The Ghost Shift (37 page)

“I need an hour,” he said.

They spent it on the terrace. Feng found a bathing suit upstairs and lay on an inflatable raft in the pool, waving her arms in the water, while Lockhart and Mei sat on chairs. Mei scanned the Deep Water Bay beach in the sun with binoculars, watching a couple with kids bouncing in the shallows of the ocean. The technician appeared right on schedule an hour later, tapping on the sliding doors to get everyone’s attention. Feng maneuvered herself to the side of the pool by scooping the water and put on a robe.

By the time she emerged, the sun was setting and she had gotten dressed. She crossed the terrace and sat in front of them.

“Congratulations, Mei.”

“The same chip?” Lockhart said.

“Identical.”

“But you don’t know what it does.” Mei said.

“We do now. We found out while you were inside Long Tan. The NSA sent over a helpful young man to work with us. You met him in Washington, I think. He’s called Joe, or that is what it says in his passport. Not good at eye contact but very clever. We enjoyed the cooperation.”

“We ought to do it again,” Lockhart said.

“Maybe. I shouldn’t tell you this, but you earned it.”

Mei nodded. She didn’t care what they said—it was forgiveness. She had brought herself back from the ghost shift, and they had
stopped talking about Yao, or breaches of discipline, or traveling on a false passport. She was not locked in a PLA camp or Camp Peary. She was at liberty.

“I’ll keep it simple,” Feng said. “Everything sent over the Internet is scrambled so that nobody can read them except the person they’re intended for. Every document, every file. They’re encrypted on the sender’s computer using a number called a public key. The key is exchanged with the other computer to decrypt the message, but it doesn’t matter if the number is intercepted on the way because possessing the public key isn’t enough. You need to know the private keys—the two numbers the computer has multiplied to create it.”

“Can’t you work out the private keys from the public key?” Mei was no cryptographer, but she had factored numbers.

“That’s the clever part of it. The computers use two very large prime numbers for the private keys and it’s extremely hard to factor large primes. It’s impossible, actually, unless you have a very powerful computer and a lot of time—months, perhaps years. As long as you use random prime numbers, it’s safe. The only thing is, they must be random. If someone knows one of them, or even what it might be, they can unscramble the public key and your message. They can unlock everything.”

“And this has something to do with the chip?”

“The encryption is built into the master chip. It generates random primes to create the public key. But if the chip has a security flaw and selects numbers that appear random but actually aren’t, the encryption is breakable. That’s what they call a trapdoor. If somebody has fixed the chip, they can factor the public key easily. It means that nothing on the device is safe. No emails, no documents, nothing. That’s what they’ve done with these tablets. They can read everything on them, anytime they like.”

“You might as well put your emails on a poster and hang it in Tiananmen Square for the tourists,” Lockhart said. “It’s cute. You’re sent your tablet, wrapped in its original box. You think it’s okay because it’s come straight from the factory. It can’t have been tampered with. But they fixed the factory. Think about it. The ability to know
everything that was being said in Zhongnanhai or the West Wing. That would be worth plenty. Worth building a ghost factory for.”

Mei thought of the tablets being packed in boxes, ready to be loaded onto the trucks outside P-1. “Where have they gone?”

“They were gifts to officials, sent anonymously with compliments from Poppy,” said Feng. “We’ve found sixteen with Politburo members, six with the Politburo standing committee, five with PLA generals. Those are the ones we’ve retrieved, but there’s a list of others. It’s spreading.”

“They’ve sent some to the U.S. now,” Lockhart said. “To the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA. The U.S. ambassador to Berlin got one last week. Everyone wants the latest Poppy tablet, and they don’t ask questions.”

“Let’s take a walk,” Feng said.

She led Mei and Lockhart down the stone steps to the exit and walked a hundred yards along the driveway. They stood by a slope covered in trees and bushes, with a set of steel stairs leading down fifty feet to a platform underneath the driveway. Feng descended, holding the handrail, and they followed. They passed knotted banyan trees and ficuses, leaning out over the gorge but rooted on the hillside.

