by Reece Hirsch
“If anyone really looks at this, I’ll need more than that to cover my ass.”
Chris got to the point, and he didn’t try to hide the desperation in his voice. “Can you help me?”
After a moment of silence, Charlie said, “What am I going to do, leave you hanging? The fact that you’re calling me like this tells me that you’re hard up. Sure, give me the information.”
Chris provided Reiser’s phone number and asked him to pull all of his phone records for the previous July and August, or at least the numbers for any international phone calls he had received during that period.
“Thanks, Charlie. Did I mention that I owe you big-time?”
“You just start brainstorming how you’re going to repay me,” Charlie said. “And I’ll see what I can do.”
Chris pulled back onto Highway 1 and continued north into San Francisco. By the time he was on the 101 overpass with the lights of the city’s jagged skyline glimmering before him, he had his answer. Charlie called him back on his cell phone and told him that Reiser had received only one international call during July and August. The call had been on August 8—from a number in Barcelona. Charlie had even looked up the number for him and found that it belonged to a shuttered factory that once manufactured parts for Fiats.
Chris had figured that he was headed for Barcelona, but now he knew where he was going when he got there. But before he could book a flight, he would need to pay another visit to Zoey.
CHAPTER 14
The Bottom of the Hill was open until 2:00 a.m., so Chris figured that he should be able to catch Zoey before her shift at the bar ended.
Chris got his hand stamped with red ink in the outline of a monkey and entered the club, which was crowded, hot, and loud. Another band, more skronky and atonal than the first, was now playing on the small stage. Zoey was working full tilt serving up drinks, so he waited until she took a break. He got a beer from a bartender at the other end of the counter and nursed it while he observed her. He noticed that the largely male crowd tended to congregate at her end of the bar, preferring to be served by Zoey rather than her male counterpart. Zoey didn’t seem to solicit that sort of attention and appeared oblivious to the effect that she was having, but Chris was pretty sure that she knew.
As Chris sipped his beer, he planned the trip to Barcelona. An objective outsider, like one of his law firm partners, would probably think he was crazy to embark on this trip to Spain. Chris didn’t even know with certainty that Sarah had been abducted. But there was no doubt in his mind that she was in trouble.
When Zoey finally took a break, she came directly over to his table and sat down. He hadn’t realized that she had spotted him.
“So, how’d it go?”
“Well, you were right about the slime, but Reiser’s information really helped. I found another connection between Enigma, Ripley, and Barcelona: an abandoned Fiat factory in Barcelona. Does that sound familiar?”
“No. So are you going?”
“Yeah. And I want you to come with me.”
“Really. Why would I want to do that?”
Chris had been assembling his arguments while he waited. “Because I need someone who knows the hacker community from the inside to help me track this crew. Because my client will pay for you to travel with me to Europe as my assistant. And because, even though you don’t know her, you don’t want Sarah Hotchner to come to harm.”
Zoey watched the band leaning into their instruments onstage like they were summoning a storm. Then she said, “Free trip to Barcelona or tend bar here? That’s an easy one. Sure.”
Chris didn’t believe for a moment that Zoey was as cynical as she let on.
“But I’d need to know who I’m working for,” she continued. “No more of this ‘my client’ stuff. It’s BlueCloud, right?”
“Right,” Chris said.
Zoey continued, “I get my own room, and I’m not sleeping with you.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. Get your bags packed, because we’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I have a couple more conditions.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t call me your assistant.”
“How about technical advisor?”
“Okay. And don’t ask me to do corporate. I don’t do corporate.”
“I know. Just be yourself.” Chris added, after considering for a moment, “But maybe a slightly toned-down version.”
CHAPTER 15
January 10
Chris found air travel tiring under the best of conditions, but since he’d started the cancer medications it had become exhausting. Even though his cancer was in complete remission, it had left him feeling watered down and spread thin. Sitting next to Zoey through the entirety of their cross-country and transatlantic flights wasn’t going to enhance the experience.
He usually liked long flights because he felt pleasantly untethered from his work responsibilities. Up in the air was the one place where no client could reach him with a call or an email. It was a relief to be free of the ringing phone, because, in Chris’s legal practice, some client somewhere was always experiencing a crisis, such as a hacking incident or the theft of a laptop containing hundreds of thousands of SSNs. Clients expected him to be there for them when that crisis occurred and he understood that, at a rate of $800 per hour, that expectation was not unreasonable.
The one client he was still very much in touch with was BlueCloud. BlueCloud’s general counsel, Scott Austin, had, without blinking, authorized his trip to Barcelona and the hiring of Zoey as his assistant. The stakes were so high for the company that they were going to give him just about anything he asked for.
When Chris had disclosed to Austin his belief that Sarah had been kidnapped by Enigma and Ripley, it had clearly troubled him. Austin had immediately arranged a conference call between Chris, Austin, and Silver. While Silver was obviously worried that Chris’s personal mission would take precedence, even he was sensitive enough not to state it that bluntly. Since they hadn’t pulled the plug on the assignment, he had to assume that Silver and Austin had calculated his kidnapping theory was only going to make him more driven to find the hackers.
