by Tom Clancy
Adam was an actor, a con man, a spy.
And he was selling it now. He had a set of lock picks in his hand, and he pushed into the post office, walked directly up to Zha Shu Hai’s P.O. box, and knelt down. With men and women within inches of him on both sides, no one paid an instant’s attention to him.
Yao picked the lock in under ten seconds. He slipped his hand inside and found two pieces of mail, one a business envelope and the other a small package containing a Bubble-Wrapped item. He pulled both pieces of mail out, closed the door to the box, and then pulled out the pick holding the tumblers up, which instantly relocked the door.
He was out in the street a minute later, and he did a quick surveillance detection run to make sure he had not been followed from the post office. Once satisfied he was in the clear, he descended into the MTR underground station and headed back to his office on Hong Kong Island.
Soon, he was back at his desk dressed in his suit and tie, and had placed the small package and the envelope in the ice tray portion of a small refrigerator/freezer he kept near his desk. After letting them chill for an hour, he reached into the freezer and removed the envelope, and opened it with a sharp knife. The sealant had frozen solid, and this allowed the knife to cut through it without tearing the paper, and it would also make it easy to reseal the envelope once it had thawed out.
When he had it opened, Adam read the address on the outside. It had been sent from mainland China, from a town in Shanxi Province that Yao did not recognize. The address was handwritten not to Zha Shu Hai, but to the P.O. box. The return address was a woman’s name; Yao wrote it down on a pad on his blotter, and then he reached inside the envelope.
He was somewhat surprised to find a second envelope inside the first one. This envelope had no writing on it at all. He cut it open in the same manner as the first, and inside found a letter handwritten in Mandarin by a shaky hand. Adam read it quickly, and by the third paragraph he understood what it was.
The author of the letter was Zha’s grandmother. From her note he could tell she was in the United States, and she had posted this letter to a relative in Shanxi Province so as not to tip off the U.S. Marshals Service, which she knew was hunting her grandson.
The relative from Shanxi had forwarded this on to the P.O. box without adding any note of his or her own.
The grandmother talked about life in northern California and a recent surgery and other members of the family and some old neighbors. She closed with an offer to help Zha with money or to put him in contact with other family members who, she said, had not heard from him since he’d arrived in China a year earlier.
It was a typical letter from a grandmother, Adam saw, and it told him nothing other than a little old Chinese lady in the States was likely involved with aiding and abetting a fugitive.
He put the envelope and the letter aside, and he reached back into the freezer for the package. It was small, not larger than a paperback book, and he quickly opened it before the sealant began to thaw. Once it was open, he checked the mailing address. Again, it was sent just to the P.O. box without a name, but the return address was an address in Marseille, France.
Curious, Adam reached inside and pulled out a small Bubble-Wrapped disk roughly the size of a silver dollar. It had pins coming out of the sides as though it attached to a computer motherboard or some other electronic device.
Along with the item was a several-page data sheet explaining that the device was a low-power superheterodyne receiver. The paper went on to explain that the device was used in keyless entry systems, garage door openers, remote security alarms, medical devices, and many other devices that receive external radio frequency transmissions as commands to perform mechanical functions.
Adam had no idea what Zha would want with the device. He turned to the last of the pages and saw that it was a chain of correspondence between two e-mail addresses.
Both parties wrote in English; the man in Marseille was clearly an employee of the technology company that manufactured the device. He was corresponding in the e-mails to someone named FastByte22.
Adam read it again. “FastByte Twenty-two. Is that Zha?”
The e-mails were concise. It seemed FastByte22 had made contact with this employee on the Internet and asked him to sell him a sample of the superheterodyne receiver because the company would not export it to Hong Kong. The two then negotiated payment in Bitcoin, an untraceable online currency that Adam knew was used for computer hackers to barter services and for criminals to buy and sell illicit goods on the Internet.
The e-mails went back a number of weeks, and they gave no indication as to what FastByte22 needed with a little gadget that could be used for anything from a garage door to a medical device.
Adam took out his camera and began photographing everything, from the letter from Zha’s grandmother to the high-tech receiver. He’d have to spend most of the rest of the day retracing his steps. From repackaging the envelope and the package to returning to Mong Kok to breaking back into the P.O. box to drop the two items back in before Zha had reason to suspect they had been taken.
It would be a long afternoon, and he did not yet know what he had accomplished today.
Other than finding a potential alias for Zha Shu Hai.
FastByte22.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The conference room of the White House Situation Room is smaller than most people imagine. The narrow oval table seats ten, which means for many sensitive meetings the assistants of the principals are lined up standing along the walls.
The scene in the conference room was chaotic as the Situation Room staff prepared for the meeting. The walls were full of men and women, many in uniform, some arguing with one another and others desperately trying to get last-minute information about the events of the morning.
Half the seats were empty, but CIA Director Canfield and Secretary of Defense Burgess were in their places. The director of the NSA as well as the director of the FBI were present, but they stood and conferred with underlings, sharing details of anything new learned in the past ten minutes.
