“Just a small black,” I said.
“One short,” the girl called out. “Anything with it?”
Everything in the showcase looked good. The blueberry scone looked particularly good. It had blueberries. It was practically a health food. It was also about forty-five minutes of laps around the track at the Y.
“Just the coffee,” I said, feeling almost saintly. I took a small table away from the window, with a view of the front door. I only had to wait a few minutes.
The bearded man came in and went directly to the bar, where he ordered a grande something-or-other. He took his time with the sugar and half-and-half before taking a seat on the far side of the room. I tried to look like I was not looking at him and found that it was easier just to not look at him. A moment later, my cell phone rang.
UNKNOWN CALLER. “Stafford,” I answered.
“Mr. Stafford? This is Ms. Sharp calling. Can you hold one minute for Dr. McKenna?”
It was not the voice of the Lydia Sharp in the admin office. It was the same voice that I had heard twice before when trying to reach McKenna. I risked a look across the room.
“Mr. Stafford? Are you there?”
The man was speaking into the microphone on his plugged-in earbuds, which were connected to a laptop, and through it, to a cell phone.
“Holy hell, that’s you,” I said. “How do you do that?”
“It’s an app,” he said in his own deep baritone.
“Impressive,” I said. “But why all the spy stuff?” I thought it was more Maxwell Smart than James Bond. “Can’t we just have a conversation?”
“I checked. You weren’t followed.”
“That’s comforting.” I would have been quite surprised to find out anything but.
“Spud says that I can talk to you. What do you want?”
“How about we start with names? You know mine. Is McKenna your real name?”
“I have no name.”
“Well, what would you like me to call you? ‘Spud’s friend’?”
“Joy is my name.”
I was beginning to wonder if Spud was taking revenge on me for some unknown slight on my part.
“Fine. I will call you Joy.”
“You may call me Dr. McKenna.”
I counted to ten. “How about Ben?” I said, just to get one shot back at him.
He paused. “No. Dr. McKenna.”
“Okay, Dr. McKenna. Now, will you tell me why all this secrecy?”
“I have enemies.”
“Obviously.”
“Have you heard of a company called NEQUISS?”
“Never.”
“I created NEQUISS. North Eastern Quadrant Internet Security Systems. White hats. We helped keep the black hats out of your systems.”
“What’s the product? Anti-malware? Antivirus?”
“High-level security. IDS Plus.”
“Is there an IDS Negative?”
“Intrusion detection systems. Most packages are defensive-only. Passive, reactive, or preventive. They are all defensive. They let you know that someone is trying to hack in, or where they’ve been. Preventive systems actually work to keep them out.”
“So how is NEQUISS different?”
“Active. It’s like hiring armed mercenaries with big dogs to patrol your perimeter and take out anyone who tries to break in.”
“Take out? Like terminate?”
“We didn’t kill people, but we’d send them home limping—or infected.”
“So you made some enemies.”
“Last spring we were called in by a defense contractor in northern Virginia. You’d know the name. They had very good systems in place, but someone was getting in anyway. We identified the baddies as a team of Iranians—military. They’d managed to come in the front end and bypassed all the first-line systems, but they had set off an alarm. They hadn’t gotten through to any sensitive areas but they were getting close. Our team isolated them and guided them down a rabbit hole into a honeypot.”
“You’re losing me.”
“We let them see files that were worthless. Manufactured. They looked real, so the hackers kept going deeper.”
“But really it was a dead end?”
“They copied a full set of plans for a fictitious surface-to-air missile designed to target drones. What they didn’t realize was that they were also getting a worm we had embedded in the plans.”
“What did it do? Crash their computers?” I said.
“No. The worm was a sleeper. It did nothing but migrate until it found its target. This one was designed to attack the power grid. It took a week to travel to the right network and then there were rolling blackouts in Tehran for the next three days.”
“Cyber warfare.”
“That’s just one example. This goes on every day. All the time. Ten years ago, it was kids. Geeks like me. Getting kicks, which is what teenagers do, right? Woo-hoo, I hacked the New York Times! I rule! Only now it is serious shit. Al-Qaeda. The Russian mob. The Albanians stole one hundred twenty million credit card numbers—full identity, name, address, social, everything including where you go to church—and they made it look like the Russians did it. The Chinese? They’ve got an army regiment that does nothing but hack.”
“My client thinks that’s who is causing him all of his problems.”
“Could be. They’re good. But the U.S. is way out in front. They’ve got the edge.”
“What’s the edge?” I said.
“English. All computer languages parallel the language of the originators. Most were written by people whose first language is English. So, the code follows similar logic, sentence structure, and syntax. I’m not saying you can’t understand it if your first language is Mandarin or Farsi. But if you grew up speaking English, you’ve got an edge.”
“And most of the educated classes around the globe now speak English.”
“God help us if the Indians ever start hacking,” he said.
“Sounds like a good business. It’s like being an oncologist in Florida. If you’re any good, clients find you. If you suck, you’re probably still making a fortune.”
