Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  Mark entered the dim, greenish-lit room through the round, space station-like gate. His eyes needed a few seconds to adapt to the dark.

  C-Base is Berlin’s oldest hackerspace, actually one of the first such places in the world. A hackerspace or hacklab is a not for profit workspace with all the infrastructure and tools needed to collaborate on software, hardware, and robotics projects. C-Base has powerful 3D-printers, a workshop fitted for advanced electronics work, a metal workshop, plotters, and a storage room containing all sorts of parts for all kinds of purposes. Also, it has a superfast wireless network and a comparatively powerful server farm running in its basement.

  Mark slowly made his way through the longish room spanning the whole width of the building. Along his way, he scanned the few figures hunched over laptops with lots of stickers on them. He nodded friendly to the bald guy with the tattooed face and the clipped ears behind the bar. This day, he got a nod back. That was not always the case.

  He was tolerated here, but he would never be part of the crew. He was fine with that. To become a member, he would have to get immersed in the nerdy stuff. The members of C-Base cultivated a myth that a space station crashed into the earth a million years ago and that its remnants lie below the city.

  Every now and then, someone would come out of the workshops with a so-called artifact, a ‘newly discovered’ part of the station. Most times, the artifacts were pieces of scrap metal, obsolete hard drives, CPUs, and LEDs welded and glued into a cool shape with no utility whatsoever. But they would blink and beep away in funny ways. A nice way of making use of excess creativity and excess time, if one was into that kind of stuff.

  Also, he would have to choose a hacker name, like Tr0n or M4ster, and he had no idea what he should call himself. They probably called him Ca$h behind his back because every now and then, he would recruit one of the members for a gig. He stood out with his pressed white shirt, navy jeans, and handmade brown cordovan shoes. Most patrons wore sneakers, shorts, and washed out T-shirts with nearly incomprehensible jokes printed on them.

  But the nerdiness also has a plus side. C-Base is swept for listening devices almost daily by a volunteer group who call themselves C-Leaners. The lack of windows renders laser or directional microphones pretty useless. The network and servers running in the space are probably the most robust and most secure one can find in Europe. Network traffic is continuously monitored for odd signals. Someone who wants to know what is going on in here has to show up in person.

  Sanders looked toward the far end of the room. A woman sat at a table on a comfortable bench below a blueish-glowing something fixed to the wall. She had placed herself right next to the emergency exit leading out to the riverbank. The glow of her MacBook Pro’s screen illuminated her face.

  He walked toward her and sat down right across the table. He had looked at that perfectly symmetric face a million times before, often enough marveling at the full lips, the high cheekbones, the thin, completely straight nose, and the bright-blue eyes. Her long, jet-black hair was tied into a very tight ponytail sitting high on the back of her head. She wore a very tight, low-cut, black top. Her round, firm breasts touched each other lightly forming a cleavage to die for. There was a tiny black beauty mark on her left breast. She was stunningly beautiful.

  Mark waited a while and just looked at her, then Svetlana Ivanovna Belyakova shifted her attention away from the screen toward him. “Hi Mark, how are we doing?”

  “I’m good. Thanks. Enjoying my paid parenthood leave. Family is doing great.”

  “Oh, you have to tell me all about my sweet little Sasha later,” she interrupted him. Mark did not really like it when she called his son by the Russian diminutive for Alexander.

  “But first, I need to know how we are doing. Businesswise. It’s been a while since the last job, and I do not pay for much, but I do have to pay rent, you know.” Mark sometimes did not get the subtle but very precise lingo she liked to use.

  He explained to Svetlana that it is difficult to get gigs as a team of freelancers competing with what his customers called ‘real companies’. A very positive reference from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development usually would get him into the first meeting with a new client.

  Unfortunately, the answer to the almost inevitable question ‘How many employees does your company have?’ left clients with long faces. Mark had a very good answer which he recited for Svetlana, “Zero, for every job I put together specialist teams of long-time trusted associates from my worldwide network of freelancers. This gives you the best possible result, and you can be sure never to pay unnecessary overhead. All your money goes into getting you the results you need.”

  “Great pitch, I would buy that,” Svetlana agreed.

  “Yeah, unfortunately, most of the corporate guys go by the old line ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’.”

  Svetlana sighed and gave Mark an annoyed look. “Well, I need a job, soon. Else, I will have to get work somewhere else, and you won’t be able to use me for quite a while then.”

  They continued the shop talk for a little while, then switched to another topic of mutual interest.

  Svetlana leaned closer to Mark. Her chest rested on the edge of the table. Mark mirrored her posture. “Our insurance coverage is valid for at least another week. The SVR information security grunts are creatures of habit, and sloppy, too. They maintain their bi-weekly schedule for system updates. So far my Trojan watching the Vpoiskakh has not been detected, and the exploits I use are still open. Once our names and numbers show up, my little call robot will do the rest. We will have a three- to ten-hour headstart on any unfriendlies coming for us.”

  Mark took in the good news and nodded.

