by Reece Hirsch
The cabin of the Gulfstream G650 was bigger than most New York City apartments, all cream-colored leather and gleaming, burled mahogany.
“You ever flown on one of these?”
“No, it’s a little out of my price range.”
“One of the perks of working for Saperstein. It’s the only way to travel. It can climb to forty-one thousand feet, above the commercial air lanes, and it has a top speed of Mach .925, nearly the speed of sound. Much faster than a commercial jet. We’ll be back in Menlo Park in no time.”
“Like I said, I just want a shower and a bed.”
“Help yourself to the shower in back. I’ll have the flight attendant make up one of the seats as a bed.”
After he had showered and closed his eyes, Chris found it more difficult to sleep than he had expected. He was visited by the image of the two hackers, the amateurish assassins, closing in on him in that stuffy apartment in Shenzhen. He was raising the gun, and he knew exactly what he was doing as he pulled the trigger and sent them staggering backward in a fine mist of blood. He was pretty sure that wasn’t exactly what happened, but it felt like the truth.
Guilt, emotion, and trauma had already muddied the waters of his memory, so Chris knew he would never really have a clear picture of the event. Now it was only a matter of deciding which version of the story he would choose to accept as the truth. But he couldn’t shake the sense that he had wanted to kill those two young men and, if that were true, he wasn’t sure what that said about him.
Chris believed that nearly twenty years of practicing law had not impaired his sense of good and evil, but in his professional life he was rarely called upon to make moral judgments. He was an advocate who helped his clients achieve their objectives, which were usually more about mundane matters like money or control, striking a financially favorable deal, or exercising leverage to achieve a business objective (which was usually also about money). Those issues were not about good or evil—they were about stronger arguments and weaker arguments, leverage and its absence. But if he had a choice in that terrible moment, then pulling the trigger in that apartment in Shenzhen was a matter of good and evil. The problem was, he no longer knew whether the choice had been his. In the absence of any certainty on that point, he was left to wonder how good he was, and how evil.
18
When the private jet touched down in San Jose, another limo was waiting to whisk them to Zapper’s corporate campus in Menlo Park. Thanks to the lux accommodations of the Gulfstream G650, Chris actually felt ready to face the expected grilling from Paul Saperstein and his team of security experts.
Dez Teal ran interference as they entered the Zapper corporate offices and brushed past various security desks and midlevel corporate officers. It was only Zoey, standing in the middle of the hallway with feet firmly planted and a “thou shalt not pass” look, that brought them to a stop. She clearly hadn’t slept or changed T-shirts in a couple of days, and her hair was pulled up in a ponytail, but Chris thought she looked amazing nonetheless.
“Paul is waiting,” Dez said, as if that explanation would dissolve any obstacle.
“Paul can wait,” Zoey said.
Dez looked to Chris for help.
“I actually need to speak with my colleague,” Chris said. “Give us just a second.” He motioned to an empty conference room off the hallway. “In private.”
Dez nodded in resignation. “Not too long, please?”
Chris and Zoey entered the conference room and shut the door behind them. Zoey immediately body checked him into the wall and gave him a long, hungry kiss. Dez must have heard the thump in the hallway.
Chris winced.
“Are you okay?” Zoey asked.
“Cracked rib and a fractured forearm. Never mind right now.” They finished the kiss and, when they finally pulled apart, Chris said, “I missed you too.”
“You nearly got yourself killed,” she said.
“But I made it back,” Chris said. “Hardly a scratch on me.”
“I’d like to put some scratches on you.”
“That sounds like fun, but it will have to wait.”
“I don’t care if you have an audience with the boy king. You’re going to have to stop putting yourself in harm’s way like that.”
“I had no idea it would turn out that way.”
“Next time, send an associate. Isn’t that what you guys do when there’s a difficult, unpleasant job?”
“I think HR might have issues with that.”
“We’re not done with this conversation.”
“I know.”
Chris reached in his pocket and handed her the hard drive.
“What’s this?”
“It’s the hard drive of the laptop that I found in the apartment where Owyang and Ma were staying. I think you should take it back to our lab for analysis.”
“And you still haven’t reviewed the contents?”
“I wanted to keep the forensics as clean as possible, which is one more reason to do this in our lab.”
“Right. Everyone here will be fighting so hard to claim credit that it could compromise the work.”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“Yes, you will.”
Chris and Zoey returned to the hallway, looking disheveled. With a raised eyebrow, Dez conveyed that he had noticed but chose not to comment.
Dez led Chris into Saperstein’s airy corner office, which looked out on the green expanse of the corporate campus. Chris had been expecting to be greeted by the entirety of Zapper’s all-star security team, but he saw only Saperstein and Marty Lewin, Zapper’s general counsel. Marty was a Silicon Valley legend and had served as the “adult supervision” to a host of tech giants as they negotiated the treacherous path from the garage to the NASDAQ.