It was a fluid situation, to be sure, and everyone wanted to be ready to answer all POTUS’s questions.
Time ran out on those trying to prepare for POTUS when Jack Ryan walked through the door.
He came to the head of the table and looked around the room. “Where is Mary Pat?”
Director of National Intelligence Foley stepped into the room behind the President, a slight breach of protocol, though everyone in Ryan’s White House, from the housekeepers to the vice president, knew Ryan did not give a whit about ceremony.
“Excuse me, Mr. President,” she said as she took her place. “I’ve just found out there has been a third hijacking. A Homeland Security Predator drone working customs and enforcement on the Canadian border went rogue twenty minutes ago.”
“In the U.S.?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How the hell did this happen? I ordered a ground stop of UAVs. Homeland Security was notified.”
“Yes, sir. This Predator was on the tarmac at Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota. It had been prepped for a mission along the border today, but the mission was canceled per the ground stop. They were about to push it back into the hanger when the craft initiated its systems, rolled away from ground control, and took off from a taxiway. Presently it’s flying south at twenty thousand feet over South Dakota.”
“Jesus. Where is it going?”
“Unknown at this time. FAA is tracking it, rerouting air traffic. We have a flight of two Air Force interceptors en route to take it down. There are no weapons on board, of course, but it could be used as a low-yield missile. They might try to impact another aircraft or a building or even vehicles on the highway.”
“This is unreal,” muttered National Security Adviser Colleen Hurst.
Ryan said, “I want every last UAV in the U.S. inventory, regardless of ownership, model, or manufacturer, at home or abroad, physically dismantled in whatever way necessar
y to where it cannot take off.”
SecDef Burgess said, “Yes, sir. That process is under way on our end.”
Homeland Security and CIA both agreed they were doing the same thing with their drones.
Jack looked to Scott Adler, Secretary of State. “We need your office telling all of our allies who possess UAVs that they need to follow our lead until we have more information.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. What do we know about this cyberattack so far?”
Mary Pat said, “NSA is in the process of bringing in all of their people to look at how this was done. I’ve already been warned that we will not get answers in hours, and they only hope to know something in days. I am told that this was a very sophisticated attack.”
“What do they know?”
“They suspect someone jammed the frequency of the drone’s communications to its satellite, which caused the Reaper to revert to autopilot. It does this anytime there is a break in communications.
“Once the aircraft was not under our control, someone used their own equipment to impersonate the valid secure signal. In order for them to do this, they had to have access deep inside the Department of Defense’s most secure network.”
“Who could have done this?”
CIA director Canfield said, “We’re looking at Iran.”
Mary Pat said, “Mr. President, keep in mind, it does not have to be a state actor.”
Ryan thought about this for a moment. “What you’re saying is that our threat matrix needs to include terrorist and criminal organizations, private businesses… hell, even rogue operators in our own government.”
CIA director Canfield said, “All we can do right now is look at the actors who had the motive and the means. Regarding the Afghanistan attack, that would be Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iran, as they all have been meddling in our Afghan operations for some time. When it comes to means, on the other hand, you can dismiss the Taliban. They have just about zilch in the technical-know-how department.
“Al-Qaeda is light-years ahead of the Taliban, which means they might be able to do some low-level website attacks at best. But they did not do this.”
“So you think it was Iran?”
“If anyone in that part of the world did it, it was Iran.”
Ryan asked, “They are only hacking one UAV at a time. Does that mean anything about how they are doing this? Is that due to technical ability or because they only have one pilot trained to fly the drones?”
“Could be either, sir. Might just be that they have only set up one flight control center. I’ve got to say that considering the capability we witnessed today, I find it hard to believe there is a technical reason they can’t fly more than one UAV at a time.”
“Someone is sending us a message. As much as I’d like to send them a message right back, I think we need to be in receive mode at the moment.”
Mary Pat said, “I agree, sir. We’ll get to the bottom of just how this happened before we can start placing blame.”
Ryan nodded, then turned to SecDef. “You guys have been hacked before, right?”
Bob Burgess said, “Twenty-fourth Air Force detected a virus six months ago in the Reaper system software upgrade on the network at Creech. We executed a rolling stand-down of the fleet while we checked each and every drone. None had been infected. Nevertheless, we had to wipe clean every hard drive in every GCS at Creech and start from scratch.”
Ryan said, “The Defense Department’s secure network is not supposed to be connected to the Internet. How the hell did a virus infect the Reaper software?”
Burgess said, “Yes, it’s true there is what is called an ‘air gap,’ physical space between our secure network and the Internet, that should preclude this happening.”
“But?”
“But human beings are involved, and human beings are fallible. We found the virus on a portable drive used to update map software in one of the ground-control stations. It was a breach of protocol by a contractor.”
