Hack:Moscow (3 page)

It’s been a while since that first time. Luka and I still meet up at cafés whenever we don’t have to be online and Anton’s not needed. Those days, I bring a duffel bag because Luka always insist on lending me a book or three. “You don’t need school. The great Russians explain everything. Stay with me, I’ll take care of you,” he said. Once, I told him I could download e-books and he’d glared as if I’d uttered heresy. He has a certain old-fashioned streak, I think. Or maybe the books have special meaning to him. There are always soft pencil marks in their margins. These are not written in his blocky handwriting; these are round, lilting strokes. A mystery.

Today, however, was another day in the warehouse.

When we met, Luka pulled up the website for a data protection company called Level 7. He has an archaic six-finger typing technique, like a stiff dance, a style more suited for a typewriter. “That’s our mark.” Luka tapped the screen of his laptop. It revealed little. A barebones website with a login portal. A clean interface. Monochrome colors. This website was so plain it begged to be hacked. I felt tempted to change their font to something bigger and brighter.

“Boring,” Anton judged, then he winked at me. “Hey Andrei, did you hear your President’s speech last night?” he said loudly. “He’s a popular one. Didn’t he win the last election with a hundred and two percent of the votes?”

People can be like computers: press X and you get Y. Anton knows Luka gets irate whenever politics is brought up. Last month, we’d watched online as the President stood before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The country must progress, he’d declared, then vowed to upgrade Russia’s infrastructure and military. Luka had turned livid as he accused the President of being a traitor.

Anton smirked, awaiting a reaction to his barb, but Luka ignored him this time. He was focused on the project. “Get to work now, both of you. What are you waiting for?”

After an hour, Luka came over. I smelled cigarettes on his breath as he leaned over my shoulder, its acrid smell more familiar than repulsive. “Any luck?”

“The first layer of security is based off Aegis, so we can get around it easily. The second layer though, it’s trouble and—”

“That’s all you can tell me after all that time?” Luka boomed. Why’s he so edgy?

“You think it’s easy?” Anton piped up, flipping his gamer goggles up. “The third layer is set up to shutdown once it detects any intrusion. Even if you disable that, the fourth is rigged to wipe everything on the server. It’s like hiring a suicide bomber for guard duty.” He paused. “I managed to tease out a folder title reference though. What’s this Project Silence shit? I don’t like the sound of it.” Anton’s eyes narrowed. “This work we’re doing, it better not be military-related, geezer. I’m not paid enough to mess around with something so dangerous.”

An unbidden thought struck me. I imagined jackboots kicking the warehouse door. Red gun sights flickered on our foreheads. I shook my head. Life isn’t some Hollywood show with blazing gunfire and girls with guns tucked in their stockings. There’s never been trouble, not even a peep.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Luka snapped. “We’ve barely begun and you two have given up. Get the administrator’s password and it’ll be easy.”

“Sure,” Anton said. “I’ll snap my fingers and Behemoth, the devil cat, will appear and grant all our wishes. Anyone else want anything? I’m taking orders.
Pelmeni
? Pizza, maybe?”

Luka rubbed his temples with the heels of his hands. A call on his phone saved us from another argument. He stalked away.

“Work harder, work harder!” Anton mimed a whip, then flipped his laptop shut. “Screw that.”
Turing Mk IV
, a sticker was pasted over his laptop cover. He’s the only one I know who names his computer. Once, I’d asked Luka about the person Anton named his computer after. “It probably refers to Alan Turing. He’s nothing,” Luka was dismissive, “just some dead British computer scientist. He helped his country win World War 2 by breaking the Enigma code, then was betrayed by his own government decades later. What’s new? If Anton wants one of these tragic sorts, well, we have plenty of Russian role models for him. But no, of course that man had to pick some homosexual foreigner. No surprise there.” Unfortunately, Anton came back and overheard us. I don’t think Luka really thinks Anton is gay, but it’s another reason why they don’t get along.

“I hate this.” Anton stood up and stretched. “Who does Luka think he is?”

“He knows what he’s doing. Did I ever tell you I saw his gun?” Luka had fallen asleep in the warehouse and his jacket had slipped to reveal a walnut handle. Anton shot me a look of distilled doubt. “It’s true. I almost touched it.” Right before I could do so, Luka’s eyes had flicked opened and he grabbed my arm.

“Almost touched it? Give me a break.” Anton rolled into a handstand. The orange goggles dangled around his neck. “Even if he has a gun, what does it matter? You’re too easily impressed. Try this, Andrei. You’ll see the world from a different perspective.”

“What do you see?”

“I see we’re no better than serfs. I see we’re being exploited in a gulag.”

