The graffiti-covered door of the old warehouse opened and shut again quickly as another Darth Vader entered. Across the road, Sam checked his watch.
“Shame Ursula couldn’t come,” Fargas said.
Sam smiled.
“You been to one of these conventions before?” Fargas asked.
“Nah,” Sam said, “I always wanted to go to Defcon in Las Vegas, but they stopped holding it after …”
He didn’t need to continue. Defcon was the huge international hackers’ convention. It had been held every year in Las Vegas, but the last one had disappeared from the face of the earth, along with most of the rest of Las Vegas, in a terrible nuclear cloud.
“The world is going to hell on a high-speed train, if you ask me,” Fargas said, shaking his head. “And there ain’t nothing nobody can do about it.”
Sam checked his watch. “Time to go in. It’s about to start.”
“I’m really not sure, dude. I’m going to feel like an idiot,” Fargas said.
“The trick is to make them feel more stupid than you,” Sam said.
“And how is that going to happen?” Fargas asked.
“Don’t speak to anyone. If they corner you, just act all superior and say something like ‘Talk to me when you lose the training wheels’.”
“Talk to me when you lose the training wheels, duckweed,” Fargas tried it out in a Clint Eastwood accent.
Sam laughed, then said, “And no matter what happens, don’t tell anyone about the hack we pulled off at Telecomerica.”
“What’s the point in visiting a hackers’ convention a couple of days after pulling off the hack of the year if you can’t tell anyone?” Fargas asked.
“You think the FBI can’t slip an undercover agent in among the freaks and geeks?” Sam asked, pulling a C-3PO mask out of his backpack. He slid it down over his face.
“I’m leaving,” Fargas said.
“Stay. It’s cool. Just don’t tell anyone it was us,” Sam said.
Fargas stretched the elastic of a Tonto mask over his head, and said, “What do you mean ‘us’, white man?”
Sam took the back off his cell phone and removed the battery and SIM card and made sure Fargas did the same before they made their way across the road to the warehouse.
Defcon had been a big glamorous three-day affair with huge competing sound systems, overseas speakers, competitions, giveaways and even a formal dinner.
Neoh@ck Con was another story altogether. A convention that Sam had heard whispers about, but had never been close to. Until now. A convention for the elite, the discreet. The dark figures who moved through the shadows of the internet.
Hidden, encrypted three times over, in the code of an email about Defcon had been the address of a website. A highly secure website. Hack into that website and you found the date, time and location of Neoh@ck Con.
If you weren’t smart enough to break the codes and hack the website, then you weren’t invited to the convention. It was that simple.
There were two guards just inside the door. Clean-cut, broad-shouldered men with Marine-style haircuts. Hired security. They looked serious and they looked mean.
The guards stopped them with raised hands.
“Are you a law enforcement official or in the employ of any government department?” the first man asked. He said it as if reading by rote. A muscle on the side of his jaw twitched as he spoke.
Sam shook his head.
Would you admit it, if you were?
“I didn’t hear that,” the man growled.
“No,” Sam said.
“Are you a representative of the news media?” the second man asked.
“No,” Sam said again.
They turned to Fargas. “Are you a law enforcement official or in the employ of any government department?”
“Talk to me when you lose the–” Fargas began, but stopped when Sam kicked him on the ankle, hard. “No,” Fargas said.
They entered a large storeroom lined with unused storage racks. It was dusty, decrepit and smelled faintly of sawdust and machine oil.
Thirty or forty people were milling around a row of computers at one end. Behind them a data projector was casting blue nothing onto a large screen.
So this was Neoh@ck Con.
Everybody wore a disguise or face covering of some kind. Some people wore masks, Buzz Lightyear and Darth Vader being the two most popular. Sam noticed one person had his face entirely swathed in bandages like a mummy with just a slit for his eyes. Others hid their faces with make-up. To their left was a tall, strong-looking punk, his head clean-shaven, his face painted into a grinning skull. He wore torn jeans that seemed to be held together with chains and safety pins, and a leather T-shirt covered in zips. A tattoo of a biohazard symbol on his forehead was not quite concealed by the white face paint of the skull. He stood with a girl in a denim miniskirt and low-cut white vest with tattoos of intertwining dragons down one arm. Her face covering, incongruously, was a lacy wedding veil.
Freaks and geeks, Sam thought. Freaks and geeks.
A few more people drifted in and the convention got underway, not with a fanfare and a formal announcement, but simply in the groups of people that converged around the various computer workstations.
One of the larger groups was congregated around the mummy. Sam heard the word “Telecomerica” mentioned. He motioned for Fargas to follow and they wandered in that direction.
Sam found himself standing behind Skullface Punk, and unable to see, moved to stand behind Rock Chick Bride.
“But there’s no way to beat the IPSec on that model firewall without setting off the zone alarm,” the mummy was saying. “So even if they’d used malformed TCP packets to exploit a vulnerability in the firewall and made it into the DMZ, they’d have been shut down before they could infiltrate any further.”
“That’s me ’ole bleedin’ point,” Skullface said emphatically, stabbing a finger into the air.
He was English, Sam thought, judging by his accent. Maybe even a London cockney.
Skullface continued, “It can’t have been an ’ack. It ain’t possible. It was an inside job. Some rogue trader with a grudge.”
“So if it was an inside job …” a kid in a rubber rooster mask began.
“Then it ain’t worth discussing,” Skullface said. “Some muppet on the payroll letting go a couple of wet farts ain’t what we’re here for.”
“You don’t know it was an inside job,” Sam said quietly.
“Ain’t no way in from the outside.” Skullface half-turned to face Sam. “End of bleedin’ story.”
“Any network can be hacked,” Sam said.
There was a moment’s silence.
Rock Chick Bride said, “Oh, he’s so cute! Can I keep him?”
Sam glared at her through the C-3PO mask.
“I suppose you could have hacked ’em too, if you’d felt like it.” Skullface grinned and there was laughter from somewhere in the crowd.
“If I had to,” Sam said.
“Oh, please,” Rock Chick Bride said, “I promise I’ll look after him!”
“Even if you got past the DMZ, you’d set off the zone alarm,” the mummy said.
“Yeah,” Sam said, “but what if the hacker used a signal extender to pirate a wireless station and bypass the whole DMZ? Run a network analyser, rainbow-crack the SAM file and he’d have owned the network.”
He shut his mouth abruptly.
There was another short silence.
“Come back when you lose the training wheels, muppet,” Skullface said.
“Waste of freaking time,” Sam said. He whirled and strode off.
He made it almost as far as the door, Fargas at his heels, when Skullface’s voice came from behind him. “Hold up, script kiddy.”
Sam turned back, his fists clenched as Skullface and Rock Chick Bride approached.
“Back off, duckweed,” Fargas said beside him.
Skullface moved close and spoke in a low voice.
“I was just winding you up,” he said. “Wanted to see what you got.”
“More than you got, ass wipe,” Fargas said.
“Just chill, monkey boy,” Skullface said, then to Sam: “You could be right about that Telecomerica job.”
Sam looked at him for a long moment, then shrugged. “It’s just a guess.”
“It was a good guess. Better than most of them would be capable of.” He jerked his head back behind him. “You want to go to Neoh@ck?”
“Been there, done that,” Fargas said, looking around the old warehouse. “Ain’t buying the T-shirt.”
Skullface made that macabre smile again. “This ain’t Neo. This is just the weeding-out party. Just a bunch of muppets who were lucky enough to crack the code in the invite.”
Rock Chick Bride moved up beside Sam; a sneer appeared to be permanently attached to her lip.
Skullface continued, “You want to go to the real Neoh@ck, you gotta earn it. Think you’re up to it?”
Sam felt his fists unclench. “Where is it held?” he asked, intrigued despite himself.
Rock Chick Bride shook her head. “They’ll never get in.”
“It ain’t held anywhere,” Skullface said. “Think about it. Why would a bunch of serious hackers put on silly masks and compare weenies in an old warehouse? The real convention, Neoh@ck Con, is online. Tonight. Starts at nine o’clock. The best of the best from all around the world. You gotta hack your way in to prove you got what it takes.”
“Where?” Sam asked again.
“Out of your league is where,” Rock Chick Bride said.
Skullface grinned evilly. “We’re meeting for dinner. Where the President lives. If you make it, it’s going to rock your world.”