“I’m Alec Morehouse.” My current best friend shook hands with my former best friend.

  “Pleased to meet you, Alec,” said Jude. But he never took his eyes away from mine. It felt like that staring contest between boxers while the ref gives final instructions.

  “It’s good to see you, Jude.” I didn’t mean it, but I really wanted to. “I’ve been intending to call, but things were so busy and then, well . . .”

  “It had gotten to be such a long time that you got scared to think of how I’d react,” Jude said, breaking through the small talk.

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  Alec ever discreet, pretended that a Morehouse associate across the room had summoned him over, and left us alone.

  “Expanding ROI?” Jude made sure I knew he had heard it all. Every last bit of my sold-out, profit-driven rhetoric.

  “I just learned that acronym tonight, Jude. I was blowing smoke up his ass to get a reaction, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, where there’s smoke there’s buyers, eh? Blow enough of it in that guy’s butt and he’ll float on air like everything else around here.” He paused a second, and looked in both directions as if to make sure the coast was clear. “Those CSI guys are Nazis, you know. It’s all online. Look at where their money was in 1939.”

  “If you looked at where everyone’s money was in 1939, Jude, you wouldn’t be able to do business with anyone.”

  “Q.E.D.” Jude smirked in the language of a geometric proof. “Q.E. fucking D.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “That makes one of us,” Jude started in. “How far into the service of the machine do you plan to get, Jamie?”

  “Like you should talk? What the hell are you doing here anyway?”

  “Hey, I always liked the circus,” he said. “Besides, I figured I’d find you here.”

  “Yeah, right,” I goaded him. “You got into the Silicon Stars list this month, didn’t you?” The Silicon Alley Reader put out a monthly chart of the 500 most influential Internet players.

  “For the ’zine, yeah,” he said defensively of his online hacker’s magazine. “But for the opposite reason as most of these people. We don’t even take advertising.”

  “That hack that brought down six trading sites for four hours—” I pretended to being putting two and two together. “Wasn’t there some mention of your website in the news reports? Something about being a node for anonymous distribution of denial-of-service programs?”

  “They never proved anything.”

  “But it got you on the Reader’s list. Now you’ll be famous.”

  “Just following in DeltaWave’s footsteps.”

  That was a low blow. Too low, considering his role in my capture.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Jude said. “Really. That’s all old history, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. You fuckers got me into college, after all. Even got me this job.”

  “That’s what I’m apologizing for, Jamie.”

  • • •

  My fellow Jamaican Kings, as we called ourselves, may not have had it in mind at the time, but they were responsible for everything. We had been tight as brothers. I remember fantasizing how I would submit to torture or even death, if the opportunity presented itself, rather than reveal my comrades’ identities to the FBI. Such was the loyalty our posse of hackers felt for one another. Most of the time.

  We all took the same train from Queens to Stuyvesant High—a smart kids’ public school that served as New York City’s last-ditch attempt to keep a few upper-middle-class white kids in the system. On the long number-7 train ride into Manhattan, we’d gather in the last subway car and dig through one another’s boxes of disks, exchanging the “warez” we’d garnered during our previous night’s exploits on the Net. Most of it was the software for new arcade games—the ROMS which could then be played on a computer through an emulator. No more quarters wasted on Streetfighter 21 at Star Pizza. Just mount the game’s ROM on a PC and play for free. Whatever one kid found or stole he shared with the rest of the Kings. It was the rule: no personal ownership and no personal fame. All hacks and spoils belonged to the posse.

  I was the only member with a real conflict of interest. Each year, one senior student was selected to maintain the school’s computer lab—and to manage access privileges for everyone else. I appeared trustworthy enough to win this coveted honor when I was still just a junior. Mr. Unsworth, the computer instructor and lab supervisor, had even given me a digital pager so that I could be alerted in the event of a system failure. My quasi-girlfriend at the time painted the beeper in Day-Glo colors to balance its inherent authoritarian dorkiness with some skateboarder’s edge. I was good—really good—but certainly not the very best programmer among us. I was simply the best at hacking the faculty—and maybe the least likely to crash the system just for the fun of it.

