by Reece Hirsch
“Paul Saperstein and everyone at Zapper.”
“Let’s try again.” Park brought the rolling pin down on Chris’s left hand.
From his prone position, Chris saw the tip of a ballpoint pen on the edge of the coffee table above him. Reacting to the pain, barely thinking, Chris reached up with his right hand and grabbed the pen.
“What are you doing?” Park said. “You ready to write up your confession?” He gave Chris a cruel smile. “I’m afraid it won’t be so easy as that.”
Park was still grinning when Chris jammed the pen into the side of his neck. Blood immediately began to well around the barrel of the pen. With a pained, incredulous look, Park drew the pen slowly from his neck. Blood immediately began to spurt from the wound in time with the man’s racing heart.
I must have hit an artery, Chris thought distantly as Park stood straight and wandered around the room, blood geysering between his fingers. Owyang and Ma started following him around like they wanted to help but didn’t know how.
“Put pressure on it!” Ma cried.
Owyang had grabbed a towel from the bathroom. “Just stop moving and we’ll wrap this around it.”
Park didn’t seem to hear them. He turned from the other side of the room to gaze at Chris again like he had just figured out the last thing he wanted to do. Then he staggered over to Chris and fell upon him.
Chris tried to squirm away, but Park got his hands around his throat and began squeezing with surprising strength, their faces only inches apart. Chris’s Mandarin wasn’t good enough to discern whether what was coming out of Park’s mouth was speech or simply inarticulate screaming.
Chris gasped for air as he stared into Park’s contorted features, not sure which of them would draw his last breath first.
But then Park’s grip on his throat began to loosen. A few seconds later, Park’s hands fell away, and he fell silent.
Chris tried to get out from under the dying man, but he was too damaged and dazed to move him.
Owyang and Ma crept in closer, horrified looks on their faces.
“We should get the gun,” Owyang said.
“I’m not going to get it. You get it,” Ma replied.
“The American’s not dead yet. We need to finish this.”
“I think he can hear us, you idiot. Just do it.”
“Just do it,” Owyang mimicked. “You need to get it through your head that you are not my boss.”
“All right, fine. I’ll get the gun. But you’re going to owe me.”
Chris heard their conversation faintly, but he couldn’t see them, because his vision had grown cloudy, and he felt that he was somehow drifting away from himself. Blacking out, he realized.
No. He had to retain consciousness, because as soon as the two hackers stopped bickering, one of them was going to kill him.
Chris cast about Park’s body and found the pistol still tucked in the small of his back under the shirt. He gripped the gun and pointed it at Owyang and Ma.
“Get him!” one of them screamed.
Chris saw the figures moving in close and felt the fear like pain masked by anesthesia. He squeezed the trigger. Then he squeezed it again and again, too far gone to even aim properly.
The sound was deafening in the small apartment, and he smelled cordite. He kept pulling the trigger even after the chamber was empty.
Click. Click. Click.
Then whiteness bloomed before his eyes, and he lost consciousness.
12
Zoey didn’t like answering to anyone, and she didn’t like taking tests. When she was called down to the Zapper headquarters to present her findings to the company’s all-star security team, that was what it felt like—a test. Zoey had never done well on a standardized test in her life—probably because she was not standardized.
But as she was led back to the Einstein Auditorium, a large room with amphitheater seating, and took her place at the podium, Zoey recognized that this was not a standardized test; it was a challenge. Zoey liked challenges, and she liked proving doubters wrong.
Chris had told Zoey all about his late-night meeting with the new Zapper security team, but she was still a bit taken aback when she saw the faces of a dozen or so of the world’s top security and computer forensic minds staring up at her from the audience. SoNar. Carina Blount. Doug Reeves. Sergei Timoshev.
Dez Teal stepped up beside her, testing the microphone with a tap. “Team, team, we’re going to get started now. This is Zoey Doucet, who works with Chris Bruen and runs Reynolds Fincher’s forensic lab. We all owe her a debt of gratitude because she assembled much of the evidence that led us to target the PLA facility on Datong Road in Shanghai as the likely source of the intrusion. We thought it would be useful for Zoey to level-set, walk you through her findings so that we’re all on the same page.”
Zoey caught the glances and eye rolling in the audience. Use of the term “level-set” suggested that she had gained a lead on the assembly of high-priced data security talent, and they were not used to being brought up to speed. They were paid to bring other people up to speed. It promised to be a tough room.
Zoey opened her laptop and projected it on a large screen behind her. “Thanks, Dez. I’m going to walk you through the evidence that led us to conclude the Datong Road facility is the base of operations for the Third Department, Second Unit of the PLA.”
She proceeded to flash one obscure document in Mandarin after another on the screen. The job listings that indicated Unit 61398 was hiring English-speaking hackers. The academic articles that suggested the unit was a source of expert information on covert communications and network security. The China Telecom correspondence offering a “national defense discount” for installation of fiber-optic communications infrastructure.
The first interruption came from Sergei Timoshev, who was sitting in the front row. “Excuse me, please.”
“Yes,” Zoey said. “It’s Sergei, right?”