“Welcome back, man,” Saperstein said, shaking Chris’s hand. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” Chris said.
Saperstein seemed agitated. “I had no idea what I was sending you into over there, and I want you to know that I truly appreciate what you did. We all do.”
“Thanks, Paul. Things got out of hand, but it was never my intention to escalate the situation.”
Lewin took this as his cue. “Chris,” he said with a curt nod.
“Marty.” Chris knew that it was not Lewin’s job to congratulate him. He was there to manage a crisis that had the potential to become an international incident.
Lewin motioned for Chris to sit at a table by the window. “I know that you need time to rest and regroup, but we’re going to need to debrief you now, at least get the basics of the story down. The State Department will also probably need to be informed. It was fine to keep State in the dark when this was just an exploratory trip, but now that a PLA officer and two contractors have died, we’re going to have to tell them.”
“I understand,” Chris said, taking a seat. If the Chinese government started making public statements about what happened in Shenzhen, Saperstein and company couldn’t afford to have the government believe that Zapper was holding back.
Chris recounted the entire chain of events, slowing it down to provide every terrible detail of the confrontation in the apartment in Shenzhen and the deaths of the PLA officer and the two hackers, Li Owyang and Bingwen Ma. When he was done, there was a protracted silence.
“I don’t know what else he could have done,” Saperstein said.
“Well, it’s a little early for conclusions,” Lewin said. “But if the public heard that story, a lot of people would probably be sympathetic. No one likes to have their property stolen, and having a government backing the theft makes it all the worse.”
“The problem is,” said Saperstein, “if the public hears this story, they’re going to know that our algorithms have been compromised. I don’t want to think about what that might do to our stock price.”
Zapper was one of the most widely held stocks, so a plunge in its price would impact the savings of many individual investors and perhaps the market as a whole. Saperstein also stood to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars if the stock price crashed.
“Of course,” Lewin said. “But it may not be possible to keep this out of the press. What happens next may depend on what’s on that hard drive. Do you still have it on you?”
“I gave it to Zoey for analysis in our forensic lab.”
Saperstein shot an exasperated look at Lewin.
“That’s disappointing,” Lewin said. “Why didn’t you just hand it over to Dez Teal?”
“Zoey and our lab have made more progress on this investigation than anyone else on your team. I thought it was right that she should get the first shot at this.”
“We expected you to have it with you,” Saperstein said. “It’s secure, though, right?”
“Yes, very.”
Saperstein shrugged, letting it go. “Okay, but we’re going to need that analysis right away. Let’s assume for a moment that this is the smoking gun that links the PLA to the systematic theft of US intellectual property. What do you think would happen if we shared it with the White House?”
“Given China’s role as the US’s major creditor, they might choose to sit on it,” Chris said. “While State would probably love to embarrass China with that sort of information, they might decide that the potential financial repercussions would be too great. If you insult the guy you owe money to, it’s more likely he’s going to call in his marker. The Chinese government has probably already assumed that my visit to China was endorsed, and maybe even sponsored, by the US government. If the president and State Department play that sort of information for leverage with Beijing, then that would probably just confirm their assumption that the US government was behind this operation from the start.”
“Because that’s how they do things,” Saperstein said.
“Yes.”
“And if China believes that the US government sent you there to kill a PLA officer and two of its agents as some sort of retribution.” Lewin paused. “Well, who knows what sort of shitstorm that might provoke.”
“What happens if the State Department takes the conciliatory approach, reaching out to China and sharing everything they know?” Saperstein said. “They could just decide to apologize for our actions. Make us the scapegoats.”
Chris nodded. “If State goes that route, they would renounce our actions, disclaim all responsibility for the matter, and probably bring legal proceedings against us.”
“On what charges?” Saperstein asked, clearly alarmed.
“Chris could be extradited back to China,” Lewin said, “where he could face murder charges. The US attorney general could also probably come up with some basis for an enforcement action against Zapper, something along the lines of unfair business practices.”
“If the press reported that Zapper had sent someone to China to kill the people who stole their algorithms, then you would instantly become the new poster boy for corporate malfeasance,” Chris said. “It might even be fatal to the company.”
Saperstein nodded. “But I still think the risks are greater if we hold out on the State Department. We have to tell them. Then the best we can hope for is that they bury this, and the Chinese do the same. Maybe this is just too embarrassing for all concerned.”
Lewin turned to Chris. “Is there anything else that you need to tell us about what happened in China? We have some hard choices to make here, and we can’t have any more surprises.”
Chris contemplated his nagging doubts about the shooting in Shenzhen but knew that was not what Lewin was looking for. In fact, it was probably the last thing that Lewin wanted to hear from him.
“No,” Chris said, “that’s everything.”
Lewin stood to indicate that the meeting was over. “Okay then. Thanks for being so forthcoming. Paul and I will need to talk now about how to proceed from here.”
