by Tom Clancy
That attempt had failed, so Tong then tried to exploit Levy’s knowledge by hacking into his machine.
That also failed. So Crane and his men got the information the old-fashioned way, by killing Charlie Levy and stealing it.
Tong knew Zha was cocky, and would not think DarkGod had anything in his virus that would improve on Zha’s own work.
Tong, on the other hand, appreciated how much could be learned by pooling intellectual resources of individual hackers, even hackers who did not give up their intellectual resources willingly.
Zha may not have believed that Levy had anything to add to his code, but Tong felt he had been forceful enough to make clear to the young man that he would be expected to give the data stolen from DarkGod his full attention.
TWENTY-THREE
Thirty-four-year-old Adam Yao sat behind the wheel of his twelve-year-old Mercedes C–Class sedan and wiped his face with a beach towel he kept on the passenger seat. Hong Kong was hot as hell this fall, even at seven-thirty in the morning, and Adam wasn’t running the air conditioner because he did not want his engine’s noise to draw attention to his surveillance.
He was close to his target location, too close, and he knew it. But he had to park close. He was dealing with the lay of the land, the bend in the road and the close proximity of the parking lot to the target.
He was pushing his luck parking here, but he had no choice.
Adam Yao was on his own.
When most of the sweat was off his brow he brought his Nikon camera back to his eye and zoomed in on the lobby door of the high-rise condominium tower across the street. The Tycoon Court, it was called. Despite the cheesy name, it was opulent inside. Adam knew the penthouse digs, located here in the lush Mid-Levels neighborhood of Hong Kong Island, must have cost an arm and a leg.
He used his lens to scan the lobby, searching for the target of his surveillance. He knew it was unlikely the man would be standing around in the lobby. Adam had been coming here for days and each morning was the same. At about seven-thirty a.m. the subject would shoot out of the penthouse elevator, walk purposefully across the marble floor of the lobby, and step outside and duck into an SUV in the middle of a three-vehicle motorcade.
And that was as far as Adam Yao had been able to track the man. The windows of the SUVs were tinted, and the subject was always alone, and Adam had not yet tried to tail the motorcade through the twisting narrow streets of the Mid-Levels.
Doing that alone would be nearly impossible.
Adam wished he had support from the leadership of his organization, just some resources and personnel he could call on in times like this to lend a hand. But Adam worked for CIA, and pretty much every CIA officer in Asia knew one thing about the organization: there was a breach. Langley denied it, but it was clear to the men and women on the sharp edge over here that the PRC was getting tipped off about CIA plans and initiatives, sources and methods.
Adam Yao needed some help with this surveillance operation, but he didn’t need it bad enough to risk compromise, because Adam Yao, unlike most every other CIA officer in China and HK, was working without a net. He was a CIA nonofficial cover officer, which meant he had no diplomatic protection.
He was a spy out in the cold.
Not that he wouldn’t mind something cold at the moment. He reached for his beach towel and wiped more sweat off his face.
* * *
A few days ago Yao had been alerted to the presence here at the Tycoon Court of a man from the mainland, a known manufacturer of counterfeit computer hard drives and microprocessors that had made their way into critical systems of U.S. military equipment. His name was Han, and he was director of a large state-owned tech factory in nearby Shenzhen. Han was in HK for some reason, and was getting picked up each morning by three white SUVs and driven off to an unknown location.
But even though this counterfeiter had managed to get his counterfeit devices into U.S. military equipment, to the CIA this was a commercial case, and commercial espionage was not something CIA put a lot of focus on over here.
Chicom cyberespionage and cyberwarfare were a big deal. Industrial computer crime was small potatoes.
But despite knowing good and well that Langley would show little interest in his initiative, Adam pushed ahead in this new investigation, for the simple reason that he very much wanted to know just who the hell the counterfeiter was meeting with on Adam’s turf.
Yao had been holding the camera to his eye for so long that the rubber eyecup over the viewfinder was filling up with sweat. He started to lower it from his eye, but then the penthouse doors in the lobby opened and, true to his daily ritual, the Shenzhen knockoff computer hardware maker stepped out alone and walked across the lobby. Just then three white SUVs rolled by Yao’s car and stopped under the awning of the Tycoon Court.
Each day the vehicles picking up the man were the same. Adam had been too far up the street to read the license plates on his earlier attempts, but today he was close enough to get a good angle and he had plenty of time to snap pictures of the tag numbers.
The back door to the second vehicle was opened from the inside, and the counterfeiter ducked in. In seconds the three SUVs rolled off, east on Conduit Court, disappearing around a hilly turn.
Yao decided he would attempt to tail the SUVs today. He would not get too close and it was unlikely he’d be able to follow them for long before he lost them in the thick traffic, but as far as he was concerned, he might as well head off in the same direction as they had on the offhand chance he’d get lucky and track them to a major intersection. If so, and assuming they took the same route each day, he could position himself farther along the route tomorrow and tail them a bit closer to their ultimate destination.
