18

SUSPICIOUS MINDS

Iceman's outer calm belied his absolute fury. He had lost track of time. It might have been three in the morning; it might have been three in the afternoon. But when engaged in a major hack that can take hours and hours, it was easy to become disoriented. For the most obsessive hackers, time and place evaporate. When the fury descended on Iceman, there was no real world - only the bidding of Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, mattered.

She now appeared in several forms. The first was El Mariachi, an embittered carder whose website, The Grifters, Iceman had destroyed. El Mariachi was shouting from the digital hills that he had incontrovertible proof of Iceman's real identity as an FBI collaborator. His accusation was echoed by Lord Cyric, El Mariachi's lapdog, constantly yapping and growling across the carding boards. Like many others, Iceman detested Lord Cyric.

Vitriolic accusations were hurled from one carding site to the next. It was the equivalent of a war between several mafia clans except that nobody really knew who belonged to which family, who was an informer and who was a Fed. It was chaos.

But when Iceman discovered what he then believed to be the truth, he sat almost dumbfounded in his comfortable apartment in the centre of San Francisco, paid for by Jeffrey Normington and another partner, in exchange for a regular stream of stolen credit-card numbers. From here amidst the stale pizza crusts and Coke cans, Iceman would administer CardersMarket and obsessively hack other carding sites. In October he had succeeded in hacking the very heart of DarkMarket's servers.