Codename Villanelle [Villanelle #1-4] by Luke Jennings

Author:Luke Jennings
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Fiction
ISBN: 9780316512510
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

3

It’s almost seven in the evening when FatPanda leaves the rain-streaked building on Datong Road. June in Shanghai is a time of sweltering humidity and frequent downpours. The roads and pavements shine, cars and trucks hiss by in a shudder of exhaust, and the heat rises in waves from the wet tarmac. FatPanda is neither a young man nor a fit one, and his shirt is soon clinging sweatily to his back.

But it’s been a good day. He and his White Dragon crew have launched a successful spear-phishing assault against a Belarusian company named Talachyn Aerospace, and have just begun the wholly satisfying business of draining the company’s data, stealing passwords and project files, and generally making merry with its most sensitive information.

In the eight years of its existence, the White Dragon crew has hit the best part of a hundred and fifty military and corporate targets. Initially in the U.S., more recently in Russia and Belarus. Like most of its victims, Talachyn has offered only token resistance. A week ago, a junior employee received an email that purported to come from the company’s director of security, inviting him to click on a link for information about a new firewall. In fact, the link contained the ZeroT downloader, a remote-access tool designed by FatPanda, giving his crew the run of Talachyn’s operational files.

Since these relate to classified fighter-jet designs they will be of particular interest to FatPanda’s superiors in Beijing. For the White Dragon group are not, as some have thought them, merely a gratuitously destructive team of hackers and anarchists. They are an elite cyber-warfare unit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, engaged in targeted attacks on foreign corporations, military intelligence systems and infrastructure. The anonymous-looking building on Datong Road has been fitted out with banks of powerful computer servers and high-speed fibre-optic lines, all of them cooled by precision air-conditioning systems. FatPanda, the team’s leader, is Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei, and it was he who chose the crew’s title. A moon-white dragon, according to Chinese symbolism, embodies a ferocious supernatural power. It is an omen of death. A warning.

Ignoring the crowds of home-going workers and the clammy heat, FatPanda walks unhurriedly through the evening haze of the Pudong district, gazing around him with admiration at the city’s trophy skyscrapers. At the soaring glass column of the Shanghai Tower, the silver-blue sliver of the World Financial Centre, and the vast, pagoda-like Jin Mao Tower. That things are rather less spectacular at street level, where beggars rummage through garbage-bins, is not of concern to FatPanda.

He is, in many ways, a clever and even brilliant man. He is certainly a lethal cyber-warrior. But success has led FatPanda to make a cardinal strategic error: he has underestimated his enemy. While he and his crew have been rummaging through the intellectual property of foreign corporations, diverting terabytes of secret data to Beijing, the world’s intelligence agencies and private security firms have not been idle. Their analysts have been amassing their own data: identifying

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