Any success using this technique would be a slow process and a long shot. But it beat coming here every morning, sitting here, day after day, which was beginning to look pointless.
He lowered his camera to the passenger seat and reached for his keys, but a loud rapping on his driver’s-side window made him jump.
Two police officers peered in the window, and one used the plastic antenna of his walkie-talkie to knock on the glass.
Great.
Yao rolled down the window. “Ni hao,” he said, which was Mandarin, and these cops likely spoke Cantonese, but he was pissed about wasting his morning, again, so he did not feel like being helpful.
Before the officer at the window said anything he looked past Yao to the passenger seat of the Mercedes, where the camera with the two-hundred-millimeter zoom lens sat next to a directional microphone with a set of headphones, a set of high-quality binoculars, a tiny notebook computer, a small backpack, and a legal pad full of handwritten notes.
He looked up at Adam now with suspicion. “Step out.”
Adam did as he was told.
“Is there a problem?”
“Identification,” the officer demanded.
Adam reached carefully into his pants and pulled out his wallet. The cop a few meters back watched him closely as he did so.
Adam passed his entire billfold over to the officer who requested it, and he stood quietly while the man looked it over.
“What’s all that in your car?”
“That is my job.”
“Your job? What, are you a spy?”
Adam Yao laughed. “Not quite. I own a firm that investigates intellectual property theft. My card is right next to my license there. SinoShield Business Investigative Services Limited.”
The cop looked the card over. “What do you do?”
“I have clients in Europe and the U.S. If they suspect a Chinese firm is manufacturing counterfeit versions of their goods over here, they hire me to investigate. If we think they have a case they’ll hire local attorneys and try to get the counterfeiting stopped.” Adam smiled. “Business is good.”
The cop relaxed a little. It was a reasonable explanation for why this guy was sitting in a parking space taking pictures of the comings and goings n
ext door.
He asked, “You are investigating someone at the Tycoon Court?”
“I’m sorry, officer. I am not allowed to reveal any information about an ongoing investigation.”
“The security office over there called about you. Said you were here yesterday, too. They think you are going to rob them or something.”
Adam chuckled and said, “I’m not going to rob them. I won’t bother them at all, though I wish I could sit in their lobby and enjoy the air-conditioning. You can check me out. I’ve got friends at HKP, mostly in B Department. You could call and get someone to vouch for me.” The Hong Kong Police B Department was the investigative branch, the detectives and organized crime force. The officers, Adam knew, would be A Department, the division under which the patrol cops worked.
The officer looking Adam over took his time. He asked Yao about some B Department police he knew, and Yao answered comfortably until a connection was made.
Finally satisfied, the two policemen headed back into their patrol car and left Adam by his Mercedes.
He climbed back inside his car and slammed his hand on the steering wheel in frustration. Other than tag numbers that would probably lead him nowhere, it had been a wasted day. He’d learned nothing about the counterfeiter and his activities he had not already known yesterday, and he’d been compromised by some damn security guard at a condominium tower.
Adam was once again, however, greatly appreciative of his fantastic cover for status. Running a private investigation firm gave him a ready-made excuse to be doing just about anything he could imagine being caught doing while in performance of his clandestine duties for the Agency.
As far as CIA nonofficial-cover “white side” jobs were concerned, Adam Yao’s SinoShield Business Investigative Services Ltd. was as solid as they came.
He drove off, down the hill and back toward his office near the harbor.
TWENTY-FOUR
Jack Ryan, Jr., woke next to Melanie Kraft and immediately realized his phone was ringing. He had no idea of the time at first, but his body told him it was well before his normal internal clock’s wake-up call.
He grabbed the ringing phone and looked at it. 2:05 a.m. He groaned. He checked the caller ID.
Gavin Biery.
He groaned again. “Really?”
Melanie stirred next to him. “Work?”
“Yeah.” He did not want her to be suspicious, though, so he followed that with: “The director of the IT department.”
Melanie laughed softly and said, “You left your computer on.”
Jack chuckled, too, and started to put the phone back down.
“Must be important, though. You should take it.”
Jack knew she was right. He sat up and answered. “Hello, Gavin.”
“You have got to come in right now!” said a breathless Gavin Biery.
“It’s two a.m.”
“It’s two-oh-six. Get here by two-thirty.” Biery hung up.
Jack put the phone back on the nightstand, fighting off a very strong urge to hurl it against the wall. “I’ve got to go in.”
“For the IT guy?” Melanie’s tone was incredulous.
“I’ve been helping him on a project. It was important, but not ‘come in the middle of the night’ important. But he seems to think this warrants a two-thirty a.m. meeting.”
Melanie rolled over, away from Jack. “Have fun.”
Jack could tell she did not believe him. He sensed that a lot from her, even when he was telling her the truth.
