Anarchy- Another Burroughs Rice Mission Page 2

  When they had first met, she had asked him what had happened to confine him to a wheelchair. “The doctors don’t know very much. These things generally strike people in their thirties or forties. I was hammered by this at the age of seventeen. I’m an outlier. I’ve always been an outlier. You’re going to have to accept the uncertainty—the mystery of it all.”

  Mystery. Grace pushed her head back against the padded headboard. She didn’t find mystery the least bit appealing. Mystery to a soldier was an unsurveyed terrain, a room no one had cleared yet, rounds ripping past your ear in the dark. Nothing good can come from a disease that strikes people young. He had Lou Gehrig’s disease: the malady that struck Stephen Hawking in his twenties. She wanted to know more about the prognosis. Would he still be around in ten years? An odd query for a professional soldier. You don’t ask those questions. So, she dropped it.

  He was here now: focus on that. Who knew what might happen tomorrow?

  “You’re good to me,” he remarked. A rare moment of thankfulness from the world-famous scientist and curmudgeon. Quite a compliment, but completely out of character.

  Grace smiled warmly at him. “You’re cute.”

  “I have never been even remotely cute. I’m simply a decent brain suspended in a useless, non-functioning meat bag.”

  Grace glanced over at the graphite and steel monstrosity parked by the bed: Hunter’s exoskeleton—he liked to call it that—a dull black graphite cage with an upright seat and two industrial-strength movable neoprene tracks glowering at her in the dimness of the bedroom. Getting him into the tracker required the assistance of at least one other person, one of Hunters full-time assistants, who she should be calling, but Grace wasn’t eager to break the spell of the morning.

  “A quite significant human brain behind some strikingly clear blue eyes,” she commented.

  “Which are staring up at a nondescript ceiling. Incredibly boring. The Internet is far more interesting.”

  Grace lifted herself up on her knees and stared down into Hunter’s expressionless face. He was incapable of moving his head. Once she filled his field of vision, his only choice was to stare back or shut his eyes, courtesy of small electrodes that activated nerves in his eyelids.

  “How’s this?” she asked.

  “Much better. Are you sure you’re not a Russian spy?”

  Grace laughed and kissed him on his lips. They were cool. She felt a slight movement in his face, a tremor.

  “Did that tickle?” she asked.

  For a few seconds there was no answer. Then a slightly metallic whisper. “I’ve got a better idea than surfing the Net. Why don't you take off your clothes?”

  Which Grace did. Slowly.

  Until the building alarm went off.

  竹

  B A M B O O

  Quinjang Prison

  Jianchang County

  Northern China

  OLD WORLD BAMBOO, when it ossifies and ages, becomes harder than bone. Any flexibility or forgiveness the wood possesses in its youth, gradually disappears.

  Like hope evaporating in a prison cell.

  As a result, a bamboo club in the right hands, becomes a cruel and formidable weapon of torture.

  The Chinese prison guard, a man in his mid-thirties with the face and body of a fifty-year-old, a cruel jagged scar running across his right eye, held the stick high above his head, like a baseball hitter waiting for the pitch. Then he swung the weapon down in a swift shallow arc striking the American ex-agent just behind the ear where the mastoid bone protrudes, home to a network of muscles and nerves controlling the shoulder and neck.

  The pain was intense and impossible to prepare for, ripping across Burrough Rice’s back and head. He went down on his knees, raising his hands above his head. Show supplication, he reminded himself. Scarface was like a raging animal, but Rice suspected, like many of his culture, he appreciated respect and abhorred weakness.

  Rice tucked his fingers into a fist, not in preparation to fight, but to protect the fragile bones. Better to savage a knuckle than shatter a precious finger.

  He raised his good hand. “Honorable guard, I am Landuo Rice. I beg you not to strike me.” His jailer had named him Landuo on their very first day together in Quinjang, Landuo meaning lazy in Mandarin.

  There was a ritual in addressing the jailers: you had to use the prescribed words, only use the name you were assigned, raise your hand just the right way. Get it wrong and you could get worse than the stick. Talk out of turn and you would get no food for days.

