DeathByte Read online

  DEATHBYTE

  BOOK 2 IN

  THE SPIES LIE SERIES

  D. S. KANE

  Copyright © 2014 D. S. Kane

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-0-9960591-3-8 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-9960591-5-2 (Kindle)

  ISBN 978-0-9960591-4-5 (ePub)

  Cover design by Jeroen Ten Berge [www.jeroentenberge.com]

  eBook editions by eBooks By Barb for booknook.biz

  For Frances and Leonard,

  who made me.

  Contents

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  TWELVE YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER 2 • CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4 • CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6 • CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8 • CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10 • CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  PART II

  CHAPTER 13 • CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15 • CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17 • CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19 • CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21 • CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23 • CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25 • CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  PART III

  CHAPTER 28 • CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30 • CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32 • CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34 • CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36 • CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38 • CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 41 • CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 44

  Appendix A

  Glossary

  Appendix B

  Character List (alphabetical)

  Appendix C

  Notes on Nanotechnology

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events depicted here are the work of the author’s mind. Most but not all of the places are real.

  “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”

  —William Shakespeare,

  Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Home office of Xian Wing,

  Senior Director of State Security,

  north side of Fourth Ring Road near Jingping Road,

  Beijing, China

  August 23, 4:26 p.m.

  William Wing’s small wrists strained against the handcuffs. Across the desk, his father stared at him. Behind the two, at the carved wooden door, Corporal Benjamin Chan watched. William scanned the mirror over father’s desk and saw Chan shift, his eyes wide.

  William wondered if anyone had ever seen his father angry before.

  Xian Wing seethed a whisper that could peel paint, “What do I do with you?”

  The twelve-year-old boy struggled against the cuffs but remained silent. He raised his head.

  “Father, you know what I am. You have known for a long time. You did nothing before.”

  The older man slammed the desk with his fist. “Hacking into your school and changing your grades is a crime. Hacking into the state computers is much more serious crime. Getting caught is even worse. You have caused our family considerable shame. The committee has called for your death.”

  “All I did was peek at the records.”

  “All? You were inside the CSIS servers more than twenty times before Chan figured out what you had done. You used my computer. Your trail of electronic breadcrumbs led him to me, not you. To me!”

  “But, father—”

  “Silence.” He stared right through William. “I will offer you one favor. I will spare your life. You will be flown to Hong Kong and left at the airport. You must never return to China. Never! Should you set foot here, you will be apprehended and executed.”

  The two glared at each other. Corporal Chan held his breath.

  Xian nodded to Chan. The corporal uncuffed William, who leaned over and swiped a gold fountain pen from the top of his father’s desk. Done swift and smooth, neither man saw him do this.

  Xian stood and stared out the window. He shouted, “You are no longer my son!”

  TWELVE YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER 2

  The hallway outside William Wing’s apartment,

  Ascot Heights, Block A, 21 Lok Lam Road,

  New Territories, Hong Kong

  June 17, 5:22 a.m.

  The young woman stared at the metallic blue door. She searched the hallway for cams. None, but there might be some inside. She donned a balaclava from her pocket to shroud her face. From another pocket, she pulled out a bump-key set.

  It took her eleven seconds to pick it open. Her skills were rusty. The last time she’d picked one open was in Riyadh, more than a year ago. That time it was the vault of a bank at midnight. She entered the living room and closed the door behind her.

  Cassandra Sashakovich whistled an old blues tune, “Death Letter.” There were cams everywhere, eight of them embedded into the ceiling. “Paranoid little bastard.”

  She took a wrench and started working.

  * * *

  Elevator doors scraped open on the third floor. As William Wing closed the distance to his apartment, his eyes locked on the door to his apartment and he jolted back to full awareness. Something was wrong: the high-tech paint the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service had applied to his front door bore an opaque sheen. The sheen indicated it had been opened and the circuitry held within the paint hadn’t been reset. Developed by the CSIS to protect the homes of senior officials, the paint contained nanotech that reacted to movement by shifting color tone.

  He dropped the handle of his rolling suitcase and swept back the mop of thick black hair that drooped over his brow.

  In the humid heat, he shivered but noticed his shirt was soaked through. “Damn.” Had he been targeted by a client? How had they found out where he lived?

  He pulled the jammer-scanner from his pocket, but it snagged on the new ID badge, tumbling it out. The badge’s label glared back at him: “Major William Wing, Chinese Cyberwar Technology Lab.” Working for his father, as the Chinese government had demanded, he still didn’t know why his father had demanded he accept the position.

  Twelve years since he’d left mainland China. In the hacking community, William was known as CryptoMonger, and his clients were corporations and governments. He’d learned to hide in shadows, worked hard to become one of the world’s two or three most accomplished gray-hat hackers, feared by those who failed to make themselves his clients.

