“Let me diffuse this before my mother calls in an airstrike,” I said.
“PERVERT! IN MY BACKYARD! PERVERT! CALL NINE-ONE-ONE!”
“I’ll meet you back at the loft,” he said. “We’ve got a few, uh, problems I need to fill you in on.”
“Of course you do,” I said.
“Oh, and Mikey? Maybe stay away from anyone who looks like they might be, you know, gang affiliated between now and when we meet up.”
“PERVERT! DO YOU HEAR ME? PERVERT!”
Loretta was only a few feet away from me and gaining as quickly as a snail might gain on a cheetah. “Tell me you didn’t tweak Bonaventura,” I said.
“Ah, Mikey, it was just one of those things that happens unexpectedly in the course of gathering information,” Sam said.
“Like peeping on someone’s grandmother, Sam?”
“I didn’t see a thing,” Sam said, “and I’ll take that to the grave.”
“ARE YOU CALLING NINE-ONE-ONE?”
“You might have to,” I said.
“I’ll fill you in,” he said, “but right now I’ve gotta jump over a fence guarded by a pair of vicious-looking poodles.” Working with Sam was like working with a meat grinder: The end result tended to be palatable, but getting there occasionally involved a bit more blood and guts than you might expect. “And hey, Mikey? I need you to remind me never to get dentures, okay?”
6
There’s no such thing as an entirely safe Web site. There are levels of security, firewalls and booby traps and encrypted trapdoors that will send a rank amateur back to his single bed in his mother’s basement, but for anyone with a dedicated desire to break into a site, nothing is impossible. You don’t need to be a spy, or even of voting age, to figure out how to dismantle what one would presume to be the most secure sites.
NASA?
The Pentagon?
Both were hacked by the same fifteen-year-old boy, Jonathan James. A few years later, NASA, the Navy, the Energy Department and Jet Propulsion Laboratory were all hacked by the same twenty-year-old Romanian, Victor Faur. At the same time, NASA was being hacked by an unemployed British man named Gary McKinnon, who was looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life… and was doing it from his girlfriend’s aunt’s bedroom, which isn’t exactly like working out of Quantico.
Hacking into the highest levels of American government doesn’t require an MIT education, not if your girlfriend’s aunt has a broadband connection, and not if you know even a little bit about moving around encryption devices and have a good understanding of how to rewrite programs to work for you, not against you.
Sam doesn’t have an MIT education, either. He doesn’t mainline Red Bull. He’s not prone to wearing jaunty capes while discussing his favorite manga characters with his buddies in his parents’ basement. He’s done some “special projects” for the government, so he knows his way around a computer, but doesn’t have the skills to hack his own bank to move a few zeros around, much less search for the existence of space aliens on NASA’s Web site. So while I’d been busy cleaning my mother’s house that morning, Sam was trying to work a few contacts who could take a look at the Web site streaming the video of Gennaro’s wife and daughter. He probably didn’t plan on eventually scaring a half-naked grandmother out of her house a few hours later, but then not all days go exactly how you plan them.
Which is how he ended up having a breakfast date at the Roasters ’n’ Toasters deli on South Dixie Highway with a former NSA basement dweller named Walt. He’d called Walt the night previous in hopes of handling things on the phone, but Walt was one of those old-school guys who liked to be face-to-face, though Sam got the impression the guy just wanted a free meal. The more aggravating aspect was that Walt, now that he was retired, thought meeting somewhere at six a.m. was perfectly normal. Sam hoped that once his pension came in, he wouldn’t be one of those people. He didn’t want to see six a.m. unless he was creeping up behind it on the way home.
But there Sam sat, surrounded by a breakfast gang that seemed to know each other intimately. Sharing newspapers. Bitching about the Democrats. Drinking coffee like their prostates were made of Teflon. Not a Bloody Mary or Mimosa to be found, which Sam considered a punishable offense.
“You come here a lot?” Sam asked.
“Every morning,” Walt said. “Most of the people here are ex-military or government. It’s a good crowd.”
“Just so I understand,” Sam said, “you spent thirty years in the NSA so you could retire, move to Miami and surround yourself with all of the same people?”
“You want that I should have gone to San Fran cisco and moved into some liberal hippie commune?”
Sam liked Walt, thought he was a nice enough fellow, a good American, all that, but he got the feeling Walt hadn’t turned on a television since Reagan left office. That wasn’t punishable, but watching him eat runny scrambled eggs might have been, which he’d been doing for the last fifteen minutes. Three times the waitress had brought over a plate of eggs, and three times Walt had sent it back after a few bites, saying the consistency wasn’t right, until finally the waitress brought over a serving that made Sam seriously ponder vegetarianism for a few moments.
“All that’s missing are the feathers,” Sam said.
“You overcook scrambled eggs,” Walt said, “you lose all the iron.”
Sam didn’t think that was true, didn’t even know if eggs contained iron, but at this point didn’t even really care. Two Tums from now and this whole nauseating aspect of the experience would be rectified. Besides, there wasn’t a better computer security guy in all of Miami than Walt, even though by the looks of him now, in his country club windbreaker and yellow polo shirt, he was probably spending most of his time on a putting green. He was one of those guys who looked like he was fifty when he was twenty-five, from all that time spent sitting around dark rooms, analyzing data on a computer screen, which made Sam wonder just how old Walt really was, since now the poor guy looked damn near dead, albeit relaxed, in his new retired state. He noticed Walt even had dentures now. Weird, because the last time they’d done work together was just a few months previous, and the guy had a full mouth of god-given teeth.
“Listen, Big Walt,” Sam said, “I’ve got a top-secret mission I need some help on.”
“If it’s so top secret,” Walt said, “why are you coming to a private citizen like me?”
“That’s how secret it is,” Sam said, “even people in government are suspect.”
That seemed to satisfy Walt, or at least found a spot in his ego that was sufficiently inured from actual truth. Anyway, working with ex-NSA guys was always a bit of a pain in the ass. They just knew a lot more than other people. But that was okay, Sam thought, since it gave someone like Walt something to be proud of in addition to his penchant for eating, essentially, the moderately warmed ovum of a chicken. And it wasn’t like Walt was feeding information directly to Rumsfeld back when they were both still employed, anyway. Walt’s job was your basic low-level computer security gig at the NSA, like tracking minor threats on things like the Eastern Interconnected System power grid and calls about suspected terrorists with MySpace pages. Nine to five, no weekends, no direct knowledge of Dick Cheney’s whereabouts at any given time, but a business card that said NSA, which was pretty good for getting people to waive late charges at Blockbuster.
Sam showed Walt the Web site and the video, which Sam noted had been updated since the night before. There was even more footage now.
“Don’t tell me this is some kind of pornography,” Walt said, shoving Sam’s laptop away at the first sight of the woman and child.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Sam said.
“Because I’m here to tell you that pornography leads to terrorism. Studies have proven this.”