Since these relate to classified fighter-jet designs they will be of particular interest to FatPanda’s superiors in Beijing. For the White Dragon group are not, as some have thought them, merely a gratuitously destructive team of hackers and anarchists. They are an elite cyber-warfare unit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, engaged in targeted attacks on foreign corporations, military intelligence systems and infrastructure. The anonymous-looking building on Datong Road has been fitted out with banks of powerful computer servers and high-speed fibre-optic lines, all of them cooled by precision air-conditioning systems. FatPanda, the team’s leader, is Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei, and it was he who chose the crew’s title. A moon-white dragon, according to Chinese symbolism, embodies a ferocious supernatural power. It is an omen of death. A warning.
Ignoring the crowds of home-going workers and the clammy heat, FatPanda walks unhurriedly through the evening haze of the Pudong district, gazing around him with admiration at the city’s trophy skyscrapers. At the soaring glass column of the Shanghai Tower, the silver-blue sliver of the World Financial Centre, and the vast, pagoda-like Jin Mao Tower. That things are rather less spectacular at street level, where beggars rummage through garbage-bins, is not of concern to FatPanda.
He is, in many ways, a clever and even brilliant man. He is certainly a lethal cyber-warrior. But success has led FatPanda to make a cardinal strategic error: he has underestimated his enemy. While he and his crew have been rummaging through the intellectual property of foreign corporations, diverting terabytes of secret data to Beijing, the world’s intelligence agencies and private security firms have not been idle. Their analysts have been amassing their own data: identifying Internet protocol addresses, reverse-engineering the White Dragon crew’s malware, and following their actions keystroke by keystroke.
The information they’ve acquired, and the identities of FatPanda and his team, have been passed up the line. As yet, no Western or Russian administration has risked confrontation with Beijing by directly accusing the People’s Liberation Army of state-sponsored data-theft; the diplomatic fallout would be too damaging. But others have been less concerned with such sensitivities. The predations of White Dragon have cost their victims billions of dollars over the years, and a group of individuals, collectively more powerful than any government, has decided that it is time to act.
A fortnight ago, at a meeting of the Twelve at a private seafront estate near Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei was the subject of a vote. All of the fish placed in the velvet drawstring bag were red.
Villanelle arrived in Shanghai a week ago.
FatPanda proceeds through the crowds and the diesel fumes of Pudong towards the Dongchang Road ferry terminal. He has been trained in the techniques of counter-surveillance, but it has been some years since he practised them with any real assiduity. He is on his own turf, and his enemies are continents away, little more than flickering usernames behind transparent passwords. That his actions could have deadly consequences has never seriously occurred to him.
Perhaps this is why, as he steps onto the ferry, he takes no notice of the young man in the business suit, just metres behind him, who has tailed him from his office, and who speaks briefly into his phone before vanishing into the hurrying throng on Dongchang Road. Or perhaps it’s just that Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei’s mind is elsewhere. For this prince of cyber-spies has a secret of his own, of which his colleagues know nothing. A secret which, as the ferry noses into the polluted currents of the Huangpu river, charges him with a dark thrill of anticipation.
He looks ahead of him, seeing and not seeing the illuminated panorama of the Bund, the kilometre-long waterfront on which stand the landmark edifices of old Shanghai. His gaze traverses the former banks and trading houses without interest. These monuments to colonial power are now luxury hotels, restaurants and clubs, the playground of rich tourists and the financial elite. His own destination lies beyond this gilded facade.
As he leaves the ferry at the South Bund terminal FatPanda performs a cursory sweep of his surroundings, but once again fails to register the operative reporting his progress, this time a young woman in the uniform of a hotel employee. Fifteen minutes later, he has left the Bund behind him, and is hurrying through the narrow, intersecting alleyways of the Old City. This district, teeming with shoppers and tourists, fragrant with moped exhaust and the fatty tang of street-food, is a far cry from the monumental splendour of the Bund. The pinched lanes are hung with laundry and loops of electrical cable, stalls attended by squatting women are piled high with rain-damp produce, tiny shops behind bamboo-pole awnings sell fake antiques and retro-styled girly calendars. As FatPanda turns a corner a pimp on a scooter gestures towards a dimly lit interior in which rows of young prostitutes wait and whisper.
His pace urgent now, his heart pounding, FatPanda hurries past these temptations. His destination is a three-storey corner building on Dangfeng Road. At the entrance, he keys in a four-figure code. The door opens to reveal a middle-aged woman behind a reception desk. Something in the fixity of her smile suggests extensive maxillo-facial surgery.
“Mr. Leung,” she says brightly, consulting her laptop. “Please, go right on up.” He knows that she knows that Leung is not his name, but in the house on Dangfeng Road, a certain etiquette prevails.
The first floor is given over to more or less conventional sexual pleasures. As FatPanda climbs the stairs he is afforded a glimpse, through a briefly opening door, of a pink-lit room and a girl in a baby-doll nightie.
The second floor is altogether more specialist. FatPanda is met by an unsmiling young woman dressed in a crisp green and white skirted uniform. She wears a starched cap pinned to her
