by Reece Hirsch
“Is this Pietr Middendorf?”
“You’ve got the wrong apartment, man. Fuck off.”
“Open the door, Pietr. My name is Chris Bruen. I’m an attorney and I came all the way from the US just to speak with you. I’m here with a colleague of mine from a local law firm. We know you’re Black Vector and we know about the theft of the Aspira source code. I’m here on behalf of my client BlueCloud.”
“What part of ‘fuck off’ did you not understand?”
Chris exhaled slowly. This wasn’t going to be one of the easy ones.
“If you open the door,” Chris said, “we have a deal we’d like to offer you. If you don’t open the door, I’m going to have a court bailiff come here and open it for us. If we do it that way, you’re probably going to spend tonight in jail.”
There was a long silence on the other side of the door, then, “I need a minute to put some clothes on. Is that okay with you?”
“No problem,” Chris said. “In fact, we prefer it.”
They heard the sound of footsteps shuffling around the apartment. Chris and Remko were both listening intently, their heads leaning in close to the wooden door.
And then they heard the gunshot.
In the thunderclap of the moment, Chris perceived it as more of a physical shock than a sound. He examined himself for a bullet wound.
“Are you okay?” Chris said to Remko, who had backpedaled down the hallway and was bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, amped on adrenaline.
Remko looked down at the front of his shirt. “I think so. Are you?”
“Okay,” Chris said, examining the door for a bullet hole and finding none. The shot didn’t seem to have been directed at them.
From inside the apartment, they heard the groan of a window sash opening.
“Sounds like he’s leaving by the fire escape,” Chris said. “I’m going inside. Someone could be hurt in there.” He wasn’t going to admit it to Remko, but he had other motives as well. He tested the door, but it was locked.
Chris butted the door with his shoulder, but it was unyielding. Then he strode past Remko and headed down the stairs.
“Good,” Remko said. “I’ll call the police.”
“No, not yet,” Chris said. “I’m going to go up the fire escape and take a look.”
“Are you insane?”
When Chris and Remko emerged from the lobby, the street was still empty except for a grocer turning a crank to raise the metal fence that guarded his shop. There was no sign of the shooter.
Chris walked around to the side of the building and saw that the ladder to the fire escape had been pulled down to the pavement. On the fourth-floor landing, the window was still open. From the corner, Chris surveyed the street and the alley but still saw no one who seemed like a candidate to have fired the shot.
Chris began climbing the iron fire escape toward the fourth floor. He was trying not to make too much noise, but the fire escape groaned and shuddered with every step. The iron railings were so cold in his grip that they burned. He looked down at the alley below and saw Remko vigorously shaking his head, trying to dissuade him.
He moved even more slowly as he neared the fourth-floor window. If the shooter was still in the room and looked out, he would be an easy target that even the poorest shot couldn’t miss.
Finally, Chris stood outside the window of Middendorf’s apartment. He saw his breath smoking in front of him in quick, chuffing bursts. But he wasn’t as frightened as he knew he should be. Ever since his cancer diagnosis, a kind of numbness had settled over him—it was like being on beta-blockers.
Chris darted his head forward for a quick look into the room through the open window. He pulled back so quickly, though, that he wasn’t really able to see anything. At least no one had fired a shot at him.
He tried again, this time allowing enough time to survey the room. There was only one figure inside, a man slumped at a desk, his face buried in the keyboard. The large iMac computer monitor in front of him was on and spattered with blood.
The figure did not move.
Chris climbed through the window, into a tiny flat with a bed to the right and the desk facing the wall to the left, next to a kitchenette. The room smelled of stale fried food and was littered with greasy, empty Styrofoam containers, and what appeared to be pirated copies of video games packaged with poorly reproduced artwork. A bicycle leaned against a wall in one corner.
Chris approached the body. The man’s hands were bound in front of him using the type of nylon cord used to lash packages to a bicycle rack. There was a bullet hole in the back of his skull that was still oozing blood, matting his dark, curly hair.
Leaning down to examine the face, he saw that it was Pietr Middendorf, whom he barely recognized from a photo he’d gotten from his Facebook page. One of Middendorf’s eyes was swollen shut. The other eye was open, but it was fixed and lifeless. There were lacerations all over the hacker’s face and head from some blunt object.
“Pietr?” Chris said. There was no movement. Chris picked up Middendorf’s wrist and checked for a pulse, but there was none. Chris’s earlier knock at the door had apparently interrupted the fun and games, bringing the session to an abrupt close with a bullet to Middendorf’s head.
Chris examined the room more closely now and saw signs that it had been tossed, but not very thoroughly. Every drawer in the apartment was open, from the desk to the kitchen to the nightstand. If Chris had to guess, he would say that Pietr’s killer had been looking for something, searched the place a bit to see if it presented itself and, when it didn’t, began working on Middendorf.
Chris figured that one of the neighbors would report the gunshot and he only had about five minutes before the Amsterdam police arrived. He looked under the bed, under the mattress, on the shelves of the small closet, places that didn’t seem to have been examined by the killer. He moved on to the desk drawers, removing a pen from his pocket and using it to pull the drawers open, careful not to leave fingerprints on the hard surfaces. There was nothing of interest there, just some pens, paper clips, and envelopes. Then he stopped, realizing that he had just seen something that was slightly off.
