Tokyo Firewall: a novel of international suspense

by Elizabeth Wilkerson

  “The fax he sent said that his friends had done it.”

  “I wish you’d told me,” Kiyoshi said.

  “I’m so damn sick of this guy. He’s amusing himself by spying on my life. I’m his puppet. He torments me, pulls my strings, watches me dance.”

  “We’ll find him, Alison.” Kiyoshi moved behind her chair and massaged her neck. “We’ll stop him.”

  Alison relaxed beneath the firm pressure of his touch. With a grin, she remembered how just last night those same fingers had launched her into mind-blowing orgasmic ecstasy. But now, in the reality of morning light, her problems were still present, and she recalled what else Jed had told her.

  “There’s some device I could install to tell if that freak is tapping my computer line. At least that’s what Jed said.”

  “A device? Like a bug detector?”

  “Some kind of hardware you run through your computer. If the modem line is being busted into, a light goes on.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you know you’ve got company close by.”

  “If he’s close by intercepting your email, it means it’ll be easier for us to catch him. He’s probably just some lonely guy.”

  “Excuse me if I don’t feel the least bit sympathetic. I’ve had it with his taunting and teasing. And I didn’t tell you, but I think he was in my house.”

  Kiyoshi walked around to stand directly in front of her. “In your house? You saw him in your house?” Kiyoshi’s face was stern, his voice hard-edged. Alison felt like she was being interrogated yet again.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure, it’s just — like he was there watching me when I was in bed. And when he left there was this threatening note addressed to TokyoAli. Only people I’ve met on the internet call me that.”

  Kiyoshi closed his eyes and, after a few seconds, nodded his head as if in agreement with a thought he was having. “The guy’s crossed the line, Alison. He could be dangerous. So this is what we’ll do. First, we’ll call the police in Tokyo to tell them the about the guy, and then—”

  “I don’t want to get the Japanese police involved. Not yet, anyway. I just cleared up this mess with my visa status, and I don’t want them asking me more questions about what I’m doing in Japan. I’ll talk to them, but not right now.”

  “But the police—”

  “I want to deal with this myself first, Kiyo. And then I’ll turn the guy over to the cops. Okay?”

  Kiyoshi sighed, shaking his head. “I can’t force you, but you have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

  “You’re damn right about that,” Alison said.

  Kiyoshi sat at the dining table. “There are other ways to handle this problem.” He poured himself some green tea. “I know some people who will make sure the guy doesn’t bother you anymore.”

  “I said I want to handle it. My way. Agreed?”

  Without answering, Kiyoshi finished his green tea and reached across the table, covering Alison’s hand with his. “Listen to me. I’ve got to stop by the local office. I want you to stay here, keep the door locked. Don’t order room service or anything. You can watch TV, read, there’s lots to eat in the refrigerator. I’ll be back this afternoon. We’ll figure out our next step then. Will you be all right?”

  “I’m not a child. I can amuse myself.”

  “It’s just that I’m worried, Alison.”

  “I’ll be here when you get back.”

  “And try not to think about that guy. We’ll get him. I promise.”

  She’d had to rely on Charles to help her with everyday life in Japan where her inability to communicate kept her as isolated as a bird in a gilded cage. And now Kiyoshi was telling her to lock herself up, cut off all contact with the outside world, and wait until he returned to make everything all right.

  She didn’t think so. She was a lawyer. A highly trained professional. And no one was trained like lawyers were trained on how to figure out solutions to messy problems. It was time for her to clean up the mess.

  37

  Confession time. Alison dreaded having to explain how she’d managed to lose the disk that Yamada-san had entrusted her with. Would Yamada understand that getting mugged wasn’t the same as being careless?

  Alison tried again to call Green Space from the taxi. The phone rang, and the same recorded message played. What was going on? Why wasn’t anyone answering the office’s phones?

  Alison put away her cell. She’d have to try again later. She wished she could get it over with. No one liked to be the bearer of bad news. Especially if it might cost them a job.

