Qubit, page 10
Renaissance Center (Detroit Riverfront) • Patel and Associates, LLC
Wednesday, April 25th
9:00 a.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
Lock involuntarily stepped back as Kirin came out to greet him in the reception area. “Lock!” he proclaimed, his arms spread wide, as though they were old friends. “Come in! Let’s chat.” He held the door to his office open in a gesture of invitation. As Lock walked in, he heard Kirin tell the secretary with the mole to hold all his calls.
Lock sat down on the couch, and Kirin in his throne-like chair. Lock again felt intimidated by the rich surroundings. He wore his typical sweatshirt-and-jeans combo, this time with salt- and mud-stained work boots thanks to all the slush. But he would have felt even sillier wearing slacks and dress shoes.
“Lock, I’m glad you’re here. Are you ready to get back to work?”
Lock nodded, forcing himself to sit up straight. “I have a couple of conditions.”
“Please,” said Kirin, his smile fading in a way that said he was ready to get down to business.
“First, I want another advance. I’m broke.”
“Certainly. I can arrange—”
“Wait. I’m not done. This time…I want a hundred thousand, not ten.”
Kirin sat back and coughed. “You want an advance. Of a hundred thousand dollars.”
“That’s correct. The way I figure it, you owe me two million bucks. So an advance of a hundred grand seems pretty reasonable.”
Kirin stared at him for a moment. Then his eyes narrowed. “I must warn you. The people I work for…they aren’t going to take kindly to this.”
Lock felt his entire body grow tense. “The people you work for?” He suppressed the urge to swallow. “And who is that?”
Kirin leaned back in his chair and smiled with that vague air of condescension that seemed to come naturally to him. “That isn’t your concern. What is your concern is that they aren’t terribly nice people. If you take my meaning.”
“You’re threatening me.”
Kirin chucked. “I’m not, not at all. I’m just explaining the situation.”
Lock decided he was bluffing. He didn’t have the money, and the only way he could get Lock to keep working was to threaten him. “Whatever. But without at least the hundred grand, we’re done.”
Kirin pursed his lips as though he were suppressing the urge to say something more. Finally, he said simply, “And it isn’t you I’d be worried about.”
Lock felt his fists balling up. “What does that mean?”
“I think you know exactly what it means. You have people you care about. My client knows this. It is the kind of thing they make sure to know. Specifically for situations like this.”
Lock took a deep breath. “You stay away from Sophie. She’s got—”
“Lock, Lock, Lock,” objected Kirin, waving his hands. “As I keep saying, I’m not the one you have to worry about. I’m your friend. I’m just—”
“My friend?” spat Lock. “Your trying to cheat me, and now you’re threatening my daughter. What kind of friend—?”
“Cheat you? Lock, I just need you to demonstrate that the computer works in a way that my client can understand. Why are you making this so difficult?”
“A hundred grand advance. That’s what I need. Okay?” Lock stood up. “And if you come near my daughter, if anyone lays a hand on her—” Lock felt a ball of tension rising in his throat, “—I swear to fucking Christ, I’ll kill you.”
9
* * *
Chinese Garden, Singapore
Thursday, April 26th
5:30 a.m. SGT (Singapore Time)
Katya watched a motorized sailboat drifting by on Jurong Lake. “Ong Goh says hello.”
Quartan pretended to be reading a book of Chinese poetry. “That’s nice. How’s he doing?”
“Same as ever.”
“Any news?”
Katya suppressed a smile. “They turned the deputy minister.”
Quartan looked up from the book. “Did they now?”
Despite her best efforts, a flicker of a smile broke through. “Said he couldn’t have done it without me.”
“Well. That’s true enough.” Haruo seemed indifferent, but the inflection of his words suggested something more. That was probably as close as she’d get to a pat on the back from the old spymaster.
The pair sat in silence for a while. A small turtle crawled out of the lake and made its way toward some leafy greenery sprouting up from the shoreline. “What now?” asked Katya.
“I suppose you go stateside.”
Katya wanted to grab him and kiss his smoothly shaven cheek. She forced herself to take a deep breath. “We know the Triad is close to other members of Parliament. We could—”
“I doubt the SPF would need us for that. They have enough now to get warrants if they want.”
“Ah. Right.”
“What about Rathod? You said he was back in town.”
“I’ve got nothing, but Ong Goh says he executed one of his captains.”
Quartan seemed to grunt.
“Does that mean something?” asked Katya.
Quartan lifted his head up from his paper. “Probably not.”
Her finely honed sense for speech patterns flagged Haruo’s denial. “It totally means something. Doesn’t it?”
Quartan turned his head slowly and looked into Katya’s eyes. “Are you shut down on the Li Triad?”
“No, I was—”
“Good. File your reports on the Triad investigation. But stay up on Li Mun and Vipul. For a bit longer.”
“I knew it.” She was surprised to find she wasn’t disappointed. Maybe because she didn’t expect to find anything. Or maybe it was just because she wasn’t going to let anything ruin her triumph. “What does it mean?”
