Gerry asked, “What does Sandy say about you roaming the halls at home?”
Clark laughed at this. “Yeah, it’s going to be a transition for both of us. I’ve got lots to do around the farm, and God knows why, but she seems to want me around. She may get sick of me, but I owe her the opportunity to find out.”
Gerry understood. He wondered what he would be doing now if his wife and kids were still alive. He’d lost them in a car crash several years ago, and he’d been alone ever since. His work was his life, and he would not wish that life on a man who clearly had someone at home who wanted him there.
Where would Gerry be if his family were still alive? Gerry knew he would not be working sixty to seventy hours a week at Hendley Associates and The Campus. He would damn well find a way to enjoy his family.
He could hardly begrudge John Clark one second of a life that Gerry would give anything to have for himself.
Still, Hendley ran The Campus, and Clark was one hell of an asset. He had to do what he could to keep him. “Are you sure about this, John? Why don’t you take some more time to think it over?”
John shook his head. “I’ve thought about nothing else. I’m sure. I’ll be at my place. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I’m available for you or anyone on the team. But not in an official capacity.”
“Have you talked to Ding?”
“Yeah. We spent all day yesterday at the farm. He tried to talk me out of it, but he understands.”
Gerry stood from his desk and extended his left hand. “I understand and accept your resignation. But please don’t ever forget. You always have a place here, John.”
Sam echoed the sentiment.
“Thanks, guys.”
—
While Clark was upstairs in Hendley’s office, Jack Ryan, Jr., and Gavin Biery sat in the locked conference room just off Biery’s second-floor office. In front of them was a small table, upon which the desktop computer sat with the cover removed, exposing all the components, wires, and boards of the device. Additional peripheral components were attached to the system via cables of different thickness, color, and type, and these pieces were strewn across the table haphazardly.
Other than the computer hardware, a telephone, a single coffee mug that had left dozens of small brown rings on the white table, and a yellow legal pad, there was nothing else in sight.
Ryan had spent many hours in this place over the past two months, but that was nothing compared to the time Biery had spent here.
On the monitor in front of Ryan was a screen full of numbers and dashes and other characters.
Gavin said, “First, you’ve got to understand one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“This guy, if Center is a guy, is good. He’s a first-rate black-hat hacker.” Biery shook his head in amazement. “The code obfuscation is like nothing I’ve ever seen.
“He’s using a totally new species of malware, something I couldn’t find without a long, exhaustive manual search of the machine code.”
Jack nodded. He motioned to a string of numbers on the monitor. “So, is this the virus?”
“A portion of it. A virus has two stages to it. The delivery method and the payload. The payload is still hidden on the drive. It’s a RAT, a remote-access tool. It’s some sort of a peer-to-peer protocol, but I haven’t been able to ferret it out yet. It’s that well hidden inside another application. What you are looking at right here is a portion of the delivery method. Center removed most of it after he got in, but he missed this little string.”
“Why was it removed?”
“He’s covering his tracks. A good hacker—like me, for instance—always goes behind himself to clean up. Think about a thief breaking into a house. Once he makes entry through a window, the first thing he does is close the window behind him so no one knows anybody is inside. He did not need the delivery system any longer once he was inside the computer, so he erased it.”
“Except he did not erase it all.”
“Exactly. And that is important.”
“Why?”
“Because this is a digital fingerprint. This could be something in his own malware that he does not know about, doesn’t know he’s leaving behind.”
Jack understood. “You mean he might leave it on other machines, so if you see this again, then you will know that Center is involved.”
“Yes. You would know that this extremely rare malware was involved, and the attacker, just like Center, did not clean this one part off the machine. You can infer, I think, that it could be the same guy.”
“Any idea how he managed to get his virus on Kartal’s computer?”
“For a guy with skills like Center’s, it would have been child’s play. The tough part about installing a virus is the social engineering—that is, getting human beings to do what you want them to do. Click a program, go to a website, give up your password, plug in a USB drive, stuff like that. Center and the Libyan knew one another, they had communication between one another, and, from the e-mails, it’s clear the Libyan did not suspect Center was spying on his machine, operating his webcam, going through back doors in the software to install files and delete the footprints he left. He had Kartal hook, line, and sinker.”
“Very cool,” said Jack. The world of computer hacking was arcane to him, but he recognized that in many respects, espionage was espionage, and many of the principles were similar.
Gavin sighed now. “I’m not finished looking through this drive. It might take another month or more. For now all we really have is an electronic fingerprint that we can tie to Center if we see it again. It’s not much, but it’s something.”
Jack said, “I need to have a meeting with Gerry and the other operators and let them know your findings. Do you want me to do it alone so you can go home and get some sleep?”
Gavin shook his head. “No. I’ll be okay. I want to be there.”
TEN
Todd Wicks had never done anything like this, but, then again, Todd Wicks had never been to Shanghai.
He was here in town for the Shanghai Hi-Tech Expo, and though this wasn’t his first international trade show, this was, without question, the first time he’d met a beautiful girl in the lobby bar of his hotel who made it abundantly clear that she wanted him to come up to her room.
