Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  His father had tried to reassure him, saying he knew the company well, but Liu had still felt compelled to check out a couple of big graduate job fairs, as a back-up, just in case. He’d been to one that morning, and Wang had asked him to pick up anything that might be interesting.

  Which turned out to be nothing. Liu had returned empty-handed, telling his roommates that the whole thing had been beyond depressing. He said the jobs sucked, those that were available, that the starting pay was dire and that one recruiter had told him that it was the worst graduate job market ever.

  He showed them photographs he’d taken of a vast hall that had two rows of narrow desks down the middle. The recruiters sat shoulder to shoulder behind the desks, hundreds of students swarming in front of them, wads of résumés in their hands.

  “The photo’s a bit fuzzy,” Wang said. And Liu told him that was the smog. Inside the hall, can you believe it? He said it had been freezing outside, but sub-tropical indoors, which was way over-heated. He said it stunk of sweat and the recruiters were rude and bored. It had taken him fifteen minutes to get to one desk and then, when he got there, the woman behind it just walked off.

  And whether it was a money thing, worry over his job prospects, or simply because he no longer felt bound by any commitments he’d made to his father, Liu had decided the computer security business might just be their salvation.

  The roommates were all wearing thick coats and hats, because the coffee shop’s heating system had failed. It was well below zero outside and to the roommates it seemed to be heading that way indoors. Lily had an engineer trying to put it right. She knew things could have been worse, that the router might have failed again. Her customers were cold, but still online, which was what really mattered.

  Wang was wearing his fingerless woollen gloves, so the roommates decided he should take the controls. He fired up his laptop, the turbo-charged Lenovo, for the initial scouting mission, to see what was out there, checking for potential customers, as they liked to call the targets of their attacks. Liu and Zhang moved their chairs to sit beside him.

  A register of Shanghai businesses hosted by a local trade group was always a good place to start. And, once Wang had assembled a decent list of web addresses, he opened another application called a “vulnerability scanner”, which went through each website, producing a list of weaknesses and break-in points, which Wang often imagined as being like identifying all the opened windows and unlocked doors of a house.

  There were a lot of them.

  So he looked again at their names. The best customers were usually small or medium sized, where security was especially bad and where they relied on their website for business. They’d be hit hard if they were offline for long, and they’d also be worried about their reputation with customers. From Wang’s experience, they were the ones most likely to pay up quickly for security advice.

  Liu pointed to one that the scanner said was riddled with security flaws. Just about all its digital doors and windows were wide open. It wasn’t the most vulnerable on the list, but Liu said he had a feeling about it, and they’d come to trust Liu’s feelings. That’s what made him such an important part of the team.

  “Let’s try them,” he said.

  It was a strange site. Pretty basic. The links and buttons on the home page seemed to go nowhere, like there was only a home page. Liu said it must be a work in progress, and they hadn’t yet paid much attention to security.

  “I like the logo,” said Zhang, pointing to the banner across the top of the page with the company’s name and a skyline shot of the Bund. It read, “SHANGHAI TT LOGISTICS”.

  Wang agreed that it was an ideal target.

  It took him just six minutes to insert code that gave him control of the site, and a further six minutes to put up their own banner, “You’ve Got a Problem”, and the bug with the speech bubble saying the company needed better security. Since their usual message site had been compromised by the run-in with the fat broker from Shenzhen, Wang provided one of his own numbered messaging addresses for Shanghai TT Logistics to respond to.

  Usually they’d just leave it at that. But Wang was feeling creative, getting a buzz from being back in the security business again. So he called up his stick alien, added a hoody, and placed it in the centre of the company’s home page beneath the banner. The typical hacker look. He liked that.

  “Nice one,” said Liu. “Let’s see what happens.”

  He and Zhang then returned to their smartphones, agreeing that they should just do the one for now, easing back into it.

  But Wang wasn’t through yet. There was a panel on the Shanghai TT Logistics home page that asked for a login and password, just about the only thing that seemed to be active. And he thought that if security here was as bad as the rest of the site, it can’t be difficult to crack.

  He opened another tool, a password cracker, which took under ninety seconds to rapidly test login and password combinations before coming up with one of the laziest: ‘login’, for the login, and the password, ‘pa55word’.

  The page it took him to was no more exciting than the home page, just an email account and a link for uploading documents. There were no emails, but two documents had been uploaded to the site: one called The Colonel and one called Mr Fang. He downloaded both to his Lenovo and left the website.

  He looked briefly at the cover pages of both documents. The Mr Fang one had a list of names of what it called: “Applicants for SK documents”. It was a summary of something, with fuller information inside. The second looked more fun, three photographs under the heading “Colonel General Chen Shibo”. One was a crusty-looking military guy in uniform, the second a kid, who looked a bit of a mess, like he wouldn’t have been out of place in The Moment On Time. The third was a red Ferrari, which would.

  He closed the documents without looking any further, powered off the laptop and went back to his phone, pleased that Liu had finally seen sense.

