“I had no idea,” admitted Jack.
“When I found botnets for sale possessing all the attributes I wanted, I just cast as wide a net as I could afford, rented them, and then ran some diagnostics on the hacked machines to pare them down further. Then I wrote a multithreaded program that took a peek at that location in each machine to see if that line of code was present.”
“And you found a computer with the Istanbul Drive code on it?”
The IT man’s smile widened. “Not a computer. One hundred twenty-six computers.”
Jack leaned forward. “Oh my God. All with the identical piece of malware you found on the Libyan’s drive?”
“Yes.”
“Where are these machines? What physical locations are we talking about?”
“Center is… I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but Center is everywhere. Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia. All inhabited continents were represented in the infected machines.”
Jack asked, “So how did you find out who he is?”
“One of the infected machines was being used as a relay to the command server. It was pushing traffic from the botnet to a network in Kharkov, Ukraine. I penetrated the network servers and saw that they hosted dozens of illegal or questionable websites. The sickest porn imaginable, online marketplaces for buying and selling fake passports, card skimmers, stuff like that. I hacked into each of these sites easily. But there was one location I could not get into. All I got was the name of the administrator.”
“What’s the name of the administrator?”
“FastByte Twenty-two.”
Jack Ryan deflated. “Gavin, that’s not a name.”
“It’s his computer handle. No, it’s not his Social Security number and home address, but we can use it to find him.”
“Anybody can make up a handle.”
“Trust me, Jack. There are people out there who know the identity of FastByte Twenty-two. You just have to find them.”
Jack nodded slowly, and then he looked at the clock on the wall.
It was not even three a.m.
“I hope you’re right, Gavin.”
TWENTY-FIVE
CIA nonofficial cover operative Adam Yao leaned against the entrance of a shuttered shoe store on Nelson Street, in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district, eating dumplings and noodles with chopsticks from a cardboard bowl. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening, the last of the day’s light had long left the sliver of sky between the tall buildings that ran down both sides of the street, and Adam’s dark clothing made him all but invisible under the shadow of the doorway.
The pedestrian crowd was not what it was during the day, but there was still a good bit of foot traffic, mostly coming to or going from the nearby street stall market, and Adam welcomed the crowd, because he felt his chances of avoiding detection were higher with more people strolling about.
Adam was on the job, conducting a one-man surveillance on Mr. Han, the counterfeit-chip maker from Shenzhen. After he took photos of the plates on the SUVs that picked Han up at Tycoon Court earlier in the week, he’d called a friend at the Hong Kong Police B Department and talked him into running the tags. The detective told Adam the owner of the vehicles was a real estate company in Wan Chai, a seedy neighborhood on Hong Kong Island. Adam looked into the company on his own and found it to be owned by a known Triad figure. This particular personality was a member of 14K, which was the biggest and the baddest Triad in HK. That explained the origin of the security goons protecting Han, but Yao found it very curious this high-tech computer manufacturer would involve himself with the 14K. The Triads as a whole kept their crime dirty — prostitution and protection rackets and drugs mostly — and the 14K were no more refined than the rest of the Triads. Any criminal operation Han would be involved in, on the other hand, would necessitate high-tech equipment and personnel.
This guy coming to HK and hanging around the 14K made no sense.
Once Adam knew Han was getting picked up each morning by gangsters, he spent the next few days moving around 14K-owned restaurants and strip clubs frequented by the vehicle’s owner, until he found all three gleaming white SUVs parked in a covered lot outside a hot-pot restaurant in Wan Chai. Here, with an abundance of skill derived from working in two separate jobs that required such a technique, he slapped a tiny magnetized GPS tracking device under the rear bumper of one of the trucks.
The next morning he sat in his apartment and watched while a blinking dot on his iPhone moved across a map of Hong Kong, first up to the Mid-Levels to Tycoon Court, and then down into Wan Chai. The dot disappeared, which Adam knew meant the SUV was traveling under Victoria Harbour through the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.
Adam ran outside and leapt into his Mercedes, knowing where Han was headed.
He was going to Kowloon.
Yao ultimately tracked the SUV here, to the big office building that held the Mong Kok Computer Centre, a several-story-tall warren of tiny storefronts selling everything from knockoff software to brand-new original high-tech motion-picture cameras. Anything electronics-related, from printer paper to mainframes, could be purchased here, though much of it was counterfeit and much more of it was stolen.
Above the Computer Centre were two dozen more floors of office space.
Adam did not go inside the building. He was a one-man band, after all, and he did not want to reveal himself to his quarry this early in the investigation. So he sat outside this evening, waiting for Han to leave, hoping to get pictures of everyone who came and went at the entrance of the building in the meantime.
He had attached a remote miniature camera with a magnet to the outside of a closed magazine stand on the sidewalk, and he had a wireless device in his pocket with which he could pan and zoom the lens and snap off rapid-fire high-quality pictures.
So he sat just up the street and watched, slurped noodles and dumplings from his bowl, and took pictures of all activity at either the front of the building or a side alley entrance right next to him.
For three consecutive nights he had photographed more than two hundred faces. Back in his office he ran the images through facial-recognition software, looking for anyone interesting he might link with Mr. Han or the sale of military-grade computer equipment to the United States.
So far he’d come up with nothing.
It was boring work, for the most part, but Adam Yao had been doing this for a long time, and he loved the job. He told himself that if he were ever moved into an embassy position with the CIA’s National Clandestine Service he would leave the Agency and start his own company, doing just exactly what his cover organization did, business investigations in China and Hong Kong.
Operating undercover in the streets was exciting, and Adam rued the day when he would be too old or too settled down to worry about anything more than his mission.
Four men appeared out of the dark alley that ran alongside the building that housed the Mong Kok Computer Centre. They passed close by Adam, but he looked down at his bowl and scooped dumplings and noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks. After they passed his position he looked up and immediately pegged three of their number as Triad soldiers. They wore open jackets on the warm evening, and Adam suspected they would be carrying small machine pistols under them. Along with them, a fourth man walked; he was slighter than the others and he wore his long hair spiked and gelled. He was dressed oddly, a tight purple T-shirt and tight jeans, a half-dozen bracelets on his arm and a gold chain around his neck.