Black Hat Blues (39 page)

food at a nearby restaurant. Two hours later, they followed him home

again, then fought their way back through traffic to meet up that night

back in the Baltimore house.

“Well,” said Chloe. “Everything went as planned, but there are a few

wrinkles. Marsh walks to work, which is expected, but she’s not alone.

She walks her dog in the morning and then has her assistant or maid

or housekeeper take it back home. I didn’t catch them at first, but Bee

spotted them when she walked back home for lunch. She’s got at least

two bodyguards that are doing a good job of keeping low key and at a

distance. They were replaced by another pair in the evening when she

came home. I’m betting three shifts total, 24-hour protection. That’s

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expensive, so I’m betting it’s not a normal thing for her, but rather

a new precaution brought on by, well, us. So that means they’re not

bored with routine and used to no trouble. They’re fucking looking for

trouble. We took the cameras back rather than leaving them overnight

like we’d planned because I was afraid they’d find them. That makes

any thought of getting in the house or the office physically a lot more

of a pain in the ass.”

“Things just get worse and worse,” said Paul, his frustration slowly

slipping towards a kind of fatalism that would do no one any good.

“Maybe we just forget this whole thing,” said c1sman. “I mean, listen,

I’ve been following Sandee’s blog like all of us, but I’ve been reading up

on the charges. They really have no evidence and he’s out on bail under

house arrest. Maybe the whole thing will blow over if we give it time.”

“Come on, man,” said Sacco, “You know better than that. We both

know hackers who the feds held for years without any real charges. It’s

what the fucking feds do. I’m honestly surprised Sandee’s not already

locked up somewhere.”

“We have a good lawyer down there,” Chloe said. “But Sandee’s

gonna run out of money to pay him soon, and he’s under so much

scrutiny I don’t know how to get him more.”

“My guess,” said Paul “is that the only reason he’s out at all is as a

trap for us. They’re hoping to lure us into making contact or making

some other mistake. But actually I think c1sman maybe has a point.”

Chloe gave him a curious look. “Not about giving up exactly, but about

giving up on Marsh. At least directly.”

She nodded. “You’re thinking Clover. We have plenty of leverage on

him.”

Paul smiled. “Hey, it worked once, I don’t see why it won’t work

again. I mean the first thing, before anything else, is we need to figure

out a way to find out everything Marsh actually knows about us and

what kind of strings she’s actually pulling. We need to know what we’re

actually up against. And if she and Clover are in it together, which they

obviously are, then he’s got to have some sort of in with her. We push

through the door that way.”

“I get what you’re saying,” said Chloe, “But I’m not sure I want to test

my and Sacco’s aliases against her security. Fooling lonely Ken Clover

was one thing. This woman’s something else entirely.”

“I agree, on our own it’d be tough. But she must trust Kenny-boy, at

least on some level. He’s her trusted client. So we just need to fool him

into fooling her for us. Get us in the door and show us her cards. It’s

not a solution, I know, but it’s a step forward.”

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“And you have a plan on how to do this?”

Paul looked at c1sman. “I’ve got the beginnings of one. First we need

to get c1sman a suit.”

The collar on his shirt was too tight, but that was probably his fault

for refusing to try it on before buying it. He thought he had a 15

inch neck but apparently it was more like 16. Maybe he’d been putting

on weight since he joined the Crew. His calorie intake had certainly

risen, if only from the added energy drink consumption. And all that

sugar couldn’t be good for him. He slipped his finger into his shirt and

tugged at it again and then came upon a perfect solution. He could

undo the top button and relieve the pressure but keep his tie cinched

up tight and no one would ever notice because the undone button

would be behind the knot. He glanced over to make sure Bee wasn’t

looking—she was staring out the bus window as Georgetown passed

by—and released his pinched neck from its agony. He sighed with relief,

but then started to regret the change—now he was out of distractions

to keep his fore brain occupied and so had to start worrying about,

well, everything else.

His suit was blue and, he thought, looked pretty good. He hadn’t

owned one since high school. Chloe said it looked “appropriately off

the rack,” which he thought was meant to convey the idea that he was

a man that didn’t know or care a whole lot about fashion. That at least

was true. He couldn’t tell the difference between a good and a bad suit

except that the ones in the weird colors were probably bad. His was

dark blue, and heavy, almost like a suit of armor. If he balled his hands

into fists and flexed his wrists, they disappeared into the coat sleeves,

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which made him look like some sort of robot. Bee told him to stop

doing that.

Bee was wearing a suit as well, and he thought she looked even bet-

ter. It was gray with pinstripes and she had on a yellow silk blouse

underneath. She seemed even less comfortable in hers than he did in his

and kept fidgeting and pulling on things. Unfortunately for her, there

were no buttons she could undo to relieve whatever pressure she was

feeling except ones that would make her indecent. He thought briefly

about unbuttoning them himself later and wondered if that would be

OK. When they were alone he could never tell when it was and when

it wasn’t anymore, especially not since Key West.

“Your suit doesn’t fit either?” he asked.

She turned from the window and smiled. “No, it’s not that. I just wish

I had a bug on me. And a stun gun. And a hidden camera. Nothing but

this stupid phone and clean laptop.”

“Really? Why?” Chris had been relieved when Paul and Chloe had

said that they weren’t going to take any of the spy gadgets in because

they didn’t want to risk any kind of exposure, so there would be no

listening devices hidden on their persons so the others could listen in

from outside. “I think it’s good that they won’t hear me make an idiot

of myself,” he said, trying to make the truth sound like a joke.

