Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

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.’

Midtown Manhattan, New York City

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.