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It’s a crowded place.
There are six people sitting on the floor, four Chinese males and two Chinese females. All are dressed Silicon Valley casual, Hawaiian or polo shirts, khaki slacks, comfortable footwear, and all have their hands flex-cuffed behind them. There’s a single couch and that’s it for standard furniture. Four computer workstations, with monitors, keyboards, and stacks of system towers, gently humming, are clustered in a semicircle. Cables and other equipment hang from the plaster ceiling. No television or music system. The floor is bare hardwood.
Three of Noa’s crew—Phil Cannon, Aldo Sloan, and Juan Rodriguez—are working to pile up file folders, hard drives, and other materials in the middle of the floor. Phil still has his cable television repairman uniform on while Aldo and Juan, faces sweaty, are wearing their ghillie suits, looking like extras from some sort of shrubbery horror movie.
Noa looks at the house’s occupants and sees one male face thatstands out. She grabs a folding chair and puts it in front of him, casually sits down, and nods.
“Zhou Lieu Wei, so nice to meet you.”
He’s the oldest in the group, with a fleshy face, thick black combed hair, and black-rimmed eyeglasses. He doesn’t reply. His polo shirt is black with a white IBM logo stitched in.
“Mr. Zhou, I hope you and your fellow agents are in good shape,” she says. “We don’t want to hurt you, but we also didn’t want you to destroy any computer files or hard drives as we came in to make your acquaintance.”
Noa leans over, grabs a thick black cable running in front of the workstations, gives it a tug. “Ingenious little setup you have here, Mr. Zhou. A power cable installed to send an electromagnetic pulse throughout this entire house, to instantly fry every computer in here, erase every file and system, and pretty much wipe clear the evidence of what you and your mates have been doing these past couple of years.”
Noa tugs it again.
“Didn’t work, right?” she asks. “Last week a Comcast technician came in to fix a modem problem and managed to fix this as well. When my team came rushing in a few minutes ago, one of your young ladies did her very best to set off the EMP pulse. Nothing happened.”
More and more gear is being piled up in the center of the room.
Noa says, “Nothing to say, Mr. Zhou?”
He stares at her with utter hatred and contempt, and says in good English, “I demand to call my attorney.”
Noa smiles. “Say again?”
“You heard me … woman. I demand to call my attorney. Now. Or after we’re taken to whatever location is prepared for us. Immediately.”
Noa says, “Why?”
For the first time since entering the house, the older male looks concerned. “Because … it’s the law, that’s why.”
Juan Rodriguez says, “Damn, Noa, you wouldn’t believe how much stuff is squirreled away in those back rooms. It’ll take us at least another half hour to get it all packed up. They didn’t even use the bedrooms … just slept side by side on futons in the hallways. Everything else is keyboards, servers, and filing cabinets.”
“Thanks, Juan,” she says. “Mr. Zhou, you and your comrades have been quite busy, haven’t you? Stealing various types of software programs and other systems, all for the greater good of the Middle Kingdom. And you folks delight in taking what’s been developed here for our uses—like facial recognition software to identify terrorism suspects—and use it for your own purposes, like inputting the faces of dissidents you wish to arrest and scanning for them on the streets of Hong Kong or Shanghai. Or stealing the software we developed for administering our Bureau of Prisons and using it to crush the Uighurs.”
He says, “I did not come here to be lectured by you, woman. Take us to where you plan, and I will make my phone call.”
Noa smiles once more. She shouldn’t be feeling this way, but she’s enjoying this. Unlike that spy ring in Cambridge last year that’s probably still hard at work conducting espionage thanks to the FBI, this one in Los Gatos isgone.
Their superiors in Beijing at the Ministry of State Security at 14 Dong Chang’an Jie Avenue will try for hours, days, and weeks to communicate with their spy cell here in Los Gatos and will get no answer at all.
Disappeared.
Noa likes the sound of that word.
“What phone call?” she asks.
“Do not joke with me, woman. I know the law.”
He lifts his head, spits at her, and a splatter of saliva strikes her face. Aldo Sloan and Juan Rodriguez stop in their tracks, and she holds up a hand to keep them from moving forward.
She quickly gets over the shock and says, “But there’s a new law,haven’t you heard? There’s a secret memorandum of understanding between Washington and Beijing. We’re going to treat you the same way your folks would if they arrested a group of American spies in China. Same kind of rights and legal representation that Beijing would provide if the roles were reversed.”
Now the Chinese leader seems to understand what’s going on.
“But …”