Chris knew he might never see Sarah again, and so his mind kept running through the five months they were together, the things they’d done, the things she’d said. Perhaps it was his way of making sure that he remembered everything clearly later, if that was all that he was going to have. It became increasingly obvious that there had been an inflection point in their relationship—the two days after he received his cancer diagnosis when Sarah had disappeared. After her return, there seemed to be an unspoken understanding that there was no going back on their relationship. By pursuing this uncertain trail, Chris felt that he was just living up to the implicit promise that they had made to each other when Sarah returned on that second day. There was no going back for him, either.
The cabin lights dimmed, and he studied the snow-covered Rockies forty thousand feet below. He tried very hard not to think about the computer virus that had sent the two jets crashing to earth outside Albuquerque. On the aisle, with an empty seat between them, Zoey was wearing big headphones and bobbing her head slightly to something thrashy. Chris requested water from the flight attendant and removed a bottle of Zofran from his satchel.
Zoey watched him as he tossed back a couple of pills and lifted one side of her headphones. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are those? If they’re for sleep, could you spare one?”
“It’s called Zofran. For nausea.”
“You get airsick?”
“That’s right.” Chris decided that there was no need to tell her about his cancer, particularly since he was in recovery.
They sat in silence for a while, letting the white noise of the jet engine envelop them. Row after row of passengers watched the in-flight movie, some romantic comedy, each cute reaction shot mirrored in a hundred tiny screens.
A couple of hours later, Chris tossed in a restless sleep, drea
ming that Tana was sitting in the center seat between him and Zoey.
Tana was reading a paperback, something by Laura Lippman. She liked to spontaneously buy a book in the airport newsstand right before boarding. She said that if she thought about it too long she’d end up buying something that she was supposed to read instead of what she really enjoyed. On some level, Chris knew that it was a dream, so he didn’t attempt to speak to her. He didn’t want to break the spell. He sat quietly with her, his dream self half dozing while she read, just as he had so often when she was alive. He heard the soft inhale and exhale of her breath, the occasional rustle of a turning page, saw her delicate, pale fingers holding the paperback in the narrow, bright cone of the overhead reading light.
They could have been on a flight to visit her mother in Birmingham. Or on one of the year-end vacations that they took after the law firm had completed its collections and closed its books. On those trips, they would often go someplace outside the country, like London or Cairo.
The thing he missed most about marriage was the quality of the silence. No moment he had spent since Tana’s death was as perfectly calm and peaceful as the moments he spent half dozing while she read her paperback crime novels. To an outsider it sounded boring, but it wasn’t. He clung to it as long as he could, but the dream receded like a tide until he could no longer pretend that the seat next to him wasn’t empty. He motioned to the flight attendant for a drink.
Tana had made him normal in a way that he hadn’t really been before or since. Chris had been a geeky computer prodigy as a teenager. Aside from when he was coding or in the computer lab with his friends (dubbed “the Geek Chorus” by one classics major), Chris rarely felt that he was in his element. He’d certainly never been very good with women until Tana.
They had met as undergraduates at Stanford. Chris was a computer science major with his eye on becoming a patent attorney. Tana was a Stegner Fellow in the creative writing program, and a bit of an outsider herself. She was working on a cyberpunk novel in the vein of William Gibson, which wasn’t in step with the writing program’s august literary fiction traditions. As part of her research on hackers, Tana wanted to interview Chris and some of his friends, who were renowned for pranks, such as doctoring transcripts to give all of the members of the Stanford football team straight As, a stunt that immediately triggered an NCAA investigation.
Chris was instantly attracted to Tana, with her long, reddish-brown hair (which she lost during the chemo) and freckles (which she always hated). Like the Geek Chorus, Tana was a little intense and not all that well socialized herself. She would fire questions at him and then be brought up short with a laugh when he said something that surprised her. He started trying to find ways to elicit that laugh. It became difficult to concentrate on her questions after a while because he couldn’t stop thinking about her freckles. He wanted to find out if they covered the rest of her body.
Ordinarily, Chris would have never found a way to talk to a girl as pretty as Tana, but she made things easy. She was always doing the talking, peppering him with questions. It took a while for them to connect, but she was persistent. Pretty soon, Chris was the only member of the Geek Chorus that she was still interviewing—at local bars, restaurants, and, eventually, in bed in Chris’s cluttered student apartment.
After Tana’s death, Chris had to admit that he had regressed a bit as a person. He wasn’t the geeky misfit that he had been as a teenager, but he also wasn’t really comfortable in his own skin anymore, either. Where he once threw himself into his coding in Stanford’s computer lab, he now threw himself into his work at the firm. He wasn’t nearly as shy as he had been back then, but the cool, professional façade that he had developed as an attorney was every bit as difficult to crack. It was his personal firewall, and it was nearly impenetrable.