Haruo turned toward her, leaning on one elbow, his book dangling from the opposite hand. “I honestly don’t know, Katya. Probably nothing. It’s a thousand little things. Rathod’s behavior just doesn’t fit the profile of some local gangster. And since we’re already up and running on him, we might as well wait a big longer, until the op is officially terminated.”
“I see.” She thought back to her excitement when she’d first understood why Haruo was interested in Vipul. “He’s taking a big gamble,” she added.
Haruo had returned to his usual pose. “Yes,” he agreed. “What else?”
Katya thought for a moment. “The travel?”
“Yes. Right after his little coup.”
Katya was silent, hoping Haruo might continue.
“Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“Very well.”
Katya stood up and ran her hands down her hips as though smoothing a dress, even though she was wearing track pants.
“You know, Katya,” said Quartan.
“Yes?”
“Probably nothing will come of this. But if something does, I’m sure we can get someone new set up on Vipul Rathod. So you can go back stateside. You’ve earned that.”
“Thank you, Haruo.”
“Like I said, probably nothing.”
“You keep saying that,” Katya laughed.
ψ
Katya sat on her couch with her laptop propped up on her knees and her World’s Greatest Daughter coffee mug on the side table next to her. She’d drawn the blinds to reduce the ambient light while she watched recordings from four different cameras, hoping to find some sign of Vipul’s involvement with the rumored execution of one his men. At the same time, she was flipping through transcripts of phone conversations. She flagged one mentioning Detroit and kept going, wondering as she did so why she wasn’t preparing the reports that might well be her ticket stateside. Her conversation with Haruo had inspired her to find something more concrete that might justify his (and now her own) intuition that Vipul was doing something that might be of interest to the Agency. But why did she care? She’d already done her job.
Two mornings earlier, Vipul and Anand Vaidyanathan—the pair were inseparable—had entered the back of a restaurant in Little India and exited thirty minutes later. She went back and watched the comings and goings more closely, endlessly rewinding and fast-forwarding. There seemed to be one less person leaving than arriving. That could be the execution. But so what? What difference did it make? The SPF already knew about it and there was no clear evidence on the tape—and even if there was, they wouldn’t have been able to use it. She watched Vipul and Anand talking outside the restaurant. It looked as though Vipul was trying to convince Anand of something.
She paused the playback and put aside her laptop. Sighing, she popped up off the couch and hopped over to the window to raise the blinds, turning her head away as the sunlight burst into the room. She stood there, framed in the window, staring glumly at her laptop. She needed to buckle down and file those reports. All this fascination with Vipul was nothing more than procrastination. Filing reports was boring. And maybe she and Haruo were both going a bit stir-crazy after more than two years on a case that even she had to admit had moved more slowly than her introductory poli-sci class at Harvard.
Let’s go home, she decided. She resumed her place on the couch, took a sip of lukewarm coffee, and picked up her laptop. She closed down all the video playback windows and the cell phone transcripts and fired up the special Agency software used for case tracking. As she began typing, she found her mind wandering back to Vipul, and to one question in particular.
What business could he possibly have had in Detroit?
Singapore Financial District • South China Finance Group
Thursday, April 26th
8:30 a.m. SGT (Singapore Time)
Vipul had to fight the urge to scold Mohit for wearing such an annoying plaid shirt. It was a minor, irrelevant detail, he knew. Yet in his head he was already drafting a memo banning plaid shirts. Fifteen meetings in two days—and now this little dweeb was trying to make some kind of fashion statement.
Mohit was a small, thin young man with large black-rimmed glasses. The pair sat in Vipul’s office behind his desk, Mohit having pulled one of the guest chairs around so that they could both look at Vipul’s laptop.
“It’s called public-key encryption,” he was explaining.
“I know what it’s called. I’m asking you what it does. Why are we using it?” Vipul rubbed his eyes, which wanted badly to close, and sometimes did of their own accord. For a split second, he wasn’t sure where he was.
“We can both encrypt and sign the messages you send that way,” continued Mohit.
“I don’t understand. Sign? How can I sign a message? It’s digital, virtual. It’s not a real thing.”
“But it is a real thing. A message decrypted with your public key must have been encrypted with your private key. Which means it must have come from you.”
Vipul groaned. He’d studied this before. He had understood it. But now it was just sounding like gibberish. He took a breath. The hard part—signing up all those brokers—was nearly over. “A message. From me. To someone else.”
“Right. It’s encrypted with your private key—”
“Let me,” interrupted Vipul, raising his hand and closing his eyes again. “I have a public key and a private key.”
“Everyone does.”
Vipul opened his eyes and rolled them back in his head. He glared at Mohit, who shrank in his chair. He cleared his throat. “Everyone knows my public key. That’s why it’s public.”
Mohit pursed his lips.
“Right?” urged Vipul.
Mohit nodded. “Right.” He paused. “That’s what makes it public.”
“That’s what I said. Now. I encrypt the message with my private key. Which no one else but me knows.” It was Vipul’s turn to pause, staring hopefully at Mohit. “Right?”
Mohit nodded again. “Right.”
“And because it’s symmetric key encryption, a message encrypted with my private key can only be decrypted with my public key.”
