Zha may not have believed that Levy had anything to add to his code, but Tong felt he had been forceful enough to make clear to the young man that he would be expected to give the data stolen from DarkGod his full attention.
TWENTY-THREE
Thirty-four-year-old Adam Yao sat behind the wheel of his twelve-year-old Mercedes C–Class sedan and wiped his face with a beach towel he kept on the passenger seat. Hong Kong was hot as hell this fall, even at seven-thirty in the morning, and Adam wasn’t running the air conditioner because he did not want his engine’s noise to draw attention to his surveillance.
He was close to his target location, too close, and he knew it. But he had to park close. He was dealing with the lay of the land, the bend in the road and the close proximity of the parking lot to the target.
He was pushing his luck parking here, but he had no choice.
Adam Yao was on his own.
When most of the sweat was off his brow he brought his Nikon camera back to his eye and zoomed in on the lobby door of the high-rise condominium tower across the street. The Tycoon Court, it was called. Despite the cheesy name, it was opulent inside. Adam knew the penthouse digs, located here in the lush Mid-Levels neighborhood of Hong Kong Island, must have cost an arm and a leg.
He used his lens to scan the lobby, searching for the target of his surveillance. He knew it was unlikely the man would be standing around in the lobby. Adam had been coming here for days and each morning was the same. At about seven-thirty a.m. the subject would shoot out of the penthouse elevator, walk purposefully across the marble floor of the lobby, and step outside and duck into an SUV in the middle of a three-vehicle motorcade.
And that was as far as Adam Yao had been able to track the man. The windows of the SUVs were tinted, and the subject was always alone, and Adam had not yet tried to tail the motorcade through the twisting narrow streets of the Mid-Levels.
Doing that alone would be nearly impossible.
Adam wished he had support from the leadership of his organization, just some resources and personnel he could call on in times like this to lend a hand. But Adam worked for CIA, and pretty much every CIA officer in Asia knew one thing about the organization: there was a breach. Langley denied it, but it was clear to the men and women on the sharp edge over here that the PRC was getting tipped off about CIA plans and initiatives, sources and methods.
Adam Yao needed some help with this surveillance operation, but he didn’t need it bad enough to risk compromise, because Adam Yao, unlike most every other CIA officer in China and HK, was working without a net. He was a CIA nonofficial cover officer, which meant he had no diplomatic protection.
He was a spy out in the cold.
Not that he wouldn’t mind something cold at the moment. He reached for his beach towel and wiped more sweat off his face.
A few days ago Yao had been alerted to the presence here at the Tycoon Court of a man from the mainland, a known manufacturer of counterfeit computer hard drives and microprocessors that had made their way into critical systems of U.S. military equipment. His name was Han, and he was director of a large state-owned tech factory in nearby Shenzhen. Han was in HK for some reason, and was getting picked up each morning by three white SUVs and driven off to an unknown location.
But even though this counterfeiter had managed to get his counterfeit devices into U.S. military equipment, to the CIA this was a commercial case, and commercial espionage was not something CIA put a lot of focus on over here.
Chicom cyberespionage and cyberwarfare were a big deal. Industrial computer crime was small potatoes.
But despite knowing good and well that Langley would show little interest in his initiative, Adam pushed ahead in this new investigation, for the simple reason that he very much wanted to know just who the hell the counterfeiter was meeting with on Adam’s turf.
Yao had been holding the camera to his eye for so long that the rubber eyecup over the viewfinder was filling up with sweat. He started to lower it from his eye, but then the penthouse doors in the lobby opened and, true to his daily ritual, the Shenzhen knockoff computer hardware maker stepped out alone and walked across the lobby. Just then three white SUVs rolled by Yao’s car and stopped under the awning of the Tycoon Court.
Each day the vehicles picking up the man were the same. Adam had been too far up the street to read the license plates on his earlier attempts, but today he was close enough to get a good angle and he had plenty of time to snap pictures of the tag numbers.
The back door to the second vehicle was opened from the inside, and the counterfeiter ducked in. In seconds the three SUVs rolled off, east on Conduit Court, disappearing around a hilly turn.
Yao decided he would attempt to tail the SUVs today. He would not get too close and it was unlikely he’d be able to follow them for long before he lost them in the thick traffic, but as far as he was concerned, he might as well head off in the same direction as they had on the offhand chance he’d get lucky and track them to a major intersection. If so, and assuming they took the same route each day, he could position himself farther along the route tomorrow and tail them a bit closer to their ultimate destination.
Any success using this technique would be a slow process and a long shot. But it beat coming here every morning, sitting here, day after day, which was beginning to look pointless.
He lowered his camera to the passenger seat and reached for his keys, but a loud rapping on his driver’s-side window made him jump.
Two police officers peered in the window, and one used the plastic antenna of his walkie-talkie to knock on the glass.
Great.
Yao rolled down the window. “Ni hao,” he said, which was Mandarin, and these cops likely spoke Cantonese, but he was pissed about wasting his morning, again, so he did not feel like being helpful.
Before the officer at the window said anything he looked past Yao to the passenger seat of the Mercedes, where the camera with the two-hundred-millimeter zoom lens sat next to a directional microphone with a set of headphones, a set of high-quality binoculars, a tiny notebook computer, a small backpack, and a legal pad full of handwritten notes.
He looked up at Adam now with suspicion. “Step out.”
Adam did as he was told.
“Is there a problem?”
“Identification,” the officer demanded.
Adam reached carefully into his pants and pulled out his wallet. The cop a few meters back watched him closely as he did so.
Adam passed his entire billfold over to the officer who requested it, and he stood quietly while the man looked it over.
“What’s all that in your car?”
“That is my job.”
“Your job? What, are you a spy?”
Adam Yao laughed. “Not quite. I own a firm that investigates intellectual property theft. My card is right next to my license there. SinoShield Business Investigative Services Limited.”
The cop looked the card over. “What do you do?”
“I have clients in Europe and the U.S. If they suspect a Chinese firm is manufacturing counterfeit versions of their goods over here, they hire me to investigate. If we think they have a case they’ll hire local attorneys and try to get the counterfeiting stopped.” Adam smiled. “Business is good.”
The cop relaxed a little. It was a reasonable explanation for why this guy was sitting in a parking space taking pictures of the comings and goings next door.
He asked, “You are investigating someone at the Tycoon Court?”