He looked less like a Triad and more like a punk rocker.
It appeared to the American in the dark doorway that the three Triads were watching over this kid, much like the detail that protected Mr. Han.
Adam stuck his hand into the pocket of his slacks and found the remote control for the camera affixed to the magazine stand, and then he looked down to his smart phone and the image from the camera’s lens. He pushed a tiny control stick on the remote, and the camera rotated ninety degrees, more or less centering itself on the quickly moving punk rocker. Adam depressed a button all the way down on the control box and, at a range of only two meters, the camera started recording high-definition images, four per second.
The pictures clicked off automatically, but Yao had to pan the camera via the control stick to keep the subject in the frame. In seconds the four men had moved up Nelson Street and out of range, and then they turned left on Fa Yuen Street and disappeared from Adam Yao’s sight.
He had no idea if they would be returning tonight. He pushed himself back in the doorway to wait for Han, but as he sat back down with his noodles he decided to take a quick look at the images he had just recorded.
The camera was connected via Bluetooth to his iPhone, and it was a quick and easy thing to review the last set of images. The camera had night-vision capability, so the faces, while not perfectly clear, were a hell of a lot better than they would have been if they were shot without a flash with a normal camera in this nighttime street.
He scrolled through them. He saw the first two meatheads pass by; they had the requisite “Fuck off” expressions of gangsters who thought they owned the sidewalk on which they walked. Behind them was the third security man; he looked to be as much of a thug as the others, but Adam noticed the man’s left hand was low on the elbow of the punk rocker, leading him along as they walked up the street.
The kid was odd, and it was not just his clothes. He held a handheld computer with both hands and thumbed it furiously. Whether he was playing a game or working on his thesis, Yao could not tell, but he was intense and completely unaware of his surroundings. It looked to Adam as if the kid would walk into moving traffic without the three men in front of him guiding him up the street.
Adam looked at the young man’s face now, illuminated via night-vision enhancement. He scrolled back and forth between the two closest and most in-focus images on his phone. Back and forth.
Back and forth.
The American CIA man could not believe his eyes. He muttered to himself, “I know this asshole.”
Yao stood quickly and headed off in the direction of the four men. As he passed his magnetic remote camera, he deftly reached up and pulled it off the magazine stand without breaking stride.
Adam found the group ahead of him in the crowd, and he stayed a full city block behind them as they walked, but he managed to keep them in view for a few minutes, until they turned and went into the Kwong Wa Street post office.
Normally the young CIA officer would not chance a close encounter, but adrenaline was racing through his body, and it encouraged him forward. He walked right into the post office. It was closed for the evening, but the P.O. boxes and mail slots were still accessible, as was a stamp machine.
Adam walked right by the four men, he felt the eyes of the 14K goons on him as he passed, but he did not meet their gaze. Instead he pulled some HK dollars out of his pocket and bought stamps.
As he waited for the stamps to be dispensed he glanced over his shoulder, taking a mental snapshot of what he saw. The punk rocker had unlocked a P.O. box on the wall and was going through the mail on a wooden table. Adam could not hope to read the box number from across the room, but on a second glance, this one as he exited the post office, he took another quick mental snapshot.
He stepped back out into the street. He did not smile; he would not think of breaking his cover like that. But he was happy.
He got it.
The young man’s P.O. box was the largest of the three sizes along the southern wall, four from the left, two from the bottom.
He walked deeper into the night, some eighty meters away from the building, and then he turned around.
The four men left the post office and headed in the opposite direction, and then turned into an apartment building, the Kwong Fai Mansion.
Yao looked up at the building. It was easily thirty stories high. There was no chance in hell he could tail anyone inside that building. He turned and headed back for his car, still somewhat in shock by tonight’s revelation.
It wasn’t every day, after all, that Adam Yao stumbled upon a fugitive.
The kid’s name was Zha Shu Hai, and Adam first heard of him more than a year earlier, when he was e-mailed a bulletin from the U.S. Marshals Service asking him to be on the lookout for an escaped felon who, both Marshals and FBI suspected, would be heading to China.
Zha was an American citizen who’d been arrested in San Diego for trying to sell the Chicoms classified engineering secrets from his employer, General Atomics, the makers of unmanned aerial vehicles for the Air Force. He’d been caught red-handed with hundreds of gigabytes of design information about the secure networks on which communications and GPS information was sent, and he’d bragged to the Chinese embassy that he knew how to bring the system down by hacking into its sat link, and how to obtain deep persistent access into the Department of Defense’s secure network by building a RAT that could infect a government contractor’s network and then swim upstream. The Feds did not believe him, but they weren’t sure, so they offered him partial immunity if he told General Atomics everything he knew about the system’s vulnerabilities.
Zha refused, and was sentenced to eight years in prison.
After just one year in a minimum-security federal correctional facility, however, he walked away from a work-release program and disappeared.
Everyone in the States knew Zha would try to slip back to China. Adam had been working in Shanghai at the time, and he’d received the BOLO, or “Be on the lookout” notice, from the Marshals Service because there was a reasonable expectation that some high-tech firm in Shanghai would employ Zha if he did make it to the mainland.
Adam had all but forgotten about it, especially after he moved from the mainland to Hong Kong.
Until tonight. It was clear Zha had done much to change his appearance; the booking photo on the BOLO showed a nondescript young Chinese man, not a spiky-haired flamboyant punk rocker, but Adam Yao recognized him nonetheless.
As Adam climbed into his car, he wondered about this strange relationship. Why the hell would Zha be here, in the protection of the Triads? Much like his discovery that Mr. Han had a relationship with the local street thugs, Zha was, if everything the Feds said about his abilities as a top-level black-hat hacker were to be believed, seriously out of the 14K’s league.
Yao had no idea what this meant, but he knew he’d be placing all of his other work on hold in order to find out.
One other thing was certain, though. He would not be shooting an e-mail to the U.S. Marshals Service or the FBI.
Adam Yao was a NOC; he wasn’t exactly a team player. He knew that a call to the Marshals Service would bring marshals and embassy staff here to the post office on Kwong Wa Street and the Mong Kok Computer Centre, and he also knew good and well that Zha and the 14K would see all the white guys with earpieces, they would leave the area, and that would be that.
And there was another reason Adam decided to sit on this news for now.
The obvious breach at CIA.
In the past few months several CIA initiatives had been thwarted by the MSS. Well-placed agents in the government were arrested, dissidents in contact with Langley were imprisoned or executed, electronic operations against the PRC were discovered and shut down.