Zero Days, page 32
Like a presiding judge, Schoenberg brought the table to order and began his summing-up.
‘Dmitry Gerasimov and Ken Tsang are dead. We’ve shared the code book and technical details of the Cerberus zero day with the chip maker and with those attacked by it. As for Ric Cullen, Wang Yang and Igor Strykov, I think their careers are probably over. Cullen faces some uncomfortable questions in Washington. He’s facing criminal charges over the hospital. My one big disappointment is Efren Bell. There may of course be something on this,’ he said, tapping Drayton’s memory stick. ‘And we have a record of the cryptocurrency payments in and out of Dmitry’s wallet, with Milo matching names where he can. But he does seem to have got away.’
‘Not completely,’ said Drayton, passing along the table a copy of that day’s International New York Times, a picture of Bell on the front under the headline, ‘Tech tycoon faces antiquity smuggling probe’.
‘Antiquities?’ said Norgaard.
‘Old stuff, you mean?’ said Milo.
‘Yeah, Milo. Even older than last year’s iPhone.’
Schoenberg looked at the newspaper. ‘It says he’s being investigated for receiving stolen Buddhist artefacts from Myanmar. They’ve seized as evidence a twelfth century inscription stone from his Berlin villa.’
They all looked at Drayton.
‘Dmitry was testing his zero day on Professor Pendleton, the archaeologist, holding him hostage through his pacemaker. But he was also forcing him to steal some particularly valuable artefacts, some for Bell, and none more rare than that stone, which Bell had always wanted. Well, it seems as if the professor had the last laugh. The inscription below the head was written in ancient Burmese languages. Pendleton knew that language and added a few words of his own saying, “This head has been stolen and the owner is a thief.” The Berlin police were tipped off by Pendleton’s Burmese assistant, who also provided them with a full translation.’
‘This assistant,’ Vika said, ‘he’s not the same person that dabbles in computer code by any chance?’
Drayton didn’t answer, just smiled, and then Milo said, ‘I mean, doing the guy for stealing this old stuff still seems petty after what he’s done.’
‘They take antiquity smuggling seriously in Germany,’ Schoenberg said.
‘And anyway,’ said Norgaard. ‘Think of Al Capone. They got him for tax evasion.’
‘I think his Digital Pagoda Fund is dead after this,’ said Schoenberg. ‘Investors will run for the hills.’
Vika stood to leave. A hand briefly on Drayton’s shoulder. A few whispered words in her father’s ear, a kiss on his forehead, and then to nobody in particular, ‘See you guys around.’
Bret followed her out, saying he felt the need to kick the shit out of some punchbags. Then Raymond, saying he had work to do in Hong Kong. When Drayton looked back across the table, he saw that Thomas had already left.
That left Schoenberg, Milo, Norgaard and Drayton.
Schoenberg said the Berlin Group was back in business and with more work to do than ever. ‘I need you all.’
‘Let me think about that,’ Drayton said, standing to leave, shaking Schoenberg’s hand. High-fives with Milo and Norgaard. ‘I might just go offline for a while.’
Then he sat back down beside Schoenberg. ‘There’s something that’s been niggling me, Wolfgang. When you first rang me, to bring me to Berlin, you were already working with Vika and Thomas. They were feeding you information about Dmitry. But then Thomas was kidnapped, and Vika disappeared. You feared she was dead. Is that right?’
Schoenberg said nothing, slowly rotating the wine glass in front of him.
‘Isn’t that why you sent me to Myanmar, to find your daughter? To find Vika. You were communicating with her throughout our little travels, after she took over the email account. You knew what we were doing. Everything. Then when things got a bit crazy, veered off script, there was one crucial thing you could always rely on, that I had no great loyalty to my old employers, not after I was scapegoated for the hospital attack.’
Schoenberg refilled Drayton’s glass, and topped up his own, his face breaking into the familiar half-smile that gave nothing away.
He raised his glass.
‘Prost. Enjoy your break, Drayton. And keep in touch.’