“It’s safer …” I began and Anton rolled his eyes. Luka had explained it all to me, how he’d bought a map from a contact in the municipal office. That’s how he picked this warehouse. Beneath Moscow, the new cables traced the pathways of the old sewer pipes. Luka had went down the sewer access in the warehouse and hacked the communications terminal. When he told me that, I’d imagined him inside the tunnels: a flashlight in his mouth, a sack of tools, and wires lassoed around a shoulder. Now, not even the service providers can trace us when we log in. This ‘gulag’ is safer than anywhere else. Anton’s biased. “I’m not going to argue with you, Anton.”

“Oh? Who do you want to argue with?” He walked over and began scratching the flaking paint on my pillar. “Why were you late this morning?”

I thought of Anna and blushed. “The bus.”

“That’s why you’re still a boy. That’s why you are Andrei 1.0. Grown ups, real men, take responsibility for all their actions, good or bad,” he said. Flecks of pastel blue paint drifted down as he scratched.

Andrei 1.0—it’s a running joke between us. I hate it, but it’s the one joke that both Anton and Luka will laugh over. “That has nothing to do with it. The bus was late,” I protested.

“The bus, the bus—why don’t you ever take the Metro? It’s faster. And prettier.”

Ever since Luka made me read the
Underground Man
, my chest hurts whenever I think of the escalators leading to the trains, sinking, sinking. The bowels of each station are full of statues and everyone looks lifelike, as if molten bronze had been poured over real people. Each time I’m on those escalators, I can’t stop counting, converting speed and time into depth, trying not to think of people buried underground or drowned.

“Say what you will about Stalin, he had some right ideas. The Metro, the Seven Sisters, the pogroms. Would have been a better if he killed more. Just kill all the Russians and be done with, right?” His laugh had a brutal edge and unnerved me.

“Aren’t you part-Russian too?”

“You know nothing.” He pulled out a switchblade to work the paint. “Have you ever been to a foreign country?”

Some day, I want to travel—but his question didn’t sound like a question.

He pulled the strap of his gaming goggles, and they made a loud, angry snap against his skin. “I live in one. Every day. People here look down on my kind. On the streets, the cops stop and shake me down. In bars, people mock me. They think we’re inferior because of our skin, we’re half the man they are. They call us bums, then they say we’re terrorists, or homosexuals, or rapists. We’re everything they hate. So be it.”

I’d heard rumors about the hate groups before, but... “Surely not everyone is like that. How do you know they’re talking about you?” I wonder what he sees when he wears his goggles. More enemies probably.

“You’re right, Andrei. They must be discussing their grandma’s jam recipe. My mistake.” He made a contemptuous sound. “That’s why I dyed my hair. If they want to stare, I’ll give them a reason.” My skin prickled as his blade scored a teasing, jagged line. “A while back, two of my people, us half-breeds, were attacked after a Spartak Moscow match. The skinheads thought it’d be fun to make his older one watch as they did a free kick with his brother’s head. No newspaper or website ever reported that incident. Nobody dared. This is the kind of city we live in, Andrei, make no mistake. There is no kindness or fairness or mercy here.”

“What happened after that?”

“What happens when a boot connects with a young boy’s head?” His lips puckered into white ridges like scars as he flayed a long strip of paint free.

“I’m not sure I like this story.”

“Oh? Here’s another one then. Once, God, for shits and giggles, went to a man who’d been beaten up by his neighbor. He healed the man and told him He’d grant a wish for all the wrong he’d suffered. Whatever he wished for, his neighbor would get twice as much. ‘Why, God?’ the man raged. ‘After all the injustice? Why does he get rewarded?’ The man raged. ‘My son,” God told him, “I love you. Let go of your hate. Let go of your pain. I will reward you. I will take care of you.” The man spent the night thinking it over and next morning, God appeared. ‘Child, what is your wish?’ The man had his answer. ‘I want you to blind one of my eyes.’ Everyone hates us so we hate them back. People like me, we never forgive, we never forget.”

“I like you, Anton.” Luka does too; he’d been delighted to find Anton. The F.S.B. doesn’t hire mixed-bloods, he said. But if I told Anton that, he’d probably misunderstand everything. Again.

“You?” He examined a square crust of paint he pried free, then showered me with crushed blue confetti. “That’s for liking me. Alright, alright.” He reached for my hair, and I batted his hand away. “Your birthday’s coming, isn’t it? I’ll give you a present.” He sat down and typed on his laptop. Seconds later, an attachment appeared in my inbox.

“What’s that?” I tried not to sound suspicious. Among the three of us, I prefer to confront a program head-on and pick it apart, while Luka’s a jack-of-all-tricks. Neither of us comes close to Anton when it comes to churning out Trojans and converting computers into serf-bots.

