shoulders. I figured that Hines was well and truly off the reservation since, as Allie put it, he was getting his beak wet at every opportunity, and that’s not a gag you can pull off without a lot of earned autonomy. Of Scovil I wouldn’t have suspected it up till now, but after last night’s conversation with Billy, and my own tranquil reflection on all my interactions with her, I became more and more convinced that she had likewise gone rogue. It wouldn’t take much—a leave of absence from work and the next flight to L.A. But I needed to know for sure, so I turned to the Hackmaster, not forgetting what Chuck said about the trail of electronic breadcrumbs it could leave.
Conundrum! I had to shine a light in dark places without anyone tracing the beam back to me. So I settled down with the Hackmaster’s instruction manual to see if I could find a way. Hours later, apart from some grins at crimes against syntax—“for avioding of crinminal charge use a nony mouse relay protical”—I had nothing to show for my work. The device could do what it promised, but it couldn’t promise not to be seen. Okay, I thought, if I’m going to be seen, let’s make being seen not a problem.
I first cooked up a new identity, that of a teenage hack hobbyist from—I picked an Eastern European country at random—Romania. I gave myself a name, Luca Durbaca, and a screen identity, Jokerman23. Then I established a loud presence on the kind of underground discussion boards routinely monitored by interested government officials. (Taking care first, of course, to launder my posts through three or four “a nony mouse relays.”) What I had in mind was to hide my efforts in plain sight. Posturing like a teenage hacker high on testosterone, I boasted that I had written slam code to breach law-enforcement databases all over the world and would post results of my work within twenty-four hours. Naturally, I had written no such code, but if the Hackmaster was everything it awkwardly expressed itself to be, that wouldn’t be a problem.
I picked an international array of police departments, army intelligence bureaus, and national security agencies, including the German Bundespolizei, Tatmadaw (Burmese military), the defense intelligence services of Uruguay and Paraguay—and the Australian High Tech Crime Centre and Hines’s fraud task force. See what I was getting at? If anyone in those places noticed me snooping around, they’d trace me back to these discussion boards and decide that I was on a self-indulgent because-it’s-there teenage jag. They might worry about Luca Durbaca selling access to their secrets, but they wouldn’t worry about Radar Hoverlander looking for the goods on Scovil and Hines.
I spent the better part of the day happily crashing the inner sancta of the world’s law-enforcement agencies—and wittingly laying a breadcrumb trail back to the fictive Jokerman. I have to say that the Hackmaster worked a pip, and if I ever wanted to run, say, a friendly little blackmail game, I now knew that the finance minister for the government of Iceland favors sex-tourism excursions to Nicaragua. Merely out of hacker curiosity (or so it would appear to subsequent keystroke analysts), I checked out the operations files of both the Aussie crime center and the Fibbie task force, and found not a whisper in either place of Billy Yuan or yours most humbly truly. This indicated that Scovil and Hines were indeed running dark, so mission accomplished.
Or maybe not. Unfortunately, absence of proof is not proof. I might have been looking in the wrong place, or they might be working with wink sanction. Ah, well. I’d done the best I could to establish that their activities didn’t officially exist. If I was wrong, I was wrong. I’d just have to improvise a new solution if it came to that.
There was one last search I wanted to run, to get Hines’s real name, which of course I didn’t have, else his FBI affiliation would’ve surfaced back when I first searched Grandpa’s bona fides. I thought I might be able to flip that rock by running Allie through a general cross-reference matrix. I might also get independent evidence that Allie was, indeed, on board as a protected informant, which corroboration would certainly be a balm to my suspicious soul. In the end, though, I abjured the search, for going after so specific a target might belie my hacker holiday masquerade, and I couldn’t take that chance. I’d just