target’s defenses, but also (hopefully) use their own political paranoia
against them.
This whole con was the biggest, scariest thing she’d ever been a part
of. Not in terms of physical danger or even risk of going to jail. She
thought they’d planned well enough and had their outs ready enough
that neither of those disasters was very likely. But in terms of the impact
they were going to have, the chaos they were going to stir up, and the
number of moving parts that could suddenly stop moving the right way,
it was definitely at the top of the list. Also in terms of how much, how
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very, very much, she really wanted to pull this thing off. Before Paul,
even under Winston, the cons had always been about the money. Sure,
85% of the time they were taking that money from jerks or faceless
corporations or both, and some of the time she’d gone after someone
just because she didn’t like them. But this time around they were going
after genuinely bad people. Bad, nasty people who fucked with the lives
of thousands. If they pulled this off, the lives of those thousands might
actually be better, at least for a while. Certainly the fucking bastards
would be out of the picture anyway. That was awesome. It also meant
that she felt responsible to them, even though they had no idea who she
was (and they better not ever have any idea).
Chloe had leaped out of the role of typical, law-abiding citizen when
she was still in college after being tricked into helping pull off a par-
ticularly complicated con. She still had no firm idea who was respon-
sible for her baptism into a life unbound by law, but there’d been no
going back. The life she’d jumped clear of as fast as she could had been
slow, frustrating, stultifying, and the world she wormed her way into
moved fast, was always exciting, mostly lucrative, and yes, still awfully
frustrating some of the time. But she’d figured out you never got away
from frustrating entirely, you just had to find ways to take control of
the frustration and blast through it.
Her crew of cohorts had operated in Northern California for years
and included Bee and a few dozen others, all of whom were out of her
life now. She didn’t miss most of them, which was good, because she’d
basically traded all of them for Paul one very tough night in San Jose.
So instead of stealing Paul blind as originally intended, she’d ended up
fighting by his side against certain former friends who had other ideas
about what should happen to Paul and his money. Stupid love, makes
you do stupid things, but she was definitely in love, so what’re you
gonna do? Apparently, in her case anyway, you make a run for Florida
and set up shop in Key West because the love of your life has a pirate
fetish and can’t stand the cold.
It was no secret that she didn’t like Key West very much—too small,
too isolated, too touristy. But she, Bee, and Paul had scratched out a
workman like con-artist living there as they built up their network of
contacts, influences, and hidden cameras. They’d sucked a drag queen
bad ass extraordinaire into their little circle, and that had both given
them some local expertise and also made life a lot more fun. Still, she’d
been clawing at the walls when her old mentor Winston arrived on the
island and invited her and Paul to a meeting of other Crews from all
over who were trying to plan some big score.
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65
That’s when she met Isaiah, the creepy-cool, intimidating as hell
leader of a big New York Crew who was trying to organize a kind of
shadow corporation as a tool to fight the man or whatever. Isaiah’s
politics were radically left and devilishly organized, while Chloe’s were
nascent and mostly gut level. But she and Paul recognized someone
who had their shit together when they saw him, and she’d been inter-
ested in working with him. Then someone went and got murdered and
the whole thing went to hell. Really, truly fucked up shit happened,
but they came out alive and still together in the end. They’d opted
out of joining Isaiah’s shadow corporation, but times had changed,
and while they weren’t exactly members of the secret group, they had
formed a sort of mutual aid pact. Now it was time to check in and
make sure everyone was getting the aid they needed in this weekend’s
battle royale.
Outside the hotel, Chloe pulled out her special phone. OK, one of her
special phones. The German-made cryptophone looked like a normal
flip phone, if a relatively styleless, mundane one. And it worked like a
normal phone too, plus a few key features. They’d gotten a half dozen
of the things, and even with Sacco pulling some favors with some of the
Cyrptophone founders he knew through the German Hacker scene, they
still cost close to $2000 a piece. But they were operating in Washington
DC and going up against some potentially very nasty and savvy foes.
Plus they had to coordinate with their friends down in Florida. Secure
communications were an absolute necessity. The cryptopohone uses
custom software to encrypt calls with 4,096 bit Diffie-Hellman key
exchange and SHA256 hash function AES 256 and Twofish. Chloe
knew what half those words meant, and Bee explained the rest, assur-
ing her that it was “pretty good.” That level of encryption ensured that
no known technology could intercept and decrypt the telephone calls,
although as Sacco and Bee had both pointed out, you never knew what
the NSA was really capable of. The trick was that the conversation had
to be between two cryptophones for it to work, so setting up a secure
communications setup was pricey. The hackers who’d started the com-
pany stayed true to their roots by making all the software open source,
and Bee had claimed she could probably make her own versions of the
phones given enough time, but they needed Bee’s talents elsewhere and
both Paul and Chloe agreed that when it came to secure communica-
tions, they preferred to trust in tested and hacker-approved hardware.
Chloe stood outside the hotel entrance, a hundred or so feet down
the sidewalk from the porte-cochere and out of earshot from anyone,
including Sacco, who was standing by the door and smoking. It was
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cold out, and she’d forgotten her gloves again, so she wanted to make
the call to Florida as quickly as possible. She’d sent an encrypted text
message ten minutes ago setting up the time for the call, and as soon as
the clock tipped over to 3:24 she dialed the number from memory.
Isaiah picked up on the first ring. “Hello,” he said, his voice patient
and even as always.
