The Director: A Novel

  The other man nodded. “I am Hagbard Celine himself.”

  This peculiar exchange of phrases was a recognition code. It would have sounded like gibberish to someone at a nearby table, but the references were unmistakable for anyone who was part of the Illuminatus cult.

  Junot and his boss, James Morris, had done their homework: The three novels involved, among their many plots and subplots, the adventures of the Discordians and their hero, Hagbard—who piloted a gold submarine and was an avatar of the true Illuminati who believed in perfect freedom. It was a cult book thanks to a German hacker named Karl Koch, who got caught in the 1980s selling secrets from U.S. military computers and died in a supposed suicide.

  Junot ordered a beer for the German and another tequila for himself, with a beer chaser.

  “So how’s it hanging, Hagbard?”

  “It’s hanging just fine, mister, what is your name?”

  “I don’t have a name,” said Junot. “Sometimes people call me ‘Axel.’ On-screen I’m ‘Dirtbug,’ or ‘Snakehead,’ or ‘Gurulgmaster.’ Take your pick.”

  “I’ll call you ‘John Dillinger,’ maybe.” That was the name of another fictional character in the bizarre Illuminatus saga.

  “Yeah, that fits. Except my dick is bigger.” Junot’s voice had the rough edge of someone who was well on the way to being hammered.

  “Ho-ho,” said the German. He rolled his eyes.

  It was nearing midnight and the music was getting louder. The DJ had turned up the bass so that the whole room seemed to vibrate with the music.

  “You want to dance?” asked the German.

  “No. Gets in the way of my drinking. You go ahead. I’ll watch.”

  The German melded into the crowd of men and women on the floor, losing himself in the layers of sound. Two men tried to dance with him, as did one woman, but he ignored them all. He came back to the table twenty minutes later, trailed by a woman who wanted to buy him a drink. His face was flushed; his long hair was glistening with beads of sweat.

  “Let’s go outside,” said the German. “Too hot and noisy here. I’ll come back and dance more later.”

  “Whatever you say, Hagbard.” This was proving easier than Junot had expected.

  When they were out in Morgenthaler Street, the night air was beginning to bite. There was a café just down the street, quiet and nearly empty.

  “You look cold,” said Junot. He pointed to the café door just ahead. “In here.”

  The American led the way to a quiet table in the back. He brought back two cups of black coffee from the bar.

  “So, Mr. Hagbard Celine, they say you can get me inside. That’s why I’m here. Not to fuck you, although I can do that, too.”

  “Ugh,” said the German. “Please. And what are you talking about, ‘inside’? I don’t know anything about you, except that we read the same books.”

  “Don’t mess with me, Hagbard. I promise you that’s a mistake. The people who arranged this meeting say you are connected with ‘the friends.’ That’s why I’m here. I always want to make friends. Either that, or I make enemies.”

  “The friends of what? And listen: I am not afraid of you, Mr. John Dillinger, whoever you are, whose balls are the size of a hazelnut, I am sure.”

  The German stuck his chin up.

  Junot rubbed the rough stubble of his beard, as if contemplating whether to do something—throw a punch, or perhaps take out a pistol. He was coiled tight, capable of sudden, impulsive action. He squinted at the German, and folded his hands down on the table.

  “I must be hard of hearing, because I missed what you just said. So I’m going to ask you again, in a nice, how’s-your-mom, American way, whether you know any of the Friends of Cerberus. Because the people who arranged this meeting told me that you did. And they would be unhappy if it turned out that they were wrong and looked stupid, making me look stupid, too.”

  The young man swallowed hard. He stared at the table and sipped at his coffee. His false courage was gone.

  “Yeah, I know someone. We call him Malchik. I don’t know what his real name is.”

  “Is he the real deal?”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand real deal. He does not deal drugs.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant is he connected to Cerberus. The real Cerberus, or what’s left of it, after all the CIA losers and BND assholes have been chucked out. Because we are looking for serious people only.”

  “I can connect you to Malchik. He is serious. Too serious for me. I will give you an address.”

  “No way. I want a face-to-face introduction. You come with me. That way, it’s your bad if something happens.”

