Silent Assassin (4 page)

C
HAPTER
6

 

M
organ had first been contacted by Zeta Division a few years after he retired from the CIA as an assassin to pursue a normal life. A man who called himself Smith had approached him in the echoing garage under the Boston Common. Smith had extended an invitation into . . . something. Morgan hadn’t known what it was, but it was big, and it was secret. He’d understood that it was some kind of nongovernmental intelligence and Black Ops organization, and that was about it. Morgan had said no at the time, but Smith still left him with a business card. Printed on it had been a phone number and nothing else.

At that time, Morgan had sworn to himself that it was over, that he was out of the life and the business, that he was going to live like a normal person. He was going to focus on what had previously been his cover career dealing in classic cars and live a regular family life in the suburbs with his beautiful wife and his lovely daughter. But as it usually went in this game, things were not that simple.

He’d felt an itch, one that grew less manageable every day. In all his years in Black Ops, he had known there were other agencies that operated outside of the purview of the government. As an independent contractor of sorts, Morgan had escaped the tightest scrutiny of the Agency, but his actions were still tightly controlled and subject to rules upon rules. He had always thought of all the good he could do, everything he could accomplish, if he were working with an independent group, not beholden to Washington bureaucrats. And now, here it was, an invitation into that world.

He tried to ignore the business card. He kept it in a closed drawer in his home office, and did his best to convince himself that his day-to-day responsibilities as a father, husband, and car broker were enough. But the card proved a constant prickle in his brain. It kept him up at night. He would frequently take it out of the drawer just to stare at the rich creamy stock, the fine classic typeface, and those tantalizing numbers. Telling himself it was just a matter of healthy caution, he went down to Boston to look for the surveillance footage from the parking garage that day—only to find that all of the video that might have shown him something useful was mysteriously missing. Nobody seemed to be able to tell him why or how it had disappeared. And Morgan was left without a lead.

Finally, one afternoon when his wife, Jenny, who was an interior decorator, had an appointment with a client and his daughter, Alex, was out for a run, he gave in to his curiosity. He sat at his mahogany desk and lay the card out carefully—which was unnecessary, as he had, since receiving it, memorized the ten digits backward and forward—and then set the phone beside it. He took a deep breath, picked up the receiver, and dialed. He listened expectantly, but all he heard was a series of pulses, and then the line went dead.

Morgan set the receiver down. He’d known better than to think he would get a perky receptionist asking him where to direct his call, but he wondered if and how they would make contact now. He was slightly worried that the line was no longer in service, and that he had missed his window of opportunity.

That fear was put to rest the next day, during his morning run. He had dropped off Neika, his German shepherd, at the house after she’d grown too hot and tired, and had decided to keep going. As he turned onto a street perpendicular to his little cul-de-sac, a sleek black Audi pulled up next to him. The car kept pace with Morgan as he ran, and the driver’s window rolled down. Morgan’s fight-or-flight response was about to kick in when he recognized the man. Even with his large dark sunglasses, Morgan knew that precise short dark brown hair and that perfectly inexpressive face. It was a face that had played in his mind and in his dreams many times since he had first seen it. Smith.

“Why don’t you get in, Mr. Morgan?” said Smith. “I think you and I have much to talk about.”

Morgan shuffled scenarios around in his head. A spy getting into a car with a stranger could lead to someone getting killed, even in a sleepy Boston suburb. But sometimes, finding out the truth took risk. He opened the door to the passenger’s seat. The air in the car felt icy as the cold air-conditioning hit Morgan’s sweaty skin. Still, it felt great to come in from the heat, which had abated only a little from the height of the summer. His sweaty shirt clung to the leather seats as he sat down.

“Feel free to adjust the temperature to your liking, Mr. Morgan,” said Smith. He set off along the shady suburban street. “I’m afraid that’s about as much as I can do to set you at ease.”

“I think there’s plenty more you can do,” said Morgan, looking forward, but keeping the corner of his eye firmly fixed on Smith.

“Oh?” Smith asked.

“I have questions.”

“Of course you do,” said Smith. “That’s why you called, after all, isn’t it? It seems like curiosity is at least one weakness of the infamous Cobra.” Morgan’s brow furrowed at the comment. “Well, you know as well as I do that I cannot offer you full disclosure. But I will tell you whatever I can.”

