Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  PETER RETURNED to the table, pulled out his laptop, and inserted the thumb drive. His computer, a Linux machine, identified it as a Windows file system, which was just what he needed since Wallace’s machine was also a Windows box. Finding several files in it, Peter erased them. Then he popped the DVD out of its case and pushed it into the slot.

  “Why don’t you just use the local copy on your machine?” Wallace asked him.

  “Ooh, good trick question!” Peter said. “It’s like I told you. There is only one copy. It’s on the DVD. I am not about ripping you off.” The DVD appeared as an icon on his desktop. He opened it up, and it showed but a single file. He dragged that over to the thumb drive’s icon and waited for a few seconds as the files were transferred. “Now, two copies,” he said. He dismounted the thumb drive and removed it. “Voilà,” he said, holding it up. “The goods. As promised.”

  “Not until I agree that it is what you have claimed.”

  “Go ahead and check it out!”

  “Oh, I’ve looked at the sample you sent. They were all legit credit card numbers, just like you said. Names, expiration dates, and all the rest.”

  “So what are you getting at?”

  “Provenance.”

  “Isn’t that a city in Rhode Island?”

  “Since you are an autodidact, Peter, and I have a soft spot for autodidacts, I’ll forgive you for not knowing the word. It means, where did the data come from?”

  “What does that matter, if it’s good data?”

  Wallace sighed, sipped his club soda, and looked around the feast hall. As if willing forth the energy needed to go on with this stupid conversation. “You are misconstruing this, young man. I’m trying to help you.”

  “I wasn’t aware I needed any help.”

  “This is proactive help. You understand? Retroactive help—the kind you’re thinking of—is throwing a drunk the life preserver after he’s fallen off the pier. Proactive help is grabbing him by the belt and pulling him to safety before he falls.”

  “Why should you even give a shit?”

  “Because if you end up needing help, boy, owing to a problem with the provenance of these credit card numbers, then I’m going to need it too.”

  Peter spent a while working it out. “You’re not in business for yourself.”

  Wallace nodded, managing to look both encouraging and sour at the same time.

  “You’re just running the errand—acting as an agent, or something—for whoever it is that’s really buying this.”

  Wallace made expressive gestures, like an orchestra conductor, nearly knocking over his club soda.

  “If something goes wrong, those people will be pissed off, and you’re afraid of what they’ll do,” Peter continued.

  Wallace now went still and silent, which seemed to mean that Peter had at last come to the correct conclusion.

  “Who are they?”

  “You can’t possibly imagine that I’m really going to tell you their names.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So why do you even ask, Peter?”

  “You’re the one who brought this into the conversation.”

  “They are Russians.”

  “You mean, like … Russian mafia?” Peter was too fascinated, yet, to be scared.

  “ ‘Russian mafia’ is an idiotic term. An oxymoron. Media crap. It is vastly more complicated than that.”

  “Well, but obviously…”

  “Obviously,” Wallace agreed, “if they are purchasing stolen credit card numbers from hackers, they are by definition engaging in organized criminal activity.”

  The two men sat there silently for a minute while Peter thought about it.

  “How these people come to engage in organized criminal activity is quite interesting and complicated. You’d find it fascinating to talk to them, if they had even the faintest interest in talking to you. I can assure you it has nothing in common with the Sicilian mafia.”

  “But you just got done threatening me. That sounds like…”

  “The cruelty and opportunism of the Russians are greatly overstated,” Wallace said, “but they contain a kernel of truth. You, Peter, have chosen to trade in illegal goods. In doing so, you are stepping outside of the structures of ordinary commerce, with its customer service reps, its mediators, its Angie’s List. If the transaction fails, your customers will not have any of the normal forms of recourse. That’s all I’m saying. So even if you’re a complete shite-for-brains with no regard for the safety of yourself or your girlfriend, I’ll ask you to answer my question as to provenance, because I still have a choice as to whether I’ll proceed with this transaction, and I’ll not go into business with a shite-for-brains.”

  “Fine,” Peter said. “I’m working with a network security consultancy. You already know that. We got hired by a clothing store chain to do a pen test.”

  “What, their pens weren’t writing?”

  “Penetration test. Our job was to find ways of penetrating their corporate networks. We found that one part of their website was vulnerable to a SQL injection attack. By exploiting that, we were able to install a rootkit on one of their servers and then use that as a beachhead on their internal network to—to make a long story short—get root on the servers where they stored customer data and then prove that their credit card data was vulnerable.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  “It took fifteen minutes.”

  “So these data you’re trying to sell me are already compromised!” Wallace said.

  “No.”

  “You just told me that the client has been tipped off to the vulnerability!”

  “That client has been tipped off. Those numbers were compromised. These numbers are not those numbers.”

  “What are they, then?”

  “The website I’ve been telling you about was set up by a contractor that subsequently went out of business.”

  “No wonder!”

  “Exactly. I looked through archived web pages and shareholder disclosures to learn the names of some of the other clients who’d hired the same contractor to set up retail websites during the same period of time.”

  Wallace thought about it, then nodded. “Reckoning that it was all cookie-cutter.”

