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218 pages

English

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An image goes viral in ChinaIt threatens the ruling Communist Party...Internet rumours take on a life of their own and online revenge becomes a weapon of dissent in a city where truth and reality are as clear as the thick smog around them in this gripping cyber thriller.When a young blogger who lives his life behind a screen posts an image online, he has no idea of the impact it will have on the nation – or that his life will collide with a delusional British businessman trying to sell the crumbling China miracle, and an American diplomat tasked to chase cyber spies. When the image takes on a life of its own, it threatens them all – but most terrifyingly, the Communist Party.The power of online ridicule and rumour in a society where fake news clouds reality is revealed; the veil beneath which corrupt politicians struggle for power, spies stalk cyberspace, and a bubble economy is at bursting point.From Beijing's smoggy streets to Shanghai's historic Bund, from the casinos of Macau to the grim factories of southern China, this novel captures the madness, corruption and dangers of the People's Republic and sheds light on the Westerners who have grown rich by looking the other way...

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Publié par	RedDoor Publishing
Date de parution	31 octobre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781913062309
Langue	English

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BEIJING SMOG
Also by Ian Williams: Zero Days
BEIJING SMOG
A CYBER THRILLER
IAN WILLIAMS
Published by RedDoor www.reddoorpress.co.uk
© 2019 Ian Williams
The right of Ian Williams to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design: www.dissectdesigns.com
Typesetting: Tutis Innovative E-Solutions Pte. Ltd
For Serena, Millie and Ollie
‘Online rumours undermine the morale of the public, and if out of control they will seriously disturb the public order and affect social stability.’
The People’s Daily
‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.’
Otto von Bismarck
Chapter One
The Cyber Guy
The hotel described itself as an intelligent building, the smartest hotel in Beijing, full of sensors to make stuff happen without pressing buttons, but the way Chuck Drayton saw it, the place was retarded.
He called the front desk, which tracked down the general manager, a German called Wolfgang, and he told Wolfgang they needed to work on the intelligent bit.
‘Not just once, three times, man. I was up half the fucking night.’ Wolfgang said he was sorry to hear that and he’d be straight up, meeting Drayton five minutes later in the executive lounge on the thirty-fifth floor, where the American was standing beside one of its big windows looking for a view. The first thing he told Wolfgang was that the view sucked. He said that it reminded him of one of those over-priced Chinese landscape paintings they sold in the hotel shop, mountains shrouded in mist. Except the mist was smog, thick smog, pierced here and there by the dark shadows of grey skyscrapers and apartment blocks.
He said he could feel his life expectancy shrinking just looking at it.
Wolfgang ordered coffee and said, yeah, but don’t you think it’s kind of moody, and he apologised again for what he called the hiccups with the technology. He said it was a new hotel and they’d had teething problems with the sensors that were supposed to detect movement in the room and switch stuff on and off.
‘There was no movement, Wolfgang. I was asleep,’ Drayton said. ‘Then suddenly the curtains open, the TV and the lights come on. I went to sleep last night thinking I’m in a hotel, then next thing I know I wake on the set of Paranormal Activity . You get what I’m saying?’
Wolfgang said he got what Drayton was saying and apologised again. He said it was definitely a hotel, and offered a complimentary dinner, lunch, drinks – whatever the hotel could do to make things good; Drayton said he’d take the lot. With a final flurry Wolfgang said he would deal with the matter personally, right now, and excused himself to go and find someone to yell at.
The German had sweat dripping down his forehead as he left. He looked stressed, and Drayton suspected his wasn’t the first complaint about the hotel’s IQ.
Drayton made a note in his iPhone, a reminder to speak later to the US Embassy security guys, who’d recently given the place full clearance as safe for American diplomats, and tell them that giving a green light to a hotel with a mind of its own, a forty-floor poltergeist, might not be the way to go.
Then he looked again for the maestro. Where the fuck was he? They’d agreed to meet in the lounge at two and travel together to the concert, scheduled for late afternoon, but it was now nearly a quarter to three.
He found an internal hotel phone and called down to the maestro’s room, but it went straight to voicemail, meaning that the guy was either on the phone or had it on do-not-disturb mode. Maybe he’d taken a nap and overslept, though the maestro didn’t strike Drayton as the type that took naps.
He decided to go and bang on his door, but the maestro’s room was on a different floor to Drayton’s and the smart lift wouldn’t take him there since it wouldn’t accept his smart key to get access to the maestro’s smart floor. And since the smart lift didn’t respond to yelling or to banging on the lift’s smart console, Drayton went back to his room and phoned down again for Wolfgang.
