Black Hat Blues (16 page)

style constant patter about Miami going for the whole drive out to the

apartment, told him this would be his office for the weekend.

“What is this place?”

“Just a friend’s apartment. She moved to Ft. Lauderdale and she’s

letting me use it until she can rent it out. Nice and quiet, plenty of

bandwidth and air conditioning. You’ve got everything you need on

your laptop, right?”

Actually he’d brought two laptops and three portable hard drives, but

he did have everything he needed, or at least he assumed he did. “What

is it I’m doing exactly?”

“I’ll give you all the details once you get unpacked and set up and

are comfortable. There’s someone I want you to meet and then we’ll go

over everything. And if you aren’t cool with it, that’s fine. We’ll pay

you and you can spend the weekend on the beach and then head back

to Georgia.”

It didn’t take long to settle in, so while he waited for Alan to return

with his friend, he hooked up a router he’d brought along and plugged

in his two computers. There were also three wireless networks within

the building, two of them open, so he played around with those for a

while and started sniffing at the closed one in case he wanted to access

it for some reason down the line. Half an hour later, Alan returned

with two women.

The taller woman, Alan introduced her as Sarah, had a killer figure

and was, quite frankly, kinda intimidating. She was a harsh kind of

beautiful, but her eyes were red and she looked on the verge of tears

and her eye makeup had smudged. Even in such a bedraggled state she

was obviously way out of Chris’s league, and so he wrote her off as any

kind of potential love/sex interest and filed her under “Unattainable

and therefore A-Sexual.” The other woman though, short, a little pudgy

maybe (but who was he to talk), Asian with dyed blond streaks in her

shoulder length black hair was another story. She had a shirt on that had

a pair of red slippers and the phrase “There’s no place like 10.0.0.0.” He

probably loved her at that moment, and would’ve laughed if the other

woman weren’t crying. Alan introduced her as Kim.

He had to concentrate on listening to Sarah’s story, especially because

Kim was occupying herself setting up all kinds of interesting hardware

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on the table next to his laptops, but it was a compelling story. Sarah was

an old friend of Alan’s (Chris guessed more than just a friend), and she’d

recently been forced out of her job. Not just fired or laid off, but fired

and accused of some truly nasty stuff, like stealing corporate funds and

selling company data to competitors. She hadn’t done anything of the

sort—wouldn’t even know how to do those things, but they were set-

ting her up as some kind of scapegoat for their own mismanagement or

misdeeds or whatever. They were “being nice” and saying they weren’t

going to press charges if she just admitted to doing the things she didn’t

do. It was all total bullshit. And her friend Alan had said that maybe

c1sman could help her.

“I thought of you, c1sman. I thought maybe you could help us get

something on these guys, some proof that Sarah is innocent or that

they’re guilty or whatever. Both, maybe. Something we can fight back

against their blackmail bullshit with.”

“So you want to hack your old company?” he asked. He could see the

appeal. When he’d been laid off, he’d hacked his old company, although

just to confirm that the financial situation really was as bad as they’d

claimed it was. It was true, which meant he wasn’t surprised when it

went out of business four weeks later.

“Is that possible?” Sarah asked. “Could you do something like

that? Maybe find an e-mail where they talk about setting me up or

something?”

“Sarah and Kim and I scraped together some of our savings to fly you

down here,” Alan said. “It’s that important to us.”

Chris looked over at Kim, whose back was to him. She was setting up

some sort of cell phone based device that looked quite intriguing. Of

course he would help them. He needed the money sure, but now he felt

kind of bad about taking their savings. But since he had no savings of

his own and it definitely seemed like a good cause, of course he’d help.

“We can do that.” Kim turned around and smiled at him, just as Sarah

started thanking him profusely. “We can do that, no problem at all.”

The company, which turned out to be some sort of venture capital

firm that controlled what seemed like dozens but turned out to be hun-

dreds of other corporations, had pretty good security, and it had taken

more than just the weekend. He waived any additional fee, though. He

was deep in the hunt now, and working side by side with Kim, who soon

had him start calling her Bee after the fifth or sixth time she failed to

respond to Kim. It was an old childhood nickname, she said. Bee knew

the electronics and mechanics side of things back to front, and was good

with the basics on network security. They worked mostly together, with

Rick Dakan

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Sarah and Alan coming and going at odd hours, bringing food and,

one time, sheaves of papers and disks they’d liberated from the garbage

bins at Sarah’s old company.

Since they absolutely did not have permission this time, Alan had

urged Chris to be extra careful and not get caught. Like he needed to

tell him that, but Chris appreciated the concern. They took their time,

found their hole, and slipped in nice and easy. Well, it seemed nice and

easy at first. But then Chris had trouble escalating his network privi-

leges beyond a basic user level. The internal security was tighter than

he’d expected and he couldn’t get into the executive’s files or get root

access. Then he and Bee came up with a plan. He mused about how

much easier it would be if they just had a machine they controlled on

the inside. A day later and Bee had built the thing—a computer in the

shell of a power strip that would plug into a printer access point Chris

had identified. All they needed to do was get it inside.

Sarah said she had a friend who’d do it for her. She and Alan disap-

peared late that night. Bee got a text message that told them he should

be able to access the little trojan power strip. They could and he did, and

by the end of business the next day he had root access and pulled down

all the files Sarah needed to prove her case, and a lot more besides. He

left it to the others to sort through the data and find the useful stuff.

He’d done his part.

