Zero days, p.9
Zero Days, page 9
He squeezed along the narrow station platform, around makeshift stalls and ground sheets overflowing with food and drink, a rising clamour of voices as the train approached. The six decrepit carriages of the Yangon Circle Line train were dragged slowly into the station by an ancient diesel engine. The outside of the carriages were daubed with hand-painted advertisements for a new 4G cellular network and a Red Bull energy drink.
A young woman stepped off the train and waved. ‘Ko Win, where are you going?’ He pretended not to hear and boarded the packed train through another door. The engine wheezed and spluttered to life, sending dense clouds of smoke into the air. The carriages strained and then jerked forward, crawling out of the station and through a vast yard littered with rusting locomotives. Groups of people criss-crossed the tracks ahead.
Ko Win squeezed onto one of the hard blue benches, which lined the carriage. He was wearing Western dress, faded blue jeans and a T-shirt. There were others dressed that way too, alongside men and women in traditional dress, the women’s faces covered in a cosmetic white powder. Most sitting on the benches, legs folded beneath them. Almost everybody had a smartphone, mostly cheap Chinese models, like his own. Windows and doors were all wide open, providing some relief from the stifling heat. A child next to him stood on the bench and leaned out of the window, grabbing at trees. Hawkers moved up and down the carriage, selling fruit and snacks, yelling as they passed. A big woman selling watermelon sat on the floor in front of him.
The train moved in fits and starts and it took an hour to reach Myittar Nyunt station, the closest to his destination. The station was little more than a cracked and overgrown slab of concrete beside the track. Ko Win put up his umbrella as he left, a sudden torrential downpour coming as if from nowhere.
At first sight there was little to distinguish Thaketa Township from most other townships that made up the outer suburbs of Yangon. Stained and crumbling tenement blocks beside small, squat homes with corrugated metal roofs. Strips of overgrown wasteland with more piles of smouldering rubbish.
What was different was the silence, and the almost complete absence of people on the streets. Perhaps they knew we were coming, he thought. He walked slowly down one of the wider roads, avoiding potholes the size of craters, and passed a police post. Nobody was on duty. The police had melted away, as they always did before the trucks arrived.
He took cover in a doorway, checking his cell phone for any last minute change of plan. The only sounds were barking, yelping dogs and the battering of rain on metal roofs.
Thaketa Township was home to Yangon’s small Muslim population, though that wasn’t immediately obvious. There was a mosque close to where Ko Win was waiting, a pair of stubby minarets obscured by trees that were growing out the roof of an adjoining building. The loud speakers at the top of the minarets had not been used for weeks, the call for prayer stopped at the request of the police, who said it was ‘provocative’. Prayers now took place in homes or else a small madrasa, a religious school a couple of doors from the mosque. The Organisation for the Protection of Race and Religion had now demanded the prayers stop altogether, because that was provocative too. Today they were coming to enforce their demand.
The Muslims of Thaketa Township had always regarded themselves as first and foremost Burmese. Most were not particularly devout. They went to Burmese schools, had Burmese friends. Most had been in Myanmar for generations. They heard about the barbarity in the remote areas of the country bordering Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of Muslims forced from their homes and expelled across the border, but still they thought Thaketa was safe. That it would never happen to them.
The intimidation and attacks in Thaketa Township were sporadic at first, but then grew in intensity. Buddhist friends and neighbours stopped talking to them and then grew openly hostile. Shops stopped serving them. Children were expelled from school; their parents sacked from their jobs. But it was the hatred on social media that frightened them most. Community leaders had seen the angry calls to protest that day and many people had fled from the Township. They’d called on the police for protection, but the police had left. The more defiant among them gathered in the madrasa, where they waited and prayed.
Ko Win watched as the first of the open-back trucks approached the madrasa. Crowds of mostly young men spilled onto the street. Most wore traditional Burmese longyis. Some were bare-chested; others wore T-shirts with baseball caps. They made no attempt to disguise themselves.
