saying, like maybe she could hire me or get me a job when I finish
school and that sounded really great and all. So this afternoon I get this
text message from her and she wants to meet with me and talk things
over, but she wants to do it not here but in her room which isn’t even
in this hotel but over across the way at the Omni.”
“Hey, tell me something, what does this lady look like?” he asked.
“She’s real pretty, kind of exotic looking you know? Like maybe she’s
part Indian—Indian like from India—and dresses really nice. Suits
and stuff. But she’s fun too, not all serious. I was kind of flattered she
was talking to me since there were like dudes all over her. That’s also
kinda why I think she might be a fed or something, she wasn’t paying
no mind to the other guys and people once she heard me say some stuff
I shouldn’t have.”
Chloe could almost see the thoughts and hints clicking into place
behind his eyes. According to c1sman, Heidi had passed on the basics
of Oliver’s warning to the trusted Shmoos and Chloe’s description
matched the general stats they had for Sandee, or Toni as they were
thinking of her. “Interesting,” he said. “And so you think she might be
a fed, OK, sounds like maybe you should avoid her.”
“But she might not be a fed, right? And if she can actually hook me
up with a job, that would be awesome. So I want to meet her, but I’m
scared to sort of, even though, honestly, I didn’t really do half the stuff
I sort of hinted to her that I did do. So I was wondering if, like, the
feds check in with you guys or whatever and if there was some way you
could look up if she was legit?”
“No feds have checked in that I know of,” he said. “Not that they
usually would unless they were on a panel. Now, you said she’s staying
over at the Omni, not here?”
“That’s what she said, yeah. I’m supposed to go over there and ask for
her at the front desk.”
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“And what did you say her name was?”
“Terri Robinson, she said she’s a security consultant of some sort, but
that could be anything right?”
“Well, I’m not sure what to tell you. I’ve got no idea if she’s a fed or
not, and there are some strange people out there, so if you don’t feel
comfortable with it, I’d just forget the whole thing. If she’s not here
actually at the con, I don’t think there’s much we can do about it.”
“I was just hoping someone might know her or something.” Chloe
was hoping he’d suggest the next move, but he didn’t. She wasn’t even
sure if the thought had occurred to him, so she tried to throw a hint
his way. “I’d like to talk to her and be sure, but I’m a little freaked
out about seeing her over there by myself.” Nothing from him, he just
nodded in sympathy. Fine, she’d just ask. “Is there any way maybe you
could come over there with me, just to make sure, like, she’s not crazy
or whatever? Or maybe find out if she’s a fed or an undercover reporter
or something. Like that woman from Def Con a couple years ago?” A
reporter had tried to pose as a hacker and get people attending Def Con
to go on record saying or bragging about black hat types of things, but
she’d been outed almost at once and in a very public and embarrass-
ing manner that was all over YouTube within hours. Chloe hoped that
maybe the allure of outing another such infiltrator might appeal to
the man. Just to help matters, she stuck out her chest a little too, and
stopped just short of batting her eyelashes at him.
“Hmmm, I don’t know what good it would do, but if it’ll make you
feel more comfortable, I suppose I could come along. Maybe snap a
picture of her and see if anyone else on staff recognizes her as a fed.”
Chloe imagined he was hoping to show the picture to Heidi or Oliver
and see if this mystery woman was indeed the same as Oliver’s mystery
woman. At least that’s what she hoped he was hoping.
He used his radio to tell his fellow security staffers that he was going
on break, and then the two of them walked the block down the street
to the Omni. Chloe kept up an amiable chatter with him as they went,
talking about the con and Washington DC and other innocuous topics.
She marched him up to the front desk and asked for Terri Robinson.
The woman behind the counter returned with an envelope with the
name of Chloe’s alias, Penny, on it. It contained a room key and a slip
of paper with a room number and instructions to come on up. They
both agreed that this was pretty weird behavior for a fed or anyone else,
but they took the elevator up to the fifth floor and went to the room.
Chloe knocked first, but got no answer. She waited, knocked again,
then finally used the key card to open the door.
Rick Dakan
125
Inside they found a normal looking hotel room with a single king
sized bed and a small disposable cell phone sitting in the center of it.
Ten seconds after they’d closed the door, it rang. They both stared at it,
surprised. It rang three times before he said, “Maybe you should answer
it?” She looked nervously at him and picked it up on the fourth ring.
“Hello, Penny,” said the voice on the other end, a woman’s voice.
“Hi, um, Terri. How are you?”
“Sorry I had to run out for a meeting, but I wanted to talk and it had
to be secure, so I left you this phone.” Chloe was holding the handset
so both of them could lean forward and listen.
“Um, OK,” said Chloe, mouthing to him, “This is really weird.”
“We talked about you doing some work for us last night, are you still
interested?”
“What, um, what kind of work are we talking about?”
“Oh, things like you were talking about last night. The kind of jobs
you said…”
Chloe punched the off button and tossed the phone on the bed.
“Jesus!”
“What?” he asked, “Why’d you hang up?”
“Are you kidding? This whole set up is weird. I’m getting out of here.
You were right. I should have left it alone.” She headed for the door and
turned back when she saw he wasn’t following. He was reaching for the
phone. “Leave it!”
“Why?”
“Because she might want it back or she might have it bugged or it
might be trapped or who knows what!” Chloe raised the pitch of her
voice, almost screeching by the end. “Are you not freaked the fuck out
by all this?”
“I guess it’s pretty weird,” he said, drifting towards the doorway
where she stood.
