by Jon Evans
“The legend of LoTek lives on!” Mulligan intones. “Well. Hopefully. Unless you, like, die and shit.”
* * *
Danielle looks at Mulligan’s tarnished mirror, so low on the wall she has to squat to see her face, and hardly recognizes herself. She supposes that’s the idea. The picture in the paper was her passport photo, taken when she had short hair. She has let it grow since then, into a bob – now a very blonde bob. She looks around. The tub and toilet bowl are scaly and stained. The floor is covered with old dirt and new tufts of hair, the latter thanks to Keiran’s newly uncovered scalp. And Danielle’s hair is now the shade of platinum blonde she associates with fake breasts. Well, no one ever said running for your life was dignified.
She emerges into the living room and sits on the couch. Jayalitha is curled up in a tattered sleeping bag, dead to the world, and Mulligan has gone somewhere to buy food and electronics. Keiran sits in front of one of Mulligan’s computers, his face bathed by flickering LED light.
Danielle is reminded of the night she first met him, five years ago, at a noisy party in Oakland. She went upstairs to use the bathroom, and on the way back, saw light gleaming in a dark room. A man working at a computer. Something about the scene had intrigued her, the man’s dark solitude while a party throbbed below, and she had gone in and struck up a curious conversation. It wasn’t until he accompanied her out of the room a half-hour later that she realized he was tall and good-looking. And amazingly Keiran still is, despite his newly shaved head, despite the years of abuses and deprivations, junk food and drugs, he has put his body through. He is blessed with looks, health, superhuman brains. Everything comes naturally to Keiran except human understanding.
He glances at her. “Nice hair.”
Danielle sighs. “Same to you. I feel like a walking escort service ad. You really think this will stop police from recognizing us?”
“No. But it might slow them enough that we get a head start. The idea, remember, is that they never see us in the first place.”
Danielle nods.
“How are you doing?” Keiran asks.
She pauses. The question is unlike him. “I don’t know,” she says. “Scared. Dizzy. Angry. Stressed. I’m tired of it all already. Like, I just want the whole situation to be over, one way or another. How are you?”
“Mostly angry. Not just at him. At the system that lets it happen. If people actually cared about a few thousand dead children in India, there would have been real investigations, Shadbold would have been found out and stopped long ago. But nobody really cares.”
“Why do you?”
He looks at her, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not exactly a people person. What do you care about children in India?”
“I’m not –” Keiran pauses. “What Shadbold’s doing, that’s, it’s a crime against humanity, not just people. I believe in humanity. To quote our murdered Scottish friend, I believe in a better world.” He smiles sourly. “I like the idea of people. It’s the individual instances I have problems with.”
“Because we’re all so stupid?”
“You’re not stupid.”
“Compared to you I am. Compared to you almost anybody is.”
“I used to think so. But, you know, lately I’ve begun to wonder.”
“If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” Danielle asks sarcastically.
“Not rich exactly. More like, why aren’t I doing something with it? Why aren’t I…”
“Happy?”
Keiran looks at her.
“Sorry,” Danielle says.
“Is it that obvious?”
“I can read you pretty well.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Keiran says. “I have lots of money, a lucrative and occasionally interesting position, plenty of friends. Hacker friends, chemical friends, maybe not the cream of the social crop, but I get invited to plenty of parties. And one day about six months ago I realized I was profoundly unhappy. Not depressed. Just unhappy. I didn’t know why. It was a problem, so I tried to logically analyze it, come up with a rational solution, but that just didn’t work. And I realized I couldn’t talk to any of my friends about it. Not one. We’d just never had those kind of friendships. I was seeing this woman, but that was just, I certainly couldn’t talk to her.”
“Why not?”
“She actually was kind of stupid,” Keiran admits. “But that wasn’t – I mean, I just didn’t know how. The only person I’ve ever really been able to talk to is you.”