She was a prostitute. Todd wasn’t the worldliest guy around, but he managed to figure this out pretty quickly. Her name was Bao, and this meant, she told him in her heavy but alluring accent, “precious treasure.” She was gorgeous, maybe twenty-three years old, with long, straight black hair the color and luster of Shanxi black granite and a tight red dress that was at once both glamorous and sexy. Her body was long and lean; when he first saw her, he thought she might be a movie star or a dancer, but when he caught her eye, she lifted her glass of chardonnay off the marble bar with delicate fingers and floated over to him with a gentle but confident smile.
It was at this point Todd realized she was a “working girl,” and she was working.
He asked her if he could buy her a drink, and the bartender refilled her wineglass.
Again, Todd Wicks did not do things like this, but she was so far beyond stunning that, he told himself, he would have to make an exception, just this once.
Before Shanghai, Todd was a nice guy with a nice life. At thirty-four years old, he was the Virginia/Maryland/D.C. territory sales manager for Advantage Technology Solutions LLC, a California-based IT company. He owned a nice-sized home in Richmond’s desirable West End, where he was dad to two good-looking children and husband to a wife smarter, better looking, and more successful in her field, pharmaceutical sales, than he was in his.
He had it all, he bore no complaints, and he had no enemies.
Not until that night.
Later, when he thought back on the even
ing, he blamed the vodka tonics he had been drinking since dinner with colleagues, and he blamed a slight light-headedness from cold medicine he had been taking since coming down with a sinus infection on the twenty-hour flight from Dulles.
And he blamed the damn girl. Bao, the precious treasure who fucked up his life.
—
Just before midnight Todd and Bao stepped out of the elevator on the eleventh floor of the Sheraton Shanghai Hongkou Hotel. They were arm in arm, Todd reeling a bit from drink and his heart pounding with excitement. As they walked to the end of the hallway, Todd felt neither guilt nor remorse for what he was about to do, only some concern about how he was going to hide the ATM withdrawal of 3,500 Chinese yuan—more than $500—from his wife. But he told himself he’d worry about that in the morning.
Now was not the time to stress.
Her suite was the same as his, a king-size bed in a room off a sitting area with a sofa and a large-screen TV, but hers was illuminated with candles and scented with incense. They sat on the sofa and she offered him another drink from the bar, but now he was worried about his ability to perform while intoxicated, so he declined.
The small talk reeled Todd Wicks in every bit as much as the young woman’s beauty. A story about her childhood was disarming; her questions about him and where he grew up, about his brothers and sisters, and her asking him about whatever sport it was that he played that kept him in such peak physical condition—all served to further mesmerize a man who was already more than willing to throw caution to the wind.
He loved her voice; it was small and halting but intelligent and confident. He wanted to ask her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like this, but it didn’t seem to fit. This was a nice place, and his lowered inhibitions made it hard for Todd to see anything wrong with what was going on. He couldn’t see anything, for that matter, past her sparkling eyes and her plunging neckline.
She leaned forward to kiss him. He hadn’t even handed over the 3,500 yuan, but he had the strong impression that she wasn’t thinking about the money right now.
Todd knew he was a catch, surely ten times better than any other john she’d been with. Bao was into him, falling as hard as he, Todd had no doubt in his mind.
He kissed her deeply, put his hands on either side of her little face, and held her for more.
In minutes they slid off the couch onto the floor, and in minutes more her dress and heels were still there on the floor of the sitting room, but the two of them had moved to the bedroom. She lay on the bed; he stood naked above her.
He knelt down, his moist hands slid up the outsides of her legs, made their way to her underwear, and he tugged on them slightly. She was compliant, and he saw it as more evidence of her lust matching his. She lifted up to allow him to remove her silk panties from her narrow hips.
Her stomach was flat and toned, her alabaster skin radiant in the soft candlelight of the room.
Though Todd was on his knees he felt them shake under him. He rose slowly and unsteadily, and then he lay down on the bed.
In moments they were one. He was on top of her, he was seven thousand miles from home, and no one would ever know.
He moved slowly at first, but only for an instant, and then he moved faster and faster. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto her clenched face, her eyes tight with what he took as ecstasy.
He picked up the pace even more, and soon his eyes locked on her beautiful face as her head rolled from side to side in orgasm.
Yes, this was a transaction to her, it was her job, but he felt her feel him, and he could tell with absolute certainty that her orgasm was real and her flushed skin was hot from a feeling inside her unlike the other men that she’d been with in the past.
She was awash with emotion just the same as he.
He kept up his movements for a short time more, but in truth his stamina was not what he had hoped, and he came quickly.
As he gasped and panted on top of her, their bodies now still except for the movement of his lungs and the pounding of her heart, her eyes opened slowly.
He gazed deeply into them; golden sparkles flickered in the candlelight.
Just as he was about to tell her that she was perfect, her eyes blinked and then refocused on a point over his right shoulder.