“So she’s a fed and it’s creepy, or she’s not a fed and it’s even creepier.
Whichever one it’s got nothing to do with me anymore. Come on, come
on, come on.” She reached in and grabbed him by the arm and pulled
him back out with her. Then she slammed the door shut, leaving the
phone and the room key locked inside on the bed. “We’re leaving.”
“I really don’t think she was any kind of fed,” he said as they walked
back.
“Why not?”
“Feds don’t need to be that sneaky and, well, weird.”
“They do if they’re trying to entrap you in some sting or something.
If they were trying to get me to be all hackery and evil or whatever,
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then they might be all strange like that.”
“Maybe, but I think it’s something else. We got word that there was
some woman matching your description of this lady who talked to you
who’s been going to hacker cons and trying to trick people into doing
black hat style jobs for her. I’m pretty sure this was her.”
“You’re serious? Really? What the hell is that all about?”
He told her the whole story, or at least a fourth-hand version of it that
got most of the details wrong but still contained the core truth about
what had happened with Oliver. If he was telling her that easily, the
whole story would be spread throughout the hacker community by the
end of the convention. And now they’d added their own little chap-
ter of misdirection to the mix, hopefully giving any curious Shmoos
plenty of false leads to chew on. The hotel room they’d rented as a back
up three nights earlier in case they needed some place close to stay or
retreat to. Sacco had checked in under a false ID and no one but him
and Bee had been in since, and she’d only been there long enough to
drop off the phone and the key. There was nothing that would lead
back to the Crew.
When they got back to the hotel driveway, Chloe thanked him for
escorting her and said she was going to go into McDonald’s and get
something to eat and try and calm down. He said he needed to report
in but would be happy to talk with her about it some more later if she
was still freaked out. She said she might take him up on that, then went
into Mickey D’s long enough for him to walk up the driveway. Then
she ducked back outside and took the escalator down into the Woodley
Park Metro stop and left the hotel and Shmoocon far, far behind her
with no plans of ever stepping foot inside again. Hopefully Paul had
gotten everyone and everything else out without any difficulty.
It was a bad time to bug out. Not the worst possible time, but certainly
a bad time. Saturday evening would be a high-traffic period for the
hotel lobby, with the last talks wrapping up around 7 PM and people
milling about the bar area trying to decide where to go to dinner and
which room parties might be fun and whether to take a cab or walk
all the way over to the dance club in Adams Morgan that was hosting
the Saturday night party. Plus Sandee couldn’t help. As soon as Chloe
reported back what had happened, Sandee changed into boy clothes,
pinned his hair up under a baseball cap, and got the hell out of the
hotel. And since Chloe said she needed the Omni room for her scheme,
that meant he’d had to go all the way to fall back position two, a Days
Inn out in Maryland.
That left Paul and Sacco to try and clear out a room full of computers
and other gear without attracting too much attention, since their emer-
gency protocol dictated no one who had had any contact with anyone
in the Shmoocon staff could now return to their HQ suite for fear of
drawing some unwanted attention or cementing some future connec-
tion between them in a hypothetical investigation. So that ruled out
Bee, c1sman, and now Chloe, and Sacco only had two hours to help
before he had to go back out in the field to oversee tonight’s candle-
light vigil/protest at Wolverton’s fundraiser. The two of them scrambled
around the room, stuffing everyone’s clothes into whatever suitcase they
fit in and trying to pack up electronics gear such that it both wouldn’t
break and wouldn’t attract attention as it traveled through the lobby. All
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the while Paul kept checking the two laptops that were mirroring the
targets’ email and phones to make sure nothing unexpected happened.
It took them three trips to load up the cars, and he knew that he’d
gotten at least one curious look from a hotel staff member even though
he used a different exit each time. But they got everything packed up
and out the door in under an hour, giving Sacco enough time to get on
over to Georgetown.
As he drove towards the Bethesda Days Inn to meet Sandee and wait
for Chloe, Paul kept checking the one laptop he had a mobile internet
connection for, hoping that nothing transpired that needed his atten-
tion. But at this point all the wheels that they’d set in motion were
spinning on their own momentum, and most of it he couldn’t stop
even if he wanted to. He’d followed up the afternoon’s dramatic protest
with links and tips via e-mail and even a couple of calls to help stir the
media plot, and the story was now out there at places like Daily Kos
and Firedog Lake, waiting for the papers, cable shows, and networks
to start Googling when the night’s protests hit the wires. One gang of
rowdy, disaffected youth was a minor event. Two obviously coordinated
protests in one twelve hour period smacked of pre-mediation, planning,
and a bigger story.
And the story wasn’t new, it had just largely been ignored by the
mainstream media. The U.S. protectorate of the Marianas Islands was
a haven for sweat shops and forced labor. Clothing companies with fac-
tories there operated outside the reach or interest of U.S. labor laws but
still got to print “Made in the USA” on their labels. The owners not only
kept their laboring class in slave-like conditions, they often imported
them from other countries, trapping them on the island with no sup-
port network and no recourse. And working in the factories wasn’t the
sole dehumanizing endeavor on the island. Many of the women were
forced into prostitution in the island’s bars and nightclubs, and if some
slimeball sex tourist should get one of them pregnant, well, forced abor-
tions were the order of the day. This was horrible news, but it wasn’t
new news, and it had gone on not just under the noses of Congress,
but with their explicit consent and support. While back in the day the
defrocked Tom Delay might have been the slavers’ main champion,