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Snake hovered over his keyboard, staring at the monitor as he wove through the now familiar memory banks of the C&P Telephone mainframes.
He’d been inside every day this week, smoothing the way to the switching programs, finding the path of least resistance, the one that left the fewest traces. And that was rarely the most direct path.
He’d spent the last two weeks probing the system until it felt like home. Like old times, reminding him of his high school days as a phreaker when he’d pull all-nighters with his Apple II+, hacking into phone companies, banks, and universities all over the country, free in cyberspace, hunting the electronic grail of system mastery, suffused with the sheer joy of the doing. He’d never stolen, never destroyed data. Never even left taunting electronic graffiti like some of his jerkier brother hackers. He wasn’t looking for attention; he was looking to see how far he could go, how many barriers he could overcome, how deep he could get. The idea was to conquer the hacked system, defeat all its security, open all its doors, declare victory, and move on.
Snake felt an echo of that old thrill even now. He smiled. Mikey MacLaglen had been such an idealist. Such a nerdy purist. Such an asshole. So awed with the novelty and grandeur and immensity of cyberspace that he’d missed out on endless opportunities to exploit his power.
Truth was, he hadn’t even realized he had power. Just as well. If he had he wouldn’t have been able to resist exploiting it, probably would have been caught, and would even now be on the FBI’s hacker list. No thanks.
He could have been nabbed in college too. He’d been heading for an engineering degree at MIT when he started hacking cable boxes for his classmates who wanted free HBO and Showtime. Somehow a video pirate named Mitchell Fuller—hacker handle: “Brushman”—caught a blip about Mike MacLaglen’s skills and offered him a job hacking video boards for satellite dishes. The six figures he offered was four times the entry-level salary his engineering degree would net him after graduation—if he could even find a job—and all tax free. Things were great until Fuller ripped off Mac’s elegant and excruciatingly difficult hack of the latest Videocipher board. When Mac complained, Fuller laughed in his face and said, “Whatta you go
Shocked, Mac stared down at the battered, bleeding s.o.b. and wondered what to do. He still wanted to kill him, but he was thinking now… and he had a better idea.
He dumped him in the trunk of his car, then called Fuller’s wife. He told her she wouldn’t see her dear Mitchell alive again unless she delivered $100,000 in cash.
Now. When Fuller came to, Mac let him talk to his wife, to tell her how to get the cash together. The way Fuller looked at him when Mac made him get back into the trunk, the fear in his eyes, wondering if he’d ever see daylight again… it somehow opened a door within Mac, and stirred something on the other side.
Fuller’s wife delivered the money within hours. She never called the cops or the FBI. Couldn’t. They’d want to know how her husband earned his money. It all went down so smooth and fast, Mac wished he’d asked for more. But a deal was a deal and, after all, he was netting a hundred large for less than a day’s work. He let Fuller go. And he got out of the video-hacking business. He’d found a better line of work.
Snake was born.
Simply amazing how many people were out there making tons of money illegally, or in legit cash businesses but not declaring it.
They became Snake’s prey. They weren’t fighters. The sight of a pistol, a hint of casual brutality with a promise of more to come—letting them know they were no longer a person; they were a commodity, a package— usually bought instant cooperation. Snake liked calling their buyers—their families or business cronies—threatening all sorts of injury if they didn’t pay up quickly and quietly. Even if they hated the guy, they were stuck.
Snake remembered one time when a package’s partner told him to go ahead and kill the fucker… and do it slow. Snake hadn’t been prepared for that, but he’d come up with the solution. He told the partner he would indeed kill the guy slowly, and during the process extract the full details of their gun-ru
Snake had the ransom within hours.
Yeah, like Fuller’s wife, the last thing any of these clowns wanted was the attention of a federal agency.
Trouble was. Snake couldn’t do it alone. He needed someone to baby-sit the packages. Paulie Dicastro had fit the bill. Not the brightest bulb in the box, but no dummy either. And his rep was dependable: A guy who showed up when he was told to, did what he was supposed to—mostly he made deliveries—then went home and kept his mouth shut.
Snake had used Paulie for his first couple of jobs, and things went swimmingly. But on the third job, Paulie had brought his new girlfriend along. Poppy. Paulie swore she was all right, and that this would be better. This way they could take shifts watching the package. One would be on duty while the other slept. Snake hadn’t liked the idea— this Poppy was a wild card—but it’d been too late to call off the snatch. He had held his breath through that whole gig, but things turned out okay.
This job, though, was a little different. Snake usually made the snatch himself. He could say he was better at it, more experienced, that he was the only one he could trust not to screw things up, but truth was, he liked doing the snatch. He liked to see that look in the package’s eyes when he realized what was happening to him.
Snake had never known anything else that even approached the rush he got when it dawned on the package that he’d become property—stolen property. That his life was no longer his own. Someone had taken control of his world.
Someone who called himself Snake.
Even now Snake could feel the first faint stirrings in his groin. But this would be different. This would be a kid, and kids weren’t in control, anyway. So he’d found it easier to let go of the actual physical snatch.
Besides, he had a lot more riding on this one. Other people involved. Heavy people. Snake preferred to operate on his own, but the heavies had come to him and made an offer he couldn’t refuse. Literally. Offered him a fortune for this job, but even if they hadn’t, you didn’t say no to these guys.
He’d been startled that they were even aware of his little enterprise, and rattled by how much they knew. They told him they liked the idea that he was experienced in the art of the snatch and so they were hiring him. That was it. Not: Do you want to do one for us? More like: Here’s what we want you to do.
Snake was trusting Paulie not to screw up. He knew this would be the last job with Paulie. Poppy would see to that. Snake had the distinct impression the only reason Paulie was in on this one was because the payoff was so big. Poppy’d got all spooked when the last snatch got a little rough. Last time he’d seen her she’d looked like a rat on an electric grid, waiting for the next shock.
Too bad. Paulie was a reliable dude. Hard to replace. But that’s what you get when you let yourself get attached.
He stretched, picked up the snub-nosed.38 special he kept by the keyboard—a Colt Cobra… something about that name—and swiveled in his chair, sighting at the toys that filled his current domain. Three computers—two Pentium 166s and a Mac 7100/80 Power Station—each with a hex-speed CD-ROM drive, all of them up and ru