Black Hat Blues (35 page)

and hoped that bleach and water would erase the microscopic evidence.

It would certainly ruin all his beautiful dresses. He walked upstairs,

glad the windows were closed and the blinds drawn. If he had half an

hour, it might just be enough time. Then maybe he wouldn’t spend the

rest of his life in jail. Maybe.

Paul was relieved. He felt kind of guilty for feeling relieved, but he

was. Not that Sandee had, well, whatever it was that Sandee done.

Or had done to him. Arrested probably, although right now he had no

way of knowing. But there was no mistaking the fact that the house

was surrounded with feds and that Sandee missed the rendezvous at

the car. Waiting any longer would’ve been insane, especially if they

decided to close the bridge. Paul and Bee got in the car, the money

and the encrypted hard drive hidden in the compartment under the

trunk, and headed north. They checked ahead with a friend to make

sure there wasn’t any kind of blockade, and Paul hunkered down in the

back while Bee drove them north. No police or federal attention that

either of them noticed, and no sign that anyone was following them.

Just in case the feds were sweeping the whole area for cell phone traffic,

Paul kept off the phone, even the cryptophone. They might not be able

to decrypt it, but the encryption alone would send up alarms. A couple

hours later they left the car on Marathon Key and took the getaway

boat from there, headed to Miami.

The relief came from finally letting the voice of doom in the back of

his mind out of its cage. He’d been sure this moment was coming ever

since he’d seen Oliver’s blog post, and now that it had come he could

ignore the niggling, chewing, nasty Doubt Monster and concentrate on

the problem in front of him. Logically the odds of Oliver’s post leading

to an FBI raid on his house were pretty slim. He and Chloe had gone

over those odds again and again, and there was no clear path from one

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to the other. Or at least no path they’d seen. The path clearly existed

though, that much was obvious. Now he just had to get back together

with Chloe, make sure she was OK, and move forward from there.

If they’d found the house, then who knows where else they’d found.

On the one call that Paul had risked from the cryptophone to Chloe,

he’d called an audible and picked a random letter and number out of the

air. Using a simple transposition code and a AAA map of Miami both of

them had in their cars, it named a map coordinate in Dade county and a

time. They’d meet at whichever McDonald’s happened to be nearest the

center of that map grid at 3:30 the following afternoon. Until then, no

contact, no calls, no e-mail, no texts, no nothing. Paul and Bee left the

boat at a slip they rented, and took a bus to a motel for the night (fake

ID, cash payment). Bee was quiet the whole time, folding in on herself

like she usually did when they met some major setback. She knew better

than to try to contact c1sman. Paul had sent him the emergency code

via e-mail before leaving the house, which should have sent him scur-

rying offline and hunkering down in his house in Athens.

They killed the next day taking public transportation and slowly

making their way to the shitty neighborhood Paul had randomly chosen

for their meeting. They scoped out the McDonald’s an hour early. As it

turned out the only person they saw who approached looking suspicious

was Sacco, and that was just because Paul knew he never really read the

paper while lounging on the corner. They skipped the McDonald’s meet

and followed him back to the car where Chloe was waiting.

Chloe gave Paul a love-filled python of a hug, crushing him close.

He was so relieved to see her, he could have cried. Then he did, but just

a little. Wiping the moisture from his eyes, he kissed her, while Bee

and Sacco sort of awkwardly shook hands. Chloe took the wheel and

Paul slid in beside her, the other two in the back. There was no secret

compartment in this car, but the only thing they had incriminating was

a duffel bag with $300,000 in cash and some gold coins in it, which

was pretty suspicious if anyone ever saw it, but there was no reason

anyone should. They stowed it in the trunk. Driving the speed limit,

they headed for the highway.

“Sandee’s under arrest, or something like it,” Chloe said.

“How do you know?” asked Paul, nervous that the call would be

traced.

“Believe it or not, he put it on his MySpace page.”

“What?”

“His actual MySpace page. The one under his real name where he

keeps in touch with his family and old school friends and stuff.”

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187

“The one full of lies,” Paul said. He hadn’t thought the public page

was a very good idea, but Sandee had insisted. If he disappeared from

his family and friends, they’d be worried, they’d ask questions. He kept

the page up and updated it often enough with believable lies about his

life as a pretty boring Key West resident who worked for a property

management company and took yoga classes. Nothing about being a

drag queen, and certainly nothing about being any kind of anything

illegal.

“Yeah, he just put up a brief thing about how some tenants were in

trouble and he was being questioned about it and it’s all a big misun-

derstanding, but his lawyer’s on the case.”

“Man, that might work,” Paul said, although he had his doubts. It

all depended on what the feds already knew. But at least Sandee had

brought in the Key West Condos and Estates lawyer, who only knew

Sandee as an upright citizen who occasionally hooked him up with

some pot.

“Do you think so, really?” asked Bee from the back.

“Maybe,” said Chloe. “I mean, if he’s updating his MySpace page from

his phone, at least we know he’s not being interrogated at Guantanamo

or some shit. Hopefully he can stall them until we figure out a way to

get him free.”

“We’re going to get him free?” said Bee.

“Damn straight we are,” said Sacco. Paul was surprised but pleased

to hear the determination in his voice. “If we have to break him out of

jail, we will.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” said Chloe. “First we go check

in with c1sman, regroup, and figure out what the fuck just happened.

Then we rescue Sandee.”