Drayton walked to the river, where he sat at a scruffy beer bar and ordered a cold bottle. Let the performance begin. That’s what the German had said when they were all gathered at the Chernobyl radar. Perhaps the performance had started a lot earlier than that – when the German first called him in Washington, summoning him to Berlin.
He took out his phone and opened a banking app from which he transferred one thousand dollars to an account in Myanmar. He then sent a message to Tun Zaw.
‘Thanks,’ he wrote. ‘Good job. Your computer course is covered. And some. Stay away from the dark side.’
Tun Zaw replied almost immediately. ‘Need anything else?’ he asked, sounding eager. Then he wrote, ‘Did you ever find our daughter?’
It took Drayton a few moments to remember. That’s how he’d described Vika back in Bagan. ‘Yeah, I found her,’ he replied. ‘She’s off travelling again now. You know, you might even get to meet her. You have a lot in common.’
Then he wiped his phone, drinking another beer as he watched the progress bar as it deleted all his data. When it was finished he walked to the water’s edge and threw the phone in. For a split second, it seemed to hang in the air, twisting and turning, life-like, as if it was struggling, before falling like a stone and hitting the water.
It floated briefly. A pair of seagulls swooped low and then hovered overhead, thinking it might be something tasty or useful. It turned out to be neither, and they quickly flew away.
Drayton walked on. He wasn’t sure where he’d go next. But as his phone sank into the Dnieper, he was reasonably confident that only he would know.
Chapter One
The Cyber Guy
The hotel described itself as an intelligent building, the smartest hotel in Beijing, full of sensors to make stuff happen without pressing buttons, but the way Chuck Drayton saw it, the place was retarded.
He called the front desk, which tracked down the general manager, a German called Wolfgang, and he told Wolfgang they needed to work on the intelligent bit.
“Not just once, three times, man. I was up half the fucking night.” Wolfgang said he was sorry to hear that and he’d be straight up, meeting Drayton five minutes later in the executive lounge on the thirty-fifth floor, where the American was standing beside one of its big windows looking for a view. The first thing he told Wolfgang was that the view sucked. He said that it reminded him of one of those over-priced Chinese landscape paintings they sold in the hotel shop, mountains shrouded in mist. Except the mist was smog, thick smog, pierced here and there by the dark shadows of grey skyscrapers and apartment blocks.
He said he could feel his life expectancy shrinking just looking at it.
Wolfgang ordered coffee and said, yeah, but don’t you think it’s kind of moody, and he apologised again for what he called the hiccups with the technology. He said it was a new hotel and they’d had teething problems with the sensors that were supposed to detect movement in the room and switch stuff on and off.
“There was no movement, Wolfgang. I was asleep,” Drayton said. “Then suddenly the curtains open, the TV and the lights come on. I went to sleep last night thinking I’m in a hotel, then next thing I know I wake on the set of Paranormal Activity. You get what I’m saying?”
Wolfgang said he got what Drayton was saying and apologised again. He said it was definitely a hotel, and offered a complimentary dinner, lunch, drinks – whatever the hotel could do to make things good; Drayton said he’d take the lot. With a final flurry Wolfgang said he would deal with the matter personally, right now, and excused himself to go and find someone to yell at.
The German had sweat dripping down his forehead as he left. He looked stressed, and Drayton suspected his wasn’t the first complaint about the hotel’s IQ.
Drayton made a note in his iPhone, a reminder to speak later to the US Embassy security guys, who’d recently given the place full clearance as safe for American diplomats, and tell them that giving a green light to a hotel with a mind of its own, a forty-floor poltergeist, might not be the way to go.
Then he looked again for the maestro. Where the fuck was he? They’d agreed to meet in the lounge at two and travel together to the concert, scheduled for late afternoon, but it was now nearly a quarter to three.
He found an internal hotel phone and called down to the maestro’s room, but it went straight to voicemail, meaning that the guy was either on the phone or had it on do-not-disturb mode. Maybe he’d taken a nap and overslept, though the maestro didn’t strike Drayton as the type that took naps.