“All the utilities come down here. It’s remarkable,” Feng said.

“Great infrastructure.” Lockhart said.

They halted on the platform, the endpoint for the staircases that reached down into the gorge from the rear of the other properties. In front of them stood a padlocked metal gate with a turquoise sign reading No Unauthorized Entry. It would be easy to ignore the gate and slip over the handrails, Lockhart thought. The path beyond it led through greenery to a property commanding the hillside—a white stucco villa behind a balustrade, half shielded by palm trees.

“That’s Cao Fu’s house,” Feng said.

Mei stepped onto Deep Water Bay Road, wearing a Gucci dress in pink with a dahlia print she’d taken from the closet. Viscose clung to her hips, and the racer back exposed her shoulders. In her twenty-three years, it was the most glamorous thing she’d ever worn.

A mistress’s wardrobe rather than a wife’s, she’d thought as she’d rippled her fingers along the clothes, trying to picture their owner. She was as tall as Mei and had a similar figure. All the hemlines were short, and the shoes stacked in boxes all had high heels. Mei had taken a glossy pink pair to go with the dress and a matching wallet. The owner didn’t do casual. She seemed to spend most of her time going out at night, looking pretty. It wasn’t easy to walk in the shoes, which were half a size too big. Mei fastened the ankle strap tightly, ignoring her bruises. Her heels broke the night’s silence.

She buzzed the entry phone at Cao’s property, stirring a guard from his post. The man opened the gate, looking at her appreciatively, and Mei smiled brightly.

“I’m here to see Cao Fu.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“I know him well. My name is Jiang Jia.”

“Wait here.”

The guard strolled up the driveway, and she looked at the front of the house. Two black Mercedes were parked near the door, a driver waiting in one. She couldn’t see guards, except for the one who was now walking back toward her. He opened the gate to admit her, then
led her to the front door. A maid took her into the hallway, where a middle-aged woman stood, bristling with suspicion.

“What do you want? My husband is busy.”

The woman was dressed in a silk tunic and pants and had a beautiful face—a fine nose and high cheekbones. She’d reached an age at which she didn’t display her legs the way she had done once, and she regarded the pink dress as if Mei were wearing explosives.

“I have to speak to him.”

“You must leave. Now.”

A mahogany door opened onto the hall, and Cao appeared behind his wife in a smoking jacket.

“I’ll handle this.”

His wife whipped around to face him, pointing a finger. “You told me—”

“I said I’d handle it. You—” The guard stiffened. “Come.”

Cao’s study was large and comfortably arranged. Aside from his mahogany desk, it held three sofas, and shelves weighted with books, ornaments, and photographs of him with Hong Kong celebrities and mainland politicians. In one, a young Cao stood by Deng Xiaoping, showing the Great Leader a crude production line in a small factory. It sat on the desk, by a panorama of the concourse at Long Tan, lined with workers applauding. Sliding doors looked onto the monumental terrace.

“I’m surprised to see you here, Miss Lockhart.” He sat on one sofa and gestured at her to put herself opposite. The guard, who had halted inside the door, was doing his best impression of a statue.

“You thought I was dead?”

“I wasn’t sure. You brought an army with you.”

“It wasn’t my army.”

“And this time? Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re brave. Naive and reckless, like many Americans, but brave, I admit that. What do you want?”

Mei opened her wallet and brought out the old Long Tan card with Lizzie’s photo on it.

“You said I was familiar. Look at this badge. It belonged to a
woman called Tang Liu, and it was found in a field in Dongguan. Your thugs killed her a month ago, and they left it there. That was stupid of them.”

Cao stared at the badge and scrutinized Mei. “So, you make a habit of coming back from the dead,” he said.

Lockhart grasped the
pipe forming the handrail to the steps and pulled himself under. He wore a tracksuit and sneakers and carried a canvas bag. Above, Cao’s house looked like a wedding cake, set on the glowing terrace. Lockhart stood under a banyan tree, watching for activity. After five minutes, a guard walked along the terrace, gazing across the valley from the balustrade.

