Hong Kong (25 page)

Jake eared back the hammer one more time, put the pistol against

ong's lips.

"There is no place on this planet you can hide, Mr. Wong. If any harm comes to my wife, I'm declaring war on you."

Then Jake ran. Out the kitchen door, across the dining room as fast as he could scramble toward the sampan dock at the main entrance. He heard Sonny Wong running behind him.

The kitchen exploded with a dull boom.

Rip Buckingham was standing alone on the dock. There were no boats.

The fire came out the kitchen door; the dining room quickly filled with smoke.

Jake said, "Shall we?" to Rip, took a last look at Wong, then dove into the black water. Rip was right behind him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When the van brought Eaton Steinbaugh home after his radiation treatment, his wife, Babs, was waiting by the curb. He felt like hell. Babs helped him inside. He wanted to go to the study and lie down on the couch, and today she let him. Usually she insisted he go to the bedroom and get in bed, but not today.

"You got an E-mail," she told him.

"Did you print it out?" he whispered.

"Don't I always?"

She handed him the sheet of paper. The message was from Hong Kong, somebody in Hong Kong—he had never before seen that E-mail address. The body of the message was a series of letters, arranged as if they were a word. He counted the letters. Twelve of them.

The letters appeared to be a code. And they were, but the code wasn't in the message. The twelve letters
was
the message.

He handed the sheet of paper back to Babs.

"Want to tell me what that means?" she said sharply.

"Within four hours."

"Cole?"

"Yes."

"Really, Steinbaugh, I don't know about you. Sick as you are and

vou're messing in other people's business. All away around the world, in China, no less."

"Umpf."

"They could prosecute you."

"For what?"

"How would I know? Something, that's for sure."

"They already did that," her husband replied. "Years and years ago." When he was twenty he spent two years in a federal penitentiary for hacking into top-secret Pentagon computer files. Of course he was thrown out of the university and ended up never going back. That was over ten years ago.

"Prison didn't teach you a damned thing, obviously," she snapped, and walked out with her head down.

A husband dying of cancer was a heavy load, and he appreciated that. Not much left for Babs to smile about.

Virgil Cole!

It was really happening.

Cole promised him it would. "Have faith," he said. "The time will come."

"I might be dead by then," Eaton Steinbaugh told Cole. He hadn't been diagnosed with cancer then. Maybe it was a premonition.

"Hey, man, the Lord might call us all home before then. Just do your best to make it work when the hour comes."

"They might change the codes. They might change the system."

"If they do, they do. That's life. I don't want you to guarantee anything. Just do the best you can and we'll all live with it, however it turns out."

Babs was sure as hell wrong, he reflected wryly, about what he learned in prison. While doing his time he taught a computer course for the inmates. Every day he had hours alone on the machine, hours in which he was supposed to be preparing lesson plans. He spent most of those hours hacking into networks and databases all over the globe. What he didn't do was tamper with the data that were there, so no one came looking for him. Locked up with nothing to occupy his mind, the hacking kept him sane.

That was then. Today just getting into a network was tougher, and a lot of the security programs had alarms that would reveal the presence

of an unauthorized intruder. System designers finally were waking up to the threat.

But Eaton Steinbaugh had also learned a few things through the years. One was that getting in was a lot easier if you had access to the software and constructed a back door that you could use anytime you wanted.

He became a back door specialist. As soon as he was released from prison he was heavily recruited by software companies. Through the years he took jobs that interested him, and the demand for his skills forced the companies to pay excellent wages. For his own amusement when he designed or worked on networks, he put in a trapdoor for his own use.

He was working for Virgil Cole's company when Cole called him in one day. Cole found one of the back doors, which was the first time anyone ever managed that trick.

That Cole! He was one smart cookie, shrewd and tougher than cold-rolled steel. Steinbaugh had never met a man like him.

Cole didn't fire him. Just told him to do a better job on the back doors or take them out.

He was working for Microsoft when Cole telephoned him eighteen months ago, wanted him to accept a job with Cole's company, which Cole was no longer with, go to China to do some Y2K remediation.

Steinbaugh had always refused Y2K remediations, which he regarded as mind-numbing grunt work, but he did it because Cole asked.

On his way to Beijing he went through Hong Kong and dropped in to see Virgil Cole at the consulate. Cole took him to the best restaurant in town, which was French of course, where they ate a five-star gourmet dinner on white linen in a private alcove and sipped on a two-thousand-dollar bottle of wine.

"You didn't have to do this for me, you know," Eaton Steinbaugh told Virgil Cole.

"I needed an evening out, and you're a good excuse."

They were sipping cognac and sucking on Cuban cigars after dinner when Steinbaugh remarked, "When you stop and reflect, life's contrasts are pretty amazing, aren't they?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I grew up in blue-collar Oakland, Dad worked on road-paving crews, we never had a whole lot. Then I wound up in prison,

u h was a bummer. Since then I've been all over the world, married, a kid, and here I am in Hong Kong having a five-star dinner with billionaire, just like I was somebody. You know?"
C
le laughed. Later Steinbaugh realized that Cole had hoped for this reaction, indeed, had played for it.

"I spent a lifetime working to get here, too," he said. "The low point

mv Hfe was a night in Vietnam. I was a bombardier-navigator on

A-6 Intruder aircraft. One night near the end of the war the gomers

shot us down."

"I didn't know that," Steinbaugh said.