  The German was scared. He was in a public place, and he could see that the American was half drunk, so for a moment he considered bolting for the door. But what would he do then, and where would he run if the American and his friends came after him?

  “What do I get, if I help you?

  “Just what you were promised: The cocaine charge will disappear. You’ll get your job back at Siemens. Everybody will be happy. I have powerful friends, believe me.”

  The young man stared at him. His hands were trembling. He had fallen into something he didn’t understand, and it was about to eat him up.

  “Who are you, Mr. Axel?” he asked. “How did you find me? Are you in the Mafia?”

  “Don’t ask, Hagbard. Let’s just say the ghosts sent me.”

  From the ashen look on the German’s face, it seemed almost that he believed he was in the power of real ghosts, come to life.

  “I want to meet Malchik tomorrow,” said Junot. “Bring him to C-Base at eighteen hundred. Tell him he’ll be meeting a friend of a friend. Can you do that for me? Bring him to C-Base?”

  “How do you know about C-Base?”

  Junot wagged his finger.

  “You forget, Hagbard, I am connected. That’s why it’s dangerous to make me angry. I’ll see you at eighteen hundred with Malchik. You don’t get a second chance. Now get the hell out of here, unless you’ve decided you want to blow me in the bathroom.”

  The German stood, pale as a bedsheet, and backed toward the door. When he reached the street, he broke into a run, and didn’t stop until he reached the Alexanderplatz, a half mile away.

  C-Base was ground zero for the Berlin hacker culture. It was located on Rungestrasse in the Mitte district, in an old warehouse that backed onto the Spree River. Just across the river was the old East German television tower, known as the Fernsehturm, topped with a round silver sphere that made it look like the entire structure had landed from outer space. When the Wall came down and Berlin’s fledgling hackers wanted a place to gather, they had seized the warehouse and pretended that they were restoring a spaceship that had landed on that spot 3.5 million years ago. It was the sort of innocent Trekkie fantasy that hackers cherished back in the nineties, before they found the dark side. C-Base had survived ever since as a kind of hackers’ club.

  Junot set himself up that afternoon in a bar on Rungestrasse and waited for his prey to arrive. It was a dead-end street, so he could monitor traffic easily through the window. He ordered a beer, but nursed it.

  Germans wandered up and down the street, but Junot saw nothing of interest until just before six p.m., when a tall man on a motorcycle rumbled slowly down the street; in the jump seat behind was the slender man Junot had called Hagbard. The man parked the big Kawasaki and removed his helmet. His hair was tied in a ponytail and he was wearing biker leathers, top and bottom. His eyes were covered by Ray-Bans. He walked into a courtyard marked NO. 20, and entered a door at the back, with Hagbard trailing behind.

  Junot waited ten minutes for them to get fidgety, and then walked to the entrance. He looked as fearsome as ever, with his bald head and sawed-off shotgun of a body. He knocked on the entry. The door cracked open; inside was a sign that read NO ALIENS.

  “I’m expected,” said Junot.

  The doorkeeper grunted assent. He led Jun
ot through a makeshift replica of an air lock, with colored lights blinking, and metal knobs and buttons. At the other end of this passageway stood the tall man in leather, flanked by Hagbard.

  “Cute,” said Junot, gesturing to the light show of the make-believe spaceship entryway.

  “Fuck off,” said the tall man. He was embarrassed by the kiddie show.

  “You must be Mr. Malchik,” said Junot. The big man nodded.

  Junot proffered his hand, but it wasn’t taken.

  “I’m Axel,” said the American. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “There’s a bar, but some people in there I don’t know. We go downstairs.”

  The big man turned to Hagbard.

  “Go check. If there’s anybody in the library, kick them out.”

  Hagbard disappeared.

  “Follow me,” said Malchik. He led Junot past an old Atari game and a stack of discarded twenty-year-old computer hardware. Ahead was a screen topped by a sign that read BIOMETRIC RECOGNITION MACHINE. Junot shook his head.

  “What is this shit?

  “It doesn’t work,” said Malchik. “Come on.”