CIA Director Canfield said, “Iran has done this sort of thing before. A couple years back the Iranians successfully hacked into a Predator feed and downloaded videos from the cameras.”
DNI Foley interjected, “Grabbing the video off a camera’s sat transmission is not the same thing as taking total control of the unit, aiming and firing the weapons, and then crash-landing the UAV. That is several levels of magnitude more complicated.”
Ryan nodded, taking it all in and reserving judgment for now. “Okay,” he said. “I expect you to let me know when you learn anything of value about the investigation.”
SecDef said, “Mr. President, as you know, we lost eight members of First Cavalry Division, and forty-one Afghan Special Forces soldiers. We have not released information about the casualties yet, but—”
“Do it,” Ryan said. “And admit the UAV was involved and there was a technical malfunction. We need to get out in front of this and tell the world that we got hacked and American and Afghan servicemen were murdered.”
Burgess said, “Sir, I recommend against that. Our enemies will use that against us; it makes us look weak.”
DNI was shaking her head, but Ryan was ahead of Mary Pat. “Bob, whoever hacked the drone is going to have the video feed from the cameras. They can show themselves defeating our technology whenever the hell they want. If we do anything to cover this, it’s just going to compound the problem.”
Ryan added, “In this case, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to have to take this on the chin. I want you to release a statement saying that while on a sensitive mission in Afghanistan airspace, at the invitation of the Afghan government, an unknown force wrested control of our hunter/killer drone and attacked an American forward operating base. Our attempts to destroy the weapon before it crossed into Pakistan were unsuccessful. We will find the perpetrators, the murderers, and we will bring them to justice.”
Burgess did not like it, Ryan could tell. SecDef would be thinking about how, within hours of that announcement, the Taliban would be on Al Jazeera with some bullshit story about how they did it themselves.
He said, “I don’t like us sharing our vulnerabilities with the world. It will encourage more people to try it.”
Ryan retorted, “I’m not thrilled about it, either, Bob. I just see the alternative as being worse.”
At that moment the phone beeped in the center of the conference table. President Ryan himself tapped it. “Yes?”
“Sir, we just heard from Homeland Security. The Predator drone has been shot down over western Nebraska. No casualties reported.”
“Well, thank God for that,” Ryan said. It was the first good news all day.
TWENTY-NINE
Computer hardware territory sales manager Todd Wicks sat in a pizzeria with a slice of cheese pizza greasing up a waxed paper plate in front of him.
He had no appetite, but he could not fathom any reason why he should be sitting here, right now at three p.m., that did not involve him eating pizza.
He forced himself to take a bite. He chewed slowly, swallowed tentatively, worried he would not be able to keep it down.
Todd thought he was going to puke, but it wasn’t the pizza’s fault.
The phone call setting up the meeting had come at eight o’clock that morning. The caller did not give a name, nor did he say what the meeting would be about. He just gave a time and a place, and then he asked Todd to recite back the time and the place.
And that was it. Since the call, Wicks’s stomach had felt like he’d eaten a live cat; he’d stared at the walls in his office and he’d looked at his watch every three or four minutes, at once wanting three o’clock to never come and to hurry up and get here so he could get this over with.
The man who contacted him was Chinese, that much was clear from his voice over the phone, and that, along with the short and cryptic conversation, was enough reason for him to worry.
This man would be a spy, he would want Todd to commit some act of treason
that could get him killed or thrown in prison for the rest of his life, and, Todd knew already… that whatever it was, he would fucking do it.
When Todd got home from Shanghai after the episode with the hooker and the Chinese detective, he considered telling the inevitable agent who contacted him to go fuck himself when he came calling about his bullshit spy mission. But no, he could not do that. They had the videotape and the audiotape and he only had to think back to that fifty-two-inch TV in the Shanghai suite and his lily-white sweaty ass bouncing up and down to know that the Chinese had him by the fucking balls.
If he balked when the Chinese came calling, then there was no doubt that within a few days, his wife, Sherry, would open an e-mail containing an HD video of the entire event.
No fucking way. That’s not happening. He’d told himself this at the time, and since then he’d waited on the call and dreaded whatever would come after the call.
At five minutes past the hour an Asian man carrying a shopping bag walked into the pizza joint, bought a calzone and a can of Pepsi from the one man behind the counter, and then brought his late lunch toward the small seating area in the back.
As soon as Todd realized the man was Asian, he tracked his every move, but when he neared Todd’s table the computer hardware salesman looked away, down at his greasy cheese pizza, assuming eye contact would be a definite no-no in a situation such as this.
“Good afternoon.” The man sat down at Todd’s little bistro table, violating the protocol Wicks had just established.
Todd looked up and shook the hand offered by the Chinese man.
Wicks was surprised by the look of this spy. He certainly did not seem ominous. He was in his twenties, younger than Todd would have predicted, and he seemed almost nerdish in appearance. Thick glasses, a white button-down shirt, and slightly wrinkled black Sansabelt slacks.