His finger clicked one last time, and around them played the famous scene of the tank in People’s Square crushing the old Communist Party’s riot-control truck, the crowd of protesters’ initial looks of surprise and then their celebration as they realized that the military was on their side. He saw a few instinctively nodding their approval, reliving the moment when they had remade China into their vision.
“I have abused your time, so I will end my presentation with three questions. First, just as we acted then to meet the people’s true expectations of their nation’s leaders, we must ask, What do the people expect of us now? Second, what do you expect the Americans to do once they learn of our energy discovery? Third, and most important, is a simple question of the arc of history: If now is not the time, then when?
“You know the answers to these questions, and thus you know that you, the truly powerful, actually have no choice.”
Admiral Lin appeared at Wang’s shoulder and placed a hand on his back. Wang noticed that the commandos now surrounded them. Perhaps he had gone too far.
“Admiral, the Presidium thanks you for your views,” said Lin. “These men will see you out.”
As Wang walked down the hallway, wedged between the commandos, he replayed the presentation in his mind. He could find faults with his performance, but he was at peace.
At the elevator door, the commandos stood in silence. Wang wondered where they would take him next. Then he noticed that they were tensing up as the elevator lights numbered ever closer to their floor. The door opened and another armed phalanx emerged; these bodyguards were Caucasian in ethnicity and wearing civilian suits, but they were clearly military. While the two groups eyed each other warily, Wang watched how the elderly man in the middle didn’t bother even to look up from the outdated computer tablet he tapped away on. Red diamonds and purple hearts reflected in his traditional eyeglasses. He was surprisingly fit for his age, but supposedly the old Russian spy was addicted to memory-improving games, an effort to stave off what Directorate intelligence suspected was dementia. A strong body still, but not the mind.
So, Wang realized, this had not been a strategy session but an audition. The Presidium had already made its choice.
Part 2
Attack your enemy where he is unprepared,
appear where you are not expected.
Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, Washington, DC
Armando Chavez exhaled when he made the initial slice. As his mentor Dr. Jimenez had explained so long ago, the key to precision was to move slow but steady, advancing the blade at a consistent pace. The cut complete, Chavez reached down, picked up the withered rose branch, and placed it into the faded canvas bag slung over his shoulder.
Landscaping was a step down for someone with an MD from Universidad Central de Venezuela. But it was the only kind of work Armando Chavez had been able to get since he’d arrived as a refugee from the chaos in his homeland seven years ago. He could get angry or he could focus on achieving the little perfections that made life satisfying.
As he trimmed the flowers at the base of the sign, he glanced at the etching in the black marble: Defense Intelligence Agency. He wasn’t sure what the DIA did. Hadid, his supervisor, said it was something like the CIA, but for the U.S. military. It didn’t matter. The landscaping crew was almost done here. After the break, Hadid said they would head over to trim the hedges behind the base’s elder-care center.
Because of security, the landscapers were not allowed inside the building. When break time came, the others gathered in the shade, but Chavez walked over to sit by the small decorative pond beside the entrance doors.
He flipped open the tablet he kept in his pocket to see if he had any messages. The screen projected a 3-D packet from his cousin back in Caracas. More pictures of his granddaughter. Such lovely eyes.
Armando’s smile went unnoticed by Allison Swigg as she cut across the grassy field by the pond in her rush from the parking lot. The imagery analyst had gotten stuck in the traffic on I-295 on her way back from a networking lunch out at Tysons Corner. And now she was late for the staff meeting.
Neither of them noticed the other, but as she passed the landscaper, his tablet recognized the RFID chips embedded in Swigg’s security badge. A localized wireless network formed for exactly 0.03 seconds. In that instant, the malware hidden in the video packet from Caracas made its jump.
As Chavez finished the iced tea his wife had made for him the previous night, Swigg approached the security desk manned by a guard in a black bullet-resistant nylon jumpsuit. A compact HK G48 assault rifle hung from the glossy gray ceramic vest that protected his chest. The only insignia on his uniform was the eagle-silhouette logo of the security company that guarded the DIA headquarters. No Personal Devices Allowed read the sign suspended above a row of silver turnstiles.
“Hey, Steve,” said Allison. “How’s the little one?”
“Pretty good,” the guard replied with a smile. “She slept through the night.”
She placed her iTab bracelet in a metallic lock box and pulled out the key. But Swigg’s badge stayed with her. As she walked toward the gate, the software in her badge automatically communicated her security clearance to the machine via a radio signal. And at the same moment of network linkage, the malware packet jumped again in less time than it would take to read the engraving on the entrance walclass="underline" Committed to excellence in defense of the nation.
The idea of using covert radio signals to ride malware into a network unconnected to the wider Internet had actually been pioneered by the NSA, one of the DIA’s sister agencies. But like all virtual weapons, once it was deployed in the open cyberworld, it offered inspiration for anyone, including one’s enemies.
The turnstile gate lifted. Swigg rushed down the hall, too far behind schedule to make her ritual stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts stand just inside the spy agency’s entrance. By the time she had passed the old Soviet SS-20 ballistic missile that stood mounted in the lobby like a Cold War totem pole, the malware packet had jumped from the gate onto another security guard’s viz glasses. When the guard walked his rounds, the packet jumped into the environmental controls that cooled a closet full of network servers supporting aerial surveillance operations over Pakistan. After that, it went to an unmanned-aircraft research and development team’s systems. And bit by bit, the malware worked its way into the various subnetworks that linked via the Defense Department’s SIPRNet classified network.
The initial penetrations didn’t raise any alarms among the automated computer network defenses, always on the lookout for anomalies. At each stop, all the packet did was link with what appeared to the defenses as nonexecutables, harmless inert files, which they were, until the malware rearranged them into something new. Each of the systems had been air-gapped, isolated from the Internet to prevent hackers from infiltrating them. The problem with high walls, though, was that someone could use an unsuspecting gardener to tunnel underneath them.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
A thin teenage girl stood behind a workstation, faintly glowing metallic smart-rings on all her fingers, one worn above each joint. Her expression was blank, her eyes hidden behind a matte-black visor. Rows of similar workstations lined the converted lecture hall. Behind each stood a young engineering student, every one a member of the 234th Information Brigade — Jiao Tong, a subunit of the Third Army Cyber-Militia.
On the arena floor, two Directorate officers watched the workers. From their vantage point, the darkened arena seemed to be lit by hundreds of fireflies as the students’ hands wove faint neon-green tracks through the air.