“A woman with some geek cred. Jonathan, you’ve been holding out on me,” Weaver said. Then he turned serious. “About, oh, fifteen years ago, the Chinese government got worried that Microsoft might have put backdoors into Windows that would give us or NSA covert access to their systems. The source code to Linux is free, so the Chinese decided that it would be safer to own their own operating system for critical functions. So they created their own variant called Red Flag Linux. The logo is a marching penguin carrying a Chinese flag. I’m not kidding.”
He double-clicked the icon. A Linux virtualization program launched, followed by the application. The program filled Weaver’s monitor with a blank window divided into quadrants, all black, and a small toolbar of icons across the top under a menu of Mandarin characters. “It looks like a pretty standard CAD program, I think,” Weaver observed. “Did you get any of their data files that we can load up?”
“No,” Jonathan admitted. “Or if we did, the NCS wouldn’t hand them over.”
“Always a possibility with that lot,” Weaver conceded. “I can build some test objects later to scope out the program functions. What I can tell you right now is that these”—Weaver pointed to a set of characters in the upper left quadrant—“are probably simple measurements fields: height, width, scale, and so on.” He clicked his mouse several times and rendered a cube with each quadrant displaying the object from a different vantage point in two dimensions. The upper left window showed the cube in three. “Yeah,” Weaver said. “Definitely units of measurement, all metric, probably — centimeters, meters, whatever. I’m not sure what this one is,” he said, pointing at a label of unreadable characters. “This measurement field doesn’t change when I change the object size. I’ll call APLAA and see if they’ll send me a translator to read the label. But if all else fails, I’ll just reverse-engineer the algorithm behind that field.”
“‘Just,’” Jonathan mused. “How long?”
“If APLAA will help, a few hours, maybe. But that’s unlikely,” Weaver said with certainty. “We are a bit of a drive from headquarters out here. They won’t be anxious to come this far out in the snow, even if the Agency does reimburse the mileage.”
“They’ll beg off,” Jonathan agreed. “So without their help?”
“I’ll have to tear the app apart. A week if I put in some long hours,” Weaver replied.
“Any way you can speed that up?” Kyra asked.
Weaver turned slightly in his chair and considered the woman. Kyra wasn’t sure she liked the look on his face. “I’ve been known to work a minor miracle with the proper incentive.”
“And what incentive are you looking for?” Kyra asked.
“You and me. Lunch in the Agency dining room,” Weaver said. He was perfectly serious.
“You’re bold,” Kyra answered. She kept her face neutral.
“Life gives nothing to the meek,” Weaver told her.
Jonathan raised an eyebrow and looked at the young woman. Kyra didn’t flinch, whether from case officer training or just personal experience with software engineers, Jonathan couldn’t tell. “What text editor do you use? Vi or Emacs?” she asked.
“Emacs,” Weaver said.
“Sorry, I’m a Vi girl. I don’t go out with Emacs guys.” Jonathan suspected that Kyra would have picked whichever option Weaver hadn’t.
“I’ll convert.”
“I can’t respect a coder who’s willing to abandon his preferred text editor for a woman he just met. That’s just bad form. Shows desperation.” Kyra paused for just the right effect. “I’m embarrassed for you now.”
“Hey, I’m not a Linux fanboy with bad hygiene,” Weaver said. “I know how to show a girl a good time.”
Kyra cocked her head and smiled, and Jonathan sensed Farm training was coming into play. Weaver was out of his league. Dating any woman was an exercise in codebreaking for men under normal circumstances. Chasing women trained in covert operations and espionage recruitment elevated the game to a new level, southern charm notwithstanding. “I’ll make you a deal,” she finally said. “You reverse-engineer that app and figure out what that number means for us in three days. Reconstruct it in C plus plus. If your interpretation of the algorithm is sufficiently elegant, I’ll let you take me to the ADR.”
“Objective-C would be prettier.”
“And cheating if you use the Cocoa framework. You do that and you only get to take me to Starbucks. I like a man who can write his own root class from scratch,” Kyra chided. Jonathan was completely lost in the jungle of jargon that the two were tossing around.
“Three days, eh?” Weaver scratched his stubble. “You’re on. Jon, you’ll have to excuse me. I have a deadline to meet.”
“You realize that I didn’t understand a word of that?” Jonathan asked the pair.
“Suffice it to say that your partner there will be enjoying a rack of lamb with me in the ADR a week from today.”
“You’re assuming that your code will be elegant enough to meet my standards,” Kyra said. Jonathan couldn’t tell whether she was teasing. “That’s a subjective measure and totally out of your control.”
“Let’s just say that I have a high opinion of my coding skills,” Weaver told her, smiling. “And I appreciate the challenge, no matter how this turns out.”
“I doubt your team chief will appreciate us monopolizing your time,” Jonathan said.
“Did you tell anyone here that you were coming?” Weaver asked.
“No,” Jonathan said.
“The word will get out. It always does. If anyone asks, I’m working with you in the interest of damage control.”
“Whatever makes you happy,” Jonathan said. “Good to see you, Garr.”
“Always my pleasure. I’ll call when I have something.”
“Good luck,” Kyra said with a wry smile.
“Luck is for people who lack skill,” Garr replied. He turned back to the monitor, and Kyra watched the cybersecurity analyst vanish in a moment into his own little world.
“In a hurry?” Drescher asked. Kyra’s manner was impatient.
“I’m on my way to the airport,” she said. “Pictures of a hundred dead bodies?”
“Much better,” Drescher said. He pressed a button and the Ops Center monitors blanked out the news channels and replaced them with single feed. “A few hundred Chinese tanks rolling for the coast. Pretty shot too. Low-orbit, great lighting, the overhead angle is almost straight down. Satellite imagery doesn’t get prettier than this.”
“Where are we looking?” Kyra asked.
“Nanjing, Guiyang Army Base,” Drescher replied. He held out a map of the Chinese coast with symbols marked on the page. “Eleven infantry divisions, eight special forces regiments, two armored divisions, one artillery division, and a pair of reserve units,” Drescher read off a paper prepared by his APLAA analyst. “Total manpower around three hundred thousand. No heat blooms in any navy ships along the coast, so all those tanks are just for show until they get their air bridge set up. That’s where the real action is.”
He handed over a set of photographs. “I don’t think they’re lining these up just to send us a message. Too many working bodies around the planes.” Some of the dark specks marking the ground crews in the pictures were standing by spaghetti hoses of jet fuel lines snaking up to the planes. “There’s activity at Shantou, Fuzhou, Zhongshan, Taihe, and Zeguo. But that’s not what’s interesting.” Drescher pushed another set of photos into her hands, then turned and put his finger down on a map of China taped to the wall behind his desk. “All of that other activity is along the southeastern coast, but those were taken over Chengdu.”
Kyra saw where his finger had landed on the map and her eyebrows went up. “You’re on your way to India that far west.”