Cole continued: "I remember lying in the jungle with a broken back waiting for the North Vietnamese to find and kill me. I was absolutely certain I had come to the end of the road. And I was wrong." He lifted his glass in a silent toast to Steinbaugh, and drank. Steinbaugh did

likewise.

When he had his glass back on the table, Cole said, "If the Chinese people can get rid of the Communists, who knows, perhaps in the fullness of time they too will have some of the same opportunities that have enriched our lives."

"Yeah," Steinbaugh agreed, for the comment seemed innocuous enough.

"I want your help to make it happen."

Steinbaugh wasn't sure how to answer that.

"I want you to install some of your back doors," Cole said, looking him straight in the eyes.

"Where?"

"On some systems in Beijing. You're going to be working on some systems in the Forbidden City, the Chinese Kremlin. I want you to install back doors so that when the time comes, you can get into those systems and control them, screw them up, or disable them."

"When will the time come?"

"When the revolution starts."

Jesus Christ!" Steinbaugh's eyes got big in surprise. He had sort of suspected that Cole had something on his mind when he asked him to come to see him in Hong Kong on his way to Beijing, but in his wildest imaginings he hadn't envisioned anything like this. "A revolution! Me screwing with government computers to help a revolution—wouldn't that be an act of war or something?"

"I'm no lawyer," Cole said, "but I suspect you're right."

The consul general's cigar had gone out, so he fussed over it, scraped off the ash, and got the thing smoldering again. When he saw that Eaton Steinbaugh was still listening, he went into specifics, some of which were very technical.

Steinbaugh was even more amazed, then he wasn't. Cole didn't do anything by guess or by God. He had thought about this, about what he wanted.

"Cyberwarfare," Steinbaugh said.

"That's right. We must divert the government's attention, confuse them all to hell, make it as difficult as possible for them to figure out what the threat is. That's the first goal. Second, we want to make it difficult for the Communists to respond militarily to the real threat when they figure out what it is. Third, we must deprive them of control over the people, the economy, the course of events. If we can deprive them of the power to make things happen, we will win."

"We?"

"You and me."

"Oh, come on."

"The revolutionaries."

"You're one of them?"

"Yep."

"Goddamn," Steinbaugh said.

Of course he agreed to do it.

Eaton Steinbaugh had pretty well finished the Beijing assignment when he got sick and had to go home to California. He was just thirty-five years old, and the doctors said he had terminal cancer. He mailed Cole a note, told him he'd better hustle the future right along, make it happen soon. Cole knew what he meant.

Now, today, this message arrived.

Within four hours.

One more message to go.

Steinbaugh got up from the couch and turned on the computer. He had set up the E-mail system so it would notify him immediately of any incoming mail.

Babs heard the computer noises and came to the door.

"You're really going to do it, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"You're a damned fool, Eaton. As if you don't have troubles enough, , •
_g
man
about to face the Lord and answer for all you've done, d and good. I don't know how many felonies you're going to commit

now"

"Neither do I. This is sort of fun, huh?"

She shook her head and went back to the kitchen.

Well Babs was Babs. She was a good woman, although she knew absolutely nothing about computers, which were his passion. Truthfully, she didn't know much about men, either, or at least Eaton Steinbaugh__didn't know why he did what he did, made the choices he

made. She thought him a fool for hacking as a young man and for his back doors, which he had made the mistake of mentioning a few years ago when they were talking about how fascinating his work was. Practical and unimaginative as always, she thought him a complete flaming idiot for helping Cole. He knew that, and somehow it didn't matter. She had never had any romance in her soul. Still, he loved her and she loved him, each in their own way, and that was good enough for this life.

When Jake Grafton got back to the consulate with Rip Buckingham, Tiger Cole's office was in an uproar. Even though it was almost midnight the lights were on, the secretary and two hovering aides looked white as ghosts, and Cole was on the phone. Since it was midnight here, it was noon in Washington.

Cole was standing beside the desk holding the telephone to his ear, looking out the window.

Although Jake didn't realize it, Cole was looking straight at the

windows of the office of Third Planet Communications. There was a

man at the window looking this way, but with the lights behind him,

->ole didn't recognize him. Cole hoped the man was Hu Chiang on a

break—Third Planet was going to be a busy place a bit later tonight.

Un the telephone an undersecretary of state was demanding to know what the hell Cole had been up to in Hong Kong. The fax of Grafton's

ter to the National Security Adviser had apparently found its way to
ⁿ
>s desk, and the undersecretary was shouting.

"A gross breach of trust, Cole. Outrageous! I have called the Justice Department. The lawyers there are recommending that the FBI investigate you for a possible treason prosecution. Do you hear me?
Treason^

"I don't know what to say, Mr. Podgorski. I suppose this incident will be an embarrassment to the administration."

"An embarrassment? You suppose? It'll be a nightmare, Cole. How could you? You know the president is on a tightrope over China, and now
this\"

"Darn. What was I thinking? A public discussion of the administration's willingness to deal with tyrants won't win you any friends I fear."

"Public discussion? Is that a threat?"

"You don't think I'm going to plead guilty to some trumped-up political charge or refuse to talk to the press, do you?" Cole asked dryly. "Prosecutions are political acts. I promise you that you will be reading my repeated requests that the administration stand up for the human rights of China's enslaved citizens in
The New Yor/^ Times.
This whole issue is going to get a full, complete, open airing. Perhaps my friends in Congress will decide to hold hearings."