Wireless (28 page)

Roscoe shook his head. “Bullshit or not, you going to take any chances?” He straightened up slowly. “Believe me, there’s one place you don’t want to go.”

“Okay, okay, I hear what you’re saying.”

“I hope you do.” Roscoe dumped the wad of towels in the kitchen trash and stomped back into the living room, then dropped himself on the sofa. “Listen, when I was your age I thought it couldn’t happen to me, either. Now look at me.” He started thumbing his way through the stack of old magazines on the coffee table.

“I’m looking at you.” Marcel grinned. “Listen, there was a call while you were out.”

“A call?” Roscoe paused with his hand on a collector’s copy of
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
.

“Some woman, said she wanted to talk to you. I took her number.”

“Uh-huh.” Roscoe put the magazine back down.
Heads it’s Janice, tails it’s her lawyer,
he thought. It was shaping up to be that kind of day; a tire-slashing and an hour of alimonial recriminations would complete it neatly. Marcel pointed at the yellow pad next to the elderly dial phone. “Ah, shit. I suppose I should find out what it’s about.”

The number, when he looked at it, wasn’t familiar. That didn’t mean much—Janice was capable of moving, and her frothingly aggro lawyer seemed to carry a new cellular every time he saw her—but it was hopeful. Roscoe dialed. “Hello? Roscoe. Who am I talking to?”

A stranger’s voice: “Hi there! I was talking to your roommate about an hour ago? I’m Sylvie Smith. I was given your name by a guy called Buzz who told me you put him on the backbone.”

Roscoe tensed. Odds were that this Sylvie Smith was just another innocent kiddee looking to leech a first-mile feed, but after this morning’s run-in with the law, he was taking nothing for granted.

“Are you a law-enforcement officer federal employee police officer lawyer FCC or FBI agent?” he asked, running the words together, knowing that if she was any of the above she’d probably lie—but it might help sway a jury toward letting him off if he was targeted by a sting.

“No.” She sounded almost amused. “I’m a journalist.”

“Then you should be familiar with CALEA,” he said, bridling at the condescension in her voice. CALEA was the wiretap law, it required switch-vendors to put snoopware into every hop in the phone network. It was bad enough in and of itself, but it made the noncompliant routing code that was built into the BeOS access points he had hidden in a bus locker doubly illegal and hence even harder to lay hands on.

“Paranoid, much?” she said.

“I have nothing to be paranoid about,” he said, spelling it out like he was talking to a child. “I am a law-abiding citizen, complying with the terms of my parole. If you
are
a journalist, I’d be happy to chat. In person.”

“I’m staying at the Days Inn on Main Street,” she said. “It’s a dump, but it’s got a
view of the Falls
,” she said in a hokey secret-agent voice, making it plain that she meant, “It’s line of sight to a repeater for a Canadian wireless router.”

“I can be there in twenty,” he said.

“Room 208,” she said. “Knock twice, then once, then three times.” Then she giggled. “Or just send me an SMS.”

“See you then,” he said.

Marcel looked up from his machine, an IBM box manufactured for the US market. It was the size of a family Bible, and styled for the corporate market. They both lusted furiously after the brushed-aluminum slivers that Be was cranking out in France, but those laptops were
way
too conspicuous here.

Roscoe pointed at the wireless card protruding from the slot on the side nearest him. “You’re violating security,” he said. “I could get sent up again just for being in the same room as that.” He was past being angry, though. In the joint, he’d met real crooks who could maintain real project secrecy. The cowboy kids he worked with on the outside thought that secrecy meant talking out of the side of your mouth in conspiratorial whispers while winking Touretically.

Marcel blushed. “It was a mistake, okay?” He popped the card. “I’ll stash it.”

The Days Inn was indeed a dump, and doubt nagged at Roscoe as he reached for the front door. If she was a Fed, there might be more ways she could nail him than just by arresting him in the same room as an illegal wireless card. So Roscoe turned around and drove to a diner along the block from the motel, then went inside to look for a wired phone.

“Room 208, please . . . Hi there. If you’d care to come outside, there’s a diner about fifty yards down the road. Just turn left out of the lobby. I’m already there.” He hung up before she could ask any awkward questions, then headed for a booth by the window. Almost as an afterthought, he pulled the copy of
2600
out of his pocket. The hacker magazine (shut down by a court injunction last year) was a good recognition signal—plus, having it didn’t violate the letter of his parole.

Roscoe was halfway down his first mug of coffee when someone leaned over him. “Hi,” she said.

“You must be Sylvie.” He registered a confused impression of bleached blond hair, brown eyes, freckles.
Must be straight out of J-school.
“Have a seat. Coffee?”

“Yes please.” She put something like a key ring down, then waved a hand, trying to catch the waitress’s eye. Roscoe looked at the key ring. Very black, very small, very Nokia. Rumor said they were giving them away in cereal boxes in France.

“Suppose you tell me why you wanted to meet up,” Roscoe said quietly. “Up front. I can tell you right now that I’m out on parole, and I’ve got no intention of doing anything that puts me back inside.”

The waitress ambled over, pad in hand. Sylvie ordered a coffee. “What were you charged with?” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

Roscoe snorted.
Score one for the cool lady
—some folks he’d met ran a mile the instant he mentioned being a con. “I was
accused
of infringement with a side order of black crypto, but plea-bargained it down to unlawful emissions.”
Score two
—she smiled. It was a weak joke, but it took some of the sting out of it. “Strictly no-collar crime.” He took another mouthful of coffee. “So what is it you’re doing up here?”

