Hong Kong by Stephen Coonts

Author:Stephen Coonts
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780312978372
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

“Here’s a sandwich and some water, Don Quixote,” Babs Steinbaugh said. She scrutinized the computer monitor. The E-mail program was still there, waiting.

Eaton Steinbaugh sipped on the water. The sandwich looked like tuna salad. Babs read his mind: “You have to eat.”

He took the duty bite, then laid the sandwich down. Yep, tuna salad!

“China is so far away,” she mused. “What can you do from here?” Here was their snug little home in Sunnyvale.

“Everything. The Net is everywhere.” His answer was an oversimplification, of course. Steinbaugh didn’t speak a word of Chinese, yet he knew enough symbols to work with their computers. He wasn’t about to get into a discussion of the fine points with Babs, however, not if he could help it.

“This Cole . . . is he paying you anything?”

“No.”

“Did you even ask for money?”

“We never discussed it, all right? He didn’t mention it and neither did I.”

“Seems like if you’re going to do the crime, you oughta get enough out of it to pay the lawyers. For Christ’s sake, the man’s filthy rich.”

“Next time.”

She grunted and stalked away.

Babs just didn’t appreciate his keen wit. Next time, indeed!

As he waited he thought about the trapdoors—sometimes he referred to them as back doors, because he had installed them—which were secret passages into inner sanctums where he wasn’t supposed to go. While in Beijing he had worked on the main government computer networks in the Forbidden City. The powers that be didn’t want to let him touch the computers, but Cole’s company had the contract and the Chinese didn’t know how to find the problems and solve them, so they were between a rock and a hard place. After much bureaucratic posturing and grandstanding, they let him put his hands on their stuff.

The network security system was essentially nonexistent. That was deplorable, certainly, but understandable in a country where few people had access to computers. Constructing and installing a back door was child’s play once he figured out the Chinese symbols and Pinyin commands. A Pinyin dictionary helped enormously.

Installing back doors in other key government computer systems was not terribly difficult either, for these computers all were linked to the mainframes in the Forbidden City.

Like all top-down systems, the Communist bureaucracy with its uniform security guidelines and procedures was extremely vulnerable to cybersabotage. The best ways to screw with each computer system tended to be similar from system to system, but what worked best with railroad timetables and schedules usually didn’t work at all for financial systems. Putting it all together was a sublime challenge, the culmination of his lifelong interest in logical problems. Eaton Steinbaugh enjoyed himself immensely and was bitterly disappointed when the reality of his cancer symptoms could no longer be ignored.

His illness did create another problem, however, one that he took keen interest in solving. The whole point of triggering the inserted code programs from outside Hong Kong was to prevent compromising the computer facility there—Third Planet Communications. But the person doing the triggering was going

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