The Canton Connection (22 page)

Ten minutes later, Jake saw Eric Li motioning to them from the front door of the building beside his house.

Simon Wu stood
in the shadows glowering at Stacy.

“You ready for this?” Jake asked
her.

She took a deep breath and nodded.

Together they crossed a grassy field. Even from that distance, Jake could see the glow of computer screens within the office.

Li led them inside.
“So here is where you’ll be working.” He pulled out a desk chair in front of several computer terminals.

Simon Wu’s interest seemed piqued.

Stacy nodded as she absorbed all the details of the setup.

Jake could only identify the basics. One computer had a sign above it that read .COM. Several computers next to that were labeled ASHBURN, HONG KONG, FRANKFURT and NEW YORK.

“There you go,” Li said. “Type in the password, and you’ve got complete access to the A root server.”

“Just like back in Virginia,” she said.

“Just like back in Virginia,” Li confirmed.

Simon
Wu stepped forward and cracked a smile as he read the lines of code on the screens.

“Why not take a seat?” Li
suggested to Wu.

Wu slipped into the main chair and pulled the various keyboards to within reach.

Li turned grandly to Stacy and rubbed his hands together. “I guess now’s the time,” he said.

Jake never thought that she would tell Wu the password. And her hesitation bore that out. Certainly, she could no longer trust a man who was poised to take over the internet on her command.

For the first time in a long while, Jake felt proud of her. She was standing up for her country, her fellow man. Nothing would stand between her and her patriotic duty to protect all that she felt sacred.

“The password is ‘Honeypot,’” she said.

What? Jake was confused.

Wu pounced on the nearest keyboard and began typing.

What the hell…? Jake stared at the scene in amazement. Stacy had just given away the store. The big store.

Her expression was unchanged. Her eyes were still clear. Her smile never left her lips.

At once, things began to happen. All the screens surrounding Wu sprang to life. The code was spreading around the internet, and the screens reported the changes.

They heard a whoop in back of the room. Voices were filled with excitement.

The tone was not worried or upset. Rather, it was joyous. The programmers sounded like convicts who had just been released from prison.

Given the keys to the internet, they began running the programs they had developed for that very moment.

“We’ve got Barclays Group,” one man shouted.

“Just got Aramco.”

“Deutsche bank is ours.”

“Hello, HSBC. I’m home.”

“We’re into Royal Dutch Shell.”

“We own Wal-Mart.”

Like burglaries happening all over the internet, their routines were breaking into banks and corporations all over the world.

Stacy’s bright eyes slid toward Jake. It wasn’t a haughty look. It was a cue for action.

It was a small glance, but it told Jake volumes. She trusted him. She knew he would save the day.

Jake hated to do it. But it was necessary.

He slipped one hand into his coat pocket for Wu’s phone and his other hand reached for his pistol.

“You can stop right there, Simon,” he said coolly.

Wu turned and saw the weapon. A look of confusion crossed his face, then he jerked around, knocking a keyboard askew, and reached for his shoulder holster.

The single bullet Jake fired into Wu’s chest brought all human activity in the room to a halt.

The sound reverberated off the walls, and Wu’s body thudded on his keyboard. He was dead.

Jake speed-dialed the number Bill Brewster had given him.

He looked up to see Li holding a snub-nosed handgun to Stacy’s head.

“Easy, Li. You shoot her and I shoot you.”

Stacy winced under Li’s grip around her throat, and her eyes glanced at the muzzle against her temple. “Jake!”

The line picked up, but there was no answer.

“Now,” Jake said into the phone.

He had only experienced one earthquake in his life. It had struck in central Virginia and
destroyed property all the way into West Virginia, shook people in Maryland for half a minute and severely damaged the Washington Monument.

This tremor was more abrupt, but equally devastating. The floor moved beneath his feet with a single thrust. His knees buckled, and he ended up on all fours.

Wu’s chair flipped out from under his limp body and shot across the room. Computer monitors hopped several inches in the air and came down hard.