They carried rocks and sticks. He saw the flash of a knife. He estimated the mob was at least two hundred strong. He stepped out of the doorway and began to take photographs. Then a bit of video. Alternating between the two. He knew from experience that a mob could be unpredictable. He felt their nervous tension as they closed in on the religious school. As individuals they were cowards; as a mob they were deadly. It usually took a trigger, a spark to start them off, and it was always hard to predict where that would come from.
Then a group of monks came to the front of the mob and started shouting at the madrasa through a megaphone. The sound was distorted and it was hard to hear clearly. The monks were carrying sticks. Except the one with the megaphone; he held a long machete-like knife, partially concealed under his flowing robe.
A man appeared from the madrasa. A Muslim religious leader, an imam. He appealed for calm, inviting the monks inside to talk. Ko Win videoed him. The imam took a step closer to the monk with the megaphone, holding out his hand. But the monk pulled out the machete and swung wildly. It sliced into the imam’s shoulder, a sharp crack as it shattered the bone, the imam screaming as he fell to the floor, clasping at his gaping wound. Two men ran from the madrasa to help the imam, one of then lunging at the monk, who lost his footing and fell, hitting his head on his megaphone. Then the mob exploded, surging forwards, falling on the two men in a frenzy of sticks and knives, while rocks rained down on the madrasa.
The air was filled with angry chants. The mob parted for a group carrying tins of kerosene, which they splashed on the walls of the building and then poured through the smashed windows. Then came the flames; bottles of kerosene, rags stuffed roughly in their tops, lit and flung inside the building. The fire rapidly took hold. The horrible screams from inside only seemed to encourage the mob, the monks at the forefront, acting like deranged cheerleaders, egging them on.
Ko Win moved quickly amid the mob, cell phone in his hand. He lingered at the monk who had fallen on his megaphone. He had a small cut above his eye and Ko Win worked his camera. Stills and video. Plenty of both. Milking the moment, as the monk displayed suitable agony for the camera.
*****
Police and soldiers arrived with firefighters only after the madrasa and several adjoining buildings were smouldering shells. They escorted the mob back to their trucks, showing due reverence to the monks. Then they gathered up survivors from the fire, the terrified dozen or so who had escaped the flames and then outrun the gauntlet of rocks, sticks and knives. They had taken refuge on the banks of a nearby river. They were told they would be escorted to a refugee camp on the border, for their own safety, and that there would be no time to collect their possessions from their homes, since that would be a provocation.
It took Ko Win half an hour to reach the centre of Yangon and to a newly renovated building on 50th Street, in the heart of the old part of the city. A sign on a balcony two floors up read ‘Digital Futures’. At a door down a side alley, he entered a PIN code and then placed the index finger of his right hand on a fingerprint scanner. The door clicked open. He sat in front of a computer in a ground floor office and transferred the images from his phone. He had uploaded some of the more dramatic images during the journey back, but could now work faster, posting to scores of Facebook and Twitter accounts, together with the story of the Buddhist faithful defending themselves and their religion against an unprovoked attack by Muslim extremists. The Muslim dead and injured, shown in gory detail, became Buddhist dead; the burned-out madrasa became the home of a defenceless Buddhist charity. Then there was the injured monk, lying on the ground where he’d fallen on his megaphone. There were plenty of shots of his bloodied face, the victim of an unprovoked attack, though it took careful editing to remove the machete from his hand. The images went viral almost as soon as he posted them.
Ko Win then transferred onto a memory stick the video of the imam appealing to the monks for calm. That would need more expert work. The foreigners mostly worked on the floor above. A strange group, he thought, who went by unusual nicknames. He found the one who called himself Grom and handed him the memory stick, explaining what was on it.
‘Thanks,’ Grom said. We can have fun with that.’
*****
The fire in Thaketa Township was still burning as the Thai Airways flight descended towards Yangon Airport through a blanket of grey clouds, rain lashing against its windows. It shuddered and bounced as it made its final approach just to the north of the township, where rain had doused the flames but intensified the smoke. The captain radioed ahead to report it.
