that natural selection would work against the fools, especially their communications officer Emad Kartal, a man who did not follow his own security protocols.
The controller overseeing the cell in Istanbul had discovered that a group of Americans who worked for the company Hendley Associates was conducting surveillance on the Libyans. With Dr. Tong’s blessing the controller allowed the assassination of the entire five-man cell, all for the objective of planting a virus on the closed network of Hendley Associates so that the Ghost Ship could learn more about them. The plan had failed when the masked Hendley Associates gunman took the entire computer with him instead of doing what the controller had hoped, pulling media off the machine and returning to the States to place it on his own network.
Still, Tong’s controllers had already been working other avenues to learn about the true nature of the curious organization Hendley Associates.
Other criminal organizations hired by Center included Triad groups in Canada and the United States, as well as Russian
Soon Tong began active recruitment of more high-level espionage professionals to work as field assets. He found Valentin Kovalenko and decided he would be perfect for this task, used one of his Russian
As with many other spies, Center started Kovalenko out slowly, monitored his success and his ability to keep himself undetected, and then he began giving him more and more responsibility.
Tong also had another type of spy unwittingly under his command.
The converted spy.
These were turned employees in government agencies around the world, in businesses like telecommunications and finance, and in military contractor and law enforcement positions.
None of these co-opted members of the organization had any idea they were working on behalf of the Chinese government. Many of these assets felt the same as did Valentin Kovalenko, that they were conducting some sort of industrial espionage on behalf of a large and unscrupulous foreign technology concern. Others were convinced they were in the employ of organized crime.
Dr. K. K. Tong was in control of the entire operation, taking directives from the Chinese military and intelligence communities, and so directing his controllers, who then directed their field assets.
It helped, perhaps more than anything else, that Dr. K. K. Tong was a sociopath. He moved his humans across the earth much as he moved 1’s and 0’s across the information superhighway. He had no more regard for one than the other, though the failings of human beings caused him to look with more respect at the malicious code he and his hackers developed.
After two years of Ghost Ship activity, it became clear to Tong that his near-omnipotent control was not enough. Word was getting out about brilliant new viruses, worldwide networking of cybercrime, and successful penetrations of industry and government networks. To combat the spread of information, Tong told the PLA and MSS leadership that in order for his cyberoperations to have maximum effect, he would need additional kinetic assets, a unit of soldier-spies in America, not duped assets but men dedicated to the Communist Party of China and completely beholden to Center.
After argument, deliberation, and finally the involvement of senior military officials, the computer operations man Tong was given command authority over a team of PLA special-operations officers. Everything Tong did worked, they reasoned. His two years of running proxy assets around the world had greatly empowered the PLA and strengthened the Chinese cause. Why not allow him a small unit of additional deniable forces?
Crane and his team, eight men in all, came from Divine Sword, a special-operations unit of the Beijing Military Region. They were highly trained in reconnaissance, counterterrorism, and direct action. The team sent to the United States to follow the instructions of Center was given additional vetting for bravery, pure ideological thought, and intelligence.
They were infiltrated into Vancouver Triad crime for a few months before making their way south over America’s porous border with Canada. Here they lived in safe houses rented or purchased by Ghost Ship front companies, and they had documentation, thanks to Center and his ability to generate resources of all types.
Crane and his cell, if captured or killed, would be explained away as a team of Triad gangsters from Vancouver, working for computer criminals somewhere in the world. Certainly not at the behest of the CPC.
As in the operation in Menlo Park and the operation in Las Vegas, Crane and his men performed wet operations, killing people who represented a threat to Center’s operations and stealing code and records necessary to further Ghost Ship activities.
Those few highly placed individuals in the PLA and the MSS who knew about Center and his Ghost Ship were pleased. The Chinese had their weapon, and their plausible deniability. They could steal secrets from American government, military, and industry, and they could prepare the battle space for any upcoming conflict. If Tong and his organization were ever discovered, well, he was an enemy of Beijing, working with the Triads — how could anyone make the claim that he and his people were working
It was a short walk from Tong’s office up a well-lit linoleum-floored hallway to a set of double doors, guarded on either side by hard local men with space-age-looking QCW-05 submachine guns hanging from their chests. The guards wore no uniforms; one wore a scuffed leather jacket and the other a blue polo shirt with the white collar turned up to his ears.
Dr. Tong did not address the men as he passed through the doorway, but this was nothing out of the ordinary. He never spoke to them. Tong did not make small talk with any of his underlings, much less the thirty or forty local Triads on and around the premises who had been tasked with protecting him and his operation.
A strange relationship, to be sure. A strange relationship that Tong himself did not care for, though he understood the strategic necessity of leaving his homeland to come to Hong Kong.
Through the double doors K. K. Tong walked down the middle of the open operations floor, passing dozens of men and women hard at work at their desks. Twice someone stood and bowed to Center and asked him for a moment of his time. Both times Dr. Tong just held up a hand as he passed, indicating he would get back with them momentarily.
Right now he was looking for someone specific.
He passed the banking and phishing department, the research and development department, the social media and engineering department, and made his way to the coders’ department.
This was where the men and women worked who did the actual computer network hacking.
At a workstation in the back corner of the room, next to a floor-to-ceiling window that, had it not been covered over with red velour drapes, would have given a southerly view over Kowloon, a young man with dramatically spiked hair sat in front of a bank of four monitors.
The young Chinese punk stood and bowed when Tong appeared behind him.
The older man said, “Kinetic operation complete. You should be receiving data shortly.”
“Zha?”
He quickly stood back up and turned around.
“Yes, sir?”
“I want a report on what you find. I don’t expect DarkGod’s code will reveal anything you can use to optimize your RAT before we attack DoD, but keep an open mind. He did well to get as far as he did in the CIA Intelink network with his limited resources.”
The punk rocker said, “Of course, sir. I will look at DarkGod’s code and report to you.”
Tong turned and headed back through the operations room without another word.
The young punk rocker’s name was Zha Shu Hai, but he was known in cyberspace as FastByte22.
Zha was born in China, but his parents immigrated to the United States when he was a child and he became a U.S. citizen. Like Tong, he was something of a child prodigy in the computer sciences, and also like Tong, he went to Caltech, graduating at age twenty. When Zha was twenty-one years old he obtained a U.S. government security clearance and began working in the research-and-development department of General Atomics, a high-tech defense