“This is all very—circumstantial. Clearly.”
“True, but Chris has already uncovered additional concrete evidence that we were right about Datong Road. So it seems that we’re past the point of questioning the findings of our initial investigation. Clearly.”
Sergei’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t used to being mocked. “And where is this new concrete evidence?”
“In China. With Chris. We’ll be able review all that when he returns.”
“Then not so concrete, is it?”
“What is your—?”
Dez stepped in and interrupted Zoey before things got out of hand. “Thank you, Zoey, for that excellent summary. Now let’s move on to some of the leads that you’re currently pursuing.”
Zoey knew that this was going to be the most difficult part of her presentation. It would be easy to criticize and poke holes in what was coming next, but if her instincts were right, then it was too important to withhold.
“Well, just in the past twenty-four hours I’ve found something that troubles me. It’s not solid, but I thought you all should know so that you can consider it and maybe build on it.” She hit a key on the laptop to display a string of text on the screen. “This is a message board chat between someone we believe to be a manager of Unit 61398 and some sort of contractor. We’ve had it translated from Mandarin.”
“How do you know that this person is a manager?” It was Carina Blount, of Blunt Object Consulting.
“That was established by reviewing many posts by this individual over the course of several weeks. Time and again, but usually in subtle ways, he demonstrates manager-level knowledge of the unit’s operations. I’d be happy to produce those materials after the presentation if you’d like to review them.”
“Yes, I would,” Blount said.
Zoey picked up a laser pointer and focused it on a line of the chat message. “Here, the manager is chatting with t
he contractor about the Deep Web and Silk Road.”
Silk Road was a popular website offering illegal goods and services, located in what is known as the Deep Web, a vast collection of websites and databases that search engines like Zapper have not indexed for their search results.
She moved the pointer. “Here, the contractor refers to Silk Road and says, ‘Isn’t that where Red Sun has set up shop?’ The manager responds, ‘If you want to continue this conversation, then we need to move to an encrypted channel.’ ”
Zoey turned back to the audience. “That got me wondering who or what Red Sun was. So I combed through Silk Road until I found this on a page called “White Wolves Professionals.” She hit a key to display a screenshot of what could have been any slickly designed corporate website, except that it was filled with efficient-looking men aiming high-powered rifles and handguns, their faces in shadow or turned artfully away from the camera.
“ ‘White Wolves Professionals’ offers the services of hit men, and here is a page dedicated to a contract killer who goes by the name Red Sun.”
The webpage for Red Sun included another anonymous photo of a man with a high-powered rifle, probably lifted from a gun catalog. The text read simply, “Professional hits—clean, experienced, anonymous. Standard pricing in bitcoin.”
As Zoey went on to demonstrate to the room, pricing was listed on another “White Wolves” page, ranging from twenty-five thousand dollars for a “citizen” to two hundred fifty thousand dollars for a CEO, and fifteen million dollars for a head of state.
“So what are you saying here?” Timoshev asked. “Do you really think the PLA, with all of its trained soldiers and spies, would need to hire a contract killer?”
“I’m not drawing any conclusions, just showing you what I found,” Zoey said. “But I suppose if you wanted to build a theory, you could say that maybe the PLA would use a contract killer like this Red Sun for a job where they wanted complete deniability and virtually no electronic evidence trail. As we all know, that’s the beauty of the Deep Web, TOR, and Silk Road.”
When searching the Internet, most users merely dipped their nets in the sunny shallows of a wide sea of data, never plumbing the dark reaches of the Deep Web. But in order to enter that world, where criminals transact their business in anonymity and with impunity, the price of admission was merely the download and installation of some free software.
The Deep Web had been born in 1996 as a project of three scientists at the US Naval Research Laboratory, who presented a paper titled “Hiding Routing Information” at a workshop in Cambridge, England. The paper outlined the features of a system initially known as “onion routing” that would permit users to access the Internet without ever revealing their identities to web servers or routers. The special browser used to access the Deep Web, known as TOR (for The Onion Router), was highly anonymous because it used onion-like layers of encrypted connections.
In onion routing, a connection to a particular server, such as the one offering Red Sun’s services as a killer for hire, was routed through a chain of other computers, or nodes, with each node peeling away another layer of encryption. At any link in the chain, it was impossible to tell where the message had come from or where it was going, ensuring an extraordinary degree of anonymity. Payment for Red Sun’s services was equally anonymous because all transactions on Silk Road were conducted using bitcoin, an online form of currency that could be translated into dollars.
Timoshev shook his head in disbelief. “You know this Red Sun, and all of the hit man ads on Silk Road, are probably just shams, pranks.”
“Perhaps.”
“And why would a manager of Unit 61398 be chatting on a message board?” Blount asked.
“It was an IRC board, so he believed that there would be no record of the chat messages. Also, they were off duty and weren’t talking about official business. They just slipped up a few times and dropped some hints.”
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) boards were a popular mode of communication for hackers because they were not hosted by an Internet service provider, so records of the chat messages were not stored.
Timoshev resumed the questioning. “And are you telling us that, in all of Silk Road, this so-called killer was the only person using the name Red Sun?”