A woman sitting in the second row of business class was too busy to notice. She was shredding documents by hand, tearing them into tiny pieces and stuffing them into an airline sick-bag. The documents carried the logo of the United Nations.
‘Some things in Burma haven’t changed,’ she said to the man beside her, by way of an explanation, seeing him watching her. ‘I don’t want them sniffing through these as we enter the country.’
‘Sorry,’ said Chuck Drayton ‘I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just a slightly unusual way to use a sick-bag. Why would they go through your stuff?’
They’d sat in silence for most of the hour and a half flight from Bangkok, and now the woman tried to squeeze a lengthy explanation into the final minutes before touch down. She told him her name was Margarethe Van Der Beek, and she was a special representative of the UN, monitoring the persecution of Burma’s Muslim minority, the Rohingyas. She used the old name for Myanmar. She said she was based out of a UN regional office in Bangkok, where they’d reverted to paper documents after their computer systems were hacked.
‘They broke into our main server in Bangkok and stole and destroyed files. Brought down our website too. We brought in experts who found spyware on our laptops. Then there’s all the fake news and online hatred. Flooding Facebook and Twitter with the stuff. Scores of fake accounts. Stirring up Buddhist nationalism.’
She said the internet was relatively new to Burma, but was spreading fast, and that to most Burmese Facebook is the internet.
‘What is it they used to say? That social media connects people, is somehow liberating. Not here. It’s spreading hatred like the plague.’
The aircraft hit the runway with a heavy thud, the engines sounding like a badly tuned lawnmower as they went into reverse thrust.
‘They even posted an interview online. Me in a village after an attack, saying Muslims had burned their own homes, burned their own homes, and defending the heroic work of the army. It was shocking.’
‘You never said that?’
‘I never even gave the interview. I was never in the village. How can they even do that?’
‘But you’ve given other interviews. There are publicly available images and recordings of you?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s called a deep fake. They feed what they have of you into a computer, teaching it to imitate your voice and expressions and then generate the speech. They literally put words in your mouth and put you just about any place they want. The more data they have, the better the fake. It takes a lot of computer power and know-how. I’m surprised that’s available, I mean here in Myanmar.’
‘Oh, they’re good. They are good.’
‘Who are they?’
Van Der Beek shrugged. ‘I’m guessing the government. The army. Or somebody working closely with them. Our experts couldn’t say for sure.’
The aircraft came to a standstill. An airbridge edged to the door. Thunder rumbled beyond the windows. The UN woman looked out at several huddled figures, airport workers, the rain pounding off their shiny raincoats and hoods and jumping off the tarmac around their feet. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Never fly in the late afternoon in the rainy season. It’s a golden rule to avoid shredded nerves in the tropics, but one I always break.’
Drayton gave her a business card and asked her to keep in touch.
‘Thank you Andreas,’ she said. You don’t sound German.’ The name on the card was Andreas Fischer, Technical Director of AF Global Digital Solutions. It gave a German cell phone number beside an email address and website.
‘I was raised in America,’ Drayton replied.
He left the aircraft. A nonchalant immigration officer flicked though and then stamped his passport, which was German and also in the name of Fischer. It was the best that Schoenberg could come up with at short notice, though not ideal.
‘We have to get you there as soon as possible,’ Schoenberg had said.
Drayton’s German was passable, he was reasonably fluent in small talk, but was far from being native. Norgaard had created a plausible website for the company and a LinkedIn profile for Fischer.
Walking out of the airport was like opening the door of an oven. Heavy damp heat and then a wall of faces. Men wearing skirt-like wraparounds they called longyis, some smoking long and pungent cigar-like cheroots. Hotel reps with spray-on smiles, always good to see you. Kids working their cell phones. A pair of monks. Anxious, expectant, excited. The faces of the new Myanmar. Several soldiers stood to one side, carrying ancient rifles and timeless scowls.
