Hagen groaned. “Why would I even care about that?”
“Because they don’t approve of whites who hang out with the blacks or the Latinos. So you’ve even managed to annoy the whites. The guy that pushed you near the staircase is their leader. He’d given you a hint but you failed to get it. So you’d just gotten here and managed to piss everybody off at once. Including our Jimmy.”
Hagen habitually grabbed his head with both his hands. “Fuck, I don’t understand anything. I don’t want to be in a gang, or under a gang’s protection, or join the white supremacists, for God’s sake. I don’t want to be here in the first place.”
Roman chuckled. “As if any of us do.”
They entered their cell. Mike collapsed onto his bunk, placed his palms on his face and his head on the pillow which gave off a faint whiff of disinfectant.
Roman looked at the wall with his porn mag poster. “Hey, what happened to my girlfriend? Has she found another guy?”
“Jim’s taken it,” Hagen mumbled into the pillow. “He also called you a godless bastard.”
Roman looked around and crouched. Then he stood on his knees and rummaged for something underneath his bunk. He reappeared with a porn mag in his hand.
“Old Jimmy is OK. We’ll have to work with him, too. So don’t make him angry.”
Hagen sat up on his bunk and looked at Roman in surprise. “What are you on about?”
Roman leafed through the magazine in search of the centerfold. He pried the staples open gently and pulled the poster out. Then he peeled a piece of cellotape off the back page and used it to stick the centerfold to the wall.
“Look, comrade, this Gonzalo guy is really a puto—he did you a bad turn there. If you weren’t a gang member outside, you have no need to join one here, or look for their protection. If you’ve always been your own man, that’s what you should stay. But there’s a silver lining to it all—you’ve just met all three of our future employers.”
“Come again?”
“Comrade, it’s time for me to tell you why they’ve made you my cellmate.”
Chapter 21. You’ve Gotta Carry that Weight
Hope is what makes us strong. It is why we are here. It’s what we fight with when all else is lost.
God of War 3
ROMAN SCRATCHED his nose and spoke, taking his time working it up to the point,
“As I already told you, there are a few mob kingpins serving their time here. Fino and Ford are merely the most conspicuous ones. But there are much more serious people here, too. There’s a guy who’s the right arm of the Turkish mafia’s boss, and there’s some VIP from Ukraine who’d been selling old Soviet weapons to African countries. They’d locked him up before his own country experienced a need for weapons. I even know a big shot who sells smack via hot dog vendors. The owners of the hot dog joints love doing it so much they’d stopped caring about their alleged primary business altogether. That’s how one of the joints went belly-up—an inspection found unnatural additives in their hot dogs.”
“Such as insect fragments, perhaps?”
“Yeah, something of the sort. Then the public health inspector found a huge pack of heroin underneath their dishwasher. Basically, there are people doing time here who’d set up shady businesses that are still running. And they’d like to stay on top of things.”
Roman rose from his bunk and peeked out into the corridor. Having made sure no one was overhearing, he lowered his voice,
“They usually send instructions during visits, through friends or relatives. Apart from that, inmates who make the impression of being trustworthy and wishing to reform, have limited email access. The emails are checked meticulously, of course, so they have to think of how to use cypher in such a way that the corrections officers don’t spot it. The most desperate way of getting in touch with the outside is to get a mobile phone and call directly. But everyone’s real uneasy about using it.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s considered a serious violation of prison rules. In general, if they find you in possession of a cellphone, you’re likely to get an extra two or three years. There was a time when they’d operate with third party help—inmates who’d agree to look after phones for a price, the real owners being the bigwigs who didn’t want to serve any extra time. But one of those middlemen spilled the beans once, and ratted out everyone who’d ever used the phone. He also gave them all the data about the numbers dialed and the text messages sent. No one has trusted any intermediaries since then. And no one will, until they manage to solve the issue of keeping certain fellow inmates from knowing too much.”
Hagen shrugged. “Sure, this is all pretty interesting. But what’ve I got to do with it?”
“Nothing so far. I’ve been considering my own situation for the most part. Just think of the market that opens itself up to you. There are dozens of mob kingpins desperately wishing to contact their buddies on the outside. They lose reputation, territory they control, and, most importantly, money. And we’re talking serious money here.”
Roman stopped talking and jumped onto the bed, pretending to be resting. The guard walked past the door. He eyed Hagen’s smashed nose with suspicion. His glance slid over Roman; then he ambled off.
“It will do you good to learn the guards’ habits. Mark the time. They pass our cell once each twenty minutes. So, in theory, we have twenty minutes to do whatever we want without any risk of being noticed.”
“Why would I want to know that?”
“If someone wanted to stick a shiv between your ribs, this would be the best time for it.”
Hagen gulped loudly. “Why would anybody want to...”
“Prison is an unpredictable place. Everyone’s worked up here. Someone might simply take offense at how you look at him during lunch.”
Hagen shuddered as he recollected the guy from the canteen who’d been gorging himself so fast you couldn’t help watching him.