Danielle isn’t sure how to interpret that. “Maybe that’s because I’m the only person you’ve ever even tried to really talk to.”
Keiran cocks his head and looks at her as if she has said something revelatory.
Danielle says, “This Filipino girl I knew once told me that in Tagalog, lonely and unhappy are the same word.”
“Lonely,” Keiran says, tasting the word. He sighs. “If I’m so smart, how come it’s taken me thirty years to work out that utter contempt is maybe not the best default standpoint to take when dealing with other human beings?”
Danielle half-smiles. “Yeah. I kinda wish you’d figured that out when we were dating.”
“Well, you helped put me on the road, if that’s any consolation.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Was I a bastard to you?” Keiran asks. “When we dated? I’m sorry if I was. I tried not to be. I truly liked you.”
Danielle shrugs. “You were a boyfriend. Better than some, worse than others.”
Keiran looks deflated.
“I did like you too,” Danielle says hastily. “You were different. There wasn’t any bullshit about you. I liked that.”
Keiran nods. They look at each other.
“What did you owe Angus?” Danielle asks. “What did you have to pay back? I know you said you couldn’t explain without his blessing, but …”
“But he’s unlikely to come back from the grave to okay it now,” Keiran says.
“Yeah.”
“Angus and Estelle, wherever they’re buried, I’ll bet you they’re organizing the whole graveyard. Holding skeleton meetings, assembling communiques, issuing strongly worded corpse grievances. We demand better flowers and fewer maggots. Or maybe they’re marching on the Pearly Gates with protest signs and gas masks. End the Cloud Nine Discrimination! Equality and salvation for all!”
Danielle smiles wanly.
“My sister,” Keiran says. “She owed these three insane Albanians a lot of money. For drugs, I don’t know what kind. They took her up top of this empty car park in Birmingham, told her she was out of chances, broke her cheekbone with a hammer. She called me. Middle of the night, I was just coming down from acid, I hardly recognized her voice. It had been years. Half her face was broken, she was sobbing, it took me ages to understand her. She said I had to bring money, six thousand pounds, and if I wasn’t there by dawn, or they saw the police, they would drop her off the roof.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Danielle says softly.
“I don’t. For all intents and purposes. She was,” he hesitates, “damaged. From birth, I think. But I stupidly decided to help, called Angus, woke him. Between us we had the money, I was paranoid hacker enough to keep a few thousand around, and he’d collected dues for some protest he was organizing. I’d known him less than a year, but he was round my flat five minutes later, all his money in the glove box, to pick me up and drive me to Birmingham. It should have been simple, right? The money for the girl. I remember getting out of the car holding six thousand pounds in a Tesco bag. My sister looked like she’d been hosed down with her own blood. Up until then I had wondered if it was a ruse, if she was part of it. But no, there really were crazy Albanians. Kids, teenagers, tweakers, strung out on crystal meth. They decided the money wasn’t enough, they wanted our car too. They didn’t have guns, no one has guns in Britain, but they had knives and hammers. They grabbed me, I tried to fight, they hit me in the h
ead, I fell down. It seemed pretty apparent by then that they weren’t planning to let us get away alive. Angus could have just driven away. It wasn’t his problem, his sister. But that was Angus. Always fighting other people’s battles.”
Keiran falls silent.
“What happened?” Danielle asks.
“He ran us over,” Keiran says. He smiles faintly at the memory. “We were all in one tight group, that was their mistake, they never thought he’d run us down with me and my sister there too. Sideswiped us like a fucking stunt driver, knocked them all over. Cracked two of my ribs and hairline-fractured a tibula. Not that I noticed until the next day. I don’t remember exactly what happened after that. Concussions fragment your memory. I remember picking up a knife and stabbing one of them. I was snarling. Like a dog. Everyone was. It sounded like a dogfight. I remember Angus coming out of the car with a crowbar, and one of them hit him with a hammer. After that it gets hazy. Like a nightmare. The whole night was like a nightmare, but instead of waking up, it just kept getting more real, and more awful. Somehow we won. They ran away. Angus’s arm was broken, I was the only one who could drive, so I drove us to casualty with a concussion and a broken leg. Still on acid, good thing too, dulled the pain. And while they were examining Angus and I, my sister vanished with the money. I don’t know how she made it outside. She’d sprained her ankle badly. Must have had some drugs left on her.”
