Black Hat Blues (36 page)

shouting about it if he could, which means either he doesn’t know or

he knows and the feds are making him keep his mouth shut while they

investigate. If that’s the case, then they’re watching him close and we

can’t do a thing about it.”

“So either way we focus on Clover,” said Chloe.

“I just don’t see him having the pull anymore,” Sacco countered.

“He’s done.”

“He’s down but not out,” Chloe said. “But maybe this is some death

throes thing.”

“Or maybe we’ll find he’s still got some leverage on Wolverton that

he’s using to force him to help,” said Paul. “I think he’s the best place

to start no matter what. We saved all the files we pulled down from his

servers before we bugged out. Let’ go through it all again and see if we

can find anything at all. And start sniffing around him some more too

see if we can get any inkling of what he’s up to now.”

“But carefully,” said c1sman. “Carefully. Nothing that leads back

here.”

“Absolutely. Carefully. But fast as we can. We’ve got to find some

lever, something we can use to help Sandee, OK? Remember, the most

important thing right now is getting him out.”

Paul and Chloe had decided they had to cut Mr. Data out of the loop.

They didn’t think he was a leak, and their contact with him had been

sequestered from all their other activities, so even if he was, it would

have only been awful and not devastating. But he was still out of their

direct control and thus just too risky. It was a shame because his data-fu

would’ve come in handy at the moment, but it’s not like the rest of

them were idiots. They divided the Cloverfield files into five chunks and

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191

each of them started plowing through them. Then everybody switched

chunks and started going over the files again just to make sure nobody

missed anything. It took the rest of that day and most of the next, and

at times felt as promising as panning for gold in a swimming pool, but

then c1sman made the connection.

On her go through, Chloe had highlighted some phone numbers

that appeared in e-mails but not in any of Clover’s phone records. It

was c1sman who had the idea of going through the records again and

searching for numbers that were similar enough to be multiple lines

going to the same home, office, or set of cell phones. And there was

the match, a number one digit off from the number given in the e-mail

Chloe had found. Paul re-read the e-mail, which was a note from a

fellow lobbyist giving the contact information for “the person I was

telling you about last night.” At first blush Paul suspected it might be

for an escort service or something like that, especially when c1sman

started digging around and found that both numbers were unlisted.

That wasn’t going to stop him of course, and it was easy enough to dis-

cover that they in fact belonged to an offshore holding company, which

told them nothing more than that they were an intriguing lead.

Looking at the timing on Clover’s e-mails and phone records, there

was no immediately obvious connection between the timing of the call

and anything else. He’d called the number only once, and that was a

day and a half before he went offline completely. But it was close enough

to cause and effect that Paul went back through the e-mails from those

last two days, looking closer at messages before and after the call. There

was a difference. Before, Clover had been in emergency damage control

mode, sending mail to everyone on his contact list looking for help and

getting very little in response. After the call, most of his e-mails were

either him dealing with responses from those original inquiries (none

of which offered him much hope) or wrapping up other business mat-

ters by handing clients off to other lobbyists or lawyers. He’d pretty

much stopped asking new people for help, although he did send out

feelers when friends and allies asked if there was anything they could

do (although when he came up with something they could do, they all

found some way to say “sorry, I wish I could but I can’t). But it struck

Paul that Clover was just going through the motions with these later

e-mails. The stridency and urgency was gone, and his replies to those

denials were sharper and even sometimes venomous than someone who

really expected help would send. From one point of view they could be

read as the writings of a bitter, angry man who’d lost hope, but Paul

thought there was more to it than that. To him they seemed like they

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

were from a bitter, angry man who’d already settled on a course of

action and was just calling out “old friends” in a way that revealed how

little they actually valued the supposed friendship. He was seeing who

would stand by him in a fight, and it turned out to be nobody, or at least

not anybody who was in a position to actually help him.

That number, and whoever was lurking on the other end, seemed

to be the only piece that they couldn’t place. Paul laid out his theory,

and the others agreed, although he wasn’t sure if it was because he’d

actually been convincing or if it was because there simply weren’t any

other leads. It was a Washington DC exchange, and it was a cell phone

registered to a International Business Company in Belize, meaning it

was a shell corporation. Unless they went down to Belize and raided the

IBC registry’s files, that was a dead end. All that was left to do was call

the number. Chloe, Bee, and Sacco ended up driving to Charleston, SC

to make the call, taking along a tricked out laptop to record everything

and buying a disposable cell phone once they got to town. They had to

assume the phone was monitored and had a trap on the line. The num-

ber rang and went straight to a generic voice mail. They didn’t leave a

message and dropped the phone in the ocean before driving back. They

tried again with another phone the next day from Raleigh and then the

following day from Asheville. Same thing every time. Whoever it was,

it seemed like they were only picking up when they knew the number,

which wasn’t really a surprise, but they’d been hoping for some voice or

message at the other end that would give them a clue to work with.

When the traveling phone crew returned empty handed, they met

again to discuss options. From Paul’s point of view, there really weren’t

many. The number was their only lead, but they had no way of getting

more info about it unless they hacked phone company records and

got some GPS data on where the phone was being used, but c1sman

assured them that was basically impossible. That left only one way of

finding out who was on the other end of that phone, and thus (hope-

fully) who it was that was bringing all the pressure to bear on them:

Clover himself.

