“Will you be needing the WiFi password at all?”, the blonde waitress asks, with a chirpy waitronly lilt.
The man looks up from his laptop and shakes his head.
He doesn’t need a password. He could trivially penetrate the router in seconds if he so wished. Not only would that give him access to the Internet, but to the mundane network traffic of all the hipsters in this Shoreditch café. He doesn’t do it because he has no interest in their Instagram photos or the worthless startup code the bearded, bespectacled twenty-something in the table opposite to his is undoubtedly slinging. The coder has a Hadoop sticker on his Macbook. The man shudders.
He also doesn’t need the WiFi password, because there is a SIM-card inside his laptop that creates an encrypted connection to an out-of-band tower that most people’s packets will ever touch only if the main net gets properly hosed and the network operators switch onto the government-run hot fail-overs reserved for civil emergencies and the like. He doesn’t trust public networks any more than he does this café’s router, which is to say, not at all.
Nor does he fuck with commercial hardware. His laptop is purpose-built from components originally intended for gaming consoles and entertainment units, sourced mainly from niche manufacturers no government or business in their right mind would bother to infiltrate. The Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, the Brits, — he trusts none of them. The Chinese are installing custom motherboard controllers that look just like the real thing, but when activated, are able to hook into the internal functions of the computer, rewrite the boot instruction set, install a rootkit and take control of the entire device. The Russians are doing the same, except that they aren’t even pretending to be subtle about it: you can open up any machine sold by Telek and the mod is there in plain sight, just short of a big red blinking light that signals in morse code “we have no fucking idea what we’re doing”. The Americans and the Brits aren’t in the hardware game, they’re network-level players. It’s slightly easier to work around, but it’s the smart play. You can keep switching strategies once the old ones stop working, and you’re not going to get caught unless someone blows the whistle.
Even with his custom hardware, he is a couple of days overdue for a full sweep. You never know who’s tampering with your shit. He knows, because he’s in the business of tampering with other peoples’ shit.
The man puts on a smile and mouths a big “thank you” to the waitress who is waiting for a verbal response.
The man doesn’t like to talk. Growing up he had a lisp. Every time he opened his mouth was an open invitation for ridicule or a beating, or both. Though these days you couldn’t really tell he’d ever had a speech impediment, the habit of defaulting to non-verbal communication stuck. Besides, he finds that people treat him nicer before he opens his mouth. He has a thick accent he hasn’t been able to train himself off of, and once people hear it, they begin to speak down to him like to a slow child. People can be such idiots. He speaks perfect English, his grammar and vocabulary are better than any of the native speakers in this trendy London café, he’s sure of it. His mouth just makes different sounds when he speaks.
Instead, he prefers to communicate by text. He drops his eyes back to his laptop screen. The screen is true black, originally intended for a children’s gaming tablet. The blackness of his screen is only illuminated by bright green text. It doesn’t need to look like this, it’s 2017 after all, that’s just the terminal theme he’s installed because he likes the nod to iconic 90’s hacker films and his favourite film, The Matrix.
He shoots off a rapid-fire message to his client. Before the message leaves his computer, it is encrypted with a key only his client knows, tunnels through a VPN (a virtual private network), and after it bounces off the government backup cell tower, it hits a couple of randomly chosen relays on web servers whose operators are completely unaware their WordPress sites are being used for packet hops, until it’s received by the client who, the man assumes, has a similar string of security measures on their end, though he has no way of knowing. He has no idea where, or who, the recipient is. All the has is a 64-bit hash identifying the client’s current dead drop. The hash code looks like a random string of letters and numbers, because that is basically what it is.
The message says:
We have contact.
The man monitors his subject. A device on the other side of town records a raw stream of input and pipes it wirelessly to a server that analyses the data and turns it to human-readable text, which is streamed live to the man’s laptop. He looks around the café, full of fashionable young normies completely unaware that although he looks just like them, he isn’t like them at all. Still, after hundreds of jobs, he gets a thrill out of being able to monitor someone without them having absolutely no idea. He likes to watch.
His current subject is a middle aged newspaper editor, not a particularly interesting job. Though looking at the stream, the guy’s got a lot going on. Maybe something juicy will still develop. What was, in theory, supposed to be cool about this gig was the tech: a new type of beacon that’s 70% smaller than the previous iteration and can run indefinitely by converting motion and heat energy into power. As always, the difference between theory and practice was smaller in theory than practice. In practice, this thing was an absolute piece of shit.
He squints and tries to make out patterns out of the stream. He could run data analysis on the stream to gather insights from the metadata, and he probably will, but only as a last resort. No matter how thick the data pipeline or clever the algorithm, he believes he can do a better job using his own heuristic computer: his brain and his intuition. At least for a few years anyway, eventually his brain will turn into mush and decay back into the earth where it came from, and the algorithm will keep getting smarter forever.