He decided to go and bang on his door, but the maestro’s room was on a different floor to Drayton’s and the smart lift wouldn’t take him there since it wouldn’t accept his smart key to get access to the maestro’s smart floor. And since the smart lift didn’t respond to yelling or to banging on the lift’s smart console, Drayton went back to his room and phoned down again for Wolfgang.
A woman on the front desk said Mr Wolfgang was in a meeting, but she had a message from Mr Abramovich.
“He says he’ll meet you at the concert and that he’s taking the car,” she said, and Drayton said that was just great and could she call him a taxi? The woman said sure, only there weren’t many around right now and the traffic was terrible.
Drayton hung up and opened a taxi-hailing app on his iPhone. He could see taxis. They looked like rows of termites on his screen. Usually it didn’t take long for one to respond, changing colour from white to black when they accepted the fare. Only today the termites weren’t nibbling, stuck in little white clusters.
He refreshed the app, but the termites were still stuck. He could barely make out the road below from the window, but at that moment the smog cleared just enough to see what had paralysed the termites. The receptionist was right. The traffic on the ring road was at a complete standstill.
Maybe the maestro hadn’t travelled too far, and could still turn around, bring the embassy car back and collect him. He picked up the maestro’s business card from his desk: “Alexander Abramovich, composer, conductor and cultural ambassador”. Drayton called the cell phone number on the card, an American number, and after three rings the maestro picked up.
“This is Abramovich.”
“Mr Abramovich, this is Chuck Drayton. I was surprised to hear you left without me. It’s very important we stick together.”
But before Drayton could get to the bit about turning the car around, the maestro interrupted him, saying he’d had to leave earlier than planned because of the traffic, and wasn’t going to be delayed by Drayton’s petty squabbling with the hotel. He said he had a concert to conduct, that this wasn’t just music, it was diplomacy, and that you, Mr Drayton, still had a few things to learn about that.
“And another thing,” the maestro said, “I want my laptop back.”
“Can we talk about that later?” Drayton said, not trusting the telephone line.
“I want it back, Mr Drayton, and you have until tomorrow to return it to me.”
“We still have a few tests.”
“Fuck your tests, Mr Drayton. I want it back. It was nothing. I overreacted. And anyway, I no longer want to pursue it, and I no longer need you. What I’m doing here is too important to be undermined by your cyber stupidity and paranoia.”
Drayton wanted to yell, you were hacked, you moron, and I just hope your pretentious bullshit about cultural diplomacy is being read by somebody who cares more than I do. But the maestro had already hung up.
Drayton decided he’d have to take the metro, and he hated the metro. The nearest station was just around the corner from the hotel. That was the easy bit. When he got there the entrance was packed, and he was swept inside on a human tide, which carried him down two escalators and to a platform on which there was barely room to breathe. The platform had markings, little lanes, for getting off and on the trains, which was encouraging, but meant nothing. As the train approached, the crowd on the platform steeled itself like a team facing off with hated opponents in a grudge football match, and when the doors opened both sides charged. Drayton was carried onto the train by the weight of the crowd behind him.
He’d now almost certainly miss the pre-concert reception at the National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing’s modern egg-shaped arts centre, usually just known as that, the Egg, where Abramovich was performing. Drayton reckoned that at this rate he’d be lucky to get there for the concert itself. Not that he was too bothered, since he found the guy, this maestro, insufferable. He had an ego the size of Tiananmen Square, maybe bigger.
And the loathing was mutual.
The guy’s laptop had been hacked soon after he’d arrived in Beijing, there wasn’t much doubt about that. He’d opened the machine in his hotel room to find it had connected itself to the internet, the cursor roaming around the screen and doing its own thing, like it had a mind of its own. The laptop was hyperventilating, fan whizzing around and doing all sorts of stuff, but without the maestro at the controls.
