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THE RAID

Toshok protested his innocence, though he acknowledged that he knew about the breach. His old friend Max Vision was staying with him at the time of the intrusion, and he got very excited when the source code popped up online.

Hearing Max Vision’s name sent the agents into double time—they nearly tripped over themselves to finish the search and get back to the office to prepare a warrant application for Max’s new apartment. Chris watched gloomily as they gathered his nine computers, some music CDs, and his Xbox. The blonde agent registered the look on his face. “Yeah,” she said, “this is going to be hard for you.”

When Max heard about the raid, he knew he didn’t have much time. He ran around his apartment stashing his gear. He hid an external hard drive in a stack of sweaters in the closet, another in a cereal box. One of his laptops fit under the sofa cushions; he hung a second one out the bathroom window in a garbage bag. Everything sensitive on his computers was encrypted, so even if they found his hardware, the agents wouldn’t get any evidence of his hacking. But under the terms of his supervised release, he wasn’t supposed to be using encryption at all. Moreover, it would be incredibly inconvenient to let the FBI take all of his computers.

The feds arrived in force, as many as twenty agents swarming like ants through the apartment. They found only the routine trappings of a San Francisco computer geek with hippie leanings: a bookshelf with Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi classic Ender’s Game, and a smattering of Asimov and Carl Sagan. There was a bicycle, and stuffed penguins were strewn everywhere. Max loved penguins.

They discovered not one of Max’s slapdash hiding spots, and this time, the hacker had nothing to say. The agents left without any evidence linking Max to the Valve intrusion, much less any hints of the crimes he was committing with Chris. Just a stack of CDs, a broken hard drive, and a vanilla Windows machine he’d left out as diversions.

But Charity had just learned what it meant to be in Max Vision’s world. Max insisted he was innocent of the source code theft. It was prob-