Panic

38

R azur was thin, like his sharp-edged namesake. He wore a goatee dyed platinum blond and black eye-glasses and a Celtic cross tattooed on the back of his neck. ‘Evan?’

‘Yes. Razur?’

Razur shook hands with him and sat down at Evan’s table, in the far back corner of the cafe. He tilted his head at Evan. ‘Your eyes look like you just smoked yourself a big chronic.’

‘Chronic?’

‘A potent joint, mate.’

‘Oh.’ Evan shook his head. ‘No. You want a coffee?’

‘Yeah, black. Largest they got.’

The cafe was grimy and funky, but not too busy, a line of computers on one side of the metallic wall, young people Web-surfing while downing juices, teas, and coffees. Evan got up and ordered the drink from the barista. He sensed Razur’s gaze on him the whole time. Evaluating him as a series of problems to be broken down into his constituent parts and solved. Or maybe revisiting the marijuana theory and deciding Evan’s request was the result of reefer madness. Evan came back to the corner table and set a steaming cup in front of Razur.

The hacker took a cautious sip. ‘I’m told you’re being raked over by nasty people.’

‘The less you know the better.’ Evan didn’t want to get into the details of the Deeps or their entanglement with the CIA.

Razur gave a thin smile. ‘But you’ve gotten their dirty secrets.’

‘Yes. On a laptop. But I can’t get past the password.’

‘I won’t either,’ Razur said. ‘Without the cash.’

Evan handed him a laundry bag from the hotel. Razur peeked inside at the money.

‘Count it if you want.’

Razur did, fast, under the table, where the bricks of cash wouldn’t draw attention. ‘Thanks. Sorry I’m not a trusting soul. You got the system?’

‘Yes.’ Evan brought the laptop out of a shopping bag he’d found in the back of the Jaguar.

‘I’m not really into breaking the law, I’m into technical challenges, showing up the bastards who think they’re so smart but they aren’t. Savvy?’

‘Savvy.’

Razur popped open his own sleek laptop, revved it up, cabled it to the Ethernet port of Khan’s machine. ‘I’ll run a program. If the password can be found in a dictionary, we’re in.’

He clicked keys. Evan watched as words began to rapid-fire scroll on a screen, faster than he could read them, throwing themselves against the gates of Khan’s laptop fortress.

After a few moments Razur said, ‘No joy. We’ll try it with alphanumerics thrown in at random and variant misspellings.’ Razur slurped at his coffee. Watched the slow, solemn rise of a status bar as millions of new combinations attempted to speak the open sesame of Khan’s laptop.

‘Hey, do you know much about handhelds?’ Evan asked.

‘Not my specialty. Low-powered buggers.’

Evan pulled Khan’s PDA out of his pocket, used his thumbprint to open it.

‘Biometric security,’ Razur said. ‘What have you got on your to-do list, stealing a nuclear weapon?’ He laughed.

‘Not today. What are these programs? I don’t recognize them.’

Razur studied the small screen. ‘My. I’d like to play with these. This one’s a cellular interference program – it would emit a signal to jam any cell phone in the room. Should we try?’ He grinned mischievously, eyeing the several customers chatting on their phones. Tapped the pad without waiting for Evan’s answer.

Within ten seconds everyone was frowning at his or her phone.

‘Ah, I think I just broke a law.’ Razur tapped again and the phone service seemed to return as the customers re-dialed and started their conversations again.

‘And this one’ – Razur tapped it open, studied the program with a frown – ‘it’s like what I’m using on your laptop. But specialized. For keypad alarm systems. Most have only a four-digit password. Patch into the alarm system and it would decipher and activate the code.’

‘You mean it would give me the code of an alarm system on the screen so I could enter it?’

‘I think that’s what it’s designed to do. Hmmm. This one copies a storage card or a hard drive. Compresses the data so it would fit on this PDA.’

‘You couldn’t copy a whole computer hard drive using this, though, could you?’

‘No. Not this. Too small. But another PDA, or a set of files, sure.’

Maybe my mother used an approach like this to steal the files from Khan, Evan thought. ‘It would be fast?’

‘Sure. If you grab other files along with it, no problem. Grab a whole folder, it’s faster than searching and grabbing for files. If you can compress it, all the better.’ He handed him back the PDA, his eyebrow raised. ‘You steal this from the spooks?’

‘Spooks?’

‘Spies.’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘I don’t,’ Razur said.

Evan watched the status bar slowly inching its progress. Please, he thought, crack. Give me the files. But they weren’t just files: they were a lifetime’s worth of secrets, the financial trails of terrible deceits, the record of lives snuffed out for dirty money. He had one hand to play with Jargo, and it was on these files.

Razur lit a cigarette. ‘I could hack a porn site while we’re waiting. Cover up the tits with pictures of prominent politicians. I’m very antiporn these days. I’ve gone all Victorian.’

Evan shook his head. ‘I want your opinion on an idea of mine. If we crack the password, but the files on the laptop are encrypted, would that keep you from copying them to another computer?’

‘Possibly. Depends on how they’re encrypted. Or if they’re copy-protected.’

‘The program to de-encrypt the files has to be on this laptop, right? I mean, you would need to edit files, so you would have to decrypt them first, make changes, and lock them back up.’

‘Yes. If the unlocking program’s not on the laptop, it needs to be in a place where it can be downloaded easily. Otherwise it’s like a lockbox without a key, worthless. If your bad guy stashed a custom program on a remote server, I’ll dig through his cache, if it hasn’t been erased, to track it, or I’ll have to hack into his service provider.’ Razur grinned. ‘I detect an evil idea about to take flight.’

‘So we could decode the files,’ Evan said, running a finger along the smooth edge of the laptop, ‘and hide a copy. On a server where I could retrieve a copy off the Web. Then we encrypt the hard drive of this laptop again, using the same locking software and the original password. I give the bad guys their encrypted laptop, they might believe I never, ever saw the files. It’s like returning a locked box to them that I never had the key for. So they think I’m no longer a real threat to them.’

Razur nodded.

‘Or even if they kill me, the files could still be used to cut off the balls of said bad guys. It would be my ace in the hole.’

‘No guarantees,’ Razur said, ‘that I can even break this system open.’

‘Then I think I need a Plan B.’ Evan toyed with the possibilities. He smiled at Razur. ‘I’m going to need a bit more help from you. Of course I’ll pay extra.’

‘Sure.’

‘Tell me, do you play poker?’