It was an old brick building. The ground floor had high ceilings supported by timbers of old-growth fir, which would have made it a fine setting for a restaurant or brewpub if the building had been on a more accessible street and if Georgetown hadn’t already had several of those. As it was, he’d subdivided that level into two bays, one leased by an exotic-metals welder who made parts for the aerospace industry, the other serving as Peter’s workshop. It was there that Zula’s car had spent the weekend. Above was a single story of finished space with nice old windows looking out toward Boeing Field. This too was subdivided into an open-plan live/work loft, where Peter lived, and another unit that he had been fixing up in the hopes of renting it to some young hip person who wanted to live, as Peter put it “in the presence of arches.”
The remark had made little sense to Zula until she had spent a bit of time in the neighborhood and started noticing that, yes, the old buildings sported windows and doorways that were supported by true functioning arches of brick or stone, the likes of which were never used in newer construction. For Peter to have noticed this was a bit clever, and for him to have understood that it would be attractive to a certain kind of person reflected somewhat more human insight than one normally looked for in a nerd.
So, that night, when they got back to his space at about 2 A.M. and she went upstairs to collect the stuff she’d left scattered around during the months that she’d been quasi living with him, and she saw the brick window arches that he had left exposed during the remodel, a lot went through her head in a few moments and she found herself unable to move or think very clearly. She stood there in the dark. The lights of Boeing Field shone up against a low ceiling of spent rain clouds and made them glow a greenish silver that filled the apertures of the windows smoothly, as if troweled onto the glass.
She was strangely comforted. The natural thing for Zula to be asking herself at this moment was What did I ever see in this guy? Other than his physical beauty, which was pretty obvious. Those occasional left-handed insights, like the arches. Another thing: he worked very hard and knew how to do a lot of things, which had put her in mind of the family back in Iowa. He was intelligent, and, as evidenced by the books stacked and scattered all over the place, he was interested in many things and could talk about them in an engaging way, when he felt like talking. Being here now, alone (for he was down in the bay unpacking his gear), enabled her to walk through the process of getting a crush on him, like reenacting a crime scene, and thereby to convince herself that she hadn’t just been out-and-out stupid. She could forgive herself for not having noticed the relationship-ending qualities that had been so screamingly obvious for the last twelve hours. Her girlfriends had probably not been asking each other, behind Zula’s back, what she saw in that guy.
Which led her to question, one last time—as long as she was alone in the dark and still had the opportunity—whether she should have broken up with him at all. But she was pretty certain that when she woke up tomorrow morning she’d feel right about it. This was the third guy she had broken up with. Where she’d gone to school, mixed-race computational fluid dynamics geeks didn’t get as many dates as, say, blond, blue-eyed hotel and restaurant management majors. But, like a tenement dweller nurturing a rooftop garden in coffee cans, she had cultivated and maintained a little social life of her own, and harvested the occasional ripe tomato, and maybe enjoyed it more intensely than someone who could buy them by the sack at Safeway. So she was not utterly inexperienced. She’d done it before. And she felt as right about this breakup as she did about the other two.
She turned on the lights, which hurt her tired eyes, and began picking up stuff that she knew was hers: from the bathroom, her minimal but important cosmetics, and some hair management tools. From her favorite corner, some notes and books related to work. A couple of novels. Nothing important, but she didn’t want Peter to wake up every morning and be confronted with random small bits of Zula spoor. She piled what she found at the top of the stairs that led down into the bay and looped back through the living quarters, gleaning increasingly nonobvious bits of stuff: a baseball cap, a hair clip, a coffee mug, lip balm. She went slower and took longer than necessary because when this was over she’d have to carry it all downstairs to the bay where Peter was fussing with his snowboarding gear, and that would be awkward. She was too tired and spent to contend with that awkwardness in a graceful way and did not want Peter’s last recollection of her to be as a fuming bitch.
When she returned to her stuff pile for what she estimated was the penultimate time, she heard voices downstairs. Peter’s and another man’s. She couldn’t make out any words, but the other man was vastly excited. A cool draft was coming up the stairs from below: outside air flowing in through the open bay door. It carried the sharp perfume of incompletely burned gasoline, a smell that nowadays came only from very old cars, precatalytic converter.
Zula looked out a small back window on the alley side of the building and saw a sports car parked there with its lights on, the driver’s door hanging open, the engine still running. The driver was arguing with Peter down in the bay. She assumed that this was because Peter had left the Scion blocking the alley while he unloaded. The convertible was stopped nose to nose with the Scion; its driver, or so Zula speculated, was pissed off that he couldn’t get through. He was in a hurry and drunk. Or maybe on meth, to judge from the intensity of his rage. She couldn’t quite follow the argument that was going on downstairs. Peter was astonished by something, but he was taking the part of the reasonable guy trying to calm the stranger down. The stranger was shouting in bursts, and Zula couldn’t understand him. He had (she realized) some sort of accent, and while her English was pretty much perfect, she did have a few weak spots, and accents were one of them.
