by Dave Buschi
123
“WHOA, time out,” Lip said, putting his hands in a T-shape. “We didn’t come for a revolution, we came to get you. Mission accomplished.” Lip glanced from Johnny Two-cakes to Marks. “Why does this suddenly feel like a GW moment?”
Johnny Two-cakes double blinked. “I know, this is all out of left field for you two, as it was for me. My encrypted messages would have helped explain.”
“Well, we didn’t get them,” Lip said.
Johnny Two-cakes nodded. “As I ascertained when I didn’t hear back from you. They’ve penetrated our most secure encrypted channels. I used our old protocols, JAP and Mixminion, but even those appear to be compromised. Obviously, they are aware their machinations have become transparent to us and they are moving to contain the situation, and so far, I hate to say, they’ve been rather adept at doing so.”
“But how could they?” Lip said. “Mixminion, JAP? Both of those are entirely anonymous.”
“I can only deduce they are blanketing, shutting down entire networks,” Johnny Two-cakes said. “I tried other approaches, and we even sent someone. With Mei’s help a suitable courier was found. He flew out three days ago. He was supposed to go straight to your office and deliver you a disk drive, but he never reported back. I can only assume they got to him, as well.”
“What was on the disk drive?” Lip said.
“Enough to validate what I’ve suspected from the beginning,” Johnny Two-cakes said. “Thank god I took the precautions I did before I came here. I never thought they’d actually be needed. The letter to you and my wife, which I had Lawrence personally deliver if I wasn’t on the return flight. The stick in my office was also insurance, in case something happened to me. Even if I couldn’t get messages through or if I was captured, or worse, I figured at some point you’d go to my house and discover it, and find out what I knew. I’m impressed by the way, Lip. You pieced it together rather well.”
“You mean that crazy theory is on the level?” Marks said. “They’re going to hack the election and tank our financial markets? And China Telecom is involved?”
Johnny Two-cakes double blinked. “Yes, but it’s more than just that. This is a Cold War, gentlemen, and it’s been going on for some time. The nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee are in a struggle for survival. They view democracy as their biggest threat and they mean to take it out by any means necessary.”
Johnny Two-cakes told them of some of the things he’d found in the last week. Some of the things that were on the disk drive that they never received. Marks and Lip listened.
“Jiminy,” Lip said, after Johnny Two-cakes was done. “That’s a lot of crackers.” He looked at Mei. “What’s your take on all this?”
“It is very simple,” Mei said. “The Black Widow is being used to track my people.”
Johnny Two-cakes nodded. “Make no mistake, gentleman. We are aligned here, and we’ve got the green light from our side and Mei’s. We’re taking it down.”
“China Telecom?” Lip said.
Johnny Two-cakes blinked twice. “Yes.”
124
MARKS frowned. “You, me, Lip and Mei? We’re going to infiltrate China Telecom and take it down?”
“Yes,” Johnny Two-cakes said. “But we’ll have help.”
“Help?” Marks said. “You mean these kids with their pop guns? Fifteen of them and us?”
Mei nodded; her face was very serious. “Yes, but there are more than fifteen kids.”
Johnny Two-cakes suddenly had the gleam in his eyes again. “Tell him Mei.”
“There are fifteen million of us,” Mei said. “And we don’t need guns. Each of us has a laptop.”
Lip whistled. “Fifteen million. Holy moly.”
Mei smiled winsomely. “And we’re ready. We hit China Telecom tonight.”
“And everything else,” Johnny Two-cakes said.
“Hold on,” Marks said. “Fifteen million? How are you going to orchestrate that? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No kidding now. This is not a joke,” Mei said. “Have you forgotten when we first met?”
Marks cracked a smile, thinking about it.
Little Mei Ling.
That was over a decade ago. Back in 2001. Mei was nineteen. She and her club of hackers took down the White House website. They used a DDoS, a “distributed denial-of-service attack”, and they didn’t just hit the White House, but they hit over a thousand American sites, including the US Navy website.
