by Theo Cage
“Like what?”
“People throwing their dog in the backseat and sending the car to the vet. I saw that once. Or marching the kids off to kindergarten. No adult in the car.”
“Shit.”
“These cars are smarter than their owners most of the time.”
Wey asked Zerzy, “Did you know it was Invicta? The President’s daughter?”
“They didn’t tell me that when we got command.”
“That’s serious shit. You killed the daughter of one of the most powerful people on the planet. That doesn’t knock you for six?”
Zerzy stood up in her chair, her face red. “You don’t think those assholes deserve it? Like they wouldn’t do that to us in nanosecond? Spoiled rich jerks cruising around in $200,000 cars, drunk on champagne that costs $500 a bottle?”
“Still— “
“We did job; we get crypto. That’s all I care about,” said Zerzy.
“Will they know?”
“That it was a righteous hack?”
“Shit,” swore Toshi, “They’ll figure the car failed. They expect those new releases to eight up. They don’t get it, don’t understand the algo’s or what they’re doing. And even if they did suspect. Then what?”
“And you’re sure they can’t trace it?”
“Our security is cray flawless. If they were super lucky, someone with half a brain might find a backdoor into one of the Lutu chips. That would be Yang’s problem, not ours. There’s no link between us and Lutu. Can’t be done. There isn’t a computer powerful enough in the universe to break our encryption on thousands of hubs and routers all over the planet. Be no way of knowing who put it there and when. And just in case, I buried some Cyrillic code in there for fun.”
“That’s bullshit.” Zerzy was pissed now. She had to know that this kind of thing went on all the time: Russian hackers blaming Korea, Korean intrusion experts leaving bits of Romanian text behind or breadcrumbs that took them to Israel or Canadian dark web sites.
Wey stood up behind his wall of monitors.
“Hey. Hey. Stop, you guys. Our F35 is in the air. Mission number two is about to begin.”
顶
J A C K E D
RICE HQ
ONE FINAL MEETING BEFORE HUNTER’S JUMP was held in the main boardroom. Grace wanted to talk some sense into Jimmy and Hunter before they jacked him into the Internet.
Jacked. Those were Jimmy’s words. It sounded brave and futuristic coming out of his mouth, but Grace had a different view.
“I’m asking for one more day,” she said.
“Rice may not have one more day,” offered Hunter.
“And Grace, what’s one more day going to accomplish?” asked Jimmy.
“Let’s try a small increase, then. Do a review. Take small steps.” she said. “Like regular scientists do. Not use the Dr. Frankenstein method—open up the roof and shove Hunter right into the jaws of a lightning storm.”
Jimmy smiled, despite himself.
Hunter was standing in his tracker, fully upright, his arms by his side. Grace noticed the pose was somewhat reminiscent of the movie monster’s stance. She realized she may have been sharing a bed with Boris Karloff all along.
“I should probably be offended,” said Hunter. “Being accused of playing a character in a B movie. Jimmy? Is there a way to design something simple we can use to control the volume at the start?”
“Yes, we can use a simple speed cap. It’s the same technique Internet providers use to throttle bandwidth to users. I can control the router with software.”
“Does that reassure you, Grace?” asked Hunter.
“Before we do that, I need to understand why you can’t locate Rice using the technology you already have at your fingertips. Why risk opening the floodgates?”
“It might just be me, Grace. Maybe I need more practice. Maybe I’m not as clever as I thought I was. But I know the information we need is out there somewhere. I just need more leverage.”
“And no one has done this before,” she confirmed. “You’re the first? No undocumented experiments in China or Ukraine that you can review?”
“Right,” answered Hunter. “We are ahead of the curve.”
Grace sat back in her chair, her palms down flat on the tabletop. “I have a bad feeling about this, Hunter. I know it’s not scientific, it’s just emotion, but it still keeps me up at night.”
“I noticed,” he replied.
Grace looked into Hunter’s eyes. News flash: if we thought we were keeping our sleeping arrangements a secret from the rest of the team, think again, Hunter. Jimmy turned away, pretending not to notice.
“China has an industrial strength firewall on most of its localized Internet traffic,” said Hunter. “The first challenge will be to break through. And I have no idea how to do that yet. I’ve been a passive receiver up to now. I just sit there and soak up the stream. Becoming active will be a new experience.”
“What about the language problem?” asked Jimmy.
“I’ve been working on learning Mandarin for months. Not completely versant yet, but I can get the gist of most of the traffic. And I have a translator program I can use if I need to break something down. Like a book or a specific document.”
“Are you researching right now?” asked Grace, knowing he couldn’t resist multi-tasking. “Can you tell us anything new about Rice’s mission to Beijing?”
“I’m focusing on Rice’s positioning data,” said Hunter, his voice monotone, distracted. “Rice flew to Beijing, that we know, but not under his true identity.” They had zeroed in on three identities Rice had used in the past. He had fake passports and credit cards originally supplied by the CIA. But Grace knew he was unlikely to use them—they had been compromised in the past.