He was a childhood friend of the US Ambassador, so he’d taken the machine straight to the US Embassy, yelling and ranting, saying the laptop contained sensitive plans, emails and notes as well as semi-finished compositions. The Ambassador said he’d have specialists look over it, do the forensics, look for digital fingerprints. That had calmed the maestro down a little, but still he ranted, like the future of world peace was at stake.
Like it was all the fault of the embassy.
The first thing Drayton did when he was put on the case was to make sure it wasn’t, that nobody at the embassy had been poking around the guy’s data. Abramovich had just been to North Korea, part of a tour that started in Russia and would take him on to Vietnam. The way Drayton saw it, the guy had kept some pretty unsavoury company in Pyongyang and Moscow. But nobody at the embassy put their hand up.
He’d hit it off badly with Abramovich from the start, calling his concerts the Tyrant Tour, thinking he was being funny, making a joke of it. But the maestro had called him an idiot, saying that America had lost the moral authority to lecture anybody about anything. He said he was using music to build bridges. That bridges were needed right now because there was a clown in the White House, a dangerous clown, and that he, Abramovich, was the real American diplomat.
Now, a week later, he and Abramovich could barely stand the sight of each other, and Drayton was seething because thanks to this jerk he was stuck on a train that was beyond crowded, four stops from the Egg, four stops too many as far as Drayton was concerned, the crush getting worse at every station.
He didn’t think he’d ever be able to get off, but salvation came in the form of a bunch of what he took to be students, who’d clearly done the journey before and lined up in a wedge-like formation as the train pulled into Tiananmen West station, the closest to the Egg. Doors opened, and a dozen heads were lowered, shoulders tensed, before the wedge drove its way off the train; at its arrow-like point a lanky kid with his arms outstretched in front of him was holding an iPad to slice through the crowd. Drayton followed in their wake, thinking it was the smartest use of an iPad he’d seen all week.
Only they swept out of the wrong exit for the Egg, and he had to double back against the tide and into another dark corridor, this one lined with posters and with another barely penetrable crowd. Then he found himself face to face with the maestro, or at least a giant poster of the man, looking grim, about to fire up an orchestra, baton in hand, his chin raised, eyes wide open. Which was pretty scary. The caption said, “A Concert for Resilience and Hope”.
Drayton paused for breath under the poster, thinking he could do with both if he was ever going to make it to the hall.
At least the forensic guys still had the maestro’s laptop. Abramovich had started to have second thoughts twenty-four hours after he’d handed it over to the embassy, seduced by all the bullshit receptions, as Drayton saw it, Chinese officials telling him they were honoured. Privileged. That this was a special moment. An historic occasion for Beijing, for China-US relations, for classical music, they’d said, raising a glass. And the maestro lapped it all up, all the fawning, as if it meant something.
Drayton had trailed along, one reception after another. One Chinese official had told him they were excited to have in Beijing America’s greatest living conductor, and a true statesman, performing with a Chinese orchestra for the first time, and Drayton didn’t have the heart to say he’d never heard of Abramovich before the guy had arrived in Beijing.
But it all played to the maestro’s ego, and he’d said to Drayton that maybe he’d made a mistake, that maybe he’d just been tired and nothing really was going on with the cursor and stuff. And anyway, he said, it really wasn’t worth making a fuss over.
Drayton had tried to change the subject, asking Abramovich, “What’s with the Leningrad thing? Why are you playing that? It’s Russian.”
The maestro said that was the point, that music has no boundaries. He said his grandparents on his father’s side were Russian, that he’d inherited a passion for Russian classical music, but it was really all about the message.
“On one level the Leningrad Symphony is about the defence of that great city during the Second World War, Mr Drayton, but Shostakovich saw it essentially as a tribute to human resilience.”
“And this Shostakooooovik, he’s Russian?”
“He’s Russian, Mr Drayton. But if it makes you happier, after the break I’ll be conducting the New World Symphony, written in New York, and a reflection on America. Neil Armstrong took a recording to the moon. Is that American enough for you?”