There were two staplers on Middendorf’s desk, one black and one gray. Judging by the disorder of the apartment, Middendorf didn’t seem like the type to be so organized as to own one stapler, much less two. Not sure what he was looking for, Chris tested the black stapler, mashing down the upper arm. A staple ejected, tiny, silver, and crumpled like a swatted spider.
Chris tested the second, extra-large gray stapler, and nothing came out. He picked it up and opened the compartment that held the staples. There were no staples inside—there was no room because a flash drive had been wedged behind the spring mechanism. The silver plastic drive had a piece of paper taped around it bearing the image of a smiling red devil, with horns and a long, forked tongue. Chris was willing to bet that the flash drive contained the stolen source code.
He considered whether he should be removing possible evidence from a crime scene but only hesitated for a moment. His client had sent him to Amsterdam to do a job and he wasn’t about to return empty-handed. He placed the flash drive in his pocket, then used a paper towel from the kitchen to wipe down the two staplers.
The baying of police sirens could be heard in the distance. He surveyed the cluttered room one last time to see if he had missed anything. It was then that he noticed that the green LED light of the computer’s webcam was on. He was being observed.
His mind raced. The webcam must have been on the whole time, even through Middendorf’s beating and murder. Perhaps the killer had been making an example of the hacker for the benefit of whoever was on the other end of the webcam. Chris leaned in and gazed into the lens as if he could see the person on the other end. He held up a finger to the camera as if to say I know you’re there.
At that moment, the computer pinged—the sound of an incoming email. Middendorf’s email inbox was open on the screen, but it
took a moment to read the message, because the monitor was spattered with blood. The subject line read: “YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT BELONGS TO US.”
Chris looked into the webcam and said, “If you want it, why don’t you tell me where I should send it?”
The computer pinged again. Another email. The message: “WE’LL FIND YOU.”
CHAPTER 3
January 7
The long flight back from the Netherlands had taken its toll on Chris, so he decided to work from home after dropping off the flash drive in Reynolds Fincher’s computer forensic lab for analysis. Home was a cavernous loft in a commercial district south of busy Market Street, within walking distance of the firm’s offices. The one nonutilitarian object in the living room was the upright Steinway piano crouched in a corner, with a silver-framed photo of his late wife, Tana, perched on top. The place suited Chris because it was the right size for one person. A bunch of unused rooms would have seemed like a rebuke to his solitary life.
The light coming through the big windows was soft and gray, filtered through the marine layer that draped the city. The Bay Bridge loomed in the middle distance. The view had been even better before a phalanx of glass apartment towers had shot up south of Market—just in time for the real estate crash.
He put on a pot of coffee, made toast, and cued up a vinyl recording of Glenn Gould’s 1981 performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Gould’s playing was introspective, ruminative, the sound of an artist nearing the end of his life but still engaged. Chris admired Bach because his compositions were as mathematically precise as an elegant string of computer code.
Chris was still trying to make sense of what had happened in Amsterdam. The Dutch police had brought him and Remko down to the station and questioned them for nearly two days. They had been particularly interested in the email that read, “YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT BELONGS TO US.” Chris had fudged his timeline by a few minutes to suggest that the email came in before he was on the scene. Remko didn’t contradict his story, because he had been too upset to note the time.
Eventually, the police seemed satisfied. Chris had feared that he would be detained in the Netherlands, but the detectives were reassured by the fact that he was associated with a major Amsterdam law firm, and they knew where to find Remko.
Chris had hidden the flash drive beneath a dumpster in the alley just before the patrol cars arrived. He returned to retrieve it after the police had finished their questioning. Chris never said a word to Remko about the flash drive. There was no need to implicate him in a possible obstruction-of-justice charge. And if it turned out that the drive did contain something material to the murder investigation, he would find a way to return it to Dutch law enforcement—once he was safely back in the US. Better to ask for forgiveness from a foreign jurisdiction than to ask for permission.
For the past two days, Chris had been trying to understand what Middendorf might have been thinking in his last hours. After taking such a beating, why would he still refuse to turn over the flash drive? It had to be either very valuable or very incriminating. Or maybe Middendorf knew he was a dead man and his refusal was a last act of defiance.
Chris brought his coffee mug and plate over to the desk and booted up the computer. The monitor screen immediately filled with a black-and-white photo of Darby Crash, the lead singer of the seventies LA punk band the Germs, all wild eyes and broken teeth. Chris had been hacked—again.
There was a cadre of hackers who took pride in their ability to take down Chris’s computer. Chris’s hacker adversaries usually couldn’t get through the law firm’s firewall, so they focused on his home computer. Chris had upgraded his security repeatedly, but clearly it still wasn’t enough. At least he knew better than to store anything truly sensitive on his hard drive.
Chris knew instantly who the culprit was. Blanksy, a relatively harmless prankster, had a fondness for the late-seventies LA punk scene. The photo of Darby Crash was meant as a calling card. Chris respected Blanksy’s skills and he had been a longtime source of information on hacks and hackers, but the disruptions were getting annoying. Blanksy had invited Chris to speak at DefCon, the annual hacker convention that was to be held in Brooklyn later that month, and had been pestering him ever since he refused.
