by Reece Hirsch
“Have you ever thought about us having our own place?”
Zoey looked startled, “Are you talking about a house?”
“Um, no. Not at the moment anyway. I’m talking about our own law firm. Your own computer forensic lab.”
Zoey swiveled around in her chair now, her back to the monitors. “Is this talk talk or serious talk? Because it would be cruel to lead a girl on that way.”
“It’s just talk—for now.”
Zoey turned back to her array of monitors. “Hmm. That must have been some lunch. Did he pay?”
“No, but I think he might.”
21
Tao Zhang had never seen so many Americans in one place, except on television during the World Series. As he advanced through the customs line in the hangar-like international terminal of the San Francisco airport, they were everywhere: wearing their National Football League jerseys; speaking in their braying accents; punching the buttons of their smartphones and tablets with their stubby fingers; playing Angry Birds; wiping the spittle from their blond, great-headed toddlers; eating McDonald’s hamburgers, which appeared to be just as inedible here as they were in Shanghai, with their bird-shit spatters of Day-Glo-colored condiments; and authoritatively expressing themselves, as if their every trivial preference was a governmental edict.
Yes, that was really it, the trait that defined them as Americans—that confidence and authority. It was how you could always distinguish them from the self-effacing Canadians. It was bred in the bone, that attitude, which came from being told from birth that you lived in the greatest nation on earth.
But what if that ceased to be true? What would they do then? How would they behave? Now that was something Tao would pay good money to see.
And that day was coming. He didn’t believe in communism or the party or his government, but he believed in China—as a people, as an overwhelming force of nature; as a giant that had been weak only because it had been constantly told that it was weak.
Even before he received this assignment, Tao had known that China was stealing America’s intellectual property and trade secrets—anyone with access to the Western media had heard those claims. Tao didn’t consider such an appropriation as theft—more like reparations for generations of the West’s meddling with and oppression of China. If this hit was another way in which the PLA was drawing a line in the sand against the US, then that was fine with Tao.
“Is your trip for business or pleasure?” the customs agent asked, snapping him out his reverie.
“A bit of both.”
He made his way through the terminal, with its motif of DNA-like strands of white piping, and rode a bus to the rental car company. He chose the most nondescript-looking car imaginable, a white Ford Focus, and drove north from Burlingame into San Francisco on a bright, cool day. The air was remarkably clear, and the midafternoon light was crisp. No filthy mái shrouded this city, although he had heard that he would feel right at home in smoggy Los Angeles to the south.
Not one to waste time, Tao went directly to Bruen’s workplace before he had even checked into his hotel. Bruen’s law firm was in Four Embarcadero Center, which was near the waterfront and the landmark Ferry Building, the fourth in a series of massive, tombstone-like, white office towers lined with narrow, vertical windows.
Tao took a seat on a concrete bench outside the office tower and waited. It was a good vantage point for surveillance. There was only one set of doors and one security desk for the building, so it would be easy to spot Bruen when he left work in the evening. Because the office was situated in the middle of a shopping center, he wouldn’t appear conspicuous if he occupied the bench for long periods of time. There was also a Peet’s coffee shop nearby with a view of the doors, so he could alternate his position if necessary.
After Tao had waited in the coffee shop for an hour and a half, Bruen finally pushed through the revolving door, lugging a heavy laptop bag. Tao recognized him immediately from the photo he had been given in Shanghai. Bruen was hard to mistake: tall—well over six feet—with a shock of unruly dark hair, and a long face with a thin nose and heavy-lidded eyes. He strode past the coffee shop window with the power-walking gait of someone who billed by the hour, and at a high rate. After waiting a couple of beats, Tao set out after him.
Bruen headed south on Battery Street. Tao knew that he lived within walking distance of the office in a loft south of Market Street, and that appeared to be his destination. Bruen kept a fast pace with his long legs, and Tao had to work to keep up, threading through the early evening crowds pouring out of the office towers.
Bruen took a left on Market and walked down to the Embarcadero, where the lights of the Bay Bridge glimmered in the dusk. If he was heading home, then he was taking the scenic route. Runners passed by with springing strides, relishing the cool of the evening and being out from behind their desks.
The target stopped at Red’s Java House, a white clapboard shack suspended on pylons over the water. He emerged a few minutes later with a paper bag that already showed grease stains, containing what Tao assumed was an unhealthy takeout dinner. He was hungry, and his stomach rumbled in response.
After a few more blocks, Bruen arrived at his apartment. The lights came on in the loft, which had floor-to-ceiling windows that weren’t covered with curtains at the top.
Tao walked up a nearby street that climbed a hill, looking for an angle that would allow him to see into Bruen’s apartment with binoculars through the gap above the curtains. He had to back away over a hundred yards, but he finally found his vantage point. He removed a set of minibinoculars from his bag and focused until he saw Bruen moving about in his apartment.
Of course, Tao couldn’t stay there for long. A man standing on the sidewalk gazing through binoculars at an apartment building would quickly draw attention. But if he could manage to park on the street in the spot next to where he was standing, he could probably take a clean shot with a high-powered rifle.
The notion was entirely impractical, and he instantly dismissed it. He would never set up for a rifle shot in such an exposed position. Nevertheless, this was Tao’s thought process when he was hunting a target. He took pleasure in meditating on the assignment, exploring every angle until he had settled on the perfect strategy. Improvisation often produced the best results, and it didn’t pay to fall back on familiar tactics. If he became predictable, then he wouldn’t last long enough in this line of work to help his brother.
Tao took another look through the binoculars and saw that Bruen was now sitting at an upright piano in a corner of the loft. His hands fluttered over the keyboard. From his hunched posture and the speed of his fingering, Tao assumed that he was playing some classical piece, something precise and complex. He wondered whether Bruen was an improviser or a planner.
Tao didn’t even have a gun yet, so nothing was going to happen tonight in any event. This was just about reconnaissance, becoming familiar with Bruen’s habits. And he knew that he wouldn’t be shooting through the window of the loft, as interesting as it was to contemplate how that might be accomplished. No, that would look like an assassination and would attract far too much attention.
His initial thought was that he would get him using a handgun when he was walking in this less busy neighborhood in the evening.
Tao imagined for a moment that the lens of his binoculars was a rifle scope as he focused on the spot just below the hairline at the base of his skull. There. Reflexively, his trigger finger twitched.
Tao’s thoughts were interrupted by the buzzing of his cell phone. It was a text from his US contact. Time to begin in earnest.
22
Zoey knew that she shouldn’t have made a copy of the flash drive. Chris would be pissed off if he found out. Make that when he found out. And Paul Saperstein and the team at Zapper would be livid.
When she made the copy, she wasn’t even certain yet that she
would do anything with it. She just knew the PLA should not be allowed to rob US companies blind with impunity. As her hacker friends liked to say, information wants to be free. And, to her way of thinking, this information, which proved irrefutably that the PLA was behind the APT1 attacks, was screaming to be released.
So far the State Department had received a report summarizing the contents of the flash drive, but the original remained in her forensic lab. Her forensic lab. She still loved the sound of that more than she probably should. And a stunt like this was the sort of thing that could cause her to lose that job.
Although she rarely acknowledged it to Chris, she was happy in her new position. Although she considered attorneys to be a noxious subspecies, now that she worked among them every day, she had to concede that some of them had redeeming qualities. She enjoyed the work, compiling the evidence to stop thieving employees and ruthless hacking crews. And she was good at it. For once in her life, she was able to use all of her talents and get decently compensated for doing it.
Zoey knew that she had a tendency to sabotage herself in the workplace, but that usually happened when she hated the job. Over the past ten years, she had worked in a dozen semimenial jobs, including stints as a math tutor, a security consultant, a writer of graphic novels, and a bartender, holding no job more than eight months at a time. She hoped this wasn’t a case of her self-destructive instincts kicking in.
And her talent for self-immolation wasn’t limited to the workplace. She was also adept at blowing up any relationship with a man that had the potential of turning into something stable and promising. And she would categorize her relationship with Chris Bruen as promising. Unlikely—perhaps. Maddening—definitely. But also promising.
Since she’d started sleeping at Chris’s place, she had learned a few things about him. He wasn’t over the death of his wife, Tana, but he was as close as he was probably going to get without someone else. Whether he could get fully beyond his loss remained to be seen. From what Zoey had learned about Tana, she thought that she would have liked her, despite the fact that they were very, very different people. She had decided that was a good thing, because if she had been too much like Tana he would probably always think of her as some sort of weak-tea version of her.
Chris had developed some quirks in his years of living alone, and she knew that she had as well. The question was whether they had become so set that they couldn’t be adjusted to accommodate another person. For example, he would wake up in the middle of the night and play a short passage of Bach over and over again to lull himself back into drowsiness. That wouldn’t be so bad, but he hummed to himself while he played. It was the humming that was starting to get to her.
What would her hacker compadres say when they learned that she was seriously dating a lawyer? And not just any lawyer—oh no. Chris was a former DOJ prosecutor, someone who had put more hackers in jail than almost anyone else. For black-hat hackers, Chris was on every conceivable enemies list. If word of their relationship got around, she was going to have to wear a disguise to the next DefCon conference.
She realized that disclosing the emails regarding APT1 would place an enormous strain on her relationship with Chris, but she felt she had no choice. If you had to sacrifice your ideals for your partner, what kind of relationship was that? Even though the whole “information wants to be free” thing had become a tired slogan, in this case there was truth to it. The Chinese theft of US intellectual property was a problem of national importance. Who gave the State Department the right to sit on that information?
Zoey knew Matt Geist, a journalist for the muckraking San Francisco Sentinel, a free weekly newspaper that took a particular interest in tech industry issues. Geist would love this story, and he and his publisher, a holdover from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, were ballsy enough to run with it in the face of State Department intimidation. He was also just reputable enough that the mainstream media would not ignore him.