“Anyway, comrade, don’t you fret. I’m not trying to scare you. All I’m doing is warning you. That’s the kind of information you’ll need to be ready for the kind of stuff we’re going to get into.”
“What exactly would that be?”
Roman jumped off his bed, crouched, and produced a black cardboard box from underneath his bed. He opened it and called Hagen over.
“Take a look at this.”
The box was half-filled with computer parts—an old hard drive, a laptop cooler, some cables, and network cards that had already been obsolete when Hagen was a pre-teen. The box reminded him of its counterparts at DigiMart—Hagen would use them for storing old parts salvaged from dismantled computers.
As Hagen was rummaging through the parts, Roman continued,
“I’m actually a programmer. You might call me a hacker—that’s why they’ve locked me up. But I’ve left some unfinished business outside. For example, I have a bunch of hacked bank accounts—I charge them small sums in a way the owners don’t notice. A dollar each would bring me about ten thousand a month. And I have other things going for me, too, such as cryptocurrencies. I’ve been into them for years, studying the market and building up my stash. Imagine this—once their value soared, I found myself locked up. I am technically a millionaire. But, in practice, I am a nobody. I can’t do any work without Internet access.”
Hagen took a motherboard and a processor out of the box. “These aren’t compatible.”
“Cool, Mikey. I already like you. So, you get it, then. I want to set up an independent server, as robust as possible, that will give anyone interested an opportunity to communicate with their contacts outside. And that’s gonna cost them. A lot.”
“I don’t know why you want a robust server and not an easier arrangement.”
Roman closed the box and shoved it underneath his bunk.
“It’s a question of my personal needs, really. When I shared my startup concept with the local kingpins, they all supported it. These parts are all we could scare up here. You wouldn’t believe the k
ind of stuff that gets smuggled in here sometimes. However, you probably understand that I can’t use these parts to assemble a computer. Even if the processor did fit the motherboard. I’m not really a hardware guy. Back in the early cryptocurrency days, I had a partner who’d built a mining farm. However, they locked him up, too.”
Hagen shrugged. “I wouldn’t be able to use any of this old crap, either.”
“But you would be able to do it if you had the right parts, wouldn’t you? That would be your job—as well as finding out how and where you could place it to be able to connect to the prison network. When Gonzalo asked his bros to look after you, their first question was about your background. So he’s told them you were a boxer with a day job as a computer repairman. Most importantly, Gonzalo’s managed to assure them that you are no snitch. So the bosses engaged all of their outside contacts. Bribery and threats on their part resulted in you ending up as my cellmate. It was actually funny to see them cooperate, forgetting all about their prejudice and their gang relations. The wish to stick it to the penitentiary system can be a mighty valid cause for combining efforts. So, it’s up to you now, comrade.”
“It’s easy enough, but the parts...”
Roman produced a sheet of paper from underneath his mattress.
“This is the approximate map of the networks. You’ll have to sketch a list of necessary equipment. Also, bear in mind that really large parts would be impossible to smuggle in. You wouldn’t want to know how some of the stuff gets smuggled in. Thus, the server needs to be robust, and have a lot of storage space. At the same time, it has to be small and noiseless. Apart from that, we’d need to place several access points in a few places so that our clients would be able to access our hidden Wi-Fi network from their cells.”
Hagen examined the sheet of paper. “But how do you intend to hook it up to the prison network? I mean, they have passwords and security measures.”
“Comrade, leave that to me. I just need a computer. Everything else is for me to worry about. So, are you in? I have to tell you that a refusal would be tantamount to a death sentence. A shiv when you least expect it; Mark Borkowski, the prison hack; the morgue, and that’s that. On the other hand, if you agree, no one will dare to touch you here. Apart from the guards, that is.”
“But what if we get caught?”
“If we get caught, forget about two years. You’ll serve ten at least.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Think about whether you’d like to survive? Of course, comrade. Just don’t think too long. Inmates learn to be patient, but we don’t have the time for that. Gangsters are an unsophisticated bunch. They think that if you’re an ‘IT guy,’ you’ll be able to ‘get them on the Interwebs’ even with parts as crappy as these. They don’t understand the different sockets of RAM module types.”
Hagen lay down on the bunk and closed his eyes. The quest window had already been in front of his eyes for a while.
Life or Death
Survive and get out of prison early.
“Dem?” Hagen asked soundlessly. “Why is this quest so unusual? They are mostly related to fighting, after all.”
“Any conflict, any fight, any bout, any altercation, all of that. You need your fighting spirit to address every one of those issues. Your goal isn’t just to get out alive. It’s to get out a winner, too.”
“A winner over whom?”
“Man. A winner over yourself, as always. You gotta carry that weight.”
“A weight’s a weight,” Hagen sighed.
He called up his stats before falling asleep. He’d had four undistributed XP points and two ability points since his bout against Hilton “Clerk” Desmars.