Paul admitted from the outset that it had to be one of his crazier

schemes. Chloe said it was definitely ballsy and probably insane. Sacco

loved it. C1sman hated it. Bee voted for it. Chloe shook her head and

smiled. “What the fuck else are we gonna do?”

Chloe missed having Paul by her side. Sure, he was in her ear on

the other end of a phone that was less than a mile away, but that

wasn’t the same as having him right there next to her. For them, this

kind of thing had become easy. They had an almost telepathic rapport

and could riff and improv off each other without pausing to think.

Together they’d been feuding married couples, hare-brained business

partners, wild-eyed meth-dealers, suave business consultants, grizzled

treasure hunters, and multiple variations on the theme of expert con

artists. Paul had the imagination and the ability before they’d met,

and she’d brought out his repressed wild abandon and helped hone his

fast talk chops after they got together. And while this newest gambit

came straight from that amazing fevered mind of his, he couldn’t play

one of the two key roles. She looked over at Sacco, who had cleaned up

nice. Intellectually, Chloe knew he was up to it, but she wasn’t really

comfortable with him. Not that she would let him know that.

“You clean up nice,” she said. They were driving a rented Mercedes

along the winding, artificially picturesque streets of a Virginia bedroom

community that was home to hundreds of wealthy DC commuters.

Sacco wore a new, perfectly tailored Italian suit and had shaved his

usual stubble into a pencil thin mustache that floated above his pursed

lips. His hair was moussed back in a Gordon Gekko inspired look, shiny

black and just a little wavy. With the subtle but expensive gold cross

around his neck, the Rolex on his wrist, and the diamonds on his cuff

links, there wasn’t a sign of his inner, anarchic true self on display.

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“You’re too kind,” he said, with a mild, indeterminable European

accent that could be Spanish or Italian or something more exotic. Sacco

called it his Euro-mutt voice. “And you, my dear, are looking as lovely

as ever.”

“Why thank you, Bernard,” she said, rhyming his cover name with

“herd” instead of “hard” as he preferred. She respected him for keep-

ing in character, but it was another thing she and Paul never did. They

fed off the energy of jumping right in at the last possible second. She

and Paul would also keep going over their cover story again and again

until that last second, but rehashing the plan only seemed to make

Sacco more anxious, so she kept biting her tongue on that too. She

had decided to go with a dress instead of suit. It was a business dress

though, nothing with ridiculous cleavage or showing too much leg,

but the blue fabric clung to hips and breast just enough to be flat-

tering. She’d accented with black pearl earrings and a silk scarf that

complimented her ridiculously expensive shoes. They aimed to present

as representatives of powerful business interests, and she thought they

passed remarkably well. But these were exactly the kind of people that

Wolverton had dealt with all his professional life, and he would prob-

ably notice any mistakes they made. So the key was to not make any

mistakes. Hah.

They pulled up into the driveway that matched the house number.

They’d gotten lost a couple of times back here, but c1sman had made

them all paranoid about how there could be someone at NSA or wher-

ever tracking any GPS device that was using Clover’s house as a desti-

nation and so, even though Chloe wasn’t entirely convinced that was

possible, let alone likely, they’d used good old-fashioned maps and pens

instead of Google and GPS to figure out where they were going. As

they pulled into the empty driveway of the multi-million dollar cookie-

cutter McMansion that looked just like the ones to either side, Chloe

took a breath in through her nose, the tip of her tongue on the roof of

her mouth, and then slowly let it out. She waited for Sacco to get out

and come around and open the door for her, taking two more breaths

in the process, before grabbing her briefcase and stepping out of the car

and into Maria Lanier.

Sacco let Chloe lead the way towards the front door, a frosted and

beveled glass affair that was one of the structure’s few distinct features.

She pushed the doorbell and waited. She could see a shadowy figure

moving in the foyer beyond, but whoever it was didn’t come all the way

to the door until the second time she pressed the button. “Who’s there?”

he called out from inside.

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195

“Mr. Clover?” Chloe said, using a flat, all business accent that could’ve

been polished at any top-tier MBA program in the country.

“Who’s there?” the voice repeated, undeniable annoyed.

“My name is Maria Lanier and I’m here with my associate—”

“No reporters, solicitors, or evangelists.” It was hard to hear him

through the glass.

“We’re none of those, sir. We’d like just a moment of your time.”

“I don’t know you,” he said, and the shadowy figure started to recede

back into the house.

“It’s about what happened to you,” Chloe not quite shouted. “We

know you were hacked. We know you were conned.”

The shadow grew close again. “You cops should be talking to my

lawyer. You know better than this.”

“We’re not law enforcement, Mr. Clover. We’re fellow victims. We

work out of Florida. And the Caribbean.”

The shadow stood there, his hand on the doorknob. Chloe let him

sort through what she’d said on his own schedule, and he came to the

right decision. He opened the door and looked out at her, face painted

with skepticism. The real live Ken Clover looked good for someone

whose life was falling apart. He wore a golf shirt and khakis, his feet

were bare, his face tan and healthy. He was probably twenty pounds

overweight, but he carried it well. His dark hair was graying at the

temples and well-groomed, his gold-rimmed glasses the perfect size for

his face. But he did look very tired, and there was no hiding the bags

under his eyes or the drooping at the corners of his mouth.