Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (22 page)

The MOD guys never apologised, even when they knew they were in the wrong. Apologies never got anyone very far on a New York City street.

It was an attitude thing. ‘I’m sorry, man’ from Corrupt was the equivalent of a normal person licking the mud from the soles of your shoes.

The new password was: M0Dm0dM0D. That’s the kind of guys they were.

Par was just signing off to try out the new password when Corrupt jumped in.

‘Yeah, and ah, Par, there’s something you should know.’

‘Yeah?’ Par answered, anxious to go.

‘I checked out her mail. There was some stuff in it.’

Theorem’s letters? Stuff? ‘What kind of stuff?’ he asked.

‘Letters from Gandalf.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Friendly letters. Real friendly.’

Par wanted to know, but at the same time, he didn’t. He could have arranged root access on Altos long ago if he’d really wanted it. But he didn’t. He didn’t want it because it would mean he could access Theorem’s mail. And Par knew that if he could, he would. Theorem was popular on Altos and, being the suspicious type, Par knew he would probably take something perfectly innocent and read it the wrong way.

Then he would get in a fight with Theorem, and their time together was too precious for that.

‘Too friendly,’ Corrupt went on. It must have been hard for him to tell Par. Snagging a friend’s girlfriend’s password and breaking into her account was one thing. There wasn’t much wrong with that. But breaking that kind of news, well, that was harsh. Especially since Corrupt had worked with Gandalf in 8lgm.

‘Thanks,’ Par said finally. Then he took off.

When Par tried out the MOD password, it didn’t work of course, because Gandalf had disabled the account. But Par didn’t know that. Finding out that Theorem’s account was disabled didn’t bother him, but discovering who disabled it for her didn’t make Par all that happy.

Still, when he confronted Theorem, she denied that anything was going on between her and Gandalf.

What could Par do? He could believe Theorem or he could doubt her.

Believing her was hard, but doubting her was painful. So he chose to believe her.

The incident made Theorem take a long look at Altos. It was doing bad things to her life. In the days that she was locked out of the German chat system, she had made the unpleasant discovery that she was completely addicted. And she didn’t like it at all. Staring at her life with fresh eyes, she realised she had been ignoring her friends and her life in Switzerland. What on earth was she doing, spending every night in front of a computer screen?

So Theorem made a tough decision.

She decided to stop using Altos forever.

[ ]

Bad things seemed to happen to The Parmaster around Thanksgiving.

In late November 1991, Par flew up from Virginia Beach to New York. An acquaintance named Morty Rosenfeld, who hung out with the MOD hackers a bit, had invited him to come for a visit. Par thought a trip to the City would do him good.

Morty wasn’t exactly Par’s best friend, but he was all right. He had been charged by the Feds a few months earlier for selling a password to a credit record company which resulted in credit card fraud. Par didn’t go in for selling passwords, but to each his own. Morty wasn’t too bad in the right dose. He had a place on Coney Island, which was hardly the Village in Manhattan, but close enough, and he had a fold-out sofa bed. It beat sleeping on the floor somewhere else.

Par hung out with a Morty and a bunch of his friends, drinking and goofing around on Morty’s computer.

One morning, Par woke up with a vicious hangover. His stomach was growling and there was nothing edible in the fridge, so he rang up and ordered pork fried rice from a Chinese take-away. Then he threw on some clothes and sat on the end of the sofa-bed, smoking a cigarette while he waited. He didn’t start smoking until he was nineteen, some time late into his second year on the run. It calmed his nerves.

There was a knock at the front door. Par’s stomach grumbled in response. As he walked toward the front door, he thought Pork Fried Rice, here I come. But when Par opened the front door, there was something else waiting for him.

The Secret Service.

Two men. An older, distinguished gentleman standing on the left and a young guy on the right. The young guy’s eyes opened wide when he saw Par.

Suddenly, the young guy pushed Par, and kept pushing him. Small, hard, fast thrusts. Par couldn’t get his balance. Each time he almost got his footing, the agent shoved the hacker backward again until he landed against the wall. The agent spun Par around so his face pressed against the wall and pushed a gun into his kidney. Then he slammed handcuffs on Par and started frisking him for weapons.