Chris looked up Blanksy’s number on his phone and dialed him up.
“Greetings, Chris.” Chris had never met Blanksy in person, but they had developed a relationship of sorts over the years. He even knew that Blanksy’s real name was Jay Hartigan. In conversation, Blanksy had the charmingly geeked-out enthusiasm of a comic shop clerk on Red Bull, which amused Chris on most days.
“You know, Jay, when most people want to talk to me, they just pick up a phone.”
“Dude, you don’t return my calls or texts. It’s a little harder to ignore me when you’ve been pwned, isn’t it? And please, call me Blanksy.” “Pwned” was hacker slang for gaining complete “root kit” control over a computer.
“I have work to do, Blanksy.”
“This is about your work—your little adventure in Amsterdam.”
“So you’ve heard about that.”
“You know how word travels. Some people are saying that you’ve gone rogue, that you’ve stopped arresting hackers and started assassinating them.”
“And you believe that?”
“No, but you should watch your back just the same,” Blanksy said. “When people start saying stuff like that, they can justify all kinds of bad behavior.”
“Like hacking my home computer? How did you hijack my computer, anyway?”
“It’s just a matter of knowing what sort of email you always open. Then I used Zeus.” Zeus, also known as zbot, is a popular open-source malware toolkit for hackers. Zeus can be used to create a Trojan Horse, an email hiding malicious code, a practice sometimes referred to as “spear phishing.”
Chris changed tack. “What is it that you want? I assume that there’s a reason for this surprise visit.”
Blanksy adopted the plummy tones of a monologuing supervillain. “You know, we are not so very different, you and I …”
“The main difference being that I’m an adult.”
“You wound me,” Blanksy said, only half kidding. “I am wounded.”
“No offense intended.”
“Okay,” Blanksy said. “Apology accepted, but I want you to reconsider the invitation to DefCon. It would be massive if you could make it. You may be the enemy, but there’s a lot of respect for you out there. If you stepped up to the podium at DefCon, it would be the biggest display of brass cojones ever.”
“At this point in my life, I don’t really need that.”
“Say you’ll consider it, if you want your computer back.”
A long, grudging silence ensued. “I’ll consider it,” Chris said. “But that is not a commitment.” Being heckled by an auditorium full of hackers was not Chris’s idea of fun.
“That’s all I ask, dude. You are released.”
“Thank you. And please don’t call me dude.”
“I’ve just gotta say, though, that I think you’re well on your way to being just a legendary badass.”
“Good-bye, Blanksy.” Chris hung up.
It distressed him that there were hackers saying that he had killed Pietr Middendorf, but there was nothing he could do about that sort of irresponsible chatter. Responding to the rumor on one of the hacker message boards would only serve to incite them further.
When his computer came back up, Chris saw that Eduardo “Ed” de Lamadrid, the director of the firm’s computer forensic lab, had sent him an email: “Can you make it to the office? I found some very interesting stuff on that flash drive.”
Chris tapped out a response. “Can’t you just tell me?”
“This is something that you need to see. Trust me on this.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
CHAPTER 4
The computer forensic laboratory, which was located in the firm’s offices near
the San Francisco waterfront on the thirty-eighth floor of Building Four of Embarcadero Center, didn’t look like anything special. There were no technicians in white lab coats, oversize LCD monitors, or other crime lab trappings. Instead, there was just a whiteboard that ran around all four walls of the room, covered with scribbled passwords, cryptic decision trees, the names of hackers, and fragments of code. The counters were made of thick wood that did not conduct electricity. Most law firms did not have their own computer forensic lab, but it was an essential resource for Chris’s unique practice.
As Chris entered, Ed was sitting alone in the center of the room in a black leather chair, staring at an array of three computer monitors. He was in his characteristic pose of intense concentration, pinching his lower lip and wispy black goatee between his thumb and index finger. Ed was in his early thirties, with short, black hair, a round face, and wire-framed glasses with round lenses. A copy of A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick, which he dipped into during downtime while a program was running, rested open and spine up next to his keyboard.
Chris met Ed three years earlier when he was investigating a hacker attack against a large accounting firm. Ed was working in the accounting firm’s IT department, and he took an unusually keen interest in Chris’s investigation. Eventually, Chris learned the reason for that interest. Ed’s hobby was hunting down and decoding computer viruses, then sharing the information with a group of other professional and nonprofessional security experts who had appointed themselves unofficial guardians of the Internet. The accountants saw Ed as a pudgy and introverted Cuban kid from Miami. Chris recognized Ed for what he truly was—a geeky version of Batman who made up for his lack of superpowers with a vigilante’s thirst for justice. Chris had immediately hired Ed away from the accounting firm to be the first director of his computer forensic lab.
“I hope this is worth bringing me into the office,” Chris said.
Ed swung around in his chair. “Oh, it’s worth it,” he said. “First, you’ll be happy to know that you got what you were after. The flash drive contained a copy of the Aspira source code.”