Authors: Jeff Abbott
‘You really wouldn’t dare.’
‘My child’s life is really at stake, Fagin, so, yeah, I would. Sit down. We’re going to talk.’
He sat. He still looked like the computer teacher he’d once been, in a New York high school. On the back wall was a Teacher
of the Year award he’d gotten years before, back when he still taught, smelling of chalk, dry-erase pens and fusty
computer labs. Of course. Fagin had been so talented at encouraging young talent and honing minds. Unfortunately he encouraged
them to hack into banks and government databases, usually as a prank. Special Projects had recruited him when he and his keyboarding
artful dodgers tried to delve (unwittingly) into a front company for the CIA, kept him and his iPodded foundlings from a prison
sentence and guided him toward more constructive pursuits. To the outside world he worked as a software design consultant.
‘Your child’s life? Aren’t you being really melodramatic?’
He didn’t know anything about my personal life – as far as I knew.
‘I’m looking for a young hacker, of Chinese descent, who might have grown up here in New York.’
‘Oh, that narrows it down.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Really. Do you want the left or the right side of the phone book?’
‘Do you know a hacker who’s vanished in the past couple of years?’
‘No.’ I saw his crossed arms tighten for just a moment. I would have to ask very precise questions to get a useful answer.
The basic principle of Fagin’s psychology is that knowledge and intelligence are the only currencies. Really.
I produced my cell phone. I didn’t say anything. I just wanted him to see it. Right now it was more frightening than a loaded
gun.
‘I think he was from New York and he did something bad enough to hide out under a false name, Jin Ming, at grad school at
Delft University of Technology. He has come back to New York, at huge risk, when he has every reason to dig a tunnel below
a Dutch canal and hide for the next ten years. So I’m thinking it’s for a family reason.’
‘A lot of Asian kids study computers, but not a lot turn to hacktivism. Cultural mores. More respect for authority in Chinese
families.’ Fagin studied his fingertips. ‘Not to stereotype or generalize, really.’
‘So how many do you know?’
‘Well, several, still. A few came through my, um, camp. I’ve kept tabs on them.’
‘Because you don’t want them talking about their work with you or because you’ll need them again?’
‘Both. If I show you their faces, will you leave?’
‘I need a name, Fagin.’
‘And then what?’
‘You don’t say anything to Special Projects that I was here, and I don’t give your home address and real name to your many
enemies overseas.’
‘I’m really hurt. I don’t think you’d do that, Sam.’
‘My child. The rules are off.’
He stood. I followed him to one of the computers. I leaned close. I wanted to be sure he didn’t send an email to August or
anyone else in Special Projects. Hackers are trickier and more subtle than pickpockets. He could hit a keystroke and reformat
the entire network for all I knew. Watching Fagin at a keyboard was like watching the cobra slowly rise and undulate from
the reed basket.
‘I keep a dossier on all the Oliver Twists,’ he said. He entered in a passcode too fast for me to register it, then another
one, then another. He had a file labeled
TWISTS
and he opened it up. Dozens of names. He clicked on a few and their files opened. Complete with pictures. I doubt Fagin had
made them stand still for a picture; these looked stolen from passport and driver’s license pictures. Or even school pictures:
some of the kids looked
to be barely thirteen or fourteen. Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen.
He began to click through the photos while I watched. ‘No. No. No,’ I said.
It would have been too much to hope that Jin Ming had worked for him; if so, then if he wanted to surrender to someone he
could have run straight back to Fagin. ‘None of these are Jin Ming.’
‘Jin Ming. Jin Ming. I remember a Jack Ming.’
‘Jack Ming. That name’s too close to Jin Ming for it to be a good alias.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Jin would be the surname, not Ming. He’d be called Ming by his friends, not Jin. And a good alias is one
you can remember.’ He sat down, searched on Jack Ming on a Google search. News reports came up. A picture.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Fagin said. ‘Him.’
It was the young Chinese hacker. ‘That’s him. What did he do?’
‘I only knew him by reputation. Supposedly he hacked Bruce Springsteen’s laptop once. Stole recordings of an album in development.’
