Situation Room. Jack Mars
metal door had a clasp with a heavy lock. Sal lifted the bolt cutter and with one quick snap, chopped the lock right off.
“You’re in,” he said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
He was already moving down the hall toward his office.
“Thanks for your help,” Ed called to his back.
Sal raised one hand. “I’m an American.” He didn’t turn around.
Ed bent over and pulled up the door. They observed what was visible before going in. Ed stuck his hand inside and slowly waved it side to side, up and down, looking for trip wires.
It wasn’t necessary. Li’s warehouse was unprotected by booby traps. More than that, it seemed long abandoned. When Luke flipped the switch, half the overhead lights didn’t work. Plastic-wrapped pallets of cheap toys were stacked in rows in the gloom, and covered with green tarps. Boxes of generic, no-name household cleaning products, the kind that would turn up in dollar stores and odd lot outlets, were piled in one corner, nearly to the ceiling. Everything was blanketed in a thin film of dust. The stuff had been sitting here for a while.
Li seemed to have imported a shipment of junk to keep up appearances, then never bothered with it again.
“The office is over there,” Swann said.
In the far corner of the warehouse was the door to the small office. The door was wood, with a frosted glass window for the top panel. Luke tried the knob. Locked. He glanced at Ed and Swann.
“Either of you guys have a pick on you? Otherwise, we have to go back down there and explain to Sal about how organized crime has cornered the market on year-old discount store crap.”
Ed shrugged and took his keys out of the pocket of his jeans. The key ring had a small black flashlight on it. Ed held the flashlight like the world’s smallest night stick, and smacked it against the window, smashing the glass in. He reached through the hole and unlocked the door from the inside. He held up the flashlight for Luke’s inspection.
“It’s like a pick, only more direct.”
They went in. The office was bleak, but tidy. There was no window. There was a three-drawer filing cabinet, which was mostly empty. The bottom drawers each had a few folders with shipping manifests and receipts. The top drawer had a few power bars and small bags of pretzels and potato chips, plus a couple bottles of spring water.
There was a long wooden desk, with an old desktop computer on it. On one side of the desk were the kind of deep drawers where people often kept files on hangars. These drawers were locked.
“Ed?” Luke said.
Ed walked over, grabbed the handle of the top drawer, and wrenched it open with brute force – to the naked eye, it looked like a parlor trick, one deft snap of the wrist breaking the lock. Luke knew better. Then Ed proceeded to open each drawer in turn using the exact same technique.
“Like a pick,” he said.
Luke nodded. “Yes, but more direct.”
There was nothing much in the drawers. Pencils, pens, faded pieces of stationery. An unopened pack of Wrigley chewing gum. An old Texas Instruments calculator. In one of the drawers, on the bottom, were three CD-ROMs in dirty plastic cases. The cases were marked with letters A, B, and C, written in magic marker on scraps of masking tape. The case with the letter B on it was cracked.
Swann sat down to the computer and booted it up. “Pretty low-tech,” he said. “This thing is probably twenty years old. I’ll bet it’s not even hooked to the internet. Sure. Look at this. It’s from a time before cable hookups, and from way before wireless. There’s nowhere to plug in a Cat 5 cable. You want an internet connection on this thing? Anybody here remember dial-up?”
To Luke, it didn’t make sense.
“Why would an advance man from a country known for sophisticated hacking have a computer that isn’t even on the internet, and almost couldn’t be on it, even if he wanted it to be?”
Swann shrugged. “I have a couple guesses.”
“Do you care to share them?”
“The first is that he’s not Chinese at all. He’s not part of any sophisticated anything. The hack that took the dam out wasn’t particularly advanced. That dam’s system was ripe for the plucking. He may be part of a group with no government backing.”
“If he’s not Chinese, then what is he?” Luke said.
Swann shrugged. “He could be American. He could be Canadian. He has high cheekbones and flat facial features, which could mean he’s Thai. He’s a big guy, which could mean northern Chinese. He could be an American of Asian descent. I didn’t get anything from being in that room with him that indicated any nationality. But I wouldn’t peg him as Chinese just because he has a Chinese passport.”
“Okay, what’s your second guess?” Luke said.
“My second guess is they went low tech so no prying eyes can see what they’re doing. You can’t hack into something that isn’t connected. If Li is not on the internet, no one can read his files. The only way to access them is to come here to this godforsaken warehouse in a crummy industrial district on the outskirts of Atlanta. The only way to find out this warehouse even exists is to torture Li, or in your case, threaten to torture him. And that’s something which never should have happened in the first place, because Li was supposed to kill himself before he was caught. The people who were supposed to find this computer were Li’s handlers, or in a worst-case scenario, Sal would find it when the rent money ran out. Then he would either toss this old computer in the trash, or sell it for ten bucks.”
The computer screen came on and asked for a login code.
Swann gestured at the screen. “And that, right there, would have been enough to stop Sal in his tracks.”
“Can you beat it?” Ed said.
Swann almost smiled. “Are you kidding? These circa 1994 encryptions are a joke. I was breaking these things when I was thirteen years old.”
He typed in a command, and an old black MS-DOS screen appeared in the top left corner. He typed in a few more commands, hesitated for a moment, typed in a few more, and Windows returned, no longer asking for a password.
When the desktop loaded, Swann clicked around for a few moments. It didn’t take long. “There are no files on here,” he said. “No word processing documents, no spreadsheets, no photographs, nothing.”
He glanced at Luke over his shoulder.
“This computer’s been wiped clean. The hard drive is still here, and it functions, but there’s no evidence of anything. I think our friend Mr. Li might have pulled a fast one.”
“Can you get the files back that were deleted?” Luke said.
Swann shrugged. “Maybe, but I can’t do it here. Could be there were never any files to begin with. We’ll have to remove the hard drive and bring it back with us to NSA to know for sure.”
Luke sagged the slightest amount. Generally, he had a lot of confidence in his ability to read people. But maybe Swann was right. Maybe Li had pulled a fast one. His terror seemed real enough, but maybe he had faked it. Why would he do that? He had to know that Luke was coming right back for him. There was nowhere to run.
“What about the CDs?” he said. “Let’s check those.”
Swann picked up the first one, marked A. He held it between two fingers as if it had something contagious on it. “Sure, why not?”
He slid the CD into its slot. The computer suddenly began to rev like an airplane preparing for takeoff. A moment passed, and then a window opened. It was a list of word processing files. The files had names that followed sequential patterns, most often with a word and then a number. There were dozens and dozens of files.
The first word in the list was “air,” and it went from “air1” through “air27.” A later word that seemed interesting