The Gomorrah Gambit

by Tom Chatfield

  Azi can hear seconds passing as he stares at her, chewing his bottom lip like someone about to take a chance on a stranger.

  “Do you have your passport?”

  She nods, gesturing to her bag.

  “And nobody knows you’re in London?”

  “They can’t. The content of our messages was secure, right? If the people who got to you were watching me, I’d be long dead. I don’t think they know my face or my real name. You?”

  “Sensible to assume they know too much for comfort. But I’ve got nothing on me they can track, I left nothing behind they can use, and it’s not easy to watch airports unless you’re, you know, police or government. I’m going, right now. A favor, from a very old friend. If I vouch for you, if I say you’re with me, he should be able to sort us both out…so you need to decide, fast.”

  She nods quickly, looking into his eyes again as if she remembers losing something there. Until this point, Azi realizes, he hasn’t genuinely believed in the sequence of events he went through again and again in his kitchen. This doesn’t happen in real life, to two strangers, to smart people with homes and ideas and knowhow. Unless those same smart people discover that their choices have been outsourced.

  “It’s not just about my cousins, you know,” Munira continues after a pause. “They were the reason I started to look into things. The two that flew off to Turkey, we’re all better off without them. But what I found…you’ve seen a few of the files, but there’s so much more. Whatever you think it is, it’s worse.”

  Azi stops outside a chemist.

  “Do you want to go in there and grab a toothbrush or whatever? Meet out here in five minutes and then we need to get on a train. We’ll have time to talk later.”

  “I can come? Will that be okay with your friend?” She looks at him with wide eyes that make him even more determined to get it over with.

  “Yeah. I figure I owe you, and at least this way we can pool resources. I can contact him, while we’re on the train. Go. Hurry.”

  As she walks away he pulls out the phone he was given before leaving home and types a message: Done.

  They’re going to Berlin.

  Seven

  Since its birth on America’s Western frontier, hacker culture has dreamed of gun-slingers and justice: of heroes and villains at war over manifest destiny. In other words, it has always been riddled with self-delusion.

  White Hats are the goodies. They’re career researchers in the security business, handsomely paid when they find vulnerabilities in software and let the vendors of said software know. Perhaps you’ve spotted a way to bypass the authentication process on an airline website? They’ll offer you a few hundred thousand air miles for the info. Maybe you cracked a messaging app’s allegedly impassable crypto? You need some serious skills to pull this off—but then you’re closer to half a million dollars. Assuming, of course, you were officially authorized to conduct your hack in the first place—and that you tell the app’s creators rather than seeing what the criminal fraternity can come up with.

  If you head towards the criminal fraternity, that’s when you need to put on your Black Hat. Selling what you know means you’re a bad guy too, outside the law and likely to find a bounty on your head. If you’re lucky, it’ll be years before any evidence of your crimes comes to light. If you’re careful, you’ll already have half a dozen new exploits ready to roll. For every loophole that closes, another dozen open. Somewhere in the rear-view mirror, almost out of sight, governments legislate for the last decade’s abuses, creating further opportunities as they do. It’s almost as if they want everything that everyone does online to be insecure by design.

  Then, like in all the best movies, there’s the bit in between: the zone of human interest. People who don’t fit into either camp are called Gray Hats, and they sell some of the twenty-first century’s most powerful secrets to governments and corporations alike: one-time backdoors into systems the world thinks are secure; snooping techniques even the spooks haven’t heard of; malware able to spread and lurk for years, waiting for the signal; vulnerabilities deep in the software of satellites.

  Azi has spent the last decade on the pale side of this gray zone—but he has also become increasingly unhappy with the whole hackers and hats thing. The hacker vibe is so naff, so retro-cyberpunk, complete with 1990s movie references: Jonny Lee Miller hacking the Gibson and Angelina Jolie’s pixie haircut. He has come to consider himself as something else: a connoisseur of biases, blind spots, delusions, illusions, confusions, bewilderments, aversions and longings; the moments of weakness and madness; the overlooked and the understudied; the groupthink and the solecism; the fact that very few people are still concentrating when they get to the end of lists like this.

