Freedom TM

to take care of it.”
    “We need to make sure we don’t lose track of him in the transfer—”
    Someone on the control board called out again. “Something’s going on there, sir.”
    Everyone looked up onto the screen to see plainclothesmen pouring out into the street again, looking frantically all over. Some were talking on radios.
    “Looks like they still don’t have him.”
    “Only half of them came out.”
    “Maybe there was a shoot-out?”
    “Did we have confirmation that Ross was in the building?”
    “Yes, sir. Two informants confirmed it.”
    The video image pulled back to show a dozen men frantically running into frame from either side of the bar building.
    Two more black vans arrived, and tactical squads poured out of them with black body armor, helmets, and ballistic goggles. They brandished automatic weapons and were spreading out into the streets, shouting at people to lie down. The whole shopping area was coming under lockdown.
    “Jesus Christ, they don’t have this guy.”
    “They must have a hundred boots on the ground.”
    “They’ve gotta find him now.”
    “They’ve got two million surveillance cameras networked in that city. Believe me, they’ll find him.”
    “Yeah, but our asset won’t be in place to take him out.”
    Fulbright turned to Philips. “Thanks for coming in, Natalie. I’ll let you know if you’re needed again.”
    She was still staring at the screen. “Yes, sir.”
    On-screen the Chinese soldiers were still frantically talking on radios.
    Philips exited the conference room, and then Ops Center 1. She walked down the bustling hallway outside, and ducked into the ladies’ restroom. She checked the stalls to see whether anyone else was present.
    She was alone.
    She entered the farthest stall, then closed and locked the door. She sat down and put her head in her hands. And then began to weep—her hands still trembling. As she felt the tears streaming silently down her face, she realized just how deeply she’d fallen in love with Jon Ross.

Chapter 16: // Pwned
    Hours later Shen Liang entered the unmarked Golden Shield Central Command facility in downtown Shenzhen. Although there were no guards or signs to mark the nondescript six-story block of windowless concrete, the moment Shen stepped through the mirrored sliding doors in the underground garage, he was met by a dozen heavily armed PLA soldiers waiting to either side of metal detectors. Security officers in dress uniform ushered him through the scanners.
    What happened here was very important to the Party. Golden Shield was China’s sweeping program to create information systems to identify and contain dissent and subversive social elements that might threaten the country’s leadership—and thus the people of China. The GSCC building was the culmination of a multiyear, six-billion-dollar investment in internal security—which was itself just a pilot program for the much larger “Safe Cities Initiative,” which would link together all data moving through Chinese society, combining financial, communication, and street-level high-resolution CCTV images into a single software-driven internal security solution. Nothing like it had ever been attempted in the history of mankind, and it would serve as a model for security to be emulated around the world. Shen felt a tremendous sense of pride in yet another example of China’s technological prowess. He also told himself that it was necessary. Necessary to protectthe Chinese people from themselves. Order must be maintained or imperialist forces would rob them of their destiny yet again.
    As Shen moved through concentric rings of security, he looked up at the numerous camera and sensor domes that he knew even now were analyzing his face, his thermal image, his perspiration and respiratory patterns, all in an effort to determine if he was under emotional duress.
    Outside in the streets, two million networked high-resolution CCTV cameras covered the entire city of Shenzhen. In 2006 the government had mandated that all Internet cafes and entertainment venues such as restaurants and bars install video cameras with a direct feed to their local police station. From there, the images were sent to a central cloud computing application that could apply any number of algorithms to the imagery and in turn alert local authorities to a wide array of suspicious behavior. People running, violent motion, sudden groupings of six or more people, flames. Then there was search: