rallied the other three, putting them to work packing up their stuff
in the Baltimore squat and arranging transportation—new vehicles,
because none of the old ones were safe any more—to get to New York.
Twelve hours later they were in a ten year old Honda and an eight year
old Chevy van (both bought for cash off Craig’s List), traveling back
roads instead of highways as they worked their way to the big city.
They found a motel in New Jersey that took cash and didn’t look too
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close at their fake ID, and settled in as best they could. Exhaustion had
overcome panic, at least for the time being.
Now Paul and Bee were in the van, which had no air conditioning or
radio and practically bald tires, giving c1sman a little pep talk.
“These are you friends,” Bee said. “Your hacker peoples.”
“I don’t even know them, really,” c1sman protested. “They’re just
people I’ve met at cons.”
“That’s better,” Bee said. “They’ll leave you alone. Just stick to the
story and keep an eye out. Keep looking around whenever anyone new
comes in, but otherwise keep your head down, right?”
“I know, I know. Right.”
“Remember, even Isaiah doesn’t know about you. All you need to
do is watch.”
C1sman bit his lower lip and bobbed his head up and down six or
seven times, rocking forward and back as he did. “OK, OK, OK.”
Bee gave him a kiss and sent him on his way. Then she and Paul
watched the video feed from the hidden camera in c1sman’s glasses as
he crossed the Brooklyn street and entered the four story, run down
building down the block. They could hear through the hidden micro-
phone in his MP3 player attached to his belt and could talk directly to
him when he put the earphones in. Everything he said or saw they’d
catch as well.
According to c1sman and its own website, HackNY was a relatively
new hacker space modeled on what worked best in similar hacker spaces
in the U.S. and Germany. Members each paid $65 a month in dues,
which went towards rent and utilities. In exchange they got access to the
hacker space and could participate in the various classes and activities
that the space sponsored. HackNY was on the third floor and occu-
pied a large loft space. It had its own high speed internet connection
of course, along with a network to support it and a variety of tools for
common use. Not only computer hackers, but hardware hackers, mak-
ers, artists, and general tech enthusiasts used the space as a combination
social club, workshop, and office. There were people coming in and
out at all hours, and with over a hundred members, there was always
someone there.
C1sman had an appointment to meet Ray Poole, one of the founders,
who he knew from the convention scene. His cover story was that he
was in New York doing a contract job, but that he didn’t like work-
ing out of the client’s office because the client was way too pushy and
annoying. He needed a place to work out of for a few weeks, some place
where he could relax and think. Ray was fine with that, especially since
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237
c1sman offered to sign up for a full year’s membership, claiming, “I’m
going to be in and out of NY for the next eight months with this client.”
C1sman paid cash up front, Ray gave him the grand tour, and then
left him to settle in at a corner table with his laptop to do some work.
Outside, Paul and Bee settled in to wait.
C1sman, wearing glasses with a hidden video camera that broad-
cast to the van, stayed in the space for twelve or thirteen hours at a
time for the next three days, working on coding some personal project
of his the entire time. As nervous as he might have been, he at least
had the ability to lose himself in his work. Whichever shift was on
van duty at any given moment, was left with nothing but a couple
of Nintendo DS’s, a portable radio, and a really unpleasant smell-
ing bottle. Halfway into day three, and Paul was starting to feel the
slightest inkling of panic. Paul was about ready to put up some really
incriminating information about Isaiah on the honey pot, details
about what he’d done in South Florida, when a man walked in that
he recognized.
He sat up straight and fumbled with the microphone so he could talk
into c1sman’s ear. “Who just came in?” C1sman whispered something
back that Paul couldn’t understand, but he started looking around the
room. “There!” said Paul. “Hold on that guy.”
He was African-American, early to mid-twenties, wearing a
Transformers t-shirt and jeans. He unfolded a Mac at the big table
in the center of the room and started powering up. Paul was sure he
knew him from somewhere. “I need a closer look,” he said. “Go to the
bathroom and walk by him, OK?”
C1sman nodded, making the camera shake up and down. He stood
up and walked across the room, looking at and then away from and then
back at the newcomer. The closer he got, the more certain Paul became.
“I swear that’s one of Isaiah’s people. I recognize him from Key West.
Bee, take a look.”
C1sman was in the bathroom now, staring at himself in the mirror.
The low-quality image combined with the fluorescent lighting made
him look almost corpse-like. Bee rewound the live feed they were
recording to look at the man. “I don’t recognize him,” she said. “But I
wasn’t with you and Chloe when you met Isaiah’s crew.”
“I swear that’s one of them. And that makes sense, right? It’s not
like we thought Isaiah would come here himself. He’d use one of his
crew members. C1s, when you come out, just ignore the guy, don’t
show any interest, but be ready to leave as soon as he does. We want
to follow him.”
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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
“OK,” said c1sman, still whispering, but at least loud enough for
Paul to hear him. Paul watched as c1sman flushed the toilet, washed
his hands, and walked back out into the main room. Without looking
at the target once, he took his seat and resumed working. Paul and Bee
sat and waited an agonizing three and a half hours while both men sat
at their computers and did whatever it was they were doing. Finally,
c1sman got up. “He’s leaving.”
“Great, let him get ahead and then be ready to follow him. We’ll be
watching outside and tell you which way he went.”
A couple minutes later, the target came out the front door of the
building and headed to his left. Paul let Bee out to start following
him at a safe distance. C1sman came down a couple minutes later,
but instead of following the target, he came running down the block
towards the van, tearing off his glasses as he did so. He banged on the
side of the van once before Paul slid open the door.