“I was getting to that,” Zoey said. “There were some other references to Red Sun on Silk Road. It’s also the name of a brand of heroin, and a couple of online drug dealers have taken Red Sun as their alias.”
“So what makes you think that this manager wasn’t simply a drug addict?” Timoshev asked. “Isn’t it a little—melodramatic—to think that he’s talking about a contract killer?”
“Based on the context of the messages, I thought it was more likely to be a reference to a hit man. I guess you could call it an instinct.”
More eye rolling from the audience.
“So really, Zoey, what is the point of presenting us with this?” Carina Blount asked. “Are we supposed to be scared?”
“You’re supposed to draw your own conclusions,” Zoey said. “But if Chris succeeds in China and brings back evidence that would be damaging to the PLA’s economic espionage program, a program that they’ve clearly invested a huge amount of money and resources in, then that sounds to me like a situation where they would want to strike back hard while maintaining complete deniability. Knowing that, and then seeing a connection between the PLA and this Red Sun character, well, yeah, that scares me.”
At that point the presentation broke down as the assembled experts piled on with a barrage of questions and criticisms. Zoey had been expecting it, but she still found herself unable to respond politely, and Dez swiftly brought the session to a close before the company’s high-priced assemblage of security talent came to blows.
Zoey had known that the presentation wouldn’t end well, but she didn’t regret having brought forward the information about Red Sun. The thought of the PLA working with a contract killer did frighten Zoey, and she thought that it should scare everyone in the room. At least now they couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned.
13
When Chris finally came to, he was shocked to find himself staring into the face of the gunman, Park, inches from his own, eyes open. The dead man was still sprawled on top of him, and his blood covered everything around them.
Repulsed, Chris pushed away from the body and stood up. He was unsteady on his feet, and his head ached with every movement. His hands were shaking, and he was nauseated from the adrenaline and the smell and feel of the bright, sticky blood, much of which had soaked through his shirt to his skin.
Smog-burnished sunset light streamed through the curtains, suggesting that an hour or more had passed. On the floor beneath the window were the bodies of the two hackers, Li Owyang and Bingwen Ma. Owyang had taken a bullet to the forehead, and Ma had been struck twice in the chest. Several more stray bullets had pocked the plaster walls.
The metallic smell of blood seemed to thicken the warm, still air in the apartment. Chris felt sharp electric pain in his right arm and side. If he had to guess, he would say that he had a cracked rib and a fractured forearm.
He found it hard to grasp that he had been responsible for the deaths of these men, but he knew that each of them had been prepared to kill him. But once his pain-clouded mind had absorbed the terrible facts of his situation, panic began to set in. It was the same panic Chris associated with one of his recurring nightmares, in which he had done something horrendous and irreversible. But in this moment, as in the recurring nightmare, one thing was certain—he needed to start running.
Chris realized that Mei-Hua could return to the apartment at any time. He had to get out of there, but first he would finish his assignment. He had come too far and paid too high a price to do otherwise.
He found a laptop and shoved it in his computer bag, even that simple motion bringing a stab of pain. There wou
ld be time to review its contents later, but Chris suspected that it would hold evidence that Owyang and Ma were involved in the Zapper hack.
Chris removed the gunman’s wallet. An ID badge showed that his name was Xi Park and he was some sort of security officer in the People’s Liberation Army. He had probably been assigned to protect the hackers or escort them to their next assignment. The PLA and the Chinese government would be using all available resources to track down the hackers’ killer because they would immediately suspect that this was retribution from the US for the APT1 intrusions.
At a sudden sound in the hallway outside, Chris froze. He heard keys jangling on a chain, so he picked up Park’s gun again and faced the door. A woman’s voice cursed softly in Mandarin, and there was the sound of a package being placed on the floor. It could be Mei-Hua, but he wasn’t sure.
The sound of a key turning in a lock.
But it was not the door to that apartment. It was the unit across the hall. Chris’s heart rebooted, and he began to breathe again.
He photographed Park’s face and IDs with his smartphone. He photographed the bodies of Ma and Owyang. He recognized that it was risky to carry the laptop and photos with him, because they were all the evidence needed to arrest him for three murders. If he felt that his pursuers were closing in, Chris would abandon it all with the computer bag.
Before Chris could leave, he would have to do something about his clothes, which were smeared with blood. He searched the closets and found a shirt, pants, and hooded jacket that fit him. Chris shoved his bloody clothes into a trash bag from the kitchen. He would toss it into a dumpster once he was several blocks from the scene.
He pulled the hood up over his head, stifling a cry of pain. If someone saw him, perhaps they might mistake him for Owyang or Ma, though he was taller than both of them.
Chris turned the doorknob and ventured out onto the landing. No one in the stairwell.
Chris crept down the stairs, stepped onto the sidewalk, and walked quickly away from the building, keeping his head down. When he was a half block away, he glanced back to see if he was being followed. It was then that he saw Mei-Hua returning, carrying a brown paper grocery bag. She passed him on the opposite side of the street and did not see him. He watched her enter the building.