A woman on the front desk said Mr Wolfgang was in a meeting, but she had a message from Mr Abramovich.
‘He says he’ll meet you at the concert and that he’s taking the car,’ she said, and Drayton said that was just great and could she call him a taxi? The woman said sure, only there weren’t many around right now and the traffic was terrible.
Drayton hung up and opened a taxi-hailing app on his iPhone. He could see taxis. They looked like rows of termites on his screen. Usually it didn’t take long for one to respond, changing colour from white to black when they accepted the fare. Only today the termites weren’t nibbling, stuck in little white clusters.
He refreshed the app, but the termites were still stuck. He could barely make out the road below from the window, but at that moment the smog cleared just enough to see what had paralysed the termites. The receptionist was right. The traffic on the ring road was at a complete standstill.
Maybe the maestro hadn’t travelled too far, and could still turn around, bring the embassy car back and collect him. He picked up the maestro’s business card from his desk: ‘Alexander Abramovich, composer, conductor and cultural ambassador’. Drayton called the cell phone number on the card, an American number, and after three rings the maestro picked up.
‘This is Abramovich.’
‘Mr Abramovich, this is Chuck Drayton. I was surprised to hear you left without me. It’s very important we stick together.’
But before Drayton could get to the bit about turning the car around, the maestro interrupted him, saying he’d had to leave earlier than planned because of the traffic, and wasn’t going to be delayed by Drayton’s petty squabbling with the hotel. He said he had a concert to conduct, that this wasn’t just music, it was diplomacy, and that you, Mr Drayton, still had a few things to learn about that.
‘And another thing,’ the maestro said, ‘I want my laptop back.’
‘Can we talk about that later?’ Drayton said, not trusting the telephone line.
‘I want it back, Mr Drayton, and you have until tomorrow to return it to me.’
‘We still have a few tests.’
‘Fuck your tests, Mr Drayton. I want it back. It was nothing. I overreacted. And anyway, I no longer want to pursue it, and I no longer need you. What I’m doing here is too important to be undermined by your cyber stupidity and paranoia.’
Drayton wanted to yell, you were hacked, you moron, and I just hope your pretentious bullshit about cultural diplomacy is being read by somebody who cares more than I do. But the maestro had already hung up.
Drayton decided he’d have to take the metro, and he hated the metro. The nearest station was just around the corner from the hotel. That was the easy bit. When he got there the entrance was packed, and he was swept inside on a human tide, which carried him down two escalators and to a platform on which there was barely room to breathe. The platform had markings, little lanes, for getting off and on the trains, which was encouraging, but meant nothing. As the train approached, the crowd on the platform steeled itself like a team facing off with hated opponents in a grudge football match, and when the doors opened both sides charged. Drayton was carried onto the train by the weight of the crowd behind him.
He’d now almost certainly miss the pre-concert reception at the National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing’s modern egg-shaped arts centre, usually just known as that, the Egg, where Abramovich was performing. Drayton reckoned that at this rate he’d be lucky to get there for the concert itself. Not that he was too bothered, since he found the guy, this maestro, insufferable. He had an ego the size of Tiananmen Square, maybe bigger.
And the loathing was mutual.
The guy’s laptop had been hacked soon after he’d arrived in Beijing, there wasn’t much doubt about that. He’d opened the machine in his hotel room to find it had connected itself to the internet, the cursor roaming around the screen and doing its own thing, like it had a mind of its own. The laptop was hyperventilating, fan whizzing around and doing all sorts of stuff, but without the maestro at the controls.
He was a childhood friend of the US Ambassador, so he’d taken the machine straight to the US Embassy, yelling and ranting, saying the laptop contained sensitive plans, emails and notes as well as semi-finished compositions. The Ambassador said he’d have specialists look over it, do the forensics, look for digital fingerprints. That had calmed the maestro down a little, but still he ranted, like the future of world peace was at stake.
Like it was all the fault of the embassy.
The first thing Drayton did when he was put on the case was to make sure it wasn’t, that nobody at the embassy had been poking around the guy’s data. Abramovich had just been to North Korea, part of a tour that started in Russia and would take him on to Vietnam. The way Drayton saw it, the guy had kept some pretty unsavoury company in Pyongyang and Moscow. But nobody at the embassy put their hand up.
He’d hit it off badly with Abramovich from the start, calling his concerts the Tyrant Tour, thinking he was being funny, making a joke of it. But the maestro had called him an idiot, saying that America had lost the moral authority to lecture anybody about anything. He said he was using music to build bridges. That bridges were needed right now because there was a clown in the White House, a dangerous clown, and that he, Abramovich, was the real American diplomat.
Now, a week later, he and Abramovich cou