“I’m working on a story about some aspects of unwiring that don’t usually make the national press,” she said, as the waitress came over, empty mug in one hand and jug in the other. Roscoe held his up for a refill.

“Credentials?”

“I could give you a phone number, but would you trust it?”

“Point.” Roscoe leaned back against the elderly vinyl seat.
Young, but cynical.

“Well,” she added, “I can do better.” She pulled out a notepad and began scribbling. “
This
is my editor’s name and address.
You
can look up his number. If you place a call and ask for him, you’ll get put through—you’re on the list of interview subjects I left him. Next, here’s my—no, an—e-mail address.” Roscoe blinked—it was a handle on a famous Finnish anonymous remixer. “Get a friend to ping it and ask me something.” It was worth five to twenty for black crypto—anonymity was the FCC’s worst nightmare about the uncontrolled net. “Finally, here’s my press pass.”

“Okay, I’ll check these out.” He met her eyes. “Now, why don’t you tell me why the
Wall Street Journal
is interested in a burned-out ex-con and ex-unwirer, and we can take it from there?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she dangled her key ring again, just a flash of matte black plastic. “These are everywhere in Europe these days, along with these.” She opened her purse, and he caught a glimpse of a sliver of curved metal, like a boomerang, in the shape of the Motorola batwing logo mark. “They’re meshing wireless repeaters. Once you’ve got a critical mass, you can relay data from anywhere to anywhere. Teenagers are whacking them up on the sides of buildings, tangling them in tree branches, sticking them to their windows. The telcos there are screaming blue murder, of course. Business is down forty percent in Finland, sixty in France. Euros are using the net for telephone calls, instant messaging, file-sharing—the wireline infrastructure is looking more and more obsolete every day. Even the ISPs are getting nervous.”

Roscoe tried to hide his grin. To be an unwirer in the streets of Paris, operating with impunity, putting the telcos, the Hollywood studios, and the ISPs on notice that there was no longer any such thing as a “consumer”—that yesterday’s couch potatoes are today’s
participants
!

“We’ve got ten years’ worth of editorials in our morgue about the destruction of the European entertainment and telco market and the wisdom of our National Information Infrastructure here in the US, but it’s starting to ring hollow. The European governments are
ignoring
the telcos! The device and services market being built on top of the freenets is accounting for nearly half the GDP in France. To hear
my
paper describe it, though, you’d think they were starving in the streets: it’s like the received wisdom about Canadian socialized health care. Everyone
knows
it doesn’t work—except for the Canadians, who think we’re goddamned
barbarians
for not adopting it.

“I just got back from a month in the field in the EU. I’ve got interviews in the can with CEOs, with street thugs, with grand-mothers, and with regulators, all saying the same thing: unmetered communications are the secret engine of the economy, of liberty. The highest-quality ‘content’ isn’t hundred-million-dollar movies; it’s conversations with other people. Crypto is a tool of ‘privacy’ ”—she pronounced it in the British way, “prihv-icy,” making the word seem even more alien to his ears—“not piracy.”

“The unwirers are heroes in Europe. You hear them talk, it’s like listening to a course in
US
constitutional freedoms. But here, you people are crooks, cable thieves, pirates, abettors of terrorists. I want to change that.”

That evening, Marcel picked a fight with Roscoe over supper. It started low key, as Roscoe sliced up the pizza. “What are you planning this week?”

Roscoe shifted two slices onto his plate before he answered. “More dishes. Got a couple of folks to splice in downtown if I want to hook up East Aurora—there’re some black spots there, but I figure with some QOS-based routing and a few more repeaters, we can clear them up. Why?”

Marcel toyed with a strand of cooling cheese. “It’s, like, boring. When are you going to run a new fat pipe in?”

“When the current one’s full.” Roscoe rolled a slice into a tube and bit into an end, deftly turning the roll to keep the cheese and sauce on the other end from oozing over his hand. “You know damn well the Feds would like nothing better than to drive a ditch-witch through a fiber drop from the border. ’Sides, got the journalist to think about.”

“I could take over part of the fiber-pull,” Marcel said.

“I don’t think so.” Roscoe put his plate down.

“But I could—” Marcel looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Security,” Roscoe grunted. “Goddamnit, you can’t just waltz up to some guy who’s looking at twenty-to-life and say, ‘Hi, Roscoe sent me, howzabout you and me run some dark fiber over the border, huh?’ Some of the guys in this game are, huh, you wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night. And others are just plain paranoid. They wouldn’t want to meet
you
. Fastest way to convince ’em the FCC is trying to shut them down.”

“You could introduce me,” Marcel said after a brief pause.

Roscoe laughed, a short bark. “In your dreams, son.”

Marcel dropped his fork, clattering. “You’re going to take your pet blonde on a repeater splice and show her everything, and you’re afraid to let me help you run a new fat pipe in? What’s the matter, I don’t smell good enough?”

“Listen.” Roscoe stood up, and Marcel tensed—but rather than move toward him, Roscoe turned to the pizza box. “Get the
Wall Street Journal
on our side, and we have some credibility. A crack in the wall. Legitimacy. Do you know what that means, kid? You can’t buy it. But run another fat pipe into town, and we have a idle capacity, upstream dealers who want to know what the hell we’re pissing around with, another fiber or laser link to lose to cop-induced backhoe fade, and about fifty percent higher probability of the whole network getting kicked over because the mundanes will rat us out to the FCC over their TV reception. Do you want that?” He picked another cooling pizza slice out of the box. “Do you really want that?”