Todd smiled, turned his head slowly to follow her gaze.
Standing at the edge of the bed, looming over Todd’s naked body, was a severe-looking middle-aged Chinese woman in a matte gray pantsuit. In a voice like a knife being sharpened on a whetstone she said, “Are you quite finished, Mr. Wicks?”
“What the fuck?”
As he leapt off the girl and spun from the bed, Todd saw other men and women in the suite. There had to have been half a dozen strangers who had somehow slipped in while Todd was lost in the throes of ecstasy.
He fell on the floor, naked, and he scrambled on his hands and knees, looking for his pants.
His clothes were gone.
—
Ten minutes later Todd Wicks was still naked, though the woman in the gray pantsuit had brought him a towel from the bathroom. He sat on the edge of the bed with the towel pinched around his waist; he had to hold it tight because it was not large enough to cover him properly. The overhead lights were on and the candles had been blown out, and it was as if all the strangers around him had forgotten him. He sat there seminude as men and women in black and gray suits and raincoats milled about in the suite.
He had not seen Bao since she’d been hustled out the door in a robe, seconds after the intrusion.
On the fifty-two-inch flat-screen TV in the sitting area, well within Todd’s view at the edge of the bed, a pair of men watched the playback of a recording they had obviously made from a surveillance camera. Todd glanced up at it when they turned it on, and he saw himself sitting on the sofa, making nervous small talk with Bao. They advanced the recording a few minutes and the angle changed; a second camera had apparently been secreted in the bedroom high in the corner by the bed.
Todd watched himself take his clothes off, stand there naked and hard, and then kneel down between Bao’s legs.
The men advanced the recording again. Todd grimaced as his very naked and white backside began gyrating at cartoonish speed.
“Jesus,” he muttered. He turned away. Watching this in a room full of men and women, a room full of strangers, was killing him. He wouldn’t have had the stomach to watch himself having sex even if he was alone. His heart felt like it had been tied in a knot and the muscles in his lower back had cinched tight at the midline of his spine.
Todd felt like he was about to puke.
One of the two men standing at the television turned to him. He was older than Todd, maybe forty-five, and he had sad hangdog eyes and narrow shoulders. He took off his raincoat as he walked closer, hung it over his forearm, and he pulled a chair from the desk up to the edge of the bed before sitting down directly in front of Wicks.
The sad eyes stayed locked on Todd as the man’s right hand came out and patted him on the shoulder gently. “I am sorry about all this, Mr. Wicks. This is very intrusive of us. I can’t imagine how you must feel.”
Todd looked down at the floor.
The man’s English was good; he spoke with British English inflections slightly clipped in the Asian style.
“I am Wu Fan Jun, detective with the Shanghai Municipal Police.”
Todd kept his eyes lowered to the floor, the embarrassment and humiliation unbearable. “For the love of God, can I please put my pants back on?”
“I’m sorry, we have to log them into evidence. We will have something brought down from your room: 1844, is it?”
Wicks nodded.
To his right in the sitting room, the fifty-two-inch plasma kept going. Todd glanced at it and saw himself from another angle.
It was no more flattering than the previous one had been.
What the hell? Did these guys edit this in real time?
Todd heard the sounds of his own grunting and groaning.
“Can they turn that off? Please?”
Wu clapped his hands as if he himself had forgotten, then called out in Mandarin across the suite. Quickly a man rushed to the television and fiddled with the remote for several seconds.
Finally, mercifully, the screen went blank and Todd’s own moans of lust left the otherwise silent room.
Wu said, “There we are. Okay. I don’t need to tell you, sir, that we have a delicate situation here.”
Todd just nodded, eyes on the floor.
“We have been investigating certain . . . untoward activities here in the hotel for some time. Prostitution is not legal in China, as it is unhealthy toward women.”
Todd said nothing.
“Do you have a family?”
Wicks started to say “No,” a reflexive response to keep his family out of this, but he stopped himself. I have fucking pictures of me and Sherry and the kids in my wallet, all over my fucking laptop. He knew he could not deny they existed.
He nodded. “A wife and two kids.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“One of each.”
“A lucky man. I myself have a wife and one son.”
Todd looked up at Wu now, into the hangdog eyes. “What’s going to happen, sir?”
“Mr. Wicks, I am sorry about the situation you find yourself in, but I did not put you here. You provide us with evidence that we need in our case against the hotel. Their promotion of prostitution is a cause of great concern here in the city. Just imagine if it was your young daughter who had turned to a life of—”
“I’m really, really sorry. I don’t ever do this sort of thing. I have no idea what came over me.”
“I see that you are not a bad man. If it were my decision to make, we would just record this as unfortunate, a tourist who got caught up in something unpleasant, and leave it at that. But . . . you must understand, I will have to arrest you and charge you with engaging a prostitute.” Wu smiled. “How can I charge the hotel and the woman if I have no one else, no one to provide the third corner of the triangle that is this sad, sad crime?”