“That’s why it’s interesting. Thought your partner might like to know.”
“Has Taiwan responded?” Kyra asked.
“Nothing significant. Increased air patrols, but they’re all staying inside Taiwanese airspace.” Drescher rested a hand on the photo stack. “No heat blooms in Taiwanese Navy ships in port. Tian has got Liang shell-shocked. The PLA storms Kinmen, Taiwan tries to start moving, and the PLA knocks out one of their best ships while it’s still in port. Liang’s probably too scared to make a move. He hasn’t got a skirt to hide behind until Lincoln and Washington show up.”
“Thanks,” Kyra said.
“Talk to you on the other side,” Drescher said with a slight bow.
“At least we got business class. Economy would have killed me,” Kyra said. Agency regulations allowed travelers to upgrade on flights over eight hours, which Kyra had hoped would give her a fighting chance to sleep.
“It won’t help,” Jonathan said. The woman sounded very satisfied with herself at getting approval for the trip, and had been from the moment she saw his surprise when they received the notice. He was still wondering why Cooke had approved the trip and quietly hoped that the chief of station at the other end wouldn’t just out them to the Chinese on arrival. He imagined that Carl Mitchell would be less than enthusiastic about taking responsibility for a pair of analysts, given current events. “China is thirteen hours ahead of us. Your body clock will be jet-lagged no matter how much sleep you get. You’d do better to stay awake for a while.”
“Pessimist,” she accused him.
“Realist. There is a difference,” Jonathan said. His eyes didn’t shift from the copy of the Economist on his tray table. “Optimists make poor analysts,” he said. “They aren’t critical enough.”
“That’s just morose.”
“Reading the PDB every day will do that to you,” Jonathan said.
“The president does that, and he still smiles.”
“A politician’s job depends on smiling. Mine doesn’t. It does depend on my being awake, even after fourteen hours on a plane. Yours too. So lay off the wine,” he advised her. “You don’t want to fight jet lag and a hangover at the same time.” The plane had only been in the air for half an hour and Kyra was already working on her second glass. Dinner was still a few hours off, so she was drinking on an empty stomach, and he knew that case officers favored bars and pubs as places to meet assets for reasons that had nothing to do with security. CIA’s clandestine service was still a boys’ club that ran on a machismo that made an inability, or unwillingness, to imbibe alcohol a fatal weakness among one’s peers. Mormons and Muslims got a pass, but the rest were expected to follow the unwritten rule, and Burke had no doubts that Stryker could match the men drink for drink.
“Why? The coffee is free,” she deadpanned.
“So is the turbulence.”
“Speaking from experience?” she asked.
“I don’t drink,” Jonathan said, his voice suddenly cold.
Alcoholics in the family tree? They weren’t nearly close enough for her to ask that question, and Kyra knew when to turn a conversation. “Sounds like you’ve traveled your share for work,” Kyra said. She didn’t refer to the Agency by name. Even on a Boeing 777, business class was cramped quarters, and they had no idea who was a foreign national and who wasn’t. The case officer had already picked out several of their fellow travelers as Chinese nationals and heard at least four other languages being spoken that she couldn’t identify at the moment. One sounded vaguely Japanese, though Kyra couldn’t really distinguish some of the Asian tongues from each other. Some of the other languages closer to his side of the aisle sounded like they came from Eastern Europe. She didn’t know what anyone around her was talking about, but the conversations were animated enough that she assumed they were discussing the Kinmen invasion. Every passenger on the plane was flying into a country that was at war, and she couldn’t imagine what else they might talk about under the circumstances, even if Jonathan seemed determined to avoid the subject.
“I’ve flown domestic plenty. London a few times, Rome once. I hiked the Okinawa battlefields. And I did a tour in the sandbox.”
The sandbox, she thought. Iraq. “You see any action?”
Jonathan shrugged. “I was at Camp Doha before the war. Saddam sent some Scuds over during the buildup, but nothing close. Then I was in the Green Zone for a year. Zawahiri’s boys sent some mortar rounds our way. There were some car bombs. Nothing too close.” He shifted in the seat and stretched out his legs to work out the kinks. “So you going to tell me what happened down in Venezuela?”
Her head twisted in surprise and he saw pain flash across her eyes. “Cooke told you about that?”
“Only after I made a few deductions about why she brought you to the Red Cell.”
Kyra frowned and looked around the darkened cabin. Most of the passengers were settling in to sleep or starting to watch movies. She reached down and rolled up the long shirt sleeve on her left arm. She still had a padded gauze bandage taped across her upper arm. She pulled it back and turned so the senior analyst could see the back of her arm but her body blocked the view of wandering eyes across the aisle.
Jonathan looked down at the wound. The girl had a lateral laceration running across her triceps. No question, she had lost some meat and the scar was going to be ugly. He tilted his head and studied the wound. “Seven-point-six-two-millimeter round?”
“Lucky guess,” she said. Kyra replaced the bandage and pulled her sleeve down.
“It’s a common caliber used by South American militaries,” he said. “They were close.”
“Yeah, they were,” Kyra said. “You ever make it to Beijing?” she asked. Please let it go.
He paused, as though considering whether to grant her unspoken request. “No, unfortunately,” he said finally. “It would be very useful if one of us had spent time on the ground there. I’m told it can be a difficult city to navigate.”
“Not a problem,” Kyra said.
“Optimist.”
“If we can’t find our way around a foreign city without a map, then we’re working for the wrong agency,” she said. It surprised her to finally see Jonathan smile.
Weaver put the soda can a safe distance from the keyboard — he’d lost more than one electronic device to carbonated drinks — and turned his attention back to the monitor. It was dead quiet inside the vault except for the hum of the server fans mounted in the rack under his desk. He had the vault to himself and he preferred it that way. It was difficult enough to translate hexadecimal code into assembly language without the distractions of other analysts talking in the hallway.
Reverse-engineering a compiled computer program was the most difficult craft a programmer could master. Writing programs in the first place, even complex ones, was child’s play by comparison. The programmer could use any one of dozens of languages to create one. Any of those languages made life easy for the coders by letting them use English words — called source code—instead of forcing them to use pure numbers, which was all that computers really understood. Those English commands were converted into those numbers by a compiler, a one-way translator between the two.
Reverse engineering was the craft of turning those raw numbers back into English commands with no source code to act as a guide. It was like trying to translate demotic Egyptian without benefit of a Rosetta Stone. Humans thought in the base-ten counting system, where the numbers ran 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 before adding a second digit to make 10. Computers thought in eight-bit binary — base two — where the sequence was 00000000-00000001-00000011, on to infinity. But it was easy to misread the streams of 0s and 1s while suffering a boredom that no Coke or coffee could cure. So Weaver used a decompiler to convert the binary numbers into hexadecimal — base sixteen. Weaver could at least think in hexadecimal, which counted 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-a-b-c-d-e-f. But from there, he had to look at the numbers and try to turn them back into source code that performed the same functions.