“Oh yeah?” Morgan knew it was never that simple. “What are you getting out of coming down here and answering my questions?”

He looked surprised. “I thought that much was clear. My hope is that you will come to work for us, Mr. Morgan.”

“So this is a kind of job interview, then?”

“Oh, no. We’re very much past that point. I would not be here if I did not already know that I wish you to work for us. There is no point in making you jump through hoops as if you were vying for a position as assistant manager in a pet supply store. No, no. I am here to convince you.”

“All right, I’ll bite,” said Morgan. “You said you have no name. What’s your purpose?”

“We aim to make the world a safer and freer place.”

“What are you, running for president?” said Morgan. “That tells me jack. Are you with the U.S. government? Some kind of international coalition?”

“We are not beholden to the government or anyone else, Mr. Morgan.”

“No oversight?”

“I like to think that we oversee ourselves.”

“And who’s financing this little venture? Who’s calling the shots? And more importantly, who’s benefiting?”

“Our benefactors are of the kind that would rather remain anonymous. As for the benefits . . . we all benefit, Mr. Morgan. But I am aware you cannot take my word for it, and neither will you trust me when I say that our interests are—I won’t say
pure
, but we are the good guys, Mr. Morgan. Among those who determine our mission are some names you would certainly recognize, and some you would not.” Morgan had some idea, but remained silent. “Of course, I cannot name any of them for you. But what I can tell you is that there is a balance of interests. We have no interest in playing favorites. Just that which makes us all richer. Peace. Prosperity. Freedom.”

“How about truth, justice, and the American way?” Morgan said sarcastically.

“Much in the way that the governmental intelligence and enforcement agencies would consider them, yes.”

“So why not let them take care of it?”

“You cannot leave it all to them, Mr. Morgan. You know that yourself, firsthand. Government agencies are often slow to action, riddled with corruption and petty personal squabbles, and with rewards based on obedience instead of effectiveness. Their work is not without its merit. But their failures can be spectacular.”

“And you?” Morgan asked.

“
We
step in when governments fail.”

Morgan mulled it over, looking out the window at the quiet rows of houses as they drove, with the sun filtering down the bright green canopies of the elms and sycamores. “How am I supposed to take your word for it, Mr. Smith?” He said the obviously fake name pointedly.

“I do see the conundrum, Mr. Morgan. You don’t know me, much less trust me enough to make a judgment like this. You can contact your old resources, but I can guarantee that none of them have heard of me or the people I represent. But perhaps that will not be an insurmountable problem. Perhaps a solution will present itself in good time.”

As he said this, he pulled into the parking lot of a chain drugstore. And the solution did present itself, six-foot-seven, khaki shorts on skinny legs and dark aviators. There, leaning against a Jeep in a parking space, was his old friend and partner, Peter Conley—known, professionally, as Cougar.

“Go on,” said Smith.

Morgan shot the mysterious man one last glance, then left the car. He couldn’t help but smile as he approached his old friend. Conley smiled broadly in return. “I’ve been hoping you would make the call sooner or later,” he said.

“I guess a normal life doesn’t quite suit me,” said Morgan.

“I could’ve told you that,” said Conley. “It gets to you. Something that wants to get out. You can’t keep a cobra down forever.”

Morgan grinned. “Or a cougar, apparently.”

“True enough,” said Conley.

“So, this Smith guy . . .” said Morgan. “This mysterious organization. Is it what he says it is?”

Conley squinted against the sunlight streaming through the trees and said, “As far as I can tell. We fight terrorists, tyrants, and criminals. We do things that the CIA and NSA can’t, or won’t, do. And I always get a choice. The right to refuse any mission.”

That was important. Morgan had always retained that right, even when working for the CIA. He’d never give up his own rights of conscience. “Does it worry you?” said Morgan. “That you’re the hand of an organization, and you don’t know where it keeps its head?”

“Was it different in the Agency?” asked Conley. “Did we ever know why they did what they did? The reason behind their decisions? Did we know that we weren’t supporting someone’s political career more than the American people? We did our best to choose whether or not to accept the mission. But ultimately, we had to trust that it all added up to something. That’s what I do now.”