Rescuing Sandee from the feds was way, way beyond anything they’d

ever tried to do before, and Paul had not the slightest idea how they

could do that. “Absolutely,” he said to Bee, looking back over his shoul-

der. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

Whoever was after them, however they’d found their Key West opera-

tions, they didn’t seem to know anything about c1sman. After driving

straight through from Miami to Athens, the four of them arrived at

c1sman’s apartment complex, tired and cranky and happy to be out of

the car. They dropped Bee off first, letting her make first contact and

make sure everything was safe and sound. She signaled that it was,

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and the rest of them trudged across the parking lot and into the tiny

townhouse.

It seemed like it was definitely safe—no signs of law enforcement

anywhere—but Paul had his doubts about how sound it was. C1sman

was in a mood. And really, even though the last thing he wanted to deal

with after the over twelve hours in a car worrying about Sandee was

calming the nervous hacker’s worries, Paul couldn’t blame him. As he

kept telling them, this wasn’t what he’d signed up for. Bee was supposed

to be trying to keep him calm, but she was as tired and burned out as

the rest of them and clearly didn’t want his shit either. It was Sacco who

stepped up, thanking c1sman profusely for letting them crash with him

and assuring him that the law wasn’t going to come crashing through

the door or anything like that. Bee and c1sman retired to his room,

while Chloe and Paul set out sleeping bags in the office and Sacco took

the lone couch downstairs. If he hadn’t been so exhausted Paul’s worries

would have kept him up, but he managed to get in a solid seven hours

before waking up alert and anxious after a dream disturbing enough

that he was happy to let it slip from his mind.

Things were calmer the next morning, and by things, he meant

c1sman. Bee had filled him in on every detail, and while he was clearly

still worried, he also understood how much more worried and upset the

rest of them were about Sandee’s arrest. He did his best with the role of

host, going out early for Krispy Kremes and coffee and buying some air

mattresses from WalMart for Chloe and Paul. By noon everyone was

ready to concentrate on the task at hand. Paul stood in the center of the

living room with a small white board taken from c1sman’s office. The

others sat perched around him, c1sman, Bee, and Sacco with laptops

open and ready.

“So what do we think?” Paul asked. “What the hell happened?”

“Well, I’ve got one idea,” said c1sman, “Although I’ve been dancing

around confirming it because I don’t want to fall into the same trap.”

“What trap?”

“You know that wiki that Oliver set up about you? Did you look at

it a lot?”

“Yeah,” said Paul, seeing where c1sman was going. “But I was always

running through a TOR proxy. They shouldn’t have been able to trace

my IP address, right?”

“Not usually no, unless they were able to monitor all the traffic going

in and out of the TOR proxy you were using. If they could do that and

then had some decent analytics and a really comprehensive look at the

traffic going in and out, they might have been able to do it.”

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189

“Well, fuck. We saw feds at our door, so the FBI or NSA could do

that?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Well, fuck.”

“That doesn’t explain how they found everything else,” Chloe said.

“That might lead them to Southwest Florida or even Key West, right?

But how did they find the party and then the house so fast?”

“Who knows,” said c1sman. “Maybe some other clue we’re not think-

ing of. Maybe just, you know, good police work or whatever.”

“The point is,” Paul said, “Whatever it is it boils down to the fact that

we’re dealing with a shit load of law enforcement involvement.”

“And that jibes with what Isaiah told me,” Chloe said. “He was seeing

massive mobilization across state, local, and federal agencies. I think

the general consensus is that the pressure’s coming down from someone

with real pull in Washington. Wolverton or Clover are the most likely

culprits there.”

“So what do we know about what they’re up to?”

“Wolverton’s been back to normal as far as we can tell,” said Sacco.

“The hooks we had into their computers and Blakberries got cleared out

during the scheduled security upgrades, pretty much as expected. No

sign that they ever realized they were there, but we’ve lost our monitors

on them. The scandal we set up has pretty much passed by. Even the

bloggers have let it go and are working on other shit. Now the Clover

thing is different. He’s basically gone into seclusion in his home in

Virginia. Clover and Associates shut down and filed for bankruptcy and

there’s talk of an investigation working its way through the House. So he

seems pretty fucked. The way
The Post
and then
The Times
and
The Wall

Street Journal
raked him over the coals—I mean, even the Murdoch

Journal, shit—he seems done to me. He hasn’t been online, hasn’t been

on the phone. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hangs himself.”

“Sounds like you think it’s the Congressman,” said Chloe.

“He’s got the pull, yeah, but we’ve got no reason to think that he

suspects anything. Why would he bring down all that heat, call in all

those favors, if he doesn’t know something hinky is going on?”

“The obvious answer is that he does think something hinky is going

on,” replied Chloe. “Maybe it wasn’t routine security sweeps that found

our hooks, maybe it was some smart Capital Hill IT guy figuring out

what was what.”

“Maybe,” said Sacco. “I suppose. But I don’t think he would have

sat on the information. This is a guy who never fails to play the victim

given half a chance. I’ve read all his public statements since he came

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into office, and he’s always whining about being persecuted for being

white or a Christian or a conservative or a man or whatever. If he found

trojans on his computers or phones he’d be blaming every political

enemy in sight, especially the protesters and the bloggers who jumped

all over him.”

“But we don’t know, do we. Maybe it was the FBI who found them

or the NSA and they’re making him keep it quiet for security reasons.

We’d have no idea.”

Paul couldn’t argue with either of their positions. “If it is Wolverton,

then there’s really not a whole helluva lot we can do about it,” he said.

“I mean, if it is Wolverton then I think you’re both right. He’d be