Dirty Tycoons: King of Code-Prince Charming-White Knight Read online

  I tapped the panel outside the cage.

  “Name.”

  “I don’t give a fuck, chuckin’ my deuces up.” I chanted the song lyrics flatly.

  The door unlocked with a clack.

  “Suck on my balls, please,” a pipsqueak with the notepad said from behind Mona.

  She spun on him like a schoolteacher. “What?”

  “I had enough,” I added, and Mona gave me a wide-eyed stare. “I ain’t thinkin’ about you.”

  Pipsqueak tipped his pencil to me. “Beyoncé”

  I winked at him and opened the door. I didn’t look back at Mona to see if she’d gotten over it. They piled in. I closed the exit behind them.

  “We’re ready. Behind these doors is a room sealed against Wi-Fi. There’s no internet connectivity. All the electrical outlets route through a secure panel. Quantum Intelligence Four is pure virgin code.”

  It bleeds when breached.

  We said that a lot around the conference room table, but not in front of Mona Rickard.

  I opened the doors. My coders stood. On the screen I’d just stood in front of, and on the walls that usually displayed nature scenes, were the scrolls of masked code as it would appear on the Tor site. They were the only light in the room. I laid my hand on the one machine we’d left on. It was in a mini-Faraday and was responsible for the screens.

  “What you see here”—I indicated the men in the room—“are the best coders alive today. And on the walls is QI4’s code. It looks like nothing because it’s masked, and it’s going to continue to look like nothing unless someone gets in.”

  “Which won’t happen.” Deepak came from behind his desk with a big white smile. Charming fucker. He’d have no trouble getting laid once he had a minute to wink at a girl.

  He held his hand out to Mona, and she was about to shake it when his smile melted like solder on a hot iron. His hand froze between them. I followed his gaze to one of the projections.

  The code wasn’t masked.

  ASCII flew down the roll. Then—

  “Binary?” I whispered and stepped toward the wall. There was no binary. QI4 circuits didn’t work that way. “Shut it down!”

  Scrambling. Clicking. Keys unlocking drawers where safepasses were stored. My glands opened like circuits for sweat, hormones, fight or flight, firing neurons in the face of a breach I didn’t have an algorithm to process.

  “Shut it down!” The scream rattled the top of my throat.

  Jack was the first to have his passkey out, but before he could type in a command, the entire system went dark with a sigh of hard drives winding down.

  We all stood in the dim, windowless room.

  The air crackled with silence broken only by the sound of Mona’s pencil looping over paper, like someone woken in the darkness, writing down the details of a nightmare.

  V

  TWITTER

  @Wired

  Ex Black Hat hacker Beezleboy creates

  the unhackable system. Until it’s hacked.

  @gizmodo

  That time you bragged about the

  unhackable system and someone…

  @nytimes

  Oracle Inc. may delay system

  upgrades in the face of QI4 breach.

  @hackerbitch

  Beezleboy got pwnd. Always a

  fucking pussy. #QI4choked

  @git-up

  Finally. Someone he couldn’t screw

  by snapping his bitch fingers.

  #tool #douche # QI4choked

  @anon_00110001

  @hackerbitch

  He’s the fucking King. What did he

  make you choke on?

  @engadget

  Did someone just climb the

  Everest of exploits?

  @hackerbitch

  @anon_00110001

  Careful – your douche is showing.

  # QI4choked

  @anon_00110001

  @hackerbitch

  Temporary setback. Your most useful skill is

  tweeting with your legs in the air.

  #QI4rulz #stackslut

  @shelly-code

  @beezleboy363636

  That, my friend, is the taste of crow.

  @hackeropz

  Rumored QI4 hack may be part of a

  bigger stunt. Don’t write off @beezleboy363636

  & Alpha Wolf yet.

  @hackerbitch

  @anon_00110001

  080 114 111 110 032 104 097 115

  032 114 117 105 110 101 100 032

  121 111 117 013 010

  @anon_00110001

  @hackerbitch

  Not impressed by ASCII. Pron is nectar. You

  can’t even get a job that doesn’t require

  kneepads #QI4rulz

  @DeadBeefCafe

  Anybody seen @beezleboy363636?

  Tor’s quiet. His account’s dead. Is he

  hanging from his belt in the closet?

  VI

  This is how a guy ends up in a windowless room full of computers, wearing nothing but his jockeys. He kicks everyone out. He locks the doors. He looks for code fingerprinting. He spends a long time—the lighting change he programmed tells him it’s just about twenty-eight hours—finding nothing. He takes a shower to clear his head. In the middle of it, with soap in his hair, he realizes he could check the core dump for clear text. Rinsing his hair doesn’t even occur, and drying off will take too long, so he puts his underwear on while he’s walking back to the cage. It sticks to him like a wet T-shirt sticks to tits. He sits down and searches everything.

  There isn’t much to see until there’s a squeak of the door opening behind him, and he spins his chair to see who it is.

  * * *

  “How did you end up…?” Deepak held out his hands, incredulous over how I looked.

  The full-speed-ahead train of my thoughts runs through how I ended up in a windowless room full of shattered computers, sitting in front of my laptop, wearing nothing but my jockeys.