It wasn’t satisfying, of course. But Conley was right. There was no better guarantee than this. There wasn’t always black and white in international politics, and the further you went into the spy game, the greyer things tended to become.

“Are you glad you’re in?” asked Morgan.

“I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t,” said Conley. His tone turned personal and sincere. “We could really use you, Dan.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Morgan. “That’s all I can promise right now.”

Conley nodded. “Think on it. Meanwhile, want a ride?” he asked, motioning to his Jeep.

“Nah,” said Morgan. “I think I need to take some time to reflect on my own.”

“Give me a call if you want to talk,” said Conley. “You could be doing a lot of good here.”

Morgan had begun to run, planning a long way back to his house. As his feet hit the pavement, he’d tried to keep a level head and weigh this decision carefully. But with the giddy excitement in his gut about his new prospect, it had been hard to think that this was anything but a foregone conclusion.

C
HAPTER
7

 

L
incoln Shepard’s fingers hovered over his keyboard, and he took a deep breath. He was about to set his already considerably high personal bar just a little bit higher.

The name of the thing was Hong Yan. Satellite—Chinese military, top secret, and with a big, deadly high-powered laser strapped on its back. It had been built to swat ballistic missiles right out of the sky, although Shepard had done some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured out that it could probably even take out a target on the ground, provided it moved slowly enough. It was one of the most advanced pieces of technology in the world, the result of a years-long research and development process that was kept tightly under wraps. Its existence had so far evaded the notice of the CIA, the NSA, and MI6. Nobody outside of the People’s Republic was supposed to know it even existed yet.

And he, Lincoln Shepard, was going to hack it.

He was in Zeta Division headquarters, which took up several levels below the parking garage of a skyscraper in downtown Boston. They’d only just moved into the new digs three weeks ago. Shepard wasn’t allowed to see all the facilities in the new headquarters, although it was obviously far too big for just the current members of Zeta. What he had seen was more spacious than any of their temporary sites had been, which meant that Bloch, and whoever else called the shots, had every intention of expanding. Shepard had his own little command center, with a dozen empty workstations waiting to be filled. For himself, he had his own multiple-monitor station connected to enough computing power to control the air traffic for the entire Western hemisphere. In the corner he had his only non-computer requirement for his workspace: a minifridge stocked with energy drinks and a cabinet filled to capacity with snack food. The walls were a nice dark maroon, which were not conducive to a tranquil work environment, but he was fine with that—he found that he worked a lot better when he was perpetually on edge. He already had his
Space Invaders
poster up next to his workspace. It had been rolled up and put away for a while. He had stopped bothering to personalize his space while they had no permanent offices, because they never seemed to stay in one place, and each successive move just made it seem more pointless.

“Walk me through this again, Shep,” came the severe voice of Diana Bloch, who was behind him, hunching over his chair. She was the boss, head honcho at Zeta Division. The one who had interrupted his normal intelligence duties to put him to work on this Chinese satellite. Once the intel had come in on it, dealing with it had become top priority. After all, it was able to render the threat of nuclear strike harmless by making China impossible to hit with ballistic missiles, which would upset the threat of mutually assured destruction in nuclear war. The thing could tilt the balance of power between nations and aggravate international tensions. China would be able to act unilaterally with impunity, and it wasn’t hard to see how far things could devolve from there. Naturally, then, the only answer was to bring it down as discreetly as possible.

They’d had a mole who was feeding them information, that was plain, or else they wouldn’t even know about it in the first place. The most important thing that he’d brought in was a copy of the satellite’s operating system. Bloch had delivered it to Shepard in a hard drive along with his deadline to crack it: two weeks. They couldn’t wait longer and risk the Chinese discovering the mole or changing their security protocols significantly enough to keep them from being able to bring it down. “You’re kidding,” he’d said. But she hadn’t been. Diana Bloch was never anything other than completely serious.

