Freedom

by Daniel Suarez

  Fulbright nodded. “We don’t think the Chinese have even detected—much less decrypted—the IP beacon the Daemon is broadcasting. At least not yet. But capturing Ross might give them access to both. In particular, the Destroy function. That would give the Chinese the ability to destroy individual corporate data on demand—and from there who knows where that knowledge goes. If word got out, it could cause a global stock market panic.”

  “But the Chinese are co-invested with America, they wouldn’t—”

  “General Zhang is the wild card here. We think his people were responsible for the illicit back doors in corporate routers. It appears the Daemon is closing them, and it’s made Zhang increasingly desperate for something to justify his existence.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  Fulbright gestured to several men in suits who were already eyeing her from their place among the generals. “These men want you to identify Ross in that crowd. Before the Chinese get to him.”

  Philips looked around the room, suddenly noticing just how many people here were wearing visitor badges.

  “Natalie, please . . .” He nodded toward the screen.

  She looked up at the video image, now zooming in to scan the patrons of a martini bar. It looked like a sniper’s perspective from a distant rooftop. “They’re going to kill him.”

  Fulbright gripped her shoulder. “You don’t know that. We simply need to identify him in that crowd, Doctor.”

  “Who are all these men?” She was eyeing the contractors who were even now staring back at her.

  “Doctor, we’ve been given a simple directive. We need to provide information.”

  “To whom?”

  “Natalie, Jon Ross escaped our custody and fled to a foreign power. He’s a serious danger to national security.”

  “But—”

  “This isn’t a debate. You worked alongside him for months. He may have changed his appearance since then, but you have an eye for detail. Help us identify him in that crowd.”

  Philips felt her pulse quickening as she looked up at the screen. There was no way she could do this. And yet, what Director Fulbright said was true. Ross did possess information that the Chinese would be desperate to have—information that they were likely to torture him to get. They might kill him in the process. But if she pointed him out to these men—what then? She tried to remain poker-faced as her mind kept rejecting the cold facts.

  The screen panned across Asian and Western faces laughing in the martini bar.

  “Doctor, do you see him?”

  She couldn’t do it. “I . . .”

  A board operator suddenly called out. “The Chinese are making their move, sir.”

  “We’re too late.”

  Dozens of plainclothesmen brandishing weapons poured through the front door of the high-end bar, creating chaos inside. The camera jerked, then zoomed out a little.

  “Yeah, they’ve gone in.”

  One of the suits near the wall spoke loudly. “We might still get a shot when they bring him out.”

  Fulbright cast a glance to Philips. She was watching the screen. Numb.

  “If we miss him, let’s see if we can track what prison they take him to.”

  Philips was familiar with this math—“cruel calculus” is what Fulbright had called it. For the first time in her life, she was getting sick of math.

  “We’ll use a private asset to take care of it.”

  “We need to make sure we don’t lose track of him in the transfer—”

  Someone on the control board called out again. “Something’s going on there, sir.”

  Everyone looked up onto the screen to see plainclothesmen pouring out into the street again, looking frantically all over. Some were talking on radios.

  “Looks like they still don’t have him.”

  “Only half of them came out.”

  “Maybe there was a shoot-out?”

  “Did we have confirmation that Ross was in the building?”

  “Yes, sir. Two informants confirmed it.”

  The video image pulled back to show a dozen men frantically running into frame from either side of the bar building.

  Two more black vans arrived, and tactical squads poured out of them with black body armor, helmets, and ballistic goggles. They brandished automatic weapons and were spreading out into the streets, shouting at people to lie down. The whole shopping area was coming under lockdown.

  “Jesus Christ, they don’t have this guy.”

  “They must have a hundred boots on the ground.”

  “They’ve gotta find him now.”

  “They’ve got two million surveillance cameras networked in that city. Believe me, they’ll find him.”

  “Yeah, but our asset won’t be in place to take him out.”

  Fulbright turned to Philips. “Thanks for coming in, Natalie. I’ll let you know if you’re needed again.”

  She was still staring at the screen. “Yes, sir.”

  On-screen the Chinese soldiers were still frantically talking on radios.

  Philips exited the conference room, and then Ops Center 1. She walked down the bustling hallway outside, and ducked into the ladies’ restroom. She checked the stalls to see whether anyone else was present.

  She was alone.

  She entered the farthest stall, then closed and locked the door. She sat down and put her head in her hands. And then began to weep—her hands still trembling. As she felt the tears streaming silently down her face, she realized just how deeply she’d fallen in love with Jon Ross.

  Chapter 16: // Pwned

  Hours later Shen Liang entered the unmarked Golden Shield Central Command facility in downtown Shenzhen. Although there were no guards or signs to mark the nondescript six-story block of windowless concrete, the moment Shen stepped through the mirrored sliding doors in the underground garage, he was met by a dozen heavily armed PLA soldiers waiting to either side of metal detectors. Security officers in dress uniform ushered him through the scanners.

