It was so easy for Miguel and Flavia to dismiss her as a hypochondriac. They weren't trapped by fear; they didn't have a mother and other relatives who had died of cancer. Lately it had become worse. Maybe her body knew something that her mind didn't. Or perhaps they were right and she was a hypochondriac. If they cared about her at all, then the question they should have asked themselves was, what did it all mean? Was it something other than fear? She didn't know.
Three blocks farther on, a group of individuals is stacking logs and boulders on the pavement. The protesters are of all ages. Twelve-year-old kids taking up arms for the first time, young people who were born in democracy and are tired of accepting its imperfections, older professional agitators who know how to harness the people's fury. The blockades are primarily to stop traffic, but in some cases stubborn protesters don't even want to let pedestrians pass; at others, they ask for a "contribution" in order to be let through. Cars have been stranded on the streets, their owners having locked and abandoned them to danger. A car alarm shrieks obstinately.
She does not feel like confronting anyone, getting into an angry discussion. They will ask her why she isn't obeying the blockade. The only way to make the government back down is to unite the people. Oh, if only they knew. But the truth of the matter is that the Coalition has managed to unite the most diverse groups by standing up to the government. The poor who complain about the lack of electricity in their neighborhoods, middle- and upper-class women who rant about the rate hikes. Unionists of the old guard, young hackers espousing a principled, anti-globalization discourse. Montenegro hadn't calculated how much opposition there was in Rio Fugitivo when he transferred control of the electricity to foreign hands. He thought the people were so desperate for an efficient power company that they would be willing to accept the cost of privatization. And after a decade of continually privatizing almost all sectors of the economy, he knew that people would complain, just not loud enough to be heard. The government allowed the protests to begin, failed to provide a quick solution to the problem, thinking that things would die down. Because it underestimated the power of the Coalition, little by little the matter of privatizing the electricity in Rio Fugitivo had become a referendum on whether or not Montenegro should stay in power and whether or not the country should continue with its neoliberal policies. The government had shown itself to be weak, vulnerable, and its problems had multiplied.
"Miguel's boss," she says at last. "Albert. One of the people in charge of intercepting messages pointed out to Albert that ads for a nonexistent bookstore had been published in one of Rio Fugitivo's newspapers, Tiempos Modernos, as it was called at the time. The ad was very small, practically unnoticeable in the lower right-hand corner of one of the inside pages."
"You remember all the details."
"I dream about them every night. Underneath the name of the bookstore was a famous phrase from one Bolivian author or another. The ad came out on several consecutive days in early August and then ceased. Albert, almost as a routine matter, passed the file of ads on to Miguel. And Miguel, who at that time was nearly invincible, discovered that each of the ads contained a ciphered message: the day on which the coup would take place, the names of contacts in the city, the time, et cetera. All of the information regarding the coup was being blatantly transmitted in the city's best-known newspaper. People tend to be overconfident and make those kinds of mistakes when they think their code is extremely secure."
"So ... so it's true. Albert and Turing were responsible for preventing the coup."
"You could say that. What at that time was considered to be the government's most important triumph—the dictatorship against opposition movements—was the work of Albert and Miguel. Well, Miguel above all."
"And how did he feel?" Cardona asks, scratching the spots on his right cheek. "Did he receive any sort of honors from the government?"
"Because of the nature of his work, the government couldn't publicly give him an award. No one could even know that Albert or Miguel existed. Miguel Sáenz was a bureaucrat lost in a branch of the civil service and had nothing to do with Turing. Montenegro couldn't ask him to the palace, but he did send a brief note of congratulations with one of his aides. Anyhow, it didn't matter. Miguel did his work and that's it—it didn't matter to him that Montenegro was his boss. He distanced himself from everything that went beyond what Albert put on his desk. He wasn't interested in honors, wasn't bothered by anonymity."
"And how did you feel?"
"I didn't find out for some time," she says. "Putting two and two together, I came to the conclusion that Miguel's long nights of work had everything to do with dismantling the planned coup. Miguel told me so when I asked him a few weeks later. He responded without any emotion whatsoever. It made me sick. But I had become so used to being sickened by him that it became something I could live with."
Ruth does not want to face the protesters. The fervor in their eyes, their fists raised high, their loud chants. She has to admit that the Coalition leaders, recycled from union movements and politicians on the farthest left, have done an admirable job. She can't stand them—demagogues able to harness civil fury at so many unmet demands but incapable of proposing any viable alternatives to overcome the concrete problem of the supply of electricity in Rio Fugitivo. "Now globalization is the cause of all our problems. But we have to look back. Before that word entered our vocabularies, we were backward, dependent, exploited neocolonies struggling for a freedom that would never be ours. The discourse has to change so that everything can remain the same."