His taxi was an old and rattling Toyota, a steering wheel on the wrong side, which he shared with a single buzzing and diving mosquito with a voracious appetite and the disappearing skills of a blood-sucking Houdini. Spindly wipers struggled to cope with the rain, which was drumming heavily on the roof of the car. The road was dark and lined with the fuzzy outlines of old colonial-era mansions just visible beyond tall stained walls. Figures huddling under umbrellas. Billboards advertised cell phones. A bank. Beer. All in strange squiggly letters, barely visible through the downpour.
The traffic was quickly snarled up, reduced to a crawl.
Drayton checked his phone for messages from Anna. He’d tried calling her before leaving Berlin. Texting her that he was travelling to the Far East, apologising for what seemed like the millionth time, pleading for her to meet, if only briefly, or at least to respond. He knew he sounded pathetic, desperate even. And guessed she thought that way too, since there was no reply.
His hotel was in one of the old mansions set back from the road. Its driveway had become a lake. A concierge holding an oversized umbrella guided him to a lobby lined with black and white pictures of old Rangoon. The umbrella mostly did its job, but his shoes were soaked by the time he reached the check-in desk, and they squelched as a porter escorted him up a creaking stairway to a second floor room, sparsely furnished and overlooking a garden.
A storm was now raging outside, and the trees below his window swayed violently as they were lashed by the wind and torrential rain. They looked as if they might be ripped from the ground at any moment. The lightning was almost constant, like a flickering light bulb. The thunder came in waves. A deafening boom that shook the windows, as if somebody was firing a cannon from the balcony next door, followed by a deep rumble that seemed to go on for ever.
It was mid-evening. He’d been travelling for twenty-four hours, but he was wide awake, jet-lagged. The hotel bar was decked out in a nautical theme. Ship’s wheels, dive helmets and all manner of brass gauges and levers. There was a piano in the corner and a television tuned to CNN. A familiar headline screamed of more cyber-attacks. This time on airlines, credit card data plundered. ATMs emptied in Asia. A nuclear power station in Japan closed down by ransomware, the same snarling three-headed dog.
He ordered a beer and picked up a local newspaper. A front page report described how Muslims were burning and looting their own homes. It said the army, in spite of its best efforts, found it difficult to stop these acts of self-harm. Elsewhere, watermelon prices were rising, MoMo, an elephant at Mandalay Zoo was celebrating its sixty-fourth birthday, and there’d been a crackdown on drivers, ‘reckless ruffians’ in search of cheap thrills.
He drank a silent toast to reckless ruffians, cradling his drink, replaying in his mind his last conversation with Wolfgang Schoenberg. ‘The police believe Neo took his own life. That nobody else was involved. We have to assume otherwise.’
It was a chilling assumption. It meant Neo was working with Cerberus and had been eliminated before he could talk, that somebody had tipped off the three-headed dog. And the only people who knew they were onto Neo, apart from Drayton and his small team, were the Cardinals – Ric Cullen, Igor Strykov and Wang Yang.
Drayton opened his laptop, logged in to an email account and wrote a brief note saying he had arrived, which he saved to drafts. Schoenberg, Milo and Norgaard shared the password and login to the account and would pick up the message from the draft folder. ‘Never send the message. If it’s not transmitted it can’t be intercepted,’ Schoenberg had said. He was adamant, ‘This must be the only way we communicate.’
The Berlin Group’s digital dead letter box.
Voice calls were emergency only, their identifying ringtone being The Pink Panther theme tune. Perhaps Schoenberg did have a sense of humour after all. Though it was more likely Norgaard who’d come up with that one.
A message from Milo contained rambling lists of names. Razor, Dim sum, Bubblegum, Tox, Phreak, Fisheye, Ghoul, Grom, Punch. Then there was a Batman and a Robin, an Archduke, Troy, Truck and a Dread. Next came Slimeball, Shark Toad and Stonefish. They were nicknames, the online handles of hackers. Milo had trawled through the logs of the dark web forums and chatrooms used most often by Neo, and these were the names that kept recurring during his eighteen-month journey from a terraced house in North London to East Europe, the Far East and his grisly death in Berlin. ‘Could be that several are used by the same hacker,’ Milo wrote. ‘Can’t say for sure. Lots of them. Neo was busy. Trying to narrow it down.’
