She cocked her head at me. “Yeah.”
“Go shut it off, okay?”
I waited outside her door while she went into her room and moved around. She opened her door, holding her laptop in one hand and its battery in the other.
“I think you’d better tell me what’s going on.”
* * *
I thought I’d have the biggest news of the night, but I was wrong.
“How sure are you that your computer is safe?” Ange said, when I was finished telling her my story. It wasn’t exactly what I was expecting her to say at that juncture.
“Yes, I’m fine, just a little shaken up, thank you for asking,” I said.
“Forget that for now. Do you think your computer is clean? Do you trust it enough to get into the darknet?”
Only now did I notice what I should have seen right away. Ange was freaked out, too, and not just because of what I had to tell her.
“What is it?”
“Do. You. Trust. Your. Computer—”
“Yes, yes,” I said. I woke it up and started typing and clicking.
“Search the database,” she said. “Look for Zyz. That’s zee-why-zee.”
“What’s a ‘zyz’?”
She gave me a “don’t ask stupid questions” look. I typed.
Chapter 10
Zyz wasn’t always called Zyz. It was once called Fireguard Security, and it was founded by an exec at Halliburton, a giant military contractor that sucked a bazillion dollars out of America’s bank accounts selling pricey, underperforming military services to our troops all over the world, then followed up by helping to build a couple of semidefective, way-over-budget oil wells, including one that may yet be responsible for the sterilization of the Gulf of Mexico.
Halliburton had a “dynamic, thrusting young VP” (seriously, that’s what Fortune magazine called him) named Chambers Martin, who quit the company in 2008 to found Fireguard, which immediately began to make major bank by taking U.S. Army contracts to guard Halliburton supply convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So far, so normal. There are plenty of companies who bled out the taxpayer by providing bloodthirsty mercs. They guarded truckloads of Twinkies around Kandahar Province and Fallujah to restock the Forward Operating Bases that were a cross between an armed fortress and a minimall. The Army paid them enormous fees to have soldiers’ clothes laundered and to supply Internet access and Pizza Hut.
But Fireguard had bigger plans. Rather than simply sucking up tax dollars for substandard services, they decided to become … a bank. Specifically, they began to issue bonds based on their anticipated future U.S. government contracts. The simplest bonds are basically loans: I sell you a bond for $100 with a five percent return and then I pay you $5 a year over the term of the bond (say, five years), and when the bond runs out its term, say, five years, we’re done. Of course, if I go broke before the bond runs out, I go bankrupt and you’re screwed.
Fireguard was selling its debt left, right, and center, paying top interest rates, telling everyone that the gravy train could never end, because every year they were taking in bigger military contracts, which meant that every year, they’d have more money on hand to make their bonds’ payouts. It worked great, until the military drawdowns started to reduce their annual revenues, and they needed to branch out.
So they started trading bonds, instead of just issuing them, beginning with bonds issued on student loan debt. It turned out that every dollar I borrowed to go to Berkeley got turned into a bond—someone with money bought the right to get paid every time I made a payment on my debt. This made big bucks for Berkeley and for other universities and companies that “gave” students the loans they needed to get their magic diploma paper. Student debt bonds are even better than skeezy military contractor debt bonds because a skeezy military contractor can go bankrupt, but students can’t.
Bet you didn’t know that, huh? If you borrowed money to go to college and you someday find yourself so flat broke that you have to go bankrupt, all your debts will be wiped off the books—credit cards, car notes—but your student debts are immortal. And whenever you miss a payment, the scuzzy finance companies that buy the debts from universities are allowed to jack your debt up with monster fees and penalties, so if you owe $30,000 for college and $50,000 in credit card debt and you go bankrupt, you’ll find the credit card debt reduced or eliminated, but your student debt might grow to $150,000 after all the missed-payment fees are tacked on. The way student debt bankruptcy laws are set up, they can take money out of your Social Security check to pay the student loans you took out as a teenager, even if you’ve already paid millions in fees and penalties.
Zyz liked the sound of this. So they took the money that was coming in from the sale of their bonds and started buying up student debt. But not just any student debt: desperate, miserable student debt. Debt carried by the poorest people in America, who had put themselves into permanent hock just to try to get a better job than their parents had by getting a degree.
These people were in trouble. Getting a college degree (or, ahem, dropping out of college) hadn’t led to them getting great jobs. They were unemployed, or working a ton of crappy part-time jobs to make rent, and they were missing payments like crazy. They had debts that they could never, ever pay off.
Enter Zyz. They had a dynamic, thrusting plan to get people to pay: straight-up thuggery. Zyz knew a lot about scaring, hurting, and chasing people. They had deep connections with Homeland Security, which meant access to databases of who lived where, who they were related to, what their tax returns said, how much income their parents, ex-spouses, grandparents, cousins, and school pals made. Zyz was … aggressive … about using this information. Thrusting, even.
So far, so sleazy. But it got worse. People who owed money to Zyz started to do things that were pretty out of character for them: a couple armed robberies, some burglaries, a little blackmail. A bunch of them joined the military, only to be discharged for being grossly unfit for service.
