Authors: Jeff Abbott
‘Surrendering to the CIA in New York? He must be American.’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t make assumptions. For all their faults, the CIA is still the most powerful intelligence agency in the
world, and our mysterious Mr Jin may just want to deal with the biggest.’
‘For all their faults?’ I said. ‘You sound like a veteran.’
A blush spread across her cheeks, up to her auburn hair. ‘Don’t. I’m not. I don’t have anything to do with the CIA.’
‘So what now? You look for criminal computer science students of Chinese descent who have gone missing?’
‘Yes, actually, I do,’ she said. ‘But here’s the other thing, Sam. New York. If Jin Ming wants to surrender to the CIA, why
isn’t he doing it in Amsterdam? There are agents there. They could easily pick him up. Why does he need to run?’
‘You ask like you know the answer.’
‘I do. Right now he’s wanted in Amsterdam.’ She pulled up a web page of the Amsterdam English language paper. ‘He left a hospital
where he was a patient. A man was found dead there, beaten to death with a metal pole. The dead man has a criminal history
as hired muscle.’
‘They tried to kill him once before.’
‘Yes. And the supposedly helpless hacker killed the thug.’ Leonie sounded almost proud of him. ‘The police seem to think Jin’s
in danger, and running, and are trying to get him to surrender.’
‘But he could still surrender to the CIA there. In fact, he has even more reason to because he’s being hunted. But he’s not
turning himself in to the closest CIA office. What’s here? What’s
in New York?’ I said. I hadn’t thought of this. The kid had to have a compelling reason to take the risk to come to New York.
‘Two reasons,’ I said. ‘He knows a CIA contact here.’ August had dealt with him in Amsterdam; maybe while in their care he’d
heard something that tied August to New York, and wanted to meet him specifically. I didn’t know the whole story of what had
gone on between them when August grabbed Jin Ming from the coffee shop.
Leonie waited.
‘Or he’s from here, and he’s running home.’
‘Why run home?’ she asked. ‘He’s been very smart as to how he hid himself. Very. If he’s a fugitive from here, it implies
he’s wanted here. Huge risk to return.’
‘Maybe he has family he wants to collect and protect. Maybe he needs to say goodbye to them if he’s going to vanish.’
‘I assume that if he was living in Holland under a false name he’s already vanished once before.’ Exhaustion crept into her
voice. We couldn’t let the toxic mix of lack of sleep and emotional turmoil derail us. ‘If he was already hiding, then why
does he come home? That seems to be a bigger risk than he needs to take.’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve heard of people in witness protection coming home. They just get tired of living a lie.’
‘My clients don’t do that. Once I hide them they stay hidden.’
I don’t know what possessed me. ‘Nice. I mean, you shelter people fleeing murder raps. Scum that Novem Soles needs protected.
Nice.’
‘You don’t know a single thing about what I do or who I help.’
‘As if you’d tell.’ She knew more about me than I knew about her. Whose fault was that?
She raised an eyebrow at me, took a long drink of coffee to let the tension melt in the room. I felt mad at myself for provoking
her. I needed her right now; moral judgments had to be saved for later. ‘If he’s from New York, then that narrows down the
possibilities considerably.’
I leaned forward and looked into her computer screen, studying the chat room, with nested columns of comments to show threads
of conversation. ‘What is this site?’
‘DarkHand. A hacker community.’ She started to type. ‘That’s how I found out about Jin Ming. I found hackers who had existing
back doors into the systems I needed to access. By the way, you’re paying them for their time.’
‘How much?’
‘You’ll launder some money for them. Both are Chinese, they want to clean about fifty thousand bucks into US accounts. You’ll
make that happen.’
‘How, exactly?’
‘Through your bar in Las Vegas.’
She knew about The Canyon Bar. Not just that it was where I’d met Anna but that I owned it. ‘Your hacker friends are not washing
their dirty money through my bar.’ God only knew what the money might be. Hackers might have cracked open ATMs for cash, might
have committed extortion not to bring company websites down. She was involving me in new crimes. She seemed almost amused
at my outrage.
‘You can’t refuse. The deal is done. It’s for the children.’
She was, of course, absolutely right. ‘For the children’: the three most powerful words in the language. Fine, I thought.
