Qubit, page 31
“I don’t know how they could have known. I made no report to the state or metro police.”
“Oh, don’t worry, DC,” said one of Lakhani’s men, who had taken a position next to Dinsha and had apparently overheard their conversation. “I took care of that.”
“Took care of what?” asked Lakhani.
“I called it in to Metro when you forgot.”
ψ
Sophie sat up. The two men in the front seat spoke in low voices, looking behind them, past her, and out the back window every few seconds. She figured they were discussing the little blue car that was following them about a hundred yards behind. In any event, they weren’t paying any attention to her, which was the important thing.
This was going to hurt, she knew, but she might not get a chance like it again. She had slowly eased herself over so that she was pressed against the door. She had also managed to unlock it. No one had noticed. All she had to do was open the door and push herself out.
It was the last part she was worried about. She was so weak, she wasn’t sure she could push hard enough to clear the SUV. She pressed against the floor to test herself and hardly moved.
Of course, she could simply wait and hope that the rescue attempt, if that’s what this was, was successful. But the little blue car behind them wasn’t gaining any ground, and they’d left the farmhouse far behind. If she could jump out of the car, they’d have to either leave her, or go back and get her, and then they’d have to deal with whoever was in the blue car. Maybe they’d just decide to leave her. Even if she was retaken, she’d be badly hurt—and maybe she’d simply die from her injuries.
She pressed her feet against the floorboard again and managed to lift herself away from the seat. Was that good enough? She wasn’t sure. There really was only one way to know. She took a deep breath and grabbed the door handle. She began to pull but then lost her nerve. The man in the front passenger seat had turned back again to check on the progress of the blue car. His eyes darted to the door handle. He began yelling.
It was now or never.
Sophie pulled the handle and leaned against the door. She’d forgotten about the wind resistance. Planting her feet and pushing with all her might, she fell into a blue hurricane. Then something hit her entire being so hard her molars buzzed and she was sure she would bounce miles into the sky. She was flying and her mind crackled like a high-voltage wire.
And then everything went gloriously, spectacularly white.
ψ
Rao hit the brakes hard, and the car slid off the concrete onto the gravelly berm. He hadn’t seen exactly where the girl had landed. He opened the car door and began to get out when he saw the SUV turning around. They would kill him, he was sure of it.
He got out of the car and looked across the road. The girl was over there somewhere. He looked back at the SUV, rolling slowly right toward him. He reached into the car and pulled his gun, fumbling with the safety. He looked up again and saw that the SUV had stopped not ten feet in front him, its headlights blinding him.
Rao ducked, turned, and ran into the blackness behind the road. He heard several shots fired behind him before he fell into a tangle of leafy stalks. He looked back and saw two figures illuminated by the headlights. Getting up, he stumbled forward, praying that the darkness gave him cover. He fell again and turned. One of the men aimed at something on the ground with an automatic rifle. He saw the flash of the muzzle and heard the rapid percussion punctuate the still night air.
Rao exhaled in relief. The man was merely shooting out the tires of his car. He saw them assess their work and then walk across the road, away from him. They weren’t coming after him. He lay on his back, catching his breath.
ψ
Dinsha jumped out of the combat unit van as it pulled up to where he saw Rao standing next to the blue Tata, which featured a row of bullet holes along the bottom of the car. “I thought you said it was a shootout?” he asked Rao, still eyeing the bullet holes.
“It was,” stuttered Rao. Dinsha looked up at him. Even in the darkness, Dinsha could see his face was flushed of blood. “I got close, but they took out my tires.”
Dinsha kicked the car door, narrowly missing Rao, and leaving a large dent. He could tell just by looking at him—let alone the ballistics evidence—that Rao was lying. The AC was too frightened to even think clearly, otherwise he’d have realized very quickly that his lie wouldn’t pass muster with Dinsha.
Dinsha turned and gazed into the darkness where the road ahead disappeared.
“I guess you two will be needing a ride back to Patna?” asked Lakhani from behind him.
Dinsha glanced contemptuously at Rao. “No, it’ll just be me, thanks.”
Jurong East, Singapore • Katya's Apartment
Saturday, May 12th
9:00 p.m. SGT (Singapore Time)
“I think I found something.” Lock pushed the undersized office chair back from the desk and angled his body toward Katya. “You know, this is quite literally the most uncomfortable chair I’ve ever sat in. I mean, it’s like they designed it to be uncomfortable. Why else would they have this dip in the back?”
Katya was curled up on her sofa, tablet in hand. She’d been doing some background reading on the Federal Reserve Bank, hoping to gain some insight into Vipul’s greenmailing scheme. “I’m afraid it’s the only one I have.”
Lock grunted, glaring disapprovingly at the back of the chair. “Anyway. I think I found something. Actually, it’s been sitting there the whole time.”
Katya rearranged herself so she was facing him. She found herself fascinated by the rapid, almost microscopic, changes in his facial expressions. She imagined hundreds of gears and wheels and pulleys inside his head, controlled by his facial muscles. “Sounds promising.”
