In the end, President of the United States Jack Ryan did not have time to decide whether or not it was necessary to shut down all of the UAVs in the U.S. military and intelligence. As the secretary of defense’s black Suburban pulled through the White House gates one hour after the crash of the Reaper in Pakistan, a massive Global Hawk drone, the largest unmanned vehicle in the U.S. inventory, lost contact with its flight crew while flying at sixty thousand feet off the coast of Ethiopia.
It was another hijacking — this became clear as the phantom pilot disengaged the autopilot and began making gentle adjustments to the pitch and roll of the aircraft, as if testing out his control of the big machine.
The men and women watching the feed recognized quickly that either the phantom pilot of this incident was not as experienced as the one who expertly operated the Reaper over eastern Afghanistan, or else it was the same pilot, but his familiarity with this larger and more complex airframe was not as good. For whichever reason, within moments of the hijacking the Global Hawk began to lose control. Systems were shut off incorrectly and restarted out of sequence, and any chance to right the aircraft was lost while it was still several miles in the air.
It crashed in the Gulf of Aden like a piano falling from the sky.
This was seen, by virtually everyone cleared to know about it at all, as a message from the hackers. Your entire unmanned fleet is compromised. Continue to operate your drones at your peril.
TWENTY-SEVEN
CIA officer Adam Yao was dressed in a black baseball cap, a white T-shirt, and dirty blue jeans. He looked like most every other male his age in Mong Kok, and he moved through the street crowds like a man who lived here in the lower-income neighborhood, not like he lived in Soho Central, one of the ritziest parts of Hong Kong. He was playing the role of a local merchant coming to get the mail for his shop, like any one of hundreds of other men in and out of the Kwong Wa Street post office.
Of course he had no shop, and he had no address in Mong Kok, which also meant he had no mail at Kwong Wa. In truth he was there to pick the lock of Zha Shu Hai’s P.O. box and to get a look at the young man’s mail.
The post office was crowded; it was shoulder to shoulder coming through the door. Adam elected to arrive just before noon, during the busiest part of the day here in always congested Mong Kok, hoping to use the chaos to his advantage.
Adam had always operated in the field with a simple credo: “Sell it.” Whatever he was doing, whether he was playing the part of a homeless person or a high-flying young trader on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Adam embraced his role totally. It allowed him to get into and out of buildings without proper credentials, to walk right past Triad gunmen without them giving him a second glance, and it meant secretaries in line for noodles and tea on their lunch break might well chat about work within earshot of Adam without knowing, allowing him to learn more about a company and its secrets during lunch hour than he would by breaking into the company over the weekend and rummaging through file cabinets.
Adam was an actor, a con man, a spy.
And he was selling it now. He had a set of lock picks in his hand, and he pushed into the post office, walked directly up to Zha Shu Hai’s P.O. box, and knelt down. With men and women within inches of him on both sides, no one paid an instant’s attention to him.
Yao picked the lock in under ten seconds. He slipped his hand inside and found two pieces of mail, one a business envelope and the other a small package containing a Bubble-Wrapped item. He pulled both pieces of mail out, closed the door to the box, and then pulled out the pick holding the tumblers up, which instantly relocked the door.
He was out in the street a minute later, and he did a quick surveillance detection run to make sure he had not been followed from the post office. Once satisfied he was in the clear, he descended into the MTR underground station and headed back to his office on Hong Kong Island.
Soon, he was back at his desk dressed in his suit and tie, and had placed the small package and the envelope in the ice tray portion of a small refrigerator/freezer he kept near his desk. After letting them chill for an hour, he reached into the freezer and removed the envelope, and opened it with a sharp knife. The sealant had frozen solid, and this allowed the knife to cut through it without tearing the paper, and it would also make it easy to reseal the envelope once it had thawed out.
When he had it opened, Adam read the address on the outside. It had been sent from mainland China, from a town in Shanxi Province that Yao did not recognize. The address was handwritten not to Zha Shu Hai, but to the P.O. box. The return address was a woman’s name; Yao wrote it down on a pad on his blotter, and then he reached inside the envelope.
He was somewhat surprised to find a second envelope inside the first one. This envelope had no writing on it at all. He cut it open in the same manner as the first, and inside found a letter handwritten in Mandarin by a shaky hand. Adam read it quickly, and by the third paragraph he understood what it was.
The author of the letter was Zha’s grandmother. From her note he could tell she was in the United States, and she had posted this letter to a relative in Shanxi Province so as not to tip off the U.S. Marshals Service, which she knew was hunting her grandson.
The relative from Shanxi had forwarded this on to the P.O. box without adding any note of his or her own.
The grandmother talked about life in northern California and a recent surgery and other members of the family and some old neighbors. She closed with an offer to help Zha with money or to put him in contact with other family members who, she said, had not heard from him since he’d arrived in China a year earlier.
It was a typical letter from a grandmother, Adam saw, and it told him nothing other than a little old Chinese lady in the States was likely involved with aiding and abetting a fugitive.
He put the envelope and the letter aside, and he reached back into the freezer for the package. It was small, not larger than a paperback book, and he quickly opened it before the sealant began to thaw. Once it was open, he checked the mailing address. Again, it was sent just to the P.O. box without a name, but the return address was an address in Marseille, France.
Curious, Adam reached inside and pulled out a small Bubble-Wrapped disk roughly the size of a silver dollar. It had pins coming out of the sides as though it attached to a computer motherboard or some other electronic device.
Along with the item was a several-page data sheet explaining that the device was a low-power superheterodyne receiver. The paper went on to explain that the device was used in keyless entry systems, garage door openers, remote security alarms, medical devices, and many other devices that receive external radio frequency transmissions as commands to perform mechanical functions.
Adam had no idea what Zha would want with the device. He turned to the last of the pages and saw that it was a chain of correspondence between two e-mail addresses.
Both parties wrote in English; the man in Marseille was clearly an employee of the technology company that manufactured the device. He was corresponding in the e-mails to someone named FastByte22.
Adam read it again. “FastByte Twenty-two. Is that Zha?”
The e-mails were concise. It seemed FastByte22 had made contact with this employee on the Internet and asked him to sell him a sample of the superheterodyne receiver because the company would not export it to Hong Kong. The two then negotiated payment in Bitcoin, an untraceable online currency that Adam knew was used for computer hackers to barter services and for criminals to buy and sell illicit goods on the Internet.
The e-mails went back a number of weeks, and they gave no indication as to what FastByte22 needed with a little gadget that could be used for anything from a garage door to a medical device.
Adam took out his camera and began photographing everything, from the letter from Zha’s grandmother to the high-tech receiver. He’d have to spend most of the rest of the day retracing his steps. From repackaging the envelope and the package to returning to Mong Kok to breaking back into the P.O. box to drop the two items back in before Zha had reason to suspect they had been taken.
It would be a long afternoon, and he did not yet know what he had accomplished today.
Other than finding a potential alias for Zha Shu Hai.
FastByte22.