  It’s how my double life began, really. By day, I was the shining young do-gooder, entrusted with master keys to the building, full access to the school’s computers, command over all other student users, and encryption of the Board of Education’s security codes. By night, I was DeltaWave, youngest member of the Jamaican Kings.

  Our posse took this name even though we were mostly from Flushing because both Queens neighborhoods used the same telephone routing station. If someday a hack were traced, the posse’s name might lead the authorities off the track to Jamaica. Plus, it made us sound like Rastafarians with dreadlocks, when we were actually Jewish kids from the boroughs. All except for El Greco, a chubby Armenian boy who earned his name not for anything to do with his bloodline but the extensive graffiti landscapes he’d paint on the walls of underpasses. It didn’t stop everyone’s parents from asking him questions like “who sells the most authentic baklava in Astoria?” when he came to dinner.

  If I hadn’t felt so conflicted, I probably would have been able to maintain a divided allegiance and double identity. I could have kept my exploits as a King completely secret and my teachers unaware of my nefarious activities. Everything the Kings did was anonymous anyway. No one had to know. But I felt like a traitor whenever I’d sit by Mr. Unsworth’s side after school working on security codes, knowing I would be turning them over to the Kings the next morning. Meanwhile, my responsibilities at school made me feel like a fake among my fellow hackers. As far as the Kings were concerned, my day gig as Stuyvesant’s Uber-Programmer was just a cover. But deep down I cherished the authority I’d earned.

  As if to reveal myself, I made constant, almost counter-phobic blunders. I once bragged to Mr. Unsworth about how I could sabotage the Board of Education’s mainframe with a single keystroke. And I gloated to the Kings about how “Someday you’ll all be coming to me for jobs.” No one seemed to care but me.

  By spring of my junior year, a new fearlessness took hold of the Jamaican Kings. All of them except me were seniors, and had already gotten into college if they were going to go. They were bored with classes, oblivious to grades, and ready to work on what they thought might be our final act together. It was the project that would make us famous: the Ultimate Hack.

  It all happened in less than a week. The original plan was masterminded by Jude, our default leader. Some said he earned this position because his was the first stop along the 7’s route on the way to school, making it appear as though he owned the rear car while the rest of us simply arrived there. Others chalked it up to the fact that he lived alone most of the time—his parents had a business importing Sri Lankan hats and were out of the country more often than not, leaving Jude with twenty-four-hour access to the phone line and the only reliable server.

  But, in the end, Jude probably earned his place atop the pecking order because he knew how to intimidate people. Wherever my sweet-talking wouldn’t work, Jude’s scare tactics would. A curly red-haired boy and the first among us to sport a passable beard, Jude had a sinister way of talking through his teeth and rolling his eyes up in his head—mannerisms he copied from The Shining, 22 and that worked to dissuade bigger kids from messing with him. The rest of us, sadly, remained Stuyvesant’s most probable targets for wedgies 23 and whale-hooks. 24

  While Jude would have stood only as good a chance as any other King of physically defending himself (meaning none), he alone understood that perception is nine-tenths of the law, and made this altered axiom his life credo. He wore torn-up heavy metal T-shirts under a black leather jacket and pretended to act crazy whenever he got in a tight situation. After a few years, it was as if Jude bought his own act and became a delinquent—in relative terms, at least. Halfway through his senior year, he stopped going to any classes except computer science and philosophy and decided to forgo the college application process altogether. This gave him the time to hack while we were all in class, studying for the SAT’s, or begging for recommendations. It also gave him the ability to act as though he were above such petty, mundane, and sold-out pursuits. Which, in effect, he was.