She has to change direction again. What if she just goes home? No, she doesn't want to see Miguel. She has to admit that there were times when she loved him as she thought one should love. That there were times when he was everything to her. In the beginning, Ruth had dreamed that they would both go to the United States or Europe to get their master's degrees and then not return; they would have a bright future in the strange field of work they had chosen. But Miguel was obsessed, not ambitious. He didn't want to leave Rio Fugitivo, not even to move to La Paz. He had a good job—what more could he want? Without dreams to unite them, their intimacy quickly faded. Love had not entirely run its course when insidious routine took hold. Then, something worse: deception, at least on her part. Their ethical, moral differences.
Why hadn't she divorced him? It would have cost less than so many years of self-deception. Maybe she thought that suddenly everything would change. They were both getting caught up in their work, perhaps as a way to avoid the hellish silence that resulted when they were together. When he wanted to have children, she found excuses to postpone it: she couldn't bring a child into a home without love. As the years went by, Miguel stopped insisting. And yet, owing to a miscalculation, one day she found she was pregnant. That is how Flavia was born. A tepid hope that everything would change. A hope that was soon dispelled.
She stops all of a sudden. She has just realized that if the government militarizes the city, tanks will be posted at the university entrances and they will be closed indefinitely. Soldiers will search offices for proof of conspiracies by professors and students. Her manuscript is in a locked drawer in her office.
"So," Cardona says quietly, "Albert and Turing."
"It's as if you're more interested in them than you are in Montenegro."
"Not exactly. But you have to start somewhere."
She had better go to the university immediately, before it's too
Chapter 15
IHE FIRST FEW MONTHS after leaving home, Kandinsky lived with Phiber Outkast in his disorganized room. A sleeping bag on the tile floor. Notebooks and loose pages covered in scribbles, computer program diskettes and manuals, empty Coke cans and pens on the desk and a chest of drawers, a profusion of cables snaking along the floor, dirty clothes piled in a corner. On the walls, posters of rock groups: Sepultura, Korn. Kurt Cobain and KILL MICROSOFT stickers on the windows. The house is noisy. Phiber Outkast has three teenage sisters who are discovering t
he chaos of hormones, and their parents never seem to stop shouting and cajoling. There is leftover food in all the rooms; forks and knives are never returned to their rightful place and stubbornly remain on furniture buried in dust.
At times he misses the mood, the atmosphere of his house. He used to live in an Italian neorealist film; now he is in the middle of a frenetic cartoon, more anime than Disney. But Phiber's computers make up for it all: PCs with enough memory and speed to make Phiber the envy of his friends. He assembled them himself, having stolen the pieces bit by bit from a computer repair shop where he worked for a few years. Both of them take their lunch and dinner to the room, close the door, and, trying to isolate themselves from the surrounding noise with headphones, sit in front of their monitors until the morning light shines in through the windows. They sleep fitfully throughout the morning.
They are chatroom fanatics, constantly changing identities. Names pile up in their wake. At times they wind up so lost in their own labyrinth that they find themselves chatting to each other without realizing it—one pretending to be Ze Roberto, a retired firefighter in Curitiba, the other Tiffany Teets, a fifteen-year-old in search of kinky sex. In between, there is always time for online games, above all MUDs, or multiple user domains, where they assume roles in laborious medieval or futuristic fantasies.
Their activity takes on a more serious tone in the middle of the night. They begin to look for victims to hack. Their targets are common citizens: Phiber thinks that is the best way to practice until the time comes for more ambitious attacks. Kandinsky has gone along with him but no longer entirely agrees. A hacker's ethic is that governments and large corporations are fair game but that civilians should be left alone. Still, he says nothing, feeling uncomfortable, and does what his colleague tells him to do.
During their long nights together it becomes clear to Kandinsky that Phiber will never be anything more than a script kiddie. Faithfully following the instructions for programs downloaded from sites like attrition.org, he is like any adolescent orchestrating a DoS attack against the mayor's office. It is small-potatoes hacking, and cheesy. Kandinsky, in contrast, uses the programs he finds as a starting point. Reworking their basic code, adding and extending, he makes them more malleable, efficient, powerful.
Phiber watches Kandinsky work with a mixture of pride, envy, and jealousy. He feels as if he is back in kindergarten at the Centro Boliviano Americano, where from the sidelines, his fists clenched, he would watch the other children easily absorb the rules of the game the teacher had prepared or start to stammer out their numbers and colors. All of a sudden he would run up behind one of them and start punching, as if trying to steal the secret ease with which that child could name the world. It is difficult for him to live with someone who makes him feel inferior. Right now he needs Kandinsky, but he knows that separation is inevitable.
Their first big triumph: accessing the Citibank database in Buenos Aires and leaving with several credit card numbers and their respective passwords. On IRC, Phiber Outkast contacts a Russian hacker to whom he sells the credit card numbers. The money is paid by means of a transfer to the Western Union branch in Santa Cruz. Phiber Outkast travels there by bus and uses a fake ID to collect the money. It is practically impossible for anyone to suspect them, since for the Citibank assault first they took over a computer at the University of Mendoza, and from there they telnetted to a computer in Río de Janeiro, then another in Miami, finally arriving in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, Interpol is on the trail and they need to minimize risks.