She was just about to call 911 when she heard the stranger mention “voice mail.”
“… turned it off…” Peter explained, again in a very calm and reasonable voice.
“… all the way from fucking Vancouver,” the stranger complained, “rain pissing down.”
Zula moved to the window and looked at the stranger’s car again and saw that it had British Columbia license plates.
It was that guy. It was Wallace.
There had been some kind of problem with the transaction. It was a customer service call.
No. Tech support. Wallace was complaining about a “fucking virus or something.”
The tension somehow broke. The adrenaline buzz on which Wallace had blasted down from Vancouver had abated. They had agreed to talk about this calmly. Wallace shut off the convertible’s engine, killed the lights, came into the bay. Peter pulled the door down behind him.
“Whose car is this?” Wallace demanded. Now that the big door was closed, the sound echoed up the steps and Zula was better able to follow the conversation. Her ear was tuning in to the Scottish accent.
“Zula’s,” Peter said.
“The girl? She’s here?”
“I dropped her off at home.” Zula noted the lie with grudging thanks and admiration. “She parks it here when she’s not using it.”
“I have to take a vicious piss.”
“There’s a urinal right over there.”
“Good man.” The freestanding urinal in the middle of his shop was one of Peter’s proudest innovations. Zula heard Wallace’s zipper going down, heard him using it, thought it would be funny to come down the stairs and make her exit at that point. But her car was now blocked in by Wallace’s. “I’ve been assuming that you deliberately fucked me,” Wallace remarked, as he was peeing, “but now I entertain the possibility that it is something other than that.”
“Good. Because it was totally on the up-and-up.”
“Other than being a massive identity theft scheme, you mean to say.”
“Yes.”
“Convincing me of that is easy enough. Already done. But the people I work with are another thing.” Wallace finished and zipped up again. Zula could hear the timbre of his voice
change as he turned around.
“I thought you said you worked alone.”
“I was telling the truth the first time,” Wallace said.
“Oh,” Peter said after a noticeable pause.
“I’ve already had three fucking emails from my contact in Toronto wanting to know where the hell are the credit card numbers. As a matter of fact, I’d better send him an update right now. If lying through my teeth can be so called.”
The conversation lapsed for a few moments, and Zula guessed that Wallace was thumb-typing on a phone.
“I guess I don’t understand why you haven’t just sent him the numbers,” Peter said. “So maybe you should just take this from the top, because everything you were shouting when you pulled up a few minutes ago left me totally confused.”
“Almost finished,” Wallace muttered.
“The password to my Wi-Fi is here,” Peter said, and Zula heard him sliding a piece of paper down the counter.
“Never mind, I used something called Tigmaster.”
“You should use mine; it is way more secure than Tigmaster.”
“What is that anyway, an animal trainer?”
“Welder. My tenant. He should put a password on his Wi-Fi, but he can’t be bothered.”
“Right, he’s not security conscious like you and me.”
Peter didn’t answer since that must have sounded to him, as it did to Zula, like a trap.
Zula had thought better of calling 911 when she understood that it was Wallace and not some random enraged crankhead. Now she considered it again. But Wallace was much calmer now. And Peter was the only person here who had actually broken the law. Zula was satisfied just to have broken up with him. Sending him to prison would have been overkill.
“Take it from the top? All right, here we go,” said Wallace, then paused. “Any beers in that fridge?”
“I thought you didn’t drink.”
Silence.
“Be my guest.”
Fridge-opening and beer sound effects as Wallace went on: “As you saw, I transferred the file to my laptop right there in the tavern. Verified its contents. Closed the laptop. Went to my car. Drove back to Vancouver, stopping only once for petrol, never left the car, never let the laptop out of my sight. Parked in the garage at my condo building, went to my flat, hand-carrying the laptop. Set it down on my desk, plugged it in, opened it up, verified that everything was just as I’d left it.”
“When you say ‘plugged it in,’ could you please tell me everything you plugged into it?” Peter had now dropped, improbably, into a polite, clinical mode, like a customer service rep in a Bangalore cubicle farm.
“Power, Ethernet, external monitor, and FireWire.”
“You say Ethernet—you don’t use Wi-Fi at home?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Just asking. You have some kind of firewall or something between raw Internet and your laptop?”
“Of course, it’s a corporate firewall solution that I pay a fucking mint for every month. Have a lad who maintains it for me. Totally locked down. Never a problem.”
“You mentioned FireWire. What’s on that?” Peter asked.
“My backup drive.”
“So you’re backing up your files locally?”
“You’re not getting this, are you?” Wallace asked. “I told you who I worked for, yes?”
“Yes.”
Peter had not mentioned to Zula that Wallace worked for anyone and so she did not understand what this was about, but the way both men talked about Wallace’s employer had certainly attracted her notice.
“There are a couple of things I would never, ever like to have to explain to him,” Wallace said. “First, that I lost important files because I forgot to back them up. Second, that his files have been accessed by unauthorized persons because I backed them up to a remote server not under my physical control. So what choice do I have?”
