Black Hat Blues (19 page)

dirty secrets, it would let him force the bastards to fix up The Polaris.

He was calling it Blackmail Blitz, and he planned to hit the owners,

particularly the main dude, Frank Keller, with a barrage of problems

so fast and so thick that he’d be driven to his metaphorical knees and

left begging for some relief. But he needed help to pull it off in the

rapid-fire time needed, and he needed a lot of one-time assistance from

people who couldn’t be tied too closely to him. There was the off chance

(maybe better than off chance) that Keller had some mob connections,

and he didn’t want any of that OC bullshit coming back on him. So he

needed cash, and gear, and operatives. He had exactly none of that.

Sacco turned to his newfound fans online, sending out some vaguely

worded, innuendo laden calls for assistance. Contacting each one

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individually with separate, encrypted e-mail accounts and choosing

only those he felt he had some reason to believe had a decent head on

their shoulders, he told them that he needed donations and volunteers

for a “radical operation” that would “force some good” down some

people’s throats. He never mentioned anything illegal and never even

hinted at the target, but anyone who knew anything could guess he was

up to something that was, at least, outside the bounds of the law. More

people responded positively than he’d anticipated, at least at first, but

when he was cagey with the specifics and exacting with his tech and

cash needs, a lot of them stopped e-mailing him back and avoided him

on IRC. Then he heard from her, the HOPE girl.

He’d bought her a few beers the night he quit Hacks of Rebellion,

and she’d bought him a few more, all the while listening to him go on

and on about the group and what it had meant to him and how his

friends had failed him. She knew how to listen, that was for sure, and

she seemed like she was really interested. Her name was Anne, and she

kept asking him questions, wanting to know more, and he kept talking.

It was great to vent to a kind ear who didn’t have any ties to or interest

in all the other fucking bullshitters and haters in his world right now,

and as long as she let him go, he kept talking.

A few hours later, he was trying to figure out how to move things

back to his place or her room. She was staying in the Hotel Pennsylvania

where the con was being held, and that was a lot closer. She’d been flirty

all evening, although in a sort of cutting way that left him scrambling

to keep up with her. And then she got a call on her phone and took it

outside. Just because he was drunk and curious and feeling full of him-

self, he took out his own phone and tried to see if any of the tools he’d

loaded on there would let him pick up anything from her phone, but no

luck. When she came back she said she had to go, that she was meeting

some friends at the party over at Hacker Halfway House. She asked if

he wanted to come along, but he knew the other guys from Hacks of

Rebellion would be there and also he was pretty sure that the hostess,

B9 Punk, was pissed at him after that thing he’d said to her at Notacon

(which, in retrospect, had been pretty stupid). He tied to convince Anne

to stay with him, but she was having none of it, although she rejected

him with a smile and they exchanged e-mail and PGP keys.

Since then they’d sent some mail back and forth. She’d been trying

out Listnin and liked it a lot, but had some questions about particular

applications and he’d given her some friendly tech support. She was

based somewhere down south, otherwise he might have tried to help

her in person, but the conversations back and forth were cool, and she

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usually inquired as to how he was doing and what he was up to. He’d

included her on the list of people he sent out e-mails to asking for help,

but wasn’t surprised when she didn’t respond. But now, a few days later,

there was the e-mail from her, offering to help. Awesome. They set up

a time to chat over encrypted IRC for later that night.

Sacco: What’s shakin’ pinky

Ann3: Same as always, trying to take over the world

Sacco: Me too! What a coincidence

Ann3: So you need some monies

Sacco: yup

Ann3: Monies I got. Gear I got.

Sacco: rly?

Ann3: People you need to get.

Ann3: rly

Sacco: K

Ann3: There’s a catch

Sacco: always is

Ann3: I wanna watch

Sacco: you wanna help?

Ann3: probably not. But I wanna watch.

Ann3: Assuming its cool

Sacco: its cool with me, yeah

Ann3: no, i mean assuming what ur doing is cool

Sacco: oh, it’s fucking cool

Ann3: ?

Sacco: ? what?

Ann3: ? what is it. Tell me

Ann3: Do it.

Sacco: it’s a secret

Ann3: so’s the location of me cash and gear.

Sacco: it’s a slum lord here in NY. I’m gonna take em down

Ann3: oh yeah

Sacco: haven’t you heard? Property is theft. And property

owners? Biggest thieves around

Ann3: Nothing wrong with stealing from a thief.

Sacco: Nothing at all. Not that I’m stealing anything

Ann3: Of course not.

Sacco: Im really not.

Ann3: ok

Sacco: I’m not!

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Ann3: OK!

Sacco: I’m making him do good.

Ann3: ?

Sacco: Forcing him to be human. To do good.

Ann3: Will that work?

Sacco: of course it will. It’s my plan.

Ann3: We’ll see.

Sacco: So you’ll help

Ann3: How else will I see if I don’t help?

Ann3: Remember, I’m gonna be watching you

Sacco: I’ll show you anything you wanna see

Ann3: uh-huh, I’ll bet

Sacco: :)

Ann3: Show me what and how much you need.

Sacco: How much you got?

Ann3: I asked you first.

He ended up asking for $7500 plus some phones, three computers, and

a whole lot of bugs and hidden cameras, stuff Anne apparently just had

lying around because it arrived on his doorstop in a FedEx box two days

later. He was impressed. With the money he could hire on some guys

he could trust to do the work, and the rest was just a matter of digging

in and getting it done. Anne didn’t want to come up until the blessed

day itself, which was fine with him. He hadn’t been too thrilled about

the idea of her looking over his shoulder the whole time, and he was

still trying to figure out how to keep as much as possible from her when

she did show up. The money and gear were great, but the fact that she’d

been so free with it all kind of freaked him out. Freaked him out in the

way leather and whips did—both exciting and scary at the same time.

