Zero days, p.23
Zero Days, page 23
When Drayton didn’t respond, Cullen said, ‘He was born in 1950 in the East. In Dresden, in communist East Germany. Studied at the Technical University in that city. It was about the best tech education the communists had to offer. He went on to work on their first personal computer and first computer network. Both pretty basic compared with the West at the time, much of the know-how stolen from us, but it was still cutting edge for the Soviet bloc. When the wall came down, he became a member of parliament in united Germany, chairing the Bundestag’s committee on research and technology. Then he headed a string of ministries. Intelligence jobs. And most recently, of course, your cherished Berlin Group.’
‘I don’t see how that makes him a cybercriminal,’ Drayton said.
‘Well, here’s the thing, Drayton. You couldn’t succeed at top levels in science and technology in East Germany without being a member of the party and without cooperating closely with the secret police, the Stasi. The Soviet secret police, the KGB, took a strong interest too. And Herr Schoenberg served them all with enthusiasm. He never gave up those loyalties.’
‘Loyalties to what? To a bankrupt ideology? To a country that no longer exists?’
‘You should never underestimate the hatred that grows out of resentment and humiliation. The humiliation of seeing the country you’ve served dismantled and subsumed by the West, your work belittled. Laughed at. He has in the past provided services to the Russians; sometimes to the Chinese. Even North Korea. Mostly he’s motivated by revenge and money.’
Cullen paused, waiting for a response from Drayton. There was none.
‘He assembled a group of hackers. The best in the world. Based them in Kiev. They were a kind of cybercrime service centre. They searched for flaws in major global computer systems. Zero days. And a few months ago they came up trumps. They found a flaw in the world’s most widely used computer chip. The ultimate zero day.
‘He sold an early version to the Russians. That’s what they used at Mountville Memorial Hospital. The one that defeated Chuck Drayton, but you don’t need me to tell you about that, do you?’
He picked up his empty beer, crushed the can, and had another shot at the bin, getting it in this time. ‘Now he’s holding us all to ransom. ‘We need that zero day, Drayton. We have to avoid it falling into the wrong hands.’
‘And which hands are those?’
Cullen ignored the question.
Then he said, ‘Schoenberg lost control of his hackers. He needed to find them and eliminate them. They had outlived their usefulness. He had what he wanted. That’s where you came in. The useful idiot.’
‘He seemed like an idealist,’ Drayton said. ‘He wanted to stop the trade in zero days.’
‘Yes, a cyber Geneva Convention, isn’t that what he talked about? All very worthy, but breathtakingly fucking naïve and another deception. To weaken us. Because who would benefit from cyber-arms control? It would be the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans. That’s who. It’s cyberspace, Drayton, everybody cheats and everything’s deniable. And why would we give up our advantage, and agree to something that would leave us weaker? Do you think Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by signing treaties? He intensified it, and the Soviets couldn’t keep up. We won through strength and resolve.’
There was another long silence, and then Cullen said, ‘What you need to understand Drayton is that we are on the same side.’ He banged his fist against the arm of the chair for emphasis. ‘Schoenberg is on the run. His organisation is crumbling, but there is important information we need.’
‘What sort of information?’
‘Think back to Digital Futures in Yangon. What did you find there?’
‘The place was empty.’
‘Then think harder. Secondly, we need to know everywhere you went and everybody you met during your little holiday in the Far East. Most importantly, we want you to arrange a meeting with Schoenberg, which of course you will inform us about.’
‘How do I contact you?’
Cullen stood and started walking to the door.
‘Don’t you worry yourself about that, Drayton. We’ll know how to find you and will be in touch when we need to. You have forty-eight hours.’
‘And then what?’ Drayton said.
‘If we don’t have what we want, things could end badly for you, Drayton. Very badly.’
*****
Drayton closed the window and then sat in the big leather armchair vacated by Cullen. He listened to Captain America’s fading footsteps on the stairs and then the faint click of the door to the apartment block as Cullen let himself out to the street.