  “Yeah. All these sites are clones of each other, more or less, and since the contractor went belly-up, they haven’t been keeping up with security patches.”

  “Which is probably why you got hired to do the pen testing in the first place.”

  “Exactly. So I did find a lot of cookie-cutter sites that shared the same vulnerabilities, including one big one. A department store chain that you have heard of.”

  “And you then repeated the same attack.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which is now traceable to that consultancy you work for and its computers.”

  “No no no,” Peter said. “I worked with some friends of mine in Eastern Europe; we ran the whole thing through other hosts, we anonymized everything—there is absolutely no way that this could be traced to me.”

  “These friends of yours work for free?”

  “Of course not, they’re getting part of the money.”

  “You trust their discretion?”

  “Obviously.”

  “That explains why your initial contact with me came through Ukraine.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s good to have that loose end tied up,” Wallace said primly. “But the biggest loose end of all is still loose.”

  “And that is?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Peter was stuck for an answer.

  “Just tell me you’re addicted to cocaine. Being blackmailed by your dominatrix. It’s perfectly all right.”

  “I’m upside down on my mortgage,” Peter said.

  “You mean on that hacker dump where you live?”

  “It’s a commercial building in Seattle … an industrial neighborhood called Georgetown…”

  Wallace nodded and
quoted the address from memory.

  Peter’s face got hot. “Okay, you’ve been checking me out. That’s fine. I acquired the space before the economy crashed. I use part of it as live/work space and lease out the rest. When the economy went south, vacancy rates went nuts and the property lost a lot of book value as well as not bringing in rent. But with this, I can make it right. Avoid foreclosure, fix a few things, sell it, be in position to buy…”

  “A real house where a female might actually want to live?” Wallace asked. For Peter, in spite of willing himself not to, had let his eyes stray momentarily in the direction of Zula.

  “You have to understand,” Peter began.

  “Ah, but Peter, I don’t wish to understand.”

  “Seattle is full of these people—no smarter than me—no harder working than me—”

  “Who are zillionaires because they got lucky. Peter! Listen to me carefully,” Wallace said. “I’ve already told you who I work for. How do you think I feel?”

  That left Peter silent long enough for Wallace to add, “And did I make it clear enough that I don’t give a shite?”

  “You give a shit about tying up those loose ends.”

  “Ah, yes. Thank you for bringing me back to important topics,” Wallace said. He checked his watch. “I got here about half an hour ago. If you’d been watching the parking lot, you’d have seen two vehicles pull in. One is mine. Nice little ragtop, not so well adapted for these roads, but it got me here. The other a black Suburban with a couple of Russians in it. We parked on either side of your orange 2008 Scion xB. One of the Russians, a technical boy not much less talented than you, opened up his laptop and established a connection to the Internet using the lodge’s Wi-Fi network. He is sitting there now waiting for me. If we go through with this transaction, I’ll be in the backseat of that Suburban about thirty seconds later handing him this thumb drive. And he has got, what d’you call them, scripts that can go through your data and check those credit card numbers fast. And if he finds anything wrong, why then the retribution that I was warning you of, a few minutes ago, will have been completed before your liver has had time to metabolize that swallow of Mountain Dew you just enjoyed.”

  Peter took another swallow of Mountain Dew. “I have the same scripts,” he said, “and I just ran them on this data a few hours ago. My friends in Eastern Europe have been keeping an eye on things too; they’d let me know if there was a problem. I’m scared of the people you work for, Mr. Wallace, and I wish I had never gotten into this; but one thing I’m not worried about at all is the integrity of the data I’m selling you.”

  “Very well then.”

  Peter set the thumb drive on the table and slid it across to Wallace.

  Wallace drew a laptop from his bag and opened it up on the table. He inserted the thumb drive. Its icon appeared on the screen. He double-clicked it to reveal a single Excel file entitled “data.” Wallace dragged that folder into his “Documents” icon and watched for a few seconds as the little on-screen animation reassured him that the transfer was taking place. As this was happening, he remarked: “There is another way that this could go wrong, of course. Already alluded to in this conversation.”

  “And that is …?”

  “Perhaps this is not the only copy of the data? Perhaps you’ll double your money, or triple it, by selling it to others?”

  Peter shrugged. “There’s no way I can prove that this is the only copy.”

  “I understand. But your Ukrainian colleagues—?”

  “They’ve never even seen this stuff. When we ran the exploit, the files went straight to my laptop.”

  “Where you have retained a copy, just in case?”

  “No.” Then Peter looked a bit uncertain. “Except for this.” He ejected the DVD from his laptop. “Would you like it?”

  “I would like to see it destroyed.”

  “Easy enough.” Peter bent the disk into a U and squeezed it hard, trying to snap it. This required a surprising amount of effort. Finally it made an explosive crack and fell apart into two halves, but several shards went flying onto the table and the floor. “Fuck!” Peter said. He dropped the two jagged semicircles onto the table and held up his right hand to display a cut on the base of the thumb, about half an inch long, with blood welling out of it.

