Bogdan put his fork down on the table, very carefully. “May I have one of the beers?” he asked, in a very tentative voice.
Chapel popped the cap off the remaining beer and handed it over. Bogdan sucked deeply at the bottle, drinking half of it in one gulp.
Gotcha, Chapel thought.
“I can see why you’re so paranoid,” he told Bogdan. “No. That’s harsh. Let’s say — reasonably cautious. You must have pissed off some very powerful people when you took away their radioactive toys. A lot of guys wouldn’t have done what you did. They would have been too scared. But you—”
“It was a challenge, yes,” Bogdan said. “The bigger the challenge, the harder to resist, sometimes.”
Chapel nodded. “And you worked a pretty sweet hack on them.”
“The sweetest.” Bogdan’s eyes were getting brighter, and not just because of the alcohol he’d consumed. People like Bogdan — loners, reclusive intellectual types — had a desperate need to brag when they were in the real world. They worked miracles in the virtual world, in cyberspace, but nobody was there with them to congratulate them on their successes. They told themselves that didn’t matter, but it did.
Chapel thought of Angel and the various methods she used to break into encrypted systems. “What did you use? A keystroke logger? Packet sniffer? Or just brute force decryption?” Chapel had no idea what most of those words meant, but he was certain Bogdan would.
“Not even,” Bogdan said, looking down at his plate. He was starting to smile, for real this time. “Social engineering,” he whispered. “Is always the best way.”
“Social engineering?”
Bogdan nodded and put his hands on the table, fanning his fingers. “Computers, you will see, are very, very good at holding to secrets. They are designed this way. But information is useless if it cannot be accessed by human beings. Someone always knows the passwords. Someone can always get in. You find that someone, you can work them. Hack them, instead of machine. In this case, it was a woman. It was she who made arrangements. You know, meetings between the seller and the buyer. She introduced the parties but had no knowledge of what they sold or how much they paid.”
“A cutout,” Chapel said. “That’s what we call it.”
Bogdan nodded. “Did not matter — she was the link, the one at center of deal. Knows everybody, e-mails everybody. Middle-aged woman, single, no babies, yes? Is a common enough problem, in postfeminist world.”
“Sure,” Chapel said, having no idea what he was getting at.
“She had online dating page. So I seduce her.”
Chapel’s eyes went wide. The idea of the lanky hacker seducing someone — anyone — was pretty hard to imagine. “What, you bought her flowers, took her for drinks—”
“Online. I created a profile with a fake picture, fake statistics. Same height as me, but that was all. Said I was a banker in Ploiesti — this is a town just north of Bucharest — with a dead wife. Wanted children in a hurry, wanted someone to travel with, grow old with. Best sales pitch possible. She responded and we go to chatting. I looked up love poetry, romantic comedies online, looking for code words. I found the words most often used in successful dating profiles. My e-mails to her are peppered with these words. She never stood a chance.”
“Jesus, I feel sorry for her now,” Chapel said.
Bogdan shrugged. “To be fair, she was setting up this deal to sell stolen plutonium to a rogue state.”
“Yeah, I guess there’s that,” Chapel replied.
Bogdan had warmed to his topic and didn’t want to stop talking. “She responded very quickly, wanted to set up a date. I said my schedule is too hectic, me being a banker, you see? So she gives me her telephone number so we can text, and her private e-mail she checks always.”
“And then she started talking about the deal?” Chapel asked.
“No, of course not! If I ask about that, she sees through me in an instant. No. I just want her contact information. As soon as I get it, I delete my profile, and this fabled banker man, he just disappears from the earth. I had her e-mail address, now I need her password. From her VKontakte page I learned the town where she was born — Lugoj; mother’s name — Irina Costaforu; favorite movies, everything. I call up the e-mail host service and say I have forgotten my password, can they help? They ask security questions, and I know the answers.”
“Her mother’s maiden name, the town where she was born—”
“What secondary school she went to, yes, what is her favorite color… I am in. They help me change her password, and now I control her e-mail. I download all her contacts and e-mail folders. Then I change this password back to what it was before, so she does not know I have been there.”
“You mean she never even suspected what happened?”
“Whole thing, from online profile to download, takes six hours,” Bogdan said, really smiling now. “I did it in middle of the night, when she sleeps. I turn this information over to Nadia and my part, it is done.”
“Wow,” Chapel said. “That’s incredible. You stole her e-mail that easily? Remind me never to piss you off!”
Bogdan actually laughed, then, a kind of wheezing, halting noise that made him sound like he was choking. It was the laugh of somebody who hadn’t heard a good joke in his entire life and had no practice at laughing. “I am good, yes. The best, maybe.”
“I’ll say. So this woman you duped, what was her name?”
Instantly Bogdan’s face fell. He picked up his fork and speared another piece of lamb. Chapel could tell he’d pushed too hard.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot myself for a second. You can’t talk about this.”
“It was a secret mission,” Bogdan said. “I take very serious. Nadia would not like if I told you anything, any small detail.”
“I understand,” Chapel said. “We won’t talk about it again.”
“Thank you,” Bogdan said, and stuffed the lamb in his mouth.
“These once-a-day phone calls are driving me crazy, sugar,” Angel said.
Chapel smiled in the dark of his room. “Me, too. But I have to wait until I’m sure we won’t be overheard.” Through the thin walls of the hotel suite he could hear Bogdan snoring in the room next door. The one beer the hacker had drunk with dinner seemed to be enough to put him down for the night. As for Nadia, she’d never woken up for dinner, and the last time he’d checked on her she was still sprawled across her own bed. He needed to get to sleep himself — tomorrow was going to be a big day, the day they illegally crossed the border into Kazakhstan, if everything went right. But first he needed to check in. “We met with a Russian gangster today,” he told Angel. “She’s the one providing our equipment. Her first name was Varvara.”
“Let me check the Interpol database,” Angel said. He listened to her click away at her keyboard. It was one of the most reassuring sounds he knew — it meant she was looking out for him. “Here we go. Varvara Nikolaevich Lyadova. Wanted in four countries, that’s impressive. Arrested on a dozen different charges, actually did jail time on one of them — wow. Murder.”
“Yeah?” Chapel asked, suddenly worried.
“Let’s look at the case files… okay, actually it was conspiracy murder. That’s why she only did three years. Looks like her husband killed a rival gangster back in the midnineties and Varvara helped destroy some evidence. A bloody shirt… when the police came for her husband, she jammed it in the oven and baked it for thirty minutes at four seventy-five degrees. They pulled it out before it was good and crispy, but at that point it was tainted. They couldn’t get any DNA from the blood.”