  That’s what he thought yesterday, anyway: back when he was the one in control. Now, everything he thought he knew is gliding into memory. Hunched wordless opposite a beautiful stranger on the Gatwick Express, Azi can feel his past coming unanchored. Living a lie is one thing—but he has no idea what to do with his own sunken truths.

  Once upon a time, Azi wanted to be a hacker with all the desperate energy in his teenage body, because that was what escaping his 1990s meant. Empty teenage years in London’s hollow rim. East Croydon Station, a creeping blot of concrete and steel. Ducking past street corners where his peers gathered for aimless hours, eking out McDonald’s meals, cheap booze and cigarettes. The cavernous IKEA where he worked warehouse shifts on weekends and holidays, which had opened to fanfare in 1994, looming like a yellow-blue demigod over the ugliest road in southern England.

  This was where he began to build his elsewhere: a screen and a modem his route to somewhere apart, to a place his mother’s questions about school couldn’t reach. A copy of Snow Crash on the floor beside his bed, a photocopy of the Hacker Bible in German, crudely translated using a stolen school dictionary. “Chaos Computer Club,” it said on the cover. It became his motto, together with those opening lines that snaked through a maze of circuitry: “A path can always be found out of even the most oppressive or addictive predicament.”

  Azi remembers all this like it was yesterday because, until today, he still lived in the same house and worked from the same shed that, aged thirteen, he ineptly patched up, hammering roofing felt in bent layers while trying not to fall off a kitchen chair, not knowing he should have stripped the old roof’s greasy remnants first.

  It was dry inside—just—but a fungal smell clung to the chipboard for years. The interior was dimly lit and cramped, half-filled by an ex-display MALM desk on whose underside some bored child had scrawled a stick figure massacre. Azi squeezed two folding chairs, a side table and that ancient standard lamp into what remained of the floor area, then squeezed himself into two jumpers and a pair of fingerless gloves to keep the chill air at bay. Plus he felt more like a hacker in fingerless gloves.

  None of it mattered. This was where it all began, with a white snake of telephone cable slung along the fence all the way from the kitchen socket to a hole in the shed wall, through which it slithered into the rear of a 14.4 kilobits US Robotics Sportster Faxmodem. Along that cable came the entire world—extremely slowly, when his mum wasn’t using the phone. It was everything that his other (and more practical) early digital bible, The UK Internet Book, had promised—alongside the warning that, the internet being what it was, it wouldn’t be long until he upset someone.

  It took Azi just under a week.

  “Mate? Did you hear about the American bloke who hacked his telephone by whistling at it?”

  This was Azi’s best friend, Ad, staying over after school one dismal Friday in December 1994 to behold The Shed for the first time. Ad—pale as paper, long limbs unblemished by fat or muscle—leant back as far as wooden walls and his IKEA chair would permit, striking a pose of studied indolence. Azi—brown-skinned, compact, fourteen years young and still awaiting his growth spurt—nodded and grinned.

  Ad’s dad was as enigmatically absent as Azi’s, but his mu
m did something important with teams at Microsoft, meaning Ad had owned an IBM PC with a 486 processor while Azi was still making do with the school’s battered BBC Micros. Now that Ad had a spanking new Pentium PC at home, his old 486 had taken pride of place in Azi’s shed together with the all-important modem. It was a new beginning.

  When it came to computers, Ad’s status in Azi’s life was close to divine: a creature touched by proximity to the future. Azi was his disciple, and this revelation about phreaking out telephones was the most important thing Azi had ever heard. As Azi finished nodding, he sensed that Ad’s wisdom demanded a more formal verbal cue.

  “How, Ad? What did he do?”

  “You won’t believe it, right, but he whistled down the phone line using some toy whistle he found in a packet of biscuits or something, and that note tripped the switches or something, right, and then he could make free calls, as many calls as he liked, to anywhere.”

  “To anywhere?”

