Zero days, p.33
Zero Days, page 33
Drayton said he liked the sound of that, but why couldn’t he put the music by the American guy first?
The maestro said the American guy was Czech, his name was Dvořák, and would Drayton please excuse him. With that he headed back towards a podium, where more tributes were flowing, telling his assistant along the way to please keep that moron from the embassy away from him.
Which would have been just fine by Drayton, but he still had a job to do, and this was bigger than Abramovich. Much bigger.
He continued his slow progress down the corridor and into the Egg, though this time without the help of the student battering ram.
Eventually the corridor opened onto a vast concrete-walled lobby area, the Egg’s main glass doors up some steps to one side, the ticket office and cloakrooms on the other. A wall of metal detectors blocked the route down to the main concert halls, though security staff in badly fitting uniforms, frisking people at random, seemed mostly to ignore the madly pinging machines.
No sooner had Drayton been through a metal detector when a group of perhaps twenty police and plain-clothes security agents, some with barely concealed weapons, entered through the main doors. They swept down the steps, shouting to clear out of the way, and forming a cordon around a short balding man with thick-rimmed glasses. The short man just looked straight ahead, walking briskly, or as briskly as people could be cleared from his path. What Drayton noticed most was the way the man’s big glasses framed a child-like face. Most people backed away instinctively.
The short man and his escort barged through the metal detectors, since there was no way round them, and the pings turned into one manic high-pitched wail, which lasted well after they’d moved on.
“Who’s that?” Drayton asked one of the Egg’s security men, who was looking at his metal detector like it might blow up at any minute.
The man just shrugged. Didn’t know, and cared even less.
Much to his surprise, Drayton had arrived with twenty minutes to spare before the concert, so he found a bar and ordered a beer, a local Tsingtao, which was lukewarm but went down so well he ordered another, thinking all the time, who was that guy? Maybe the maestro was the real deal after all. Drayton hadn’t really got a good look, since the guy was dwarfed by his bodyguards, but there was a stern, serious look on that baby face, that was for sure.
A buzzer, a five-minute warning, sounded, and Drayton made his way to his seat, in an elevated section at the back of the hall. The place was packed, but he really wasn’t in the mood for this.
The lights went down, and an announcement asked valued customers, out of respect for the artists and the law, to kindly refrain from any recording, videoing or photography.
As the orchestra entered the stage, dozens of smartphones were raised in the air to record, video and photograph. They were joined by still more, as the maestro entered, clad in black jacket and black bow tie, bowing deeply to the smartphones, spotlights highlighting his shiny balding head and round rimless glasses.
Attendants who’d been showing people to their seats scrambled into action. Each had a small laser pointer that they trained on the offending devices, moving the beam up and down. The laser beams were soon dancing all over the auditorium.
The orchestra looked like they’d seen it all before. If the maestro was surprised, he didn’t show it. He looked serious and solemn. Just like his poster. And just like the music he was about to conduct.
The smartphones were lowered, driven away by the lasers, or maybe because they already had what they wanted and were now posting online with captions saying, “Hey, look where I am”.
Drayton loved those small acts of defiance.
The maestro lifted his baton and the symphony began with a rousing melody from the string section, which Drayton hadn’t expected and rather liked. But it didn’t last; the Nazis were on the march and so was the maestro, waving his baton as if the defence of Leningrad depended on him alone, the music growing in intensity.
The first movement seemed to go on forever, and as it reached a climax, Drayton felt exhausted, drained. Then he felt a sudden trembling that seemed to rise up through his chair. Those sitting nearby felt it too, and they looked around like maybe the Führer’s Panzer tanks had entered the hall and were about to take out the maestro. It stopped, but then started again, which is when Drayton realised he was sitting on his phone, which he’d switched to vibration mode and stuck in his back pocket. Somebody was trying to get hold of him.
The first movement ended, and as throats were being cleared, noses blown and smartphone messages checked, he ducked for the aisle, winding his way towards the exit, his body bent forward like a stressed orangutan criss-crossing the floor of its cage.
“No re-entry once the music starts again,” said an attendant, one eye on Drayton, one on the lookout for smartphones.
“That’s fine by me,” Drayton said.
The security detail, the Praetorian Guard for the little guy, was now huddled in small groups outside the main hall. Other plainclothes security patrolled past the doors of the hall with curly earpieces and big bulges under their jackets.
Drayton reached a quiet corner of the foyer between a pillar and a big gold artwork, a grotesquely contorted head of a buffalo mounted on a wooden plinth, when his phone vibrated again, a call from an unknown number. He took the call, but said nothing, waiting on the caller to speak first.
“Chuck, it’s Dave.”
“Hey Dave, what’s up?”