  The big man descended a winding metal staircase to the basement. In the first room, mannequins were seated in the stripped-down metal frames of old airplane seats. Nearby, another mannequin, dressed in a fur hat, was installed at an old sewing machine.

  They ducked into a smaller room, deep in the basement. Against one wall was a bookshelf, crammed with two kinds of literature: science fiction novels and fat, oversized computer science manuals. Above the shelf, as decoration, was a row of white porcelain urinals that had been nailed to the wall. In the corner of the room were two dilapidated chairs, each losing its stuffing.

  “Come, sit,” said Malchik, pointing to one of the chairs. He turned to Hagbard, who was hovering anxiously outside the room.

  “Get lost,” Malchik said to the German youth. He closed the door, took a seat in the other chair and turned to Junot.

  “So talk,” said the big man. “What do you want?”

  “First, I bring you greetings from a mutual friend. I think you know him as Hubert. He arranged for me to come.”

  “Yeah, I know Hubert. We do some work together. So what? Why you call this meeting?”

  “We need some help. You’re the only person we know who can deliver.”

  “Help with what?”

  “Zero-day exploits. We’re buying.”

  Malchik laughed. Zero-day exploits, so named because they targeted software flaws that were unknown to the vendor until the first day they were used, were hackers’ gold.

  “Everyone is buying. You know what someone paid in Thailand last week? Five hundred thousand dollars. For one zero-day exploit.”

  “We can pay more, on a steady basis. You have the network that can produce. We have the clients. And we’re in a hurry.”

  “What network?” snorted Malchik. “You mean Cerberus? The smart boys of Cerberus Computing Club? Well, I’ll tell you something. They are too clean to work for you, whoever you are. They are pure white, those boys. They think Snowden still works for the NSA. They want to mess with government, business, Mafias, anyone who has money. They hack for freedom. Free porn, free sex, free money. I don’t know. But they will just laugh if you talk to them. Whoever you are, if you have money, you are the enemy.”

  “But I’m not going to talk to them, Malchik. You are. They know you. Maybe they’re scared of you, maybe they don’t like you, maybe they think you want money to pay for pretty women and big motorcycles. But you’re one of them. You can get what I need.”

  The big man shook his head, but he was thinking, calculating in his mind.

  “How much?” he said.

  “We give you ten million for a steady flow of zero-day exploits. What we want especially are UNIX exploits, or any exploits that will get us into financial databases. Oracle, Unisys, McAfee, RSA, anything you’ve got. We want random number generators that aren’t random. We want to be able to manipulate big databases. You listening?”

  “Yeah. I am listening.”

  “Well, start taking notes, brother.”

  “I got a good memory.”

  “Okay, we want networking software that we can beacon. We want anything that’s already beaconing inside banks or financial exchanges. We want anything that will get us into SWIFT, even an old zero-day in SWIFT that we can recode. We are especially interested in large international transfers involving central banks. You still tracking this?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Malchik. “You got a heavy shopping list, my friend. What you going to do? Break into the Federal Reserve?”

  “Something like that. Now here’s what we don’t want: No botnets. We don’t give a shit about denial-of-service attacks. No carder bullshit for identity theft. We’ll leave that to all your weenie friends in Moscow and Kiev. No code-breaking, password-cracking, none of that. We’re fine in that department. We want to get inside large financial institutions. And we need people who can hack in German.”

  “You pretty big guy,” said Malchik.

  “Yes, I am. And I want this shit as soon as possible. Day before yesterday.”

  “Fifty million,” said Malchik. “I am not like most hackers. I have expensive tastes.” He was smiling, revealing a grille of gold inserts.

  “Fuck you. We need to steal the money first. Twenty million.”

  “Thirty. Not less. I want a G-5, just like in the videos.”

  “Twenty-five. Money sent to Liechtenstein, Cayman Islands, Nauru, wherever the fuck you want. Not more. Do the deal now, or I walk away.”

  Junot stuck out his hand.

  “Twenty-five million for six months,” answered Malchik. “If you like my shit, you’ll pay me more. If you don’t, okay, bye-bye.”