“We were very good. But fortune is the devil’s servant. It seems we pissed off more than a few people. There were death threats, which we ignored for the most part until they started coming to our homes.”
“You’d been hacked,” I said.
“Maybe, but the more likely scenario is that we were sold out. We reported everything to the police. The next thing we knew, the FBI shut us down. They seized all of our assets, threatened the employees with prosecution, and arrested my partner and our CFO.”
“What about you?”
“I got a text message warning me. I walked out my front door, and before I got two blocks there were about a dozen government vehicles converging on my house. I’ve been off the grid ever since,” he said.
“I don’t get it. Why is the FBI after you? I thought you worked for the good guys.”
“We’ve talked long enough. I have to switch phones.” He hung up.
I watched him close up the flip phone and dig into a battered backpack. He pulled out another phone, identical to the first, connected it to his laptop, and redialed. My phone rang again.
“I have to keep switching phones or they’ll find me.”
“You didn’t answer my question.” If I was going to do business with this scary young man, I wanted to know what enemies I might be taking on.
“Someone who was very good hacked into SOCOM. Special Ops Command. The black helicopter guys. Ninjas. The hackers didn’t really get anything juicy. Certainly nothing we haven’t seen before on cable news. Not secret, just sensitive. It was a feint, nothing more. But they left footprints. Footprints that made it look like we were the ones breaking in. And they left a door open, which led
to a site used for coded Taliban communiqués.”
“Was it your work?”
“Of course not. We would never have been so sloppy.”
“So you’re in hiding, your buddy’s in jail—”
“In the system. I don’t know that he is in jail, actually.”
“Okay. ‘In the system.’ What happens next?”
“His wife and kids are with her parents. They’ve hired a lawyer. I get messages from her. When it first happened, I asked for help online, but in the hacker community we’ve always been unpopular. But there’s a few good guys I’ve emailed with. Eventually, we’ll get through it. Straighten things out.”
“That’s optimistic.”
“Yeah. Or not. Did you get the blueberry scone? It’s good.”
“No. No offense, but you’ve got some heavy baggage. I don’t know what Fred thought we could do for each other.”
“He said you had a client who’d been hacked.”
“Not exactly. Look, I don’t doubt that you know your way around the Internet or whatever, but I think you’re too busy running to do me any good, and I really don’t know what I can do to help you. I think we’re stuck.”
“I need cash. I’ve been couch surfing, moving on every couple of days, but eventually I’m going to get tripped up somehow. I need money—cash money—to stay hidden.”
“I can do that. But I still don’t see what you can do for me.”
He began tapping at his laptop. “Give me a minute.”
It took him a bit more than a minute. Four minutes.
“I’m going to put more cream in my coffee. When I stand up, come over here and look at the screen.”
I waited until he was at the counter. No one was paying any attention to him—or me. I picked up my things and made myself walk slowly across the shop. As I passed his table, I looked down and froze.
My bank account was open on McKenna’s laptop. Cash balance, $3,480.11. My check for estimated federal tax must have cleared already. Money market account, $157,323.44. Mortgage balance, $0.00. Paid off before I went to prison. Home equity LOC showed a balance of $34.82, which I kept forgetting to pay off.
I knew I was staring and that someone would soon notice, but I was transfixed. The knowledge that a bit of magic is possible, and that the technology behind the trick is not even that difficult, takes very little away from the actual performance. I wanted to punch the screen with my index finger and close the page. Instead, I willed myself to look away and take another seat facing the window.
My phone rang a minute later.
“How did you do that?” I said.
“Your ID is your email account. You should change that. Your bank should have caught it. I found that in less than a minute. Maybe you should change your bank. Then I ran a password-busting program I designed. It’s essentially a pattern-checking iterative cracker with various dictionaries to back it up. Much faster than Cain and Abel or John the Ripper. Your password is only thirteen characters. My program can break anything up to thirty in less than five minutes.”
“It took you just over four.”
“If it can’t find a pattern, it reverts to brute force. Sometimes that takes longer. What is it, by the way?”
“You don’t know?”
“The program does it all. I don’t ever need to see it.”
“It’s the site of one of maybe three Shakespeare quotes I know. HVIPt2A4S2l84. Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2, line 84. It’s where somebody says, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’ It’s easy to remember.”
“It’s not bad. It would keep most lowlifes out. Add a space break somewhere in there and it will up your bit strength a thousand percent. Most people just use their name and a couple of numbers. Or their dog’s name. I don’t have to know their dog to find it out. The program will run dog names.”
“King?”
“King123. You wouldn’t believe. Then you get the math or techno geeks who think they’re being smart. They use the decimal value of pi, or a series of prime numbers, or a Markov chain. Pattern checkers pick those out in nanoseconds.”
I had used prime numbers for my password when I was back at Case. One of the IT security guys had cracked it after only five attempts.
“But if I screw up typing it in, the website will stop me out after three tries.”
“It will stop most hackers because they won’t want to spend the time, but if you have enough monkeys typing . . .”