I’d deal with that problem later. ‘Don’t make any more promises you can’t keep.’
‘Do you want to find this guy or not?’ She stood up, rage bright in her eyes. ‘You’ll do what I say. No argument.’
‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘I have every right to know if you’re dragging me and my business into criminal activity.’
‘And I have every right not to care.’
I let five beats pass in peace. ‘So. Let’s operate under the proposition he has a personal tie back to New York.’
She nodded. ‘We find the tie, we find him.’ She turned back to the laptop. ‘Let me get back to work. Thanks for breakfast.’
‘And, what? I wait? No.’
‘Do you have any idea on how to be useful?’ Her voice had taken on a hard edge to it. ‘I find him, you kill him, bullet. You
have the easier job.’
‘I don’t get to ask my crooked friends for help,’ I said. Which was a lie. I had resources, through the Round Table, that
I had no intention of sharing with her. I gave her my cell phone number. She didn’t write it down but she repeated it back
to me.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked as I headed for the door.
I didn’t answer her. She didn’t need to know. Her way was going to take too long.
Most code names in the Company are not jokes, but his was: Fagin. Charles Dickens’s master of thieves from
Oliver Twist
, who pulled in the wayward children of London to shape them into pickpockets. The Fagin I knew put his own modern take on
the identity.
I took the subway south to Chelsea. It was mid-morning now, and shoppers walked the streets, eyeing the art in the many gallery
windows. I walked down to the last address I knew for Fagin. I hoped he hadn’t moved. I went up to the top floor of his building,
knocked, listened. I picked the lock and went inside.
It was a large apartment (I didn’t even want to think about how much it cost) and still his place. A picture of Fagin and
his wife hung on the wall, smiling, tropical forest behind them. He was thin and wore a reddish beard and had very dark brown
eyes, the color of coffee. Dirty breakfast dishes stood stacked in the sink; a coffee mug half full. I lived in spare apartments/offices
above bars; I was starting to forget what it was like to live in an actual home. Lucy and I had owned a beautiful place in
London, not far from the British Museum. A home that was a comfort to return to in the evening, full of touches of the life
we were building together. Best not to dwell on that right now. You might guess that a person named for the Fagin in
Oliver Twist
would not respond to a sentimental plea to help me save my poor child.
It was a four-bedroom apartment. One bedroom had an IKEA bed, a scattering of men’s and women’s clothes on the furniture and
the floor. Fagin was a bit of a slob. The second bedroom had six computers in it, all along a table, a bean bag chair, a TV
with an elaborate game station attached. Fagin – still up to his old tricks.
Two young Oliver Twists – maybe sixteen or so – sat at the computers, plugged into their iPods. In their envelope of music
they hadn’t noticed me. So I went back to the kitchen, got an apple from Fagin’s fridge, and washed it. I took a knife from
a drawer because I didn’t know these sixteen-year-olds and I went back to the computer room.
I bit into my apple and came up behind the first Oliver Twist. He was a thin kid, brown, curly hair, a scattering of pimples
on his cheeks. He was intent on what he was doing on the computer screen, fingers hammering on the keyboard.
I glanced at the screen over his shoulder. Computer code, but with comments written in Russian. I scanned them. Interesting
mischief the Oliver Twists were conjuring.
I popped out an earplug and said, ‘Hi, whatcha doing?’
He jumped out of his chair. His eyes widened at the knife in my hand.
‘Uh … uh.’
The other kid – African American, a bit older, wearing a New Orleans Saints T-shirt, jeans and the ugliest yellow sneakers
I’d ever seen – bolted out of his chair. I showed him the knife and he stopped.
‘What. Are. You. Doing?’ I asked again.
Neither answered. ‘Hacking into China or Russia today, boys?’ I pretended like I hadn’t read over their shoulders and took
another bite of the apple. ‘Or perhaps another country? Fagin loves putting the screws on Egypt and Pakistan.’
Again, neither answered. They glanced at each other.
‘Silence bores me,’ I said. ‘It makes me want to play knife games.’ Aren’t I nice, threatening teenagers?
‘Russia,’ the Saints fan said after a moment. ‘We’re laying data bombs into their power grid.’
‘Sounds very patriotic,’ I said. ‘Is Fagin due here soon?’
