“I’m sorry, officer. I am not allowed to reveal any information about an ongoing investigation.”
“The security office over there called about you. Said you were here yesterday, too. They think you are going to rob them or something.”
Adam chuckled and said, “I’m not going to rob them. I won’t bother them at all, though I wish I could sit in their lobby and enjoy the air-conditioning. You can check me out. I’ve got friends at HKP, mostly in B Department. You could call and get someone to vouch for me.” The Hong Kong Police B Department was the investigative branch, the detectives and organized crime force. The officers, Adam knew, would be A Department, the division under which the patrol cops worked.
The officer looking Adam over took his time. He asked Yao about some B Department police he knew, and Yao answered comfortably until a connection was made.
Finally satisfied, the two policemen headed back into their patrol car and left Adam by his Mercedes.
He climbed back inside his car and slammed his hand on the steering wheel in frustration. Other than tag numbers that would probably lead him nowhere, it had been a wasted day. He’d learned nothing about the counterfeiter and his activities he had not already known yesterday, and he’d been compromised by some damn security guard at a condominium tower.
Adam was once again, however, greatly appreciative of his fantastic cover for status. Running a private investigation firm gave him a ready-made excuse to be doing just about anything he could imagine being caught doing while in performance of his clandestine duties for the Agency.
As far as CIA nonofficial-cover “white side” jobs were concerned, Adam Yao’s SinoShield Business Investigative Services Ltd. was as solid as they came.
He drove off, down the hill and back toward his office near the harbor.
TWENTY-FOUR
Jack Ryan, Jr., woke next to Melanie Kraft and immediately realized his phone was ringing. He had no idea of the time at first, but his body told him it was well before his normal internal clock’s wake-up call.
He grabbed the ringing phone and looked at it. 2:05 a.m. He groaned. He checked the caller ID.
Gavin Biery.
He groaned again. “Really?”
Melanie stirred next to him. “Work?”
“Yeah.” He did not want her to be suspicious, though, so he followed that with: “The director of the IT department.”
Melanie laughed softly and said, “You left your computer on.”
Jack chuckled, too, and started to put the phone back down.
“Must be important, though. You should take it.”
Jack knew she was right. He sat up and answered. “Hello, Gavin.”
“You have got to come in right now!” said a breathless Gavin Biery.
“It’s two a.m.”
“It’s two-oh-six. Get here by two-thirty.” Biery hung up.
Jack put the phone back on the nightstand, fighting off a very strong urge to hurl it against the wall. “I’ve got to go in.”
“For the IT guy?” Melanie’s tone was incredulous.
“I’ve been helping him on a project. It was important, but not ‘come in the middle of the night’ important. But he seems to think this warrants a two-thirty a.m. meeting.”
Melanie rolled over, away from Jack. “Have fun.”
Jack could tell she did not believe him. He sensed that a lot from her, even when he was telling her the truth.
Jack pulled into the parking lot of Hendley Associates just after two-thirty. He came through the front door and gave a tired wave to William, the night security officer behind the front desk.
“Morning, Mr. Ryan. Mr. Biery said you’d be staggering in looking like you just woke up. I’ve got to say you look a lot better than Mr. Biery does during normal business hours.”
“He’s going to look even worse after I kick his ass for dragging me out of bed.”
William laughed.
Jack found Gavin Biery in his office. He fought his mild anger over Biery’s intrusion into his personal life and asked, “What’s up?”
“I know who put the virus on the Libyan’s machine.”
This woke Jack up more than the drive from Columbia. “You know the identity of Center?”
Biery shrugged dramatically. “That I can’t be sure of. But if it’s not Center, it’s somebody working for or with him.”
Jack looked over at Biery’s coffeemaker, hoping to pour himself a cup. But the machine was off and the pot was empty.
“You haven’t been here all night?”
“No. I was working from home. I did not want to expose the Campus network to what I was doing, so I did it from one of my personal machines. I just got here.”
Jack sat down. It was sounding more and more like Biery had had a very good reason to call him in after all.
“What have you been doing from home?”
“I’ve been hanging out in the digital underground.”
Jack was still tired. Too tired to play twenty questions with Gavin. “Can you just fill me in while I sit here quietly with my eyes closed?”
Biery had mercy on Ryan. “There are websites one can visit to conduct illegal business in cyberspace. You can go to these sort of online bazaars and buy fake IDs, recipes to build bombs, stolen credit card information, and even access to networks of previously hacked computers.”
“You mean botnets.”
“Right. You can rent or buy access to infected machines around the world.”
“You can just put in your credit card number and rent a botnet?”
Biery shook his head. “Not your credit card number. Bitcoin. It’s an online currency that is not traceable. Just like cash but better. It’s all about anonymity out there.”
“So are you telling me you rented a botnet?”
“Several botnets.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“It’s illegal if you do something illegal with them. I did not.”
“What did you do?” Jack found himself playing twenty questions with Biery again.
“I had this theory. You know how I told you the string of machine code left on the Istanbul Drive could lead us to whoever the culprit was?”
“Sure.”
“I decided I would reach out in the cyberunderground, looking for other infected machines that also have the same lines of machine code that I found on the Libyan’s machine.”
“That sounds like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Well, I figured there would be many machines out there with this virus. So it’s more like looking for any one of a bushel of needles in a haystack, and I did what I could to make the haystack smaller.”
“How so?”
“There are a billion networked computers in the world, but the subset of hackable machines is much smaller, maybe a hundred million. And the subset of machines that have been hacked is probably a third of that.”
“But still, you had to check thirty million computers to—”
“No Jack, because malware that good isn’t going to just be used on a couple of machines. No, I figured there were thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of nodes out there with this same remote-access Trojan on them. And I narrowed it down further by only renting botnets of machines using the same operating system as the Libyan machines and high-quality processors and components, because I figured Center wouldn’t fool around with any old machine. He’d want to break into the machines of important people, companies, networks, et cetera. So I just grabbed botnets of high-caliber players.”
“They rent out botnets of different quality?”
“Absolutely. You can order a botnet that is fifty machines at AT&T, or one that is two hundred fifty machines from offices of the Canadian Parliament, or a ten-thousand-node botnet of Europeans who have at least one thousand friends each on Facebook, twenty-five thousand computers that have industrial-quality security cameras attached to them. Pretty much any variable can be purchased or rented.”