He put the index cards and the revolver on the round elevated desk and said to his crew, “Log off and shut down,” and at once they returned to their workstations to do as he instructed.
Once an infinity transmitter had been hooked into a phone, it hibernated until an activating call was placed from an outside line. As the final digit of the number was entered, the caller at the same moment triggered an electronic whistle into the mouthpiece. This instantly switched on the infinity transmitter, which prevented the target phone from ringing but activated its microphone. The people in the room, this room, would be unaware that every conversation among them was being transmitted to a law-enforcement agency, which was recording everything. With an open-end court order granted for national-security reasons, the FBI was most likely eavesdropping on the Radburn operation frequently but not continuously, though there was no reason they couldn’t record 24/7 if they wished.
When all the computers had been shut down, Jimmy went to a tall metal cabinet in the northeast corner of the long room. It contained the switching system for a business with a couple dozen phone lines. He fiddled in there for a minute, and when he closed the cabinet door, Jane assumed he had shut off his entire telecom package.
When he returned to her, he said, “What’s with the wig?”
She pointed toward the boarded windows at the south end of the room. “There are so many traffic cameras anymore, people stop seeing them. You’ve got one mid-block, in front of your store, but it’s not a traffic camera.”
“That sucks.”
“It looks as if it’s shooting west to east, but it’s aimed at your front door.”
“Orwellian bastards.”
Of which you are one, unrealized, Jane thought.
She said, “It clicks every two seconds and transmits high-resolution images of everyone who goes in or out of Vinyl. That’s why the wig. And the massive eye shadow. At least, the last I knew, the camera isn’t twinned with facial-recognition software.”
“What’s your name?”
For the hell of it, she said, “Ethan Hunt,” borrowing it from the bakery delivery guy in San Diego.
“Funny name for a girl.”
“I’m not your usual girl.”
15
* * *
JIMMY RADBURN SENT MALWARE—whose name was Felix—downstairs to get first aid from Ms. Ennui, also known as Britta. He dispatched the other six guys in his crew to wait in the shop for instructions. They thundered down the steep stairs, and he shouted, “Close the door behind you,” which someone did.
He led Jane to a table covered with boxes of cookies, packages of candy, bags of potato chips, pretzels, corn chips, cans and jars of nuts—enough munchables to satisfy a legion of potheads during an around-the-clock smoke-in. The complexity and delicacy of the tasks undertaken by Vinyl’s black-hat hacker crew ruled out weed before or during—and pretty much after—work, but evidently either a salted-carb rush or a sugar high was thought to contribute to productivity.
They pulled out a couple chairs and sat facing each other.
Jimmy Radburn looked like an adult Kewpie doll—pleasantly rounded but not truly fat, his face smooth and unlined and nearly beardless. He was well barbered, freshly scrubbed, and had the most perfectly manicured hands of any man Jane had seen.
He said, “How’d you get your information, the stuff on the index cards? Which, anyway, is probably all gubbish.”
“Doesn’t matter how I got it. And it isn’t garbage.”
She wasn’t going to tell him that she was an FBI agent on leave. He couldn’t testify in court to what he didn’t know.
She said, “They came at you with grandpa tech, and you missed it during your sweeps because you’re always running straight-line analysis, looking for breaches where you expect them. When you’re developing products—apps, whatever—or trying to crack a network, you want straight-line progress, but you know you also need to take a drunkard’s walk.”
“Respect randomness,” he agreed. “Drunkard’s walk. Brownian movement. Random and undirected progress.”
“So you should apply it to security sweeps as well.”
“I’m a genius and an idiot.” With his smile, he tried to project self-deprecation, but it was a smile borrowed from a baby rattlesnake. “So how screwed am I? Should I flush this place today?”
“They’re paying out line to you, letting you run with the hook, building files on the other fish you swim with. So you’ve got time. Maybe a few months, maybe a year. But if I were you, I’d melt out of here over a couple of nights, using the back entrance, and leave this an empty room by next week.”
“So it’s a pessimal situation.”
“Opposite of optimal,” she agreed. “I won’t tell you how I know any of this, but if you want, I can tell you how they tripped over your tracks.”
As she talked, he had extracted an Oreo from a bag of cookies. He popped the entire thing into his mouth, as though it was the size of a Cheez-It, and chewed vigorously. After swallowing, he said, “I guess I need to know. So tell me.”
“You remember a client named Carl Bessemer?”
“I make a point of not remembering clients.”
“One of your apps allows even tech idiots to perform super-easy spoofing from any smartphone. The call or text message gets routed through a Canadian exchange before it bounces back to the States, where it bounces some more before going to the recipient with fake caller/sender ID.”
“I’m proud of that one. My winnitude went off the charts with that one.”
His smug expression abraded Jane’s nerves. She said, “Plus, the call escapes the phone-company billing system, there’s no evidence afterward that it was ever made.”
“Spank me now. I’m a bad boy.” He plucked another Oreo from the bag. “In my defense, I must say we try to make an effort to identify potential terrorists and not sell to them.”
“How does that work?”
Crunching the cookie, he said, “Not as well as I’d like.”
“You also sold Bessemer a clever voice synthesizer with an interface that allowed it to be used with his smartphone. Feed the synthesizer a one-minute sample of anyone’s voice, which you could record by making a phone call, and the damn thing can change your speech to mimic the other person’s so well that a wife would think she’s talking to her husband, or a child to her mother, when in fact it was Bessemer.”
“Another Radburn top-of-the-charts product.” As he spoke, he celebrated himself by bumping one fist against the other.
His thick-fingered hands were pale pink and utterly hairless, as were his wrists to his shirt cuffs, smooth as rubber, seemingly boneless, repellent. Like the hands of some android bred in a vat.
“What’s bad for you is, Carl Bessemer wasn’t an ordinary phone phreaker trying to stiff AT&T. He wasn’t even an ordinary criminal.”
“In my experience,” Jimmy said, “there isn’t such a thing as an ordinary criminal. It’s a community of entirely unique individuals.”
“Pretending to be who he wasn’t, Bessemer lured young women to lonely places, then raped and killed them.”
“You can’t blame General Motors for selling cars to guys who get drunk and drive.”
Jane loathed him, but she needed him. “Understand, I’m not judging you, only telling you how the Feds stumbled onto you.”
“Don’t worry your pretty purple head. I’ve got a nose for character. I can smell it. Your character has the same scent as mine. You’re not the judgmental type.”
“Bessemer wasn’t his real name.”
“A lot of our clients’ names aren’t their real names, Ethan Hunt. Anonymity is essential to privacy, and privacy is a right.”
“His real name was Floyd Sutter.”
“Ah,” he said, getting the full picture. “Sutter the Cutter. The star of tabloids and TV news. What—fifteen, sixteen kills?”
“Nineteen.” She had been the one to cripple Sutter with a leg shot and secure him with cable zips of the kind he used to bind his victims on first disabling them. “Your bad luck was that they didn’t kill him in the process of capturing him. Floyd is a chatterbox. He didn’t know your physical address—”