“What’s this? What’s that? Too many questions.” He pretended to sigh. “Since you’ve never travelled, let me show you a different world.” He tilted his laptop towards me. There’s a room with pink walls, trimmed with white crown molding. The polka-dot curtains were tucked beside the window frame, and the fabric swayed slightly. This wasn’t one of his virtual reality games. It’s too real. In the corner of the room, there was an empty bed. A rosy glaze over the window hinted at dusk. It’s early afternoon in Moscow. Where’s this?

“It’s my pet-bot. You can control everything. Press this button, and the webcam turns on without anyone knowing. This webcam is fancy. It even pans.” He pressed a button and the view shifted. I saw a wardrobe with carved knobs. Beside it, a mirror reflected the computer. How many layers of reality can a looking glass offer? “Don’t move the webcam when she’s around.”

“She?” I felt my pulse quicken. I thought of how my father made me close my room door whenever he brought one of his female students home. Once, I peeped and saw them on the couch, their limbs tangled. I’d closed the door softly, fearing that they, the world, would hear my heart thumping.

“I thought you hated porn.” I played it cool. “Didn’t you crash a porn site last month?”

“This? This is art,” he scoffed. “Don’t mistake this for your typical spyware, it’s undetectable, with built-in zoom and image optimization. And to clarify, I have nothing against porn, it’s exploitation I fight against. That, and oppression of all kinds. I’m a freedom fighter.”

Maybe I’m not that old after all because I don’t get it. His is a complicated morality.

“Here, you try, Andrei.”

Old Nelya told me temptation is a snake in Paradise. The warehouse is hardly Paradise but Temptation reared in my lap.

I wanted to look away. I edged closer to the screen instead.

Two weeks have passed and we’ve made little progress. Luka’s mood has steadily worsened. Until today.

“The system administrator’s name is Garrett O’Brien,” Luka trumpeted when we met up. “We’re back in business.” I knew he’d come up with something; he always does. Online, there are black market exchanges where you can buy information, from credit card numbers to personal secrets. It’s a fragmented and furtive market; the best exchanges are available only to a select few. I wondered whether Luka bought the information and how he knew to trust it. “Play the man, not the ball.” Luka instructed us to start prying into Garrett O’Brien’s life. Social networks, trade journals, blogs—we trawled the internet. “It’ll make sense once we have all the pieces.”

And he was right. O’Brien was cautious, but he made one mistake.

“Look,”—Anton sent the link around—“it’s a site for his wedding four years ago.” The website was updated with honeymoon pictures of a plain-looking couple travelling around. In one picture, they posed against a bridge.
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
, the caption read, although I didn’t see any golden gates, only rust-colored girders. Another album had them posing against a starry night somewhere. In the next, they’re high up, pale flabby figures steeped in an infinity pool, which overlooked a deep blue sea wrapped around an island city like a scarf. “Sometimes when you travel around the world, it leads the world right back to you,” Anton said, as we flicked through the pictures.

The internal site counter revealed that few have visited this obscure and abandoned digital shrine. “Why do people create something like this?”

“Love,” Luka replied. “Idiocy,” Anton said at the same time.

Love and idiocy sounds about right. The way I see it, they’re a subset of each other. Each time I think of Anna, something gnaws my insides.

Luka ignored Anton. “Andrei, if you’re lucky enough to meet the right woman, make sure you never let her down.” He ran his hand through his hair, then it was back to work. “Keep digging.”

Apart from their travels, the O’Brien’s seemed like a solitary couple. No kids, few friends. Then, Anton found the wife’s Tumblr account. She used an anagram for her login, “As though that would hide her identity,” Anton sneered. One site led to the next and we discovered she belonged to a bird-watching society and maintained their official blog. On it, she posted pictures of sightings: birds singing, flying, posing with wings spread, mating, flapping. Kestrels, peregrines, blue-banded hawks, and ibises. Birds, birds everywhere.

“If we can get a key logger on the man’s computer, we can figure out his VPN setup,” Luka mused as he reviewed our findings.

“You think he’ll be that careless?”

“He isn’t. But Mrs Cuckoo Brain is,” Anton said. “I’m sure they share a home network. If we can get to her,”—he snapped his fingers—“that’s our way in. It’d be easy from there.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Luka said.

They exchanged the first smile in a long time. The sun and the moon were friends again.

“Would he log in to work from home?” I asked tentatively, afraid to break the peace.

“Does a mother suckle her child?” Luka retorted. I thought of my mother who had never suckled me. “He’s a system administrator, they’re slaves to their machines. Those birds will lead him to us, you’ll see.”