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KINGPIN

It was 6:30 a.m. and still dark out when Chris Toshok awoke to the sound of his doorbell buzzing, the long continuous drone of someone holding their thumb on the button. Figuring it for a neighborhood drunk, he rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. Then the buzz broke into an insistent rhythm, bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, like a busy signal. He reluctantly crawled out of bed, grabbed his pants and a sweatshirt, and moved groggily down the stairs.

When he opened the door he found himself squinting into the glare of a flashlight.

"Are you Chris Toshok?" said a woman's voice.
"Uh, yes."
"Mr. Toshok, we're with the FBI. We have a warrant to search the premises."

The agent—a long-haired blonde—showed Toshok her badge and pressed a thin sheaf of papers into his hands. Another agent put a firm hand on his arm and guided him outside to the porch, clearing the doorway to admit a flood of suits into the house. They roused Toshok's roommate, then began tossing Chris's bedroom, riffling through his bookshelves and pawing through his underwear drawer.

The blonde, joined by a Secret Service agent, sat down with Toshok to explain why they were there. Four months earlier the source code for the unreleased first-person shooter Half-Life 2 had been stolen from the computers of Valve Software in Bellevue, Washington. It was swapped in IRC for a while and then showed up on file-sharing networks.

Half-Life 2 was perhaps the most anticipated game of all time, and the emergence of the secret source code had electrified the gaming world. Valve announced it would have to delay the launch of the game, and the company CEO issued a public call for Half-Life fans to help track down the thief. Based on sales of the original game, Valve valued the software at a quarter of a billion dollars.

The FBI had traced some of the hacking activity to Toshok's Internet IP address at his old house, the agent explained. The judge would go easier on Toshok if he told them where he'd stashed the source code.