“What is localization?” Zula asked. Peter sighed, letting her know it was a stupid question.
“Translating foreign software into Hungarian, making things work correctly in the special environment of Hungary,” Csongor explained, and Zula thought that she could glimpse, here, in the way that he contentedly explained things, Csongor’s father the schoolteacher. “As an example, because of inflation, Hungarian currency is debased.” Warming to the task, he pulled a wallet out of his pocket and produced a sheaf of bills from Magyar Nemzeti Bank, illustrated with engravings of men Zula had never heard of with crazy hats and florid mustaches. The denominations were enormous; the smallest was 1,000, and some of them bore five digits. “So if you have some trivial app that is used in retail, like for a cash register, foreign software might not be suitable because it wants format consisting of decimal point followed by some number of cents. But we don’t have a decimal point or cents, just an integer. So minor rewriting of software is needed. I did this kind of thing for merchants.”
“Which led to credit card readers?” said Peter, who was finally showing some patience.
“Exactly. In Warsaw Pact times, merchants did not have credit card readers, but when the economy came to life in the late 1990s, everyone suddenly had to have them, and so when people learned that I could program such machines, I had lots of work to do. My father had died from cigarettes and my mother could not make so much money, so I made money to put Bartos through school and so on. All fine. But there is a little snag. You see, the last Soviet soldier left Hungary in 1991. But there were other Russians who came in during the Cold War who took a little bit longer to leave.”
“These guys,” Zula said, cocking her head in the direction of the neighboring plane.
“Mafia, yes,” said Csongor. “So Step 1 of the new economy was that everything got very bad. Step 2 was that things got better and everyone obtained credit cards. And Step 3—”
“Step 3 was credit card fraud,” said Peter.
“Yes, and this was attempted in a number of different ways. Some better than others. The best of all ways is like this. A waiter in a restaurant has a little credit card reader in his pocket. The customer wants to pay his bill. He hands his credit card to the waiter. The waiter takes it back to a place where he is not observed and swipes it once to pay the bill. So far, totally legitimate.”
Peter was already nodding, confident that he knew this material, so Csongor finished the story for Zula’s benefit. “However, then the waiter swipes the card through the illegitimate reader in his pocket and makes a copy of the credit card data. The reader stores the data of many such cards. These data are aggregated and then sold on the black market.”
“So you got involved in that racket,” Peter said.
Csongor hesitated, not completely happy with the phrasing. “I took a job to program the firmware of a device. I was perhaps naive. It became clear to me only slowly what the device was used for.”
Peter let out a tiny snort. Csongor caught it immediately, thought about it, finally shrugged his huge shoulders and met Zula’s eye. As if she had somehow been named the judge of all such matters. “So I am just the latest in a very long line of Hungarians being talked into extremely stupid adventures by Germans, Russians, whatever. But it took me into this culture”—he shifted his gaze onto Peter, and Zula understood that he was now talking about international hacker culture—” where I was cool. Respected. Powerful drugs for a teenager.”
Peter did not meet Csongor’s gaze, and so Csongor went on as if the point had been conceded.
“Then later the same client came back to me with a new problem: there was too much data. Thousands of these machines had been mass-produced and distributed to waiters, not only in Hungary but all over Europe, and the data storage problem was becoming an issue, there were security problems, and so on. Could I help with this? And by the way, if the answer was no, perhaps they would report me to the police or cause other trouble for me. So I became a systems programmer. I built the systems these people needed. And after that, they needed someone to keep the system running in a secure and reliable way. So, over years, I morphed into a kind of mostly freelance systems administrator. I run servers, set up email systems, websites, wikis—”
“I know what a systems administrator is,” Peter said.
“My clientele are small companies or sole proprietors who are not big enough to hire someone just for this purpose. But my specialty, my niche, is situations where privacy and security are very important.”
“You work for gangsters,” Peter said.
“As do you, Peter.”
“This part of it is boring for me,” Zula said.
Csongor turned to look at her, his face a mixture of curiosity and regret. “Systems administration?”
Zula shook her head and made a gesture of two fists banging into each other, looking between Peter and Csongor. They seemed to take her point. Zula continued, “So I’ll bet Wallace contacted you and said ‘I need secure email, no questions asked.’”
“Exactly,” Csongor said. “I knew he worked for Ivanov. But. A Scottish accountant in Vancouver. What could possibly go wrong?” He chuckled and slapped his thigh, hoping that the others would join him in a little round of ironic laughter, but Peter was having none of it.
“Who is Ivanov? What did Wallace do for him?” Peter asked.
Csongor leaned back in his seat, suddenly feeling tired, and rubbed his eyes. “I had been working for these people for six years before I ever met Ivanov. Then he showed up in Budapest one day and took me to a hockey game and dinner, and then it was obvious who was really the boss.”