I AM CHINESE replaced the US Navy’s regular web page. CHINA HACK replaced the Department of Labor web page. Mei and her network had some fun. They ended up taking down almost every US government website.
And it was all prompted by a little incident where a US spy craft collided with a Chinese F-8 fighter jet. The American pilot ejected safely, but the Chinese pilot was killed. That was the spark, and the Chinese youth jumped all over it in a nationalistic fervor. Mei and her club, which she called the China Girl Security Team, linked up with other clubs throughout China. They let it be known they didn’t appreciate what had happened.
That’s when the magnitude of things hit Marks, Lip, their SCS team, and the greater NSA community. China had an army of kid hackers. At the time, they were able to determine the clubs contained hundreds of thousands of kids, and all of them were savvy with computers. Being a hacker was akin to being a rock star in Chinese culture. It was what most elementary-school students aspired to be.
“Well, we’ve all grown up,” Mei said. “And we’re a little more sophisticated now. Not to mention the fact our numbers have grown.”
“I’ll say,” Lip said. “Fifteen million? That’s pretty heavy. How’re you keeping under the radar? The Black Widow must make it difficult for you.”
“Yes, it does. We’ve had to adapt. But we manage.”
“As I recall, you and your network were pretty keen on the nationalism thing,” Lip said.
“And we still are,” Mei said. “We love our country.”
“And they know what it can be,” Johnny Two-cakes added.
“Free,” Mei said.
125
MEI rose. “We need to leave. Final preparations need to be made.”
She went and spoke with the kids in the next room. Marks got a glimpse of her giving them each a hug. Marks noticed that they looked at her with respect. No, it was more than that, he realized.
It was adulation.
Mei had definitely grown up.
He remembered the feisty little girl that didn’t mind giving him a piece of her mind. Marks and Lip had been dispatched to pay Mei a visit back in 2001. It was the first of many meetings with Mei. Their relationship had evolved over the years. From adversary… to what they had now.
And what is it we have now? Mei had asked last time.
It’s good, whatever it is, Marks had said.
Not what I wanted to hear, Mei had said.
Women. Not Marks’s strong suit.
Marks and Lip waited halfway down the steps. Johnny Two-cakes lingered upstairs, still in the room. Marks still had some questions. Namely, how the plan was going to go down. Next to him, Lip fidgeted.
“What is it?” Marks said.
“Nothing.”
“Give it up.”
Lip shrugged. “Just thinking about the fact we could be here for a while. Revolution? Tell me when those ended in a day?”
“So?”
“So, I have one pair of underwear. And it’s not like its spanking clean.”
Marks smirked. “Life is hard.”
Lip snorted and glanced up the steps. “You notice anything different about Johnny Two-cakes? And I’m not talking about him getting us.”
“Clarify that—he got you, not me. But yeah, man has loosened up.”
“I think I know why.”
Marks raised an eyebrow.
“Marion,” Lip said. “Guy is finally getting some. I need to get on that bandwagon.”
Marks shrugged. �
��Well, you got twenty million here. Say half are female? Say half of those aren’t picky?”
Mei hustled down the stairs in her spiked heels. Another bit of appreciation on Marks’s part: baby could really move it with them on.
“Don’t get his hopes up, Marks,” Mei said. She winked at Lip. “Move it, Casanova.”
The four of them went outside.
126
CHINA Telecom owned the soup of the Chinese people. Their whispers, their dreams, their secrets, their failures, every bit of daily correspondence that transpired in China went through China Telecom’s lines. They owned the land lines. They had the largest network of wireless broadband in the country. Their mobile telecommunications weren’t too shabby either.
They were a state-owned monopoly whose size could only truly be appreciated by putting them in proper context. Think Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, Cingular and all the other telecommunication providers in the US all under one umbrella. That was China Telecom. You spoke, they heard.