Hagen felt silly about having forgotten about this treasure for the course of the litigation process. On the other hand, it was a good job he hadn’t wasted those points. Otherwise he’d dumped them all into Charisma to impress April by becoming a parody of Sylas aka Ken. How naive could one be?
+1 to Strength, Agility, Stamina, and Intellect
He’d really have liked to boost his Luck stat but, judging by his fight with Lorenzo, it would make more sense to invest those points into the characteristics that would have a more immediate effect. He’d hardly manage to get so lucky that Lorenzo aka Brix would get a stroke the next time they would fight each other, as Demetrious had promised once.
Hagen invested his ability points into Punch and Kick. Those were the ones he’d need the most to survive.
He admired his stats before going to bed:
Mike Björnstad Hagen
Age: 29
Level: 7
HP: 12,000
Battles/victories: 13/11
Weight: 145 lbs
Height: 5’ 4”.
Current status: Inmate
Punch: Level 9
Damage: 17,100
Kick: Level 5
Damage: 3,500
So he wasn’t nicknamed “Crybaby” anymore. He had a vague memory of his mother telling him that Björnstad stood for something like “bear” in one of the Scandinavian languages.
* * *
ROMAN KAMENEV had committed his first cybercrime in Russia at the tender age of twelve. There was a rumor among his classmates about their Russian literature teacher being a pedophile. Roman promised them he’d root the old man’s home PC and find evidence.
He then took advantage of the fact that the teacher had always been kind to boys and exchanged video games with them. He gave the teacher a USB drive with a self-executing Trojan that would let him access any computer where the application would automatically install itself.
It had turned out that the teacher didn’t watch any child porn, after all. However, Roman became obsessed with the idea of getting access to someone’s computer or telephone and then observe that person as if he was standing behind their shoulder. Roman watched his teacher browse all sorts of sites, talk to his friends and acquaintances on social networks, torrent movies and series, and leave comments on politics-related sites under a sock account as he’d waited for them to download.
That was when Roman realized his greatest ambition was to find out other people’s secrets.
Given that his parents had lacked familiarity with IT, he started spending every waking hour studying the kind of resources that interested him. By the age of fifteen he had broken enough laws to end up behind bars. He may have gotten his just desserts if his parents hadn’t emigrated to the USA when he was fourteen.
Roman kept on working on his skills. He had totally missed the moments when his hacking activities started to feel evil. Like every other idealist, he’d followed the Hacker Manifesto—fighting the system by cracking and defacing the sites of governmental organizations.
The young hacker didn’t think of the fact that someone had already hacked his mind to implant a choice of a country in his crusade, making him see different governments as good or evil. Once he grew up a bit, he’d realized all of them were evil in one way or another.
His conclusion was that he’d have to look after himself first and not any mythical idea of justice that had obsessed him when he was defacing the web page of a Libyan hospital with a caricature of Mohammed.
Since then, Roman had cared more about what would be lucrative rather than what he might have perceived as right. By the age of twenty-two he had already gathered a group of hackers around him—one that included people from all across the world. They would accept any offer, caring little for whom their target might be—Greenpeace or an Instagram account used for recruiting volunteers for ISIS.
One wouldn’t need to be a psychic to predict what would happen next. The authorities tracked him down and put him behind bars. He’d been a star in the hacker community for a while as he’d pleaded guilty of every charge without ratting out any of his friends. He hadn’t even expected that he would behave so nobly. That cost him three extra years.
The funniest thing was that the press had dubbed him head of a Russian hacker group,
even though he’d been the only Russian among them. He’d identified himself as an American, anyway—his mother and father had come to the US to have him born there, and he’d been a citizen for a long time.
For the course of the first two years, Roman would often be taken from one prison to another due to some incomprehensible security code provision. Eventually, he realized that the reason had been to prevent him from getting used to the routine and forming contacts with the inmates. They must have actually suspected him of working for the KGB. Eventually, they’d lost interest in him, having left him in this prison, a long way away from his native San Diego.
And this was the first time in two years that he’d been given the opportunity of going back to his favorite pastime—hacking “the system” and making money.
He only wished for this weird Mike Hagen guy to turn out as good as his word.
ROMAN WOKE in the morning. His cellmate had been huffing and puffing on the floor, whispering, “Fifty-five... fifty-six...”
“Comrade... What on earth are you doing?” Roman asked with a yawn.
“I’m doing push-ups. Training.”
“Do you really have to do it at night?”
“It’s almost six in the morning.”
Roman yawned again. “Actually, once they’d given the ‘Lights out’ command, you’re no longer allowed to walk around the cell or do anything other than use the toilet.”
Hagen didn’t answer. He rose and started to punch the air, occasionally kicking it, too.
Roman had intended to ask Hagen about his decision and whether he’d be able to count on him in what concerned the assembly and the installation of the server. However, sweet morning sleep got the better of him.
“Comrade... We’ve gotta get up in half an hour. Could I please get some sleep?”
Level Up- The Knockout Page 31