“Hi,” Chloe said, biting back an instinct to say something playful.
Isaiah never seemed to appreciate the playful banter. He waited for her
to continue.
“We’ve checked into our rooms and everything is great. It’s a really
nice hotel.” That was code of course. Just because the call was encrypted
didn’t mean she or Isaiah were crazy enough to talk about what they
were really doing in the open.
“I’m glad to hear it. Things are busy down south. The cousins are in
town, so everyone’s getting a little wild.”
Uh-oh. That wasn’t good. It meant Isaiah and his Crew were encoun-
tering some unexpected resistance or complications or what have you.
“Sounds like quite a party. Do you have enough food for all of them.”
“Oh, I think we’ll be fine.”
“Well, good. Listen, I was hoping to ask you a favor.”
“Of course.”
“Can you pick up my mail for me? I’m expecting a package and UPS
will just leave it at the door.”
“No problem, just let me know when it’s supposed to arrive.”
“Sometime this week. Everything’s packed up and almost ready to go.
I should have a tracking number for you soon.” There was no package.
She was letting Isaiah know that she was sending him some important
data from the target’s computer in the very near future.
“I’m happy to help.”
“Just let me know when you’ve got time to pick it up.”
“I will.”
“Ok, bye.”
“Goodbye.”
That was the easiest, least argumentative, least condescending con-
versation she’d ever had with Isaiah. Any worries that his whole “toler-
ant wise uncle” shtick would be annoying during the actual operation
began to evaporate. She knew intellectually that he and his Crew hadn’t
gotten so successful by being disorganized or inefficient, but the hours
spent debating in the goddamned Brooklyn loft and on IRC and on
the cryptophones had just about driven her up the wall. It was the exact
opposite of what working with Winston had been like, but of course
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67
that was exactly why she was doing it. Still, there had been times when
she was about ready to tear her hair out dealing with the man, and she
had no one to blame but herself. It had, after all, been her idea.
Paul had been against it, which was weird, because he actually liked
and tolerated Isaiah more than she did. But he didn’t want to be saddled
with a partner they had little or no control or even influence over.
Once they’d rejected his offer to join his shadow corporation, Paul had
wanted to cut all ties and branch out on their own, and in the begin-
ning they’d done just that.
But their experiences with Isaiah had made it clear that they needed
a top-notch hacker in their Crew, something they hadn’t had since leav-
ing California. Paul, Chloe and Bee had made the trip out to the coun-
try’s biggest hacker convention—Def Con in Las Vegas. The scene had
been overwhelming—more than 8000 hackers, a sea of black t-shirts
and scraggly ponytails, occupying a Las Vegas hotel. It had been a crash
course in hacker culture for all of them (even Chloe had never been to
a hacker con), and they got the feel for the community and the kinds
of people in it. Paul had also decided that Def Con was way too huge,
chaotic, and uncontrollable for him to operate in comfortably, and so
they’d decided to work within some smaller cons first and see if they
found anyone there. They did.
But it turned out that even with their ranks swelled with new recruits,
striking out on their own while simultaneously trying to strike against
really bad targets was tough. Isaiah knew the targets, knew their weak-
nesses. She and Paul didn’t. Not that the world lacked for bad guys, but
they were having a hard time focusing their efforts, so hard in fact that
they’d both let themselves concentrate almost exclusively on bringing
in the new recruits without any real clear idea about who they were
going after. Only when she’d brought Sacco in and he started pressing
for some real action against legitimate targets had they been forced to
confront their lack of direction. Chloe still had Isaiah’s contact info in
the back of her head, and they’d seen some signs that he and Marco’s
Crew were up to something in Florida. She tried to ask him what, if
only so they wouldn’t step on each other’s toes. He ignored her, so she
contacted Marco and asked him. He talked to her at least, but wouldn’t
tell her anything. Isaiah had sworn him to silence. Fine. She got even
more interested and started digging on her own, flexing some of the
new muscles that having c1sman and Sacco and the others on board had
given her. Isaiah was careful and she still didn’t know much about his
power base, but she knew Marco worked mostly out of the cruise ship
industry and so started tracing things from there. When she showed
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up at a Starbucks in Miami where Isaiah was sitting reading the paper,
he’d been pissed. Or at least she assumed/hoped he’d been pissed. It
was hard to tell with him.
So they’d gone outside and found a quiet, hot bench to have a talk.
She hinted at her Crew’s expanded capabilities and desire to do some-
thing meaningful. He’d re-affirmed that she and Paul were no longer
invited to participate in his shadow corporation. She’d said that was
fine, but, hey, no one can do everything on their own. Everybody could
use some help sometimes. He’d agreed to think about it, and she walked
away just happy that she’d been able to surprise him like that. When he
contacted her five days later with a tip off and an offer, she’d been the
surprised one, and she took the idea to Paul and the rest of the Crew.
OK, she probably should’ve taken it to just Paul first, but they were
already having a planning meeting that night, and the topic of what to
actually fucking finally do was the one and only thing on the agenda.
Sacco had some ideas about going after big corporations or banks, but
it all seemed either small fry hacker-pranks or incredibly unfeasible.
The one area where he seemed both passionate, and to have some decent
ideas, was something to do with labor or working conditions. Isaiah had
told Paul that his chosen big bad victim for the shadow corporation’s
machinations was involved in modern slavery in some way, and both
Paul and Chloe had thought that doing something in that arena seemed