Par looked at Morty, now sobbing in the corner, and thought, You narced on me.

Once Par was safely cuffed, the agents flashed their badges to him.

Then they took him outside, escorted him into a waiting car and drove into Manhattan. They pulled up in front of the World Trade Center and when Par got out the young agent swapped the cuffs so Par’s hands were in front of him.

As the agents escorted the handcuffed fugitive up a large escalator, the corporate world stared at the trio. Business men and women in prim navy suits, secretaries and office boys all watched wide-eyed from the opposite escalator. And if the handcuffs weren’t bad enough, the younger Secret Service agent was wearing a nylon jacket with a noticeable gun-shaped lump in the front pouch.

Why are these guys bringing me in the front entrance? Par kept thinking. Surely there must be a backdoor, a car park back entrance.

Something not quite so public.

The view from any reasonably high floor of the World Trade Center is breathtaking, but Par never got a chance to enjoy the vista. He was hustled into a windowless room and handcuffed to a chair. The agents moved in and out, sorting out paperwork details. They uncuffed him briefly while they inked his fingers and rolled them across sheets of paper. Then they made him give handwriting samples, first his right hand then his left.

Par didn’t mind being cuffed to the chair so much, but he found the giant metal cage in the middle of the fingerprinting room deeply disturbing. It reminded him of an animal cage, the kind used in old zoos.

The two agents who arrested him left the room, but another one came in. And the third agent was far from friendly. He began playing the bad cop, railing at Par, shouting at him, trying to unnerve him. But no amount of yelling from the agent could rile Par as much as the nature of the questions he asked.

The agent didn’t ask a single question about Citibank. Instead, he demanded to hear everything Par knew about TRW.

All Par’s worst nightmares about the killer spy satellite, about becoming the man who knew too much, rushed through his mind.

Par refused to answer. He just sat silently, staring at the agent.

Eventually, the older agent came back into the room, dragged the pitbull agent away and took him outside for a whispered chat. After that, the pitbull agent was all sweetness and light with Par. Not another word about TRW.

Par wondered why a senior guy from the Secret Service would tell his minion to clam up about the defence contractor? What was behind the sudden silence? The abrupt shift alarmed Par almost as much as the questions had in the first place.

The agent told Par he would be remanded in custody while awaiting extradition to California. After all the paperwork had been completed, they released him from the handcuffs and let him stand to stretch. Par asked for a cigarette and one of the agents gave him one. Then a couple of other agents--junior guys--came in.

The junior agents were very friendly. One of them even shook Par’s hand and introduced himself. They knew all about the hacker. They knew his voice from outgoing messages on voicemail boxes he had created for himself. They knew what he looked like from his California police file, and maybe even surveillance photos. They knew his personality from telephone bridge conversations which had been recorded and from the details of his Secret Service file. Perhaps they had even tracked him around the country, following a trail of clues left in his flightpath. Whatever research they had done, one thing was clear.

These agents felt like they knew him intimately--Par the person, not just Par the hacker.

It was a strange sensation. These guys Par had never met before chatted with him about the latest Michael Jackson video as if he was a neighbour or friend just returned from out of town. Then they took him further uptown, to a police station, for more extradition paperwork.

This place was no World Trade Center deluxe office. Par stared at the peeling grey paint in the ancient room, and then watched officers typing out reports using the two-finger hunt-and-peck method on electric typewriters--not a computer in sight. The officers didn’t cuff Par to the desk. Par was in the heart of a police station and there was no way he was going anywhere.

While the officer handling Par was away from his desk for ten minutes, Par felt bored. So he began flipping through the folders with information on other cases on the officer’s desk. They were heavy duty fraud cases--mafia and drug-money laundering--cases which carried reference to FBI involvement. These people looked hairy.

That day, Par had a quick appearance in court, just long enough to be given protective custody in the Manhattan detention complex known as the Tombs while he waited for the authorities from California to come and pick him up.