  Rice had tried a few times to engage Scarface in talk about his family, tried to build some rapport. The attempt always cost him more bruises and pain.

  Rice waited for the next blow. He had trained as a Navy SEAL in resisting interrogation techniques, even taught a course once at Langley, but that was a long time ago. Over twenty years. He taught CIA agents that torture was rarely effective to tease out intelligence. It did, however, have other uses.

  Today’s beating was just part of daily prison routine; delivered equally to all, designed to keep prisoners in line. To teach respect. To destroy morale.

  And to reward the guards who were hungry for a diversion from the long daily grind in one of the most infamous prisons in the world.

  Rice had come to China to meet with a corporate whistleblower, a local willing to risk his life to pass on information about a Chinese company Rice and his security team had been investigating or years: Lutu Technologies.

  The Chinese government suspected as much and was trying to ferret out the traitor’s name. Every second day they would drag Rice off through a maze of tunnel-like hallways to a special room where they kept their prized interrogation tools: car batteries, jumper cables, five-gallon jugs of water. Here they would dig deeper looking for answers. Why was Rice in China? Where were his partners? Who was his accomplice—the whistleblower they were searching for so desperately? Always the same questions.

  Instead of talking, he sang songs to them: “Born In The USA” was one of his favorites. Even his torturers knew the words. After all, a hit is a hit.

  Then they dragged him back to his stinking cell where his personal jailer would continue the hourly abuse.

  The next strike from Scarface was to Rice’s right rib cage. Rice grunted, twisted slightly, felt a bone fracture again. Was this the second or third time? He had lost count. The days, like the injuries, were an agonizing blur. He thought it was day twelve. Twelve days in Quinjang seemed like an eternity.

  When Scarface left, Rice would check the lines he had scrawled into the unpainted concrete by his lice-infested sleeping matt. Keeping the calendar straight was one of Rice’s obsessions. It almost kept him sane. Almost.

  He would scratch a mark on the concrete wall with a jagged pebble every time Scarface visited: once with breakfast, again with dinner. There was no other indication of time passing. The cell had one narrow plastic window high up on the wall that was dimly lit by an exterior light. Another technique designed to break prisoners down: provide no sense of day or night.

  The first meal, following interrupted sleep, was a spoonful of gooey, flavorless rice soup. Dinner was more rice and one chunk of grey greasy meat. At least, he thought it was meat, there was no way of knowing with any certainty. The odds were fifty-fifty. So, he chewed the tough gristly material and swallowed with reluctance. Protein was protein.

  Except when the meat was a single boiled chicken foot which Rice would toss into the corner of the cell. It wouldn’t last long. The foot would eventually disappear to the prison rat population—the scrawny creatures providing the only entertainment available at Quinjang.

  冲闯

  C R A S H

  RICE HQ

  EVERY MEMBER OF THE TEAM received the same text message immediately following the general alarm:

  URGENT! All hands to the lounge. NOW!

  The text came from, Jimmy McKinnon, their head of security and technology, an ex-marine who had served with Rice in Iraq.
>
  The Lounge was their nickname for the smaller of two decks, a more private area off the second floor. On lazy afternoons it promised a well-stocked bar, umbrellas, and comfortable chairs. This wasn’t a lazy afternoon.

  In attendance were Jimmy, because he called the meeting at 6:30 AM, Quinten Hunter, Grace Daly, and Britt Johnson, Rice’s partner.

  “If you haven't already heard”, announced Jimmy, “President King’s daughter, Invicta, was killed a few hours ago in a car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway near Big Sur. With her was Jordan Kennedy, a tech billionaire from San Diego.”

  “That’s horrible, Jimmy,” said Grace, “I can’t imagine what President King is going through. Do you think it was intentional?”

  “You all know I’ve been working on a project for the CIA, researching compromised integrated circuits. For years, we believe a Chinese company called Lutu Technologies has been distributing high-tech to manufacturers all over the world for far less than market pricing. The chips are fake. We say that because they are labelled Malaysia or Singapore, or sometimes counterfeited to appear like they were made by prominent Japanese companies like Fujitsu. But they’re not. They are made in Chinese factories and in my opinion, they are extremely dangerous.”