And as Lip reminded Marks and the group, they didn’t just own the soup of the Chinese. They had bigger ambitions. China Telecom had hijacked the Internet not that long ago. They’d rerouted 80% of all Internet traffic for thirty-two minutes and ten seconds. Wasn’t the first time they’d done it either.
Now, according to Johnny Two-cakes, they had a Black Widow.
That was a dangerous mix.
It was one thing when the country in possession of such a beast was democratic. The Black Widow in the US was technically owned by the “good guys”. They used it to keep tabs on emerging terrorists around the world. Spot the buggers before they took off their diapers.
But in the hands of a communist country like China, a Black Widow was another beast altogether. When Cray designed their Black Widow supercomputer they designed it to handle calculations on an unfathomable scale. The exabytes of data that had to be sifted through was too enormous to be handled by networks of computers. They just didn’t have the capability. Couldn’t handle the “flops”—that was a Lip and Johnny Two-cakes term. Something about how when you cluster computers together “they don’t scale well… what is needed is something that can do an exaflop… do one quintillion operations in one second.”
For that, what you needed was something like the Black Widow.
The soup was an abyss. So much chatter that it was like a fire hose. To pull any actionable intel out of that you needed something that could analyze trillions and trillions of bytes per second—hell, it was the only way you could make sense of anything. Otherwise all that you were listening to was blabber… white noise… a black hole of endless voices.
That was where the Black Widow came into play. If the Chinese had one, then it was a no brainer what it could be used for. Spotting terrorists was one thing. Spotting dissidents before they could propagate and give voice to their ambitions of freedom, was quite another. Used that way it could suppress a population of 1.4 billion. Clamp down on a Chinese youth in an Internet café having a harmless web chat with his friend about the oppression of The State.
Bam! Men in black could whisk that boy away faster than you could say ma’am, may I have another, please?
Marks understood the deal and it wasn’t even his bag. Mei, Johnny Two-cakes and Lip lived and breathed that exabyte shit. They knew the implications of a Black Widow. And Mei knew it personally. It was targeting her people every day. Finding them in Internet cafés, in their homes, on the bus, on the street, anywhere they were chatting or texting on a phone or logging onto the Internet.
“It must be taken down,” Mei said.
THEY were ensconced in another safe house. Safe was a relative term here. Their safe house—or rather, their very accommodating hotel suite with fresh towels and clean sheets—had a direct line of sight on China Telecom. It was less than three blocks away. The telecommunications facility was a behemoth of a building. Made Fort Knox look like a kid’s sandbox.
“We’re attacking that?” Marks said. “And we’re not using Tomahawks?”
Marks wasn’t talking about the Indian hatchet version. From what he was looking at a BGM-109 Tomahawk, long-range, all-weather, subsonic cruise missile would have done the trick. If you used a hundred of those babies.
“Easy cheesy,” Mei said, smiling.
127
THEY were in the prosperous “shiny” part of Shanghai. Glittering skyscrapers everywhere, well-heeled pedestrians, lots of fashion, and lots of style.
Two faces. One shiny. One not.
There was no Shoney’s in China. That would be a not. For their needs, in this shiny locale, Pizza Hut was the next best thing. Fit the bill as a place to chow and go over the plan. Plenty of tourists and foreigners, which allowed them to fit right in; no need for old man masks. Pizza Hut in China was not your funny-roof version you get in the States. The décor and menu made that very clear.
“What are you having?” Marks said.
“I think I’m going to try their escargot,” Lip said. “Least for starters. What are you having, Mei?”
Mei wasn’t looking at the menu. She was taking in the mood lighting and ethereal atmosphere. Place looked like the most upscale restaurant you’d find in Vegas or Chicago. Very hip. White tablecloths, linen napkins, and nattily-dressed waiters.
No shit. Pizza Hut. Who would think it? You had to be there to believe it.