  What happened here was very important to the Party. Golden Shield was China’s sweeping program to create information systems to identify and contain dissent and subversive social elements that might threaten the country’s leadership—and thus the people of China. The GSCC building was the culmination of a multiyear, six-billion-dollar investment in internal security—which was itself just a pilot program for the much larger “Safe Cities Initiative,” which would link together all data moving through Chinese society, combining financial, communication, and street-level high-resolution CCTV images into a single software-driven internal security solution. Nothing like it had ever been attempted in the history of mankind, and it would serve as a model for security to be emulated around the world. Shen felt a tremendous sense of pride in yet another example of China’s technological prowess. He also told himself that it was necessary. Necessary to protect the Chinese people from themselves. Order must be maintained or imperialist forces would rob them of their destiny yet again.

  As Shen moved through concentric rings of security, he looked up at the numerous camera and sensor domes that he knew even now were analyzing his face, his thermal image, his perspiration and respiratory patterns, all in an effort to determine if he was under emotional duress.

  Outside in the streets, two million networked high-resolution CCTV cameras covered the entire city of Shenzhen. In 2006 the government had mandated that all Internet cafes and entertainment venues such as restaurants and bars install video cameras with a direct feed to their local police station. From there, the images were sent to a central cloud computing application that could apply any number of algorithms to the imagery and in turn alert local authorities to a wide array of suspicious behavior. People running, violent motion, sudden groupings of six or more people, flames. Then there was search: “the ten million face test” was used as the measure of facial recognition algorithms, and software was able to routinely spot and track Caucasian and dark-skinned people, or determine gende
r. The list was long and getting longer all the time. The state was acquiring eyes.

  But then, Shen knew why it was necessary. The government was worried. There were roughly a hundred and thirty million migrants wandering China looking for work—the equivalent of nearly half the population of the United States, and all in a nation roughly equivalent in size to the United States. In fifteen years the number of migrants was projected to be three hundred and fifty million. Shenzhen was already a city with seven million migrant laborers out of a population of twelve million. And these migrants lacked the benefits of permanent citizens, such as subsidized health care and education. Their national ID cards showed their residency as linked to the rural villages where they were born—places where there was no work, giving them no choice but to head for the cities. And so a second class of citizen had been created: people desperate for work who had helped make this economic miracle possible—but who were increasingly angry at their circumstances. Particularly with the wealth that was evident all around them.

  Was it fair? Shen knew it wasn’t, but he also told himself that there was no other way. How else could China become the world leader it was destined to be if not for this sacrifice? Unless someone bore the burden?

  Shen hadn’t worked on Golden Shield, but his company had worked on secret modifications to router firmware. He did not doubt that those back doors were utilized throughout the system.

  He eyed the camera and sensor arrays again.

  He wondered if they detected his nervousness. He had promised his commanding officer, General Zhang, that he would be able to turn the fugitive, Jon Ross, to their side. But Shen had failed. The loss of their back doors in Western networks was still unsolved, and Shen knew that unless it was solved soon, many heads would roll. He hoped his would not be among them.

  Jon Ross had known about the chipsets modified by the General Equipment Department—without the knowledge of Western client companies. If Ross knew about the loss of those back doors, then he must have been in on it. Shen was still wondering how on earth it could have been accomplished. America and Europe were not capable of sudden, sweeping changes across companies and borders—without so much as a peep in any e-mails. It seemed impossible.

  Shen’s concern about failing to win over Ross was tempered by the fact that he had also been the one to locate the fugitive Ross in the first place. Well, as far as they knew he did—and it was the MSS goons who lost Ross in the streets, not him.

  Shen was still puzzled by that.

  He was entering the central nerve center of China’s great surveillance experiment now. A uniformed soldier ushered him into an elevator that had no buttons. It might as well have been a microwave for all the control he had over his destination. The doors closed behind Shen, and he was on a one-way ride to somewhere down.

  In a little while the doors opened, and Shen came out into a windowless control room, a hundred feet across with a ceiling at least thirty feet high. All along the walls were hundreds of large flat-panel monitors—with one gigantic, stadium-sized display in the center of it all. Currently the large screen showed a map of the city of Shenzhen, and it looked to have the location of each camera marked as a blue dot—but he knew this was impossible, since it would cover the entire city. He guessed they were nodes to local law enforcement feeds or perhaps junctions. There were various digital pin markers and status indicators on some of these dots and moving markers as well (vehicular subjects of surveillance?).

  Covering the floor of the control room were banks of zone managers—uniformed officers of the Ministry of State Services. These would be the top graduates from the academies. Eager, smart, and ready to implement the Party’s will.

  As Shen entered, a young aide saluted him. “Captain Shen. You are expected.”

  Shen almost laughed—as if he could have gotten in here uninvited!

  The aide motioned for him to follow and brought him through rows of surveillance technicians to a raised dais with an additional semicircle of monitors and control equipment. There he saw General Zhang Zi Min—director of the Ministry of State Services—in a dignified business suit amid a knot of technicians in short-sleeve shirts and ties, with ID badges on lanyards. While half of them were Han Chinese, Shen was shocked to see that the other half were clearly Westerners—and from their appearance, Americans.

