TURKEY SHOOT

had real form. He had first been arrested on fraud charges in 1998.
Two years later came his biggest miscalculation when he and his
collaborators were caught red-handed using cloned white plastic credit
cards to extract cash from ATMs in the port of Izmir. After having
served five years of a twenty-seven-year sentence, the prospect of further
incarceration was too much for him. And so one day in May 2005
Çağatay went over the top of his prison walls and off the radar. He was
less a fugitive and more a ghost.

He blamed his arrest in 2000 on the men with whom he was
working — something he was determined not to allow again. If you
want something done properly, ran Çağatay's basic philosophy, do it
yourself.

Naturally he understood that during his five years in prison the
cyber world had undergone significant changes. He knew all about
Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors that may
be placed inexpensively onto an integrated circuit will continue to
double every two years until roughly 2015. Translated into real life, that
law means that every year gadgets get funkier, computer programs
more complex, hacking tools more devious and the rewards correspond-
ingly more juicy. And so he set about adapting to the new circumstances.

First, he needed a new cyber identity. Çağatay disappeared for almost
four years, his name being replaced on his passport with the name of
one his subordinates, the bodyguard Hakan Öztan, and in the ether
by Cha0 (pronounced like the Italian greeting). He had been using the
first syllable of his name and the figure zero since he first graced the
BBS boards in the early 1990s. At that time, Cha0's exceptional secu-
rity system had ensure that nobody could identify him. In public
forums like Crime Enforcers and DarkMarket, Cha0 sold skimmers. In
private, he sold impenetrable security systems for computer users who
really did not want their identity revealed.

But now Bilal had stumbled upon him. However, it was one thing
spotting Cha0's location. It was quite another gathering the requisite
evidence to build a case against him. Turkey's judges and prosecutors
are even less acquainted with the Internet than their equivalents in
Western Europe or America, and already the city had spawned several
high-profile, expensive defence lawyers who were quickly learning how
to exploit that ignorance for the benefit of their clients and their own
bank balances.