  The Russian intelligence services have a similar way of distributing ‘Be on the lookout’ bulletins, or BOLOs, to their operators worldwide as the American CIA. Once a Person of Interest, is identified, he or she enters this Vpoiskakh system with all available information on the person. The database contains phone numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, ATM and credit card information, license plates, passport identifiers, basically everything that can be used to track a POI’s movements and communication.

  Unlike their Western competitors, the Russian services have fewer inhibitions against working together. SVR and FSB, the civilian intelligence services work almost as interlinked as their common predecessor, the KGB. GRU, the military intelligence service is also growing closer to its civilian siblings. One very early collaboration between the services was a common Vpoiskakh database and distribution system.

  It made sense, for quite some time FSB was hunting for dissidents who could at any time leave the country. Uber-wealthy oligarchs who fell out of favor went to London or Switzerland, like Boris Berezowski. These days, Cyprus was a cheaper alternative which also ‘minigarchs’, multi-millionaires could afford.

  Also, double-agents had fake papers. Their favorite destination was England. They believed the famous MI-6 could protect them. Some were proven wrong, like Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal.

  Being in the system is something to be avoided. Important POI usually get unwelcome visitors within twenty-four hours. The free flow of information between these intelligence services sped up the process considerably.

  Svetlana’s phone chirped. “Just a sec, my ride has arrived.” She opened her laptop, and for a minute she concentrated on typing a few lines of code into the keyboard.

  The beautiful hacker had a particular way of moving around Berlin. Most people in Berlin used Uber or one of the many car sharing services and paid by credit card. Not Svetlana. Her favorite car sharing service was DriveNow.

  She was a fan of their cars but also of the barn-door-sized holes in their security. She accessed their maintenance schedule through an exploit on their server side and marked a car she liked with a ‘maintenance required’ flag. During the one hour window their crew needed to get to the car she could drive wherever she wanted and then un
flag the car again.

  “Okay, done. Mark, I have to leave in the next five minutes. Got to go home and change for my date tonight. Anja’s really cute. And fun, too. So, I want to look hot.”

  “Well, if it were me, you wouldn’t have to change a thing. You look great,” Mark grinned.

  Svetlana smirked and said, “Well, if it were you, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “Are you still stealing DriveNow’s?” Mark asked with his eyebrows raised.

  “I am not a thief, I am a free-rider. That’s something completely different,” Svetlana replied with somewhat ironic indignation.

  “One could argue,” Mark tried to say. She gave him a look that immediately drained his motivation to continue the philosophic argument. She got up and put her laptop into her Hèrmes bag.

  As she passed him, he asked, “Hey, Svetlana. We’re good, right?”

  “Of course, we’re good. I prefer working with you very much. Other jobs would pay much better, but with you, I know that it’s always honest work, mostly interesting, and you always put together a good team. Plus, you are very good at keeping the assholes away from me. I appreciate all that very much. But I do need money, soon. Bye.“ She did not wait for Marks reply and headed off.

  “Bye.” Sanders had a blank expression on his face.

  He turned and watched her move through the room. Her black ballerinas seemed to barely touch the ground. She held her bag in her right hand, a feminine, well-toned triceps showed under the short sleeve of her top. The black skinny jeans were formed into a peach shape. They had a shiny, metallic eagle logo sewn to the center of the small right back pocket. Her elegant figure and swan-like movements seemed to pull all the heads of the men in the room like on a string. The black ponytail just so reached her shoulders and wagged from left to right and back. Even after almost fifteen years, her classical ballet education still paid off.

  Mark sighed, got up and went to the bar. „Hey Ghoul, could you get me a Hefeweizen, please?“

  The hairless, tattooed character opened a bottle of Schneider Weisse beer and gave it to Mark. He looked around the room. Most patrons sat there dreamy-eyed and looked in the direction where Svetlana had disappeared seconds earlier. “Does Mlada even know what she’s doing to the men around here?”

  Sanders thought for a moment and answered, “Oh, she knows. But she doesn’t care.”

  Mark had an hour to kill before his next meeting. He poured the Weizen into a glass and drank his beer silently and alone.

  ✽✽✽

  It was only four years earlier that he had met Svetlana, or Mlada as she called herself in hacker circles. Mark was still CEO of the company he had co-founded and led the company’s largest project with a financial advisory firm overseas. The client’s Chief Information Officer had suspected an intrusion and theft of customers’ financial data. He had tasked Mark’s team at Paramond Security to use their world-leading intrusion detection system to check on the servers.

  Paramond’s proprietary software scanned any system configuration and logfiles. It could automatically detect anomalies in both. The algorithm was based on the latest advances in machine learning and had been trained on millions of configurations and logging patterns.

  The company had also collected the world’s largest database of so-called hacker fingerprints. Every hacker leaves traces of his or her doing. Some are pretty cocky and leave a signature. Some signatures are elegant like a gentleman burglar’s glove in an old movie. Some are ugly like gang tags sprayed on a wall. Anyhow, the cocky guys are usually the harmless sort. The dangerous sort are the ones who do not want to be found. They can still be identified by their operating procedures and the code they leave behind. Paramond had identified about two hundred markers that could attribute an intrusion to an individual hacker just like a fingerprint can identify a single person.