“The target is in Low Earth Orbit,” he was telling her, now, exactly two weeks from the day she had delivered the drive, “fifteen minutes away from flying over the Nevada desert.” The fact that he had made the deadline had surprised even him, but Bloch had that quality of pushing people to do things beyond what they thought they were capable of. Sometimes, he was discovering, it was no more than a matter of expecting more from people. And now, everything was geared to go, and the satellite was about to enter an area thick with military satellite dishes—satellite dishes whose controls Bloch had, somehow, gotten him access to. Zeta wasn’t U.S. military, at least not as far as he knew—its exact nature wasn’t exactly crystal clear, not even to its members. But Shepard could be sure of one thing: they had friends in high places.

“So the satellite dishes are going to cause what’ll look like normal interference,” he said. “But in the meantime, I work my magic. I’ve got everything set up here.” He pointed to the six monitors arranged in a rough semicircle around his chair. There were a few windows open on each monitor, colored code against black, and on the upper right corner of the rightmost one, a red timer counted down from fourteen. “Ready to upload everything as soon as our window of opportunity opens.” He played a drum riff on the desk with his fingers. “This here”—he pointed to a monitor on his left—“is what they see.” The screen was taken up mostly by telemetry data and logs of running subroutines—information being fed to him by the satellite in orbit. “I’m basically cutting them off, and periodically feeding them corrupted data, so that it looks like digital interference. They’ll panic while it’s unreachable, but once it’s clear, and when they don’t see any sign of tampering—”

“
If
they don’t see any sign of tampering,” Bloch interrupted. Shepard could tell she wasn’t going to let anything slide today. He was glad for that, annoying as it was. It always helped to have a second brain working on a problem.

“Who are you talking to, here?” he said, grinning. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. They’ll find no indication we were ever there. And
then
. . .”

“Then, after a reasonable amount of time,” Bloch cut in, “the satellite will suffer a sudden malfunction, its orbit will decay, and it will burn up in the atmosphere.” She pursed her lips and took a deep breath through her nose.

“To a crisp.” Shepard made a gun with his index finger and thumb, and mimed firing it at the screen that was displaying the data from the satellite. She looked at him with mild disapproval.

If there was one word that described Diana Bloch, it was professional. (Some of the other people at Zeta had other, less kind words for her. But while he agreed that she could be a hard-ass, he couldn’t bring himself to have any real animosity toward his boss.) She was, in some ways, the opposite of Lincoln Shepard: terse and somber where he was boisterous and boyish. But they were both meticulous and precise, perfectionists to a fault. That allowed them to work well together.

It had been a strange path for Shepard, the way to this moment. His hacking career before Zeta had been illustrious—no,
meteoric
—and he’d had nowhere to go but up. In high school, as a prank, he had defaced the websites of four Internet security firms. Meanwhile, he’d made money on the side expunging infractions from other students’ permanent records. He’d been a member of a group of hackers who found embarrassing secrets of politicians and made them public. While still in college, for the sheer challenge of it, he’d managed to gain access to an enormous cache of secret CIA files. He’d gotten caught for that last one. In a mostly dark interrogation room, in the middle of an intense grilling by a hairy, sweaty, unfriendly investigator, Diana Bloch appeared to him in her impeccable outfit with her eyes of cold steel. She had laid out the choice before him: he could go to federal prison for ten years and get slapped with a lifetime ban on using a networked computer. Or he could come work for her.

The decision had not been difficult.

The truth was, as Shep had to admit to himself, he was an overgrown kid. It was a by-product of a cushy upbringing and an environment—hacker culture—where arrested development was something approaching the norm. He would regularly stay up days at a time, put off work, drink nothing but highly caffeinated drinks, and eat nothing but junk food. Bloch’s seriousness and authoritarianism, pain in the ass as it might be, supplemented what discipline he lacked. At Zeta, he worked harder and faster than he had ever worked before.

The job also resonated with him on a deeper level. The group of hackers he ran with had this idea of creating mayhem for a good cause: taking down the websites of governments and financial institutions as a form of protest against injustice, and exposing secrets in hacks that, truth be told, were never more than pranks, but which at least held to some ideal of liberty and transparency. However, the futility of those efforts had been getting to him. They had tried to go up against real bad guys once, a Mexican drug cartel. They’d found out the identities of members and even evidence against a corrupt local police chief in a small Mexican city. But once the cartel had gotten wind of what they were doing, his group had received death threats, not only on themselves, but against their families. Then the cartel had vowed to execute innocent people if they continued their campaign. And finally, one of their members had been kidnapped. Realizing that things had gotten too real, that their group didn’t have the muscle to pull off something like this, they’d backed off with their tails between their legs.