He offered to take Bee out to dinner and celebrate. Well, he actually

offered to take them all out, but Sarah and Alan begged off, intent on

digesting their ill-gotten data. Bee came along, taking him to a fancy

crab place on South Beach. It had been a wonderful evening and if he’d

thought about it he would’ve asked her to walk on the beach and then

who knows what would have happened. OK, to be fair, he had thought

about it, it was just that the words never quite made their way past his

lips. Still, it was a great evening. They laughed and drank wine and got

messy eating butter-soaked crab. When they got back to the apartment,

Alan and Sarah were still at it, but they left with Bee an hour later,

everyone thanking Chris up and down.

The next morning he found an envelope with $10,000 in cash sitting

on his laptop and the print-out for a boarding pass on a Delta flight that

afternoon to Atlanta. There was an e-mail from Alan, thanking him

again for all his help, and one from Bee thanking him for a wonderful

night out. He thought about staying, but didn’t think he should stay

in this stranger’s apartment anymore. Besides, he had to deposit the

money and pay some bills. Send Jessica some money for Shawn. Get

back to real life.

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

In the weeks after he got home, Chris watched for news on the invest-

ment company he’d hacked, but never saw anything. Nor anything

about Sarah for that matter. Alan would drop him a note occasionally,

and he and Bee started up a nice e-mail thread that stayed friendly and

fun, although she either ignored or deflected his few, tentative forays

into flirting. Still, it was nice to have new friends, and apparently every-

thing had gone well for Sarah. She was very happy with the results.

Good. He’d done his good deed for the year.

When Alan showed up outside his house one night, Chris was star-

tled, but secretly thrilled too. “Alan, what the heck, man! Great to see

you.”

“Good to see you too, c1sman. Can I come in?”

They sat down at the kitchen table, beers in hand, a few pleasant-

ries exchanged. “I have another job offer for you, c1sman, if you’re

interested.”

“I am, sure.” He was too. He’d sent most of the 10k to Jessica, and

paid off credit cards with the rest. And bought some RAM and two

new hard drives.

“Good, good. I’m glad to hear it. You were amazing on the Miami

thing, really. But there are some things you need to know.”

That didn’t sound good. “What kind of things?”

“Well, first of all, my name’s not Alan. It’s Paul.”

Chris listened to the whole spiel, which even then turned out to

only be about one fifth of the whole story. He’d been secretly courted

by Paul and Chloe and Bee (she really was Bee!) from the beginning,

and he’d passed every test. They not only wanted him on board, they

needed him. He could work mostly from home. They could provide

documentation to make the money look legit. He’d never have to do

anything he wasn’t comfortable with. No, it wasn’t even a little legal,

but they weren’t planning on getting caught. Never had been caught

before either. He wanted time to think about it first, and Paul under-

stood that, but he had a job for him that needed attending to right

away—tracing the origin point of some e-mails Paul had somehow

intercepted. Could he help them?

“Of course I can,” he heard himself say. “Of course I’ll help.”

“Where’s your phone?” Paul asked as soon as c1sman and Bee came

through the door, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.

“In my bag?” c1sman replied, slipping the backpack off his shoulder.

He dug around inside and pulled it out. “I had it on vibrate and I guess

I couldn’t feel it.”

“I need you to have that where you can feel it,” said Paul. C1sman just

nodded. “But that’s OK. You’re here now. I need you to look at some-

thing for me. We’re having what seems like a weird delay between when

the e-mails are time stamped as being received and when we actually see

them. And then another big delay when we send mail out. I’m worried

stuff might be slipping through without us seeing it.”

“No, I know what the problem is. Don’t worry, I can fix it, but noth-

ing’s slipping through.” C1sman sat down on the couch where Paul had

been perched and started working at once.

Paul didn’t need to give c1sman any other instructions. The hacker

was prone to worry and distraction and second guessing when he didn’t

have something else to occupy his mind, but give him a well-defined

goal and he was off to the races. Plus the Adderall seemed to be helping

a lot too. Paul went over to Bee and talked to her in a low whisper. “And

what about your phone?”

“It’s not getting any signal in this hotel. I’m going to switch to one

of the other ones. A stupid one. I’ll forward everything to that.” Bee sat

down at the desk next to Sandee and started messing with her phone

and another one she took from the box on the table.

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Chloe knocked and then let herself in a few minutes later. Paul

assumed that, as usual, she’d moved through the halls and waited until

no one else was around before she stepped inside their suite. She pulled

off the wig as she shut the door behind her, sighing in relief. He stepped

up next to her and ran his hand through her short, pink hair and then

down to the back of her neck. He rubbed there for a while and the two

of them watched the others at work. Sandee was monitoring e-mails

now, while Sacco looked over his shoulder. Bee and c1sman were hard

at work on their projects. They had, he hoped, a moment to catch their

breaths and relax.

“Care to follow me into the bedroom?” Chloe asked.

“Absolutely,” he replied.

“Don’t go too crazy in their kiddies,” Sandee called from across the

room as they started to close the door behind them. “One quickie and

then back to work, OK?”

“Yes, mom,” Chloe said, and closed the door.

The two of them collapsed onto the bed together and stretched out

on their backs.

“How’s Isaiah?” Paul asked.

“He seems good. Who can tell. Sounds like he ran into some kind of

minor hiccup, but he’s handling it. Any word from Mr. Data?”

“We’re all good to go there too. He’s sorted through everything on

the accounts front and pulled it all together with the database Sacco