“What about those systems that use a randomizer program to generate passwords?”
“They’re good, but truly random is not easy to attain. For example, it takes seven shuffles of a deck of cards to remove the patterns from the previous game. Show me a history of randomly generated passwords, and I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy what the next password will be.”
“I’m impressed. No, I am awed.”
“Well, it’s not me. The program does it. Unless you’ve got a Department of Defense–sized computer generating your passwords, there will be holes. In theory you can create an unbreakable code, but the reality is somewhat less than.”
“You’re hired.”
“Thank you.”
We worked out details. The money request was surprisingly modest, and McKenna said the work would take him less than a week. I gave him as many details of Haley’s story as I could think of, and we agreed to meet again in Manhattan in a few days.
If he managed to stay a step or two in front of the Feds.
16
I had owned a house in Montauk.
There was no water view unless you count the backyard pool—although out there, Long Island is so flat and narrow that all you really need for a water view is a third story. Montauk, unlike the Hollywood Hamptons to the west, tends to look down upon ostentatious wealth and twenty-thousand-square-foot stone mansions built on shifting sandbars. My house had no third story, or second. It was a Santa Fe–style ranch on two acres and surrounded by deer-tick heaven—scrub oak, pitch pine, and poison ivy—but it had a faux coyote fence that enclosed a terrace of slate and river stones, and an L-shaped pool long enough to make swimming laps possible if not exactly comfortable. And it was very private.
Angie had never liked the house. She had used it, entertained friends there constantly—all summer and every summer until the Kid turned three, when keeping an eye on him around a pool all day had become more an ordeal than a vacation. But she did not love the house. It was small—though three bedrooms and two and a half baths, plus the full apartment in the pool house, seemed adequate to me for a family of three. It was only small if a necessary piece of the weekend curriculum was throwing a lawn party for a couple hundred gin-guzzling hangers-on. And for Angie that was the single unforgivable inadequacy—the house was too far from the party circuit of the Hamptons.
But I loved that house even before I knew Angie. I bought it from a woman who had just survived a messy divorce, and I bought it furnished. The furniture was all Mission, with plenty of quartersawn oak, both masculine and feminine in feel. The fabrics were all in vaguely Southwestern colors and design, but a bit muted to give a more sedate, East Coast atmosphere. The touches that I added on my own were few, but each had a meaning or memory for me: the powder room mirror with the hummingbird motif in pressed tin that I bought in Cabo; the framed photo of my father behind the bar, beaming into the camera with love and pride, that stood on the fireplace mantel; and the set of handmade fireplace tools in the shapes of various dragons that I had found in Hong Kong.
When my legal bills began moving up into the seven-figure range, I was forced to sell. The people who bought the house from me wanted it gutted. The salt air had pitted the silvering on the mirror so badly it went straight into the trash. The picture of Pop had survived our downsizing and the trek back into the city, but disappeared somewhere when Angie moved out of our Tribeca apartment. While I
doubted that she had been heartless enough to toss it on purpose, she may have been simply too inebriated to notice. I don’t know what happened to the fireplace set.
—
Charles Penn’s secretary had granted me twenty minutes with the great man, but I would have to haul my tail out to Montauk first thing in the morning to meet with him. When a billionaire gives an audience, no matter how brief, the wise man shows up early. That was not one of my father’s pithy aphorisms; it was one of my own.
I entertained myself with computing various routes as I drove uptown and east to the Triborough Bridge. The Grand Central to the LIE was the only way to get started, the other bridges and the tunnel being impossible unless you were traveling in the middle of the night. I took the Sagtikos to Southern State to Sunrise Highway rather than stay on the Expressway. The LIE depressed me. And on Sunrise, once past Patchogue, it’s a clear run all the way to Southampton. The Pine Barrens is Long Island’s only remaining wilderness and it’s almost soothing to drive through.
In the old days, I never drove it. After work on a Friday night, I would catch the Hampton Jitney a block from the office, and after putting on my Bose headphones, I was fast asleep before we left Manhattan. I usually woke up as the bus swayed through the dips and rises of Hither Hills, minutes before arriving in Montauk. I once hitchhiked a ride with Burt Terwilliger in his seaplane—he ran the firm’s M&A group, and though he made enough money to have bought a place in Southampton, he spent his weekends deep-sea fishing, and Montauk is where you go for that. I arrived out east in such a jangled, exhausted state that I politely declined the invitation to join him every weekend. In my worldview, airplanes are big things that, one hopes, never land on water.
Midweek, in the gray days of off-season, it was not a bad drive. Two hours from the bridge, I took the left at the Tower and drove up toward Gosman’s Dock. I was an hour early. Dangerously early. It meant that I had plenty of time to drive by the house and dig around in all the old wounds. I could have had a leisurely breakfast at one of the two dueling pancake purveyors, or I could have sat and watched the seagulls fight over the barnacles on the jetty. Instead, I took the right and headed over toward Lake Montauk.
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