“First of all, we’re not going to make idiots of ourselves. Second of

all, the whole point is that if we did make idiots of ourselves and they

were listening in they could say something to help. But now they can’t,

so it’s all on us.”

Chris just nodded and looked past Bee out the window. All on them.

That was what he really hated. But Paul couldn’t do it for obvious rea-

sons. Chloe and Sacco were already playing their parts. Sandee was…

gone. That left him and Bee, the two people least skilled at whatever

this was. Acting. Social Engineering. Lying.

They rode the rest of the way in silence, getting off in the center of

Georgetown and walking the four blocks to Marsh’s office. It was in an

old looking building sandwiched between two other, nearly identical,

brick and wrought iron old buildings. He’d never been to an office like

it. It was like somebody’s house or something. He double-checked the

piece of paper with the address on it, but it was the right place. When

he heard “office” he pictured glass and aluminum and cubicles and

fluorescent lights shining down on crowded conference rooms. Inside

this place it was quiet, thick carpet and wood paneled walls and a good-

looking guy in a suit behind the front desk. They gave their names—

fake names, he was John Cooper—and waited on the leather couch for

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five minutes before being ushered into a meeting room. More heavy

wood and thick carpet, with thickly cushioned wheeled leather chairs.

At least there was something he recognized—a large screen on one wall

and an HD projector hanging from the ceiling. There was a USB port

hub in the center of the table. The receptionist told him to go ahead and

set up his presentation and that the others would be in shortly.

Chris couldn’t help himself. As he plugged in his laptop he decided

to take a peep around the network. There wasn’t any wireless. The USB

hub was only connected to the projector, nothing else. No snooping

for him. He fiddled with getting his clean laptop working with the

projector and brought up his power point slides. Neither he nor Bee

said anything until they came in.

Emily Marsh looked like a man. No, that was his brain getting ahead

of him again. This wasn’t Emily Marsh, it was someone else. He was a

younger guy, maybe around Chris’ own age. He wasn’t wearing a suit,

just a button-downed shirt and black pants. He had long, frizzy red hair

tied back in a pony tail and wore little round glasses. “Hello,” he said,

bearing straight down on Chris with his hand extended and a smile on

his face, “I’m Roger Fitzpatrick.”

“Oh, shit,” slipped out past his lips before Chris could stop it. “Wow,

hey, nice to meet you. I’ve read your stuff. I’m John Cooper.”

“Great to meet you, John,” said Roger. Chris knew him of course.

Well, not personally. But he’d seen his talks at Black Hat and Def

Con and he’d read his columns and articles. He was, in hacker circles

anyway, pretty famous. He was known for his no-nonsense, call it like

he saw it attitude and a particular fondness for going after the hacker

community’s sacred cows and preconceived notions of what’s right and

what isn’t. His Black Hat talk from two years ago, “Why Microsoft

Rules” was incredibly controversial but, once you ignored all the politics

and bullshit, was in fact pretty smart. The question was, why was Roger

Fitzpatrick in this room with him?

“I’m Trisha Kim,” Bee said. “Nice to meet you.” Chris was a little

surprised at how completely different she sounded—quite clearly chip-

per and excited, neither of which had been true about her for days.

“So, Emily handed this meeting over to me. I’m a consultant for her

on these kinds of things.”

“I thought you were with Keller, Wilson?” Chris asked. It was one

of those big security firms that did everything from info sec to hired

bodyguards and private intelligence contractors.

“Left about six months ago and set up my own shop as a private con-

sultant,” he said, taking a seat and motioning for them to do the same.

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“So, Emily tells me you guys are selling some sort of security service?”

Chris covered his rapidly rising panic by turning away from Roger

and needlessly adjusting his laptop. His first instinct was that this was a

disaster. They’d thought they would be giving a pitch to Marsh herself,

who probably wasn’t any kind of tech savvy person as far as they could

tell. He’d been prepared to just steamroll over her with technical terms,

impressing her with the apparent breadth and depth of his knowledge

while Bee translated his techno-babble into sales talk. That had been

the plan. But Roger would see through any bullshit right away. Roger

knew his shit, cold. Oh Christ.

“It’s OK,” Bee whispered in his ear. “Do the presentation as written,

it will be fine. Trust me.”

“We could just—”

“Trust me.” Bee turned to Roger and started the pitch, sounding

just like every marketing person Chris had ever ignored when he was

in the corporate world. He started punching through the slides in time

with her words. According to Bee’s story, they were a sort of start-up, a

network of exploit hunters and hackers who’d met while selling exploits

to Bountysploit for cash. They’d started to team up to maximize returns

and discovered that there was even more money to be made as a team.

They weren’t incorporated as such, and liked to refer to themselves as

The Post-Hoc Posse. Originally it was because they’d come in after a

new software release and scour it for zero days and security holes, often

claiming bounties within days, sometimes even hours.

“That’s the background,” said Bee. “But in the past four months we’ve

created a new alliance called Propter Hoc. She pointed to a symbol

with a cool logo of some sort of black-hat wearing spy that Paul had

come up with. “This is a new service we’re offering that specializes in

preemptive or aggressive network defense. What we’ve learned over the

past few years is that many times multiple attacks on a network can all

be traced back to a single source. Look at what happened in Estonia.

A single source practically took down a whole country’s network. How

was that lone, angry Russian able to do that? He had a bot net army

the size of the 101st Airborne Division. But we’ve come up with a way

to strike back. How? We’ve gone and recruited out own army. I’ll let