  “Yeah. And this was ages ago, before we were born, but…you know those noises a modem makes, when it’s dialing?”

  “Yeah, mine is set to V.32bis modulation with the local echo on, keeping the serial port at fixed settings, sending CD on connection, variable link speed negotiation. The Demon package seems great, so I reckon I’ll have enough bandwidth for the web and everything.”

  Azi had been practicing this in his head all day. It was important that Ad knew that he knew it—that Azi was more than a dumb apprentice. He always got better marks than Ad at school, and computers were surely the same. You put in enough hours and, eventually, you knew more than anyone else.

  “Right, so it’s talking to the computer at the other end, and just like people in America who worked out you could whistle the right noise and use it to fool the phone system, I have something that can kind of do something even better, like, you know, in WarGames?”

  Azi knew. They both knew everything that happened in WarGames, because they had watched Ad’s VHS copy of the classic 1983 movie about two dozen times in the last six months. Azi stayed at Ad’s house at least once a week, and Ad’s mum didn’t care how late they went to sleep, or what they watched on the TV in his bedroom.

  The luxury of this felt almost obscene to Azi, alongside Ad’s unkempt long garden and brand-new kitchen-diner. Over and over, they watched Matthew Broderick hack his way into a video game called Global Thermonuclear War, discover that it was in fact a real military missile system and then save the world by teaching the system the concept of mutually assured destruction. It was glorious, even if his and Ad’s gleeful count of technical errors had reached double figures (you would never be able to login to a system like NORAD without both a username and a password, they liked to mutter).

  “So you know in WarGames, at the start, right,” Ad continued, “when he’s dialing up all those numbers looking for a machine to hack? Well, thing is, I’ve got something that can do that on this.” Ad let the magnitude of what he was saying sink in for a moment, then produced a floppy disk from deep in his khaki jacket’s pockets with a flourish. TONELOC.EXE was written in extremely neat felt pen on its white label—because Ad’s determined diffidence did not extend to his handwriting. He slipped the disk into the computer.

  “No way.”

  “Way. It’s a war dialer, that’s what you call it, after the movie, right…and we can use it to keep on dialing up other computers until we find something we can talk to, and try to break into.”

  “Like Matthew Broderick.”

  Ad nodded.

  “And, but, are we allowed to do it? I mean, what if we get caught?”

  “Azi, trust me. Only a lamer gets caught. Are we lamers?”

  “Nah. No way.”

  “So we’re good, right, we’re good. Let’s play a game.”

  “What’s the primary goal?”

  “Same as always, Professor Azi. To win.”

  And it worked. One nervous installation later, the computer was dialing numbers in automated sequence, the modem’s buzz and hum populating a log file of failed and promising attempts. They watched in awe. Azi had never experienced anything like it. He was in a tiny, filthy shed in Croydon, yet he was also reaching out to household after household, mapping the invisible lines that linked them all.

  Like a spider at the heart of its web, he watched and waited while the machine worked through the local phones they had specified. Ad sipped Um Bongo and glossed the war dialer’s findings in a whisper: dozens of dead ends in the form of lines with no modem, but also some systems that talked back, that could perhaps be fooled, hijacked, twitched into action.

  This was interrupted when Azi’s mum called them in for tea, serving the sausages and waffles that Azi insisted such an occasion demanded. She was just asking them what they had got up to at school when the phone calls began.

  It was his mum who picked up the first call, told the caller it must be a mistake and put the phone down. The second call came a minute later and, bewildered, she went through the same operation. Two minutes later, the phone rang again—and this time Azi leapt to answer it. You rang me, an old man’s voice bleated, I rang back and there was just this noise—are you selling something? Are you recording this? Is it about my TV license?

  “It’s just a mistake,” Azi replied, a heavy mass lodged in his stomach as he realized the scale of their error.

  They had made the calls from his mum’s landline. They had told the computer to work through a block of local numbers, and to hang up if a human rather than a modem answered. Now, once the modem was offline, people were ringing back, because this was the 1990s in South London, not California in 1983. The war dialer had gone through over two hundred numbers in the last few hours. That was, what—twenty people if even one in ten knew how to call back?

