contractor in San Diego, and the manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles for the military and intelligence industries. Zha was tasked with testing secure and encrypted networks to see if the systems could be hacked into.
After two years of work, Zha reported back to General Atomics that such hacking was virtually impossible without specific knowledge of the networks, the communications gear that transmitted signals to the drones, and incredibly sophisticated equipment.
And then the young Chinese-American tried to make contact with the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., telling them that he would like to offer them his specific knowledge of all these things, and then help them build incredibly sophisticated equipment to help them exploit this knowledge.
Unfortunately for Zha, a routine polygraph required to maintain his clearance picked up strong indications of deception, and a search of his computer picked up the correspondence with the Chinese embassy. The young General Atomics penetration tester was arrested and sent to prison. As soon as Tong started the Ghost Ship, however, he used his resources to help the young man make his way out of the United States so he could join Tong in his operation in Hong Kong.
With Zha’s knowledge of computer code and penetrating secure networks, he developed the Ghost Ship’s powerful remote-access Trojan, the malware that allowed Center to steal data covertly, as well as see through the cameras and listen through the microphones of every machine it infected.
Zha’s virus was as insidious as it was brilliant. It began by performing a port scan, looking for computer security’s version of an unlocked window. If it found the exploitable port, it then began a series of common password attempts to make entry on the machine.
All this happened in the span of a few hundredths of a second. No one operating the computer at the time, unless they were watching the machine’s resources carefully, would notice anything amiss.
If the worm succeeded in getting into the machine’s subconscious, it then performed an ultra-high-speed reconnaissance, taking note of the applications installed and the quality of the processor and motherboard. Low- quality or older machines were rejected; the worm would instantly relay information back to the hacker that the node was not worth probing further, and then it would delete itself. High-end machines, on the other hand, were invaded further by the malware, the brain of the computer was taken over by the virus, and the message would go back to the hacker that another member of the robot army was reporting for duty.
Once the computer had been taken over by the Ghost Ship, a subroutine designed by FastByte22 himself would go into the system’s machine code and remove any vestige of the delivery system.
Or so Zha thought. In truth, his subroutine missed a single strip of code, and this is what Gavin Biery detected on the Istanbul Drive.
With this virus Zha had been the first to break into the CIA’s Intelink-TS network router for cable traffic, but on one of his maintenance forays into the source code, he realized he was not alone. He traced the other hacker, narrowing down the man’s identity by monitoring research done at open source bulletin boards and technical directories, discovering he was a well-known amateur hacker in the United States named Charlie Levy. And then Center’s controllers went to work trying to convince Levy to work for his organization so he could exploit the man’s knowledge.
That attempt had failed, so Tong then tried to exploit Levy’s knowledge by hacking into his machine.
That also failed. So Crane and his men got the information the old-fashioned way, by killing Charlie Levy and stealing it.
Tong knew Zha was cocky, and would not think DarkGod had anything in his virus that would improve on Zha’s own work.
Tong, on the other hand, appreciated how much could be learned by pooling intellectual resources of individual hackers, even hackers who did not give up their intellectual resources willingly.
Zha may not have believed that Levy had anything to add to his code, but Tong felt he had been forceful enough to make clear to the young man that he would be expected to give the data stolen from DarkGod his full attention.
TWENTY-THREE
Thirty-four-year-old Adam Yao sat behind the wheel of his twelve-year-old Mercedes C–Class sedan and wiped his face with a beach towel he kept on the passenger seat. Hong Kong was hot as hell this fall, even at seven-thirty in the morning, and Adam wasn’t running the air conditioner because he did not want his engine’s noise to draw attention to his surveillance.
He was close to his target location, too close, and he knew it. But he had to park close. He was dealing with the lay of the land, the bend in the road and the close proximity of the parking lot to the target.
He was pushing his luck parking here, but he had no choice.
Adam Yao was on his own.
When most of the sweat was off his brow he brought his Nikon camera back to his eye and zoomed in on the lobby door of the high-rise condominium tower across the street. The Tycoon Court, it was called. Despite the cheesy name, it was opulent inside. Adam knew the penthouse digs, located here in the lush Mid-Levels neighborhood of Hong Kong Island, must have cost an arm and a leg.
He used his lens to scan the lobby, searching for the target of his surveillance. He knew it was unlikely the man would be standing around in the lobby. Adam had been coming here for days and each morning was the same. At about seven-thirty a.m. the subject would shoot out of the penthouse elevator, walk purposefully across the marble floor of the lobby, and step outside and duck into an SUV in the middle of a three-vehicle motorcade.
And that was as far as Adam Yao had been able to track the man. The windows of the SUVs were tinted, and the subject was always alone, and Adam had not yet tried to tail the motorcade through the twisting narrow streets of the Mid-Levels.
Doing that alone would be nearly impossible.
Adam wished he had support from the leadership of his organization, just some resources and personnel he could call on in times like this to lend a hand. But Adam worked for CIA, and pretty much every CIA officer in Asia knew one thing about the organization: there was a breach. Langley denied it, but it was clear to the men and women on the sharp edge over here that the PRC was getting tipped off about CIA plans and initiatives, sources and methods.
Adam Yao needed some help with this surveillance operation, but he didn’t need it bad enough to risk compromise, because Adam Yao, unlike most every other CIA officer in China and HK, was working without a net. He was a CIA nonofficial cover officer, which meant he had no diplomatic protection.
He was a spy out in the cold.
Not that he wouldn’t mind something cold at the moment. He reached for his beach towel and wiped more sweat off his face.
A few days ago Yao had been alerted to the presence here at the Tycoon Court of a man from the mainland, a known manufacturer of counterfeit computer hard drives and microprocessors that had made their way into critical systems of U.S. military equipment. His name was Han, and he was director of a large state-owned tech factory in nearby Shenzhen. Han was in HK for some reason, and was getting picked up each morning by three white SUVs and driven off to an unknown location.
But even though this counterfeiter had managed to get his counterfeit devices into U.S. military equipment, to the CIA this was a commercial case, and commercial espionage was not something CIA put a lot of focus on over here.
Chicom cyberespionage and cyberwarfare were a big deal. Industrial computer crime was small potatoes.
But despite knowing good and well that Langley would show little interest in his initiative, Adam pushed ahead in this new investigation, for the simple reason that he very much wanted to know just who the hell the counterfeiter was meeting with on
Yao had been holding the camera to his eye for so long that the rubber eyecup over the viewfinder was filling