Other triumphs will follow. An insurance company in Lima. A Calvin Klein store in Santiago. A car dealership in La Paz. It is not a lot of money each time, but it is adding up, a mountain of earth piled high by diligent ants. Early one Sunday morning, after hours of work, Kandinsky accesses the server of a Canadian virtual casino and for ninety minutes manages to make every roll of the dice in crap come up pairs and every pull of the virtual slots produce three cherries. During that time, no one in the casino loses. Kandinsky wins $110,000. An investigation by CryptoLogic, the company in charge of the casino's software, establishes that a hacker was behind the uninterrupted wins but is unable to establish his identity. The casino pays all the winners.
With his money, Phiber Outkast decides to open a company dedicated to computer system security. "What better façade?" he says enthusiastically. "They'll think we're protecting them when really we're doing the opposite." Kandinsky consents. He is still thrilled by his entry into the casino. For the first time he is proud of his accomplishments and is overcome by the power he possesses. Only now does he recognize his self-worth. His talent is so natural that he has had little time to reflect on it, to realize the magnitude of his gift. In religion classes at school, the priest would tirelessly recite the parable regarding talents: each one of us would be judged for the way in which we had allowed what we had been given to flourish. Kandinsky thinks he can live with that kind of final judgment hanging over his head.
Up until now, he has agreed with all of Phiber's plans. He owes him: Phiber has fed and housed him during a difficult time. But he feels ever more distant from him. Phiber's only objective seems to be monetary. Kandinsky is drawn to fooling the security systems of large corporations and the government, but he does not think that the end should be solely financial. He wants to do something else with his life, but the question remains: what?
The name of the company is FireWall. They have rented office space on the seventh floor of the Twenty-First-Century Towers. Their logo is at the entrance: a hand shielding a computer from a large blaze. Kandinsky and Phiber offer their services to the Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Not many are interested. In some cases the excuse is the recession; in most other cases the reason is that few companies in Bolivia have realized the importance of having a secure computer network. A company's bank account numbers, its commercial strategies, the information on its sales plans, its profits and losses: all of it is on hard disk drives protected by passwords that an average hacker could easily crack.
Kandinsky is disheartened. At one time he thought that this might be a legal job he could like. Phiber Outkast asks him not to forget the goals they have set. This is only a façade.
"What goals?" Kandinsky asks. "To get rich?"
"Having cash will give us the freedom to do whatever we want."
Phiber tries to calm him down; it is not in his best interests to lose Kandinsky now. Kandinsky washes his hands of the whole affair and goes to an Internet café to play online games. At the entrance is a sign announcing the imminent arrival of Global Playground in Bolivia (Live a parallel life for a modest monthly sum!). Kandinsky wonders what the hell that might be.
All the while, Kandinsky entertains himself by studying the bodies of Phiber Outkast's sisters. Laura is fifteen and has brown hair that falls over her forehead; her breasts are round and firm. Daniela is fourteen and has blond hair cut very short; her long legs and agility have made her a fearsome beach volleyball player. Gisela, her twin sister, has black hair with bangs cut by epileptic scissors; she discovered makeup a few months ago and plasters her eyelids as if it were her patriotic duty to do so. The family is from Sucre and the three girls spend summer vacations there, where they are known as "the grapes of Sucre" because of their different hair colors. Kandinsky does not like speaking to them; they are haughty, and he is afraid of rejection. And so he imagines: Laura thinks that kissing means using her tongue as if it were a snake on the attack and exchanging saliva by the gallon; Daniela strokes Kandinsky's member, laughing mischievously, like a little girl carrying out some naughty plan that she has been hatching for a long while; Gisela lets him touch her in exchange for a blood friendship pact at sunset.
Kandinsky buys the latest Nokia, silver keys on a shiny black background. One afternoon he approaches his parents' house and watches from the sidewalk outside. His dad is on the patio, fixing a bicycle.
Kandinsky approaches with determined steps and, before his dad can process wha
t has happened, hands him an envelope of money and disappears.
Walking back to Phiber Outkast's house, he finds himself looking at the jagged mountains on the horizon, the diffuse violet light of sunset. He is searching for a cause that will allow him to better himself, one that will allow him to transcend. In 1999, his attention had been held by the enormous protests by anti-globalization groups against the WTO in Seattle. Young people from the West were protesting against the new world order in which capitalism was the only option. If there was discontent in industrialized nations, the situation was even worse in Latin America. The recession had taken hold of the country. Montenegro continued to privatize companies that were strategic for national development; he had announced, for example, the bid for the power company in Río Fugitivo. Bolivia had followed the neoliberal model for about fifteen years and had done nothing other than make the economic inequality more pronounced. A straight line connected the closing of the mines and his dad's forced relocation with the protests against globalization.
Perhaps that is the cause he is looking for.
He feels bad for having bought the Nokia and throws it in the garbage.
When he arrives and goes into the room he shares with Phiber, he realizes how stupid that was. Despite the fact that the computers sitting on the desk were assembled locally, were they not also a product of the same corporations he wanted to fight?
Turing's Delirium Page 11
