Kill Process (40 page)

Angel> I have a complete dump of Dead Channel. I will post it.

SysOp> Don’t be ridiculous.

I wait without responding. Nothing makes people more uncomfortable than silence. Repard taught me that.

SysOp> You can’t expose anybody. All connections to Dead Channel are untraceable, and the exploits boards is fully anonymous, even among the members.

Angel> You know it’s not about the government arresting them. It’s about whether any of those members will continue to come to the Dead Channel if all the archives are dumped.

Everything is dead silent, my screen unchanging for a long time. I imagine I can sense the bytes flowing along endlessly complex connections into Nathan’s computer, percolating up through network and operating system and application layers until they scroll across a screen he’ll never see and into the text-to-speech module where they’ll reconstitute into spoken words, which he will listen to, and then rage will spread across his face and through his body as he understands the magnitude of what I’ve threatened.

SysOp> Fuck you. I’ve spent my entire life building this community.

Yeah, the threat is not about getting hackers arrested. We’re not even talking about a lot of people. Maybe twenty people around the world that really matter. People who leave my modest skills in the dust. But hackers are powered by secrecy and a thin veneer of trust. Break their trust by exposing their secrets, and nobody will ever frequent Dead Channel or any other board Nathan runs. That’s nothing compared to what they’ll do to me. I know that, Nathan knows that, but desperate people are dangerous and Nathan knows I’m desperate.

Angie> I need to know who’s leading the investigation, and not some code name. Hard identity.

There’s another pause. I pass the long seconds by biting my nails. I need to find my enemy to fight them.

SysOp> You’ll get your data in the morning.

SysOp> You understand it’s over between us. You don’t burn your friends.

SysOp> Goodbye, Angie.

The connection terminates.

D
ALY
’
S SITTING
in a restaurant with a view of Angie’s building when the call comes. He shuts down the tablet
—
not that there was anything useful on it after she encrypted her connection
—
and answers the call.

“I’ve got her,” Pete says.

“Yeah?” This is the third time Pete’s said this, except every time he thought he had a solid connection, it turned out there were more layers. Spending several million dollars in NSA compute time to break three-layer encryption on what appeared to be an important stream of traffic, only to unveil Angie’s personal photos, did not make Enso happy. That the same exact photos were also posted publicly on Flickr did not help his case.

Chris was on the wrong end of a long lecture about BRI’s need to maintain a low profile, culminating in all the BRI resources being yanked off Angie’s investigation.

But Chris knows she’s up to something, and she knows
they
are up to something. There is no other explanation for a forty-five-year-old woman taking a bathroom selfie with her tongue stuck out at the camera. She might as well have captioned the photo “Fuck you, NSA.”

While, against all odds, Enso and the powers-that-be might not be convinced, Pete’s finally convinced. Or maybe he’s taken it as a personal challenge because Angie’s made a mockery of his pursuit. Whatever the case, Pete’s working on his own time, using ONI’s smaller computing resources to continue the investigation, and hiding his efforts from Plaint.

“Analyzing the network traffic profiles got us to all these different wi-fi spots around the city,” Pete says. “None of the surveillance footage has ever shown Angie in those places at the time of the encrypted traffic streams, although she visited some of the spots.”

“We knew that a week ago.”

“Yeah, but now I can tie her to those places.”

“How?” Chris asks.

“I found every city street camera, every business surveillance, every personal webcam with a view of the street and sufficient resolution to do facial analysis of vehicle drivers. A hundred and ninety cameras, an average of three thousand vehicles per day per camera, about half a million facial analyses per day, two hundred million attempts in all for the last year’s worth of data.”

“And? What did you find?” Why did Pete need to draw everything out?

“Six photos of her driving a ’77 Volkswagen Type 2 camper van.”

“Placing her at the wi-fi spots?”

