The China Dogs (11 page)

“I'm always open to a ‘deal.' ”

“Something that gives you more regular cash and doesn't cost me quite so much.”

“Like what?”

“Like a
retainer.
Say I give you 12K a year—a grand a month—two fifty a week in cash?”

“And what do I have to do for that?”

“Fish around some more of those BRIC-based companies, see what's in their accounts, internal reports, business plans. You never know—we might even be able to flutter a bit on the big casino they call Wall Street.”

Danny's interested. “Yeah, I can do that. But listen, man, you fuck me—like asking me to work 24/7—and not only is the deal off, I promise you, I will mess you up so bad you'll still be saying sorry in your next lifetime.”

“Won't happen.”

“I mean it. I'll stick your name on sex offenders' registers and screw your credit rating worse than Bernie Madoff.”

Jeff holds up his hands. “Okay, I get the message. No fucking with Mr. Genius here. Now, do we have a deal?”

“Yeah, we have a deal.”

They bump fists.

“Good. Now I've got to go. I'll mail you some companies to look at.” Libowicz taps the folder of info he'd come for. “There's a story to write. Bets to place.”

35

Weaponization Bunkers, North Korea

J
ihai finds his father straining over a microscope in a glass-partitioned office at the end of the laboratory.

He should be sleeping.

It is three days since the old man rested. Seventy-two hours since he shut his eyes and for just one second didn't toil over the creation of the mood modifiers for the Nian dogs.

“I have brought you some food.” Jihai places a tray at the end of his father's long worktop. “Fish, rice, and fruit. With a flask of tea and some juice.”

Hao doesn't look up. His brain is focused on the magnified slide and the intense biological world spinning and swarming within it.

“Father, you must stop. You must rest.”

The scientist angrily jerks his head up from his work. “It is not for a son to tell his father how to behave at work. Here, I am your boss, not your parent.”

The young man stands his ground. “Many times you have told me that a tired mind is a useless mind. Fatigue breeds failure. I worry for your health and—”

Hao slaps his son's face. “Don't you dare talk to me about failure!”

Jihai puts a hand to the sting.

“It is
you
—you and those idiots you work with who have befriended Failure and welcomed him into our workplace to ruin us.”

Jihai can see his father is exhausted. Hand still to burning face, he bows and starts to leave.

“Wait!”

He stops and turns.

“Thank you for the food. Though you should not have brought it in here, you know that.”

“If I had not, there would be no chance of you stopping and eating.”

Hao smiles and feels a pang of guilt.

“Shall I take it away?”

“No. Leave it there.” He realizes he must talk to his son. Build a bridge between them. “You know how important our work is?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hao's not sure he does. “The Americans and the West have developed ways of infecting our dogs. We have more than twenty million in our country, Jihai. Twenty million—that is like a whole country of dogs. The West, with all its research into cloning and genetic modification, has found a manner in which to bring diseased breeds into our country and have them multiply, turn on us and destroy us. This is why we still have rabies and they do not. Why we have had to ban dogs growing above knee height, ban them from being allowed out during the day, ban them from all parks, public places, and—”

“Sir—”

“Let me finish. These are the reasons our work here is so important. We must fight back. We replicate the aggression in order to find the passivity. Each day that we fail, the Americans breed more and more of these dogs—”

“What if that's not true?” Jihai jumps in. “What if it's propaganda and lies?”

Hao doesn't understand, and his face shows it.

Jihai tries to explain. “I have read things on the Internet about the Americans being attacked by dogs. Killed by wild dogs—wild in the ways we have seen in our own experiments.”

Hao dismisses his child's ramblings. “Dogs are savage animals, Jihai. Wolves by nature.” Another thought occurs to him. “Have you been reading noncensored sites?”

The young man shakes his head in despair. “Everyone reads them—everyone with a brain. Government censors can no more lock a toilet door, let alone secure a global power like the Internet. These days there isn't a student in China who doesn't know how to escape ‘the lock.' ”

His father is surprised, and instantly realizes he shouldn't be. His son and friends were born into the technological revolution. It is clay in their hands, to be modeled and shaped as they wish. Whereas
he
had to encounter it in his later years, and the experience was like meeting an alien creature and needing to learn its languages and habits.

Hao points to the microscope. “I must finish. I have work to do.”

Jihai understands he is being dismissed. “Please eat some food—and please think on what I have said—not as a foolish son, but as one scientist to another. What if things are not as General Zhang says? What if our work is not to stop lethal American dogs, but to create Chinese ones?”

36

Greenwich Village, New York

T
he reporter's money is scorching a hole in Danny's pocket as he leaves his run-down rental and heads across town.

He has plans for it.

Crazy,
crazy
plans.

He glances over his shoulder and checks reflections in storefront windows. As far as he can tell, he hasn't been followed. The last thing he wants is anyone on his tail.

Next to the newfound cash is a set of keys. Keys to a second apartment. One that neither he nor the three other hacktivists he operates with can live in. This is strictly a workplace, stuffed with the kind of technology NASA would die for.

Danny was still at college when he was recruited and paid to put the hacking group together. He wasn't sure what was happening at first. It was just one of those things that started small and snowballed into something bigger.

Much bigger.

He'd been at a party and a friend of a friend introduced him to an Ivy League dude with a bad coke habit and money to burn. As a favor, he set up his 3D home media entertainment system for him. It was one of those obscenely expensive domestic networks that plays your videos, music, and Internet all over the house and gardens. Afterward, the guy says he has a friend who will pay him a fortune to screw up a competing company's computer system. It wasn't exactly a fortune, but back in college two grand seemed so. Next thing Danny knew, he's being introduced to other rich boys with grudges, no principles, and lots of money that they're happy to part with in return for some clinical and cynical cyber skulduggery.