  Hunter turned in his tracker slightly, only a few degrees, making the electric motors whine, his way of getting people’s attention.

  “Jimmy, are you saying you think the autonomous vehicle that Invicta died in was hacked somehow, or failed intentionally?”

  “Hunter, the EV was an Osprey Sport, made in San Francisco by a consortium of smaller manufacturers. All the partners are US corporations except one: a car manufacturer in Shanghai. I’m fairly certain once we examine the wreck, we’ll find technology purchased from Lutu was used in the car’s manufacture. Particularly control circuits for autonomous driving. The company has been on my list for some time, but further research should confirm our suspicions.”

  “If you’re right, Jimmy, what will that mean?” asked Grace. “Are you saying this was an intentional attack on the President’s family. An assassination?”

  Jimmy was gripping the top of one of the deck chairs so hard, his knuckles had turned white.

  “What are the odds of the crash being a coincidence? The President’s daughter had never been in that vehicle before. She gets picked up by someone she hardly knows, in a vehicle compromised by Chinese technology.”

  “There’s more, Jimmy,” said Hunter.

  “What?”

  “The markets haven’t opened yet but the chatter at the broker level is massive selling short of Osprey. Billions of dollars will be lost and made in the next few hours.”

  “I know very little about the stock market, Hunter. Can we find out who is betting on the collapse of Osprey? And when they made those calls?”

  “I think I can help there. It will take some digging, but a large early bet against that car company will look very suspicious.”

  Britt, who hadn’t spoken yet and was eight months’ pregnant with Rice’s child, asked. “What does Rice think?” No one answered immediately. Rice was currently undercover in Beijing at the request of the US State Department. A Chinese operative had agreed to provide information on his country's current cyber-attack strategy, but only if he was met by a senior intelligence officer in person and alone. Rice volunteered.

  Hunter called the operative a whistleblower; a designation in China, he said, that had a very short shelf life. They had to respond quickly.

  “We have a call out to him,” confirmed Jimmy.

  “When was the last time we made contact?” Britt asked. “Because I haven’t heard from him for weeks.”

  “That’s not unusual when he’s in the field—”

  “When do you decide it has been too long?” she interrupted.

  Jimmy looked to Hunter, which was no help at all, his face a frozen mask as usual.

  “We do have a protocol, Britt,” said Hunter, his synthesized voice calm and melodic. “But there are circumstances where attempting to call Rice or contact him in any way could jeopardize him or his mission.”

  “So, we don’t know where he is.”

  Jimmy cleared his throat. “Rice had a meeting scheduled in Beijing. We know that the local landlines are tapped by the Chinese military. We also know that all cell phone communications are scanned and documented by their national security apparatus. If Rice called—”

  “I know this, Jimmy,” said Britt, “I’ve been by his side for four years. But there are other ways of getting a message through.”

  “We knew that China would be a challenge,” he replied. “Their Internet is firewalled, all telecommunications that travel faster than a postcard are under constant surveillance by the Chinese equivalent of the NSA.”

  “Why didn’t one of our people shadow him?” she asked.

  Grace stepped across the patio and sat down next to Britt. She put her hand on her forearm. “He insisted. He refused to endanger anyone else on the team. And he thought he was safer going alone. He was being Rice.”

  Britt frowned and looked down at her baby bump. Her expression said it all. The father of her baby was on the black again, carrying false ID, location uncertain, condition unknown. Always the brave patriot.

  “The Chinese know that we’re investigating them,” said Britt. “Richard Yang, the head of Lutu, has been Jimmy’s target years. That work led to the ban on Lutu tech in all US government contracts. You don’t think he’d love to get his hands on the head of the team that’s exposed his company and cost him millions in contracts?”

  Grace turned to Jimmy. What Britt said, unfortunately, made sense. Was it a coincidence that Rice was called to Beijing two weeks before the murder of the President’s daughter? She didn’t think so.

