Black Hat Blues (13 page)

target’s defenses, but also (hopefully) use their own political paranoia

against them.

This whole con was the biggest, scariest thing she’d ever been a part

of. Not in terms of physical danger or even risk of going to jail. She

thought they’d planned well enough and had their outs ready enough

that neither of those disasters was very likely. But in terms of the impact

they were going to have, the chaos they were going to stir up, and the

number of moving parts that could suddenly stop moving the right way,

it was definitely at the top of the list. Also in terms of how much, how

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very, very much, she really wanted to pull this thing off. Before Paul,

even under Winston, the cons had always been about the money. Sure,

85% of the time they were taking that money from jerks or faceless

corporations or both, and some of the time she’d gone after someone

just because she didn’t like them. But this time around they were going

after genuinely bad people. Bad, nasty people who fucked with the lives

of thousands. If they pulled this off, the lives of those thousands might

actually be better, at least for a while. Certainly the fucking bastards

would be out of the picture anyway. That was awesome. It also meant

that she felt responsible to them, even though they had no idea who she

was (and they better not ever have any idea).

Chloe had leaped out of the role of typical, law-abiding citizen when

she was still in college after being tricked into helping pull off a par-

ticularly complicated con. She still had no firm idea who was respon-

sible for her baptism into a life unbound by law, but there’d been no

going back. The life she’d jumped clear of as fast as she could had been

slow, frustrating, stultifying, and the world she wormed her way into

moved fast, was always exciting, mostly lucrative, and yes, still awfully

frustrating some of the time. But she’d figured out you never got away

from frustrating entirely, you just had to find ways to take control of

the frustration and blast through it.

Her crew of cohorts had operated in Northern California for years

and included Bee and a few dozen others, all of whom were out of her

life now. She didn’t miss most of them, which was good, because she’d

basically traded all of them for Paul one very tough night in San Jose.

So instead of stealing Paul blind as originally intended, she’d ended up

fighting by his side against certain former friends who had other ideas

about what should happen to Paul and his money. Stupid love, makes

you do stupid things, but she was definitely in love, so what’re you

gonna do? Apparently, in her case anyway, you make a run for Florida

and set up shop in Key West because the love of your life has a pirate

fetish and can’t stand the cold.

It was no secret that she didn’t like Key West very much—too small,

too isolated, too touristy. But she, Bee, and Paul had scratched out a

workman like con-artist living there as they built up their network of

contacts, influences, and hidden cameras. They’d sucked a drag queen

bad ass extraordinaire into their little circle, and that had both given

them some local expertise and also made life a lot more fun. Still, she’d

been clawing at the walls when her old mentor Winston arrived on the

island and invited her and Paul to a meeting of other Crews from all

over who were trying to plan some big score.

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That’s when she met Isaiah, the creepy-cool, intimidating as hell

leader of a big New York Crew who was trying to organize a kind of

shadow corporation as a tool to fight the man or whatever. Isaiah’s

politics were radically left and devilishly organized, while Chloe’s were

nascent and mostly gut level. But she and Paul recognized someone

who had their shit together when they saw him, and she’d been inter-

ested in working with him. Then someone went and got murdered and

the whole thing went to hell. Really, truly fucked up shit happened,

but they came out alive and still together in the end. They’d opted

out of joining Isaiah’s shadow corporation, but times had changed,

and while they weren’t exactly members of the secret group, they had

formed a sort of mutual aid pact. Now it was time to check in and

make sure everyone was getting the aid they needed in this weekend’s

battle royale.

Outside the hotel, Chloe pulled out her special phone. OK, one of her

special phones. The German-made cryptophone looked like a normal

flip phone, if a relatively styleless, mundane one. And it worked like a

normal phone too, plus a few key features. They’d gotten a half dozen

of the things, and even with Sacco pulling some favors with some of the

Cyrptophone founders he knew through the German Hacker scene, they

still cost close to $2000 a piece. But they were operating in Washington

DC and going up against some potentially very nasty and savvy foes.

Plus they had to coordinate with their friends down in Florida. Secure

communications were an absolute necessity. The cryptopohone uses

custom software to encrypt calls with 4,096 bit Diffie-Hellman key

exchange and SHA256 hash function AES 256 and Twofish. Chloe

knew what half those words meant, and Bee explained the rest, assur-

ing her that it was “pretty good.” That level of encryption ensured that

no known technology could intercept and decrypt the telephone calls,

although as Sacco and Bee had both pointed out, you never knew what

the NSA was really capable of. The trick was that the conversation had

to be between two cryptophones for it to work, so setting up a secure

communications setup was pricey. The hackers who’d started the com-

pany stayed true to their roots by making all the software open source,

and Bee had claimed she could probably make her own versions of the

phones given enough time, but they needed Bee’s talents elsewhere and

both Paul and Chloe agreed that when it came to secure communica-

tions, they preferred to trust in tested and hacker-approved hardware.

Chloe stood outside the hotel entrance, a hundred or so feet down

the sidewalk from the porte-cochere and out of earshot from anyone,

including Sacco, who was standing by the door and smoking. It was

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cold out, and she’d forgotten her gloves again, so she wanted to make

the call to Florida as quickly as possible. She’d sent an encrypted text

message ten minutes ago setting up the time for the call, and as soon as

the clock tipped over to 3:24 she dialed the number from memory.

Isaiah picked up on the first ring. “Hello,” he said, his voice patient

and even as always.