  He then opened his Whack An Alien app. He was convinced more than ever that digital was his future. Wang Chu the dot-com billionaire. He liked the sound of that. Sure, he was yet to have the Big Idea, but it would come, and in the meantime the game was coming along fine.

  He’d placed a beta version in two app stores and already it had been downloaded 50,000 times. It was free for now. He still needed to figure out how to make money from it, but weapons seemed the most promising way forward, charging to upgrade them. He was already experimenting with whacking aliens with a hammer, as well as running them down with a car or crushing them with a steamroller as they emerged with their bags of money from under the portrait of Mao in Tiananmen Square.

  Breaking into the Shanghai company’s website seemed to energise all the roommates, and Zhang said, “Hey, look at this. We could enter.” He had on his screen an advertisement looking for teams to enter something called the Cyber Challenge, a hacking competition between universities. Teams would score points for analysing and identifying hidden weaknesses in computer systems by breaking into them.

  “Last year the winning team took control of a car,” Zhang said. “They remotely unlocked its doors and changed its settings, sounding the horn, flashing the lights. They even opened the sunroof.”

  Wang said that was really cool. And Zhang said the members of the winning team had all been offered top jobs with the Government, and that the whole competition had become a kind of beauty contest, a recruiting ground, not only for Government, but for businesses scouting for talent which could help them snoop on their rivals. Looking for guns for hire.

  The problem, they all agreed, was that the competition was still months away. They needed their other businesses to come good before then. But they were all smiling now, Wang already checking his messages for any response from the Shanghai company, and Liu kicking him under the table and saying give them a chance, it’s only been ten minutes.

&
nbsp; Wang said he was feeling good about it, that he was confident they’d hear from the company soon and that they could do a deal, providing their usual package of security fixes. He said he was confident that Shanghai TT Logistics would take a pragmatic and reasonable view of their business proposal.

  – 27 –

  What the Fuck?

  “Fuck. Fuck. What the fuck?”

  “Hey Chuck, everything okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. All good, Dave, just a computer glitch,” said Drayton, now back at the Shanghai consulate, where he was sitting at his desk, staring at the screen of his laptop.

  “I’m heading back to The Facility,” said the man called Dave, who still didn’t have a second name. “The guys say stuff’s happening with their worm.”

  “I’ll follow you over,” said Drayton. “Something urgent I need to sort here first.”

  “Sure thing, Chuck. Don’t want to lose your data.”

  “Too right.”

  And he might also have added “too late” since he was sitting staring at his hijacked website. The banner was still there, the skyline of the Bund and “SHANGHAI TT LOGISTICS”, but beneath it like graffiti on a Brooklyn train were the words “You’ve Got a Problem”, and a bug with a speech bubble saying he needed better security, next to a numbered messaging address. What the fuck?

  Then there was another drawing, a character in a hoody. It was a stick character, and when he looked closely, the head of the character looked like one of those classic aliens with the pear-shaped head and big eyes. What the fuck?

  At least the website was still responding. It had been defaced, but not disabled. It was impossible to tell if the hacker had got any further than the home page and accessed the email account or the documents.

  He signed in and killed all the content, deleting the documents, The Colonel and Mr Fang, but only after he’d downloaded them again. He made a note of the messaging address of the hacker, took a screen grab of the page; then he went into the settings and deleted the website.

  He was angry, with himself as much as the hackers. He felt stupid. He was the Cyber Guy for fuck’s sake. He’d set up the website as a kind of Dropbox, as a secure way of communicating with Morgan because that bozo really didn’t have a clue. There was to be no more stuffing memory sticks in a Tellytubby’s pocket or the like.

  Sure, it wasn’t the most secure website, but he never imagined it would be targeted by hackers. He tried to reassure himself that the hackers were probably kids, out to extort a buck or two, and most likely hadn’t bothered with the documents. But he needed to know for sure.

  His first thought was to get Tom and Dick on the case. This would be like child’s play for them, tracing the messaging address and finding the hacker. It would take their mind off the dumplings. But it would also be far too embarrassing. They’d think he was an idiot. The Cyber Guy duped like that! He’d never hear the end of it.

  So he went to see Ed Wong. Ed, the kid from California, who called himself Ed the Real Geek. He’d even had that printed on his business cards, but the consulate had told him to get them redone, not liking the geek thing and insisting he have a proper name and title like everybody else.

  So he was now officially Edmund Wong, Social Media Analyst, though everybody still called him the Real Geek.

  “I don’t know how you can spend all your time sitting there and sifting through all that crap,” Drayton said by way of a greeting.

  “It’s where you’ll find the real mood of China,” Ed said.

  “Well yeah,” said Drayton. “If you can hold your nose long enough while you wade through all the online effluent. There’s a ton of crooks and scammers out there. And I see bullshit spreading like digital wildfire.”

  “I get that,” said Ed. “But the internet’s holding China’s leaders to account like never before. It’s much more difficult to be a successful liar in this country.”

  “But they still try very hard,” Drayton said. “And they shut down the online stuff they don’t like.”