The Saints fan nodded. ‘Yes. He went to go get snacks.’
‘You poor, deprived things didn’t run out of Red Bull, did you?’
‘Um, actually, we ran out of Pepsi,’ the thin kid said.
‘Well, far be it from me to interfere,’ I said. ‘Fagin’s an old friend. I’m just going to wait for him.’
Slowly they sat back down and put their hands on their computer keyboards and resumed their work, typing at a much slower
level. But neither slipped their earbuds back into place.
I ate my apple and watched them and waited.
Fagin showed up ten minutes later, opening his door, holding a paper bag of groceries. He dropped the bag when he saw me.
An orange tumbled from the depths and rolled to my foot.
‘What the hell. Sam Capra.’
‘Hi, Fagin.’
His mouth shut tight. I picked up the orange and tossed it to him. He caught it.
‘Are you going to run or shut the door?’ I asked.
He shut the door. He set the small bag of groceries down on the counter. He went to the door and made sure the two Oliver
Twists were fine.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t hurt your kids.’
‘He stole an apple,’ said the Saints fan.
‘Really? Did he interfere with your work?’
‘No,’ they both said.
‘Back to it.’
Almost as one, the Oliver Twists put their earbuds back in place. Fagin set a can of cold soda by each of them. The typing
speed on the keyboards increased.
Fagin crossed his arms and said, ‘Whatever you want, the answer is no.’
‘That’s a harsh hello,’ I said.
I had met Fagin back in my days working on the CIA’s task force on global crime aka Special Projects aka The Dirty Down Jobs
We Gotta Do But No One Is Supposed To Know. Our
purview covered everything from human trafficking to arms dealing to corporate espionage, in the aspect of when it threatened
national security. Crime at this level, hand in hand with terrorism, is a threat to the stability of the West. It reaches
inside and poisons government, it undermines the basic social contract down to the bone of civilization. Twenty per cent of
the economy is now illicit. The criminals are becoming more mainstream.
But in stopping this crime we sometimes committed crimes ourselves. Fagin was an example. Remember reading in the news, when
Russia and its much smaller neighbor, Georgia, got into that brief war a while back? The Russians launched not only bullets
and missiles at Georgia, they took down all of Georgia’s internet access. With a massive cyber attack against critical servers,
the Russians managed to cut off an entire nation of four million people from the internet. If you were inside Georgia, and
you tried to access CNN or the BBC web pages, you got served Russian propaganda. If you tried to withdraw money from Georgian
banks, your funds stayed put. If you tried to email people in other parts of the country, you sat and stared at your unsent
message still warming your mailbox. The cyber attack, the Russians claimed, was not done by government hackers, but rather
by patriotic, good-hearted, milk-drinking Russians acting independently who wanted to help fight the enemy. After the war,
NATO and the highly irritated Georgians determined that some of the hackers who launched the internet attack were tied to
some of the most notorious criminal rings inside Russia. If this vigilante hacker corps wasn’t an official part of the government,
they were at least protected by the government, and their presence gave the Russian leadership necessary and plausible deniability.
The best hackers are not always on government payrolls. Sometimes you need your hackers to not be connected to you, when you
spend days breaking laws and flouting treaties.
Fagin was our back pocket, our deniable warrior. He and his digital Oliver Twists. When we needed things broken or stolen
and there was no way it could be tied to the CIA, ever, then Special Projects and Fagin stepped in to pick the pocket and
scurry away.
‘You don’t work for Special Projects any more, Sam,’ he said. ‘Get out.’
‘I’m a freelance consultant, like you. Not exactly on the formal benefits package.’
‘Really?
Really?
’ Fagin’s favorite word, delivered with a sneer. I had once counted how many times Fagin uttered
Really?
in a meeting and stopped at fifty.
‘I am here to ask you for a favor.’
‘Really? I repeat. Get out.’
‘I’m pressed for time. Tell me what I want to know or I’ll tell the North Koreans about you and your crew. And the Russians.
And the Chinese. And the Iranians.’ Fagin and his cadre of hackers spied on and created hassles for a variety of enemies.
Maybe even some friends. Let me just say the French, the Brazilians, and the Japanese also all have reason to hate Fagin.
They just don’t know it.