The Gomorrah Gambit

by Tom Chatfield

  As he wakes, Azi takes stock of the communal dorm into which he collapsed last night. The high shuttered windows admit slivers of light onto a dozen mattresses and blanketed bodies. A few sticks of furniture and personal possessions demarcate what was once a living room into personal zones that are largely respected. One Afghan and two Syrian refugees, each around twenty years old, sprawl next to eight Greeks who range from eighteen to a well-weathered sixty. Azi was the first to sleep, last night, and is the first to rise today—but the family rooms above them are already radiating shrill cries.

  Having tiptoed with his rucksack towards the shared bathroom, Azi tries not to look too hard at the decayed tiling while completing the physical transformation program he began in the Berlin chicken shop. First, he dons the vaguely anarchistic clothes he bought at a stall yesterday evening: black, capacious and spattered with Greek slogans. Second, there’s a similarly mirthless pair of boots. Third, with a wince, he pierces each ear with a needle and inserts a hooped silver earring. Fourth and finally, he cuts off all his hair.

  In the movies, shaving your head invariably entails a photogenic montage, with clumps of suspiciously clean hair dropping to the floor in time with motivational drumbeats. In real life—at least, in the all-too-real life that Azi is currently living—it turns out the process is more like hacking apart a patch of brambles with a butter knife. He swears and cuts his fingers and gouges his scalp as, with exhausting tardiness, clumps of knotted hair come away under his razor’s scything.

  On the plus side, all this self-mutilation should only serve to increase his anonymity. Less cheeringly, the reflection watching Azi through the cracked mirror resembles a hip-hop backing dancer fallen on hard times, perhaps having absconded from an especially gritty video shoot. It’s not a strong look. But it may keep him safe.

  By the time Azi has finished, he’s half-crazed with discomfort and hunger, the latter thanks to the smell of grilled vegetables, sweet chai and strong coffee rising to fill the stairwell. It’s almost homey. The old apartment building is crumbling but sound. Graffiti spatters its exterior, alongside two large cloth banners spelling out home and welcome in English; inside there are posters, a few pictures, and schedules for cleaning, cooking and security volunteering.

  Notwithstanding his exhaustion and his appearance, Azi likes it. As part of yesterday’s probationary proof of usefulness, he improved residents’ internet access by several orders of magnitude and network security by another few on top of that—and he has tentatively volunteered to give a talk in the “events” room this morning under the title “Er Hello Nice to Meet You All Maybe I Can Give You a Few Tech Tips.”

  As long as he remembers to drop phrases like “cultural hegemony” and “intersectionality” every few minutes, he’s sure everything will be fine.

  To Azi’s surprise, his talk is well-attended. By the time it ends, several simultaneous translations are being provided—and one of the translators, a young Syrian who speaks chasteningly comprehensible English, is quick to explain why.

  For those fleeing violence or trying to survive with few resources, Azi learns, maintaining internet access is more important than almost any other consideration. This is where their community of knowledge resides: updates on safe routes, available transport, bribable officials, hazards and betrayals, sustenance and shelter. Simply helping people to maximize the battery life of their phones while reducing their chances of being tracked can be lifesaving. Almost everything Azi says is instantly distributed along the digital grapevine. Tomorrow, perhaps, he’ll start to put together a wiki.

  As Azi also learns, Exarchia is going through a quiet patch, at least by its own historical standards. So far as his new friends are concerned—some of whom, he has to admit, do wear leather jackets and talk shit about Marx—the local life he has staggered into is tranquil almost to the point of boredom. Having been a hotbed of radicalism for over half a century, today’s best riots have a hard job living up to yesteryear’s. Local anarchists can sometimes be seen running either towards or away from bunched police in riot gear, depending on the strength of feelings on each side. But most of the time the authorities stay away, although there are rumors that they are herding drug dealers into the area to drive down property prices. Judging by the number of trendy tourists seeking out haunts extolled by Vice, they’re failing.