The thing he never admitted to anyone was that he got the idea for his

plan from an episode of
Veronica Mars
that he’d bit torrented. He didn’t

even watch much TV, but he’d appreciated both the tech-fetishism the

show expressed for gadgets and the fact that Kristen Bell was super cute

and smart. But, TV or no TV, the theory seemed sound to him. Find

some total jerk who relishes being a prick to other people and has no

interest in dealing with you in a reasonable manner (in this case, the

Polaris landlords). Then overwhelm them with so much bad shit from

so many different angles that he comes to realize that it was better to do

the right thing than keep being a jerk. Originally his plan had been to

hit KJL Properties directly, but that seemed beyond his abilities, even

with Anne’s helpful cash and gear. They were rich fucks who could

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hire their own private security and private eyes to come back on him.

It would take someone in law enforcement or some sort of class action

lawsuit thingy to take them on in any way that would really threaten

them. Instead Sacco decided to focus his attention on the KJL minions

who made day-to-day life at the Polaris basically unlivable. They were

poorly paid slobs and petty tyrants, used to taking orders and giving

in to threats from above.

So Sacco launched into an investigation of the three head security

guys (who basically ran the building, supplemented by occasional part-

timers they brought in to cover the odd shift), and the building superin-

tendent and his son, who were responsible for the upkeep. Dirtbags each

and every one of them, so digging up dirt on them was a breeze. Sacco

paid some of his local activist friends, mostly college kids or kids who

should’ve been in college, to follow them around with cameras, place

GPS enabled phones under their cars, and Listnin on their phone calls.

They got their drug deals and their hooker hook-ups and their gen-

eral ass-hattery all on video, and Sacco learned their patterns. Through

Monique, Sacco also got some of Anne’s hidden cameras inserted into

the public areas of The Polaris, where they could catch the bastards in

the act of hurling abusive language at residents and intimidating social

workers and housing rights advocates who attempted to gain entry,

while letting drug dealer friends and prostitutes in to use vacants for

their various business dealings.

On their own, the videos could probably have gotten the five fucks

fired, but that wasn’t Sacco’s goal. He wanted them right where they

were, but he wanted them to do what he told them, not what the own-

ers ordered. When he’d gotten all the video and info he needed and

had everything in place, he e-mailed Anne and told her it was time to

come up to NY. He offered to let her stay at his place, but she declined.

So instead she arranged to meet him at the squat he’d set up in as his

command center for the crucial couple of days when he planned on

putting the five fucks’ balls in a vice.

“Nice place,” she said as he let her in the door of the fifth floor walk-up.

It wasn’t a nice place at all, and the drafty, dusty, decrepit apartment

would be unlivable in any kind of serious inclement weather, mostly

because it was on the top floor and the roof was getting close to an

even split between ceiling and holes. He had friends squatting in the

apartment one floor down, and they’d made that much more livable,

including stealing power and internet from the building next door. He

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in turn was borrowing some of both from them. “And I’m not being

bitchy. I mean it. It’s a nice place to run your thing from.”

He looked her over, just to be sure she wasn’t fucking with him. She

looked good of course, like he remembered, although she seemed to

have let her hair grow out and dyed it black. She wore jeans and work

boots, a t-shirt and a dark, heavy sweater. No nonsense, plain Jane

clothes. He hardly recognized her. “It’s all I need and it’s close to the

Polaris. Let me show you around.” He gave her the free tour, pointing

out the sleeping bags piled in one corner, and the piss-bucket stashed

away in the non-functioning bathroom. In a corner by boarded up win-

dows and under one of the most hole-free sections of the ceiling sat his

command center: three laptops and seven cell phones, each labeled and

tied to one of his operatives out in the field. From here he could watch

everything unfold and give instructions before his final showdown with

the head fuck.

“None of the people on the other end of those cell phones know about

each other,” Sacco explained. “They each think they’re doing one act of

vandalism or whatever, and none of them know each other, at least not

well. I use them for one, maybe two things, and then I cut them loose.

It’s as simple as that.”

“So they’re hired help,” Anne said. “OK, nice, I can see that working.

No one but you has the big picture or knows what the real goal is?”

“No one. Some of the people in the Polaris know someone’s out

there trying to help them, but only Monique, my friend on the inside,

knows it’s me, and she doesn’t even really know who I am or where I’m

from.”

Anne nodded, pursing her lips in a way that Sacco interpreted as

thoughtful approval. “So, you ready to get things going?” he asked.

“I’m just along for the ride and here to collect any gear you don’t

manage to lose or ruin. It’s your dance, sport.”

It all started with tire slashing and window breaking. He’d have liked

to have been more subtle, like stealing the wheels and leaving the cars

up on blocks or filling them with cement, but he was working with

enthusiastic but untrained radical provocateurs. The simpler the task,

the better. So the two security guys who had cars, both of which they

parked in a secure garage nearby, had their tires slashed. Tiny little

explosive devices, engineered from firecrackers with a shaped charge,

were placed on all the windows and exploded on timers after Sacco’s

hirelings were safely out of the garage. Crack, crash, screech of alarms.

Sacco laughed as he listened in on the phone calls from the garage,

reporting the damage to the two cars.

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This got the guards pissed off and riled up and looking for trouble,