  Malchik thrust his hand forward. Both arms from the wrist up seemed to be wrapped in tattoos.

  “Deal,” said Junot. “We pay in installments. One-third, one-third, one-third, starting tomorrow.”

  Junot wrote down a Web address with an “onion” in the suffix, which marked it as an account that could only be accessed through an anonymizer known as the “Onion Router.” He handed the TOR address to Malchik. The talk back in Denver was that NSA had cracked TOR, but NSA was so swamped with data already, the analysts would never find his tracks.

  “Send me the coordinates of where you want the money. And we need to set up how you’re going to send your exploits and malware. The Internet Relay Chat boards are all being watched, by everybody. Your techs need to talk to my techs.”

  “No problem. I send you secure address.”

  “Roxxor,” said Junot, using a hacker expression of pleasure.

  “Whatever,” said Malchik.

  Junot looked away for a moment, to ponder something. His eyes turned to the titles on the bookshelf. They were a compendium of the innocent anarchy of the early Web: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Hobbit books, Robert Heinlein translated into a half dozen languages, a whole row of Philip K. Dick’s works in different editions. It was obvious that Malchik had a foot in both worlds, white and black.

  “Now that we’re business partners, I have one more problem, Mr. Malchik,” he said. “I’m wondering if you’ve heard what happened to a Swiss boy. He worked with some people in the underground. His name was Rudolf Biel.”

  “I heard about him. He’s dead. End of story.”

  “Yes, but do you know why he was killed?”

  Junot was probing, wanting to sample the street whispers, trying to discern who knew what, and how much they would say.

  “Maybe I hear some rumors, sure.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he knew too much about something.”

  “What something? Come on, Malchik, you don’t seem like the shy type.”

  “You pay for what I know?”

  “But I already agreed to pay. You mean pay more?”

  “Of course. This is a new thing, so it cost you new money.�
��

  Junot wanted information. He nodded.

  “What have you got?”

  “So here is a hint. We do a lot of business, you understand? We can hack anything we want. It’s true. You know this much or you wouldn’t come looking for Malchik. Sometimes we even hack governments: the big spies. The ones with three initials. They play us, we play them. Nobody believe it, but this is so. Hubert knows. We have some help, maybe. Who knows why? But yeah, we are inside everything.”

  “And the Swiss who got killed, Biel, did he know about these code breaks?”

  “Who says code breaks? You. Not me. Biel just knew that people were inside these systems. He even had some proofs that he took with him. Some lists, I don’t know. People in the underground say so many secrets coming out of America now, unbelievable. Somebody inside is talking. That’s what people say. So this Biel got stupid. He went to the Americans. Someone got nervous. Now he’s dead. Like I said, end of story.”

  “You know who killed him? What do you hear on the street when you’re out on your big Kawasaki?”

  “Come on! You crazy? I don’t hear anything. If I do know, then somebody kill me. Fuck off, man. Really.”

  Junot stepped back. His reconnaissance was done. Malchik either didn’t know or wouldn’t talk, so it was Junot’s turn to plant some information.

  “Okay, so I’ll tell you what I heard. Big secret, but I want you to know. How about that? It was the Russian hoods. They killed Biel because he was a rat. He was telling the Americans that there were leaks. He was sharing Mafia secrets. So they drilled him.”

  “That’s pretty interesting, Mr. Axel, but you know what? I don’t give a shit. We are good hackers. We break into anything. That’s what we do. Haxxor forever! But we are not killers. NSA and CIA do that, but not us. If Russian hackers start killing people like Biel, they are just another Mafia.”

  “My point, precisely,” said Junot.

  “My friend, you are barking up the wrong pole. We hack to destroy governments. This is so. We work with the Mafias sometimes, yes, it is true. I myself am sometimes one of the hard men, and some of the weak boys in Cerberus, maybe they think I am Mafia, but they are wrong. So you tell Hubert that, yes, it’s true we were not happy when Mr. Rudolf Biel decided he want a vacation in America, okay, but we did not pull nobody’s trigger. I don’t know who did this hit. Nobody does.”