When the fan on his laptop stopped, Alan opened it again. His chat program was going nuts. Questions, death threats, people wanting to know what the hell had happened. He killed the window and the program. In an instant, all that bored him. He had been a somebody, but not in the real world. He had pulled a job, but not in the real world. He needed…
He didn’t know what he needed, but he needed something more.
Out of boredom he started digging through a dump of files from a JPMorgan Chase breach. This was old, dead data. There were so many credit card numbers available online, individual numbers now went for less than a dollar. But those weren’t all that was in here. Those were just all that everybody he knew online was interested in.
He paged and paged and paged, looking for—anything, nothing, everything, something. It was hopelessly boring accounting data. There was probably something cooked about these numbers, but it was a con that the bankers had already run. It seemed there was nothing to hack.
Then Alan had an idea. Instead of looking for something that looked good to him—a bored, tech-savvy kid with a computer, just like a million other bored, tech-savvy kids with computers—Alan decided to seek out the most boring, useless piece of data in the entire archive.
Bank branch reconciliation statements were pretty boring, but they did show where the cash was and how it moved. The kind of data that a bank robber might use if those idiots were smart enough to do anything other than rob a bank. But nobody except Alan had much time for it. Why? It was so much easier to steal on the data layer.
After invoking strange words of command-line power—sed, grep, awk—on those files, he decided that data wasn’t useless enough. He copied it all off in a directory for later, and kept looking.
He found a bunch of files—huge files—all with broken headers, all out of sequence. After some fiddling he put them back together. They were a record of federal and state benefit payments. A little Googling revealed that JPMorgan Chase processed EBT and disability payments for the federal government and most of the states. JPMorgan Chase took a cut of every penny provided through a range of programs that had once been known as food stamps.
Alan shook his head and whistled in admiration. This was a skim. A real game. Made guys like his uncle look so small they disappeared. And his dad? Well, his dad had always looked like an idiot to Alan. That’s why he’d wound up in jail.
He found a line that read, “Physical transfers.” It was all listed by state and route and date. There were transfers and amounts and location addresses. It was a massive amount of data, impossible to make sense of just by paging through.
He opened a text file and in the first line he typed, “import gmaps.” Twenty minutes and seventeen syntax errors later, a map of the United States showed transfers pulsing in real time as the time scale at the bottom traveled through the last year. He set it on loop and stared at it for a while, letting his mind blank out.
As he watched he wondered if this nonexpectant blankness was what the drugs were like for his mom. Probably not, he thought. She just slept, numb to the world. The anger came from deep within, but he pushed it aside. Feeling sorry for himself. He could have had it a lot worse. She could have abused him. He never considered that being ignored was abuse, and maybe worse than being hit. Maybe worse than being burned with cigarettes.
Then he saw it. It was the kind of thing you could easily miss. Every other week, a fat pulse across the top of Florida. A very fat line. It was so big he thought it was a glitch, some bad characters in the source file, but it wasn’t. It was a shitload of cash on a truck. He zoomed in on the area and watched the money flow.
He had just made $30,000 by being smart. But it was chump change. By being smart and having some balls, he could really pull one over. Take everything he could ever need and then some. He’d be done. Fuck the whole crazy, full-of-shit world. Fuck Mom. Fuck Dad. Fuck Tommats. He’d have his.
It was exactly the kind of thing that kids who sat behind computers could never pull off. Leave the house? Nah, there’s not even air-conditioning out there. Talk to other people? Scary.
Even as he made fun of them he recognized that he was one of them. He felt the shivers run from his neck down to his fingertips. He couldn’t pull this off. No way. Not alone. But there were guys. Pros. Guys with untraceable guns. Guys who knew how to open an armored car. Guys with money to finance. He had $30,000. That had to be a start, right? But he had the feeling that $30,000 wouldn’t be enough.
He thought he would sell the job. But after pulling up a web browser and masturbating furiously to Japanese porn, he realized he didn’t really want to sell the job. Just as he didn’t really want to make love to a girl on a screen. He wanted the real girl. He wanted the real money. He wanted the real action.
He wanted a real life.