  “And there’s another side to this,” said Jimmy. “The work we did in Africa with Sang Demu and the elimination of Evelyn Bosch and her team?”

  “Who could forget that!” said Grace. They almost lost everyone on that mission. And Bosch had taken Britt hostage and tortured her for information.

  Grace glanced over at Rice’s partner. Britt was staring down at her hands slowly massaging her expanded belly.

  Jimmy continued. “Do I have to remind everyone that Bosch was being funded by Nzambi? Probably the biggest criminal organization on the planet. We are a constant thorn in their sides and they have endless resources to come back at us with.”

  “We need to up our security,” said Hunter.

  “I agree,” said Grace. “I’ll increase the headcount at the front entrance and the grounds.”

  “Good. And who’s examining the EV that crashed?” asked Hunter “It may give us some clues.”

  “Typically, it would be the State police,” answered Jimmy. “But the Secret Service has taken over the investigation.”

  “Good, I have a contact there. I’ll follow up,” said Hunter.

  “Thanks. I have another ask as well.”

  “Continue.”

  “I’ve spent the last few hours looking for clues on Rice’s whereabouts. All the usual methods are failing me because of Chinese interference with their Internet. Can you, you know—"

  “Go direct?” Hunter meant plug himself directly into the Internet and do a broader search.

  “We’ve talked about that before, Hunter. Are you comfortable—"

  Grace interrupted. “Hunter’s comfortable, but I’m not.”

  Jimmy looked to Grace, saw the set of her jaw, then turned back to Hunter. They all knew there were dangers. First, because no human had ever exposed themselves directly to more than a very controlled trickle of data. Tiny by broadband standards. Even that was overwhelming for most test subjects.

  Hunter called it a deep dive. Like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. With no seat belt.

  Hunter turned his tracker again, his intimidating black exoskeleton mounted with speakers and a display screen, sometimes a weapon, when necessary. He turned to face Grace. “We’ll t
alk,” he said. “We’ll work something out.”

  Grace got up off the lounge chair, her hand still in Britt’s. “We’ll find Rice,” she promised, staring across the deck at the scientist strapped into the dark metal tracker. “Even if it kills Hunter.”

  怪物

  M O N S T E R

  Unknown location,

  Somewhere in China

  WEY’S MOTHER BROUGHT THE BOY a bowl of sweet noodles and a spoon, then padded back into her massive kitchen, the apartment filled with soaring opera music, Puccini’s Turandot turned up to max on several massive Bluetooth speakers scattered around the hacker’s playroom.

  Wey was eighteen, baby-faced, an only child, seated in a leather Moyu, an outrageously expensive ergo chair, something he found on the dark web. Made in Germany; as expensive as a new car. Paid for with crypto he earned on a ransom attack on a bank in Atlanta.

  Which was OK because he had only ripped off rich Americans—who deserved to be chirped.

  His desk, crowded with four extremely modded desktop computers, faced a wide window looking down onto a perfectly manicured but empty street. On his right was another desk; also sitting in the living room, staring out the broad front window at a modern skyline.

  Seated at an Apple laptop across from him was Zerzy. That’s what they called her the first day they met because no one could pronounce her real name. And it stuck.

  She was a lot of woman for sixteen years of age: busty, hippy, wild platinum blonde hair, a lusty laugh. She made Wey more than a bit crazy, all that outrageous female physicality and energy so close by. Yet she was clearly one of the guys. She knew her way around code. Her daddy, a famous Ukrainian cyber hacker, taught her everything she knew.

  On Wey’s left was Toshi Suzuki, nineteen, born in Osaka. He ran a Hitachi rig. Of course, it would have to be Japanese. Wey thought it was underpowered but Toshi didn’t care. He knew the tech was the best available. Besides they had an entire rack of righteous servers stacked up behind them, supplied by the Chinese army: a dozen Intel Cascade Lake 80 core processors running Debian Linux. They didn’t need heaters in the apartment with those babies blowing. And they were ready and armed to do real damage wherever they directed their dark focus today. This was a hacker’s wet dream, for sure.