch. She would utilize backdoor vulnerabilities the way WannaCry had, traveling via handshakes between systems, lying dormant for days or even weeks like Stuxnet, or disguising herself as a JPEG like Conficker. Calliope had to look many moves ahead, ascertaining the correct next step before making any jump. And she had to do this multiple times, on her own, in a closed system, with no input from Chang—probably while being ruthlessly hunted by U.S. Cyber Command and a dozen commercial security companies. Someone would find out. They always did.
But first, Chang had to get her inside.
12
The seventy-meter yacht Torea made an honest fourteen knots under sail. She was heading east, ten miles out of Auckland, on a beam reach with full sails and a bone in her teeth. A tall Asian man with a strong jaw was at the five-foot wooden wheel on the teak of the open foredeck, just forward of a set of large windows. A lively party spilled from the main lounge behind those windows and onto the main deck. A stiff wind tousled the man’s salt-and-pepper hair. Facing away from the sun, he’d hung a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses from the V of his dark blue polo shirt. He wore khaki slacks and Sperry Top-Siders, and would have looked like one of the crew but for the fact that two members of the actual crew, Captain Carey Winterflood and his first officer, both formerly of the Australian Navy, stood at his side in spotless summer whites, explaining the complicated computer navigation and systems used to steer the boat.
As far as the first officer knew, the man wasn’t any sort of notable. He was of Asian descent but carried himself like an American, standing like a derrick with his legs a little more than shoulder width apart. He didn’t look like the Hollywood type—too real for that. Probably some grand pooh-bah from a company the first officer had never heard of. As Winterflood’s friend, he’d been given the mate’s rate, i.e., a free trip by order of the captain. Much to the first officer’s chagrin, the man at the wheel looked as if he was paying no attention at all to the briefing, gawking instead at the forwardmost mast and rigging, as if he’d never seen a foresail before. Worse yet, the captain had turned over control of the boat. Torea was a finicky thing, and it was all too easy to be taken aback without warning, causing the sails to swing wildly. It wasn’t so much dangerous as it was unprofessional, and certainly unseamanlike. The captain knew better. Why the hell was he trusting this novice?
Winterflood, a man with a silver crew cut and perpetually mischievous smile, gave his first officer a wink, then spoke to the man at the wheel. His Australian accent rolled out on a resonant baritone voice.
“What do you think?”
The man shrugged. “She handles well,” he said, still ignoring the computer screens that were set starboard of the wheel.
Behind Torea, the sun was two hours from setting over the city of Auckland, dazzling the indigo water. The high decks made it difficult to see the surface next to the vessel, but someone with good eyes could look out and catch periodic glimpses of flying fish, their pectoral fins jutting out like wings as they sailed across the waves. Gawky frigate birds, done with a day of hunting, winged toward land. Golden plover—torea in the Maori language and the namesake of the vessel—passed periodically, winging north on their eight-thousand-mile migration to Canada or Alaska. These were land birds, flying across oceans but never landing on them. It was the golden plover that had inspired early Polynesians to board their double-hulled canoes and sail north when they saw the birds flying that direction every year and then return some five months later. They needed land, so if they flew north then there had to be land there.
If the definition of ship was a boat that was large enough to carry other boats, this three-masted schooner more than qualified. At seventy meters from bowsprit to stern pulpit, with a beam of more than thirty feet, the sailing ship was longer than the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María set together bow to stern. She had a helipad and a fiberglass runabout capable of launching a parasail, and two sixteen-foot rigid-hull inflatable Zodiacs for taking passengers to and from port, should she have to anchor offshore. She carried a crew of eighteen, including a chef who had only recently been a teacher at Le Cordon Bleu, the world-renowned French culinary school. Her owner, billionaire software developer, race car driver, pilot, and scuba diver Bill Rennie, kept the megayacht’s staterooms full of influential friends and acquaintances, even when he wasn’t aboard. He was particularly fond of Polynesia, and the ship spent most of her time cruising among Tahiti, the northern Cook Islands, the Marquesas, Tonga, and Fiji, heading north to Hawaii at least twice a year. Politicians from the U.S. and Rennie’s native Canada, along with Hollywood notables and professional athletes, made frequent visits during Torea’s many voyages.
The five-hour
shakedown cruise from Waitematā Harbor after a major engine overhaul in the Auckland boatyards was as good a reason as any for a party. More than fifty guests milled and chatted around the decks and lounges, drinking Bill Rennie’s alcohol and absorbing the ambiance of his yacht. Most of them pretended they were oh-so-used to this kind of luxury that it was nothing to them.
Captain Winterflood stepped forward and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I think you’ve got this,” he said. “I’m going to step inside for a cup of Earl Grey. Want anything?”
“I’m good,” the man said, both hands on the wheel. He glanced up at the sails, adjusting course a hair—all without looking at any instrument but the compass mounted on the pedestal at the wheel.
The first officer gasped. “Captain—”
Winterflood waved him off. “He’ll be fine,” he said, and strode aft toward the main saloon in search of his tea.
The first officer took a half-step closer, watching the man in earnest now, ready to spring into action the moment some terrible mistake put the ship in jeopardy. It didn’t take long to realize that though this man glanced periodically at the computer, he was indeed relying on more basic instruments. The arrow windex mounted high on the foremast gave him wind direction. Footlong lengths of light cordage—telltales affixed to the leading edge of the sails—let him know when the ship was trimmed correctly, streaming horizontally if he was in the zone, but sagging or rising if he turned in too tight, or fell too far off the wind.
Mistakes took a while to show up on Torea, but once they happened, events unfolded quickly. She was not a particularly easy vessel to sail if one was not accustomed to her fickle ways, but this guy was, as they said down under, right-as.
“You must spend a good deal of time on the water,” the first officer said, relaxing a notch.