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
80
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
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
81
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.
82
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
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.
84
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
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