Why were they doing this? Because Zyz was providing them with “financial advice.” As in “You’d better find some way to pay your bills, pal, or things could get very, very bad for you and the people you love.” Zyz wasn’t just a private military service, and they weren’t just high-flying financial engineers: they were the mafia.
* * *
All this was contained in a series of memos, including a bunch of letters from attorneys general and district attorneys who’d gotten complaints from Zyz’s “clients.” Zyz, of course, denied everything, while simultaneously getting friends of theirs in state and national government, law enforcement, and the DHS itself to keep everything calm and easy.
The most damning memo came from a San Francisco city attorney who’d heard too many nearly identical stories from Zyz clients, and had painstakingly built a case against them, with mountains of supporting documents (all also included in the docs), only to have her boss tell her to forget about it because “there wasn’t sufficient evidence to justify an additional investigation at this time.”
Well, this lady—I cheered her on as I read—wasn’t going to take this lying down. She continued to collect stories from Zyz’s victims, and to pick away at Zyz’s finances, trying to find the “sufficient evidence” that would convince her boss. This continued right up to the time that her bank foreclosed on her house, citing payments in arrears. Being woken up at 6 A.M. and thrown out of her house with her husband and two small children turned her into a full-time, professional prisoner of a bureaucratic nightmare, trying to clear her name and credit and get her house back.
That’s where her story ended, but not Zyz’s. Zyz had hired lobbyists in every state capital in America—which must have cost a fortune, and gave me an idea of the kind of money they were sucking in from buying and selling their dirty bonds—to push for legislation that allowed them “greater leeway” in going after the assets of parents and even grandparents of ex-students who owed money, especially when the ex-students we
re living at home. Translation: if you owed for your student loans and were so broke you had to live with your parents (ahem), they wanted to go after your folks’ house, their wages, and their pension. They didn’t just want to wait to raid your Social Security check; they wanted to raid your grandma’s Social Security.
These lobbyists had been busy everywhere, but especially in California, where youth unemployment was leading the country, and where, thanks to skyrocketing tuition in the UC state system, there were also record numbers of dropouts like me, whose student debts had come due early, and Zyz wanted our parents’ dough.
Now that elections were coming up, Zyz was spreading around a lot of money. They had dozens of subsidiaries for doing this, but once again, some hardworking whistle-blower (his or her name was scrubbed out of the memo) had compiled a list of them and pointed out that they had donated to every “serious” candidate in every race, often backing opposing candidates—anyone who stood a chance of ending up on an important committee if she or he won the election.
Once the darknet team had known to search for Zyz, they’d uncovered a mountain of stuff like this. Including something that jumped out at me: Zyz had hired a top-notch head of security with years of DHS and military experience: Carrie Johnstone.
* * *
“Holy crap,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ange said. “This is why they’re so freaked out. This is their big push. They’ve been buying up all this debt— cheap bonds backed by student loans from really broke-ass kids. If they can go after those kids’ families’ houses, they’ll make millions—hundreds of millions.”
“So what happens if we go public?”
“If we go public? What do you mean, ‘if’?” She was looking at me like I’d grown another head.
“Ange,” I said, putting up my hands. “You know. These guys, you’ve read about them. They know who I am. They know I’m the guy who got the leaks from Masha. If this stuff gets out, they’ll—”
“What? Marcus, they’re insane criminals. You’re not going to keep yourself safe by going along with them. If it suits them, they’ll come after you again. And what about Masha? Those hacker creeps might’ve been total dicks, but they’re right about her. She trusted you to be her insurance policy and instead you’ve spent your time cataloging the evidence—”
“Wait, what? I’ve spent my time? You’ve spent your time, too, Ange. We all agreed that we needed to go through the darknet docs before we put them out, find out what we had, decide on a strategy—”
“Marcus, that’s what you wanted, so that’s what we did. There was no reason you couldn’t have just tweeted the torrent name and the key and said, ‘DOWNLOAD THIS NOW. IT’S FULL OF CRIMINAL STUFF.’ You’ve got what, ten thousand followers? Once you did that, the file would be unkillable.”
“Masha’s not unkillable,” I shot back.
“You don’t even know if she’s working with those creeps—”
“Ange, come on, you’re not making sense. A second ago, you were telling me how evil I was because I hadn’t released the docs to save Masha. Now you’re saying it doesn’t matter if we put Masha in danger because she might be evil? Which one is it?”
Ange shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you could be doing something here, and instead you’re doing your run in circles, scream and shout act.”
“I just want to have a plan before I do something, Ange. What’s wrong with that?”
“I’ve got a plan for you, Marcus. Step one: tell everyone how to get to the docs. Step two: there is no step two.”
I felt trapped. Our voices kept getting louder, and I was worried that we’d wake up Ange’s mom and sister. If we’d been arguing in public—in a park or something—I might have gotten up and walked away to cool off. But it was going on 2 A.M. Where was I going to go? And of course, all this only made me more angry.
“Sure, it’s that easy. Especially if you’re not the one getting kidnapped and threatened.”