Par spent almost a week in the Tombs. By day three, he was climbing the walls. It was like being buried alive.

During that week, Par had almost no contact with other human beings--a terrible punishment for someone with so much need for a continual flow of new information. He never left his cell. His jailer slid trays of food into his cell and took them away.

On day six, Par went nuts. He threw a fit, began screaming and banging on the door. He yelled at the guard. Told him none too nicely that he wanted to ‘get the fuck outta here’. The guard said he would see if he could get Par transferred to Rikers Island, New York’s notorious jail.

Par didn’t care if he was transferred to the moon, as long as he got out of solitary confinement.

Except for the serial killer, the north infirmary at Rikers Island was a considerable improvement on the Tombs. Par was only locked in his cell at night. During the day he was free to roam inside the infirmary area with other prisoners. Some of them were there because the authorities didn’t want to put them in with the hardened criminals, and some of them were there because they were probably criminally insane.

It was an eclectic bunch. A fireman turned jewellery heister. A Colombian drug lord. A chop-shop ringleader, who collected more than 300 stolen cars, chopped them up, reassembled them as new and then sold them off. A man who killed a homosexual for coming onto him.

‘Faggot Killer’, as he was known inside, hadn’t meant to kill anyone: things had gotten a little out of hand; next thing he knew, he was facing ten to twelve on a murder rap.

Par wasn’t wild about the idea of hanging out with a murderer, but he was nervous about what could happened to a young man in jail. Forging a friendship with Faggot Killer would send the right message. Besides, the guy seemed to be OK. Well, as long as you didn’t look at him the wrong way.

On his first day, Par also met Kentucky, a wild-eyed man who introduced himself by thrusting a crumpled newspaper article into the hacker’s hand and saying, ‘That’s me’. The article, titled ‘Voices Told Him to Kill’, described how police had apprehended a serial killer believed to be responsible for a dozen murders, maybe more.

During his last murder, Kentucky told Par he had killed a woman--and then written the names of the aliens who had commanded him to do it on the walls of her apartment in her blood.

The jewellery heister tried to warn Par to stay away from Kentucky, who continued to liaise with the aliens on a regular basis. But it was too late. Kentucky decided that he didn’t like the young hacker. He started shouting at Par, picking a fight. Par stood there, stunned and confused. How should he deal with an aggravated serial killer? And what the hell was he doing in jail with a serial killer raving at him anyway? It was all too much.

The jewellery heister rushed over to Kentucky and tried to calm him down, speaking in soothing tones. Kentucky glowered at Par, but he stopped yelling.

A few days into his stay at Rikers, Faggot Killer invited Par to join in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. It beat watching TV talk shows all day, so Par agreed. He sat down at the metal picnic table where Faggot Killer had laid out the board.

So it was that Par, the twenty-year-old computer hacker from California, the X.25 network whiz kid, came to play Dungeons and Dragons with a jewellery thief, a homophobic murderer and a mad serial killer in Rikers Island. Par found himself marvelling at the surrealism of the situation.

Kentucky threw himself into the game. He seemed to get off on killing hobgoblins.

‘I’ll take my halberd,’ Kentucky began with a smile, ‘and I stab this goblin.’ The next player began to make his move, but Kentucky interrupted. ‘I’m not done,’ he said slowly, as a demonic grin spread across his face. ‘And I slice it. And cut it. It bleeds everywhere.’

Kentucky’s face tensed with pleasure.

The other three players shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Par looked at Faggot Killer with nervous eyes.

‘And I thrust a knife into its heart,’ Kentucky continued, the volume of his voice rising with excitement. ‘Blood, blood, everywhere blood.

And I take the knife and hack him. And I hack and hack and hack.’

Kentucky jumped up from the table and began shouting, thrusting one arm downward through the air with an imaginary dagger, ‘And I hack and I hack and I hack!’

Then Kentucky went suddenly still. Everyone at the table froze. No-one dared move for fear of driving him over the edge. Par’s stomach had jumped into his throat. He tried to gauge how many seconds it would take to extricate himself from the picnic table and make a break for the far side of the room.