  The cab pulled up in front of the Silvercord building. The trip was shorter than Alison had expected. She could’ve easily walked to her destination. But having once miscalculated the complexity of Hong Kong’s bewildering streets, she’d decided that taking a taxi was the way to go. Plus, if the nut who’d broken into her room was stalking her, a cab might offer her some protection.

  Alison entered the multistoried Silvercord shopping center. What her guidebook promised was dead on. The building, with scores of electronics shops, was a computer nerd’s Mecca. But where to start?

  She wandered the hallways on the first floor and spotted a store with an Apple computer sign hanging in its window. A chubby-cheeked young white guy greeted her at the door. He wore a wrinkled short-sleeve shirt and a necktie that stopped a good six inches shy of his belt.

  “Y’all need some help?” he asked.

  Amid all the strangeness of Hong Kong and the indecipherable foreignness of the computer hardware in the shops surrounding her, here was an American. Someone she could talk to. Someone who could translate for her.

  “Yes, I’m looking for a device to attach to my computer,” she said. “It tells you if your modem line is being bugged. I think it’s called a Tracer.”

  “Wow, yeah. I heard about those. Shoot, where did I hear about those gizmos?” The clerk tapped his forehead. Alison had to suppress a chuckle at hearing such a thick Southern accent in the middle of Hong Kong.

  The clerk gave up on trying to thwack his brain into recollection. “Can’t remember where, but you need anything else? I can give you a good price on the new Microsoft suite. Retails for over seven hundred dollars in the States, I’ll let you have it for four-fifty Hong Kong. Comes with a manual. How ’bout it?” He grinned at Alison.

  Stacks of photocopied computer manuals were piled up behind the counter. She’d heard about software piracy problems in China. Every company in Silicon Valley was bellyaching about the rampant counterfeiting. But to see it with her own eyes was different. Even the retailers were getting in on the action. A bit brazen.

  “I’ll pass,” she said. “But there’s some other software I’m looking for. It’s called PeepHole. It’s for—”

  “Yeah, I heard of that one, too, but we don’t carry that neither.” The clerk leaned over the counter and lowered his voice. “I’ll tell you what you want to do. The kind of stuff you’re looking for, you want to go back outside, around to the back of this building. There’s a yellow sign, a real big sucker, hard to miss. Says ‘Happy Camera.’ If anybody has the kind of stuff you’re looking for, it’s them.”

  Alison thanked the clerk and left. He’d shamelessly displayed bootleg software for sale, and yet when Alison asked him about PeepHole, he’d reacted as if she were trying to score some heroin. She shrugged it off and walked around to the rear of the building.

  If the retail side of Silvercord celebrated unabashed piracy, the back alley was part street festival, part flea market. Men stood behind card tables doubling as impromptu sales counters. They were doing a brisk business selling software ranging from audio CDs to computer games to DVD pornography. The shoppers consisted of mostly young Chinese men and teenagers, but Alison could hear an occasional bit of Japanese.

  Scofflaws. Alison picked her way past the miscreants and entered Happy Camera.

  The store’s walls, painted in taxicab yellow, intensified th
e glare of the fluorescent lights hanging overhead. Televisions, microwaves, refrigerators, all were scattered hurly-burly throughout the store. Alison couldn’t figure out any rhyme or reason to the organization or lack thereof. It was as if a bomb blew up in Akihabara and they erected yellow walls around the wreckage.

  After twice touring the perimeter and searching the aisles, she found a store directory. Third floor, computers. She boarded a rickety elevator and rode up.

  On the computer floor, disciplined order governed the arrangement of items for sale. Here, the different areas of interest were clearly defined — monitors, printers, memory, PDAs — and each enjoyed its own little cubbyhole.

  Unsure of which area to enter, Alison walked to a service island in the middle of the floor. A Chinese man, mid-twenties, in a sweatshirt and jeans, tended the counter.

  “Excuse me,” Alison said, “I’m looking for a device for my Macintosh. It’s called a Tracer. Do you carry them?”

