“No.”
“You just told me that the client has been tipped off to the vulnerability!”
“That client has been tipped off. Those numbers were compromised. These numbers are not those numbers.”
“What are they, then?”
“The website I’ve been telling you about was set up by a contractor that subsequently went out of business.”
“No wonder!”
“Exactly. I looked through archived web pages and shareholder disclosures to learn the names of some of the other clients who’d hired the same contractor to set up retail websites during the same period of time.”
Wallace thought about it, then nodded. “Reckoning that it was all cookie-cutter.”
“Yeah. All these sites are clones of each other, more or less, and since the contractor went belly-up, they haven’t been keeping up with security patches.”
“Which is probably why you got hired to do the pen testing in the first place.”
“Exactly. So I did find a lot of cookie-cutter sites that shared the same vulnerabilities, including one big one. A department store chain that you have heard of.”
“And you then repeated the same attack.”
“Yeah.”
“Which is now traceable to that consultancy you work for and its computers.”
“No no no,” Peter said. “I worked with some friends of mine in Eastern Europe; we ran the whole thing through other hosts, we anonymized everything—there is absolutely no way that this could be traced to me.”
“These friends of yours work for free?”
“Of course not, they’re getting part of the money.”
“You trust their discretion?”
“Obviously.”
“That explains why your initial contact with me came through Ukraine.”
“Yes.”
“It’s good to have that loose end tied up,” Wallace said primly. “But the biggest loose end of all is still loose.”
“And that is?”
“Why are you doing this?”
Peter was stuck for an answer.
“Just tell me you’re addicted to cocaine. Being blackmailed by your dominatrix. It’s perfectly all right.”
“I’m upside down on my mortgage,” Peter said.
“You mean on that hacker dump where you live?”
“It’s a commercial building in Seattle … an industrial neighborhood called Georgetown…”
Wallace nodded and quoted the address from memory.
Peter’s face got hot. “Okay, you’ve been checking me out. That’s fine. I acquired the space before the economy crashed. I use part of it as live/work space and lease out the rest. When the economy went south, vacancy rates went nuts and the property lost a lot of book value as well as not bringing in rent. But with this, I can make it right. Avoid foreclosure, fix a few things, sell it, be in position to buy…”
“A real house where a female might actually want to live?” Wallace asked. For Peter, in spite of willing himself not to, had let his eyes stray momentarily in the direction of Zula.
“You have to understand,” Peter began.
“Ah, but Peter, I don’t wish to understand.”
“Seattle is full of these people—no smarter than me—no harder working than me—”
“Who are zillionaires because they got lucky. Peter! Listen to me carefully,” Wallace said. “I’ve already told you who I work for. How do you think I feel?”
That left Peter silent long enough for Wallace to add, “And did I make it clear enough that I don’t give a shite?”
“You give a shit about tying up those loose ends.”
“Ah, yes. Thank you for bringing me back to important topics,” Wallace said. He checked his watch. “I got here about half an hour ago. If you’d been watching the parking lot, you’d have seen two vehicles pull in. One is mine. Nice little ragtop, not so well adapted for these roads, but it got me here. The other a black Suburban with a couple of Russians in it. We parked on either side of your orange 2008 Scion xB. One of the Russians, a technical boy not much less talented than you, opened up his laptop and established a connection to the Internet using the lodge’s Wi-Fi network. He is sitting there now waiting for me. If we go through with this transaction, I’ll be in the backseat of that Suburban about thirty seconds later handing him this thumb drive. And he has got, what d’you call them, scripts that can go through your data and check those credit card numbers fast. And if he finds anything wrong, why then the retribution that I was warning you of, a few minutes ago, will have been completed before your liver has had time to metabolize that swallow of Mountain Dew you just enjoyed.”
Peter took another swallow of Mountain Dew. “I have the same scripts,” he said, “and I just ran them on this data a few hours ago. My friends in Eastern Europe have been keeping an eye on things too; they’d let me know if there was a problem. I’m scared of the people you work for, Mr. Wallace, and I wish I had never gotten into this; but one thing I’m not worried about at all is the integrity of the data I’m selling you.”
“Very well then.”
Peter set the thumb drive on the table and slid it across to Wallace.
Wallace drew a laptop from his bag and opened it up on the table. He inserted the thumb drive. Its icon appeared on the screen. He double-clicked it to reveal a single Excel file entitled “data.” Wallace dragged that folder into his “Documents” icon and watched for a few seconds as the little on-screen animation reassured him that the transfer was taking place. As this was happening, he remarked: “There is another way that this could go wrong, of course. Already alluded to in this conversation.”
“And that is …?”
“Perhaps this is not the only copy of the data? Perhaps you’ll double your money, or triple it, by selling it to others?”
Peter shrugged. “There’s no way I can prove that this is the only copy.”
“I understand. But your Ukrainian colleagues—?”
“They’ve never even seen this stuff. When we ran the exploit, the files went straight to my laptop.”