The Good Traitor (12 page)

L
ANGLEY

From what Liu had explained in the car, Bright expected to walk into an assemblage of the appropriate people from the China division, who were indeed present in surprising numbers given the hour. But the three figures Bright had not anticipated—though of course he should have; their kind seemed drawn into everything lately—were the pale cyberspecialists sitting along a bank of consoles near the front of the ops center. Just five years earlier, these men had been indistinguishable to Bright, with their matching shiny, indoor complexions and incidental-seeming bodies, soft for their age around the torsos. But as h
e’d
come to depend on them, the
y’d
become easier to identify.

The cyber men worked unfazed through Bright’s entrance. They sat hunched over keypads beneath six-screen arrays, so detached from the hubbub around them that Bright wondered if they were actually working as furiously as they seemed to be, or if they simply lacked the social acumen to engage the other human beings in the room. Bright had long marveled at how, even in the highest-level meetings, the cyber guys never seemed to be able to share in a productive interaction with their colleagues without a few gigaflops of computing power as a go-between.

This combination of disciplines—China and cyberespionage—rendered the presence of the youthful brunette planted at the center of the room inevitable. With her thick-rimmed glasses and one wavy, almond-colored lock descending along a delicate cheekbone, Amy Bristol stood over the main terminal, coaching a technician on what to display on the big screens at the front of the room. She looked up when Bright entered and, straightening slightly, nodded hello, which Bright acknowledged with a moment’s eye contact but did not reciprocate. Bristol had come to the agency as a young doctoral candidate brushing up a thesis on Chinese foreign policy, and in two years sh
e’d
leapfrogged into a senior analyst position by virtue of her superior comprehension of computer networks. In Bright’s time coming up through the agency, you had to luck into some life-threatening fieldwork to get promotions that swift. Now you just had to know how the Internet worked, which everyone under thirty-five seemed to.

A quorum attained, the room settled and Henry Liu signaled for Bristol to begin.

At the click of a small handheld remote, the wall screen filled with the now-familiar text exchange that BLACKFISH had acquired from the smartphone of China’s minister of state security. “The man on the other side of this intercept, called Peng here by the state security minister, is in fact Zhau Linpeng, a high-ranking officer in BYZANTINE CANDOR,” Bristol said. BYZANTINE CANDOR was the name US intelligence agencies had given to Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army, a secret bureau of China’s top cyberwarriors, also known as Advanced Persistent Threat 1. Bright had first incorporated into his job description the tracking of advanced persistent threats, or APTs—highly capable groups intent on targeting sensitive intelligence via cyberespionage—when BYZANTINE CANDOR was discovered back in 2002. Since then, h
e’d
worked with the NSA and private security contractors to uncover a handful of attacks that had targeted the networks of US businesses, media organizations, and the military. Nearly all of those attacks had been designed and executed by Unit 61398 from their headquarters in an unassuming twelve-story building on Shanghai’s outskirts.

A click of Bristol’s remote brought Zhau Linpeng’s photograph onto an adjacent screen. “Zhau’s been having off-campus communications with a Russian national named Anton Kozlov, who goes by Allegro.” Another photograph appeared, this one of a slim, blond-haired young man with sickly white skin. The image was accompanied by a profile that, though incomplete, provided Kozlov’s birth date, which was half a decade earlier than Bright would have guessed from looking at him.

“What did you say he goes by?” Bright asked. He started spelling out the alias printed alongside the photo. “A—one—one—E—”

“A11Egr0,” she said, again pronouncing the word as
Allegro
. “It’s leet, an alternative alphabet that substitutes numbers and other symbols for letters. It’s a hacker thing, one of the ways they set themselves apart.”
Set themselves apart from clueless people like you,
her tone seemed to suggest. “The spelling of a11Egr0 has many variations, but this is the one Kozlov is best known by.”

“I see. Go on.”

“Kozlov studied programming at MIT for three years, but he was expelled for using school computers to hack corporate targets. As you can imagine, that made him virtually unemployable—at least by noncriminal entities—and he was eventually deported after his student visa expired. We think that’s when he became a11Egr0. It’s certainly when he started getting popular in the international hacker community. This business with Zhau is the first time a11Egr0 popped up on our radar, but apparently NSA has been tracking him for years.”