  After one of his infamous stay-awake-for-a-whole-month-on-other-kids’-Ritalin 25 binges, Jude emerged having successfully hacked a feature in Microsoft Office 26 that was originally intended to allow the company to conduct market research on consumers through the Internet. Then, he and Reuben—our alpha-nerd—exploited this security breach to create a tiny e-mail virus that could alter the functioning of Office in any way we wanted.

  We spent longer trying to figure out what to do with the hack than actually writing it. Our arguments took place at an almost Talmudic level: “If an innocent person is delayed by our hack, then do we get bad karma?” “If a person uses a Microsoft product, have they implicitly put themselves in the line of fire?” “What if a person is depending on the services of someone who uses Microsoft Office? Are they to be inconvenienced or even damaged just for their unwitting patronage of a Microsoft user?” And so on.

  Jude finally convinced us that Microsoft posed such a noxious threat to the free flow of information and technology that an absolutely indiscriminate, scattershot launch of the virus qualified as a morally sound strategy. More importantly, the less targeted the attack, the less likely it was to be traced back to us.

  But given that the virus was to be spread to all Microsoft users, regardless of their level of complicity with Bill Gates’s plan for global domination, we would keep the damage on a semiotic level. Whenever a user created a new Microsoft Word file, the document would open with one sentence already written on the top: “Microsoft sucks.” Crude, but to the point.

  The plan was for us to launch the virus from eight different public access facilities simultaneously, using eight different carrier messages. One claimed that the attached file was a free teen porn picture, another promised a stock tip, and another was a certificate “to claim your jackpot prize.” When users attempted to open the attachment, they would be informed that the file was incomplete. Meanwhile, the virus would nest itself deep within Microsoft Office, and then launch itself three days later.

  As fate would have it, on the Saturday of the planned attack my parents forced me to go to shul for the bar mitzvah of an influential temple board member’s son. In truth, I was relieved to be forcibly yanked from battle. I had more at stake than the others; my permanent record still meant something to me. In any case, by Saturday afternoon, when the rest of the Jamaican Kings were spamming 27 the known Internet universe, I was dancing the hora in the back room of Goldstein’s Restaurant.

  Later that night, I was so racked with guilt that I couldn’t even bring myself to attend the Kings’ midnight debriefing. I had missed the call to action, and I knew they would blame it on my do-gooder tendencies—my innate inability to live as a daring prankster. It was in my effort to deflect this charge that I made my tragic error.

  I decided to play a part in the attack, after all. Better late than never. And in order to prove my loyalty to the Kings, I inserted my own hacker handle deep into the code of the virus. If the authorities were to take apart the virus itself, and analyze the code line by line, they would find the word DeltaWave nested in the commands. Although no one except the Kings knew the handle belonged to me, it showed I was willing to take an even bigger risk than them.

  Of course the Kings didn’t see it that way. By the time the story hit the headlines, the DeltaWave virus had become synonymous with hacker subversion. I had effectively taken credit for everyone else’s hard work. It was a sin that could not go unpunished.

  Several days before launch, we had sent a warning message about the virus to a producer at Inside Edition 28 through an alias e-mail account. Although she didn’t believe us at first, the success of the virus—three days of havoc before Microsoft developed a patch—made her wet for an interview with any of the offenders. Jude picked a chat room on a public website through which we could converse with her, and appointed me to be the Kings’ spokesperson.

  I should have guessed something was up. I logged into the chat room from home through the account Jude had set up for me—unaware that he had purposely neglected to use an anonymous channel. Before I had finished my treatise on the open source 29 movement, three Secret Service agents were knocking at the door. At least they didn’t break it down.

  I was a first-time offender, a minor, and awfully cute—to adults, anyway. Microsoft had no intention of being known as the company that imprisoned a sweet-looking kid with braces, blue eyes, and dark, wavy hair. (I wore my retainer for my court appearance.) They encouraged the judge to sentence me to a year of counseling and a bit of public humiliation. I lost my computer privileges at school and was forced to go on television talk shows and bemoan the dangers of hacking.