  Azi passes the next few hours in semitranquility, inspecting sundry mobile phones, tablets and jury-rigged electrical supplies—including a solar-powered charging station set up by one enterprising Greek. Finally, feeling altogether saner and better fed, he takes his leave and makes his way towards a patch of wall on the corner of Tzavella and Mesologgiu Streets that he’s been told, in no uncertain terms, to visit. On it is an incongruously spotless black-and-white plaque, one by two feet, featuring an image of a fifteen-year-old boy. There but for the grace of God, Azi thinks, Munira’s face shivering in his mind.

  As Azi learned over breakfast, the boy on the plaque was a student called Alexandros Grigoropoulos, shot during an altercation with two policemen in December 2008. He was unarmed. The killing triggered protests and riots across the country, but its greatest impact was here. Six years later, the rage and sadness are still raw. Sprawled around the plaque are stenciled letters and washes of color, slogans on filthy pebbledash, wreaths of yellow flowers wedged into nooks, peeling posters stretched around the street corner. More flowers rot in baskets on the tiled heat of the pavement.

  Between heavy breaths, Azi gathers his strength—because he can’t put off the next stage of his plan any longer. He needs to get online, securely. He needs to start doing some good. And this means something he has been dreading since the moment he crawled out of the crate: Stournari Street, Big Sur and begged favors.

  Twenty-three

  Stournari Street slices west from Exarchia Square for a tree-lined half mile of shuttered shop windows, its walls webbed with slogans to the height of a scrawling hand. Despite appearances, this has been the premier place in Greece to buy tech of all types for at least two decades, and is jokingly called the Greek Silicon Valley by almost everyone Azi has met—although he’s not sure whether the joke is on Silicon Valley, Greece, or just reflects the fact that most people can only name one place associated with computers. It’s a few hundred yards from the Grigoropoulos shrine, and Azi jogs towards it through the alternating shade and dazzle of gridded streets, practicing the words that he hopes will open both literal and metaphorical doors.

  Stournari Street was already sufficiently renowned in hacker lore to feature in the magazines of Azi’s youth, back when sharing code meant copying it line by line from printed paper, and it’s partly this history that drew him to Athens. In that pre-web era, while Exarchia’s bars heaved with Marxists saying the kind of things that Marxists have been saying in bars since at least 1917, tech-savvy students were on Stournari Street, scheduling appointments to sell cracked commercial software. Local hackers would hand out business cards and then meet for coffee above computer shops, advertising their skills as a way of launching mainstream careers. In those days, everyone’s hat was a shade of gray. The dark side of computational creativity hadn’t gone global.

  Azi sincerely hopes that some of that idealism still lingers in one of the street’s more infamously independent electronics boutiques: an outfit called Kremvax, whose proprietor is known as Mr. Fuck the Government after his role in a notably profane online campaign, or Mr. Government for short. Azi has never met Mr. Government, but he has corresponded and collaborated with his hacker alter ego for six years under the pseudonym Big Sur—as in the famously rugged stretch of Californian coast, as in a nickname with no connection whatsoever to a middle-aged Athenian with a tangled graying beard and penchant for 1980s band T-shirts.

  The fact that Azi long ago traced Big Sur to this particular shop will, together with his knowledge of their shared exploits, hopefully serve to verify his identity. Although it will be entirely understandable if Azi is instead assaulted f
or the crime of appearing on a fellow practitioner’s doorstep. You can never tell with old-school geeks—especially when their reputation includes spectacularly vindictive acts of sabotage.

  From the outside, the shop looks not so much closed as reinforced against military intervention. Two layers of metal shutters crisscross the window, the door is similarly barred, and no lights are visible inside. Undeterred, Azi presses an intercom button three times and waits, then waits some more. Eventually a voice rattles through.

  “Ya su?”

  “Ya su. Er, English? I’m an old friend, I believe? We met on the Conficker botnet. All hands on deck.”

  “Fiye!”

  Azi hesitates. “Can I come in, please? AZ, that’s me. You’re Big Sur.”

  “Fiye!”

