He punched up another slide, showing a graph of technological innovation from 1980 until the present. He said, “Beyond that, China is flexing its muscle with technology. It’s not hyperbole to say they are about to be the sole superpower of artificial intelligence. We don’t seem to care about that, but China does. While Google and others fight our own Defense Department on some misguided attempt at personal salvation, they sell their skills to China in a torrent.”
He flipped to another graph, saying, “And China is sucking it up in a superhuman way. It has developed the technology to a point that the entire country is a living, breathing surveillance state, and we’ve helped them to do it. And I mean we, as in the United States, have helped them to do it, not in an abstract way. Our companies sell them everything from facial recognition algorithms to biometric predictive software, creating the first full surveillance state from cradle to grave, which China is using on its own population. I’d like to say we could stop the tap on that, but if we don’t sell it to them, they steal it in our universities.”
He punched the slide deck and a graph showing Chinese economic espionage came up.
“This is what we know, but make no mistake, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Chinese government has a huge ability to steal our technology, using what is known as the United Front Work Department, a division of the People’s Liberation Army. A dedicated member of the Politburo, its sole function is to leverage the Chinese diaspora for its own ends. They do it through appeals to the homeland as a first step, then go all the way to outright blackmail or threatening of relatives. And it’s very, very successful.”
He flicked a slide and said, “Unlike China, we operate in a market capitalist system whereby each company operates independently. We don’t band together and talk about our actions for a united front. What happens in the end is our companies tend to hide their exposure to China for fear of a market loss. Make no mistake, China doesn’t operate that way. Every bit of data from the technology they sell here is going straight back to the PRC, from DJI drones to Huawei cell phone technology. They are kicking our ass even if we don’t admit it.”
Chapter 7
Jennifer laid her head against my shoulder, and I had initially hated it, because now I couldn’t move without waking her up. We had damn near fifteen hours of flight left, and she wouldn’t let me booze it up like I wanted to. If the flight attendant came by, I’d have to use sign language to get a rum and Coke, because Jennifer’s ears were tuned to the words “rum” and “Coke” even if she was sound asleep. But when I gazed at her face I knew why I let it happen. She snuggled in next to me, and honestly, I felt content. The booze cart came by and I let it go. The flight attendant looked at me, and I shook my head, letting Jennifer get her sleep.
Two movies and fourteen hours later, I sensed something pass by our row, waking me up. I opened my eyes feeling cranky. Which is how I always felt on long flights. All I wanted to do was get off the damn plane. How long could this thing stay in the air?
Jennifer was still sleeping on top of me, her head burrowed into my shoulder. Which aggravated me a little bit. How she could get a solid night’s sleep on an airplane was a mystery to me, and I gave a split-second thought to waking her up. I did not, of course.
The sun had risen in between my groggy sleep and nonsleep, the light outside my airplane window growing brighter with every second. I saw the screen at my front was frozen, right in the middle of some year-old rom-com. I pulled out my phone and booted it up, logging on to the in-flight WiFi. I looked out the window and saw land below us. We’d reached the continent of Australia.
I sent Dunkin a message, saying we were about to land in Brisbane. We had to catch another flight to Adelaide, but we’d be at his place in less than four hours. I was sure he was on his way to work, but he’d see the message before he had to lock up his phone prior to going into his secure facility.
Dunkin’s real name was Clifford Delmonty, and once upon a time he’d worked for the Taskforce as a network operations engineer, which was a polite way to say he was a hacker. A five-foot-seven-inch computer geek, at his hiring board for the Taskforce he’d made an impossible claim that he could dunk a basketball. He thought we were looking for some superhuman physical specimen and figured nobody would test him on his claim. Since we were looking for a guy who could work miracles with electronic devices, not play point guard, we hired him. Then made him put his money where his mouth was.
He’d failed miserably and figured he was fired on his first day. We kept him, but he now wore the callsign Dunkin as a reminder that it doesn’t pay to exaggerate. The Taskforce needed the ground truth. No spin.
He’d worked for the Taskforce for several years and then was offered a very lucrative job by a start-up called Gollum Solutions, working on the artificial intelligence software for the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. They’d moved him to their headquarters in Australia, and he’d left an open invitation for anyone in the Taskforce to come visit. Because of Amena’s situation, Jennifer and I had taken him up on the offer. Well, Amena and the fact that Jennifer wanted to dive the Great Barrier Reef.
I thought about texting Amena, just to let her know we’d made it, but decided to wait. The whole point of leaving her alone was to get her operating on her own two feet. No reason to create a leash on our first outing, giving her the ability to text us at every moment.
The flight attendants came back down the row, handing out some godawful quiche for our breakfast, the mess looking like it had been scooped out of a koala’s cage. I waved the offending meal away. She said, “Can I get you some coffee?”
I said, “I’ll have a rum and Coke, if you don’t mind.”
Jennifer woke up, rubbed her eyes, and said, “What was that?”
The flight attendant started to hand me my order, and Jennifer said, “Are you getting a drink? It’s six o’clock in the morning.”
Chagrined, I said, “I guess I’ll have a cup of coffee.” The flight attendant gave it to me. I muttered, “It’s five o’clock somewhere, damn it.”
Jennifer smiled and laid her head back on my shoulder. In seconds, she was fast asleep. I waved at the flight attendant and mouthed, “Give me the rum and Coke.”
Chapter 8
From the back of the room, Wolffe saw a man at the end of the table raise his hand, a question on his face. Wolffe took one look at him and had an instant dislike. He could tell the man was a self-righteous prick who spent his life in books, learning the workings of the world without ever having felt the pain. Sure of his decisions despite never having to feel the brunt of what he decided, he’d probably left a university at the age of twenty-seven with a doctorate and had spent every other waking moment giving his advice to think tanks and the NSC.
The briefer said, “Yes?” The academic drew his hands underneath his chin, like he was pontificating to the world, and said, “Okay, okay, I get it. China is the boogeyman according to you, but selling F-35s to Taiwan is just asking to exacerbate the situation. What good will it do? Is there any proof that your dire predictions are occurring? It sounds like you’re giving us a briefing on a foregone conclusion.”