“Well, there are a bunch of servers being accessed via SSH.”
“SSH?”
“Secure shell. Basically, if you’re going to lock down a server, you use SSH to access it. That way, the only way to get into it is if you have a key.”
“A key is like a password?”
“Uh, sort of. Except it’s computer generated to be unguessable. And it uses public-key encryption, which, again, I can’t crack.”
“Even with the quantum computer.”
“Right. Initially, I had ignored the SSH traffic because I was just trying to get access to Vipul’s email. Which, as you know, I did, but the emails were all encrypted with GPG.”
“Which you also can’t crack.”
“Right again. Anyway, we had set up traffic filters on some routers to harvest fresh brokerage accounts, and so I checked our logs for that traffic to see if any of it originated from these SSH boxes. And one of them was creating lots of SMTP traffic.”
Katya was silent for a moment. Lock was clearly expecting her to react. “SMTP?” she prompted.
“Email. One of them is being used for email.” Lock paused again before realizing that Katya needed further explanation. “Which is odd because Vipul doesn’t run his own email servers—they use Gmail for everything.”
“Okay…”
“I thought back to Vipul’s emails. He has a whole bunch of email from addresses that look like random strings. Like they were generated by a computer.”
“The computer that’s being used for email?”
“That was what I wondered. I started looking more closely at the email headers and I noticed—”
“Headers?”
“The to and the from, basically. And there’s some other stuff in there, too, that can help you track down where an email originates from.”
“Okay.”
“I realized Vipul is sending these encrypted emails to a single address, a user named deputy. But he’s receiving them from hundreds of these computer-generated addresses.”
“Interesting…”
“So I looked at the SMTP traffic coming from the one server, and guess what?”
“I have no idea.”
“It was doing the reverse! Sending to the computer-generated addresses and getting email from the deputy address!”
Again, Lock had paused expectantly, but Katya wasn’t sure what he was getting at. She felt her face growing warm with embarrassment. “Which means?”
Lock stood up and began pacing. “Okay. Imagine that you needed to communicate with a lot of people at once. In a secure fashion. One way to do that is you just send them all individual email messages. But if there were a lot of people, that would take too long.”
Katya was eager to show that she knew something about email. “You just put them on a mailing list, right?”
“Except you can’t do that securely because everyone would be sharing keys.”
Apparently, however, she didn’t. “Keys?”
“To encrypt the messages. So instead you write a program that works kind of like a mailing list, with the additional feature that it sends a separate email to each person on the list, using their individual key to encrypt the message.”
Katya found herself paying more attention to Lock’s passionate manner than what he was saying. She’d never seen him like this. “You’re losing me…”
“So there’s no need to share keys. Now…you could put the program on Vipul’s laptop, but then what if the laptop is stolen or the drive crashes or something? So you put it in the cloud, where you can be sure to lock down everything but SSH access, and you can have redundant images of the machine, which would include the public key directories—”
“And you lost me.”
“Sorry. I’m thinking aloud. I guess what I’m saying is…” Lock’s eyes began moving quickly back and forth, as if he were trying to follow the movements of a firefly.
Katya bit her lip.
He sat down at the laptop and slid his chair forward. “Yeah…just…I need to…”
“You can explain it to me later,” she suggested as the laptop’s keyboard began clattering, but Lock didn’t seem to hear her.
ψ
Katya sat up in her bed, suddenly awake. She thought she’d heard voices. She looked at the alarm clock next to her bed. One minute until the alarm would go off. Maybe her body clock had just woken her up.
Except that she heard voices again.
Or was it just a single voice? She turned off the alarm and stumbled out of her bedroom into the living room, wearing a dark-blue T-shirt that said “Princeton” across the front and gray sweatpants. She found Lock still at her desk, and he appeared to be talking to her laptop.
She heard him say “SSH” and “hijack” several times as she made coffee. As she brought him a cup, she saw video of a man’s face projected on the screen. He had thick, unruly black hair and several days’ worth of stubble on his face.
Lock turned to take the cup of coffee. “Thanks,” he said, his voice wearing thin. Katya noticed he was blinking rapidly and kept squeezing his eyes shut at intervals. “Katya, this is Kafka,” he said, pointing at the face on the laptop screen. “Kafka, this is Katya.”
Katya curled up on the couch. “Nice to meet you, Kafka.”
“You too,” said the tinny-sounding voice coming from the laptop.
“You look tired,” she said to Lock.
“I guess…I haven’t really slept…”
“How’s it going? Any luck?”
Lock rubbed his eyes. “Well…”
She took a sip of her coffee and waited for Lock to elaborate.
He guzzled his coffee and seemed to relax a little. “We worked out a way to hijack the deputy server. Which, in theory, would let us read Vipul’s email.”
“Fantastic!”
Kafka jumped in from half a world away. “We’ve been working on it all day. Well, all night for Lock. Lock wrote a modified SSH client that, given the session key, can hijack an existing SSH session.”
Katya scratched her head. “I thought SSH was—”
Lock explained, “We can’t crack it during the initial authentication phase. But after the authentication is finished SSH uses AES, which we can crack, using the Wave Nine.”
