‘He stole an apple,’ said the Saints fan.
‘Really? Did he interfere with your work?’
‘No,’ they both said.
‘Back to it.’
Almost as one, the Oliver Twists put their earbuds back in place. Fagin set a can of cold soda by each of them. The typing speed on the keyboards increased.
Fagin crossed his arms and said, ‘Whatever you want, the answer is no.’
‘That’s a harsh hello,’ I said.
I had met Fagin back in my days working on the CIA’s task force on global crime aka Special Projects aka The Dirty Down Jobs We Gotta Do But No One Is Supposed To Know. Our purview covered everything from human trafficking to arms dealing to corporate espionage, in the aspect of when it threatened national security. Crime at this level, hand in hand with terrorism, is a threat to the stability of the West. It reaches inside and poisons government, it undermines the basic social contract down to the bone of civilization. Twenty per cent of the economy is now illicit. The criminals are becoming more mainstream.
But in stopping this crime we sometimes committed crimes ourselves. Fagin was an example. Remember reading in the news, when Russia and its much smaller neighbor, Georgia, got into that brief war a while back? The Russians launched not only bullets and missiles at Georgia, they took down all of Georgia’s internet access. With a massive cyber attack against critical servers, the Russians managed to cut off an entire nation of four million people from the internet. If you were inside Georgia, and you tried to access CNN or the BBC web pages, you got served Russian propaganda. If you tried to withdraw money from Georgian banks, your funds stayed put. If you tried to email people in other parts of the country, you sat and stared at your unsent message still warming your mailbox. The cyber attack, the Russians claimed, was not done by government hackers, but rather by patriotic, good-hearted, milk-drinking Russians acting independently who wanted to help fight the enemy. After the war, NATO and the highly irritated Georgians determined that some of the hackers who launched the internet attack were tied to some of the most notorious criminal rings inside Russia. If this vigilante hacker corps wasn’t an official part of the government, they were at least protected by the government, and their presence gave the Russian leadership necessary and plausible deniability.
The best hackers are not always on government payrolls. Sometimes you need your hackers to not be connected to you, when you spend days breaking laws and flouting treaties.
Fagin was our back pocket, our deniable warrior. He and his digital Oliver Twists. When we needed things broken or stolen and there was no way it could be tied to the CIA, ever, then Special Projects and Fagin stepped in to pick the pocket and scurry away.
‘You don’t work for Special Projects any more, Sam,’ he said. ‘Get out.’
‘I’m a freelance consultant, like you. Not exactly on the formal benefits package.’
‘Really? Really? ’ Fagin’s favorite word, delivered with a sneer. I had once counted how many times Fagin uttered Really? in a meeting and stopped at fifty.
‘I am here to ask you for a favor.’
‘Really? I repeat. Get out.’
‘I’m pressed for time. Tell me what I want to know or I’ll tell the North Koreans about you and your crew. And the Russians. And the Chinese. And the Iranians.’ Fagin and his cadre of hackers spied on and created hassles for a variety of enemies. Maybe even some friends. Let me just say the French, the Brazilians, and the Japanese also all have reason to hate Fagin. They just don’t know it.
‘You really wouldn’t dare.’
‘My child’s life is really at stake, Fagin, so, yeah, I would. Sit down. We’re going to talk.’
He sat. He still looked like the computer teacher he’d once been, in a New York high school. On the back wall was a Teacher of the Year award he’d gotten years before, back when he still taught, smelling of chalk, dry- erase pens and fusty computer labs. Of course. Fagin had been so talented at encouraging young talent and honing minds. Unfortunately he encouraged them to hack into banks and government databases, usually as a prank. Special Projects had recruited him when he and his keyboarding artful dodgers tried to delve (unwittingly) into a front company for the CIA, kept him and his iPodded foundlings from a prison sentence and guided him toward more constructive pursuits. To the outside world he worked as a software design consultant.
‘Your child’s life? Aren’t you being really melodramatic?’
He didn’t know anything about my personal life – as far as I knew.
‘I’m looking for a young hacker, of Chinese descent, who might have grown up here in New York.’
‘Oh, that narrows it down.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Really. Do you want the left or the right side of the phone book?’
‘Do you know a hacker who’s vanished in the past couple of years?’
‘No.’ I saw his crossed arms tighten for just a moment. I would have to ask very precise questions to get a useful answer. The basic principle of Fagin’s psychology is that knowledge and intelligence are the only currencies. Really.
I produced my cell phone. I didn’t say anything. I just wanted him to see it. Right now it was more frightening than a loaded gun.
‘I think he was from New York and he did something bad enough to hide out under a false name, Jin Ming, at grad school at Delft University of Technology. He has come back to New York, at huge risk, when he has every reason to dig a tunnel below a Dutch canal and hide for the next ten years. So I’m thinking it’s for a family reason.’
‘A lot of Asian kids study computers, but not a lot turn to hacktivism. Cultural mores. More respect for authority in Chinese families.’ Fagin studied his fingertips. ‘Not to stereotype or generalize, really.’
‘So how many do you know?’
‘Well, several, still. A few came through my, um, camp. I’ve kept tabs on them.’
‘Because you don’t want them talking about their work with you or because you’ll need them again?’
‘Both. If I show you their faces, will you leave?’
‘I need a name, Fagin.’
‘And then what?’
‘You don’t say anything to Special Projects that I was here, and I don’t give your home address and real name to your many enemies overseas.’
‘I’m really hurt. I don’t think you’d do that, Sam.’
‘My child. The rules are off.’
He stood. I followed him to one of the computers. I leaned close. I wanted to be sure he didn’t send an email to August or anyone else in Special Projects. Hackers are trickier and more subtle than pickpockets. He could hit a keystroke and reformat the entire network for all I knew. Watching Fagin at a keyboard was like watching the cobra slowly rise and undulate from the reed basket.
‘I keep a dossier on all the Oliver Twists,’ he said. He entered in a passcode too fast for me to register it, then another one, then another. He had a file labeled TWISTS and he opened it up. Dozens of names. He clicked on a few and their files opened. Complete with pictures. I doubt Fagin had made them stand still for a picture; these looked stolen from passport and driver’s license pictures. Or even school pictures: some of the kids looked to be barely thirteen or fourteen. Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen.
He began to click through the photos while I watched. ‘No. No. No,’ I said.
It would have been too much to hope that Jin Ming had worked for him; if so, then if he wanted to surrender to someone he could have run straight back to Fagin. ‘None of these are Jin Ming.’
‘Jin Ming. Jin Ming. I remember a Jack Ming.’
‘Jack Ming. That name’s too close to Jin Ming for it to be a good alias.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Jin would be the surname, not Ming. He’d be called Ming by his friends, not Jin. And a good alias is one you can remember.’ He sat down, searched on Jack Ming on a Google search. News reports came up. A picture.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Fagin said. ‘Him.’
It was the young Chinese hacker. ‘That’s him. What did he do?’
‘I only knew him by reputation. Supposedly he hacked Bruce Springsteen’s laptop once. Stole recordings of an album in development.’