But now, Shepard did have the muscle—or at least, Zeta Division did. The tactical team, Conley, and the newest addition, that smartass Morgan. A number of support teams that worked out of God knew where. But Shepard still had his own moments in the sun, even without the help of the brawn. And this was going to be one of them.

“Okay, here we go,” he said, as the numbers on the monitor counted down four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

Shepard hit a couple of keys, a loading bar appeared, completed in a few seconds, and then the clock that had been counting down began counting up.

“Okay,” said Shepard, and set his fingers to the keyboard. “I’m connected to the satellite.” A number of lines of code appeared successively, a list with “OK” appearing successively at the end of each line. “The encryption codes check out. We’re all set here. Running the diagnostics now . . .” He trailed off as he typed. A window popped up, and began to list each item of the diagnostic test he had hacked together himself. Everything seemed to run as expected, until—

“Uh-oh.”

“What is it, Shepard?” asked Bloch, hunching over the back of his chair and staring at the screen.

“Something’s not right,” he said. “It’s not the same.”

“
What is it?
” she insisted.

“The programming on the satellite isn’t the same as the version of the software I was working with. It’s different.” He called up the specifics on the diagnostic report and scanned the lines of code, with the differences highlighted in red.

“What does that mean?” asked Bloch. “How different is it?”

“Key aspects of the program aren’t what I expected them to be. Big things. I expected they’d tweak it, but they have a whole new layer of security and apparently an overhaul of the—”

“I don’t need a lesson, Shepard. What does it mean for the mission? Are you still going to be able to bring this bird down?”

He sighed hesitantly. “I can try. I’ll have to modify the patch I was going to install, and work manually. It’s going to be tight, and risky, but it’s doable. There’s only one caveat. If I do this workaround and fail, they’ll know we were in there, and they’ll be able to trace it back. They won’t have any way of knowing it’s us, but odds are they’ll know it came from the U.S. I can go forward with this, but I need your say-so.”

Bloch stood up straight and crossed her arms. She frowned, deep in thought.

“Boss, I need an answer now,” he said anxiously.

There was the briefest pause in which her face was filled with doubt, but then her expression turned into hard resolve. She said, “Do it.”

He nodded grimly, fingers back on the keyboard. “We’re pushing the boundary of ‘on the fly’ here, I hope you know, but here we go. . . .” He hunched over as he typed. “Decompiling. This isn’t going to be pretty. Actually, it’ll be a damn mess. But at this moment, you should be glad you sprung for the expensive equipment.”

“I hope your complaining isn’t detracting from your focus on the task at hand.”

“What I’m doing is strictly productive bitching, I promise,” he said, without looking up.

He bent down and got to work. Bloch gripped his chair and hunched in so close he could feel her breath on his ear. He knew she understood precisely nothing of what was happening on the screen. But still, she did not move. He couldn’t say he didn’t understand the impulse not to look away.

Decompiling, the first process he was running, was a basic hacking procedure that translated code—essentially, the instructions that tell computers what to do—from the utterly undecipherable computer language of ones and zeroes into programming language that people could manipulate and rewrite. The problem was that original code would always have meaningfully named variables and labels, which would have made understanding it a relatively—the key word being
relatively
—simple process. Decompiling couldn’t rescue any of those, because they didn’t get translated into computer language. This meant that he was going to have to figure out on his own what all the moving parts did, purely from the structure of the program. And even though he had analyzed these programs at length, and knew what each subroutine was meant to do, it would still take a genius to do it in twenty minutes.
Luckily
, Lincoln Shepard thought to himself,
we have one
.

A new window full of text popped up when the decompiling was done. His mind worked at a higher level as he scanned the code newly produced by the decompiler. Things fell into place in his head, moving parts coalescing slowly to form a picture of the whole. With increasing clarity, he saw it. He saw how it worked, and how he was going to make it work for him. He glanced at the clock. Just about six minutes to go. He went to work, applying a scalpel to the code, opening up loopholes in security subroutines, and slowly building the outline of his backdoor. Just a few more lines, and—