Peter sighed. “Zula has nothing to do with it. I did sell Wallace a database of credit card numbers.”
“The one that Ivanov is so angry about.”
“Yes.”
“Well then,” Csongor said. “Now we have basis for conversation. These kinds of guys — how much do you know about them?”
“You mean, Russian, er…” Having spit out the adjective, Peter couldn’t bring himself to utter the noun.
“Mafia or organized criminals or whatever you want to call them,” Csongor said, turning hands momentarily palms up to say it didn’t matter. “They are not like how you see them on TV and movies…”
“Really? Because showing up in the private jet, killing Wallace in my apartment, it all seems pretty much straight from the script.”
“Ah, but this is extremely unusual,” Csongor said. “I am amazed, frankly.”
“Comforting.”
“Almost all of what they do is very boring. They are trying to make a living in the context of this unbelievably fucked-up system. This is their only motive. Not excitement, not violence. How they got most of their revenue in Russia was not crazy shit like drug deals or arms trafficking. It was overcharging for cotton from Uzbekistan. And when they moved into the States and Canada, it was health insurance fraud, avoiding gasoline taxes, and credit cards. Lots of credit cards.”
“What’s your involvement with all this?” Zula asked. “If you don’t mind my asking?”
“No, I don’t mind your asking,” Csongor said. “But I do mind answering, since it is somewhat embarrassing. Not a thing to be proud of.”
“Okay, don’t answer, then.”
Csongor considered it. Zula had pegged his age in the early thirties at first, but now that she was getting a better look at him — the elasticity of his face, the openness of his feelings — she understood that he was more like a big-boned twenty-five. “I will answer a little bit now, maybe more later. How much do you know of the history of Hungary?”
“Nada.”
“Zip.”
Apparently Csongor was unfamiliar with these slang terms, so Zula just shrugged hugely. He nodded and looked a little dismayed, unsure where he should begin. “But you at least know it was a Warsaw Pact country. Until about 1999 or so. Controlled by Russians in a very severe way.” Peter and Zula had begun nodding as if they did know all these things, which encouraged him. “Today, it is fine. It is totally modern, with a high standard of living. But in the nineties, when I was a teenager, the economy was terrible — the Communist system had been dynamited, like an old statue of Stalin, but it took some years for a new system to be created. Bad unemployment during those years, inflation, poverty, and so on. My father was a schoolteacher. Overqualified for it. But that is another story. Anyway, in our family, we had very little money, and the only way we knew to make a living was using our brains. As it happens, I was not the smart one. My older brother is the smart one.”
“What does he do for a living?” Zula asked.
“Bartos is pursuing a postdoc in topology at UCLA.”
“Oh.” Zula looked at Peter and told him, “That’s a kind of math.”
“Thank you,” Peter snapped.
Csongor continued, “But I could tell that I was not like Bartos, so I looked for other ways to make a living using my brain. The teachers in my academy only wanted me to play hockey for the school team. I ignored my classes and taught myself to program computers. Then suddenly I was making money this way. When the economy got better, programmers were needed all over the place. Especially doing localization.”
“What is localization?” Zula asked. Peter sighed, letting her know it was a stupid question.
“Translating foreign software into Hungarian, making things work correctly in the special environment of Hungary,” Csongor explained, and Zula thought that she could glimpse, here, in the way that he contentedly explained things, Csongor’s father the school-teacher. “As an example, because of inflation, Hungarian currency is debased.” Warming to the task, he pulled a wallet out of his pocket and produced a sheaf of bills from Magyar Nemzeti Bank, illustrated with engravings of men Zula had never heard of with crazy hats and florid mustaches. The denominations were enormous; the smallest was 1,000, and some of them bore five digits. “So if you have some trivial app that is used in retail, like for a cash register, foreign software might not be suitable because it wants format consisting of decimal point followed by some number of cents. But we don’t have a decimal point or cents, just an integer. So minor rewriting of software is needed. I did this kind of thing for merchants.”
“Which led to credit card readers?” said Peter, who was finally showing some patience.
“Exactly. In Warsaw Pact times, merchants did not have credit card readers, but when the economy came to life in the late 1990s, everyone suddenly had to have them, and so when people learned that I could program such machines, I had lots of work to do. My father had died from cigarettes and my mother could not make so much money, so I made money to put Bartos through school and so on. All fine. But there is a little snag. You see, the last Soviet soldier left Hungary in 1991. But there were other Russians who came in during the Cold War who took a little bit longer to leave.”
“These guys,” Zula said, cocking her head in the direction of the neighboring plane.
“Mafia, yes,” said Csongor. “So Step 1 of the new economy was that everything got very bad. Step 2 was that things got better and everyone obtained credit cards. And Step 3 — ”
“Step 3 was credit card fraud,” said Peter.
“Yes, and this was attempted in a number of different ways. Some better than others. The best of all ways is like this. A waiter in a restaurant has a little credit card reader in his pocket. The customer wants to pay his bill. He hands his credit card to the waiter. The waiter takes it back to a place where he is not observed and swipes it once to pay the bill. So far, totally legitimate.”
Peter was already nodding, confident that he knew this material, so Csongor finished the story for Zula’s benefit. “However, then the waiter swipes the card through the illegitimate reader in his pocket and makes a copy of the credit card data. The reader stores the data of many such cards. These data are aggregated and then sold on the black market.”
“So you got involved in that racket,” Peter said.
Csongor hesitated, not completely happy with the phrasing. “I took a job to program the firmware of a device. I was perhaps naive. It became clear to me only slowly what the device was used for.”
Peter let out a tiny snort. Csongor caught it immediately, thought about it, finally shrugged his huge shoulders and met Zula’s eye. As if she had somehow been named the judge of all such matters. “So I am just the latest in a very long line of Hungarians being talked into extremely stupid adventures by Germans, Russians, whatever. But it took me into this culture” — he shifted his gaze onto Peter, and Zula understood that he was now talking about international hacker culture — ” where I was cool. Respected. Powerful drugs for a teenager.”
Peter did not meet Csongor’s gaze, and so Csongor went on as if the point had been conceded.
“Then later the same client came back to me with a new problem: there was too much data. Thousands of these machines had been mass-produced and distributed to waiters, not only in Hungary but all over Europe, and the data storage problem was becoming an issue, there were security problems, and so on. Could I help with this? And by the way, if the answer was no, perhaps they would report me to the police or cause other trouble for me. So I became a systems programmer. I built the systems these people needed. And after that, they needed someone to keep the system running in a secure and reliable way. So, over years, I morphed into a kind of mostly freelance systems administrator. I run servers, set up email systems, websites, wikis — ”