Drayton had to assume that Cullen’s people were watching him closely, that everything he now did was being monitored. But at least Captain America had an interest in keeping him alive, at least for the next forty-eight hours. Cullen thought Drayton had important information; that he was the key to finding Schoenberg.
He replayed Cullen’s words in his head. You’re a loser Drayton. Now he needed to think like the investigator he was supposed to be. He owed that to himself, to prove Cullen wrong, but mostly he owed it to Anna.
He hailed a taxi outside the front of his apartment, and asked the driver to take him to the eastern part of the city, to Normanstrasse, to the former headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police. He quickly spotted a black Mercedes with darkened windows, trailing his taxi and making no great attempt to disguise the fact. Drayton smiled. With all the cyber tools at their disposal, it seemed almost quaint. But he assumed that was the point, that they wanted to tell him he was being watched, Cullen wanting it to be obvious. When the taxi dropped Drayton at the old Stasi HQ, the Mercedes pulled into the car park. Waiting.
He asked for Heinz, to whom he’d been introduced by Schoenberg just before leaving for the Far East. Schoenberg had called Heinz the man behind the museum, and they had seemed very close. Drayton waited beneath the watchful eyes of Karl Marx and Felix Dzerzhinsky before a woman appeared and told him Heinz was at the former Stasi Prison in Hohenschoenhausen, preparing for an exhibition. She gave him the directions.
Behind him a tour group was being given an introduction to the Stasi, their guide standing beside a box-like van, cream-coloured and with logos for a food delivery company on its side. She opened a van door to reveal five tiny, windowless cells, explaining that the Stasi operated a fleet of the vans, and used them to snatch people from the streets. She said the East German secret police had built a suffocating system of state surveillance of every citizen. ‘Can you imagine living in a country where everything you do is watched?’ the guide asked, as Drayton left the building and walked out of the former Stasi compound, trailed by the black Mercedes.
It took him forty-five minutes to reach the prison, walking along roads lined with drab Communist-era slab-like housing blocks. Back then, they came in three shades of grey, and to Drayton not even the bright new facades could disguise their intimidating monotony.
Under the communists, the Central Remand Prison of the Ministry for State Security had been a holding an interrogation centre for opponents of the regime, which meant just about anybody the party decided was suspect. It too had been preserved as a monument and museum, its solid brick walls still topped with wire, watchtowers at its corners.
The Mercedes disappeared for a while, maybe getting a little bored, but was waiting for Drayton when he arrived at the prison, parked just across the road. A man at the ticket office beside the prison’s big sliding metal gate told Drayton he could find Heinz in the interrogation block.
Heinz was supervising the hanging of pictures and framed documents at the end of a long corridor lined with identical interrogation rooms. Each room had tables arranged in a T shape. The top of the T was in front of the window with a single chair behind it, facing into the room. There were two more chairs, one either side of the stem of the T. The only other furniture was a heavy metal filing cabinet. The floor was made of fading lino, the walls hung with stained wallpaper.
As Drayton approached him, Heinz was lifting a large frame into place on the wall. It contained the quote from Erich Mielke, the long-time head of the Stasi. It was in capitals in German and English and read, ‘COMRADES, WE MUST KNOW EVERYTHING’.
‘Sounds like they were busy,’ Drayton said.
‘Very,’ said Heinz. ‘By their own definition, the entire population was a potential enemy and needed to be watched.’
When Drayton introduced himself, Heinz said he remembered him and how was Herr Schoenberg? Drayton asked if they could speak in private and Heinz led him into one of the interrogation rooms.
Drayton went to take the seat at the top of the T, in front of the window, but Heinz stopped him, saying that’s where the interrogator sat. ‘Their interrogations were very sophisticated. The interrogator always sat in front of the window, in front of the light, the light that represented freedom, presenting himself as the friend. Your biggest friend. The key to your freedom. If only you would cooperate. If only you could denounce your other friends and family. It was psychological torture.’