  “Your dick hard?” I spun back to my screen.

  “Yeah. I’m going to fuck you in the ass if you don’t let everyone back in here.”

  “No one’s getting in until we know who did this, or they’re going to do it again.”

  “What the fuck, Taylor?” He pushed a smashed computer with his toe.

  I’d trashed four in a deliberate, organized way and couldn’t find a chip out of place. Then I lost my shit and smashed monitors against whatever edge I could find. Then I found it. A dongled chip with a quarter inch antenna right in the board.

  “The poison pill was in the monitors. Five of them.” I pushed the one nearest my foot toward him. A 27-inch screen with a lightning fast GPU. We didn’t have the facilities to make our own monitors, so we bought them like normal people.

  Deepak saw it right away and picked up the green board. “Motherfucker.”

  “Said that right.”

  “What was it talking to?”

  “It had to be transmitted to something coming in and out of the cage. I found a power strip in reception with a receiver in it. Another fucking mail order. Never again.”

  Deepak spread the monitor guts on the table next to me and examined them closely. “We’re a young office. We had to buy shit to set up. We had to buy a coffeemaker too. We can’t open up everything and check for receivers.”

  “We do now.”

  “Did they come from the same place? The monitors and the power strip?”

  “No. It’s a fucking mess. I can’t make a connection. Monitors through TechWorld. The power strip was Amazon. The coffee maker was some artisanal company in Seattle.”

  “You checked the coffee maker?” He stood up from his inspection of the monitor.

  “It was clean. Look at this. I’m in the poison pill now.” I pointed at a little chip in the GPU I’d hooked up to my laptop, then at the screen.

  “Anything?”

  “The complete Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Really?”
>
  “Really. He’s fucking taunting me with it.”

  Deepak looked over my shoulder. My hacker had pasted the entire library of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the comments, and I had to go through every word.

  “Have you considered it could be one of our guys?”

  “No.”

  That was out of the question. I paid them well and treated them like princes. They each had a stake in making this work, and they each cared about what we were doing. Whatever it was—worm, virus, hack from God—it had locked me out. I could see the size of the box my life was in, but I couldn’t open it. I hadn’t connected offsite backups because we were off the grid.

  It wasn’t anyone on the team. I trusted them, and not a line of code got pushed to the source without me looking at it.

  It was me. I’d been complacent. I’d let all their work get destroyed. I’d failed them. They relied on me to lead them, and I’d let them down.

  “You all right?” Deepak asked.

  Fuck it. Guilt was taking up time and energy. I was running low on both.

  By accident, I laid too much weight on the page down key and forwarded to the middle of a completely different section. I was about to go back when I saw slashes. I hadn’t seen slashes anywhere else, then I noticed the digit at the beginning.

  9 I beg* that y*ou will look upon it

  not as a battered billycock but as

  an in*te/ll/ectua/l/ q*roblem*.

  “Look at this.” I pulled the paragraph onto the big screen in front of the room.

  Deepak stood before it with his arms crossed. He was best when he had a problem to solve or a journalist to charm.

  “Isolate the odd ones,” he said.

  I’d already done it.

  9gtyue/ll/tn/l/qm

  “He needed the q,” I said. “So he misspelled problem.”

  “What if the slashes aren’t for the letters?”

  “Other options? Numbers?”

  “Three Ls?”

  “Or ones. Leet style.”

  9gtyue3tnqm OR 9gtyuetn3qm

  We stood in front of the green letters on the black background, arms crossed.

  He tilted his head a little.

  I paced away and looked quickly.

  He looked at it from the side.

  I squinted.

  As if we had the same neurons, Deepak and I always thought with one mind. This time was no different.

  “Eleven digits. Geohash coordinates,” I said. Geohash was a newer version of latitude and longitude that split the world into a grid and gave each box a code.

  “God, please let it be Tahiti. I want to go to Tahiti.”

  We didn’t have internet in the cage, but I had a geohash database inside it. I called it up, and the cached satellite picture came on the big screen. All grey. The coordinates were inside a water mass.

  “Lake Superior,” I said. “Change the three in the second string.”

  “Done.” It came on the screen in a split second, and it was land.

  “No white sand beaches.” I folded my arms over my bare chest, looking at the pin. The coordinates fell on a big building in a little town in the middle of nowhere. “Where are we?”

  Instead of answering, Deepak contracted the map until the surrounding area was in the frame.

  Nothing.

  Freeway.

  Train tracks.

  Farms.

  An interstate.

  A nameless tributary.

  Nowheresville in The Great State of Nowhere, USA.

  “Do you think…?” Deepak said.

  “Yeah. I think he left it so I’d come looking for him.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go looking for him.”

  “Put on some pants first.”

  I was already out the door.

  VII

  Fucksville, Nowhere—aka Barrington—didn’t have an airport in a one-hundred-forty-mile radius.

  That wasn’t true. They had a dirt landing strip for crop dusters. I’d passed it on the way. What a shit hole. If I’d chartered something to land there, I would have announced my presence before I even took off.