The signal is weak, and as a trade-off of the small size and low power consumption, this model of beacon only has about 5 seconds of buffering. This means he can only monitor his subject when it beacon is transmitting, and the signal keeps cutting out, making it hard to pattern-match the input into a coherent story. He sends a ping to the beacon to see if he can fiddle with its settings, but either the bug is unreachable, or it’s not ACKing the commands.
For the time being, their communication is a one-way street, and all he can do is watch. His best guess is that the installation team must have fucked up. The ground team his client works with on their UK briefs is run by a bunch of Irish guys, ex-IRA wannabe assassin types. These fucks are about as dumb as they are ruthless, and they severely lack the attention to detail required in these types of installs.
He looks at his watch and swipes away a Tinder notification. It’s almost time. He slams the computer shut and slides it into his messenger bag. Once the computer is closed, there is no way for anyone to access it without knowing his very secure pass phrase. And even if they did, there wouldn’t be anything on it for them to find: once the single-use VPN tunnel is disconnected it gets automatically destroyed like a wormhole closing itself behind a starship in a sci-fi film, and nothing of the exchange is stored on his computer. It’s just a dumb terminal, and apart from a few select pieces of very expensive custom hardware inside, there is nothing worth stealing. Still, he doesn’t trust people, especially not in this part of London, so he takes his bag with him to the bathroom.
Immediately on his return from the bathroom, he spotted a man that fit the description he was given. His prospective client looked like he didn’t belong here: sleek, business-like, unseasonably tanned, wearing a sharp slim suit. Why was this guy wearing a suit and tie, in Shoreditch of all places? A sad robot, stuck on an infinite loop. Hadn’t he heard of casual Fridays?
The prospect stuck out like a sore thumb. Despite being culturally dislocated, he was tall, rich and powerful enough not to not have to feel self-conscious, and he stood in the middle of the room thumb-drumming his iPhone, blocking the waitress’s way. The man, wiping his hands dry on the insides of the back pockets of his black jeans, approached the prospect and extended his arm out for a perfunctory handshake to introduce himself.
“Oleg”, said the man. It wasn’t his name, but it was the name he had given the prospect. At least he hoped it was. Or was it Vlad? He could never keep his meatspace avatars straight.
“Craig. Craig Corden”, the man replied and shook his hand. Oleg seemed like the expected moniker.
They sat down, and after finishing off the message he was sending, Craig Corden placed his iPhone on the tabletop and sized up Oleg. Oleg grabbed the phone.
“Hey! Put that back!”, Corden protested.
It was amazing how a certain type of man could enter any room in almost any circumstances and still play the alpha. Here he was, Craig Corden, about to engage in a massively illegal surveillance operation with a complete stranger he just met on the dark web, a situation he presumably did not encounter on a regular basis, and yet he thought he held sway of the table. Oleg wasn’t too bothered, but he enjoyed the certain knowledge that he could slip a signal interrupt onto Corden’s phone and, using the data he would gather, reduce him to a beggar. He had a device just like that in his pocket and he could do it right now, but he didn’t need to. Just knowing that he could was enough.
Oleg turned off the phone and put it in his pocket. “You will have it back in a minute.”
Corden kept eyeing Oleg’s forearm.
“What’s that mean?”, he said, aggressively.
Oleg looked at his tattoo. “(loop (print (eval (read))))”, it read. It means ‘I don’t give a fuck’ in lisp”, he responded, attempting a tone of finality to his answer. He could never be sure whether he managed to communicate what he tried to. Tone wasn’t his strong suit. There was more to the tattoo, but he couldn’t have explained it to Corden in a million years, and they only had a few minutes.
“I don’t give a fuck”, Corden repeated, emulating his hard consonants. “You’re Russian”, he decided.
He was wrong, but Oleg felt no need to correct the man. If his accent changed the average normie’s perception of him for the worse, it had the opposite effect with clients. Apparently all hackers were supposed to sound Russian. Oleg forced himself not to roll his eyes.
“My turn to ask the questions”, Oleg said. Corden motioned for him to go on.
“You want to monitor your business partner, a Mark Corden.”
Craig Corden looked around. Nobody seemed to be listening. The people around them were too self-obsessed to care.
“Correct.”
“Relation?”
“Brother.”
“He has a wife?”
“Yes.”
“You have a wife?”
“Wha — how is that relevant?”
“Just answer the question.”
“Yes, I have a wife. And two kids too, if you must now.”
“I don’t care about your kids”, Oleg said. “Is your brother… Mark. Is Mark sleeping with your wife?”
“What!? No!”, indignant.
“Are you sleeping with his wife?”
“No! Absolutely not! What on earth are you getting at here?”
“I don’t work family affairs”, Oleg responded. What people did in the illusion of privacy afforded by their bedrooms was entirely their own business, and he didn’t meddle with husband-wife, husband-husband, wife-wife, or any other Ace Ventura bullshit. He was a consulting surveillance operations specialist, not Mickey Mouse, P.I.