“Where would Rice obtain a new ID? Does he still have contacts?” asked Hunter. Grace wasn't sure. It had been fifteen years since he was actively covert, and he was never very talkative about old connections. He had been trying to move away from that world.
“Would it have been the first time he used a new identity?” asked Hunter, then his face twitched. “Forget names, I’m going to dive into the passport records. All the airlines use photo ID to securitize passenger info. I’ll start with Air Cathay.” Then, Hunter went quiet, but Grace could swear she could hear the quiet rush of electrons over the speakers attached to this tracker: the burble of high-speed data.
“I’m scanning through thousands of images. There’s a technique to this I’ve learned: just let the images stream past. Focus on the faces as a whole. The gestalt method.”
Grace stood and paced around the room. She’d heard people call Hunter a trans-human. Part person, part machine. It sounded better than cyborg.
Hunter called her name. “Grace, I think I have something. I’ve found his photo on a flight from LAX to Beijing.”
“When?”
“Thirteen days ago. Flight number nine zero seven. It’s Rice’s face but the name on the booking is Harry Holt.” Grace smiled. Harry Holt was a recurring character in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan series. Rice’s father was an English professor and read him those stories as a child.
“Any idea where he went from Beijing?” asked Grace.
“He could probably get around from there with cash—yuan. He wouldn’t need ID.”
“He’d need a credit card to stay at a hotel in a major city. Can you get any detail on credit card records?”
“I have to go into specific bank data. This might take awhile.”
“Use Discover first, it’s the most common card accepted in China,” offered Jimmy. Hunter didn’t answer. Grace moved her face closer to Hunter’s and searched his eyes. They were moving under his eyelids. Like REM or rapid eye movement. She gave him a soft kiss on his lips, hoping not to distract him. His lips curled which surprised her. She didn’t know he was capable.
“It’s a tickle response,” he murmured. “I have no control.”
“The great Hunter has a we
akness. Where else are you ticklish?”
“I found a transaction: the night the flight landed. Harry Holt booked a room in the Starway Hotel near the Zhongxin subway station. Seventy-two dollars US funds for one night.” Then Hunter paused, Grace waited. “That was the last transaction on that card.”
“Nothing else? That’s disappointing.”
“He either used cash, another credit card, or it was in Beijing where he ran into trouble.”
“Can you search the Beijing Police records? An unclaimed body? Some disturbance that might or the next day?”
“Grace, I told you. To do that I need more bandwidth. Beijing has a population of almost twenty-two million people. They could have thousands of incidents in a single night. More than that even. Smaller American cities can have several thousand.”
“Maybe Beijing is a safer city.”
“What would I look for? There are dozens of incidents types. Disorderly conduct. Assaults. Accidents. Suicides. “
“Can you check in the area of the hotel? The Starway? The day he arrived or the morning after?”
“Grace, there are thousands of reports. They list the address but there is no mapping. I’d have to look up the address on every single incident then cross check them against the location of the hotel and we still wouldn’t know if there was any logic to that search. Rice could have left the Starway early in the morning, paid a cab in cash and—”
“Then check the cabs. That did a pickup in the morning at the Starway.” Grace’s voice had risen. She was picturing Britt, alone in her room, unable to think of anything else but her missing partner.
“First, I can tell you Beijing has sixty-eight thousand five hundred and forty-seven taxis registered.” Hunter sounded so proud of snatching that statistic out of the air.
“Can you find any data on cabs doing pickups?” asked Grace.
“Rice isn't making this easy,” commented Jimmy. “He could have left us some clues.”
“What he did was uncharacteristic,” said Hunter. “He left in a hurry without giving us much information. Why would he do that? Then he flew to Beijing, on his own, using a new ID we don’t have in our files.”
“He had a reason, Grace. He was protecting us. And his family. See why I need to increase my bandwidth? I can find the data we need if I can only open more doors.”
Grace stared back at Hunter, then glanced over at Jimmy who was uncharacteristically quiet. Probably trying to imagine how Hunter could be anyone’s love interest.
“OK, you two. Set it up. I don’t like it, but Rice would risk his life for us without a second’s thought. We have to do everything in our power to bring him home.”
北京
B E I J I N G
Quinjang Prison
RICE HAD BEEN HURT BEFORE: An Afghan sniper had taken a chunk out of his shoulder in 2003, an IED in ‘Raq had left shrapnel in his back and neck. But this was different.
He’d lost track of his injuries here; they were too numerous to catalog and track. Every time he isolated a specific source of agony, another intruded on his thoughts. There was a bleeding head wound, the shattered wrist, untreated and swollen, his spine aching from repeated blows; one knee wouldn’t bend and had turned purple.
Rice had crawled onto his matt when Scarface left, expecting a visit from a medical representative or a senior officer. That was childish thinking. Nobody was coming. Scarface had released his demons on him, obviously lacking any sympathy for an American he saw as responsible for destroying his family.
Rice turned on the straw-filled bed, trying to find a position that reduced the pain. It was useless. His wrist would never heal properly without a brace. All he could hope for, if he ever escaped, was the bone could be rebroken and straightened.
