Hacking (5)
France, Paris.
Headquarters of the DGSE, the nation’s secret intelligence agency.
The night-shift office was quiet as always. Agents were half-working, half-killing time by poking around online.
Then one analyst scraped his chair back and spoke.
“Uh… what’s this?”
The agent beside him turned.
“What is it?”
“There’s… a weird post up on the internet.”
He swung the monitor around so the other man could see.
Chinese spy names, faces, current locations, and the missions they’re running. I’ll tell you everything.
The agent’s brow furrowed at once.
“The internet’s full of that crap.”
“Hmm… but it’s way too specific to be a prank.”
The analyst’s fingers flew down the scroll bar.
Real names. Aliases. Passport numbers. Cover jobs. Three years of movement trails. Recent reports. And clear facial photos of the secret cut-outs.
Analysis was literally this man’s job. His eye for material was sharp.
“This… looks real.”
The agent next to him chewed his lip.
“This is the kind of level only the absolute top brass inside get to see… and it’s just sitting out on the open internet?”
Their voices dropped lower and lower. Every sentence was too precise, the information far too high-grade for a joke.
“Huh?”
The analyst made a small sound.
“What?”
“This guy…”
The fingertip pointing at the monitor trembled faintly. On the screen was a man taking a phone call in a dark alley. Name, cover occupation, and even the latest mission code were plastered right next to his face.
“…That’s our team’s youngest.”
“What?”
The agent next to him leaned in until his nose nearly touched the glass. Then he froze solid.
“It really is the kid.”
“Yeah.”
Both men turned at the same moment. And with perfect timing, the junior was walking past in the corridor, arms full of document stacks, wearing the same earnest expression as always.
“…Him?”
The junior seemed to sense their stares; he gave an awkward little smile.
“Seniors, want some coffee?”
The senior agent rose slowly from his chair. He stared through the junior for a long beat before he spoke.
“Kid.”
“Yes?”
“Say ‘Liu Zhiheng is an idiot.’”
Liu Zhiheng was the name of China’s General Secretary.
The junior’s feet stopped dead. His eyes locked with the senior’s. Silence stretched. The junior’s gaze wavered. His throat bobbed as he swallowed.
Then—
Clatter!
The junior spun and ran. Chairs skidded. Papers exploded off desks into the air.
“Grab him!”
“He’s running! After him!”
The entire corridor turned into chaos in a heartbeat. Crash! Thud! Nobody fully understood what was happening, but everyone in that building was a secret agent. They all tore after the junior as one.
They finally brought him down hard at the end of the hall. Three agents piled on; his body hit the floor with a metallic ring.
“I’m not—! I’m not!!”
The junior shouted desperately.
“I really am not!”
But the agents’ eyes had already gone stone-hard.
“Then… why’d you run?”
The senior’s voice was calm, and that calm made it cut even sharper. The junior pinned to the floor flinched. Breath rasped out of him.
“We already know you’re a spy.”
The junior’s eyes shook wildly.
“I—I’m not. Liu Zhiheng is a dummy, meh-long, butt, butthole~ ebebebebe. See? I can say the whole thing. It’s real.”
The senior slowly shook his head.
“Let’s see. You send reports to China every Friday evening? I just thought you were out partying for the weekend. And I know all about you sneaking into the server room after hours claiming you’re working overtime to steal intel.”
The junior’s lips trembled.
“Th-that’s… no. It’s a misunderstanding.”
The senior began folding his fingers one by one as he recited.
“The nationality you faked. Tsk. You’re pretending to be Korean. Let’s see—five forged passports used. And your cut-out is codenamed Shut-in X, right?”
Hearing even his secret contact’s code name, the strength drained out of the junior’s body. The fingers that had been resisting went limp against the floor.
A beat of silence.
The junior lifted his head very slowly.
“But… how did you know?”
There was no more excuse left in that voice—only the baffled look of a man who shouldn’t have been caught yet somehow had been.
The senior held his phone screen right under the junior’s nose. On it floated the very post in question.
Chinese spy names, faces, locations, missions—everything revealed.
The spy’s eyes went round.
The senior agent said,
“It was all over the internet.”
Western China.
The Tibetan Plateau.