  The Paramond team had detected faint traces of an intrusion, and the client rewarded them handsomely. However, they had not been able to determine who was behind the attack. Or more accurately, Mark had made sure that the hacker going by the handle Mlada remained unidentified.

  Mark’s team had been working hard to pin down the attack on a known hacker. The elegance of the intrusion and the near lack of remaining evidence had amazed the experienced crew. The whole thing took time.

  Mark had to keep the client happy and traveled to Panama City where they were based. While his team in Berlin was looking for the intruder in the depths of cyberspace, the hacker had walked up to Mark’s table with two mojito’s in her hands.

  He had to confess that he had been attracted to the incredibly beautiful Russian very much. He had been single at the time and thousands of miles away from Berlin. He enjoyed the luxury at Panama City’s Trump Ocean Club. She could have easily seduced him into doing her bidding. But she was not at all interested in him. It turned out quickly, she was not interested in men in general.

  Svetlana had not even tried to use her sex appeal. Instead she had shown Mark part of the data she had stolen. The contents of the files had been so upsetting that he had been quickly convinced into helping her.

  Paramond’s client had turned out to be the banker and legal advisor to the filthy rich and infamous. Their client base consisted of dictators and mobsters, but also Russian politicians, biznesmeny, higher tier civil servants, and military leaders.

  It was all there, holdings in state concerns, cash bribes including who had handed them out, precious metals in Swiss vaults, titles to real estate around the world from Berlin to Los Angeles. Svetlana had used a very advanced Natural Language Processing algorithm and a cascade of Neural Networks to sift through the millions of documents amounting to over two terabytes of information and organize it into a digestible format. Accounts could be linked to nominees, the frontmen, and ultimately to the real owners in the background.

  The Russian president was listed as the beneficiary owner of over 59 billion dollars worth of assets, spread across eighteen nominees.

  His senior cabinet ministers each held between 4 billion and 29 billion. Heads of major agencies were less wealthy, a couple of hundred million would be the average.

  The oligarch who had acquired a majority share in a soccer club a few days earlier was listed with owning assets worth 18,509,800,000 dollars, most of it in shares of a coal and metal trading concern that had previously been state-owned. Before becoming a raw materials tycoon, he had been employed by the Committee for State Security, the KGB.

  Only in 1990, at age thirty-two, he developed his business sense and invested a loan handed out to him by the city of St. Petersburg into founding shares of a new bank, the first private banking institution in the Russian Federation. With the stock price in this venture soaring, he could reinvest the profits into buying vouchers to participate in the privatization programs organized by the state in 1992. For some voucher packages, he paid as much as a few thousand dollars in bribes, for others a truckload of vodka bottles that middlemen handed out to the uninformed and unemployed. By age thirty-six, the man was a billionaire.

  Unfortunately, Mark had been found out by his co-founders and ousted from the company he had built.

  ✽✽✽

  At six p.m. Sanders arrived at Mittelbar, the in-house watering hole of the Axel Springer publishing group. AS published DIE WELT and other national news media. Here, in the center of a semi-public atrium, the foot soldiers get their Feierabendbier in the early evening. The top dogs, editors-in-chief and publishers, hardly ever set foot in here. They instead mingle with political and business movers and shakers in the wood-paneled, invite-only Journalists’ Club on the top floor of the skyscraper. A nice place if you can get in. Mark would not mind sitting on a Chesterfield sofa, enjoying the view over Berlin and sipping on a thirty-year-old scotch. But he was here to meet with a foot soldier.

  The atrium has a mall-like feel to it with a few small stores, a hairdresser, a post office, and an escalator leading up to a restaurant amply named Paparazzi. All these pl
aces served mostly AS employees, even though in principle anybody could enter and get a haircut or send his postcards.

  Mittelbar is partitioned from the rest of the atrium with long, white curtains that contrast nicely with the dark wooden floor. Guests can order anything from Italian espresso to Scottish whisky up to twelve years old.

  As Mark reached the curtains and looked inside, he saw a young blonde waitress in white skinny jeans with a tiny black apron standing on her toes and reaching up to the bar’s signature piece, a huge salt-water aquarium. She was cleaning the glass from the outside. She made powerful circular strokes, her whole body moved in sync with her hand. Maybe the fish will enjoy the view. Vitus sure does, Mark thought and smirked.

  Vitus Amberger, at age thirty-one a rising star among Axel Springer’s journalists, sat on a stool at the bar staring at the young blonde’s ass.

  “Should I come back at a better time?” Mark asked and put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

  Vitus seemed to need a second to shake off the hypnotic effect the girl obviously had on him. “No, why? Now is fine,” he said, still somewhat mesmerized. He got up, the two men embraced and clapped each others backs.

  Mark pointed to the dark wooden tables with the high leather chairs. “Let’s sit over there. The chairs are more comfortable.”

  Vitus reluctantly agreed. They sat down, ordered beers, and exchanged updates on their work and their lives. They had not seen each other in a few weeks.