  The man’s eyes widened briefly. He gave Alison a not too subtle up-and-down scan before saying, “Back here.”

  Alison followed as the guy led her to a private door in the rear of the computer area. He directed her to sit down at the table in the back room.

  “You want an EM Tracer?” the guy asked.

  “Yes, if that’s what it’s called,” said Alison. “Basically, I need a device to tell me if my modem line is being listened in on. If someone is trying to access my internet connection.”

  The guy blew out his cheeks. “Okay. Listening or accessing. That’s two different things. The Tracer will tell you if your modem line’s tapped. Like from another computer. If your EM waves are being picked up from outside, a light goes on.”

  “EM waves?” Alison asked.

  “Yeah. All this stuff works by electromagnetic waves. Cell phones use security coding, but not modem nets. So computers can be listened in on. If you know what you’re doing,” the man said. His haughty expression suggested he didn’t think Alison knew in the least what she was doing.

  Not to be put off by the guy’s obnoxious attitude, Alison asked, “Is there any way to scramble the EM waves so that they can’t be picked up?”

  The guy snickered. “Hey, I haven’t heard of it, man. You tell me if you figure it out.”

  What an asshole.

  The young guy continued. “If you need to stop someone from getting into your system, that’s FireAx. Access protection. Which is it you want, lady? Listening to EM waves or access protection for your files?” Arms crossed, he eyeballed Alison.

  “What do you mean about access protection? Someone at another computer can get inside my Mac and pull up my files?” Alison asked.

  The guy sighed wearily as if Alison was his cross to bear. “If you and the other computer are both online through the same Web IP protocols — and you probably are — it’s like you’re standing out there naked. No protection at all. So you need to load software like FireAx to block access. Or,” he paused, “you can run the software to give you access.” He let the implication of what he was saying sink in.

  Alison leaned in toward the guy. “Let me get this straight. By using the FireAx software, I could block someone from getting into my computer from online. Or use that same software to get into their system.”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  Alison broke into a smile. A preemptive strike had never occurred to her. She could beat that cyberfreak stalker at his own game. She could get online and sneak into his computer. And she could figure out who the hell he was.

  But first she had to confirm what she hoped she’d just heard. “Okay. What about this — I want to find out who’s sending me anonymous messages. Could I use the software to do that?”

  “Easy. It echoes back the source tag.”

  “Source tag?”

  “Yeah, you know, basic stuff. Like user ID, name, phone number.”

  “That sounds like some software I heard of called PeepHole,” Alison said.

  “PeepHole?” The guy snorted. “We got PeepHole. But FireAx’s much more powerful. PeepHole’ll give you some trace data on who’s busting into your system, but FireAx’ll give you a whole directory of the other system. You can see everything that’s on their computer and pull out any files they have on their hard drive. PeepHole can’t do that,” he sniffed. “But some people use ’em together.”

  She’d found the mother lode. One-stop shopping for hardware and software to keep that online creep out of her life. “I want it, I want all of it,” she said. “The Tracer, the software, PeepHole, FireAx, everything.” But. She thought of a threshold problem. “Do you have instruction manuals? In English?”

  The computer guy burst out laughing. “English? You crazy, man? All this stuff’s from the States. But I wouldn’t call it no instruction manual. Just a how-to-do-it thing. Real easy.”

  “Load me up with the works.” Simultaneously giddy and scared, Alison felt like she was buying a gun. She was arming herself against the enemy, and empowerment felt good.

  The guy stood. “A Mac, right?”

  “Yes, a PowerBook.” Waiting alone in the room, Alison fantasized about retribution, about gaining her privacy back, getting her life back.

  The clerk returned carrying a metal box not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes and a bunch of floppy disks.

  “The Tracer.” He handed Alison the small device. A cable dangled from a side port. He gave her a stack of three floppy disks bound together with a rubber band. “These’ll load up the Tracer and PeepHole. This is FireAx,” he said, passing over a larger stack of about six floppies also bound in a rubber band. “It’ll give your system all the protection from the outside you need. But remember you can mix it up and go out looking around in other systems, too. Either way you want it. Got it?”