The altitude was high; the air was clear and carried that distinctive deep blue. Most houses were traditional dwellings of yellow-brown earthen walls and flat roofs. Multicolored prayer flags fluttered on the rooftops. Far off, snow-capped mountains stretched in a long, silent line.
In the basement of one traditional house sat a secret base of the Tibetan independence fighters.
“The Chinese… those bastards never stop.”
Inside the hidden outpost, young warriors sat in a rough circle, grumbling.
“They ban our language and force even our kids into Han schools.”
Another fighter clenched a fist.
“They’re trying to erase Tibetan tradition itself. No prayer, no meditation, no rites, no songs. They’re after our very souls.”
“Exactly.”
The leader tapped the table with a knuckle.
“We cannot let go of our soul. If we lose that, we disappear.”
Everyone nodded in silence. They had already lived years of holding their breath.
Someone broke the quiet.
“So what’s the plan for this operation?”
The leader spread a map. Eyes sharpened.
“Talk alone won’t change anything. We have to act.”
One warrior shot his hand up.
“Uh… then how about this?”
“What?”
“We put a bomb inside a lunchbox and throw it.”
The whole room went still for a second.
“Lunchbox bomb?”
“Ohh… that’s actually cool.”
“Lunchbox bomb… easy to carry around too.”
“Concealment’s perfect.”
“If they catch you, you just say, ‘It’s just a lunchbox,’ right?”
“Perfect.”
The leader slowly smiled.
“Good. Lunchbox bomb… a very Tibetan method.”
The mood brightened at the clever idea.
“But who’s going to throw it?”
The basement atmosphere sank again. Even the people who had been excited about lunchbox bombs grew heavy-faced once the practical problem appeared.
“But… even if you throw it, you only kill one or two, right?”
Another fighter nodded.
“True. Our dream isn’t punishing one or two guys. To make the country independent we need a real army.”
“An army…”
The leader let out a long breath.
“What do you need to build an army?”
They answered with one voice.
“In the end, money.”
A bitter silence settled over the basement.
“Guns, gear, training… everything costs money.”
“All we have is a little food and a few rifles.”
“So it all comes down to cash.”
Someone scraped a finger across the floor and muttered,
“Ah… if only money would just fall from somewhere…”
Then one warrior blurted,
“Hey… back in the day, in Korea…”
Every head turned.
“Korea?”
“Yeah. Korea used to have its own independence-movement period too.”
“That Korea that’s crushing it right now?”
“That’s the one.”
He folded his arms and continued.
“Yeah, that Korea once lived just like us, fighting for independence. And back then people sold their cows, sold their houses, sold their rice paddies—and poured the money into the independence army.”
The room went quiet.
“They really… did that?”
“They did. Rich or poor, they sold the house, sold the cow, and gave the money to the fighters.”
“…Amazing.”
“They stripped themselves bare to take the country back?”
“Yeah. And a lot of them never even gave their names.”
The air in the basement grew a little heavier.
The leader murmured quietly,
“If only money would just appear from somewhere.”
Bang!
The basement door flew open. A young fighter burst in, gasping for air.
“Chief!!”
He shouted without catching his breath.
“What is it?”
“A hun—a hundred billion dollars just came in! A hundred billion dollars!!!”
The air in the room stopped dead.
“…What?”
“A hundred billion… dollars! I checked the account! An amount we’ve never even seen in our whole lives!”
“Is that real?”
“Yes!”
“Who sent it?”
“They didn’t leave a name. Just money to use for the independence movement.”
The fighters erupted in cheers.
“Krrrk! We’re just as good as Korea!”
“We’ve got our own Daddy Longlegs too!”
“So this is the independence fund we’ve dreamed of…”
“We can finally build a real army!”
“Gear! Training! Weapons! Manpower! With money everything’s possible!”
“At last… at last we take Tibet back!”
But the leader’s face hardened almost at once.
“Wait.”
He raised a hand and quieted them all. Then he spoke firmly.
“The Chinese government will move against us. They’ll come with force to snatch that money.”
The fighters’ expressions turned serious.
“Then…”
“What do we do, Chief?”
The leader slowly clenched his fist.