“I do like this place,” Mei said. She looked at Marks with just the hint of a smile. “You remember coming here?”
Marks nodded. “Yeah.”
Lip’s head swiveled. “When did you two come here?”
“Last time you visited,” Mei said. “Didn’t Marks tell you?”
Lip’s brow knit and he looked hard at Marks. “No. He didn’t.”
“I thought I did,” Marks said.
Marks felt something under the table. It caught him off guard. At first he thought it was Lip kicking him, but he relaxed. It was soft. Not Lip. No, it was very nice. It touched his leg, rubbed against it once, and then was gone. He could almost see the cute little foot in his head. Mei didn’t have one of her heels on.
He looked across the table at Mei. “That was fun.”
“It was,” she said, smiling coyly.
Johnny Two-cakes was still absorbed, looking at the menu. “Do they even sell pizza?”
“Yeah,” Lip said, his brow still clouded. “Turn the page.”
Johnny Two-cakes flipped to another section. “Oh… thanks.”
THE plan.
Johnny Two-cakes and Mei had one. And it wasn’t so bad. Needed some work, though. That’s where Lip and Marks lent their expertise, which prompted a round of lively discussion. It took some time for them to hash it out. Once common ground was found, they stitched it all together and worked out the kinks. Mei’s insider knowledge was invaluable. She knew what would work, what wouldn’t. They went over it. Went over it again. And one more time, just for kicks.
Fix it. Strike it. Exploit it.
Except in this case, the exploiting part was going to be limited.
“No souvenirs this time,” Marks said.
Lip was bummed. “What about a little one? Maybe some hard drives?”
Johnny Two-cakes shook his head. “It needs to be clean. They can’t know we were ever there. Can you two handle that?”
“No problem,” Marks said.
Lip grumbled. “Fine. Whatever.” Man was still pissed. He was eyeing Marks and Mei like a hawk.
“Something’s going on between you two,” Lip said as they were leaving. Mei and Johnny Two-cakes were up ahead.
“Nothing is going on,” Marks said.
Lip frowned. “Nothing, huh?”
“Nothing.”
Lip smirked. “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday. By the way—I approve.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
AFTER lunch, they got their gear. No Roady’s Truck Stop this time. They had to settle for Wang’s. Place sol
d everything they needed and could tailor clothes on the spot. Mei knew the owner personally.
“What about wangs?” Lip asked the owner. “Do you sell wangs?”
The owner smiled and made no reply.
“Not funny, Lip,” Marks said, as they walked outside with their loot.
“He wasn’t just being funny,” Mei said. “Wang means hope.”
THEY sure as hell were going to need it. This whole thing was hinging on hope and a prayer. Getting in didn’t sound fun. Least not the way they wanted to do it.
“What do you think?” Lip said.
“I think we’re crazy,” Marks said. He was poring over the plans that Mei had provided them.
“No I didn’t mean that,” Lip said. “I meant this.”
Marks turned and looked at what Lip had in his hand. It was a jump drive; not the same one with the emails and PDFs on it, but another one that Marks recognized. It was the same type of stick they’d used for another job. Back in 2009, the Stuxnet deal, worm thing, affected those centrifuge thingies back in Iran.
“Works like a charm,” Lip said.
“Boring,” Marks said. “I wanted to blow something up.”
128
AS the city began to light up, Johnny Two-cakes looked out the windows. He needed to tell them, he realized. On past missions he’d had no qualms keeping certain things from them, but this was different.
When Marks and Lip finally roused themselves from their naps and came into the room, Johnny Two-cakes knew that it was now or never. Mei was finalizing things with her lieutenants and wouldn’t be back for a few hours.
“Gentlemen, we need to have a talk,” Johnny Two-cakes said.
Marks and Lip looked at him with curious expressions.
“I have not been completely upfront with you regarding our mission,” Johnny Two-cakes said.
“This is about Costa Rica, isn’t it?” Marks said.