But then the jolt was over, and there were no aftershocks.

Li was sprawled back against a computer, a stunned look on his face. Stacy lay prone on the floor, moaning beside Li’s handgun.

Li’s face brightened, and he leaped for the gun.

So Jake turned his pistol on him and pulled the trigger.

Li jerked backward under the impact and remained tottering for a moment. He gave a startled look at the blood on his chest, then up at Jake. “Why?” he asked.

“I didn’t want your damned castle,” Jake said.

Incredulity
remained fixed on Li’s face as he fell in a heap.

“Come with me,” Jake told Stacy, and holstered his pistol. He tried to pull her to her feet.
That only increased her moaning.

“Where are you hurt?”

There was no response.

He had no time to play doctor. He could hear the wall of water approaching.

They had to reach higher ground.

So he bent down
and picked her up. Her arms flopped uselessly, and she couldn’t hold onto him.

The door was twenty feet away and the room was full of programmers screaming hysterically. They might have earned millions
in the past minute, but all that was about to be swept away.

“Open the door,” Jake shouted, and pulled his gun on the nearest multimillionaire.

The ground trembled from the onrush of water in the nearby lake.

There would be no way to jump over, duck under or outrun the wall of water because of the enormous power behind it.

The door swung open, and Jake hoisted Stacy onto his shoulders.

She clung feebly to his shirt and he was able to step over Li’s body and out the door.

He expected the programmers to flee the low-lying ground with him, but incredibly they stayed inside.

Between their lives and their newfound wealth, they chose their wealth.

Jake built up momentum and his feet flew across the grass. The slope increased with each step, and soon the going was hard.

But his heart drove him to move faster than ever.

He had just reached a grove of palm trees when the mighty wave roared in his ears. He didn’t look, and only heard the terrible crash as it powered through the buildings. Vegetation and debris smashed into the trees behind him.

Water lapping at his heels, he ran through the palms. He wouldn’t stop there.

Soon he was onto the access road and followed it toward Li’s chateau.

A Ferrari convertible sat in the driveway with a pearl necklace dangling from the ignition.

He leaned Stacy up against the car in order to open the door. Then he saw why she was only semi-conscious and unresponsive. She had a long bruise across her forehead. The skin wasn’t broken, but there was a scary indent the width of her face.

He set her gently in the passenger’s seat and sloshed around to the driver’s side.

He jumped into the car. The engine started immediately and he threw the transmission into reverse.

He backed uphill at full speed and pulled onto
the access road that circled the scene of devastation below. More branches smashed into the windows of the chateau and office buildings where the programmers toiled away.

The water behind the wave never formed a trough. Instead, it was a bigger wave. This one swept closer to Jake, with fallen trees splintering as they hit the pavement.

He watched flooding water creep across the road.

He spun the car around and faced uphill. The road out of the compound led, of all places, back toward the dam that had just burst. The road rose ever so slightly, and Jake was able to avoid the water that crept up
behind him.

Driving at full speed, he got a good look at the destroyed dam. The breach was in the center of the dam, but the weight of the entire upper lake had crumbled away at the hole, making it larger by the second.

The lake flowed through the breach like someone pouring water from a bucket. All the recent rain must have filled both the upper lake and Li’s lake to capacity, because the quantity of water seemed endless.

He paused and took in the scene before driving away. Down at the far end of Li’s lake, he could see that the dam was holding twice
its normal capacity. The floodwater would go nowhere but up and would completely inundate the access road.

Upstream, the breach was deeper than the upper lake. The entire lake would drain into Li’s lake.

The one-story programmer’s offices were already submerged. All he could see were satellite dishes, like giant lily pads, floating on the surface of the lake.

Next to the offices, Li’s chateau was half-submerged and one wall was completely torn away. Jake could see the staff inside frantically scrambling up the staircase for safety.

As for the dream house across the lake, it didn’t stand a chance. It had shifted off its foundation and only the upper half was visible as it floated toward the middle of the lake.