“We guard it with our lives. First—weapons! We need weapons that can protect both the money and ourselves.”
Everyone nodded.
Bang!!!
The basement door flew open again. Another fighter staggered in, panting.
“Chief!!”
The leader turned.
“What now? What’s going on?”
The fighter sucked in three deep breaths and said,
“Germany just called!”
The leader’s eyebrow twitched.
“Why Germany all of a sudden?”
“They’re asking when we want delivery.”
The leader asked, bewildered,
“…Of what?”
The fighter answered between gasps.
“Tanks.”
The entire room froze solid.
“…What??”
The fighter emphasized it again.
“Tanks. The kind the military uses. Vrrroom, clank, bang! You know—tanks?”
“No… wait.”
The leader waved a hand.
“Germany… is giving us tanks?”
“That’s what they said.”
“Why?”
The leader’s eyes went wide.
“No idea. They already got the advance payment and want the delivery address for three hundred units.”
“How many?”
“Three hundred.”
“Is this a voice-phishing scam?”
“No.”
The fighters in the room stared at one another.
“Advance payment already deposited?”
From the back someone whispered,
“…Chief.”
“What?”
“If we get the tanks, we become a real army.”
The leader drew a deep breath. Then he muttered under it,
“Good… we’re that much closer to independence. But if China finds out, they’ll go completely insane.”
Bang!!!
The door opened yet again.
The leader asked,
“And you? What now?”
The fighter who had just come in said,
“Russia called. They don’t have the latest ICBMs, but they’ve got ones made twenty years ago—fifty of them, take it or leave it.”
China stopped.
Every Chinese government agency and the servers of eight hundred eighty-eight private companies were wiped simultaneously. Banks included. Everything except records written on paper simply evaporated.
The General Secretary of China stormed through the data centers barking orders at the technicians.
“Restore it immediately!”
“…Yes, sir!”
“Right now!”
But one technician who had been pretending to work carefully opened his mouth.
“General Secretary… there are micro-sparks all over the disks.”
“What does that mean?”
“It wasn’t just deleted… the drives show physical damage that makes recovery impossible.”
“What?”
“Think of the hard disks as having been scraped raw rather than simply wiped. Because the damage is physical, recovery is… impossible.”
Every server belonging to the government and private enterprise had been erased. All of them. Clean. And the disks had been scraped so they could never be restored. According to the techs, someone had forced overcurrent through them to spark them out; in any case, recovery was off the table.
Communications stopped. Finance stopped. Logistics stopped. Production stopped.
When China unilaterally froze, every foreign country that had been doing business with it took damage too. You hurt me because of you. The entire world demanded compensation from China—astronomical sums.
The General Secretary snapped in irritation.
“Declare a moratorium!”
We’re broke. Do your worst. A moratorium was simply lying down and saying you had no money. As a result, China’s credit rating plunged five grades in a single day.
The General Secretary was furious.
Then an aide approached and said,
“General Secretary, the beacon fires have been lit.”
“Beacon fires?”
Only then did he notice three columns of black smoke rising from the mountain far ahead.
The General Secretary asked,
“What is that?”
The aide answered,
“Three lines of black smoke means… Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan have all declared independence at the same time.”
Minority independence declarations. The weak point had been stabbed perfectly.
The General Secretary’s face turned every color of rage, as if it might burst.
“Deploy the army! Stop them!”
“Understood.”
A short while later.
“We just sent the order by courier. A person has to deliver it in person, so the command should arrive within a week.”
“A whole week?”
“Air and rail are all down because the servers are gone. They have to go by individual vehicle. For a place like Tibet, a week is actually fast.”
The vast Chinese continent. A communication system that relied on human messengers. The General Secretary suddenly wondered whether starting a war with that level of coordination would simply get everyone killed. This wasn’t the Spring and Autumn period—did people really have to walk the message over in person?
He snapped an order at the aide.
“Wait! Don’t do it! No war! Leave Tibet and Taiwan alone—all of them!”
The aide said,
“Understood. But they already left.”
“Can’t you stop them? If we send the army at that level they’ll all just die!”
“Um… that does seem likely.”
“Then you should have stopped them!”
The aide could not quite bring himself to say “You ordered it,” and only blinked.