“Not exactly,” Pete says. “Knowing the vehicle I was looking for, I redid the image search looking for the van. There are a lot of cameras good enough to resolve a car, not so many that can make out the person driving it. Every day the van was out and about correlates almost perfectly with the wi-fi encrypted traffic streams, and in the majority of occasions, I can place it within long-range wi-fi distance at the time and location of her data streams. Unfortunately, the van disappeared about eight months ago. I’m guessing she switched vehicles.”

Chris muses on this. Statistically speaking, the correlation ties her to the network traffic, and Pete’s gradually turned up connections between the network traffic streams and several suspicious deaths, as well as the kid in Brazil. It’s not the same thing as proof. That would require decoding the network traffic streams, which Pete has been unable to do because she’s using multi-layer cryptography. After the photo fiasco, he’s not going to be able to go back to Enso and ask for the kinds of resources it would take to break that encryption.

However, Chris is not a judge in a court system and he doesn’t need proof. BRI’s game is leverage, and this new information is leverage.

I
SPEND THE REST
of the day in damage control, personally reaching out to every employee, explaining the article has been retracted, and it’s clear this is a smear campaign, probably led by Tomo. The problem is most of the article is true, and there’s much more, and worse, that could yet be uncovered. So I fess up a bit, and admit I’ve got skeletons in my closet, and if I could change the past, I would. All I can do is move forward. I tell everyone to take the day off and come in tomorrow prepared to kick butt.

I go easiest to hard, to give me time to refine my spiel, and so I’ve left Harry and Amber for the end.

I’m a bit tougher on Harry, both because I’m furious at him for giving away the last of our money, money I literally begged for, and because I know if I go in apologetic, he’ll think I’m guilty. So I go in hard, put him on the defensive, and tell him it’s his responsibility, as our accountant, to straighten out the mess he’s created, otherwise every employee will be without pay and the viability of the company jeopardized, and he could be liable to the investors. In one fell swoop, I’ve applied personal guilt, tribal obligations, and legal ramifications of his job responsibility. Not surprisingly, he caves. Nathan9 said my social game needed work. Hah!

That leaves Amber. She’s holed up in her office. We’ve avoided each other all day. The door’s closed and locked. I know because I hear her turn the lock each time she goes in. I knock.

She unlocks the door, pulls it open a few inches, looks at me, turns and goes back to her desk.

I enter with confidence, determined not to walk on eggshells around her. On the contrary, my mind is in high gear, boosted from an hour of successful employee discussions, and I’ve planned my approach. She’s going to make the same argument she did back when we were working out of the back of her house, about her limited time, and how I’m throwing away people’s lives.

She pounds at the keyboard for a minute and I wait to let her have the first word.

“The thing is, I’m almost thirty years old,” Amber says. “I only get so much time, so many companies I can incubate.”

Inside I’m smiling. I know her, how her mind works. I own her.

“I don’t know what you’ve got going on,” she continues, “but no matter what happens, you keep coming back here, you keep pushing everyone to succeed. I don’t understand you half the time and I don’t like the chaos you’ve caused. I can’t do anything about that. What I can do is sit here and code. Spare me whatever argument you’ve prepared, because I don’t want to hear it. I’ll be here until the police come and seize our computers. Go do whatever it is you need to do.”

“I, umm . . .” Jesus. My mind is blank. Amber’s gone way off script. This is the part where she’s supposed to say I’m wasting the limited years she has available to change the world.

Amber turns back to her computer and thrashes her keyboard some more.

“Thank you,” I say.

Her fingers pause her furious typing. “I don’t need thanks. I don’t even need your friendship. I need you to keep the company going, to figure out the revenue, and fix whatever the hell is going on out there, so we can focus on changing the world and stopping goddamn Tomo.”

I walk out of the office knowing our relationship has changed. It’s sometimes been stormy, but I thought there was a friendship, too. Whatever we had, it’s lost now, replaced by an alliance made by two parties who find themselves reluctantly on the same side in a war that’s bigger than them. Maybe I can count on Amber to the end, but I don’t have enough friends that I can afford to keep losing them.