‘That is such heresy. And that’s why he’s a fugitive.’
Fagin fidgeted. ‘Um, no, he was really good at hacking copiers.’
‘Copiers?’ I raised an eyebrow.
‘Yes. Office copiers. Most of them have microchips now, and they have internet capability. They can connect to the web if
they have a repair that needs to be made. They can either self-download a fix if it’s a software problem or tell the repairman
exactly what parts to bring.’
‘And Jack Ming would hack … copiers?’
‘Yes. He would rewrite the software in the copier.’ Fagin tented his cheek with his tongue.
‘To do what?’
‘Well, you could rewrite software on the chip to overheat the copier, damage it or destroy it. He set a copier on fire at
a firm where his mother worked as a consultant. The sprinklers came out, caused several thousand dollars’ worth of damage.’
‘Big deal. Is his mommy ignoring him?’
‘Or,’ and Fagin gave his throat a polite clearing, ‘you could program the copier to save an image of everything it scanned
and email it to you.’
‘Wow.’ Okay, that was huge. Consider what a compromised copier could give you: business proposals, legal filings before they
were given over to the court, product plans, confidential memos. Even with email now, paper copies of critical documents were
still used. You could learn a lot about a company, a project, sifting through every image that came across the copier. ‘Corporate
espionage, Fagin?’
‘Maybe, just a touch.’
‘Is that why Jack Ming had to leave New York?’
Fagin gave a slow nod. ‘He stole secrets from companies, and he must have tried to sell them. Or somehow they backtracked
the hacking to him. I think if he could make copiers spy for him, he could write other software to do the same.’
I considered. Maybe he had, maybe this was how he’d stolen Novem Soles’s secrets.
Fagin shrugged. ‘Um, I don’t think he’d come back here to see family.’
‘Why?’
Fagin cracked his first smile. ‘Well, the rumor was, he caused his dad’s death.’
His mother’s apartment was several blocks north of the United Nations Plaza, on East 59th Street. It was convenient, and his
mother had always treasured a smooth road in life. She was not a woman who cared for bumps along the ride.
Jack Ming didn’t recognize the doorman, and he didn’t have a key, so he sat in a small, elegant tea shop across the street,
sipping a strong cup of Earl Grey, staving off jet lag, waiting for her to come home. The sky rumbled, louder than the traffic.
The clouds began to smother the hard, bright morning light. A warm, gusty rain began to fall fitfully. He watched an umbrella
salesman suddenly appear on the street corner; it was almost as if the rain had conjured the man out of thin air. It was unusually
warm in New York after the unseasonable chill of Amsterdam.
He thought he would never be back here. He had expected a tidal wave of emotion; but instead, worse, he felt a slow, rising
flood of remorse and sorrow. The kind that drowned you by inches.
He tasted the risk, like wet steel on his tongue. Novem Soles might send a hired troll, like the one he’d killed in Amsterdam,
to watch his mother and kill him if he turned up. Or maybe the CIA had figured out who he was after he made his offer. Of
all the moves he’d made since being shot, coming home felt like the most dangerous one. He glanced around. If her apartment
was being watched then the watchers should have grabbed him the moment he appeared across the street. He tucked an earphone
bud into place but he kept the iPod
silenced. He had called the house using a prepaid phone he had bought when he arrived in Manhattan. As he got his mother’s
answering machine, he had hung up and decided simply to go to her apartment. His father had been wealthy and the Mings had
invested carefully from their days in Hong Kong and she still worked as a consultant from her home when she pleased.
Mom, come home, he thought. He tried her home phone again. No answer. She could be traveling for work, which could mean she
was anywhere from South America to Hong Kong to Canada. She could be screening her calls. He could try and hack into her laptop;
she wasn’t very security conscious. But that felt like rifling through her clothing drawers, or love letters from her teenage
years. You didn’t hack your mom.
He waited, watching the warm, intermittent rain streak the glass, his heart pounding. She might spit in his face. She might
scream for the police. She might call him his father’s murderer again and he wasn’t sure he could take that pain.
Fagin poured himself coffee. He didn’t offer me any.