  What Americans would be doing in the very nerve center of China’s domestic surveillance headquarters was beyond him. He was almost speechless as he was brought up to General Zhang. The general was listening to something one of the Americans was saying, but nodded to Shen.

  Shen made a dramatic, full-body salute—like he’d learned in the academy. As head of the Party ministry responsible for domestic security, Zhang was arguably one of the most politically powerful men in all of China. It was he who had selected Shen from the senior class at Wuhan to spearhead the router projects that had yielded so much valuable commercial and military intelligence. And it was Zhang who had made certain Shen’s Beijing start-up company was successful—providing access to capital and funneling plenty of clients his way. Shen owed his Mercedes, his five-bedroom house in Orange County (a subdivision north of Beijing), and his future to Zhang. Zhang was his patron.

  The American was still talking, but in a hushed tone that Shen could not hear from his position ten feet and several people away. The casual way that this American technician was speaking with the general was mind-boggling—as if the man had no idea whom he was talking to. The general just kept nodding patiently, but he occasionally shot a hard-to-decipher look Shen’s way.

  Eventually the general held up a hand to the man and motioned for Shen to join them.

  Shen straightened his tie and proceeded into the center of the circle.

  The general gestured to the screens in front of them. They appeared to be displaying the martini bar where Shen had met with Ross, as well as the streets all around it for blocks in every direction. The exterior video was wrapped around a 3-D map of the building geometry—giving it the appearance of a computer game.

  The general spoke in Mandarin. “Captain Shen. I would like you to help us understand how our Russian friend could simply walk out of the meeting point without being seen. I am being informed that your choice of meeting place was less than optimal from a visual and audio surveillance perspective.”

  Shen eyed the Americans—a fortyish-looking crew of assembly coders from the look of them. They appeared to be trying to figure out what to make of the new arrival. Shen turned back to the general. “General Zhang, I would be happy to answer your questions, just not in the presence of these Americans, sir.”

  “You are surprised to find Americans here, Captain? Do you fancy them a security risk?”

  Disturbingly, even though they were still conversing in Mandarin, the lead American engineer let a slight smile escape before he contained it.

  “Yes, I do, sir. Nor do I think this discussion sufficiently private.”

  “Let me put your mind at ease. We would not be making such rapid progress in our efforts if it weren’t for the private sector’s contributions, and some of the key systems being developed today in the world of security are being developed by private companies based in the United States, Israel, and the European Union.” He gestured to the Chinese engineers crowding around the console.

  “As you can see we have complete information sharing, and we will retain all the expertise necessary to extend our capabilities within the terms of our licensing agreement.”

  “Licensing agreement?”

  “Our partnership with the West has been richly rewarding, Captain. For both sides. You are to give your full cooperation to these gentlemen—in English, if you please. If I’m not mistaken, you are quite proficient.”

  Shen was momentarily flummoxed.

  The American smiled and extended his hand. He was a tall man of indistinct lineage—black hair and brown eyes. “Captain Shen. It’s a pleasure. Robert Haverford.”

  Shen shook his hand
uncertainly. “Mr. Haverford. Please forgive me. I’m a little bit shocked, that’s all.”

  “No doubt. Wow, your English is excellent. No accent whatsoever.”

  “I went to school in the States.”

  “Which school?”

  “Stanford.”

  “Terrific. I’m told you’re quite a hand at chip design. I think our problem is a bit more prosaic. We think it was operator error, and we just need to find out for training purposes. We weren’t present during the incident, but we’re trying to back into just what went on when this unfortunate series of events unfolded.”

  Haverford gestured to a seat in front of a control monitor that had somehow mysteriously opened up. Shen felt that it suspiciously resembled the proverbial hot seat. However, he also knew, with the general and several dozen uniformed PLA senior officers nearby, it was not a request.

  He sat and examined the monitor in front of him. It showed a blurry image of himself sitting in the booth at the Suomi Linja martini bar hours earlier. They could barely see his head, and the rest of the table was completely blocked by a beam.

  Haverford pointed at the image. “You really couldn’t have chosen a worse spot for this meeting, Captain. It’s almost as if you wanted to have a private sit-down.”

  The words just hung out there for a few moments—a smiling fuck-you from his new American friend. Passive-aggressive shitheel . . . Shen looked up to General Zhang. “The only chance I thought I’d have of turning Ross, general, was in making him feel comfortable and in reminding him of the friendship we once had in Oregon. Having policemen hanging around and cameras focused on him would not accomplish that. I take full responsibility for selecting the most shielded booth, but it was a calculated risk. I certainly did not think it would be an issue because there was no way for him to leave the bar unobserved—that is, if this system works as it must have been described in the brochure.”

  General Zhang pondered Shen’s words for a moment, then nodded to Haverford.

  Haverford sighed. “Well, okay then. I guess the fact that we don’t have any audio or video of you speaking with Mr. Ross—look there. . . .” Haverford pointed at a gesticulating arm being reflected in a mirror. “That’s Ross right there. We have him up until that point.”