Saperstein leaned across, shook Chris’s hand, and looked him in the eyes. “You put yourself on the line for us in China, and I will never forget that. We’re going to support you in every way possible.”
“I appreciate that,” Chris said.
As Chris left Saperstein’s office, he had the queasy feeling that his fate was about to be decided. He liked Saperstein, but in Saperstein’s world when someone said they were going to support you in every way possible, it usually meant you would never hear from them again. And when they said they would never forget what you had done, it usually meant they already had. Lewin would make sure that all future inquiries from Chris were directed to legal counsel.
As he walked out of the Zapper headquarters amid a throng of young programmers, Chris suddenly felt very alone.
19
Tao received the email on his smartphone as he was sitting in a darkened movie theater in Shanghai watching a generic American action movie that featured an extraordinary number of car crashes. When he saw that the email originated from his Silk Road account, he left in the middle of the film so that he could view the attachment on his home computer. Tao walked up the theater aisle, enveloped in a Dolby maelstrom of squealing tires, rending metal, and fireball explosions that briefly froze the moviegoers in their seats like Pompeians caught in the Vesuvius eruption.
“Then let me ask you, Tao Zhang, have you ever killed a man?”
As he walked home, Tao recalled those words spoken to him in that wood-paneled office in Shanghai by Mr. Chen, the automobile factory manager, because they set him on the path to becoming a professional hit man.
Professional hit man. Sometimes he still had trouble believing that such people existed outside of books and movies and that he was one of them. Tao occasionally found it necessary to retrace the path that had led him to his vocation. Tao liked to entertain the notion that if he could find an implausibility, or a choice that he would have made differently, then he would somehow be transported into a different reality. One in which he didn’t kill people for a living.
On most days Tao was a midlevel manager in an auto parts distribution company with no apparent ties to the PLA, the Ministry of State Security, or any other state agency. Mr. Chen had arranged the position for him through a friend, and for several months all he did was move boxes of carburetors and distributors in a warehouse and manage the company’s inventory. But one day he received a call at home offering free one-on-one training sessions. At first he thought this was just a zealous telemarketer trying to sell him an expensive gym membership, and he hung up. But the man called again, more insistent this time, and it became clear that Mr. Chen and his friends were finally making contact. This was how they would decide whether he had the makings of someone who could be useful to them.
The training sessions were conducted by Bo Han, a former PLA officer, at a firing range on the outskirts of Shanghai, and after hours at a Wing Chun martial arts studio. Han never wore his uniform and never said that he was acting in any official capacity, but he gave Tao first-rate training in the deadly arts.
Although Han was not the sort to praise a pupil, Tao knew that he was doing well when the pace of training accelerated. Within a matter of months, Tao had learned the basics of firearms, hand-to-hand combat, explosives, poisons, and surveillance. Tao was not so arrogant as to think he had mastered these disciplines. There was always more to learn.
Once he was properly trained and the sessions with Bo Han concluded, Tao would never again meet any of his clients in person. That was possible through the impeccable anonymity of the Deep Web and the website known as Silk Road.
Silk Road was an enormously popular and successful online bazaar for criminal goods and services, offering everything from drugs to fake passports to hacking software—to hired killers.
When Tao had completed his training, he was instructed by Han to set up shop on the “Whit
e Wolves Professionals” section of the Silk Road, where professional hit men offered their services. He was told to identify himself as Red Sun so that his bosses would know they were dealing with Tao.
The White Wolves were a loose aggregation of putative hit men. As with eBay, you took your chances when you contracted directly with a private party. Some of the so-called hit men were probably outright frauds who would take your down payment and run. Tao doubted that many adhered to his standards of professionalism.
Tao had performed three hits so far, over the course of two years. Han told him he would never meet the people giving him his assignments. The anonymity of Silk Road would ensure that they could never be linked to Tao, and vice versa. While anyone hiring a hit man has an obvious desire for anonymity, this was doubly true of the people who trained and hired Tao. If there were even an implication that a state agency utilized the services of a professional hit man, then the diplomatic and political fallout would be disastrous. Tao was called in for the jobs for which even the PLA needed plausible deniability and they needed enough distance between themselves and their operative to ensure that even the covert branches of other governments couldn’t make the connection.
On Tao’s last day of training with Han, the workout had been particularly strenuous, focusing on martial arts. Wing Chun, the quick-handed style Han favored, combined striking and grappling and was effective for close-in fighting. It had taken time, but Tao had finally perfected the all-important Wing Chun stance, which Han compared to a stalk of bamboo—firm but flexible, rooted but yielding. It was all about adaptability and improvisation, and those were useful traits for a hired killer, even outside the context of hand-to-hand combat.
The gym’s air conditioner was busted, and the air inside the gym was humid and still. At the end of the session, Tao sat cross-legged on the mat, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. Han sat next to him. Even though the workouts were designed to put the onus on Tao, his teacher was also breathing heavily.