‘Sandra Ming is former State Department. Now she consults. Very well connected in both business and government. She sits on
boards of directors for two Fortune 1000 companies. American-born but related to a prominent Hong Kong family. The husband’s
name was Russell Ming. Real-estate developer, he
died about the time that Jack vanished. Owned properties around New York and New Jersey. Heart attack about the time Jack
lit out.’
For a moment Fagin’s eyes went merry.
‘Heart attack over his son’s crimes?’ I asked.
‘The rumor mill suggested,’ Fagin said.
‘That’s a hard cross for a kid to bear,’ I said.
Fagin made a noise. He’d seen as many damaged kids as a social worker. ‘Life is full of hard crosses. If I could have recruited
him I could have shielded him. The Oliver Twists have never, ever been caught.’
‘Connected to government and business,’ I said, repeating Fagin’s own words. Could his mother shield him, or help him reach
the CIA without me finding him? I had one choice: I had to go to the mother’s house. I glanced up at Fagin.
‘Would Jack contact hackers here in town? Did he know any of your Twists?’
‘Not if he wants to keep his head low. If there’s a price on him, I might be tempted to collect it.’
‘At least you’re consistent, Fagin.’
‘And what a joy that makes me.’
‘But you, you’re not likely to turn him into the police. You don’t like talking to the police, Fagin.’
‘In my defense, they don’t much like talking to me, either.’
‘Where does Mrs Ming live?’
Fagin consulted a computer database. I looked at the photo of his mother we’d loaded into a browser: it showed an elegant
woman touching her chin in that weird author-photo pose. She was pretty, but in a cold, cubic way.
He gave me Mrs Ming’s address.
‘Thank you.’
‘That’s it? Thank you?’
‘You’re not going to tell anyone that I’m here, Fagin.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘Because I will tell the people who are looking for Jack Ming that you might know where he is. And if I do that, they will
order me to force information from you, and then to kill you.’
‘You should find a better class of person for your associates,’ Fagin said. ‘And, really, you needn’t turn into a bully.’
‘Tell me, hacker man,’ I said. ‘Have you ever heard of a hacker in Las Vegas named Leonie?’
‘Leonie, growl, I like kitty-kat-style names,’ Fagin said.
‘Just answer.’
‘No. But you know, online, we don’t use our real names.’ He widened his eyes. ‘Shocking, I know.’
‘She’s a relocator for people who want to vanish. She deals with hackers around the world to get information or to help her
create new identities.’
‘She’s not a hacker, then, she’s an information broker. Hires hackers to do a bit of a job for her, then uses someone else.
That way you never know exactly what it is she’s working on or who it is she’s working for.’
‘You know anything about her?’ I showed him the picture of her I’d taken on my phone when she slept.
‘You bored her into a sense of complacency to get this picture, right?’
‘Have you seen her before?’
‘No. But isn’t she the pretty one?’
‘You ever hear of a woman named Anna Tremaine?’
He considered, and shook his head.
‘How about Novem Soles?’
‘Sounds like a Catholic retreat.’
‘It means Nine Suns in Latin. You ever hear of a group with that name?’
‘No.’
I got up. ‘Thanks for what you could give me, Fagin.’
‘I can give you one more thing. Good luck, Sam, on finding your kid.’
I must have let my surprise show.
‘What, I can’t wish you luck?’
‘Just keep your mouth shut, Fagin, about me being here.’
‘I don’t stand between kids and their parents, man. By the time the kids come to me the parents have already shoved them away.’
Fagin watched Sam leave. Then he reached for a phone. Sam Capra could make all the threats he wanted, but he did not pay the
bills.
Fagin reported the discussion, and then he hung up to go see if the Oliver Twists were done laying their electronic mousetraps
inside Moscow’s power grid.
An hour later Jack saw her.
His mother came along the sidewalk, walking in her stiff, formal way, wearing a light blue raincoat. Her hair was impeccably
styled and more gray streaked it than he remembered. She held bags from a local artisan grocery, and the plastic bulged with
her purchases. He crossed the street, cutting toward her.
Please don’t turn away, he thought. Please don’t.
He stood and he waited for her to come to him. ‘Hi, Mom.’