The problem was he now no longer had use of his left hand and that meant issues with eating, cleaning himself, defense, hell—everything. Escape was seeming more remote by the minute, which was a thought he didn't want to dwell on.
His journey here to the prison seemed almost preordained: a foolish chain of events he should have recognized as doomed from the very beginning.
He had flown to Beijing to meet with the whistleblower, thinking it best to keep the details from his team. The Chinese were monitoring everything and everyone; he didn’t want to give them a heads up, endanger the informant or the members of his team. He thought he could do a better job than Jimmy or Grace. Call it what you want: to paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘a mid-life crises’ by any other name still smells the same.
Rice had let everyone down. He’d deserted the mother of his future child in the hour of her greatest need, had distracted Jimmy from his duty, and ignored protocol.
Now this team was wasting all their cycles and resources looking for the cave he was stashed away in.
He tried to bend his right knee, felt a jolt of pain shoot up into his thigh. Nothing broken, just swollen cartilage. He would need a week before he could run on the joint with any success. That was assuming a lot. As if he had a place to run to.
Rice had no details about the prison other than the hallway to the interrogation room. His head was bagged when they brought him in to Quinjang and dumped unceremoniously into this singular cell. The only reason he knew he was in Quinjang, a careless guard had mentioned the destination on the drive to the prison in the back of the noisy mini-van, the interior ripe with the odor of pig manure: that sharp sulfurous smell that bites at the back of your throat.
On the ride here, Rice counted off the seconds in his head for hours, trying to maintain a sense of direction. At one point he felt the sun strike the side of the bag, warming his cheek. They were travelling North: for over four hours since they left the warehouse district.
If Rice knew the area better, the direction, duration and speed might be marginally helpful. But he didn’t. Doing the calculations had only helped him keep focused.
The men in the van said little: that could be custom, personality or fear. Rice suspected a combination of the first two. The idea of inscrutability was typically based on poor understanding of culture. Some people didn’t talk much simply because they had nothing to say. They weren’t constantly chatty like most Americans.
He listened for anything, although he knew very little of the language. Maybe they didn’t know each other. Their speech was very formal, clipped. One of them, not the driver, was a supervisor or a leader. They deferred to him, ended their brief interjections when he spoke. They didn’t sound military. Rice couldn’t explain why he thought that. He’d just lived that life for so long, he knew the patter and the pattern.
Rice had been driven to a warehouse on the outskirts of Beijing to meet with the whistleblower. Rice was going to be shown a shipment of tablets, the kind kids use in school. They were manufactured in Shanghai, like so many other consumer electronics: phones, laptops, games, educational toys. According to Jimmy, they all contained contaminated chips—electronic circuits that could be controlled from a distance with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or could act as backdoors to the Internet. In laymen’s terms: if the laptop had a camera, an operator from thousands of miles away could activate the device, record the user’s actions, listen in on conversations, steal personal information—even make the devices overheat and cause attached Lithium Ion batteries to explode or cause a fire.
Rice imagined the daughter of the President of the United States, carelessly leaving her tablet sitting in the Oval office, making all conversation in that august room available to anyone with the right software.
How many millions of these infected devices were already out there? And who was commanding them?
跳
J U M P
Rice HQ
GRACE FELT LIKE THEY WERE PREPARING for a rocket launch. They were crowded into Hunter’s lab; he had lowered his stance in his tracker and was sitting now, strapped in, two of his researchers sitting at monitors off to the side, their gaze never leaving him.
Hunter, the man of the hour. Or was he the trans-huma
n of the hour.
They had talked all day about the search for Rice and no one was able to satisfy Britt with an answer. Hunter jacked into the Internet for the first time two years ago, but always at a carefully controlled level. This had given him unprecedented search power over the Internet—but not enough so far to solve the problem of the missing ex-agent.
Hunter felt there was another way. He was going to carefully increase his direct access to the Internet. That was the promise.
There was another deeply complicating matter: Hunter had made a call to DARPA, his old stomping grounds. He made a request to share cycles on the research group’s new Quantum computer, the QUEST.
There were only a dozen working Quantum computers in the world: prominent among those the Sycamore, owned jointly by NASA and Google, the D-wave processor in Canada, and IBM’s famous glass-cased Q One.
Quantum computers could solve problems in seconds that would take a conventional supercomputer tens of thousands of years to solve. Hunter believed that by using the QUEST to assist in managing his jump, he could handle the massive amounts of data pouring in without frying a billion brain cells. Literally.
It could also have the opposite effect and drive the scientist completely mad.
Hunter’s artificial hand, the right one, was flexing and extending, a nervous tick of his. It was the only group of muscles below his neck he could manipulate, so that was where he focused his anxiety.
Hunter also knew the real problem was knowing what to look for.
“All of Rice’s enemies, at least the ones I’m familiar with, are dead,” said Grace during their talk on the top patio early in the day.
Hunter had turned his head back from a view of the desert. “He should be so lucky. Rice worked on dozens of missions. Tracking all the possibilities could take us weeks if we use conventional methods.”
“I think this Chinese project Jimmy has been working on is the most likely cause of Rice’s disappearance.”