He waited a few seconds, then heard a new voice say, “This is Lion. Is this Leopard?”
Chao enjoyed the fact that every single code name for this operation had come from the nickname he’d earned on the streets of Taipei. He had no idea who “Lion” was, but knew he was very high in the PRC of mainland China. He said, “Yes. Meeting is done.”
“Do you have it?”
“Yes. I got two on my phone right now.”
“Are they good?”
“One is. It’s a speech the president gave to the members of the Mainland Affairs Council, so it was openly filmed. High-quality production. The other is not. It’s from a different, private meeting of the MAC, and Ocelot is petrified of being compromised. You can see the minister’s face, but he kept the camera on his phone low. It looks like a drunk took it.”
“That’s fine. Makes it look clandestine instead of staged. Is the audio clear on both?”
“Very clear.”
“How long did they talk? We need something to work with.”
“The minister is thirty minutes, with the audio very clear. The video, not so much. It moves up and down, like the idiot was jerking off while she spoke. The president’s speech is less time, but it’s much cleaner, because it was staged.”
“Did anyone else say anything in the meetings?”
“Not for the president. That was a canned speech, but the minister got some questions. A couple of people talked, but they aren’t on the screen. She just recognizes them to speak, and then answers the questions.”
“Perfect. You said Ocelot had some issues?”
“Yeah. He’s petrified. He knows if you use the MAC video he’ll be done. For the minister’s discussion there weren’t that many people in the room. It won’t be hard to find out who filmed it. On the other hand, he’s actually in the presidential video. You can see him, so it’s clearly not him filming.”
“Yeah, but that means there’s a record of that video. Something they can compare against. That makes the minister’s video more important. It looks like the truth by the way it was taken. The president’s video can be refuted by all of the other copies out there. Ocelot is still needed, though. You need to massage him. Make sure he knows we’ll take care of him.”
“I don’t know if I can do that. I’m not, shall we say, at his level of society. He doesn’t trust me at all. And the candidate you wanted me to prop up is doing well. The social media campaign is working. He’s rising in the polls like a rocket. We may not need Ocelot.”
“He was rising in the polls, but the protests in Hong Kong are forcing us to lock down, and that’s going to work against us in Taiwan. We need him.”
Chao scrunched his eyes, unsure of what that meant, his small world now crashing into a bigger one. He said, “Hong Kong? What’s that got to do with our candidate? He’s winning.”
“He’s winning now, but he probably won’t succeed because of Hong Kong. Us clamping down inside that state will impact the election in Taiwan, no matter what his message is. That’s not my concern, though. I don’t care if he loses.”
Chao sat up and said, “Then what am I doing all of this for if not him winning? Isn’t that the point?”
“It was the point. It’s not anymore. Now we’re going to use that candidate to cause the strife we need.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means send me the video through Telegram. You keep Ocelot on a leash. That’s all it means.”
Chao thought through the implications, and his own small world in it, and said, “But you’ll keep me in mind, yes?”
“Of course. We always take care of our own.”
Chapter 35
Sitting inside the less than impressive headquarters of the Twelfth Bureau, Han Ming hung up the phone and looked to the commander, saying, “It’s working, but we’re losing control.”
“What do you mean?”
“That asshole in Taiwan is not with us. The Leopard is not a patriot. He only wants money. He is not to be trusted. We need to put a plan in place to eliminate him. He knows too much.”
Yuan glanced at him, then said, “That’s your department, not mine.”
“Yes. True. I’ll deal with it. He’s sending the videos. You’ll need to be careful in the alteration. I don’t want to bludgeon the people, just seed doubt. Both need to say that if the administration wins another turn, they’re going to engage China. Make it subtle.”
“Who’s on them?”
“One is the president herself. The other is the president’s handpicked minister for the Mainland Affairs Council. The cabinet position that’s supposedly coordinating all business relationships with us. If she is released talking about giving in to us, it will cause immediate repercussions.”
“Like what?”
“Riots. Other unrest. Something else to exploit.”
“Exploit how?”
“That is not your concern. Stick with the digital world. I’ll make you a script for the video. You can do this, correct? Here in the Twelfth Bureau?”
Yuan Bo remained quiet for a moment, then said, “Yes. I have the assets here, but they aren’t all Chinese.”
“Who?”
“The American contractor. The one working with our commercial artificial intelligence cell.”
Han scoffed and said, “That’s insane. Get someone else.”
“If it’s as important as you say, it’ll have to be him. We just don’t have the expertise in this. It’s what he does. It’s how he’s made his name.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s an expert at facial recognition. He’s the man who’s helped design all of our systems. Remember when we couldn’t get our false positive rates down? How the system was untrustworthy when we deployed it?”
“No. I had nothing to do with that. Get to the point.”
Yuan nodded and said, “Okay, okay. He started a company called BackRub when he was still in college. He had an idea about using digital traces for advertising in stores, where the consumer would enter a shopping area and his or her phone would start sending ads based on the phone’s digital trace. On the side, as a lark, he started manipulating videos using the algorithms he designed. ‘Deep fakes,’ he calls them. He just did it for fun, but both of those efforts needed massive amounts of data for the AI engines to work through. The more data, the more accurate the rendition, be it video or cell phone tracking. And his company had invested in a way to achieve it.”
Han walked to the window in the office, seeing the American typing away on a computer keyboard in the next room. He said, “Why can’t we do it?”
“Because in order to develop an algorithm that does what his does—that does what we want—we needed that data.”
Han turned back and said, “Where’d he get the data? We have more people here in China than he does in the United States—and more cameras.”
“Yes, we do, but we’re much more homogeneous than the United States. In order to perfect the system, we need black faces, white faces, brown faces, faces of all nationalities. We were stymied because we have primarily Chinese faces. He invested in a company called Link, which is touted as a modern-day phone booth. Basically, it’s a network of kiosks in New York City that anyone can use to connect to WiFi or make an internet call, like phone booths in the old days. They’re scattered throughout the city.”