  If Alison was sure of one thing, it was that she didn’t “get it.”

  “Yes, I think I understand,” she said. She hoped she could figure it out. “So how much is everything? The Tracer, PeepHole and the FireAx software?”

  The man pulled a credit-card size calculator out of his back pocket and punched in some numbers. He turned the calculator around and slid it across the table toward Alison. She read the numbers and chewed on the inside of her cheek. Much more than she was hoping to pay. But she needed this stuff if she were going to mount a serious defense against that online bully.

  Imitating a technique she had observed in her shopping expedition the day before, Alison took the calculator, entered a few numbers, positioned the calculator to face the store clerk and pushed it back across the table.

  The guy frowned and thought for a moment. Then he punched in some more numbers and slid the calculator back over.

  “Deal,” Alison said. She paid for the hardware and software and left Happy Camera as a happy customer.

  Walking down Salisbury Road on her way back to the hotel, Alison spotted Kiyoshi coming from the opposite direction. He spied her on the street before she had a chance to slip into the hotel.

  Footloose on the boulevards of Hong Kong when she had promised to stay in the suite on lockdown, what could she say? She was busted, plain and simple.

  Res ipsa loquitur. The matter speaks for itself. The legal term for when evidence of a fuck-up is so obvious that there was no need for an explanation.

  And only now did Alison realize that her secretive excursion suffered from a fatal flaw — she didn’t have a key to get back into the hotel room. In her job search, she’d be well-advised to rule out a career as an undercover agent.

  Kiyoshi trapped her with his laser beam gaze. Alison might not be 007 material, but Kiyoshi, with that penetrating stare, would make an intimidating prosecutor.

  “Hey, Kiyo!” Alison tried to distract Kiyoshi with a “say cheese,” happy-go-lucky, just-out-for-a-stroll smile. If she had a parasol, she’d be twirling it.

  “What are you doing out here, Alison? We agreed. You were going to stay in the room.”

  “I was bored, so I
went souvenir shopping.” She hugged her bag of computer supplies closer to her body. “I’m fine, everything’s OK.” Kiyoshi didn’t need to know that she’d loaded up on hacker-grade artillery.

  “You’ve got to be careful, Alison. Bad things have happened, but you’ve been lucky. So far.”

  So far she’d been lucky, and now she was going to be smart.

  On the way to the room, Kiyoshi stopped at the front desk to pick up his messages. Alison waited by the lobby bar, never tiring of the moving-picture panoramic view of Hong Kong and the harbor. Kiyoshi spoke with the front desk clerk, and the two men turned to look at her.

  Under such close scrutiny, Alison’s cheeks warmed. She wasn’t a hotel guest in her own right, but did the hotel staff think she was a prostitute? She held up her head higher. Who the hell cared what they thought? While she worked on mustering attitude, Kiyoshi walked over.

  “Let’s go up,” he said.

  They entered the suite, and Alison quickly put away her Happy Camera bag. In the living room, Kiyoshi was pouring a shot of bourbon into a glass. He held the bottle up to Alison, but she shook her head.

  He reached into his lapel pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

  “This came for you,” he said. “The front desk clerk said it arrived after you checked out, but since they saw you — well, here it is.” He gave Alison the paper and tossed back his whiskey.

  She took a deep breath before looking at the fax. That creep was not going to leave her alone. And the hotel’s front desk couldn’t seem to understand that she didn’t want to receive faxes. Not when she had been a hotel guest and certainly not now when she wasn’t even registered.

  But being with Kiyoshi, she didn’t feel as vulnerable. And the bag full of goodies she’d acquired at Happy Camera, with their promise of protection, bolstered her sense of empowerment. Whatever madman missive that online jerk might lob her way, she could handle it.

  Resignedly, she opened the fax. But it wasn’t from the cyber freak. It was a simple handwritten note. From Charles.