  In my first few interviews, I personified penitence. I apologized for all the trouble I caused, and reflected with appropriate contrition on the addictive quality of the Internet. Soon, however, I found myself speaking more about the power one feels at the keyboard than any of the vices to which that power might lead. Before long, I had become a strident Internet proselytizer, spinning intricate visions of the connected society that lay ahead for America’s wired youth.

  A Princeton admissions officer happened to see one of my impassioned diatribes on Rivera’s World, 30 and subsequently offered me a full scholarship to enroll in the school’s new Computer Studies program. I got a free pass to the Ivy league by taking the fall for a hack I didn’t even write! After all, if I admitted it wasn’t my own work, I’d have to reveal the true perpetrators.

  After graduation, I won a string of jobs developing networked gaming concepts for Internet start-ups in Boston, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Every one of these companies peaked, then failed before my options could be vested. That’s when it occurred to me that I wasn’t in the computer game at all. The real networked game was being played by brokers, angel investors, and CEOs. This was the real game. Instead of writing the backstories for Playstation discs, I’d write them for business plans.

  • • •

  Most amazingly, tonight it looked like Jude—far from condemning me—was hoping to play, too.

  “There’s something I have to show you,” he said, leaning in confidentially. I could tell he was uncomfortable in his role as the solicitor.

  “What? Where?”

  “No, no, not here. It’s a new technology me and the guys put together. I think it could interest you.”

  “You’ve got a business proposition? Is that what you’re saying?” I wanted to force him to admit his intentions. That he wanted to get in the new.

  “Yeah, but it’s the business proposition to end all business propositions,” Jude said a bit mysteriously. “You have to see it to know what I’m talking about.”

  “See it? You mean you actually developed something?” I joked. “From what I can tell, that’s the last thing we’re supposed to do around here.”

  “Well, that’s what makes us different.”

  “Us?”

  “Me and Reuben, mostly. El Greco helped at the beginning, but then he got a job somewhere.”

  “El Greco’s in New York? What’s he doing? Is he still fat?”

  “Come see,” he baited me. I got the feeling Jude really wanted me to be part of what he was doing. That he really missed me as much as I, begrudgingly, missed him. “Greco’s got a day job over at a place in Jersey, doing commerce as entertainment software, or entertainment as commerce software. I forget which.”

  I felt myself smiling at the memory of sweet El Greco, waddling around the old neighborhood as his spray paint cans clanked against each other in his sweatshirt. “He was the best.”

  “We were the best.”

  For a minute I had half a mind to just walk out on that whole world of shiny suits and plastic cups and go back to my posse, where I belonged. Where the rent was low and the walk-ups were only one flight.

  That’s when I saw her, and the mental escape hatch suddenly slammed shut.

  “Uh, Jude,” I said, trying to cut our exchange short. “I better deal with stuff.”

  “That’s cool. I’ll watch.”

  I noticed his clothes for the first time. Torn jeans, a ratty black T-shirt. I didn’t know whether associating with him would give me street cred with Carla, or peg me once and for all as an imposter in her shop.

  “No, I mean, I better do the business thing. They are paying me.” I shook his hand, and patted his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, you do the business thing.” He wasn’t moving, and Carla had already spotted me. She was working her way over. My worlds were about to collide.

  “Who is she?” Jude asked.

  “She’s kind of my boss, I guess.”

  I hadn’t fully considered this before, but Carla Santangelo, M&L’s chief of Internet strategy, was my direct superior, at least for now. She was a spirited, selfish, and thus successful thirtysomething fund manager who worked her way up through the tech-related commodity pits before landing a job at the center of the firm’s cyberintelligence vacuum. She had the brains, beauty, and bullishness to achieve a high profile in Silicon Alley, if not on the Street, but she had no instinct for the way networks had changed the securities landscape and still used obsolete statistics like earnings estimates to determine share valuations. She had become famously frazzled in the fallout after the IPO mania, and her need for a mind like mine was outweighed only by the threat someone like me posed to her position.