  He remembered how CarderWorld and DarkMarket had come and gone. But William’s skills exceeded those of the Ukrainian hackers who merely wanted riches. He’d shunned the Anonymous LulzSec hackers who were only interested in politics. For him, it was all about his reputation as the best hacker anywhere. With the exception of his call sign, CryptoMonger had remained a cipher.

  No one had ever known where he lived.

  Until now.

  William wiped away the perspiration pooling his glasses.

  He pushed several buttons on the jammer-scanner and pointed it at the door. The digital readout indicated the number of times the door had opened since he’d left home. The scanner blinked a “2,” confirming his worst fear. The door had been opened twice since he’d left for Beijing three days ago.

  Someone had broken into his apartment. Were they there now, waiting for him?

  He reset the jammer-scanner unit for a deep scan of body presence and when it blinked a zero, his hands unclenched. But this technology, like that of the high-tech paint on his front door, was still in the testing stage. “Damn,” he whispered again, and took several steps back.

  Was this related to his hack last month for the Israelis, just b
efore he visited his father in Beijing?

  He stood frozen.

  At five-foot-six and one-hundred-forty pounds, he wasn’t big and he had no martial arts experience or weapons training. He needed to know what they’d taken, or possibly what they’d left, but he dreaded opening the door.

  William steeled himself. Cracked the door open. Silence. His calico cat, Mousey Tongue, bounded into his arms. He stroked the animal and set the scanner to search for his intruder. It flashed a big “1.” DNA somewhere in the room. Foreign DNA, not his or Mousey’s. The only other person he’d invited in was Lily, and he’d coded her DNA.

  No, this was left by the intruder.

  He kissed the top of the cat’s white head and placed her on the sofa, then threaded his way into the bathroom. Then into the bedroom. He walked to his primary computer, on a desk in the corner by the window view of the distant harbor.

  The bay was empty where the hard disk should have been.

  Panicked, he rushed to the living room and checked his other computer, the print server with a RAID array backup.

  “Damn.” The server also bore gaping holes.

  Someone had stolen his clients’ data. Every client, every secret. What would those clients do to him if their secrets became public? His heart fluttered.

  Despite the cutouts he’d always employed as intermediaries to maintain his safety, someone had managed to penetrate his false identities. Someone knew where he lived and who he was. Someone with very powerful skills. The thief had to have come from a small, select group. To survive this, he’d need to find out who it was, and then destroy the intruder and their client.

  He scanned the ceiling. Holes in the plaster where he’d placed the camcorders showed that all ten had been ripped out and were gone, even the dummies.

  Each of the missing cams used self-contained storage. Everything they’d recorded was also gone. He cursed.

  But there was still a chance he could identify the intruder. The Chinese Cyberwar Technology Lab had gifted him with an alpha test unit of new technology. An undetectable video cam was sewn into the tablecloth on his kitchen table. It was made from fiber optic microfiber thread, and used the apartment’s many wall-mirrors to reconstruct video from various points where the threads crossed. The cloth cam transmitted a wireless signal at 805.13p, outside the range of detection by any consumer wireless device.

  He pressed another button on the jammer-scanner and the tiny display flashed the letters “OK.” He walked to one of the mirrors and moved his hand while he watched the scanner. A wavy line on the screen indicated it was recording his movement. The nanotech cloth cam worked. He looked up and saw his reflection in the mirror, pudgy and short. The mirror! Not just a mirror. He took another look at the tablecloth. Despite their best efforts to avoid leaving their images behind, the interlopers hadn’t realized they were still being recorded.

  Wing rushed from the apartment to the laundry room in the basement. He produced a bump-key set taped behind the sink and popped open the utility closet door. He’d attached the receiver under the closet’s bottom shelf using duct tape. He pressed a button, and the unit beeped, transmitting a series of video and audio files to his smartphone.

  As he waited for the elevator, he pulled the gold fountain pen he’d stolen years ago from his father out of his pocket and rolled it in his fingers.

  Did the theft have to do with the trip to Beijing? Late last year, his father had called William to demand he return to Beijing. William had been reluctant but met with his father, now a tottering old man.

  William had helped the government search for the source of several hacks into the CSIS servers, ironic since it was what had got him thrown out of China.

  He’d lied to his father about the source of the hacks, saying the Americans had done it. But he’d discovered it had been the Mossad, the employer of his friend, Jon Sommers.

  The Chinese government was desperate for the skills of major league hackers to manage their Technology Development Department and its subunits, the 6000s. His reward from his father was to make him an officer in the Chinese cyberwar unit, and his father had welcomed him back.

  To William, it was the ultimate punishment.

  He’d presented his report on their mainframe server vulnerabilities face-to-face with the leaders of the Ministry of Security’s Cyberwar Development Division. He remembered how much pride his father showed as William completed his slide show. And how confused its leaders were in the aftermath. Before he arrived, they’d been confident their systems were safe.