“Keeping the hardware under your physical control is the only way to be sure,” Peter said soothingly. “What is the backup drive exactly?”
“A rather pricey off-the-shelf RAID 3 box, which I have placed inside of a safe that is bolted into the concrete wall and floor of the condo. When I am home, I open the safe and pull out the FireWire cable and connect it to my laptop long enough to accomplish the backup, then close it all up again.”
Peter considered it. “Unconventional but pretty logical” was his verdict. “To physically steal the box, someone would have to do huge damage to the safe and probably destroy the RAID.”
“That’s kind of my thinking.”
“Okay, so your first move on getting home was to open the safe and make a backup just like you said, so that if your laptop’s drive just happened to crash at that particular moment you’d still have a copy of the file I sold you.”
“You convinced me that it was the only copy extant,” said Wallace, sounding almost defensive.
“So in a world governed by Murphy’s law, making an immediate backup was the right move,” Peter agreed.
“He was expecting the file to show up on a particular server in Budapest no later than … translating to West Coast time, here … two A.M., and it was only midnight.”
“Plenty of time.”
“So I thought,” Wallace said. “Having set the backup in motion, I left the room, took a piss, and listened to the voice mail on my landline while I unpacked a few items and mixed myself a drink. I sorted through the mail. This might have taken all of about fifteen minutes. I went back to my study and sat down in front of my laptop and opened up a terminal window. When I am undertaking operations of this sort, I prefer to use SCP from the command line.”
“As you should,” Peter agreed.
“My first move was to check the contents of ‘Documents’ to remind myself of the filename and approximate size of the file that you sold me. And when I did that, I saw—well, see for yourself.”
Evidently Wallace’s laptop was already open on Peter’s workbench. There was a brief pause and then Peter said, “Hmm.”
“You need to understand that yesterday, ‘Documents’ contained a dozen or so subdirectories and maybe two score of files,” Wallace said.
“Including the file in question.”
“Yes.”
“And now it contains two files and two files only,” Peter said, “one of which is called troll.gpg, the other—”
“README,” Wallace said. “So I read the fucking thing.”
Peter snorted. “I think it’s supposed to be called README,” he said, “but there’s a typo. They transposed two letters, see?”
“REAMDE,” Wallace said.
“You’ve already opened it?”
“Perhaps stupidly, yeah.”
Peter double-clicked. There was a pause while (Zula imagined) he examined the contents of the REAMDE file.
The name had jogged a vague memory. Zula’s bag was leaning against the wall right next to her. Moving quietly, she reached into the padded laptop slot at its top and pulled out her computer. She set it on the floor, sat down next to it, and opened it up. Her first move was to hit the button that muted the sound. Within a few seconds it had attached itself to Peter’s Wi-Fi network. She clicked an icon that caused a VPN connection to be established to Corporation 9592’s network.
“We already established that you’re not a T’Rain player,” Wallace said.
“Never got into it,” Peter admitted.
“Well, that picture you’re looking at is of a troll. A particular type of mountain troll that lives in a particular region of T’Rain, rather inaccessible I’m afraid. Which might help you make sense of the caption.”
“‘Ha ha noob, you are powned by troll. I have encrypt all your file. Leave 1000 GP at below coordinates and I give you key.’ Ah, okay, I get it.”
“Well, I’m pretty fucking glad that you get it, my friend, because—”
“And now,” said Peter, cutting him off, “if we check out the contents of the other file, tr
oll.gpg, we find that”—miscellaneous clicks—“one, it is huge, and two, it is a correctly formatted gpg file.”
“You call that correctly formatted!?”
“Yeah. A standard header and then several gigs of random-looking binary content.”
“Several gigs you say.”
“Yeah. This one file is big enough to contain, probably, all the files that were originally stored in your ‘Documents’ folder. But if we take the message in REAMDE at face value, it’s all been encrypted. Your files are being held for ransom.”
Zula had brought up Corporation 9592’s internal wiki, and now went to a page entitled MALWARE. Several trojans and viruses were listed. REAMDE wasn’t difficult to find; it was the first word on the page, it was large, and it was red. When she clicked through to the dedicated page for REAMDE and checked its history, she found that 90 percent of its content had been written during the last seventy-two hours. Corporation 9592’s security hackers had been toiling at it all weekend.
“How is this possible?” Wallace demanded.
Upstairs, Zula was already reading about how it was possible.
“It’s not just possible, it’s actually pretty easy, once your system has been rooted by a trojan,” Peter said. “This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.’”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It is hard to turn this kind of virus into a profitable operation,” Peter said, “because there has to be a financial transaction: the payment of the ransom. And that can be traced.”
“I see,” Wallace said. “So if you’re in the malware business, there are easier ways to make money.”
“By running botnets or whatever,” Peter agreed. “The new wrinkle here, apparently, is that the ransom is to be paid in the form of virtual gold pieces in T’Rain.”
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