  “Do you think you could try to be a little more conspicuous?” Wallace asked. He had opened up the new “data” file and verified that it consisted of line after line of names, addresses, credit card numbers, and expiration dates. He scrolled all the way to the end and verified that it contained hundreds of thousands of records.

  Then he pulled the thumb drive out of his machine and flicked it into the fire burning a few feet away from them. Peter, who was sucking on his self-inflicted laceration, couldn’t help glancing over in the direction of Richard and Zula.

  With his foot, Wallace shoved a small duffel bag across the floor until it contacted Peter’s ankle. “Should pay for a few Band-Aids with enough left over to buy Uncle Dick a new thumb drive. But how you’ll pay off your mortgage with hundred-dollar bills I’ll never know.”

  “Turns out Uncle Dick knows something about it.” Peter had taken his hand from his mouth and now pressed the bleeding wound against the icy cold side of his Mountain Dew glass.

  “You know this of your own personal knowledge, or Wikipedia?” Wallace asked.

  “Just so you know, he has a lot of problems with his Wikipedia entry.”

  “As would I,” Wallace said, “were it mine. Answer my question.”

  “Richard doesn’t talk about the old days. Not to me anyway.”

  “What, he doesn’t think you’re worthy of his niece?” Wallace said in a tone of mock wonderment. “Richard Forthrast went straight a long time ago. He’ll not help you with your embarrassment of hundred-dollar bills.”

  “He found a way,” Peter said. “So can I.”

  “Peter. Before we part ways, hopefully forever, I’d like to speak with you briefly about something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I can see that you’ve spoken forthrightly. So now I want to respond in kind and tell you that all that stuff about the Russians was just BS. A scare tactic, pure and simple.”

  “I figured that out already.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “A minute ago you said you were going to give the thumb drive to a Russian hacker in the backseat of the Suburban. But just now you threw it in the fire.”

  “Clever boy. So I needn’t tell you that there is no Suburban in the parking lot. You can look for yourself.”

  Peter did not look. He was almost excessively ready to believe Wallace.

  “I am in business for myself,” Wallace said. “A small-timer without the muscle to back up my business, and so I have to play these mind games sometimes, as a way of judging people’s sincerity. It worked in this case. I can see that you have played me straight. Otherwise it would have come through in your eyes.”

  “That’s okay,” Peter said. “We used to watch this stupid program called Scared Straight. I think you scared me straight just now.”

  “Oh really!” Wallace drawled. “You’ve turned a new leaf! This was your last big score! You’re getting out now. Going on the straight and narrow path, like Richard Forthrast.”

  “He did it…” Peter began.

  “… so can you,” Wallace finished. “I think that is all bollocks, but I shall take my leave now and wish you luck.”

  “IS PETER A drug user?” Richard asked.

  “No, he’s straight edge,” Zula said with a quick roll of the eyes and air quotes. “Why?”

  “Because that looked like a drug transaction to me.”

  She looked back over her shoulder. “Really? In what way?”

  “Just something about the psychological dynamic.”

  She gave him a penetrating look through her glasses.

  “Which I admit doesn’t explain the antics with the thumb drive and trying to kill himself with a DV
D,” he allowed.

  She averted her gaze and shrugged.

  “Never mind,” he continued.

  “So D-squared lowered the boom on Skeletor about the apostrophes.”

  “Yeah. A well-planned attack, I’d say. And it led to, among other things, the change where D’uinn became Dwinn.”

  “Gosh, the way people talk about it on the Internet…”

  “You’d think it was a much bigger deal. No. Not at the time, anyway. But this is how history is done now. People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes. A year ago? Only the most hard-core T’Rain geeks would have heard of the Apostropocalypse and it would be considered a footnote. Maybe amusing at most.”

  “But ever since the Forces of Brightness went all Pearl Harbor against the Earthtone Coalition—”

  “It’s become important in retrospect,” Richard said, “and it’s been blown up into this big thing. But really? It was just an excruciatingly awkward dinner. D’uinn got changed into Dwinn. Supposedly for linguistic reasons. But it set a precedent that Don Donald had the authority to change things that Devin had done in the world.”

  “Which he then went on to abuse?”

  “According to the Forces of Brightness,” Richard said. “But the fact is that D-squared has been discreet, restrained, only changed things in places where Devin really pissed down his leg. Things that Devin himself would have changed, had he gone back and reread his work and thought about it a little harder. So it’s mostly not a big deal.”

  “To you maybe,” Zula said, “but to Devin?”

  Richard thought about it. “At the time, he really acted like he didn’t care.”

  “But maybe he really did,” Zula said, “and has been plotting his revenge ever since. Hiding things deep in the Canon. Details of history that Geraldine and herm it was like a dog whistle.”

  Richard shrugged and nodded. Then he noticed that Zula was gazing at him. Waiting for more.

  “You don’t care!” she finally exclaimed. Then a smile.

  “I did at first,” he admitted. “I was shocked at first. One of my characters got ganked, you know. Attacked without warning by other characters in his party. Cut down while he was defending them. So of course that was upsetting at the time. And the furor, the anger over the last couple of months—how could you not get caught up in that, a little? But—I’m running a business.”