The water at that end of the lake roiled and washed back in Jake’s direction.

A body came floating past. The handsome and placid features looked familiar. It was Eric Li, drifting in restful repose over his submerged dream.

Jake aimed for the guard booth. This was Li’s last defense. How would the soldiers react to Jake driving away?

The iron gate that normally blocked the road was open, and Jake could see onto the main street. That was convenient, but why was the gate open?

He saw a soldier slumped against the fence with a mortal bullet wound to his forehead. He still had an automatic weapon clutched in his hands.

Jake slowed down to inspect the guard booth. A pair of boots lay sprawled out of the door. Blood trickled between the guard’s legs. A gunshot wound to the chest blossomed darkly against his green uniform.

Jake gunned the engine in case Stacy opened her eyes.

He looked at her. Her head rolled back unsupported between the headrest and the door.

He took a ramp up toward the main road, and a man was walking along the shoulder. His frame was large and he had an easy swing to his gait. He wore a pair of sneakers and dark running clothes, an odd sight in the city.

Jake slowed down as he passed and looked at the man’s face.

Just as Jake suspected, he was a Westerner. And Jake could guess who he was.

He pulled up to the man and leaned over Stacy’s seat. “Know Bill Brewster?” he asked.

The man had a strong face that softened into a grin. “Good friend of mine.”

“Need a ride?”

The guy looked at Stacy. “Looks like she needs a hospital.”

Jake nodded.

“My car’s up here,” the man said. “Follow me and we’ll get her
treated.”

The man swung into a quick looking jog, that for Jake would have been an all-out sprint. His white Taurus was parked around the corner under a tree.

Jake waited for him to pull into traffic, then followed his every turn until they reached the hospital.

It wasn’t nice looking at the people
who faced each other across metal trays with needles and thread and small tweezers. Some lay gasping under machines that nobody was attending. Several dripping wet patients were pushed in on gurneys to wait for trauma care.

Stacy didn’t get the best of treatment, either.

But they were all luckier than the lost souls that would be fished out of the lake over the ensuing days.

Two days later, Jake was still reeling from the quick conclusion to the case. He sat in the upper deck of an Airbus 380 and stared through the dawn at the modern face of Guangzhou’s international airport. Thunder emanated from a gray sky.

Hokey Chinese flute and piano music cycled through the same four songs.

His shoulders hit the headrest, as the seat was made for smaller people.

Stacy sat beside him looking through a
China Daily
.

They were heading back to the United States, thanks to the helpful folks at the American consulate.

The demolition guy had a heart of gold, and had personally ushered Jake and Stacy through every step of the process.

The consulate obtained a proper Chinese visa for Jake, no questions asked. They printed a new passport for Stacy, bandaged forehead and all, and gave her back the name: Stacy Stefansson.

They treated her with tenderness, and him with distance and respect.

It was the demo guy who saw them off at the airport.

While the consulate staff ensured that Oscar Walsh’s exhumed remains were delivered into the cargo hold, Jake and Stacy had been given the VIP treatment. It began just inside the terminal doors. A red carpet was laid out there, as well as at the check-in, later in the security line, at the VIP Club, and finally they had stood on the red carpet at the gate.

It had felt like they were walking on rose petals.

A tall young lady pulled Stacy’s carry-on bag onto the airplane and had a word with the cabin crew.

That garnered them two bottles of water and a copy of the
China Daily
before other passengers got their copies.

The woman sitting next to Stacy took it all in without objection. In communist China, apparently it was okay to be elite.

The front-page stories were about health tourism, canceling anniversary events over the Diaoyu Islands, and the government’s rapid reaction to repairing the dam in Guangzhou that had been damaged by a minor tremor, no fatalities reported.

There was no welcoming word from the cockpit. The cabin doors were closed
, and they pushed back from the gate.

There was a low rumble of small, distant wheels. The huge aircraft seemed reluctant to leave the
ground. Then slowly, the wheels separated from the runway. It felt like a tractor was pulling them into the air.