  “Sure there’s an army of censors, but they can be slow and cumbersome and its awesome the way the kids get round it. Some of the kids are really smart.”

  Maybe Ed had a point, but all Drayton could think of at that moment was the drawing of the alien in the hoody and, smart or not, he just wanted to get his hands on the fucker who’d done that.

  He asked if Ed could do him a small favour.

  “You got it,” said Ed.

  “I’d like to know who this messaging account belongs to,” Drayton said, handing over the address. “I’m thinking of buying something from them online and want to be sure who I’m dealing with.”

  “Leave that with me, Mr Drayton. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Oh, and Ed…”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “It’s quite urgent. And quite private.”

  “Sure thing,” Ed said.

  Then Drayton took a regular taxi to the North Bund, getting it to drop him a few blocks from The Facility and walking the rest of the way. That wasn’t really protocol, but Dave had gone ahead with Cyril, and they’d relaxed some of the stricter security stuff as the surveillance had continued.

  When he arrived he found Tom and Dick, the two NSA analysts, hunched over Tom’s laptop. For once they were both smiling, giving each other knowing looks like a pair of kids who’d just mastered the next level of a video game.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Tom to the screen. “Talk to me, baby.”

  Drayton ignored them at first, since they frequently talked to Tom’s screen as if the worm could hear them and needed a bit of extra encouragement as it burrowed into the computer systems in the white building below them.

  Dave was playing a game on his smartphone, which he’d downloaded that morning while Tom and Dick’s attention was elsewhere. They’d banned any downloading while in The Facility, saying you never know what bugs might be out there. And they should know.

  But the way Dave saw it, this was only a game and a great game at that, whacking spindly little stick aliens with a big fly swatter as they appeared from a tunnel under the portrait of Mao in Tianamen Square carrying bags of money. He could play for hours.

  Drayton thought Dave looked chilled, and when Dave finished the game he told Drayton he liked Shanghai. That it had kinda grown on him. He couldn’t see himself moving from Beijing, but Shanghai was cool.

  Then Tom said, “Baby, yes. Thank you. Thank you”, almost shouting, but still to the screen.

  “You got something there, Tom?” Drayton asked.

  “It’s starting to communicate. The worm is responding.”

  They all gathered around the laptop and Drayton asked what it was saying and was it delivering names.

  “Nothing that clear. Not yet.”

  “So it’s kinda mumbling incoherently?”

  “It’s starting to deliver data,” Tom said, slowly, like he was talking to a child. “And that data needs analyses, and analyses can take time.”

  “When can we expect it to say something that makes sense?”

  Tom and Dick ignored that, and Drayton took the hint and powered up his own laptop, opening the documents that Morgan had uploaded to the Shanghai TT Logistics website.

  *

  Morgan had done well, or at least his wife had.

  The Colonel was not just a Colonel, but a Colonel General, which was pretty high up the People Liberation Army food chain. Colonel General Chen Shibo had commanded the Jinan and Beijing military regions. He’d been second in command at the PLA’s General Logistics Department, controlling a huge budget for housing and feeding the troops. Even buying uniforms. It was a notoriously corrupt part of the military, and Drayton thought it might explain where the good Colonel General generated a bit of extra pocket money.

 
It was probably also where he first got into computers, though it was still hard to imagine the guy as a hands-on hacker. He probably had his own versions of Tom and Dick, with him standing over their shoulder. Though it had clearly been the Colonel General at the controls when he was photographed poking around the maestro’s hard disk.

  Morgan’s report said that three years ago, Chen was appointed to head something called PLA Unit 61398. But that was where the trail went cold. There was nothing more recent about him or that unit.

  Much of the information was sketchy. Morgan had warned Drayton that his wife had found the research tough going, that it had been sensitive, that her usual contacts had been reluctant to open up. But there was still plenty here. The report said this Chen was a life-long member of the Party, with links right to the top, to the Party leader’s inner circle.

  There was far richer detail about the son, who seemed to divide his time between Hong Kong and Shanghai, fronting several companies described as being in trade and finance, a catch-all for all manner of deal-making. He’d left a rich trail of digital exhaust. A ton of stuff online, some of it linking him to the kids of other top officials. Doing business together. And he usually trailed around with a whole bunch of movie starlets and models.

  Drayton reckoned the son had to be leveraging his old man’s connections and managing the cash from the logistics job. The front man for the family wealth. But he struck Drayton as being as flaky as hell, which is pretty much the conclusion that Morgan had come to, his final sentence underlined for emphasis.

  Mr Chen Huizhi is not to be trusted. The father is powerful. The source of their wealth is dubious. We would strongly advise not going into business with this family.

  Then there was the Mr Fang file. Morgan had done well there too. Fang’s syndicate was so keen to secure an exit route from China that they’d done what they’d never done before and blown their cover, providing Morgan with enough biographical detail to secure their St Kitts passports. There wasn’t a lot, that was for sure, and more digging would be needed. But it was a rogue’s gallery of Party bigwigs from southern China. All wanting a slice of America. A refuge.