‘Well, I promise I am not here to interrogate you,’ Drayton said, the two of them sitting either side of the stem of the T. ‘It’s just that I fear Herr Schoenberg may be in trouble. You see there are those questioning Herr Schoenberg’s good name. His credibility.’
He was trying to pick his words carefully, not sure of the reaction.
‘There are those who say Schoenberg cooperated closely with the Stasi when he was a scientist in the East, and that he has never given up those loyalties…’
Heinz raised a hand for Drayton to stop, and then began to laugh and kept laughing, so loud it echoed around the small room. It was a bierkeller kind of laugh, as if Heinz had just been told an outrageous joke over two large steins of beer.
‘Please. Please. Mr Drayton. Wolfgang Schoenberg a Stasi spy?’
‘But he did work on East German computer systems and the East Germany’s first network. Would that have been possible without close connections with the party and secret police?’
‘You are right that as a young man he worked on those systems, and you are right that the party took a close interest. But Schoenberg refused to join the party and refused to cooperate with the Stasi. He argued for the purity of science. But for the party, science and technology were always a tool, to serve a political end.’
The humour had vanished now, and Heinz was staring hard across the table at Drayton.
‘They accused Wolfgang of being unreliable, restricted him from travelling and threatened to cut his research funds. But still he refused to be compromised. In 1985 he finally quit rather than submit himself to them. He moved from Dresden to Berlin. He had little choice, since they took away his home and car. In Berlin he stayed with relatives, did a little informal teaching and wrote plays. He also became involved with the dissident movement here. While all the time they watched and harassed him, ensuring that he never got any proper employment. It is all in his Stasi file, Mr Drayton.’
‘What happened when the wall came down?’ Drayton asked.
‘He became involved in the politics of unified Germany, but he never stopped fighting for full exposure of the Stasi’s crimes and its accountability for them. In 2006, he and I worked together on a computer project, to develop software to help with the reconstruction of files that had been shredded by the Stasi in the weeks after the wall came down. Shredded by hand, most of them. There were so many, it would have taken decades to put them together. You see he was determined that the truth would come out. It became almost an obsession.’
‘Did the software work?’
‘Up to a point. It certainly sped things up, though there were still glitches, and funding was hard to come by, as at times was political support. There were a lot of ghosts in the files. Still are.’
Then Heinz stood up and said, ‘Now if you don’t mind, I have things I need to do. Does that sound to you like the résumé of a Stasi stooge?’
It didn’t. Nor of a cybercrime mastermind. But then again, they never did.
‘And there’s one more thing,’ Heinz said, stopping at the door. ‘You recall that at our last meeting, I showed you a diagram of a Stasi investigation?’
‘I remember. It looked like some sort of crazed game of snakes and ladders. A spider’s web.’
‘It was the result of a six month investigation by seventeen full-time spies and dozens of informers, including the target’s wife, as well as friends and neighbours. A map of all his interests, connections and movements. His network. The map was found in the Stasi files eight years after the wall came down. It turned out that the man’s wife, who was from Ukraine, had been a long-time Stasi informant. The discovery ended their marriage, and she returned to Kiev, taking their two small children with her.’
‘That must have been hard on the guy,’ Drayton said.
‘It was Mr Drayton. Very hard. And do you know the name of the man, the target of that Stasi investigation? The computer scientist turned playwright?’
But before Drayton could say anything, Heinz answered the question for him.
‘It was Herr Wolfgang Schoenberg.’
Heinz waited for the words to sink in. Then he said, ‘I do hope that answers your questions. Good Day Mr Drayton.’
He walked out to the long corridor, leaving Drayton sitting alone at the bare desk in the cold interrogation room.
