by Jon Evans
Keiran and Danielle look at one another. There is nowhere left to run. Keiran is coldly certain they will shoot if they need to. Slowly, they interlace their hands behind their head and proceed to the wall next to the elevator. The fat man and hawk-faced man are behind them, approaching, handcuffs jingling in their hands, when five miles south of them, in Scattergood Power Station on Manhattan Beach, a false alarm triggers an emergency shutdown, and all Santa Monica blacks out.
* * *
Jayalitha, Danielle, and Keiran, who have spent the last minute praying for exactly this eventuality, react first, sprint along the wall to the stairs during the few seconds it takes their pursuers to react to the shock of blindness. That is all the head start they need. Their non-uniformed pursuers do not have flashlights, and the darkness in the garage is total. Keiran somehow manages to take the stairs in the darkness at a dead sprint, three at a time, without falling. Once at ground level, they can see a little; the major streets are eerily illuminated by car headlights. The city’s darkness is powerfully unnatural. It feels as if they are at a midnight auto rally in a desert ghost town.
“This way,” Danielle says, and leads them north. They pelt across Wilshire Boulevard into a residential zone that has so little vehicle traffic at this hour it is almost entirely blacked out. They zigzag for several more blocks before stopping, all of them panting with exhaustion.
“This won’t last long,” Keiran warns. “They’ve seen how we look now, they’ll call the Santa Monica cops on us. We need to get out. Or hide somewhere until the lights go on and Mulligan can get the car and pick us up.”
“Hide,” Danielle says. “Shit. I don’t know this area too well.”
“The beach is near,” Jayalitha says.
Danielle smiles thinly. “Yes. Getting to be a habit. We can even try last night’s trick again if we have to.”
But thankfully that isn’t necessary. Ten minutes after the city lights re-ignite, Mulligan picks them up by the Santa Monica Pier and drives them north through Pacific Palisades to Sunset Boulevard.
“Oh, crap,” Mulligan says, when they are heading east on Sunset.
“What?”
“Don’t look around, but there’s a cop behind us.”
Keiran swallows. He sees the following black-and-white in Mulligan’s side mirror. They drive in complete silence for the next few minutes. Keiran closes his eyes and tries to pretend the silent tension does not exist. Being pulled over would almost be better than this waiting. But Mulligan drives with unusual precision, and their follower eventually veers off onto a different route.
“Jesus fuck,” Mulligan says. His entire body is glistening with sweat. “This is why I don’t leave the house. The real world’s too fucking uncontrollable.”
* * *
Mulligan feels better when they are back safe in his apartment. “Not a bad night,” he says. “Snarfed their phones, tracked their boss, shut down half of LA for twenty minutes, and got away clean. Beats watching TV.”
“We broke LoTek’s Law with that blackout,” Keiran says darkly. “They will look into why it happened.”
“They won’t trace us.”
“The more we use Shazam like that, the more certain it becomes that someone finds out what it can do.”
“You know it’s near its Best Before anyways,” Mulligan says. “Everyone who’s anyone uses BitTorrent now.”
Keiran shrugs. This is true, but he doesn’t want to admit that his secret hacking weapon will soon be obsolete. “I was hoping to wring a couple years out of it yet.”
“Is it possible to eat something?” Jayalitha asks.
“Yeah,” Danielle agrees. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that fear makes you fucking famished.”
Mulligan orders a pizza while Keiran works to trace the phone number they just acquired, and very nearly traded their lives for. It doesn’t take him long; again, it is a Virgin Mobile number, and by now he knows their database as if he built it himself.
“Eureka,” Keiran says. “The phone is anonymous, but it was last used in Las Vegas.”
“Vegas,” Mulligan says meaningfully.
Keiran and Mulligan look at each other.
“BlackHat,” Keiran says, smiling.
“Got to be.”
“We can’t get there. Our ID won’t arrive. I don’t want to go naked.”
“He’ll stay for DefCon,” Mulligan suggests.
“Of course. Yes. Perfect.”