  Azi is already getting desperate. For a start, he has no idea whether he’s even speaking to the right person. Then there’s the fact that, even if he is, they may decide to ignore him—or drop a pre-owned PC on his head. But this doesn’t mean he can’t take a chance.

  “My mum, your mum, nobody else knows that. You should never have told me. But you did.”

  Like Azi, Mr. Government lost his mother at a youngish age. Azi has no idea how, why or when it happened—even in their most eloquent moments of bonding over IRC they were never that indiscreet—but he knows that this conjunction of knowledge is almost unfakeable. The tone of the intercom voice rises several dozen decibels.

  “Malakas! Gamisou!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Seriously, you need a translation, no one here has told you to fuck off? Edakrysen o Iesous! Jesus wept. Come in, come in. If you’re lying, I’m screwed anyway.”

  The shutters lift with a wheeze that sounds almost human, then the door opens to display one of the most magnificent stomachs Azi has ever seen—a rotund expanse straining the words “Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band Against the Wind” almost into illegibility on a faded black T-shirt. Mr. Government stares at Azi, then beckons him through the door and closes it behind them.

  He really is, Azi thinks to himself, an extremely big man—perhaps six and a half feet tall, and close to the same around the middle. Tattoos girdle each of his forearms. Mr. Government looks like a child’s drawing of a pirate, if that child had been told to draw a pirate who ate everyone else on his ship. His voice is a roll of slow thunder.

  “So, you’re AZ. Wow, you look…I don’t even know what you look like, friend. Not something good.”

  “Yup. And I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Nobody knows I’m here. I need a favor.”

  The front of Mr. Government’s shop is expertly cluttered, like a 1930s hardware store. A staggering quantity of components are arrayed from floor to ceiling on each wall, rendering the whole incomprehensible to anyone but its owner. Without changing his expression, Mr. Government beckons Azi into a back room that makes the front look positively minimalist: boxes upon crates upon packets upon cables, archaeologically layered through the last few decades of computing history.

  Azi could spend all day rummaging in a place like this. In fact, that’s more or less his plan, although the bearded giant filling the doorway may have other ideas. Mr. Government fondles his beard thoughtfully with one massive hand—the tattoos, Azi realizes, are circuit boards—then reaches towards Azi and crushes him into a heartfelt embrace.

  “My little friend. God himself knows how fucked you must be, to come like this. Don’t tell me. Seriously, tell me nothing, keep it between yourself and the man upstairs. You start dropping hints, I’ll be forced to eat you. Ha!” A laugh ripples seismically through Mr. Government’s torso. “No need to look like that, I’m living the vegan dream. It’s an ancient Greek thing: the triangle man, Pythagoras. What do you need?”

  Azi shudders, swallows and coughs before finding his voice. His brain doesn’t seem to be able to stop noticing the sheer scale on which Mr. Government is built. “Gear, some good stuff. A place to keep it that’s more than discreet. A few days. I have cash, I can pay my way.”

  The mighty head nods. “Heavy wizardry, deep magic—whoever they are, I feel sorry for them already. A thousand euros for the gear, and my lifelong silence is complementary. Unless they turn this into a movie, in which case I must insist I am played by Dwayne Johnson. The Rock! Now there’s a big man with heart. Please take what you need, and I’ll show you a place. I love what you do, AZ. Sorry I can’t be there with you but—”

  “Too close to home, I know. I owe you. I won’t forget.”

  “Make somebody wish they’d never been born. For old times’ sake.”

  Half an hour later, Azi leaves bearing a code for a recessed metal-and-glass door leading off the street into some apartments near the back of the shop. The door opens into a tiled stairwell, from whose first-floor landing a second code grants access to what was once a cupboard but will soon become Azi’s windowless temple to heaped electronics.

  Over the next few hours, Azi’s gleeful rummaging yields a rig that, when combined with a few lovingly dismantled and reassembled devices from Berlin, should equip him to do most things short of starting a nuclear war. If he’s patient. Speed is the one thing he can’t afford—because everything rests upon invisibility, which in this case means tethering his new Linux laptop to an untraceable selection of burner phones whose identifying MAC codes he’ll change several times a day. So far as anyone monitoring local networks is concerned, he’s changing to a new device every six hours.