She was ready for that one. “You don’t think they’ve figured out who I am? You don’t think I’m next on the list if we publish this stuff? Marcus, I don’t care what happens to me. This is too important to let my safety come first. This is bigger than me.”
“Nice of you to volunteer me to give up my safety, too.”
“I didn’t think I had to volunteer you, Marcus. I thought that M1k3y would be right there, ready to fight for what was right, rather than screwing around with getting everything perfectly organized and safe before he took action.”
There it was. Pretty much everything I’d been afraid of, laid out by the one person I loved, trusted, and needed more than anyone else in the world. There’s only one thing worse than being shredded unfairly by someone like that: being shredded when you deserve it.
“Ange—” I began.
“Forget it,” she said. “Let’s just go to sleep.”
We lay in bed next to each other, like two marble statues, rigid, not touching. I kept replaying the discussions I’d had that day and that night, the anonymous hackers who’d been in my computer, the thugs from Zyz, and Ange, furious and disappointed with me. Around and around they went, a chorus of shame and accusations.
When they got too loud, I stood up and started putting on my clothes, fumbling in the dark. I heard Ange hold her breath, expel it, start to say something, stop.
Half-dressed, shoes undone, my bag hastily restuffed with my crap, I stepped out of Ange’s room and let myself down the stairs and out the front door.
* * *
At least I’d had the foresight to charge my phone. I scrolled through the speed dial. I suppose I could have called my parents, but what could I say to them? How could they help?
There were two people in my speed dial I hadn’t called in months and months. They’d been autosorted to the bottom of the list. Only the fact that I’d manually favorited them kept them from being dropped altogether.
Darryl and Van.
I let my thumb hover over Darryl’s picture for a long second as I walked down toward Market Street, thinking of how awkward it had been to talk with him, knowing that Van had confessed her crush on me and not knowing whether Darryl knew it, knowing that Van and Ange had hated each other for years and that this couldn’t have made it any better, wondering all the time whether Darryl hated me for being his rival or hated my girlfriend for whatever grievance Van held. The days between our talks had turned to weeks, the weeks to months. The longer the gap between conversations and meetings, the weirder and more uncomfortable it would be to get back in touch—the more it would seem like some special occasion.
It was cold now, and I was shivering, and once I started shivering, it felt like something inside me was giving way and then I was shivering for reasons other than the cold, and I pressed the button. It was after three in the morning. It rang and rang.
“Hi, this is Darryl. Leave a message, or better yet, send me a text or an email.”
I hung up.
It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time. I had ParanoidAndroid installed, but that didn’t mean that my phone wasn’t rooted—just that it would be harder to root. Had it been in my line of sight the whole time I’d been in the car with Knothead and Timmy had control over it? Had the creeps who’d taken over my laptop taken a run or two at my phone?
It was all for the best. Waking someone up at three in the morning while you’re having a meltdown is no way to restart a friendship—
My phone rang. Darryl.
“Hey, man.”
“Are you okay, Marcus?” He sounded so genuinely concerned I wanted to cry again.
Sorry, dude, just pressed the wrong button—butt-dialing. Sorry. Go back to sleep. The words were on the tip of my tongue. They wouldn’t come.
“No,” I said. “No, I’m not.” A siren screamed past me, a fire engine, and I jumped and gave a little squeak.
“Where are you?” he said.
I looked up at the st
reet signs. “Market and Guerrero.”
“Stay there,” he said. “Be there in fifteen.”
Friends.
* * *
Darryl’s dad hadn’t lost his job in the Berkeley layoffs, though he’d taken a “voluntary” pay cut. But things weren’t so bad that they’d sold their car, a ten-year-old Honda that Darryl had his own keys for. It was fugly and held together with bondo and good thoughts, but it was a car, and capable of getting from Twin Peaks to downtown in fifteen minutes at 3 A.M., though I’m guessing that Darryl blew through a few yellow lights and maybe a red or two to make that time.
It pulled up to the curb and the locks popped, and I opened the door and slid in, my nose filling with the familiar smell of the car, which I’d ridden in a million times before: old coffee, a hint of McDonald’s breakfast sandwich, the baked/mildewed smell of a vehicle that had spent a lot of time with its windows rolled up in the alternating scorching heat and misty cool of the Berkeley campus.
He was wearing track pants and a T-shirt, and his feet were bare in his unlaced Converse, big toe poking through a hole in the right one. Darryl had humongous feet, and his shoes were always going out at the toes.
The first words he said weren’t “What’s wrong?” or “Do you know what time it is?” or “You owe me, buddy, big time.”
The first words he said were, “It’s great to see you again, bud.”
It was the best thing he could have said. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it’s great to see you, too.”
I tried to find some words, some place to start the story. He knew about the darknet, had been going through the docs. Presumably, he’d seen the Zyz docs, helped to assemble them. But there was so much to say, and I couldn’t figure out where to begin. I closed my eyes to think and the next thing I knew, he was shaking me awake. I ungummed my eyelids and looked around. We were outside his dad’s place, which had once been as familiar to me as my own home.
“Come on, bud,” he said, “up you go.”