  Azi’s mind reeled. Ad had become fascinated by his last sausage, transfixing it with a downturned gaze as he cut it into smaller and smaller pieces. The phone rang again, and Azi’s mum gave them both a long look. The few members of his mum’s family he had met went rapidly from loud to ear-splitting when they were angry—but not her. She became quieter, more intense, like she was folding in on her feelings. She got sad, and he hated that.

  “You done this, Azi? You done something on that computer?”

  “Yes, Mum. By accident though!”

  “Something bad? Police?”

  “No, Mum. We just tried something, it was stupid, we didn’t even think it would work.”

  “People going to be ringing my phone all night?”

  “No. Or yes. Maybe?”

  “I’m tired, Azi. I’m out of the house before you wake. You answer the phone, you fix things up. This never happens again. You slow down, you do things right. You’re a good boy. Whatever you do, I never want people calling our house—never. Do you understand this?”

  “This is it, I promise. I’ll never do it again.”

  At this, half a smile crept along her face.

  “Never get caught again, you mean.”

  “Okay, Mum.”

  They ate their final sausages in silence, interrupted every five minutes by another call for Azi to field. It was his first taste of hacking and, he later realized, the best lesson he could have learned. Never leave a trail. You’re not a predator reeling in prey. You’re a nobody: a ghost in someone else’s machine.

  Eight

  Berlin swelters in its summer, the riverside a throng of young and old. Pedestrians snake in both directions, while others watch from deckchairs or scattered tables. It’s a picture of plurality; of multiculturalism and democratic success. A postcard from a future inconceivable only half a century ago.

  Deep inside his dark clothing Azi is sweating. He has spent too much life indoors for this kind of heat. Beside him, Munira walks with the efficiency of someone accustomed to heatwaves. Like the locals, she is dressed practically, which means as little clothing as possible: shorts, flip-flops, olive green T-shirt, a tattoo in the shape of a small star winking from the inside of h
er left wrist. Without a headscarf—she claims only to wear them when placating family members or meeting secretive strangers—her dark hair tumbles past her shoulders, bouncingly immodest. It’s a good look.

  Azi squints into the sun and tries to go with the flow, admiring the endless procession of museums and concert halls, churches and government buildings, talking into the air.

  “I’m not made for meatspace, Munira. The whole walking and talking in the sunshine thing. The sooner they put my brain in a jar and hook it up to a machine, the better.”

  “Meatspace? Wow. You just went ahead and said that out loud, like it’s a real thing that normal humans might say.”

  “Ha. I regret to inform you that I know someone who says it regularly.”

  She grins at him. “Let me guess. Old friend? Sidekick? Nemesis?”

  “Something like the first two. Maybe leaning more towards the latter these days. We haven’t spoken in a while. We used to spend a lot of time on computers together, before it was cool.”

  “You’re so old. So pre-millennial! This off-grid low-tech thing we’re doing, it’s messing with my mind. But this is how you grew up, isn’t it? Nothing but meatspace as far as the eye can see.”

  Azi holds his hands up. “You win, it’s a terrible word. Fancy searching for an internet café?”

  “Yeah, because those places still exist. With public computers and Windows 98.”

  “I get it. I’m basically your grandfather.”

  “Not mine, you’re not. Horrible old man. Used to hit my dad with lengths of rubber pipe.”

  So much of what Munira says—good or bad, bold or sad—is thrown out like a punchline. Azi has never met anyone else quite like her. She is lively and quick-witted: utterly transformed from the woman he met on that station concourse.

  Skin-crawling paranoia and presentiments of unspecified disaster had pursued them through Gatwick. They shopped and drank coffee and smiled wildly at strangers, boarded their flight at the end of an overlit wasteland of corridors, read and reread in-flight magazines in silence, then queued for an hour so they might emerge into the ancient eyesore of Schönefeld Airport. They departed and they arrived. That in itself is a victory.