“For years?” Bright said, digesting the data on the big screen. “He’s twenty-five.”

“These hackers are like gymnasts, they peak young. And, as with gymnasts, both Russia and China mine their populations systematically for elite talent.”

“Whereas the US apparently deports them,” Bright noted before moving on. “So what’s a11Egr0 doing in China?”

“We think he was granted asylum there two years ago. At least one of our sources in Moscow says a11Egr0 made enemies with the SVR”—the Russian intelligence agency that replaced the KGB—“after he penetrated some of their most sensitive computer networks. When he fled, he didn’t even try to come back to the States. China took him in. And now—well, this text exchange is interesting. It clearly suggests that the Chinese planned to have someone access Ambassador Rodgers’s plane in Shanghai. And Zhau’s communications with a11Egr0 suggest that a11Egr0 himself was the person they had in mind for that. The thing is, I don’t know if I fully buy a11Egr0 working directly for the Chinese, despite his contact with them. It goes against everything we know about hackers like him—”

“Hold it. I warned you,” Liu said, cutting off Bristol. He turned to the room. “I warned you all. Each of you is here for a very specific reason, and that is to share with us your particular expertise. You are not to speculate on the wider nature of this case. This is a briefing, not a brainstorm.”

“I agree,” Bright said. He and Liu were the only people in the room on the BIGOT list for MIRAGE—that is, they were the only ones cleared to even know about the secret investigation into China’s involvement in the ambassador’s death. To keep their inquiry from becoming widely known, a meeting like this was necessary—a way to siphon, in essence, the knowledge of analysts and other experts without reading them into the case. “But I do have a question about what Ms. Bristol just said.” He turned to her. “If a11Egr0 did in fact have contact with Unit 61398, is there any reason to believe he
isn’t
working for the Chinese?”

“Sure. That’s where this gets interesting,” Bristol said. She gestured at the young man’s picture on the screen. “Hackers generally see it as their duty to keep the Internet free from the control of governments and corporations, and a11Egr0 has always projected himself as the gold standard of those principles. He’s built his reputation on it. We know he’s hacked targets in the US and Russia, and the NSA says they discovered his shadow on a handful of cybercrimes in Europe and Asia—DDoS attacks, corporate espionage, identity theft, that sort of thing. His trademark seems to be zero-day attacks that—”

“Hold on. Zero-day?” It was a term Bright had heard thrown around, and he was annoyed with himself now for not knowing precisely what it referred to.

Aggravatingly, Bristol seemed to enjoy the opportunity to conduct another tutorial. “He chooses targets that have never been hit before and designs viruses and worms that are novel and thus undetectable until after the fact, usually when it’s too late.”

Bright could feel the discourse sinking into a technovacuum. He wanted to make sense of this on the macro level first. “So a11Egr0 gets in over his head playing pranks on the SVR and, with his life in danger, finds a sudden friend in China. Which is problematic, at least for his hacker reputation. But he’s not too idealistic to recognize that turning a few tricks for China is better than the gulag. Is that the theory?” Bright looked around the room. Most of the heads were nodding in agreement.

“That explains a11Egr0’s motivation,” Bristol said. “But not the Chinese’s unusual behavior. A guy like Zhau Linpeng doesn’t usually turn up chattering away about business via text.”

“Zhau is who again?” Bright asked.

“Zhau is ‘Peng’ on those text messages. He’s high up the chain at Unit 61398.”

“Right,” Bright said, remembering. “And the NSA had him making contact with a11Egr0.”

“No, actually,” Bristol said. “The NSA didn’t intercept the intelligence about the meeting between a11Egr0 and Zhau. That particular intel was the agency’s own handiwork. It apparently came from one of your men in the field.”

BLACKFISH?
Bright thought. He glanced up at the string of digital clocks on the wall. It was just after 10:00
AM
in Beijing.

“I need to clear the room. Hank, you can stay.”

Resentment flickered in Bristol’s eyes, but Bright had long since overcome his vulnerability to that. She knew the drill as well as anyone else in the room. Most of everyone’s daily movements throughout the Langley campus, into and out of certain meetings at certain times, were dictated by three words: “Need to know.”