“Explain to us lay women, please,” Danielle says, obviously annoyed by their cryptic conversation. She stands and looks over Keiran’s shoulder, as if the call records displayed there might explain everything.
“We know where he’ll be this weekend,” Mulligan says.
“Where?”
“DefCon,” Keiran says. “World’s biggest hacker convention-slash-party. It’s this coming weekend, in Las Vegas. All the hacking world’s great and good turn up. Except hermits like Mulligan. If P2’s already in Vegas, he’ll certainly stay for DefCon. And I strongly doubt he knows we have his phone number. With only a little luck we can use it to track hiim down.”
“What are we going to do when we catch him?” Danielle asks.
“We will humbly request of him that he shares with us his hacking arsenal, and reveals all of Justice International’s super secret files.”
She gives Keiran an uneasy look. “And what if he says no?”
“He will not say no,” Jayalitha says, her eyes flashing.
“But what – “Danielle begins.
“This is the man who led the Frenchman to my family. Who sent me into exile. Believe me when I tell you, if you bring him to me, he will tell us whatever we need to know.”
After a moment Danielle asks, in a near-whisper, “The Frenchman?”
Jayalitha says, “The man who burned my family in my house was a French soldier. That is all I know. But I will ask this P2 about him as well.”
Danielle turns pale and sits down hard on Mulligan’s couch.
“What?” Jayalitha asks. “Do you know of him?”
“Yes,” Keiran says bleakly. “Laurent.”
* * *
SuperCheap Car Rental, located just a few blocks from LAX, rents elderly cars with tens of thousands of miles on them for cheap monthly rates. Danielle and Jayalitha are visibly nervous as they and Keiran stand in their office and use their brand-new drivers’ licenses and credit cards to rent a car. Keiran is slightly perturbed as well, not from any fear that their ID might fail, but because the proprietors insist on photographing their customers. Although the thousands of tiny photographs that line the office walls do imply that this is not special treatment.
“How can you be sure they don’t track their cars?” Danielle asks as she gets behiind the wheel of their new ride, a battered maroon Toyota Corolla with 75,000 miles on the odometer. “If they find out we’re using fake ID –”
“Simple economics,” Keiran says. “Look at their office. Look at this car. It isn’t worth tracking, and they couldn’t afford it if it was. And our identities are not fake, they’re false. They’re just as good as a real person’s.”
“Would it be possible to arrange a passport?” Jayalitha asks from the back seat.
Keiran shakes his head. “Sorry. My magic is fickle. The passport office is still beyond me.”
Jayalitha nods. “How long is the drive to Las Vegas?”
“Six hours,” Danielle says. “Buckle up. I’m going to do it in five.”
Chapter 34
Danielle has driven from Los Angeles to Vegas several times before, in the Crazy Years, but she is always amazed by the raw isolation of the desert between. Once out of LA – and so sprawling is that city that it takes them ninety minutes to escape it – the only town they pass is Barstow, halfway. Two enormous casinos stand like Scylla and Charybdis at the Nevada border, for those gamblers who can’t be bothered to drive the remaining hour to Vegas. The highway itself is wide and busy, a long s
mooth strand of civilization that occasionally knots itself into little roadside clusters of buildings that provide, as the signs say, GAS FOOD LODGING. But mostly the road traverses a vast trackless wasteland, the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, occupied only by cacti, Joshua trees, rattlesnakes, coyotes, and the occasional desert hermit. Danielle wonders how many lives this pitiless desert swallowed before the age of the automobile. Surely thousands.
Las Vegas would be surreal anywhere. After a five-hour desert drive, their drive up the neon canyon wonderland called the Strip is nearly overwhelming. They pass a pyramid, a compressed New York City, a fantasyland castle, a gigantic green cube, an Eiffel Tower, a Roman coliseum, an erupting volcano, a pirate ship, all of them larger than life. Huge crowds flood the Strip like army ants. Traffic moves slower than pedestrians. The sun is setting as they arrive, but its shine is soon replaced by multicoloured neon that will dazzle the throngs of drivers and pedestrians until dawn. Vegas never sleeps.
“I never imagined a place like this could exist,” Jayalitha says, eyes wide.