Zoey copied the flash drive and placed it in a letter-size envelope. She couldn’t trust it to the mail. She needed to meet with him in person.
Zoey held the phone in her hand for several minutes before punching in the number. She knew Chris would justifiably view this as a betrayal. She also believed that it was the right thing to do and consistent with the ethical principles that had guided her during her years as a hacker. Old Zoey and New Zoey warred for a moment more—and then she placed the call to Geist.
As soon as the number began ringing, she mouthed the word “boom.” Way to go, Zoey, blowing up your life again just when things were getting good.
“Geist.” His voice sounded blurry. There was a substance involved, but she couldn’t tell what it might be.
“It’s Zoey.”
“I was just thinking about you.”
“You don’t need to do that, okay?”
“Then why are you calling me? What news from the hacker underground?”
“I have news all right. I’ve got a story for you. But you’re going to have to convince me that you are capable of pulling it together before I tell you.”
“I’m with my former editor, and we are drinking with purpose tonight to mourn a lost way of life. We are journalists, and we hold our liquor.”
In the background, a gruff voice added, “Damn straight. And the liquor holds us.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Geist said to his drunken companion.
“My shit is just too fucking deep for you to fully comprehend it right now.”
“If you say so.”
“Geist!” Zoey said loudly into the receiver. “I think you’re going to want to hear what I have to tell you. If you’re not too busy mourning a lost way of life.”
“So what do you have?” Geist was making a game effort to regroup.
“I can’t tell you over the phone.”
“What, you want to meet in a parking garage at midnight too?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“You know that nothing gets me wetter than a conspiracy theory.”
“Well, dry your panties,” said Zoey. “I’ll stop by your place at 9:00 a.m.”
“Better make it eleven.”
“Okay. Drink some water before you go to bed.”
23
Visiting San Francisco’s Chinatown felt a little like coming home for Tao—if his home had been turned into a ride at Disneyland. He walked under the tiled arch at the base of Grant Avenue and was greeted by Chinatown in all its garish nighttime glory. Glowing red lanterns were strung overhead across the street, and pagoda towers lined the avenue. Even the streetlamps were exotic jade-green fantasias.
As Tao wandered the side streets, he saw that Chinatown actually had a dual nature. Part of it was a Disneyfication, a put-on for the tourists looking for their clichéd notion of Eastern exoticism. But behind the facade, he could see that an authentic Chinese community existed alongside the stores selling trinkets. The tea-smoked ducks hanging in the window of a butcher shop could have been sold on the street where he lived in Shanghai.
A group of uniformed waiters smoking cigarettes on the steps of Old St. Mary’s Cathedral eyed him as he walked past. While no street in China looked quite like this, it was close enough to make him feel a bit homesick. In a strange land, it was at least an approximation of something familiar.
The text had instructed him to come to Chongqing Bazaar Antiques at nine thirty and ask for Wan. From the outside, the shop looked like any of the other places selling ceramic foo dogs.
A bell jangled as he stepped inside, but no clerk responded. The shop was empty. Tao made his way through a maze of antique chests, painted screens, lamps, and enormous ceramics vases, proceeding to the cash register in the back. When he reached the register, he rang the bell on the counter, which jangled noisily in the silent store.
Tao waited for about a minute, beginning to wo
nder if someone was setting him up. Maybe his mission had been aborted. Maybe he was now a loose end to be eliminated. He tried to settle himself and not let his thoughts run wild.
A hushed female voice came from behind him. “Can I help you?”
He turned quickly and saw a tall woman of indeterminate middle age with glossy, shoulder-length black hair. She was wearing a tasteful, Western-style blue silk dress and a scrutinizing look.
“Wan?”
“Yes, Ms. Wan. You’re not what I expected.”
“What was I supposed to look like? Chow Yun-Fat?” She wasn’t exactly what he was expecting either. He had expected Wan to be a man.
She smiled politely. “You’re right, of course.” Stepping past him, she entered the office that was behind the register. “Please come with me.”
Tao glanced back at the front of the store, concerned about the privacy of their meeting, but he saw that the front door was shut and the “Closed” sign was up. He followed her inside.
The office was uncluttered and functional, dominated by a massive teak desk. Unlike the rest of the shop, there were no antiques. The woman went to a floor safe behind the desk, dialed a combination, and removed a Beretta 92FS nickel-plated pistol.
She placed the gun on the desk with a thump. “Satisfactory?”
“Very, so long as it’s clean.”
“It’s untraceable. Feel free to assume that I know my job.”
“I don’t know you. So it’s a little early for me to be making assumptions.”
She stared at him impassively, neither arguing nor conceding the point. “I have a message for you. You have new instructions.”
“The same target, right?”
“Yes, but you must do something extra. There’s a flash drive. A copy of the hard drive Bruen stole. It contains some files that would be very embarrassing if they became public. Bruen brought the material back with him from China, and he has it in his firm’s forensic lab. In addition to the hit, you need to retrieve any copies of the flash drive that you can find.”