Threat Vector

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“Couple of guys from work, babe. I’ll talk to them inside.”

“Can I meet them?”

“No,” he said, a little more forcefully than he would have liked, but he was worrying about what was going to happen.

Deny, deny, deny, he told himself. You don’t know anything about a virus.

He rushed off the deck and down to the driveway, catching Gavin and the Hispanic-looking man before they made it into the backyard. Play cool, he told himself over and over. He smiled widely. “Gavin? Hey, buddy. How’s it going?”

Gavin Biery did not return the smile. The Hispanic guy stood stone-faced next to him. “Can we go inside and talk for a minute?”

“Sure.” Good. Get them out of the damn driveway and into the house where Sherry can’t hear.

A minute later they were in Wicks’s living room. All three men remained standing. Todd asked his guests to sit down, but neither man complied, so Todd just stood there nervously, looking hot and uncomfortable while telling himself over and over to be cool.

“What’s this about?” he asked, and he thought he hit the right tone.

Biery said, “You know what this is about. We found the virus on the drive.”

“The what?”

“‘The what?’ That’s the best you can do? C’mon, Todd. I remember how you just about shit your pants when I introduced you to Jack Ryan. What must have been going on in your mind at that moment?”

Chavez stared Wicks down.

“Who are you?” Wicks asked.

The Hispanic man did not answer.

Wicks looked at Biery. “Gavin, who the hell is—”

Biery said, “I know the hard drive was infected with malware. In the master boot record.”

“What are you talking—”

Chavez spoke now: “Best you don’t lie. We can see right through you. And if you lie, I will hurt you.”

Wicks’s face went even paler, and his hands began to shake. He said something, but his voice cracked, and Ding and Gavin looked at each other. Chavez said, “Speak up!”

“I didn’t know what was on there.”

“How did you know anything was on there?” asked Chavez.

“It was the… the Chinese. Chinese intelligence.”

Gavin asked, “They gave you the drive?”

“Yes.” Todd started to cry.

The Hispanic man rolled his eyes. “Are you fucking kidding?”

Between sobs, Wicks asked, “Can we please sit down?”

* * *

Over the next ten minutes Todd told the two men everything. The girl in Shanghai, the entourage of cops, the detective who said he could help Todd stay out of jail, the agent in the pizza parlor in Richmond, and the hard drive.

Chavez said, “So, you got taken by a dangle.”

“A what?” asked Wicks.

“It’s called a dangle. They dangled this girl, Bao, for you to go after, and then they caught you in a honey trap.”

“Yes. I guess that’s about the size of it.”

Chavez looked at Biery. The doughy computer geek looked like he wanted to kill Todd Wicks. The Hendley/Campus network was Gavin Biery’s great love, and this guy had slipped through the defenses and brought it down. Ding wondered if he would have to pull Gavin off the younger, fitter Wicks, who right now did not look like he would be able to defend himself from a house cat, much less a rage-filled computer geek.

“What are you going to do to me?” Wicks asked.

Chavez looked to the broken man. “Don’t ever say another word about this to anyone as long as you live. I doubt the Chinese will contact you again, but if they do, it might just be to kill you, so you might want to think about grabbing the family and running like hell.”

“Kill me?”

Ding nodded. “You saw what happened in Georgetown?”

Wicks’s eyes widened. “Yeah?”

“Same guys that you’ve been working for, Todd. What happened in Georgetown is just an example of how they go about tying up loose ends. Might want to keep that in mind.”

“Oh my God.”

Chavez looked out the window at Wicks’s wife. She was pushing the children on the swings and looking back into the kitchen window, no doubt wondering who the two men were that her husband did not want her to meet. Chavez gave her a nod and then turned around to Todd Wicks. “You don’t deserve her, Wicks. Maybe you want to spend the rest of your life trying to rectify that obvious fact.”

Chavez and Biery left through the garage door without another word.

SIXTY

Gavin Biery and Domingo Chavez arrived at Jack Ryan, Jr.’s apartment just after ten o’clock in the evening. Jack was still under suspension, but Gavin and Ding wanted to fill him in on the day’s events.

Chavez was surprised when Ryan said he did not want to talk in his house. Jack handed each man a Corona, then led them back downstairs to the parking lot, and then across the street to a golf course. The three of them sat in the dark at a picnic table and sipped beer along a fairway shrouded in mist.

After Biery told Ryan about the visit to Wicks’s house and the revelation that Chinese intelligence agents had a hand in putting the virus on the Hendley Associates computer network, Jack searched for some explanation. “Is there any way at all that these guys weren’t working for the MSS? Could they have been foot soldiers for Tong that slipped into mainland China to compromise this computer guy?”

Ding shook his head. “This happened in Shanghai. Center couldn’t bug a hotel room, bring a big crew of cops, uniformed and plain-clothed, and pull this off without the knowledge of the MSS. Hotels in China, especially luxury and business-class hotels, are all ordered by law to do the bidding of the MSS. They are bugged, surveilled, staffed with agents working for state security. It just is not possible this was anything other than an MSS operation.”

“But the virus is Zha’s RAT. The same one on the Istanbul Drive. The same one on the UAV hack. The only explanation is that Zha and Tong were working for China in Hong Kong when they were under the protection of the Triads.”

Chavez nodded. “And this also means that the Chinese government knows about Hendley Associates. Just think about what’s on our network that they infiltrated. Names and home addresses of our employees, data that we’ve pulled from CIA and NSA and ODNI chatter. Obvious linkages to anyone with half a brain that we are an off- the-books spy shop.”

Jack said, “The good news, on the other hand, is what is not on the network.”

“Explain,” said Chavez.

“We don’t record our activities. There’s nothing on there that talks about any of the hits we’ve done, the operations we’ve been engaged in. Yes, there is more than enough there to target us or to prove we’re getting access to classified data, but nothing to tie us to any particular operation.”

Ding gulped his Corona and shivered. “Still, anybody in China picks up a phone and calls The Washington Post, and we’re toast.”