At last, Jake felt free to talk to Stacy. But it was she who turned to him first.

“Why did you have to kill Simon?”

“Why did you give him the password?”

“Okay. Truce,” she said. “Let’s get a few things straight. I’m glad you destroyed Eric Li’s facility. Thank you. You really came through there and helped us all out. Frankly, I didn’t know what would happen. But I had both you and Simon in the room to ensure that Li got caught. And then you carried me out of danger. And I want to thank you for that. All in all, this was a successful trip.”

Jake had to admit that everything she said was true. “We made a good team,” he said.

“So what I want to know is this.” She adjusted her hair to cover her bandaged forehead. “How did you know that Simon Wu was in league with Eric Li?”

Jake relented. He’d go first. “I knew not only because Simon’s fingerprints were on all the murder weapons, but because he had switched his thumbprints in the DOJ database with those of Oscar Walsh.”

“How did he switch the prints?”

“Remember, he had a degree in computer engineering. A forensic team went back and checked when the fingerprint files were updated. Apparently he accessed the database and tried to switch all the fingerprints, but only the thumbprint files updated.”

“You could have stopped him earlier,” she said. “Why did you wait?”

“I could only verify his tampering with the fingerprints the afternoon of the flood. Only after you gave him the password and he unlocked the internet, did I know his true intent. I had to stop him.”

“He was a deputy marshal,” she said. “I trusted him.”

“You weren’t the only one. While you were recovering in Guangzhou, I did some more background checking. It turns out that Simon Wu had contacts in the Triad from his early years living in San Francisco. The gang called on him to look up a former snitch. He checked the Witness Protection Program files and found Han Chu. But as a computer guy, Wu also re
cognized the value of Chu’s company. He must have reported back to Li that Chu had unique access to the internet. I don’t know if Li or Wu suggested you come to China for the final hacking job, or who decided to rub out all the Chinese hackers involved in the encryption coding in the States. But it was Simon who murdered everyone.”

“And Oscar Walsh?” she asked. “Why did he come to China?”

“As you now know, Walsh was head of WITSEC. Once he learned that one of his deputies had gone off the reservation, he came to China to find him.”

“What was he going to do to Simon?”

Jake rubbed the sore spot on the back of his head. “Nothing good.”

“How did you end up on this case?”

“The FBI director is a smart man. He got warnings from Commerce about attempts to breach Level One security at the A root server and learned that you were witness to a murder and put two and two together. He just needed me to find out who was attacking the server.”

“That’s why you interviewed me.”

“Right. Afterword, I started checking around DC, including the NSA. Apparently they got riled and called the FBI director and told him that you were working for the NSA. So the director called to take me off the case. I refused, and he kicked me out of the Bureau.”

“But you stayed on the case.”

“I didn’t think the Bureau was investigating thoroughly or quickly enough. When I wouldn’t stop my investigation, they put out a warrant for my arrest. I made the Most Wanted List.”

“They were going to arrest you?” She turned toward him, a shocked look on her face.

“It was the whole internet I was worried about,” he said.

“Oh, Jake.”

He wasn’t asking for her pity and he didn’t want it.

“How did Wu get on the Most Wanted list?” she asked.

“Well,” Jake said, “the U.S. Marshals Service has their own Fifteen Most Wanted. Once Oscar Walsh learned that Wu was knocking people off, he had Wu put on their wanted list. But it was too late. Wu and I were on our way out of the country. Then Walsh flew to China to get Wu and, I suppose, provide protection for you.”

Stacy sat back and closed her eyes. A federal marshal had died trying to protect her.

Now Jake had some questions. “How did you ever come to suspect Quantum was trying to hack into the A root server? Did you go to the NSA, or did they come to you?”

“Quantum billed itself as a key provider of anti-virus and anti-hacking software specifically to counter the Chinese threat,” she said. “That made them both interesting and suspicious at the same time. So I guess that’s why the NSA recruited me to keep a watchful eye on them."

