As in the operation in Menlo Park and the operation in Las Vegas, Crane and his men performed wet operations, killing people who represented a threat to Center’s operations and stealing code and records necessary to further Ghost Ship activities.
Those few highly placed individuals in the PLA and the MSS who knew about Center and his Ghost Ship were pleased. The Chinese had their weapon, and their plausible deniability. They could steal secrets from American government, military, and industry, and they could prepare the battle space for any upcoming conflict. If Tong and his organization were ever discovered, well, he was an enemy of Beijing, working with the Triads — how could anyone make the claim that he and his people were working for the Chinese Communists?
It was a short walk from Tong’s office up a well-lit linoleum-floored hallway to a set of double doors, guarded on either side by hard local men with space-age-looking QCW-05 submachine guns hanging from their chests. The guards wore no uniforms; one wore a scuffed leather jacket and the other a blue polo shirt with the white collar turned up to his ears.
Dr. Tong did not address the men as he passed through the doorway, but this was nothing out of the ordinary. He never spoke to them. Tong did not make small talk with any of his underlings, much less the thirty or forty local Triads on and around the premises who had been tasked with protecting him and his operation.
A strange relationship, to be sure. A strange relationship that Tong himself did not care for, though he understood the strategic necessity of leaving his homeland to come to Hong Kong.
Through the double doors K. K. Tong walked down the middle of the open operations floor, passing dozens of men and women hard at work at their desks. Twice someone stood and bowed to Center and asked him for a moment of his time. Both times Dr. Tong just held up a hand as he passed, indicating he would get back with them momentarily.
Right now he was looking for someone specific.
He passed the banking and phishing department, the research and development department, the social media and engineering department, and made his way to the coders’ department.
This was where the men and women worked who did the actual computer network hacking.
At a workstation in the back corner of the room, next to a floor-to-ceiling window that, had it not been covered over with red velour drapes, would have given a southerly view over Kowloon, a young man with dramatically spiked hair sat in front of a bank of four monitors.
The young Chinese punk stood and bowed when Tong appeared behind him.
The older man said, “Kinetic operation complete. You should be receiving data shortly.”
“Sie de, xiansheng.” Yes, sir. With a bow the man turned back to his desk and sat down.
“Zha?”
He quickly stood back up and turned around.
“Yes, sir?”
“I want a report on what you find. I don’t expect DarkGod’s code will reveal anything you can use to optimize your RAT before we attack DoD, but keep an open mind. He did well to get as far as he did in the CIA Intelink network with his limited resources.”
The punk rocker said, “Of course, sir. I will look at DarkGod’s code and report to you.”
Tong turned and headed back through the operations room without another word.
The young punk rocker’s name was Zha Shu Hai, but he was known in cyberspace as FastByte22.
Zha was born in China, but his parents immigrated to the United States when he was a child and he became a U.S. citizen. Like Tong, he was something of a child prodigy in the computer sciences, and also like Tong, he went to Caltech, graduating at age twenty. When Zha was twenty-one years old he obtained a U.S. government security clearance and began working in the research-and-development department of General Atomics, a high-tech defense contractor in San Diego, and the manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles for the military and intelligence industries. Zha was tasked with testing secure and encrypted networks to see if the systems could be hacked into.
After two years of work, Zha reported back to General Atomics that such hacking was virtually impossible without specific knowledge of the networks, the communications gear that transmitted signals to the drones, and incredibly sophisticated equipment.
And then the young Chinese-American tried to make contact with the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., telling them that he would like to offer them his specific knowledge of all these things, and then help them build incredibly sophisticated equipment to help them exploit this knowledge.
Unfortunately for Zha, a routine polygraph required to maintain his clearance picked up strong indications of deception, and a search of his computer picked up the correspondence with the Chinese embassy. The young General Atomics penetration tester was arrested and sent to prison. As soon as Tong started the Ghost Ship, however, he used his resources to help the young man make his way out of the United States so he could join Tong in his operation in Hong Kong.
With Zha’s knowledge of computer code and penetrating secure networks, he developed the Ghost Ship’s powerful remote-access Trojan, the malware that allowed Center to steal data covertly, as well as see through the cameras and listen through the microphones of every machine it infected.
Zha’s virus was as insidious as it was brilliant. It began by performing a port scan, looking for computer security’s version of an unlocked window. If it found the exploitable port, it then began a series of common password attempts to make entry on the machine.
All this happened in the span of a few hundredths of a second. No one operating the computer at the time, unless they were watching the machine’s resources carefully, would notice anything amiss.
If the worm succeeded in getting into the machine’s subconscious, it then performed an ultra-high-speed reconnaissance, taking note of the applications installed and the quality of the processor and motherboard. Low-quality or older machines were rejected; the worm would instantly relay information back to the hacker that the node was not worth probing further, and then it would delete itself. High-end machines, on the other hand, were invaded further by the malware, the brain of the computer was taken over by the virus, and the message would go back to the hacker that another member of the robot army was reporting for duty.
Once the computer had been taken over by the Ghost Ship, a subroutine designed by FastByte22 himself would go into the system’s machine code and remove any vestige of the delivery system.
Or so Zha thought. In truth, his subroutine missed a single strip of code, and this is what Gavin Biery detected on the Istanbul Drive.
With this virus Zha had been the first to break into the CIA’s Intelink-TS network router for cable traffic, but on one of his maintenance forays into the source code, he realized he was not alone. He traced the other hacker, narrowing down the man’s identity by monitoring research done at open source bulletin boards and technical directories, discovering he was a well-known amateur hacker in the United States named Charlie Levy. And then Center’s controllers went to work trying to convince Levy to work for his organization so he could exploit the man’s knowledge.
That attempt had failed, so Tong then tried to exploit Levy’s knowledge by hacking into his machine.
That also failed. So Crane and his men got the information the old-fashioned way, by killing Charlie Levy and stealing it.
Tong knew Zha was cocky, and would not think DarkGod had anything in his virus that would improve on Zha’s own work.
Tong, on the other hand, appreciated how much could be learned by pooling intellectual resources of individual hackers, even hackers who did not give up their intellectual resources willingly.