Qubit, page 25
“Did you get the emails I sent you? With the zip file attached?”
“Yeah,” said Ray.
Lock gathered himself. They could finally get down to business. “If you unzip those, you’ll find a bunch of intel about Sophie’s location. Terrain, disposition, whatever. There’s even an analysis there of various options for taking the area by force.”
“Yeah, I saw all that. But…Lock. This isn’t going to work.”
Lock’s heart thumped hard. “Why not?”
“I mean, she’s in India.”
“So?” Lock caught himself, realizing he was sounding angry already. “We specifically talked about that possibility.”
“I never claimed I could get her out of India. That’s halfway around the world.”
Lock choked on his frustration. “But you’re Special Forces, right? You’re trained for this kind of thing.”
“Sure. That was a long time ago. And we had the resources of the US Army behind us. Where did you get this stuff, anyway? This looks pretty legit.”
“Never mind about that. It’s definitely legit. What resources do you need?”
“Men. Planes. Jeeps. Supplies. I’d need updated intel. There’s no way for us do surveillance there, I can see that already. We’d be too noticeable. So we’d be going in blind, just off the intel. It’s too risky.”
“I thought you had guys…”
“I do, Lock. Like four or five. Maybe six. But I was thinking she was in a cabin in Petosky or something. Maybe then we’d have had a shot. For something like this, fuck, Lock, they have…I don’t know. In some of the photos it looks like there might be a couple dozen guys guarding that building. Even more in the streets around it. It’s like a fucking compound. And on top of that, you’ve got a bunch of civvies walking around—”
“Ray, please. I—” Lock found himself at a loss for words. “I’m running out of options here. Actually, no, I’m out of options. I’ve got no way to—”
“I’m really sorry, man. But I don’t see how this can work.”
Lock thought for a moment. “If you had the money, can you get the supplies and stuff? You know, like a plane, jeeps, whatever.”
“If we had the money? Probably. I would imagine. We could lease the cargo plane…Dunbar’s got a pilot’s license, although I don’t know if it qualifies him for that. But that’s not really the problem.”
“Just bear with me here, man.”
“All right, all right.”
“Now…did you read the analyst’s report? About the options for taking the area by force?”
“Well, no, I haven’t actually read it yet.”
“One of the options there is a night raid. There’s a small rise to the east of the building. You could engage via sniper fire from there and use the secondary entrance to go in and get her. According to that, you could do it with six to eight men.”
“I’ve got six. Maybe. And that’s extremely risky.”
“I’ll go. Maybe I could—”
“You’d be more of a liability than a help, Lock. Believe me, you don’t have the kind of training this requires.”
“I could be one of the snipers, maybe. The whole idea is to draw attention to the front entrance. I can do that. Hell, I’ll run up to the building with my pants on fire if that’s what it takes—”
“Lock, I hear ya, man, but…we’d still be really pushing it.”
“I’ll pay you well. Double what you would normally make. Triple. I don’t even care. Name your price. You guys could all retire for the rest of your lives.”
“We might not come back to have the rest of our lives, Lock. You do understand that, right? There’s no guarantee we get her out of there, even if we do this.”
“I do understand that, Ray. I do. But…I gotta get her out of there.”
Lock could hear something that sounded like paper crumpling on the other end. It was probably Ray sighing. He couldn’t tell if the former soldier was considering the matter or just exasperated. “Man, they’ve even identified possible landing sites.”
Lock nearly stood up with excitement. “So…you’ll do it?”
“Huh? No, no…sorry. I just meant…Lock, I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t. I would if I could. Hell, I could probably get the guys to do it for free. Well, I mean, we’d need the money for the plane and stuff…but that isn’t the thing. It’s not the money. It’s manpower. I don’t care if some pencil neck thinks you can do that with six men. You’d have to secure that whole fucking building. We’d have to secure our retreat. I’d want…maybe twelve. Minimum.”
Lock closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “Fuck,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.
“Besides, Lock, you know how long it would take to set this up? We’d have to get the plane, the jeeps, we’d need…”
Ray’s voice drifted into the background as the phone slid away from Lock’s ear. He finally pulled it away and stared at it for a moment before hanging up and dropping the phone on the desk. He put his head down, as though he was going to take a nap.
The phone buzzed and Lock lethargically reached out to pick it up. It was Kafka. He brought the phone to his ear. “Hey,” he said.
“Ray just called me. Told me what happened.”
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“And the spy lady can’t help you?”
“They say maybe they can do something, but it’ll take a while.”
“Man.”
“What the fuck have I done, Kafka?”
“Well, you got two options.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m just going through the decision tree. Either you rescue her, or you make a trade.”
Lock sat up. “A trade?”
“Rescue-wise, you’re down to cooperating with the CIA and then hoping they can get her out. Ray’s out of the picture.”
Lock winced. Ray had been the ace up his sleeve, almost since Sophie had first been taken. And now, just like that, it had been played.
“Even if the CIA does something, that could take who knows how long,” Kafka went on.
“You’re not helping.”
“That leaves option two. You make a trade.”
“I don’t have anything to trade.”