“What’s her name?” Danielle asks.
“Doesn’t matter,” Keiran says brutally. “She’s not dead yet. I check coroner’s reports sometimes. I couldn’t find her even if I wanted to, she lives completely off the grid, with crusties and squatters. Doesn’t matter. She might as well be dead. But she isn’t. Neither am I. That’s what I owed Angus.”
“God,” Danielle says.
A long silence falls.
“All right,” Keiran says. “Let’s get back to business.”
“Right,” Danielle says, very briskly. “Business. You were going to give me a new identity, right? Enroll me in your own personal witness protection program? Go on then. Show me what you got.”
Chapter 31
Keiran has to admit that on some level Danielle is right: part of him is glad to be pursued by the law. He has spent years hacking into dozens of corporate and government systems, but he has never been able to justify actually using his access before. It has always been too risky: every abuse of a compromised system might be noticed and somehow be tracked, could be the mistake that leads to his downfall. But now he has an excuse to flex his virtual muscles, use all the dormant authority he has accumulated over the years, and the exercise of raw power feels good.
First he needs anonymous money. Easy enough. He occasionally advises a group of Russian credit-card hackers on technical matters: in exchange, he has access to their “platinum list” of high-limit, high-volume credit card numbers, the kind for which a single hundred-dollar charge is likely to go unnoticed. Hacked from some upscale travel agency in Chicago, apparently. He uses thirty such credit cards to rent a nearby post office box, then purchase and post to that box four anonymous Virgin Mobile cell phones, two hundred dollars’ worth of phone cards, and twenty cashier’s checks for a hundred dollars apiece.
After money, identity. In the space of forty minutes, he arranges for three brand-new Social Security cards and California drivers’ licenses to be mailed to the post office box he just rented, in the names of Sarah Crawford, Julian O’Toole, and Parvati Rumanujan. Keiran and Danielle’s new licenses feature photos from Mulligan’s digital camera that display their new looks, touched up to look entirely unlike the pictures in today’s newspaper. He goes back to the Russian credit-card list and throws in a secured MasterCard for each of them, with thousand-dollar limits, in the same false names.
“Aren’t you worried they could find the mailbox?” Danielle asks, when he explains the outcome of his cyberspace pillaging. She has been sitting quietly beside him the whole time, shoulder-surfing, although he doubts she or any other non-hacker could have followed a tenth of the work he just did.
“They don’t know to look for it. And we have to make sure it stays that way. Remember, no phone calls home, no checking email, don’t even visit any of your favourite Web sites. We’re only omnipotent for as long as we’re invisible.”
“If you can do this, why haven’t you ever just taken ten million dollars from some bank and retired?”
Keiran shakes his head. “Taking money is a violation of LoTek’s Law. Always be invisible. Creating a new identity is invisible hacking. If you do it right, no one will even notice. But stealing an identity, or stealing money especially, that’s very visible. I could probably steal a million dollars a week from Social Security if I wanted to. Maybe I could break into a bank. Maybe not, they’re a lot sharper about security then the government. But even if I did, money is a zero-sum game, there is no way to steal significant amounts without being noticed. More than a few hundred dollars will trigger their alarms, alert their forensic accountants, get them angry. And once they’re angry, they will track you down. Once they start they usually win. Authorities are stupid, but they’re very big, very resourceful, very persistent. If they find out I exist they’ll squash me like a cockroach. But if you don’t even know you have roaches, you never call the exterminator.”