  His father had ordered him to stay in Beijing. William had argued and left with just the major’s badge as a compromise.

  What a joke. He’d been living in Hong Kong for more than a decade. He’d never wanted to return. And now his father wanted him back? Officer status in the Chinese Army would create endless problems for his freelance hacking business. He thought communism was a terrible joke. Almost as bad as democracy. All governments were nothing more than the lies the rulers used to control their people. And his father embodied all that William distrusted.

  Had his father sent the intruders? Or worse, had one of his father’s competitors sent them? He shook his head and paced in a circle. By the time the elevator doors opened again, he was hyperventilating.

  William reentered the apartment. He connected the huge television to his smartphone and wiped the perspiration from his glasses.

  He pressed a button on the remote and stared at the screen, his lips compressed. The time and date stamp on the video indicated the theft had taken place midmorning yesterday, when bright sunlight scoured the room. He stared at the interloper’s face, covered by a ski mask. Brown eyes, with no folds around them. She was Caucasian. She had the narrow hips and tiny breasts of a thin and athletic woman, slinking around like his cat, until she paused in front of his bedroom computer. When Mousey Tongue jumped onto the couch behind her, she’d turned in a swift move, her palm heel ready to strike whatever she found.

  When he saw her shift toward his cat, his hands formed fists. She’d stopped herself in mid-swing and when Mousey Tongue froze, she’d continued the move, grabbing and petting his kitty. His rage turned to confusion.

  She was lightning fast. The woman placed the cat back onto the couch and moved into the bedroom, where she caressed the computer’s rear, then pulled a screwdriver from the front pocket of her cargo slacks and removed the hard drive in seconds.

  When she turned and faced the kitchen, he paused the video. Brown stringy hair peeked from beneath her ski cap. About five-foot-seven, and probably less than one-hundred-thirty pounds. He watched her steal the hardware containing all his computer files. William pounded the coffee table.

  He let the video run and noticed how, after she’d removed the other computer’s hard drive, she’d scanned for each video cam and found them all within seconds. Except for the new cloth cam.

  She used his kitchen chair and the screwdriver to pry the cams from the ceiling, each one in a few seconds. Then, scrutinized each drive to see if there was a transmitter on any of them. When she’d determined that each had self-contained memory chips and none contained a transmitter, she stuffed all she stole into a backpack and swept out his door like a cool breeze.

  He checked the time stamp. She’d taken less than five minutes to rip him off and destroy his life.

  He watched the video for the fifth time. William knew everyone who competed in the hacker challenges. He thought of each of his contacts in the CSIS, the Chinese intelligence agency, and the Mossad, and concluded she wasn’t anyone he knew of. Was she a covert for some intelligence agency he’d never worked with?

  He regretted his failure to secure his office, his home.

  But among all his feelings, what won out, what grew huge and nested itself within his gut was a grueling fear of this woman. What if she returned? She’d already bested his security measures once. He was sure nothing he could do would keep her out. Dread of her grew within him, cutting a wide swath
in his self-confidence. If she had wanted to, she could easily have murdered him.

  He paced, shaking his head. He was a hacker, not a soldier. He’d been successful avoiding danger for twelve years. Until now. What luck to be visiting his father and out of his apartment while she was ripping him off.

  What if she made his stolen files public? He found himself shivering again. If CSIS found out his biggest client was the Mossad, they’d kill him. If the Israelis found out he was now a major in the Chinese army, they’d terminate him. And if either knew this woman had stolen their secrets from him, they’d hunt him down wherever he went.

  If she told anyone he lived in Hong Kong, they’d be able to find him. And if she could find him here, he wasn’t safe anywhere he went. Flight wasn’t an option. He paced the room. I’ll never be safe.

  Yes, it was well past time for him to learn how to defend himself. Not in the traditional, ordinary sense. No, William wouldn’t buy a gun or take a martial arts class. He smiled and felt a tiny bit safer. He’d improve his electronic security and set traps around the apartment. Traps that would kill an intruder. Traps only he would know how to disarm. He picked up Mousey and stroked the cat. Traps no cat could trigger.

  He fingered the fountain pen in his pocket while he spent a few more moments thinking.

  What had she come here to steal? In seconds, he was sure. It must have been the work products he’d stolen from a defense contractor in California last month for Yigdal Ben-Levy. What was the company’s name? Stillwater Technologies. He thought of calling Jon Sommers or Avram Shimmel, but one or both of them might have had something to do with this. Who could he trust? There was always Betsy the Butterfly, but the female hacker abhorred danger even more than he did. In the end, he decided the answer was to trust no one. Sommers had told him last year it was the first and most important of the spy bible’s rules, the Moscow rules.

  Ben-Levy. What had the spymaster at the Mossad neglected to tell him? What had he gotten himself into?