“Read the subtext before you get excited,” Keiran warns her. “All hail the great god Mammon. Thou shalt have no other god before me. Sell thy father and thy mother. Covet thy neighbour’s wife and donkey.”
“Don’t be so cynical,” Danielle says. “It’s just a playground. Disneyland for adults.”
“More like a carnival of lost souls. Gambling is just a means of relieving the statistically incompetent of their money. The house always wins.”
DefCon is hosted by the Alexis Park Resort, a large hotel east of the Strip, across from the Hard Rock Café. It is almost unique in Vegas in that it has no gambling, not even slot machines. They originally claimed to be full when Danielle called, but Danielle knows that hotels always keep a few rooms in reserve in case of disaster or a VIP appearance. By the simple expedient of claiming that she was verifying a reservation, rather than arranging a new one, and then flying into feigned outrage when they reported they had no record of her previous booking, she managed to annex a superior suite for a standard price.
The heat hits Danielle like a slap in the face when she gets out of the car. It is night, but it is also July in the desert. It reminds her of India. She hurries into the plush and air-conditioned lobby. The lobby’s ATM machines have already been hacked to display DefCon’s happy-face-and-crossbones logo and cartoon pictures of geeks at computers. She makes a mental note not to use them.
There is a crowd around the check-in desk. Their most common features are thinness, paleness, multicoloured hair, black clothing, tattoos, laptop cases, and a large number of flashy electrical accessories. There are more men than women, but the disparity isn’t as great as Danielle expected, and the men aren’t as social-outcast geeky as Mulligan. It is a subculture of anarchists more than rejects.
She and Jayalitha get the keys, return to parking, and escort Keiran to the room. He wears a black hood that conceals his face; Keiran is well enough known in the hacker community that the odds of being recognized are good, and Danielle is sure a few of his fellow hackers would be rather pleased by the prospect of reporting him to the FBI. As a result, he will have to spend almost all of DefCon in their room, and wear a hood if and when it is necessary for him to emerge.
The Alexis Park occupies nearly a square mile of space. Past the main building on Harmon Street that contains the lobby, restaurant, and conference rooms, a walkway weaves its way through an outdoor common area a hundred feet wide and a quarter-mile long, decorated with swimming pools, palm trees, and fake rocks. The guest rooms are found on either side of this central corridor, in two arrays of long, low, motel-ish buildings. Their perfectly adequate suite is near the third and last swimming pool. Danielle and Jayalitha go out again, to get food from a Subway down the street. By the time they return Keiran has assembled the laptops and other gear loaned by Mulligan: computers, screens, antennae, black boxes, and less comprehensible electronica, all interconnected by a spaghetti chaos of cables. The resulting nexus of computing power looks like the control center for a mid-sized NASA mission.
Danielle watches Keiran and his total immersion in his cyberworld. It is bizarre, and awe-inspiring, and more than a little frightening, that he can do so much, create identities, shut down whole cities, from almost anywhere, with nothing but unparallelled knowledge and a few keystrokes. She wonders if maybe the rise of the Internet, and this resulting age of interconnection, is a global disaster waiting to happen.
“So now we walk around and hope you call P2 when we’re in sight?” Danielle asks.
Keiran frowns. “I like to think the plan is slightly more sophisticated.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
“Again we start with one piece of information. His phone number. Now, when a mobile phone is on, it constantly transmits its location to its network, so it can be informed of call requests. I assume P2 keeps his phone on in case of some Shadbold-related emergency. I’ll hack into the local Sprint network, they’re the Virgin Mobile carrier, and at any given time I should be able to triangulate his location to within about a hundred-foot radius. The same way he found us in that car park. When you two are confident you have a good view of everywhere he might be, I give him a ring. We won’t get more than a couple of chances. Maybe only one before he gets suspicious and switches phones. So don’t fuck up.”
“Your managerial style needs work,” Danielle says.
“Common side effect of misanthropy. It will most likely take me until midnight to own the Sprint network completely and figure out the triangulation. You two should spend that time figuring out the local geography. But watch out. Federal marshals come to DefCon too. Techie types, mostly, but a Russian bloke was arrested here two years ago just for presenting a paper.”