* * *
Jack pulled into the parking lot of Hendley Associates just after two-thirty. He came through the front door and gave a tired wave to William, the night security officer behind the front desk.
“Morning, Mr. Ryan. Mr. Biery said you’d be staggering in looking like you just woke up. I’ve got to say you look a lot better than Mr. Biery does during normal business hours.”
“He’s going to look even worse after I kick his ass for dragging me out of bed.”
William laughed.
Jack found Gavin Biery in his office. He fought his mild anger over Biery’s intrusion into his personal life and asked, “What’s up?”
“I know who put the virus on the Libyan’s machine.”
This woke Jack up more than the drive from Columbia. “You know the identity of Center?”
Biery shrugged dramatically. “That I can’t be sure of. But if it’s not Center, it’s somebody working for or with him.”
Jack looked over at Biery’s coffeemaker, hoping to pour himself a cup. But the machine was off and the pot was empty.
“You haven’t been here all night?”
“No. I was working from home. I did not want to expose the Campus network to what I was doing, so I did it from one of my personal machines. I just got here.”
Jack sat down. It was sounding more and more like Biery had had a very good reason to call him in after all.
“What have you been doing from home?”
“I’ve been hanging out in the digital underground.”
Jack was still tired. Too tired to play twenty questions with Gavin. “Can you just fill me in while I sit here quietly with my eyes closed?”
Biery had mercy on Ryan. “There are websites one can visit to conduct illegal business in cyberspace. You can go to these sort of online bazaars and buy fake IDs, recipes to build bombs, stolen credit card information, and even access to networks of previously hacked computers.”
“You mean botnets.”
“Right. You can rent or buy access to infected machines around the world.”
“You can just put in your credit card number and rent a botnet?”
Biery shook his head. “Not your credit card number. Bitcoin. It’s an online currency that is not traceable. Just like cash but better. It’s all about anonymity out there.”
“So are you telling me you rented a botnet?”
“Several botnets.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“It’s illegal if you do something illegal with them. I did not.”
“What did you do?” Jack found himself playing twenty questions with Biery again.
“I had this theory. You know how I told you the string of machine code left on the Istanbul Drive could lead us to whoever the culprit was?”
“Sure.”
“I decided I would reach out in the cyberunderground, looking for other infected machines that also have the same lines of machine code that I found on the Libyan’s machine.”
“That sounds like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Well, I figured there would be many machines out there with this virus. So it’s more like looking for any one of a bushel of needles in a haystack, and I did what I could to make the haystack smaller.”
“How so?”
“There are a billion networked computers in the world, but the subset of hackable machines is much smaller, maybe a hundred million. And the subset of machines that have been hacked is probably a third of that.”
“But still, you had to check thirty million computers to—”
“No Jack, because malware that good isn’t going to just be used on a couple of machines. No, I figured there were thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of nodes out there with this same remote-access Trojan on them. And I narrowed it down further by only renting botnets of machines using the same operating system as the Libyan machines and high-quality processors and components, because I figured Center wouldn’t fool around with any old machine. He’d want to break into the machines of important people, companies, networks, et cetera. So I just grabbed botnets of high-caliber players.”
“They rent out botnets of different quality?”
“Absolutely. You can order a botnet that is fifty machines at AT&T, or one that is two hundred fifty machines from offices of the Canadian Parliament, or a ten-thousand-node botnet of Europeans who have at least one thousand friends each on Facebook, twenty-five thousand computers
that have industrial-quality security cameras attached to them. Pretty much any variable can be purchased or rented.”
“I had no idea,” admitted Jack.
“When I found botnets for sale possessing all the attributes I wanted, I just cast as wide a net as I could afford, rented them, and then ran some diagnostics on the hacked machines to pare them down further. Then I wrote a multithreaded program that took a peek at that location in each machine to see if that line of code was present.”
“And you found a computer with the Istanbul Drive code on it?”
The IT man’s smile widened. “Not a computer. One hundred twenty-six computers.”
Jack leaned forward. “Oh my God. All with the identical piece of malware you found on the Libyan’s drive?”
“Yes.”
“Where are these machines? What physical locations are we talking about?”
“Center is… I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but Center is everywhere. Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia. All inhabited continents were represented in the infected machines.”
Jack asked, “So how did you find out who he is?”
“One of the infected machines was being used as a relay to the command server. It was pushing traffic from the botnet to a network in Kharkov, Ukraine. I penetrated the network servers and saw that they hosted dozens of illegal or questionable websites. The sickest porn imaginable, online marketplaces for buying and selling fake passports, card skimmers, stuff like that. I hacked into each of these sites easily. But there was one location I could not get into. All I got was the name of the administrator.”
“What’s the name of the administrator?”
“FastByte Twenty-two.”
Jack Ryan deflated. “Gavin, that’s not a name.”