*     *     *

As the day goes by, the press and bloggers outside gradually give up. When the door buzzer goes off in the afternoon, someone answers it. A few minutes later, one of our engineers comes into my office.

“Angie? You got a delivery.” He shrugs sheepishly.

He’s holding a single rose, the flower petals dyed black. “It came with this.”

He holds out the rose and a manila envelope.

I receive the rose with trepidation. It’s the sort of portent we used back in the heyday. I lay it cautiously on the table and grab the envelope.

“Thanks,” I say, then stare at my engineer who’s waiting around hoping to see what’s in the envelope. He leaves disappointed.

I grasp the envelope tight under my stump and rip the red pull-tab. I shake out a micro-SD card.

I stare at it, think back to that night at Death’s party when I was fifteen. For all the years Nathan9 and I were friends, that was the last time I saw him in person. He’s the idolized hacker the kid version of me looked up to, and his reclusiveness, his blindness, the way he reaches out and changes the world from wherever it is he hides out, it’s all added to the mystique, my elevation of him onto a God-like pedestal.

For all that, he’s the one person who’s always known this side of me, held secrets no one else, not even Emily, can be aware of. He led me into this world, that day at the party, and I assumed he would remain constant.

To hold something he physically touched . . . No. My shoulders slump. He’s never touched this. He sent the bits on to someone else, had them copy the data onto the SD card. I had hoped for a sign our friendship might continue.

I find a quarantined laptop and redouble my counter-surveillance precautions. In addition to my usual measures, and the electric tape on my phone to cut the chance of my phone being used as an acoustic backchannel, I also run a frequency jammer and white noise generator. Only then do I copy the data onto the computer.

It’s the full deal. Names, aliases. Known phone numbers, email addresses, server logins. Associates. All used IMEI numbers. Hardware MAC addresses. All online profiles. Employee IDs and social security numbers. Nathan didn’t scrimp at all: he must have traded in favors in a big way. Whoever did the work used extensive correlation to determine all the identities used by this man. Chris Daly is merely the current alias of the man trying to destroy my life. His last known location? Portland, Oregon. He’s close, watching me in person, not only online.

There’s more in the package. Messages between Chris Daly and someone named Joe, concerning the client who’s hired Daly to investigate and destroy . . . me.

I try to remember to breathe. This is the proof I need!

Daly is not doing this on behalf of a government investigation. He’s freelancing, selling his access on the open market, using his power and capabilities to earn a spare buck, and ruining my life in the process.

Who hired Daly? That’s the question. If I can expose them, cut them off at the source, that’s the power I need. But the identity of the client is not here anywhere. The “client” is all Joe and Chris Daly ever refer to. The client wants background info. The client wants Angie discredited. The client wants Angie to go away. Is the client Lewis Rasmussen? I never uncovered anything to prove Lewis’s active malfeasance, and yet, who else could it be?

Daly has to know. There’s no way he, with all of his government access, would not be aware of who his own client is. In fact, he even makes reference to the client having the money to pay more. He must know the identity.

I want to scream, but I’m conscious of my surroundings. I’m at the office, and there are people all around. I’m probably being monitored. I can’t give anything away. A random outburst, if they’re listening in, could give away the significance of the flower delivery, lead them to investigate even more.

I lean over, rest my forehead on my desk. I must stop Chris Daly and expose the client. Think, Angelina Benenati, think for all you’re worth.

For long minutes, I sit there motionless. Suddenly I bolt upright, fear and certainty running through me in equal measures. There’s something I can do. Something awful. Something that makes me want to puke right here, that has me shaking in my seat. But it will work.

*     *     *

“You don’t have to do this,” I say. “Hell, I don’t want you to do it.”

“I can help, and I want to.” Igloo’s arms are buried somewhere deep inside her oversized hoodie. I’m afraid sometimes that if I blink, she might disappear inside it.

“You have no idea what risk you’re putting yourself under.”

I don’t like it. I really don’t. But Igloo is an adult, even if she seems like a kid to me. I can’t stand in her way and decide for her. I was younger than her when I made bigger decisions.