“We need to talk. We have a breakthrough.”
Drayton said that was great, but he was still at the Egg, at the concert, baby-sitting the maestro.
“Fuck the maestro,” said Dave. “We have what we need.”
Drayton said he could be at the embassy in twenty minutes or so, and Dave said, “No, don’t do that. I’ll meet you in Tiananmen Square in front of the portrait of Mao. It’s more secure.”
Drayton left by the main entrance of the Egg. He raised the collar of his thick black overcoat, with matching scarf and thick woollen beanie hat, strapped on a pollution mask and stepped out into the frigid gloom. Police cars were lined up in front of the Egg’s titanium and glass dome, with more armed men, and Drayton wondered again who the little guy was and why he needed that level of security.
It took him ten minutes to walk to Tiananmen; he thought the giant square was atmospheric in all the smog. The blurred outlines of the Great Hall of the People to his right. National Museum to his left. Tall street lights, smudge-like, lining the edges. The closer ones had halos of haze, but in the middle distance they faded to nothingness.
He stopped close to the portrait of Mao Zedong, at Tiananmen Gate, hanging above a tunnel into the Forbidden City, the old Imperial Palace. Guards stood rigid in the foreground, and crowds jostled for photographs in front of them, selfies mainly. Drayton took one himself, on his iPhone, and then looked back down the square trying to spot Mao’s mausoleum, but it was lost in the smog. He decided he’d pay the old despot a visit at some point, see him in the flesh.
There were a lot of people mingling there. Drayton guessed that was why Dave had chosen this place, figuring there was anonymity in the crowd. But it was sometimes difficult to tell what was going on with Dave, a guy who thought his job was so secret he didn’t even have a second name. At least not one he wanted to tell Drayton.
He reckoned it was probably a turf thing too, the Beijing spooks wanting to keep control, wary of the upstarts like Drayton from the Shanghai consulate. It was stupid really, but Drayton never felt particularly welcome at the embassy.
He was beginning to wonder if he’d ever find Dave when he felt a hand gripping his arm, and Dave said, “Hannibal Lecter, I presume.”
“Yeah, you like it? I figured it might add a year or two to my life expectancy.”
Drayton’s big black pollution mask was an all-encompassing studded contraption that covered half his face. He imagined it did make him look pretty scary, that he should keep away from kids, though he thought it more Darth Vader than Hannibal, the Hollywood cannibal. But it seemed to do the job, keeping out the filthy air, though at times Drayton found he was struggling to breathe at all through its multiple filters.
“This one’s pretty useless,” Dave said, pointing to his own mask. “Maybe worse than useless.”
He was wearing a simple white surgical-style mask with the words PM2.5 Mega Blocker printed on the front.
“I think it refers to the tiny bits that do the most damage,” he said. “Someone at the embassy bought a whole bunch of them online, while we wait for fresh supplies from Washington.”
Drayton said they had plenty at the consulate, smirking beneath his mask, scoring an easy point for Shanghai, which Dave ignored.
“There’re a lot of fakes online,” Drayton said.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” said Dave.
And then he said, “Let’s walk”, and they headed east away from the square along Chang’an Avenue, the wide thoroughfare running across Tiananmen’s northern end.
“I’m really sorry you got landed with this guy, this Abramovich,” Dave said. “Sounds like a real pain, but hey, you’re the Cyber Guy.”
They walked for a while in silence before Dave said they’d got the forensic results back from Fort Meade, and the National Security Agency had confirmed the maestro’s laptop had been infected with malicious software, malware that allowed somebody else to take remote control and read his files, messages and emails.
“They were having a poke around when he got back to his room and he saw the cursor dancing all over the screen.”
“Why the maestro?” asked Drayton, and Dave said there was some interesting stuff on his computer, that he’d had some quite high-level contacts in China and in North Korea. In Russia too, where he met the President.
“He had some less than flattering things to say about us, the American Government, that is,” said Dave. “There was a lot of gossipy stuff, emails, notes to himself, and a pretty full address book. The guy does have some decent contacts.”
“I can imagine. And you happened to just stumble upon all this?”
“Well, we were inside his computer. We had to look to see what might be of interest to the hackers.”
“Or to you.”
Dave ignored that and said, “The key thing, Chuck, is not whether this guy had anything interesting on his computer. It’s the pattern, the fingerprints. It’s what it tells us about their capabilities. The hackers didn’t cover their tracks very well, and Fort Meade says it’s consistent with other attacks we’ve seen against US companies and business people, hoovering up information wherever and whenever they can.”
At that moment, a pair of police cars raced out of the gloom of Chang’an, their sirens wailing, lights flashing. Both men instinctively turned away, raising the collar of their thick coats. Drayton pulled down his black woollen beanie hat to just above his eyes.
