They dished up the food and brought their plates into the living room. Ian ate ravenously, finishing his meal and polishing off the rest of hers too. She waited until he set his empty plate on the coffee table before she asked her first question.
“Do you work for the FBI?” Kate had read everything she could get her hands on about hacking after Ian explained the difference between white and black hats. The subject fascinated her, and they’d had several in-depth follow-up discussions about certain aspects of the culture. She remembered from her reading that the FBI had a number of task forces dedicated to fighting cybercrime. If Ian was as good as he said he was, it made sense that he might be involved in something like that.
“I work with the FBI. But they have priority over my other clients. Always.”
“Do they often whisk you away on airplanes without notice?”
“Only when absolutely necessary, and only if it’s something that can’t be handled out of the field office.”
“What exactly are you involved in?”
“Remember that day at breakfast when I told you about the cyberthieves who steal credit card numbers and then sell them to people called carders?”
“You said they make new cards and use them to buy things. Then they return the merchandise for cash or sell it.”
He nodded. “The credit card information is traded on a forum. It’s basically an online black market for cyberthieves. Attacks against retailers and consumers have increased, which means more of this information is being bought and sold now than ever before. The FBI created a team whose sole purpose is to dismantle one of the biggest carding rings.”
“The FBI hired you to help them with this?”
“It’s not uncommon. They simply don’t have the technical skills to do it themselves. Sometimes it takes a hacker to catch a hacker.”
“So you’re an informant?”
“More like a special consultant.”
“Does the FBI have something against letting you sleep?”
“No, but one of the team members logged on to the forum from his government IP address, which prompted accusations that it had been infiltrated by the FBI. Most cybercrime rings have been, so the paranoia is rampant and, in this case, justified. The leader of the task force summoned the team to headquarters to do damage control. My phone started blowing up after I got the call, and the plane was already waiting for me on the tarmac when I arrived. They brought in food, and we could take a quick break to stand under a cold shower in the locker room, but no one slept. We’ve spent over two years earning the trust of the forum’s key members, and we stayed online around the clock until we’d convinced them it had been a false alarm and they had nothing to worry about. Then I got back on the plane and came home.”
It wasn’t that Kate didn’t know the FBI utilized civilian assistance because she did. And she could understand how anyone working in that capacity would need to maintain a certain amount of anonymity. But it was a little disconcerting to discover that the man she was falling for actually was a superhero who spent at least part of his time fighting cybercrime and that she’d had no idea.
“You ask me about my day, and I tell you about the people I’ve helped. But when I ask you about your day not once have you ever said, ‘The team and I made some good progress toward bringing down a ring of cyberthieves.’”
“I wasn’t intentionally withholding it. When things are running smoothly I don’t think much about it. The FBI is just another one of my clients, and I sometimes forget it’s a bit out of the ordinary for most people.”
“How long have they been one of your clients?”
“A little over ten years.”
“What kinds of things have you worked on with them?”
“High-tech crime, exploitation, cyberterrorism, fraud. Some assignments are short. Some, like the carding ring, are much longer.”