  In addition to the laptop, Azi perches two monitors on a narrow perimeter of metal shelving, while hardware and software firewalls girdle his virtual machines like Russian dolls. Unless the laptop is opened and unlocked by him, everything stays encrypted. The room’s outside wall has a large metal vent, and he has taken two desk fans to shift the air, but it must still be close to thirty Celsius inside by the time Azi’s work is done and the machinery has begun to crank up its own cooling.

  The space is approximately half the size of his beloved shed, and his metal chair has to remain folded for him to open or close the door. Yet between this and the squat, Azi has never been more grateful for the freedom of uncomfortable spaces.

  To Azi’s surprise, the first thing he does after testing his privacy and security measures is to send Ad a message. It only takes a moment, but it’s still something he thought he would never do.

  Back when they were still hatching plans for world domination—via East Croydon, circa 1997—they agreed that anonymously posting a very particular message on the Alt.Folklore.Urban news group would indicate that one of them was in life-threatening danger. They called it the bat signal, both because a Batman reference was the height of 1990s cool and because the idea was for something easily, anonymously viewable from anywhere—a silhouette in the digital sky. By mutual agreement, the message was to read:

  Hey, does anyone remember that episode of Batman set in a shed in Croydon?

  Astonishingly, the news group still exists—and Azi has never managed to forget that line. So he posts the message, winces at his own hopeless nostalgia and turns his mind to more important matters.

  Anna told him to stay in touch via their mutual friend, which can only mean Jim. He doesn’t want to start populating Jim’s feeds with fresh activity but, as soon as he has logged in, notices with relief that either Odi or Anna has done something extremely sensible—namely, getting Jim to send a private message to himself containing an alphanumeric key for encrypted communications plus a ProtonMail address.

  In other words, they can start exchanging secure emails as soon as they’ve swapped keys. Azi sets himself up a brand new ProtonMail account, then sends a message containing just two words in addition to his key.

  Hi, Jim.

  A reply bounces back in the style of Jim within the hour.

  Who the fuck is this do I know u? What’s that pub where my old mate got pissed and fell into the fruit machine?

  It’s a good test. Somebody else could, theoretically, have hacked into Jim’s identity by now. A
zi replies with the name that he improvised during dinner in Berlin.

  The Crown.

  Within five minutes, there’s another message.

  Update us on your status. We have no news about the girl.

  Azi’s heart tries to escape from his chest. Munira’s not dead, he tells himself. If she was, they would surely have found her body by now—because her death would have been a warning, an example. Which means that whoever took her has a use for her. Which means that they’re doing something right now that can be traced. There’s hope.

  Azi sends a selective account of his actions since Berlin: just enough to let them know that he has left the city and is in possession of technical resources; that he is not (so far as he can tell) in immediate danger; and that he will do everything he can to help while remaining in full control of his own circumstances. There’s no way he’s going back, not now he’s free. Not while everything that happened in Berlin remains unexplained. The reply takes fifteen minutes.

  Although this channel is secure, we will send limited information while we continue internal security audits. The compromise of our location and systems remains unexplained. Our own autonomy as an organization is being severely curtailed. Do what you can to find her, but do not lose sight of the big picture—the names on the list, the power behind it. Many, many more lives will be lost if we cannot bring down Gomorrah. Send further information as soon as you have it. Look after yourself.

  It’s about what he expected, although the news of “compromised autonomy” is intriguing, suggesting the presence of other major players in the intelligence space. Then again, given the scale of what’s unfolding, this must always have been a great deal more than Anna and Odi’s hobby.

  Gomorrah is the key—and it seems that nobody knows he was able to use it except, of course, for the people behind Gomorrah themselves. Now that he has his new hacking rig, Azi has destroyed the burner phone he used in Berlin, but even so he reckons the time he can safely stay in Athens is measured in days. He needs to act fast.