“You know that building?” said Dave, pointing to the fuzzy outline of the Beijing Hotel, overlooking Chang-an. Then without waiting for an answer he said, “It was from one of those rooms on the left that the famous images were taken. Tank Man. The guy standing in the street facing off against a tank during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. It was right here.”
Drayton said yeah, he remembered the photo. He said he’d read that Tank Man had never been identified, that nobody had ever figured out who he was, and he asked Dave whether he thought that could ever happen again.
Dave said from what he could make out, the Communist Party leader seemed in control, locking away his rivals, saying they were all corrupt. And Drayton said the guy was making a lot of enemies. That maybe it was a sign of weakness.
Dave just shrugged, and Drayton said the maestro wanted his computer back, that he was making threats.
“He can have it back,” said Dave. “In fact the sooner the better. We’ve installed a little something of our own in case the hacker returns for another look around his laptop.”
“And what little something is that?”
“That’s not important right now, Chuck. What matters is that the hackers have left quite a digital trail, and we’re close to pinpointing where these attacks are coming from.”
“That does sound like a breakthrough,” said Drayton. “Where are we talking about?”
And Dave said Drayton needed to get back to Shanghai, just as soon as he could.
*****
By that time at the Egg the final movement of the Leningrad Symphony was building into a frenzy, and so was the maestro. His face was contorted, grimacing, his arms waving manically as he drove the orchestra on, marshalling the defences of Leningrad.
The little man with all the security was dabbing his eyes, overcome with the emotion of the music. He was seated alone in a box high on one side of the hall, with carefully arranged curtains making him all but invisible to the rest of the audience below.
He was an elderly man, who’d trained in what used to be the Soviet Union. He was hard, uncompromising and feared. Sentiment was not something he was known for, but he did have one private weakness – for Russian music, especially at its most intense and moving. And none more so than the Leningrad Symphony, even if it was conducted by an American.
He saw it as more than just a tribute to the resilience of a city. It was about determination and resolve. It was about strength. All of which he felt he needed now more than ever, to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party which he’d served for almost fifty years. To defend it against the enemies he saw everywhere.
As the music reached its climax, the smartphones came back out, as did the laser pointers. The phones stood firm this time, like the defenders of Leningrad, determined to capture the stirring finale of the symphony.
One laser beam, this one directed from high above the stage, seemed to wander away from the main area of the hall and the main concentration of smartphones, climbing up the steep sides of the hall and into the darkened area behind the curtain. It came to a halt squarely on the forehead of the little man in the box, who seconds later toppled backwards off his chair as a single bullet followed the beam to its target.
Acknowledgements
Writing about computers and hackers, even as a work of fiction, runs the risk of descending into techno-babble. I am tremendously grateful to those who read early drafts of this manuscript and helped me keep it grounded and comprehensible. Thank you Philip Beresford, Barrett Feldman, Patrick Garrett, Jerry Harmer, Ian Harris, Graham Williams, Serena Williams and Simon Williams. And a big shout out to Darrell Newman, who knows more about computers than I ever will and handed me the ultimate accolade, ‘it sounds like you actually understand this stuff’.
A big thank you also, to all those who helped me during my field research in the Far East, Berlin and Kiev. This was invaluable in bringing alive the political context in which hackers ply their trade, as well as understanding the way spies, criminals and corporations (often with considerable overlap) are competing for control of cyber space. They are too numerous to name individually and in any case many, in sensitive positions, prefer me not to do so.
Zero Days is a work of fiction, but I have endeavoured to make the hacks and the general cyber skulduggery as real and as plausible as possible. There is little in the book that is not possible now or will be in the near future. I am very grateful to friends, fellow-students and teachers at the Information Security Group of Royal Holloway University. They helped and inspired me to make sense of the dark cyber world, and during the course of my study there, induced in me a permanent but healthy paranoia towards computers and the internet.
I am grateful also to Clare Christian, Heather Boisseau, Julia Pidduck, Anna Burtt and the rest of the great team at RedDoor for all their hard work on this book. They understood the importance of Zero Days and have been enormously supportive throughout.
About the author
Ian Williams is an award-winning journalist who has reported from across the world. He covered business for the Sunday Times before becoming a foreign correspondent, based first in Russia and then the Far East for Channel 4 News and then the American network NBC. Ian has travelled and reported from across China, and more recently covered the Russian annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine. In 2017 he published his first novel, Beijing Smog, a satire on modern China. He has taken a strong interest in the dark cyber world, the world of hackers and cyber spies that are at the heart of his new thriller, Zero Days.
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zerodaysnovel.com
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Ian Williams, Zero Days