“What’re you doing?”
“I can’t do this!” said c1sman, in a panic.
“You have to! Come on, Sandee needs your help. You have to.”
“I can’t,” he repeated, trying to climb back into the van, but Paul
wouldn’t let him. “He’ll see me.”
“We need all three of us following. Bee has him now, so you stay
back. Then we’ll switch off. If he gets on a subway you need to follow,
if he gets in a car, I’ll follow him in the van. If he stays on foot, Bee
will follow him. Come on!”
C1sman sucked in both his lips and flared his nostrils. “OK,” he said.
“I get it.” He turned and headed off down the road after Bee.
Paul directed them both from the van, driving a couple blocks behind.
When Bee said he was going into a subway station, Paul told c1sman to
hurry up and join the two of them on the platform. The plan was for
c1sman to stay back and get on the same train as the target and Bee.
Bee would watch the target and stay on when he got off, but would tell
c1sman, who would be in another car, to exit the train. Paul would do
his best to keep up with them on the surface streets. Fortunately this
part of Brooklyn had elevated trains, so he was able to keep in contact
with them, at least until the train went underground.
Bee reported in as the target ascended the steps to the train station.
Paul found a place to illegally park in a loading dock a block away and
listened as Bee narrated events. The target was standing idle, waiting for
the train. C1sman arrived five minutes later, and spent his time looking
at the subway map. The train arrived, headed towards Manhattan. Bee
got on in the same car as the target. C1sman kept looking at the map.
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239
C1sman wasn’t moving towards the train. C1sman waved goodbye to
her as the train roared away. What the fuck?
Paul told Bee to keep following the guy, and he jumped out of the
van and ran over towards the station. He went ahead and jumped the
turnstile and ran up onto the platform, but a second train had already
come and gone by the time he got up there. C1sman was nowhere to
be seen.
He raced back to the van and tried to catch up with Bee’s train, but
it soon went underground and Paul got caught up in traffic trying to
get across the river into Manhattan. He was still in Brooklyn when Bee
came back into contact. The target had gotten off in the Lower East Side
and she’d followed him to an apartment building where he went inside.
She was waiting and worried about what had happened to c1sman. Paul
called in Chloe and Sacco to give them the heads up, and then all four
of them converged around the apartment building Bee had staked out.
While Sacco watched the door, Chloe, Bee, and Paul huddled around
the laptop to review c1sman’s footage from the hacker space.
“I don’t recognize him,” Chloe said.
“Think back to that time in Key West, when we were with Isaiah and
his whole Crew.”
“Oh, I remember the event, but I’m telling you, I don’t think this
guy was there.”
“I was sure I recognized him.”
“I’m sorry Paul, but I’m positive I don’t.”
“Really? Fucking hell.”
“Are you sure you recognize him?”
“Not anymore I’m not,” Paul said, cursing to himself.
They spent the next day confirming the target’s identity and con-
cluding that this freelance web site designer and part-time NYU stu-
dent was probably not connected to Isaiah in any way, especially given
how easily Sacco hacked his wireless network and his e-mail accounts.
They’d wasted four days on this wild goose chase, and then there was
fucking c1sman.
Bee got an e-mail from him the next day, but by then they knew what
had happened. Using his own name and his own credit cards he’d gone
straight to JFK, bought an airline ticket and flown back to Atlanta. The
e-mail was short and simple, “This isn’t for me. I can’t do this. Sorry.”
Paul had thought Bee would be upset, but she was just pissed at him,
calling him a coward and a turncoat. Paul didn’t think that was quite
fair—they really had demanded more of c1sman than he’d ever wanted
to give. He did what any sane person would have done in his position.
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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
Not that Paul was going to tell Bee that right now; she was much more
productive when angry than when depressed. The big issue was, they
were down another man and had got exactly nowhere with trying to
find Isaiah.
“We need to think about alternative plans,” Sacco said.
“Like what?” asked Chloe. “What else is there?”
“Chasing Isaiah sure as hell isn’t working, is it?”
“I should never have taken you to meet him. If I’d known you’d
develop this huge man crush on him, I wouldn’t have.”
“What, I have a man-crush and am behaving like some sort of fuck-
ing fanboy just because I don’t want to screw a good man over?”
“Hey!” said Paul interrupting them. They’d been bickering like this
all week. “Hey, let’s just think here OK. Either we find Isaiah and turn
him over to Marsh or we warn him that she’s after him. Or, I guess, we
do both. But all of that depends on talking to him, right?”
“Yeah,” said Sacco, Chloe nodding in agreement.
“So let’s just reach out to him. Send him a message through the one
channel we have left.”
“That will take days,” said Chloe. “We don’t have days. Marsh is
going to pull the trigger on us soon.”
“Then we need to make it not take days. Either that or make Marsh
give us more time.”
“And how’re we going to do that?” asked Sacco.
“Give me an hour,” said Paul. “I think I’ve got a plan.”
Chloe walked down the street in Bethesda, looking for a quiet place
to make her phone call. The rest of the Crew was back in the Bal-
timore squat, but she needed to be in an entirely different metropolitan
area before she was going to talk to Marsh. She had to assume that
the phone call would be traced. She found an office building with an
empty lobby and some chairs that were far enough away from the front
desk that she wouldn’t be overheard. Plopping down in the surprisingly
comfy chair, she slipped the battery into her cell phone and dialed
Marsh’s number from memory. She got the receptionist, who put her
on hold. That would be them tracing me, thought Chloe, although she