“Oh.”
Kafka continued: “And I wrote a script we place on a router that monitors the SSH traffic and then redirects it after the hijacking.”
Katya nodded absently, sipping her coffee. Lock didn’t seem very enthusiastic—he was probably just too tired. “This is good, right?” she asked.
Rubbing the back of his neck, Lock answered, “The problem is what happens after we hijack the session. Whoever initiated the session will assume at first that something went wrong with the network. But if they’re paranoid, and we have to assume that they are, they will check for active sessions and check the logs. That could tip them off that the server’s been compromised. So basically, even though we might be able to get in and out undetected…”
Kafka elaborated, “We have to assume that we can’t. And Lock would be the most logical suspect, because he knows how to make use of the Wave Nine.”
“Which means we have to further assume that I’m putting Sophie in danger by doing this. Anand made it pretty clear to me that if I got out of line, they’d…anyway. And we don’t actually even know for sure what we’re going to find on this box.”
Katya nodded, wishing she was a bit more awake. “So let me see if I understand the situation. We can break into this server, but not without attracting Vipul’s notice. He would logically suspect Lock and use Sophie to punish him.”
Lock stared into space.
“That’s about it,” said Kafka.
Katya frowned and felt herself becoming hollow. She hadn’t mentioned Haruo’s Monday deadline to Lock. She hadn’t particularly been trying to keep it from him, but it wasn’t like he could have been pushing himself any harder. And she hadn’t wanted to scare him off just when they were getting somewhere. She cleared her throat.
“Lock, please don’t get angry…”
Lock’s eyebrows arched in slow motion. “What?”
Katya sat up. “I want you to know this has nothing to do with me. I argued for more time, but it’s—”
“What is it?” snapped Lock.
“Well…I was given a deadline. Of Monday. Basically, tomorrow morning…”
“A deadline for what?”
“I’m trying to tell you. My boss has been working to put a special ops team in place here in Singapore. Meaning, basically, people with military training. Their job will be to terminate Vipul…and possibly you, too. If they do that—”
“So let me get this straight,” interrupted Lock. “The CIA won’t lift a finger to rescue my daughter. But they can put a team in place here to do the one thing that will pretty much guarantee she’ll be killed.”
Katya decided she’d just have to let him process it. “That’s about it.”
Lock stood up and kicked the desk chair over. “Fuck!” he yelled. He buried his face in his hands before sliding them back and into his hair. He turned on Katya. “When the fuck were you going to mention this?”
“I’m sorry, Lock,” she said softly.
“How can you work for people like that?” he spat, his face compressed into an ugly sneer.
She heard Kafka’s voice over the laptop’s speakers. “Lock, take it easy, man. We can debate ethics later. Right now, we need to focus.”
Lock began pacing. Katya wanted to tell him that she was pretty much breaking every rule in the book to help him, to make him understand that she was on his side. Instead, she decided the best thing for the moment was to be quiet.
Kafka spoke up again. “Unless we have another plan, it seems to me we have to push forward, regardless of the risk to Sophie. Because, based on what Katya just told us—”
“What Katya just told us! Katya!” He pointed accusingly at her. “How can I even trust her? How do I know she’s even telling the truth? For all I know, she’s just making that up because she wants those fucking emails so bad.” He turned to face her. “Isn’t that right, Katya? That’s all you want from me. You’ll say anything. You’ll bat your eyes and kiss me and tell me I’m doing the right thing—so long as it suits your purpose! Isn’t that right?”
Katya blinked away tears that she hadn’t even realized were there. She took a breath. “You’re right, Lock. That’s exactly what I’m supposed to do.” She paused. Lock was hovering over her like a guillotine, his chest heaving. “In fact,” she said, her voice going cold, “I have to get ready to go. I have to go meet with my boss. I’m going to tell him that I have you right where I want you.”
Part 6
A Bold Choice
32
* * *
Chinese Garden, Singapore
Sunday, May 13th
6:00 a.m. SGT (Singapore Time)
“I think we’re close to getting the emails,” began Katya, leaning over the railing of the bridge, slightly winded. She’d run over to release some of her frustration, knowing things were about to get even worse.
“You said that yesterday,” objected Haruo, staring impassively at the lake.
Katya leaned against the railing to the bridge, stretching her calf muscles. “We got the emails. But they’re encrypted.”
“So we still have no evidence of Vipul’s involvement, correct?”
“We have Lock’s testimony.”
“I know that.”
“We also got a break. I got a voice mail last night from Ong Goh. Vipul apparently decided to launch a pre-emptive strike against Li Mun. Li Mun reportedly died of gunshot wounds after an attack yesterday morning. Ong Goh believes the Li Triad is sure to go after Vipul now. So we don’t need special ops for that.”
“An attack? What kind of attack?”
“Apparently, they ambushed Li’s crew crossing a bridge.”
“What, they just came out, guns blazing?”
“That’s the impression I got from Ong Goh.”
“In Singapore? Against the Triad? That’s pretty brazen.”