Lockhart ran up the steps while the guard was still at the far side of the terrace, pausing by the top. When he raised his head, his eyes were at ground level between two pillars, and he saw across the terrace to the guard. The man stopped to light a cigarette and walked back, first crossing the terrace, then turning back toward the house. Lockhart took a syringe, holding it in his fist with his thumb on the plunger, and waited. The man drew on the cigarette as his left leg passed Lockhart’s nose.

Reaching up, Lockhart thrust it deep into the man’s thigh, through his uniform pants, as his lungs took a last shot of nicotine. He spluttered, ejecting the cigarette like a missile, and dropped to the ground. Lockhart swung himself over the ledge and sat on the body. After a couple of seconds, feeling no movement, he rolled off, lifting the gun from his bag and crouching by the side of the terrace. He was in shadow, and he had a clear view through the glass doors into Cao’s study. One of them was ajar, and he ran directly for it, afraid of stopping in case another guard appeared.

He had a view of three people as he pushed open the door. Neither the guard, immobile on the far side of the room, nor Mei on a sofa thirty feet away saw him. The guard stared at a wall to his left, and Mei was looking at something else in the room. The only pair of eyes to lock on his was Cao’s—Lockhart had walked straight into his line of sight.

Before Lockhart could lift his gun, Cao leapt toward Mei, reaching
for her with his hands. He’d gotten halfway there when she rolled her body with astonishing speed, bringing her left arm high in the air and punching him on the side of the neck. An instant later, her left foot thudded into his groin.

Lockhart swung his gun toward the guard, who hadn’t moved. The man raised his arms in surrender, and they looked at Mei, who was on top of the semiconscious Cao with an elbow around his throat. Her fashionable dress was all ruffled up. Lockhart averted his eyes, but the guard didn’t.

“Don’t talk or move,” Lockhart said to the man. Then, to Mei: “Jesus, where did you learn to fight like that?”

“Syringe,” she replied.

He threw the bag to her and walked across to the guard, gesturing at him with the gun to sit. By the time he’d taped the man’s mouth and locked the mahogany door, Mei had injected Cao in the leg; he was now unconscious. She lifted herself off and smoothed her dress. Then she sat and extracted a pair of women’s sneakers, unlacing her heels and placing them in the bag with the syringe before zipping it.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Lockhart pulled the tape from the guard’s mouth and pointed the gun at his head. “You won’t be hurt as long as you do what we say. Carry him,” he said.

The guard nodded and walked over to Cao, hoisting him on his back with his arms supporting Cao’s legs. Cao’s neck lolled to one side, and Lockhart taped his wrists in front of the guard’s body so he wouldn’t tip backward. He didn’t hear any sound from behind as they crossed the terrace, with Mei in the lead, to where the other guard was stretched. The loudest noise was Cao’s hoarse breathing. Lockhart’s gun wasn’t needed—the guard lurched a few times as he struggled with Cao’s dead weight, but he was an obedient mule.

The gate to the stairs was unlocked, and they descended, with the glow fading behind them. Once, the guard pitched forward as he caught his foot, and Lockhart grabbed his arm to prevent him tumbling down the slope. At the bottom, they silently arranged Cao’s limbs on the handrail so that the guard could climb over and hoist him on his shoulders again, and then started the ascent. The guard’s
breath grew louder as he labored up the slope, and Lockhart handed Mei his gun so he could heave from behind.

Feng stood on the terrace laughing as they dragged Cao up the steps. Lockhart cut his arms free and lowered him to the ground, letting the guard sprawl by the pool, exhausted but grinning. He seemed to like being on their side. When they’d regained their breath, the men each took one of Cao’s arms, pulling his body across the terrace and along the corridor to a rear bedroom. They got him onto the bed in three shoves, and then Lockhart handcuffed his wrists to the frame.