“What did the NSA require you to do?”

“I reported regularly on contract negotiations with Quantum. I reported on the people I met, including names, business card information, and physical descriptions.”

“So you knew Han Chu?”

She nodded. “Very well. It made me sick that Simon had to kill him.”

“What did you learn about the encryption software?”

“I combed through the code looking for back doors they could use. There were several.”

“Did you report it?”

“I reported it to the NSA, but I modified the code and let it go through to the server.”

“So you wanted to see how far these hackers would go?”

“Not so much that. I was biding my time until I could learn who was behind the hacking. China kept activating more hackers around the U.S. But it was a mystery who was behind the initiative.”

“So you never figured out the Triad connection?”

“Not even close. That was your department.”

Jake still didn’t see her game plan. “How did you end up in China?”

“Eventually it became clear that the hackers wanted me to input the password, and they wanted me there in person so that I didn’t change it.”

“So you obtained a visa.”

“I resisted. I knew that was going too far. They could have done anything with me in China.”

“So the NSA didn’t approve the trip.”

“Are you kidding? They had imposed the travel restriction on me in the first place. I was their U.S. gal. Somebody in China had to handle the rest.”

“But you did go to China.”

Her eyes were misting over. “In the end, I had to.”

“Why?” Jake prodded gently.

“My parents,” she said. “I was getting anonymous phone calls telling me to go to China, and when I refused, they said they’d kill my parents.”

Jake thought back to the lovely couple in West Virginia. “Is that why you went back to Bluefield?”

She nodded. “I wanted to make sure they were safe.”

“…before you hopped on a flight to China.”

She turned away and her voice became choked with emotion. “The first call I made from Beijing was to Bluefield. Just to check on them.”

“And…?”

“They answered the phone and called me ‘Slinky,’ and I knew they were okay.”

Jake sat back to admire her. Until that moment, she had been as cool as ice.

“You did all that? What special training did the NSA give you?”

“None,” she said simply. “I just applied for a job at Verisign and this is what I got.”

She had been a true professional all the way, whether as a programmer or a spy. But there had been so much deception. Everything he had known about her and everything she had told him was a lie.

She would always be a stranger to him.

She looked cold and tucked her elbows
under her armrests.

He reached down and took her hand.

It was cold, but she didn’t resist.

He drew the back of her hand to his lips and closed his eyes. It felt like the night she had kissed him in the parking lot. It gave him the same wonderful feeling.

The cabin was quiet except for the gentle hum of the engines.

When he opened his eyes, the cabin lights were dimmed and Stacy had turned to face him.

He was swallowed up by those amazing eyes.

“Do you think I wanted to hurt you?” she said.

He shook his head.

She was a good person with only the
best motives. His mother would love her. She was highly skilled and a dedicated worker. She just had the wrong job.

“You were only being professional,” he said. “And patriotic.”

“But it hurt you. Didn’t it.”

“It took its toll.”

“You understand that I couldn’t give anything away.”

“
I know. We were working at cross purposes. You needed me in China, but you couldn’t tell me why. And I thought you were the key to a case that I just couldn’t solve.”

She took his hand in hers. Her touch was warming up ever so slightly.

“When did you begin to suspect me?”

“Always, and never. You were goo
d,” he said. “I can’t shake the feeling that both of us were manipulated the whole way.”

She
smiled softly. Tears glittered in her eyes.

“So you don’t think badly of me
?”

He leaned over the armrest and planted a kiss on her lips. She didn’t respond at first, as if unprepared.

He pulled back and looked at her. Her eyes were shining.

She leaned forward and took his face in her hands. Her touch was gentle
. She pressed her lips firmly against his.

As in the past, she had taken control. And as
before, he went with it.

She ended with a small laugh. She lowered her head with a grin.

“What is it, Slinky?” he said.

She looked at him squarely with a wry smile. “We were good. Weren’t we?”

He caught her use of the past tense. He was about to object when he saw her staring out the window.

The coastline of China was slipping away behind them.