While changing planes in New York, Chris and Zoey had an hour to kill in the food court of the terminal at JFK. It was a cavernous space lined with duty-free stores and shops selling cellophane-wrapped sandwiches.
Chris didn’t know Zoey well, but there were things about her that didn’t add up for him. This was as good a time as any to ask a few questions.
“You’re obviously smart and talented and have certain skills.”
“Yes, I agree. But?”
“I just wonder why you’re still tending bar.”
“You mean why am I still tending bar at my age?”
An airline agent blared over the intercom, announcing a boarding flight, forcing a break in the conversation. Chris raised his hands in self-defense, ready to drop the subject.
“No, I’ll tell you,” Zoey said. “I’ve tried a few things, but nothing seemed to be a good fit.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I worked for an IT consulting firm for a while doing white hat hacking, but I wasn’t very good with the clients—especially when they were idiots. I tried writing graphic novels—but I can’t draw. I’ve done word processing. I’ve temped. I’ve taught kids computing.”
“So you just haven’t found something that you really liked?”
“Well, I liked teaching kids, but that didn’t pay. And the things that pay tend to be in a more corporate environment and—I guess this is my real problem—I don’t do corporate.”
“I’m probably the last person who should be saying this, but what about black hat hacking?”
She leaned back and gave him a look of exaggerated shock. “You are full of surprises. Actually, that would be my perfect job. Unstructured working environment. The money’s good. I could use my real talents. The only problem there is that I’m not a thief. Believe me, it would be a lot easier for me if I were, but it’s just not me.”
“So you haven’t really told me much about your exploits as a hacker …”
Zoey slurped a giant mocha frappuccino. “Are you really the person I should be talking to about that? Don’t you have people like me arrested?”
“Now that I’ve left the DOJ, I just work for my clients. I don’t prosecute anyone.”
“So how about if I tell you one of my stories and you tell me one of yours?”
“Why not? One professional to another—off the clock.”
“You start,” Zoey said.
“I’m not much of a storyteller. And most of my best stories are attorney-client privileged. What are you fishing for here?”
“Tell me about when you were a hacker.”
A cold look crossed Chris’s face.
Zoey grinned. “I knew it! When your name used to come up on the message boards, they always said that you were supposed to have been some kind of brilliant coder as a kid. And what kid who knows how to write code hasn’t tried a hack or two?”
“I’m not talking about it.”
As Zoey looked at him and assessed his mood, her smile faded. “This really bothers you, doesn’t it? I think there’s a good story there, but you’re not going to tell me today, are you?”
Chris gave her his best impassive, dead-eyed stare.
“Okay,” Zoey said. “Let’s recap what we’ve learned today. Chris Bruen was a kid hacker. Something happened and he stares death rays at anyone who brings up the subject.” She leaned back in her chair. “I think that’s enough progress for now. So do you want me to tell you one of my best hacking stories?”
“Sure,” Chris said, welcoming the change of subject.
Zoey hesitated. “How about the story about how I got involved with Enigma and Ripley?”
Chris turned to face her. “You’re joking, right?”
From the look of growing discomfort on Zoey’s face, he could see that it wasn’t a joke.
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
“Do you want to hear the story or not?”
Chris nodded.
“Well, I have a background in website design and, not to be immodest, but I have a special talent. I can replicate any company’s website. If you want something that looks exactly like the website of Bank of America, Citibank,
Amazon, whatever, I can do that.”
“So you were involved in phishing scams?” Chris asked.
“Yeah, but mostly I was using it to play pranks. For example, I’d send out an email posing as Centinela Bank apologizing for its excessive credit card interest rates and charges. If the person receiving the email clicked on a link, they would go to a perfect replica of the Centinela Bank website. It was perfect except for one thing—I gave the bank a new slogan: ‘Lending Money to Those Who Need It Least Since 1904.’ ”
“That’s a little juvenile, isn’t it?”
“Hey, no one has ever accused me of being an adult. As you so delicately pointed out, I’m thirty-five and still tending bar at a club. But at least I didn’t steal anyone’s money. And I think I had a valid point to make. Enigma and Ripley saw my work on the Centinela Bank prank and asked me to run a phishing scam for them. Well, actually, they didn’t really ask.”
“But they were more interested in doing a true phishing scam designed to commit fraud.”
“Correct. Instead of just making my little satirical, hacktivist point, they wanted recipients of the email to think that they needed to confirm their account information by clicking through to the bank’s website.”
“But what they were really doing was providing their account numbers and passwords directly to Enigma and Ripley,” Chris said.
“Most people know better than to trust an email asking for personal information, but if you send out hundreds of thousands of emails, and you’ve done a convincing job on the web design, you’re still going to find quite a few poor suckers who will just hand over their account info.”
“Did you meet them in person?”
“No, it was always by email. Anonymous accounts, of course.”
“And what did you say to their proposal?”
“I told them that I wasn’t really interested in major crime. They didn’t like that answer and insisted that I design a fake Bank of the US webpage. I did it because I was scared of them. They threatened me, showed me that they knew where I lived, the places I went.”