“See if we can get BLACKFISH on the line,” Bright said when the others were gone. He went back to reading the intel the analysts had surfaced on Zhau Linpeng and Anton Kozlov, the Russian hacker known as a11Egr0. US intelligence agencies had unraveled relatively little about BYZANTINE CANDOR, and Bright was far from the foremost expert on the secret PLA unit. But were the Chinese getting sloppy? If so, why? H
e’d
never heard of the Chinese importing Russian espionage talent—they had plenty of their own homegrown stars and were too disciplined to trust foreign nationals, especially those who had worked in intelligence. H
e’d
also never seen people like Zhau Linpeng and Feng Xuri be so careless with their use of texting, even when they believed the content of their messages was safely encrypted. On the other hand, Bright reckoned, there was no encryption that protected what a hooker saw if you left your phone out when you went to take a leak.

In the background he could hear Liu on the phone, running through authentication phrases. A few moments later, BLACKFISH was swearing over the speaker.

“I thought yo
u’d
never call. This is some shit, Lionel.”

“You’re on speaker with me and Hank Liu.”

“Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”

“No. He’s been read into MIRAGE but not half the other shit you’re hip deep in over there. So watch your mouth.”

“Ignorance is bliss, Hank, whoever the hell you are,” BLACKFISH said. “Sweet, forgotten bliss. Get yourself transferred to a station somewhere exotic where nothing happens and no one tells you anything.”

Henry Liu, who had never worked in the field, said nothing. He looked to Bright for some sort of a cue, but Bright was already launching into the purpose of the call.

“We’re connecting some of the dots you’ve given us,” Bright said, both hands planted on the desk so he could lean over the speakerphone. “But I’m not sure I believe the story line that’s emerging. That young Russian you connected to BYZANTINE CANDOR, Kozlov, he apparently has a reputation with computers. He goes by the name a11Egr0 in those circles.” He provided the childish spelling of the hacker’s alias. “But it’s a little out of character for him to make friends with regimes like China’s that censor the Internet. So we’re a little confused about what he’s doing there. We need you to find out if the Chinese were able to turn him. And if so, what do they have him doing?”

“A11Egr0?”

“That’s the name he uses, yes.”

“And how the fuck does he spell it?”

Lionel again spelled out the numbers and letters.

“Christ, Lionel. I know that cyber is supposed to be the sexy new thing right now, but tell me you see the irony in the fact that these geeks are the world’s largest collection of self-made virgins. No offense, Hank. You’re not in cyber, are you?”

“Sorry, sir, that’s classifi—”

“It’s a joke,” Bright said. “Forget it.”

“You think this Russian kid’s in Shanghai?” BLACKFISH asked.

“We don’t know that. But we think he was in Shanghai the day the ambassador’s plane flew out of there. We think a11Egr0 is the guy Uncle Orwell and Peng mentioned in that text exchange.”

From the silence that followed, Bright knew h
e’d
gotten BLACKFISH’s attention. This wasn’t another monotonous fringe op where the goal was to chat up the escort who occasionally slept with a corrupt commie who might eventually end up in the same room with the Chinese president—just so you could report to some analyst in Langley how everyone took their tea. No, this was for real. If BLACKFISH understood correctly, Bright was asking him to track the suspected assassin of an American diplomat. It was the sort of mission men like BLACKFISH had joined the service for.

“I’ll start in Shanghai,” BLACKFISH said. “There must be airport surveillance footage. Your theory is that a11Egr0 planted a bomb on the ambassador’s plane while it was on the ground?”

“Not exactly. Do you know anything about computer viruses?”

“I know a lot about free Internet porn. I don’t use computers for much else. They’re not safe.”

“You’re right about that. I doubt a11Egr0 put explosives on that plane, if he in fact had anything to do with it at all,” Bright said, vocalizing for the first time the theory h
e’d
been developing in his head. “But I think he may have planted a software virus. The guys here call it a logic bomb. Or a zero-day exploit. Or both. I can’t keep all that straight. Whatever it is, it programmed the plane’s computers to bring the thing down.”