  I wasn’t a big fan of Caddys. I drove a Tesla. Caddys weren’t a thing in San Jose, but it was the best car they’d had at the airport rental terminal. The girl behind the desk swore by it, hand on heart, eyes rolling with remembered pleasure, and I had to say, though it handled like a cruise liner, it drove like a spaceship.

  As I passed into town, the sign said the population was 1,209, but there was a fifth space before the one, as if there used to be ten thousand more people.

  The terrain was pre-winter blight. Post exploding fall colors and pre winter sting. Brown, leafless, scrubby. The sky was overhung with grey, but with no discernible clouds, as if a screen of dullness hung between the earth and the heavens.

  No way the dude who hacked QI4 was in this town. This was a pitstop on the way to some big reveal that would either be humiliating or expensive.

  I was a target. A betrayer. I’d gone from black hat to white hat. I’d created a system to thwart them and bragged about it. I was the Everest of the hacker world. They wanted to get me because I was big, I was a challenge, and I was there.

  I pulled into a little parking lot in front of two stores. A restaurant and a grocery store. It was the first commercial zoning I’d seen since passing into town.

  When I got out, I had a weird feeling I only got when I went to Scott’s Seafood with Fitz. Everyone looked and pretended not to. The room got one eighth quieter. They nudged each other, looked halfway around, pretended to take selfies so they could see over their shoulders.

  This was the same—but different. Obviously. Because Fitz and I going to Scott’s was normal. My being in flyover central to find a hacker was crazy.

  I went up the wooden steps to a restaurant called Barrington Burgers. It was closed. I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock on a Saturday. I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in the glass door, angling to see through a slit in the blinds.

  Looked all right at first glance. Homey little place. Chairs were pushed in but weren’t upside down on the tables. Maybe it was dinner only?

  Then I noticed the alcohol was gone from behind the bar. The plants were dead. Sugar packets were strewn across the wood floor, shredded and balled in a light dusting in the floorboard slats. Only the white packets were ripped. The blue and pink packets were untouched.

  Mice. Rats, maybe. Smart fuckers. I wouldn’t have touched that other shit either.

  “You looking for someone, mister?”

  I turned toward the voice behind me and my god. The prettiest things hid in the most unlikely places. Long, wavy blond hair that reached breasts hidden under a flannel plaid car coat that was cut for men. Jeans. Cowboy boots. No makeup. Wide, full lips with a crease in the bottom one. Angular nose. Freckles. Eyes that went from brown in the center to blue at the outer ring.

  She looked away, a little pink in the cheek. Tucked her hair behind her ear. The diamond in her lobe had to be a carat and a half. It looked as real as she did.

  “No one in particular,” I said. “I was thinking of staying the night around here.”

  I actually hoped I wouldn’t have to, but no one who could hack me lived here, and I needed a place to drop my stuff.

  “Oh, uh. There’s a hotel on Oakwood.” She pointed in a general direction. Her hand was fine, delicate, with white tape around three finger joints.

  I took out my phone. She stared at it. Were they still using flip phones in Nowhereville or something?

  “Do you know what it’s called? I can look it up.”

  “The connection isn’t great around here. You just go right out of the lot. Go for about a mile and a half, and you’ll see a gate onto Oakwood. Take that until you see it.”

  “What’s it called?” I could GPS the name more easily than stare at my odometer.

  “Bedtimey Inn? But like I said, the connection’s pretty spotty aroun
d here.” She jerked her thumb behind her toward the little convenience store. “I’m helping out at the grocery. Want to call from there and see if they have any room?”

  “I’ll just drive over.”

  She barely moved, but I could tell I’d snubbed her by refusing her offer.

  “I’m sure you know what you want.” Her eyelids fluttered. Her lashes were blond at the tips and darker at the roots.

  Strange looking girl. Beautiful and exotic. Just a touch younger than me. Her nipples were probably the palest pink fading into bronze at the center. Or the other way around. I wanted to know.

  It was the wanting that tweaked a thought, a memory, a flash of déjà vu. It tapped a turtle’s shell, and though the animal heard the tap, it didn’t come out.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “Um, did you go to Montgomery High?”

  “No.”

  “Do you work at the distro center off the interstate? I sub there sometimes.”

  “No.” I couldn’t help smirking. The notion that I was from here, working at the distribution center off the interstate, was ridiculous, and I couldn’t hide it. “You just look familiar. But I’ve never been around here before.”

  I almost asked her if she’d ever been to Silicon Valley or suggested we’d met at MIT, but why push it? If someone that beautiful had ever left Barrington, she never would have come back.

  “Okay.” She folded her bottom lip in thought, and I knew where the crease had come from. It was so much sexier as the result of a habit than a genetic detail. “You sure you don’t want to call first?” Another thumb jerk toward the little grocery store.

  “I’m good.”

  A shiny blue pickup pulled up in front of the store. She waved at it. A guy in a baseball cap rolled the window down to give us a short wave and a dirty look that may have all been in my head. He looked to be in his late twenties, but hard twenties, with skin the product of sun and tobacco. A hound leaned over his lap and stuck his head out, giving a bark when he saw us.