*****
Drayton was in a taxi, returning to his apartment, when he spotted the email. Tun Zaw hadn’t needed much encouragement. This time he’d hacked the computers of Bagan’s military base and read the regional commander’s messages. ‘I thought you might find this rather interesting, Mr Chuck,’ he wrote in the tone of massive understatement that Drayton was beginning to get used to.
Drayton smiled, the boy’s computer skills were coming along just fine. He noted down details from the message and its attachments.
Now he needed to find Milo, and this time he didn’t want company.
He closed the curtains in his apartment, turned on the lights, switched on the television, turned up the volume, then placed his smartphone and laptop on his bed, no longer wanting to carry anything connected, through which he might be tracked. He waited at the rear entrance of his apartment block until he heard a tram approaching, walking out quickly as it rumbled past, jogging after it and then boarding at a stop further along the street. He could see no sign of the Mercedes. They could make what they wanted of his visit to the Stasi museums, and he smiled as he thought of Cullen trying to figure out that one. But now he needed to be on his own.
He stayed on the tram until the end of the line and then descended to the U-Bahn, taking a series of random trains, walking down the carriages, getting on and off at the most crowded stations, in and out of coffee shops, always on the move. Surveillance was among the darkest of dark arts, especially in the cyber age. He knew that better than most. You could never be certain. The best you could be was reasonably confident, and only when he reached that point did he take a train to Neukölln.
It was dark by the time he emerged from the U-Bahn onto the crowded sidewalk of Karl Marx Strasse. Street performers surrounding the U-Bahn entrance: classical, sounding roughly like ‘The Four Seasons’, but only roughly. Then something Chinese. A Latin American trio. From a distance the sound merged into one discordant shriek, mixed up with the street hubbub of countless dialects. A bar boasted of ‘The best fucking burger in town’. Next to that was a Turkish shisha place. Then a place full of clanging slot machines. A store selling traditional Arabic clothes next to a sex shop and a punk place with anti-fascist T-shirts in the window. The only thing they had in common was the graffiti, crawling up their walls.
He had only the vaguest idea of where he was going. Milo had described it as his local bar. A rooftop place that accepted Bitcoin. And even if he found the bar, there was no guarantee he’d find Milo there.
He went into the place selling the best fucking burgers, but the barman hadn’t heard of any rooftop bar nearby. He tried a bistro, the Karl Marx Bistro, where a server said there was a cocktail bar on top of a new boutique hotel. Drayton took the directions, but it didn’t sound very Milo. In a cramped cell phone shop he bought two old Nokia handsets and two pay-as-you-go SIM cards. He asked two girls standing at the counter, topping up the credit on their phones, if they’d heard of a rooftop bar nearby. One mentioned a new Italian place. Good food. Good atmosphere. She thought that was on a roof. But that didn’t sound very Milo either. The other girl then described a bar on top of a shopping mall, which was pretty skanky. That was more Milo.
The entrance to the bar at the shopping mall was via the top tier of a multistorey car park attached to the mall, through a heavy metal gate and up a further steep ramp. It was mostly outdoor, worn wooden benches arranged over several tiers and looking out over the rooftops of Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Big dog-shaped silver balloons floated above the benches beside strings of colourful flags and an old green motorbike and side car with crazed-looking mannequins.
It was a young crowd, some with kids playing in sandpits. Just about everybody seemed to be smoking. There was a strong smell of weed, lots of laptops, big speakers blasting out some heavy blues that Drayton didn’t recognise. All very cool, all very Milo, except there was no sign of the man himself.
Drayton ordered a beer, a big cloudy wheat beer, and took a seat near the edge, where he could look out over the neighbourhood, but also with a clear view of the entrance to the bar. He took his time, sipping the beer, playing with the old Nokia, or at least as much as you can play with a phone like that. A young guy with a beard that looked like some sort of habitat for rare nesting birds told Drayton he liked the phone, looking at it as if he’d never seen anything quite like that before.