Then came the envelope.

Five grand in cash and the keys to a loft in SoHo, with the message: “Go in the spirit of the Slaughterhouse.” It was a cryptic reference to the Cult of the Dead Cow, a group of U.S. hacktivists who worked from a secret HQ known as the Slaughterhouse, which got burned down way back in the nineties.

Whoever sent it knew they had the right man. From the time Danny first turned on a computer he'd been interested in using it for mischief. He'd grown up learning about the antics of groups like CDC, Hacker con, Ninja Strike Force, and Hacktivismo. At a time when most kids adopted sports stars as their heroes, his were Omega, the Cult of the Dead Cow, and the “Hong Kong Blondes”—a group of dissidents who disrupted censored networks across the People's Republic of China.

Danny briefly reflects on it all as he walks around his group's new base. There's a large open hardwood floor dotted with ­generous-size desks and new high-end computers and servers. The place smells of the fresh leather of four brown La-Z-Boys, and there are a couple of giant sofas in zebra fabric to crash on as well. A screen hides an area to cook, and a big fridge is filled with soda and beer. By the front door there are boxes of Tyvek suits and latex gloves—the hackers know they should leave no trace in either the real world or the virtual one.

The place is perfect.

Danny can't wait to get to work.

37

Weaponization Bunkers, North Korea

T
he noise and the jolt wake him

Hao had been asleep.

He'd dozed off at the microscope. Fallen from his stool. On the way down, knocked over the food Jihai had brought him.

Now he is on the floor, surrounded by spilled fruit, rice, and fish, feeling an ache in his elbow and the back of his skull.

For a moment he doesn't move. He just stays there in the mess and stares up at the strips of neon on the ceiling.

Failure.

Failure is exhausting him.

Failure is breaking him.

Jihai's doubts had been the last straw. They had broken his concentration and shut down his brain. He could not cope with the thought that all their work and sacrifice of the last years was to create something murderous rather than to counter it.

Such thinking has to be banished from his mind. And from Jihai's.

He focuses.

Reminds himself of his predicament.

He had been so close to perfecting a pacifier—then everything changed. For weeks nothing went according to plan. It was as though the progress he'd made had all been a fluke and couldn't be repeated. He'd rerun all the tests using exactly the same measure of chemicals and made sure they were added, mixed, and dispensed in exactly the same doses.

Failure.

He had gone back and done it all again, this time putting the errors down to a difference in the breeds of dogs.

Failure multiplied by failure.

But even in the face of defeat he'd refused to give up.

He wondered if variances in the dogs' weight, sex, or age might have been to blame.

They weren't.

So now he knows he has to go back to his formulas.

Pick himself up and start again.

Hao does just that. He slides his hands across the food-­splattered floor, eases himself upright and brushes himself down.

He has to put Jihai's comments out of his mind. Such thinking was crazy.

Such thinking could get them killed.

38

Historic District, Miami

G
host is too tired to eat when he gets home.

He's spent the evening starting up an Incident Room to manage information on the dog attacks, and now he's wiped out.

He kicks off his shoes, throws his jacket over a chair, and grabs two beers from the fridge. He's so tightly wound; it's going to take at least two to relax him.

He pops the caps and sprawls out on the settee. Days don't come a lot worse than the ones he's having at the moment. Two dead kids within twenty-four hours and a grandfather killed as well.

He's never known anything like it.

Seventeen-year-old Kathy Morgan. Ten-year-old Alfie Steiner. Fifty-five-year-old Matt Wood. He closes his eyes and sees all their faces. Their faces and their injuries. The terrible bites, the fractured bones, the missing flesh.

Ghost finishes his first bottle and puts the second to his forehead to cool it down. He's trying not to think of the relatives now. Of the children's parents, of Wood's wife, whom he'd only seen fleetingly at the station while Annie dealt with her. The poor woman looked even paler than him. Going through her husband's life and searching for a reason for the attack will be a horrible process that will feel like it never ends.

The thought makes him restless. He gets up and takes his beer to the window. Looks out at the sweltering city and its swirl of lights and feels desperately alone.

It's almost midnight when the second bottle is empty and he's finished plotting out which few people he can detail to which numerous tasks in the not-too-far-away start to the new day.

He finds himself dialing Zoe's number while simultaneously wondering whether he's going to make a fool of himself.

She must have gone to bed, because all he gets is her voice massage. “Hi, you're through to Zoe Speed, photographer, adventurer, and lover of life. Leave a message and I'll get back to you. That is, unless you're on my shit list, in which case go . . .” A long bleep fills the gap. “. . . yourself.”

He's laughing as he leaves the message. “Zoe, you said call, so I'm calling. Sorry it's so late, I was just—”

She picks up. “Hi, it's me. The
real
me, I mean. I just didn't get to the phone in time.”

He sounds startled. “Oh. Hi.” There seems no point beating about the bush. “Listen, I've had a truly shitty day and I think you might be the only person who can make it all right. My head is full of stuff that I really don't want to think about. Do you fancy catching a late drink somewhere?”

“No, not really.”

The answer knocks him back. “Oh.”

“But I do fancy catching a cab to your place. And I'm confident I can make you forget your messed up head and sleep soundly. Would that work instead?”

He laughs again. “Yeah. I guess it would.”

“Give me a minute to steal something from my friend's closet, then I'll be with you.”

39

Beijing

P
resident Xian Sheng sits at his large presidential desk, a spacious block of ancient camphor wood so wide it takes him several strides to reach either end.

General Zhang is already pacing outside, eager to see him.

Before Xian lets him in, he pours a cup of green peony tea and waits for his call to the White House to be routed to the President of the United States.