“Right. Wrong. It’s because it’s asymmetric.”
“That’s what I said.” Vipul took a deep breath. “Okay. So…if someone can decrypt a message with my public key, it must have been encrypted with my private key.”
“Which means it must have come from you,” finished Mohit.
“Unless someone has my key.”
“Well, yes.” Mohit fidgeted slightly.
Vipul rolled his head back and forth, trying to stretch out his neck. He suddenly remembered that he needed Mohit to do his best work. He decided to put him at ease. “We must be careful, then, with these keys?” he prompted, carefully modulating his voice to sound more encouraging.
“Yes. There should only really be two copies.”
“Two?”
“Yes, one on your laptop and then a backup, in case—”
Anand appeared in the doorway. “Vipul?”
“Yes?”
“Can I speak with you for a moment?”
Vipul waved his hand dismissively toward Mohit. “We’ll pick this up later.”
Mohit nodded several times as he tried to turn around, back up, and pull the chair back around in front of Vipul’s desk all at the same time. After three tries, he arrived upon an ordering that afforded him a way out from behind the desk. “Thank you, sir,” he said, backing up toward the door.
Anand came in and sat down. He looked back toward the door to make sure Mohit was gone, then turned to Vipul. “Detroit is still giving us trouble.”
Vipul frowned. He tried to imagine Mohit giving them trouble but couldn’t do it. “How so?”
“He’s stopped working.”
“Why?”
“He wants to get paid.”
Vipul laughed incredulously. “Don’t we all.”
“Kirin wants to know if he should put the contingency plan into effect.”
Vipul rubbed his eyes again. Part of his brain was still stuck on signing digital messages. Encrypting and then decrypting. Public and private keys. He moaned softly. “Contingency plan,” he echoed slowly. “You mean that kid in Vancouver? But I thought—”
“No. Putting the daughter into play.”
Vipul paused, squinting from the effort to remember. “Okay. Right.”
“Yes.”
Vipul opened and closed his eyes several times, trying to get rid of the stinging sensation. He rubbed his chin. He hated doing this to people, using their families against them. It was…undignified. On the other hand, it was better than, say, chopping off people’s fingers or breaking their legs. “I don’t know. It’s Kirin’s call. I’m not on the ground.”
“Very well.”
Vipul felt himself getting irritated again. “I mean, why is he asking me?”
Anand seemed to shrug with his face. “He’s not accustomed to this sort of thing, I would imagine.”
Vipul snorted. “And I am? Jesus. It’s called thinking. Are we sure Detroit won’t go to the police? We’re not on our home turf over there. I’d just as soon we bring him here.”
“As sure as we can be. Kirin’s been having him followed from the start. And of course he did the background check.”
“You know what? Fuck it. Put the daughter in play. Then if we want to move him back here, we can. I’ve got enough on my mind without worrying about some nerd with an attitude.”
“Very well.” Anand stood up. “Should I send Mohit back in?”
“No. He’s given me a headache already.”
Anand headed toward the door.
“But Anand…tell him never to wear that damn shirt in here again.”
West Bloomfield (Detroit) • Sophie's House
Thursday, April 26th
7:45 a.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
It was a beautiful spring morning. Sophie thrilled in the sight of all the green grass, even if it was actually still yellowish, and the warmth in the air, even if it was still cold enough to require a jacket. She ran down the walkway toward the street where Krista’s burgundy salt-stained Sebring had just pulled up. Really, it was her parents’ car, but her mom had been promoted and bought a new car, so they let Krista use the old one as long as she kept her grades up. It was a great stroke of luck, promising a summer full of adventure. She reached the car and pulled open the door, leaning in to throw her backpack in the backseat, only to discover what appeared to be Krista’s legs in the way. “Krista, what are—”
“Get in,” said a man’s voice. “Or we’ll kill your friend.”
Sophie stood up, backpack in hand, and looked into the rear window of the car. She could see Krista’s face, tight with fear. Something flashed in the sunlight.
Her eyes scanned down.
She saw the knife against Krista’s throat.
Sophie didn’t scream. She didn’t breathe. She looked quickly back at the house and then back at the car. The house had never seemed so far away. Slowly, she got in, her knees on the verge of buckling, pulling her backpack up onto her lap.
“Close the door,” said the driver.
Sophie didn’t look at him, but she could smell his cologne, see the hairy knuckles wrapped loosely around the steering wheel, and she could sense his size. She leaned out and pulled the door closed as the world began to tilt sideways. The car pulled slowly away from the curb. She tried to breathe, but she’d forgotten how. She looked up into the rearview mirror and could see the face of the man in the backseat, or at least that part of it that wasn’t covered with sunglasses and a Tiger’s cap. Beyond his face, she could see her home growing smaller and then disappearing around a corner.
10
* * *
Lafayette Park, Detroit • Lock's Apartment
Thursday, April 26th
10:30 a.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
Lock untangled himself from his bed covers. His T-shirt was damp, and he’d slept badly. He ran his fingers through his hair and then grabbed his phone from the nightstand. It was already ten thirty. And he had a missed call. Blocked number. But there was a voice mail.