“Great. And you want me to walk around down there, with my picture on the Most Wanted list.”
“Don’t exaggerate. We’re not on the Most Wanted list. Not yet. And you look nothing like that picture any more. Believe me, the federales have plenty to distract them. Just don’t attract attention. If you find anyone called Trurl or Klaupactus, bring them up here, they’re trustworthy, I can use their help. Otherwise just stay quiet and get the lay of the land.”
* * *
The land in question is strange and unforgettable and costs 80 cash dollars to enter. The heart of DefCon is arguably the after-hours events in individual rooms, or the all-night-every-night pool party, but its public face, in the Alexis Park’s convention area, is no less colourful. As Danielle and Jayalitha enter they pass the Wall Of Shame, where the username and passwords of those foolish enough to use unprotected wireless connections anywhere near the hotel are displayed on a huge scrolling screen. In a cavernous room next door, a banner proclaims that the “WarGamez Capture The Flag” hacking contest is in full swing; around it, a dozen teams of hackers hunch over their laptops, typing and talking furiously.
The hallways and meeting rooms are full of people wearing translucent green DefCon badges, their demography white and young, ranging from teens to mid-fifties but skewing heavily towards the former. Dress is mostly casual-decrepitude or counterculture-black over punk hair and tattoos. Hiptops like Keiran’s are present by the dozen. Two camera crews rove around, presumably filming for TV or documentaries. Jayalitha and Danielle make sure to give them a very wide berth.
They pass a talk on “Bluetooth Vulnerabilities”, which Danielle now feels qualified to talk about. A pretty teenage girl is giving out “personal firewalls”, which turn out to be condoms. In the Vendor’s Room, the Jesus Phreakers and the Culture Junkies sell T-shirts and stickers with sayings like “I read your email” and “Norton cannot protect you.” In another room, eight fearsome locks are lined up for a Lockpick Challenge; according to the leaderboard, the record time for picking all eight is less than a minute. Outside, a convoy is a grouping for something called a “Wi-Fi Shootout” that involves lots of vehicles with mounted satellite dishes and people carrying elaborate homemade
shotgun antennas that look disturbingly military. Danielle decides to stay indoors for now, and blend in with the largest crowds.
“You know what I heard?” she hears a teenage voice say. “I heard fuckin’ LoTek was here.” Danielle freezes for a moment, until the voice continues “Someone said they saw him out by the pool with this hot supermodel chick. Like, in your face, FBI.”
“That’s fucking cool,” the acne-scarred kid’s girlfriend says, as they pass by, wearing matching black I SAW YOUR MOM ON THE INTERNET T-shirts. Clearly just an unfounded rumour. If an extremely unhelpful one. Keiran’s hacker-scene living-legend status doesn’t make their life any easier, especially if the feds take that rumour seriously and decide to, say, search the entire hotel.
“Idiots,” she hears another man say after the teenagers have passed, and looks over to see a man of about thirty, with pale skin beneath a thick shock of black hair, talking to a muscular bald man. The speaker’s accent is Eastern European, and he wears an expression of sour anger. “LoTek would not dare show his face here. He is not stupid. The marshals are everywhere, and never mind what they say, they are looking for him, just as they are taking pictures of us all, fingerprints, DNA, to go into their files, which you can be sure they keep offline. Go on, laugh. You think they are not?”
“It would be illegal and inadmissible,” the bald man points out. Danielle notices that he wears a single brass knuckle on his right hand; half-decoration, half-weapon.
“Of course it would. You think the police don’t do illegal things? These are hacker police. They bend the rules just as we do. They circumvent imposed limits. They perform illegal acts to secretly lay the way for their legal investigations. As they should. The rules they work under are stupid. I hope they do catch most of the people here and jail them for life. They would be doing the world a favour. Script kiddies, wannabes, has-beens. Take them away, who is left? Maybe ten of us. I myself will not come next year. DefCon is a useless, pretentious waste.”