“It’s scary that you can do this,” Danielle says.
“Good. Because right now we need to be frightening.”
“I can’t believe all these systems are so insecure that anyone can break into them.”
Keiran smiles. “Not just anyone.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply you were mortal.”
“Not what I meant. I have a secret weapon. Shazam.”
Danielle looks at him. “I’ve heard of that. I’ve used it, I had it on my computer in Bangalore. I thought it was a program for downloading music, like Napster or iTunes, right?”
“In a way. But Napster had central servers, and a business, and an address that record companies could send their lawsuits to, so they got shut down. Shazam is just a piece of software. People install it, and it looks around the Internet until it finds other computers with Shazam. It can be used to share anything, but yes, almost always music. It’s very popular. More than seven million copies in active use. It’s free and open source, so people can look at the software themselves and see that there’s no hidden agenda, no spyware, nothing that will take over your computer. And it works. Most open source software usually doesn’t quite. I’m very proud of it.”
“You hid something in it.”
Keiran nods, pleased. “A tiny little buffer overflow, obfuscated inside one of the trickiest and dullest parts of the code. Anybody can look at it, but in all these years, nobody’s analyzed it in enough detail to find the bug. Like Shadbold said when he let us go. You can rely on people to do things. It would take a great programmer several very tedious hours to analyze that piece of code and find the bug, and none of them can be bothered to waste their time like that.”
“And that little thing lets you take it over?”
“It’s like a tiny lock, with an insanely complicated key, that opens up their whole computer to me. I can own any box that runs Shazam. And you’d be amazed where it runs. Seven million copies. Police stations, the ATF, the White House, foreign militaries, you name it. Secretaries and IT grunts around the world use it to steal music from the Internet on work time. And then I use it to steal their machines. Places with seriously organized IT security ban it and make the ban stick, but you’ve worked in offices, you know how often those rules are followed in the real world. Maybe one company in ten actually enforces them. Kishkinda being one of them. Not a single instance running there. But there’s one machine on the Justice International network that proved very useful indeed.”
“And once you’ve got access you can just turn around and get me a driver’s license and Social Security card like that? It’s that easy?” Danielle asks.
“No. Shazam is just
a beachhead. I have to work out what to do with the access, where their databases are, how to break into the rest of their network, how their homegrown programs work. It isn’t easy. When I broke into Social Security, two years ago, it took me three weeks at fifteen hours a day to work out how to issue a new card and fix the audit trail to fool their safeguards. But once that work’s done, well, today I could fill a city with people that don’t exist.”
“How long has Shazam been out there?”
Keiran pauses to think. “Almost five years. Tell you the truth, it’ll be obsolete soon, it’s already being replaced by BitTorrent and the like.”
“You never told me about this when we dated,” Danielle says accusingly.
He looks at her incredulously. “You can’t be serious. We’re talking about the hacker Holy Grail here. I’ve never told anyone except a few of my hacker friends. Mulligan, George, Klaupactus, Trurl. Everyone else just thinks I’m naturally godlike. You’re the first non-hacker I’ve ever told. You should be flattered.”
“I’ll try to remember,” Danielle says, but she sounds mollified. “So if your Shazam network is so great, why can’t you stomp this P2 guy?”
Keiran opens his mouth – and closes it again. He is not accustomed to being pitted against a superior hacker. But he has to admit that truth. Keiran could have tracked Jayalitha’s phone call to Danielle; he tunneled into America’s major phone companies years ago, and has at least read-only access to most of their corporate databases. But he could not have worked out overnight which Los Angeles hotel she was in. On Keiran’s advice, Danielle had showed up at the hotel without making a reservation, and yet P2 had found her. She couldn’t have been followed, or he wouldn’t have waited until midnight, or bothered calling her hotel to verify her presence. P2 must have broken into the rental-car company’s tracking system, located Danielle’s car, and then literally hacked into every one of the dozens of nearby hotels.