“So, strictly business?”, Oleg asked.
“Yes. I believe my brother is planning to take over the company. We’re in the manufact—”
“I know what you do”, Oleg interrupted him: “I have done my research.” The only reason he wanted to meet Craig Corden face to face before taking his commission was to verify that he was an actual person, and that he wasn’t being used as a pawn in some evil game.
When it came to not working for evil fucks, Oleg wasn’t particularly picky. Some of his competitors suffered from a Robin Hood complex and only accepted work from parties whose causes they judged as “good”, and only targeted people they thought were “bad”. Oleg didn’t pretend to be a moral arbiter. The world was too complex to think in ones and zeroes. Especially the surveillance game, where the clients ranged from global businesses to nation states, the world was fractured into factions so multifaceted he simply raised his hands and played the morally flexible middle man. If you had work to do, you had money, and weren’t out to explicitly harm innocent human beings, Oleg was your guy.
When it came to Craig Corden, if it was true that his brother and business partner was attempting to stab him in the back, then the brother deserved a comeuppance, and he could help level the playing field by shedding light on their darkest secrets. If, on the other hand, Mark wasn’t conspiring to remove his brother from the company’s board as he suspected monitoring him could prove his worries unwarranted and save their personal and business relationship. Seemed like a win-win.
But still, he now required a face-to-face meeting with new clients, either in person or over secure video chat, which was almost as cumbersome to arrange as a coffee date if the client didn’t have the required hardware. Vetting clients was a drag, but one he couldn’t afford to forgo. He hadn’t always been so strict about this requirement, which had led him into some sticky situations, such as the brief he was supposed to be working on right now. He’d been doing jobs for the same client for a few years, and he still didn’t know who it was he worked for. Most of the cases were fine. His current brief was ethically ambiguous as best, but it was urgent, and paid extremely well.
Oleg was sufficiently convinced the man in front of him wasn’t evil. Seeing this simpleton seethe at the perceived slight of questioning his marital loyalty told Oleg everything he needed to know. This man was legit. Legit stupid, but earnest about his motives, and that’s all he cared about. Oleg reached into his pocket, took out a slip of paper and threw it at Corden. “I need to you to send this amount of ZCash to this address, and we’re in business.”
“ZCash? I thought we agreed on bitcoins?”, Corden said.
“That was a week ago”, Oleg said. Have you seen the price? I can give you a price in bitcoin but in last week’s exchange rates, and you can’t afford that.”
Craig Corden looked taken aback. Oleg guessed he didn’t like it when people told him he couldn’t do something, but he also bet Corden didn’t want to pay a penny more than he needed to.
“They’re pumping bitcoin up. It won’t last, believe me. ZCash is stabler and more secure.”
“How do I —”, Corden started.
“You’ll figure it out”, Oleg blurted, the “r” in “figure” resonating hard. This time Craig Corden accepted the interruption without resistance. The tables had been sufficiently turned, Oleg thought, satisfied. He could manage the client.
“I need it done by Wednesday”, Corden said, trying to assert his former power position. “Mark’s going on holiday, and I think he chose Hong Kong because he’s looking for an investor…”
“Send me the coins and it’ll get done”, Oleg said and placed Corden’s phone on the table between them. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some work to do.”
After Corden collects his phone and leaves, the waitress brings Oleg a coffee he didn’t order. Clearly Corden had gotten one, expecting a leisurely business meeting. Why prolong something that could be done as efficiently as they just had, Oleg thought. English people were weird.
He smiles at the waitress and motions the coffee away. She’s pretty. An Essex girl, based on her accent, a topic Oleg likes to study despite being unable to produce anything except his own broken, toneless voice. The waitress is dressed in credible simulation of the café’s hip customers, but she isn’t one of them, Oleg can tell. He likes her for it. He would’ve accepted the coffee just to be able to brush her hand as she handed him the offered cup, but even a sip would render him unable to concentrate. Maybe he’ll ask for her number after the work is done.
He pulls out the laptop and logs into a new throwaway VPN tunnel. He stares at the stream of surveillance data that flashes on his screen. Customers come and go at the tables next to his as hours pass and the day turns into night. He stares into the nearly random stream of consciousness that fills his screen and interrogates it for the wisdom he seeks.
Finally, he’s had enough. He establishes a new session into the dead drop. This communication is as one-way as the one between his subject and him. He is simply the medium. A shaman who can travel between the world of ghosts, and the fucked up physical realm they’re all doomed to inhabit.
He writes:
> The subject does not seem to know where the wallet is.
> He has made contact with the primary.
> I know where he is going.
> I will provide the ground team with coordinates.
Oleg thinks for a while. If the ground team doesn’t fuck up their part, this job is as good as done. However, after spending a few hours with his subject, there’s something about him he finds interesting. He wants to see how this story ends. He sends one more message before terminating the session.
> I'll keep watching.