“Hi,” Chloe said, biting back an instinct to say something playful.

Isaiah never seemed to appreciate the playful banter. He waited for her

to continue.

“We’ve checked into our rooms and everything is great. It’s a really

nice hotel.” That was code of course. Just because the call was encrypted

didn’t mean she or Isaiah were crazy enough to talk about what they

were really doing in the open.

“I’m glad to hear it. Things are busy down south. The cousins are in

town, so everyone’s getting a little wild.”

Uh-oh. That wasn’t good. It meant Isaiah and his Crew were encoun-

tering some unexpected resistance or complications or what have you.

“Sounds like quite a party. Do you have enough food for all of them.”

“Oh, I think we’ll be fine.”

“Well, good. Listen, I was hoping to ask you a favor.”

“Of course.”

“Can you pick up my mail for me? I’m expecting a package and UPS

will just leave it at the door.”

“No problem, just let me know when it’s supposed to arrive.”

“Sometime this week. Everything’s packed up and almost ready to go.

I should have a tracking number for you soon.” There was no package.

She was letting Isaiah know that she was sending him some important

data from the target’s computer in the very near future.

“I’m happy to help.”

“Just let me know when you’ve got time to pick it up.”

“I will.”

“Ok, bye.”

“Goodbye.”

That was the easiest, least argumentative, least condescending con-

versation she’d ever had with Isaiah. Any worries that his whole “toler-

ant wise uncle” shtick would be annoying during the actual operation

began to evaporate. She knew intellectually that he and his Crew hadn’t

gotten so successful by being disorganized or inefficient, but the hours

spent debating in the goddamned Brooklyn loft and on IRC and on

the cryptophones had just about driven her up the wall. It was the exact

opposite of what working with Winston had been like, but of course

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that was exactly why she was doing it. Still, there had been times when

she was about ready to tear her hair out dealing with the man, and she

had no one to blame but herself. It had, after all, been her idea.

Paul had been against it, which was weird, because he actually liked

and tolerated Isaiah more than she did. But he didn’t want to be saddled

with a partner they had little or no control or even influence over.

Once they’d rejected his offer to join his shadow corporation, Paul had

wanted to cut all ties and branch out on their own, and in the begin-

ning they’d done just that.

But their experiences with Isaiah had made it clear that they needed

a top-notch hacker in their Crew, something they hadn’t had since leav-

ing California. Paul, Chloe and Bee had made the trip out to the coun-

try’s biggest hacker convention—Def Con in Las Vegas. The scene had

been overwhelming—more than 8000 hackers, a sea of black t-shirts

and scraggly ponytails, occupying a Las Vegas hotel. It had been a crash

course in hacker culture for all of them (even Chloe had never been to

a hacker con), and they got the feel for the community and the kinds

of people in it. Paul had also decided that Def Con was way too huge,

chaotic, and uncontrollable for him to operate in comfortably, and so

they’d decided to work within some smaller cons first and see if they

found anyone there. They did.

But it turned out that even with their ranks swelled with new recruits,

striking out on their own while simultaneously trying to strike against

really bad targets was tough. Isaiah knew the targets, knew their weak-

nesses. She and Paul didn’t. Not that the world lacked for bad guys, but

they were having a hard time focusing their efforts, so hard in fact that

they’d both let themselves concentrate almost exclusively on bringing

in the new recruits without any real clear idea about who they were

going after. Only when she’d brought Sacco in and he started pressing

for some real action against legitimate targets had they been forced to

confront their lack of direction. Chloe still had Isaiah’s contact info in

the back of her head, and they’d seen some signs that he and Marco’s

Crew were up to something in Florida. She tried to ask him what, if

only so they wouldn’t step on each other’s toes. He ignored her, so she

contacted Marco and asked him. He talked to her at least, but wouldn’t

tell her anything. Isaiah had sworn him to silence. Fine. She got even

more interested and started digging on her own, flexing some of the

new muscles that having c1sman and Sacco and the others on board had

given her. Isaiah was careful and she still didn’t know much about his

power base, but she knew Marco worked mostly out of the cruise ship

industry and so started tracing things from there. When she showed

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up at a Starbucks in Miami where Isaiah was sitting reading the paper,

he’d been pissed. Or at least she assumed/hoped he’d been pissed. It

was hard to tell with him.

So they’d gone outside and found a quiet, hot bench to have a talk.

She hinted at her Crew’s expanded capabilities and desire to do some-

thing meaningful. He’d re-affirmed that she and Paul were no longer

invited to participate in his shadow corporation. She’d said that was

fine, but, hey, no one can do everything on their own. Everybody could

use some help sometimes. He’d agreed to think about it, and she walked

away just happy that she’d been able to surprise him like that. When he

contacted her five days later with a tip off and an offer, she’d been the

surprised one, and she took the idea to Paul and the rest of the Crew.

OK, she probably should’ve taken it to just Paul first, but they were

already having a planning meeting that night, and the topic of what to

actually fucking finally do was the one and only thing on the agenda.

Sacco had some ideas about going after big corporations or banks, but

it all seemed either small fry hacker-pranks or incredibly unfeasible.

The one area where he seemed both passionate, and to have some decent

ideas, was something to do with labor or working conditions. Isaiah had

told Paul that his chosen big bad victim for the shadow corporation’s

machinations was involved in modern slavery in some way, and both

Paul and Chloe had thought that doing something in that arena seemed