“Maybe you gotta take something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, man. Again, I’m just following the decision tree here. They have something you want. Namely, Sophie, of course. There’s only two ways to get her. Either force or leverage. Force, at this point, pretty much means the CIA. Leverage means…well, you gotta somehow create it.”
“I gotta take something.”
“Yeah. Something they value as much as you value Sophie.”
“I mean…there’s the quantum computer.”
“Okay. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“But they’ll just kill her. Or worse.”
“Well, then. Take something bigger. What do they value?”
“Money?”
“Makes sense to me.”
“I just steal money from them? That’s your idea?”
“Like I said, Lock, I’m just following the fucking decision tree. This whole operation is about money, right?”
“Whatever I do, they’ll just hurt Sophie.”
“Not if you can hurt them worse.”
“How would I do that?”
“Jesus, Lock, you’re like the world’s most badass hacker. You built a Wave Nine clone. So hack these motherfuckers into oblivion.”
“You sound like one of these idiots on the fucking news. Like hacking is some sort of magical spell I cast on people. I don’t even know who the fuck I really work for.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “I’m sorry, man,” said Kafka. “That’s all I got.”
The White House, Washington DC
Wednesday, May 9th
7:00 p.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
“What are we hearing out of Singapore?” asked Ryan. He was in yet another meeting room in the White House. The usual suspects were there, the suave white-haired Weintraub and the annoyingly smug Moya. They were joined by the angular, beak-nosed FBI chief, Clinton Honour, and his confused and disheveled-looking CIA counterpart, Reynold Brackenridge.
“My station chief in Singapore is telling me we’re working on the hacker,” said Brackenridge. “But we don’t have confirmation of anything yet.”
Ryan guessed that Brackenridge wasn’t going to last long as Director. He didn’t have the right look. His glasses were too small for his face. His forehead seemed gigantic. And he never seemed to make direct eye contact. How in the world had he made it this far? It was as though some backroom analyst had been accidentally promoted.
“That’s pretty much what you’ve been telling us for two days now,” said Moya icily.
“Well, we’re making progress. We’ve engaged him as a source. He’s still engaged. That’s a very good sign. He hasn’t disengaged. That may not sound like much—”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” said Moya.
“Do we have any reason to think this is even the right guy?” asked Ryan. “I mean, I know he’s our strongest suspect at this point.” Ryan glanced down at the thick file in front of him, which had descriptions of the various efforts underway to find the greenmailer. “But what do we really have? Some guy who hacked into a university and changed his grades? Who happens to be in cahoots with some gangster in Singapore? I mean, basically, that’s what we’ve got, right?”
“Which is why we’re engaging Cairnes,” explained Brackenridge as Moya twisted his mouth into a curlicue. “To get confirmation. And, ideally, some concrete evidence so that we can put an operational plan into action…with confidence.”
“In the meantime,” Ryan reminded everyone, “we’re giving the greenmailer information that could be worth billions. On a daily basis. I’m talking about things known only to maybe a dozen people in the whole world. Interest rate changes. Current accounts deficits. Ratings agency announcements. He’s getting this stuff sometimes before presidents and prime ministers. I’ve got the president of the Bundesbank trying to convince everyone to shut down Wall Street. I can’t emphasize to you gentleman how bad this really is. The amount of money this guy could potentially be accumulating—I mean, at this rate, he could buy Google. Or Apple. Or maybe a small country. When we talk about the money, sometimes it’s abstract. But what we’re really talking about is power. This guy is accumulating real, actionable, dangerous power. Not to mention the risk he poses to our economic institutions.”
“And there’s no way we can do some kind of forensics on the trades he might be making?” asked Brackenridge.
“No. As I explained—we went over this the other day with Clint, but Brack wasn’t here, so I’ll just say this again briefly—he’s very likely using the foreign exchange market. These are private, virtually unregulated contracts—in a market doing trillions of dollars’ worth of trades every day. We’ve worked with the FBI and SEC, and the other members of the G8 have done similar things, to set up alerts for obvious red flags. But I think we have to assume that this guy is sophisticated enough not to make any of these kinds of mistakes. The very fact that he’s operating in the foreign exchange market, that the whole stock market thing was just the setup, suggests he’s not going to make a stupid mistake and red flag himself.”
“So it looks like it comes down to your Singapore operation,” concluded Moya. “And our grade-changing dope dealer from Detroit.”
27
* * *
Singapore Financial District • The (New) Lab
Thursday, May 10th
9:00 a.m. SGT (Singapore Time)
Lock was wide awake before his alarm even went off. He got up, showered, got dressed, and was in the lobby by eight thirty, before either Raj or Sanjay. By eight forty-five, the trio were in a cab, heading to the office. By nine o’clock, when Anand arrived, they were seated in front of their desks. Anand glared at Lock for a moment and then instructed them to harvest more brokerage accounts.
“All I need to do is to set up the traffic filters,” announced Lock after Anand left. “The old ones were routing the traffic to the original lab. But once that’s in place, we can just let it run for a while. So, you know, queue up a movie, Sanjay.”
“Will do,” confirmed Sanjay.
“Such a beautiful machine,” said Raj, staring wistfully at the aluminum box in the corner. “And this is what we use it for?”
Lock put his finger to his lips, reminding Raj that the room was probably bugged. He leaned forward. “What else are we supposed to do?” he whispered, genuinely hoping that Raj had a suggestion.
But Raj merely shrugged, looking forlorn.
“What’s going on, guys?” asked Sanjay, wheeling his chair over.
“Do you know what that machine can do?” Raj asked him.
“Harvest brokerage accounts.”
“Yes. But it can do so much more than that. Imagine being able to predict the weather, to predict floods or hurricanes. Or earthquakes. Imagine being able to unravel the human genome and cure incurable diseases.”
“And there’s the whole machine learning aspect,” added Lock. “Being able to process huge volumes of data quickly, and find the patterns. For things like speech recognition and machine vision.”
“Wow,” said Sanjay. “That’s when the robots will take over.”
“Like in Terminator,” agreed Raj.
Lock felt the impulse to laugh, but it died in his throat.
Naubatpur (Bihar, India) • Rathod Apartment Building
Thursday, May 10th
9:00 a.m. IST (India Standard Time)
Sophie was having another nightmare. She had been kidnapped by some strange men who spoke a strange language. She was their prisoner. They kept her in a small room with no light. They gave her a little blue pill that made her tired and fed her gruel and water every day to keep her alive. She had a small cot to sleep on with a few old, worn blankets. Sometimes they grabbed her and touched her and cursed her.
One day, one of the men removed her clothes in the darkness while she slept and climbed on top of her. He pressed his body against hers and moaned like an animal. She wanted to awaken from the nightmare to stop it, but she could not. He forced her legs apart and she tried to scream, but her throat was so dry she could barely even whisper. She felt him enter her, and she tried to wake up again and again, but she could not.
When he was finished, she lay there in the darkness. The man covered her with a blanket. She tried again to wake up, but she could not.
In the morning, she drank only enough water to swallow the blue pill. She did not eat. She lay down and waited for the blue pill to take effect, waited to wake up from the nightmare.
M Hotel, Singapore
Thursday, May 10th
2:00 p.m. SGT (Singapore Time)
Anand appeared at the hotel entrance and nodded. Another of his men opened the door, and Vipul hopped out of the back seat of the SUV. He walked toward Anand and entered the hotel, ignoring the bellhops asking him if he had any bags. With Anand leading the way, he took the stairs to the mezzanine and walked down a long hallway until he reached the conference room. A square-shouldered man in a jacket was posted outside the room; Anand took a post on the opposite side of the entrance. Vipul walked into the room.
Li Mun sat alone at a large table. Vipul took the chair next to him.
“I’ve received an interesting offer,” began Li Mun in his inimitable, direct yet lugubrious fashion.
“Offer for what?”
“To kill you.”
“Oh, is that all?” Vipul didn’t have to feign his lack of surprise. Just arranging this meeting with Li Mun had been fraught with security considerations. All of which centered around the idea that Li Mun might try to kill him. Which was especially plausible to Vipul, since he had effectively paid Li Mun to kill his own brother.
“The offer was quite generous. In fact, so much so that I’d be a fool not to accept it.”
“Why tell me about it, then?” Vipul thought back to the last time they’d met, at Li Mun’s house. Now that he was the head of the family, things were more complicated.
“It was a little too generous. From an outsider. Sent me a mere woman to make the offer.”
“Ah.” Vipul knew enough about organized crime as a business to know that you could only do business with people you knew and trusted. And who shared your values. That was really the whole point of sticking with family in the first place.
“You’re the devil I know, Vipul. Except…”
“Yes?”
“You’re not. Your father, yes. Your brother, maybe. You…maybe not.”
“I am not so different from my father.”
“Perhaps. But no one ever offered us a small fortune to kill your father and cripple the Rathod family. Even the price you paid us to kill your brother doesn’t compare.”
Vipul realized through his smile that the G8, or one of its various chapters of secret police, must have discovered his identity somehow. He pushed the thought out of his mind. What had Yuan told him? Something about empty minds having no secrets. He said nothing. Li Mun said nothing. Vipul was beginning to wonder if they might sit there all day like that.
At last, Li Mun spoke. “Unknowns put my business at risk. And I’m not sure which is the greater unknown. You or whoever wants you dead.”
“Ah, Li Mun. Perhaps it was only me, taking your measure.”
Li Mun smiled. It was a slow-breaking smile. Vipul marveled at his self-control. Reading him was like trying to read the sunset for clues about what tomorrow would bring.
Vipul tried to consider the matter from Li Mun’s perspective. Li Mun knew that someone was willing to pay him a great deal of money to get rid of Vipul. Which could only mean that Vipul was costing them even more money. Which quite possibly meant that Vipul was taking it. Which meant, finally, that Li Mun might be better off as Vipul’s partner rather than his executioner. That would be far less hassle than killing Vipul and leaving the Rathod family without a leader. Eventually, Li Mun would benefit from the disintegration of the family into two or three small organizations, but in the short term, it would just disrupt business.
