The private sector paid good money to the few who could reverse-engineer programs. It was a useful skill to any company looking to steal a competitor’s software trade secrets, and Weaver had just the right amount of insanity for the craft. His skills should have brought more than double his government salary, and Microsoft and Google had both made generous offers, but Weaver’s patriotic streak kept him tethered to government service. He supposed that he could have made a healthy living performing corporate espionage, but he could perform the same acts here without worrying about the law. If Weaver hadn’t kept himself pumped full of caffeine — the true blood of programmers everywhere — he would have slept the sleep of the righteous.
The program that the Red Cell had brought him was straightforward. The Chinese coders who’d written it had been competent but uninspired. Programming was a craft where efficiency created a natural elegance, but the best algorithms ceased to be lines of code and became something beautiful, all pure in their efficiency and working together in a modular harmony. The lines of code that Weaver spent the night reconstructing weren’t even close to that, which was both a blessing and a curse. It made them almost predictable to reverse into assembly code. It also made them boring, which was not helpful, given that it was well past midnight.
The algorithm Weaver extracted from the Chinese CAD program was longer than expected and more complicated than its size implied. MIT had required him to take an introductory course in differential equations, and he’d only gotten a middling grade, so it took him an hour to realize that the algorithm was one of those. He had borrowed a colleague’s textbooks — Weaver had sold his own back to the college hours after the final exam — but they hadn’t helped him one whit. It occurred to him that, given that the algorithm was integrated into a CAD program, texts on general mathematical theory weren’t going to help him much. Geometry or mechanical engineering texts, or maybe physics, would be more relevant.
The other equations measured the simplest of physical properties — length, width, depth, area. This one stayed constant when the dimensional variables were kept proportionaclass="underline" changing an object’s overall size did not change the equation’s output, but changing its shape did. He was overlooking… what? Mass? Weaver ruled it out. That would have changed along with the area measurement. Tensile strength? Not possible without inputting the specific material the shape would be cut from, and Weaver couldn’t see a way to enter that value into the program. He considered that it could be a parts number generator, assigning unique identifiers to each new part being designed so it could be located in some database. But the equation was too complex for that. Was it some other engineering function that he wasn’t familiar with?
He finally asked an APLAA analyst to help him identify the related pictograph on the CAD program’s interface. The APLAA analyst had wasted an hour searching out the Mandarin pictograph radicals of that label before realizing they weren’t likely to be in a standard usage dictionary. She found them in a technical dictionary in short order—hengjiemian. The literal translation was… “cross-view”? That made no sense to Weaver. Yes, mechanical engineers used CAD programs to create cross-section technical drawings, but where was the connection to a mathematical formula that changed its product when the object’s shape changed but not its size?
Still, even if he had the source code in hand, it was probable that he still wouldn’t understand what the mathematical calculation was supposed to tell him. It was one thing to know that a piece of source code calculated e=mc2. It was another to know that that particular formula explained why nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. This Chinese algorithm promised to be far more complex than Einstein’s simple formula. But Weaver wasn’t going to fail. Identifying the equation’s purpose was now a point of professional pride. Lunch with Stryker was just going to be the capper. She was one of the few DI officers that he’d met of late who weren’t either taken or socially useless introverts. Besides, the woman knew how to write code. That and the fact that she was easy on the eyes made her worth the effort.
Weaver rolled back from the desk and dropped the soda can in the garbage. It was late enough that the pitiful amount of caffeine in a cola wouldn’t keep him awake. Time for the coffee mug.
CHAPTER 10
The airport was in the Chaoyang district, northeast of the city in a suburb no longer considered remote. The ’08 Olympics had fixed that. If the government had spared any expense to ready the city for visitors that year, it had not been here. Beijing’s largest airport left no question that the host country had become a deserving member of the first world. Terminal 2 was all painted girders and steel rising to a low hangar ceiling, well lit and devoid of any obvious Chinese influence. The size was impressive and the architecture was not, which was a disappointment to Kyra. Growing up in Charlottesville had given her an appreciation for the architectural influences of Mr. Jefferson. She wanted a country with such a unique heritage to make a unique first impression. The building was a justifiable source of pride for a nation whose citizens had starved to death by the millions under Mao, but Kyra hoped they weren’t losing their own culture in bits and pieces in a bid to prove their national standing.
The views of Beijing seen from the taxi window as they traveled the Shoudou Jichang Airport Expressway southwest into the city did not change that impression. It was as modern a city as any she had visited, better than most, with construction that was threatening to crush out the buildings that still matched the Beijing that Kyra had pictured in her mind. Rental cars were not available to foreigners, so they had settled for a simple taxi. It was the most random option available, and random behavior was a counterintelligence officer’s worst enemy and therefore Jonathan and Kyra’s second-best defense. The first was to say nothing during the drive and do nothing openly illegal for the rest of their stay.
The expressway terminated in an exit onto the Dong Sanhuan Beilu Freeway near the northern embassy district, one of the four major roadways that circled the city center. From there, the driver took them on a tour of the small side streets that left Kyra grasping for a sense of direction. Despite her boast on the plane, she had spent a good chunk of the flight staring at maps and guidebooks that she’d pilfered from the CIA Library’s map office. The case officer — she still couldn’t think of herself as an analyst — had been trying to memorize the major street names. She couldn’t feel comfortable entering a hostile territory without arming herself with a detailed knowledge of the terrain, but she had finally given up on that dream. The endless dajies and zhonglus labeling the streets had all run together within minutes, and so she had settled for a general overview of Beijing’s asphalt geography. The city center was an elongated box with Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City at its center and Nanhai, Zhonghai, and Beihai Lakes to its immediate west. Most of the major streets ran north-south and east-west. It was only the smaller side streets that were laid out in haphazard fashion. Seen from above, it made more sense to Kyra than Washington DC’s design; she had cursed Pierre L’Enfant’s name more than once and not because he was French.