by Richard Stevenson

some hacked files from yet another hacker who had once stolen the "incredible babe" girlfriend of hacker number two and now was going to be made to pay for his treachery.

I said, "I'm just glad all you cyberhackers are good Americans, and none of you are working for Muammar Qaddafi or the Syrians or anything."

"No, we're all patriots at heart. What we do is as American as Hostess Fruit Pie."

"So, these files are what? The e-mail correspondence between who and who?"

"Between my hacked hacker colleague—let's call him Todd, since that's his name—who is known in the community for being totally bottom-line oriented—and a current client of his.

Plus of course e-mails from his client to other parties which Todd made a point of hacking into and then saving for a rainy day. Todd is a man who is always available to the highest bidder, and on top of his amorality, he's good. One of the most talented in the field. His client this time is a name you may or may not know. His name is Sam, and right there is his e-mail address."

"Sam."

"Sam has regular correspondence with men in high places, as you'll see." Bud clicked and scrolled this way and that.

"Now here's a note to Sam from Stanley Weaver, CEO at BravuraCorp, the—what?—third largest bank in the United States?"

"Third or fourth."

"Quote: If this nutcase Louderbush wins the Democratic primary, we are so so fucked. It'll be four years of McCloskey 230

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making life all but impossible for free enterprise to function.

Can't you do anything for Merle? We'll help out naturally. JayGoshen says you're working on something for him."

"There's a reply?"

More scrolling. "Quote: Louderbush is a fag who beats up his boyfriends, and we're going to get this out. McCloskey has some clubfooted Albany PI working on it, and we're making sure his attention doesn't wander. This guy can't be bought, we've heard, but somebody who knows him told us how to keep him interested. i.e., push him around. I'm letting McCloskey's guy do the heavy lifting here, and then we'll sink McCloskey with some stories on how he's a dirty trickster unfit for office. Give me a week or two and Merle will be home free.'"

"I'm trying to remember who Jay Goshen is. Is he the head of Herkimer House or Trevalian Brothers? I know it's one of the big brokerage firms."

"Trevalian."

"How many of these Sam-to-Wall-Street e-mails are there?"

"Forty or fifty. Some of the other names that crop up—at least as copies-to—are CEOs and CFOs at just about every major Wall Street bank and brokerage and law firm."

"Law firms. Well. I'm trying to zero in on which particular mischief Sam is creating here that's actually illegal. The campaign laws are so loose that candidates can get away with just about anything short of armed robbery. Even embarrassment doesn't count for a lot these days. The electorate is too cynical to care."

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Bud raised a wait-a-minute finger and clicked and scrolled around some more.

"How familiar are you with the town of Hummerston, New Jersey?"

"I grew up in Jersey. But I've just barely heard of Hummerston."

"It's off Interstate 80 about thirty miles west of the G-W

bridge. In recent years the town has built up a sizeable Serb community. Mostly people fed up with the racist, right-wing government in Serbia, but some, too, who are happy with the old Balkan ways of dealing with people with whom one disagrees. That is, rip their ears off, and so forth. Apparently these guys volunteered to help out the New Jersey state Republican organization, and Sam heard about them."

"Wow. Actual Serbians. Who'd have guessed?"

"You're lucky, Strachey. Those guys who went after you in the Outback parking lot didn't lop your ear off and make you eat it."

"No, they were under instructions to spur me on, not frighten me off. Somebody who knows me told Sam this is how I would respond to harassment. I wonder who. Any indication in any of this as to who that might have been?"

"No, but I'm still working on collecting voice mails. That particular morsel could be buried in there somewhere."

"So Sam hired these bad Serbians to rough me up? There are e-mails to that effect?"

"Just generalities. My guess is, Sam told them to do what they had to do to get the job done but what the limits were—

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were just to set the operation in motion and confirm that such-and-such had been carried out. You'll see the oblique and possibly coded language. A lot of it's in broken English, but some borders on literate. There's one guy who seems to use an alias, John Jameson."

"Do you have some other names and addresses in Hummerston?"

"I do. There's a night club called Belgrade Grotto. Liquor and coke—and dancing, both folk and pole. These fellows appear to own it. It's their Bada Bing club."

"I'd like to download all this and have it available to me as I continue to carry out my duties for the McCloskey campaign."

"I brought you four disks, each identical, with this material on each one. I've also included two CDs of your interview with the unfortunate Trey Bigelow."

"Thank you, Bud. There's lots of good reading here to keep me spellbound into the night."

He smiled at me with quiet satisfaction, his dark eyes bright with pride.

I said, "Most of what you do is against the law, isn't it?"

"Do you really want to get into that? Your own qualms and so forth? Okay. Sure. I'm a fucking archcriminal, no doubt about it."

"You don't worry about being prosecuted and being sent to prison?"

"Oh, yeah, I do. Prison sucks, I'm sure. But I pick and choose. I don't do military secrets, and I don't do Tom Cruise.

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stick with that. It's okay. Everybody does it is a weak moral argument, I know. But law enforcement goes along. Cops have better things to do, like terrorism and clubbing persons of the colored races for backtalk. Once in a while some doofus-y kid hacker fucks up a country's banking records or whatever. He's immediately clapped in irons, and I understand that. I don't want my bank statements arriving in my mailbox in Burmese any more than you do. But basically all a hacker has to do to remain at large is, don't do sabotage. I'll concede that political dirty tricks, so-called, can be a problematical area. But in this case I'm going to turn the raw material over to you, and it's going to be your set of practical and ethical quandaries from then on."

"How did you get into this line of work, Bud? Where did you study?"

"I went to Simon's Rock, but my gift for electronic information gathering may be genetic. I'm half Ethiopian and half Greek, and my Ethiopian mother was a spy for the anti-Mengistu coalition during the Marxist reign of terror after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973. She worked for the State Bank of Ethiopia, and she provided data on the regime's finances for the Tigreans and the Eritreans and for the CIA.