📸 Photo

Pizza and Plastic

On the top floor of the Post Street Towers, Max's computers sat on the wood-veneer floor, silent and cool. Outside the bay window, shops and apartments were ready to unwittingly feed him bandwidth through his oversized antenna.

Max had gone dormant for a few months after accumulating a pile of cash from the Citibank operation; he'd abandoned his penthouse apartment and put his hacking on the back burner. But he couldn't stay away long. He'd asked Chris to rent him a new safe house, one with more neighborhood Wi-Fi options than the last. “I just need a closet, I don't need any space,” he'd said.

Chris had delivered. There was ample Wi-Fi swimming around the Post Street Towers, and the apartment was indeed a closet: a three-hundred-square-foot studio that seemed scarcely larger than a prison cell. Decked out in blond wood, with a Formica counter, a full-sized fridge, and a bed that unfolded from the wall, it was a clean and functional McApartment, bare of all distractions and able to provide the necessities for Max's all-night hacking sprees. The high turnover in the building made him anonymous. Chris just had to flash a fake ID at the rental office, pay a $500 deposit, and sign the six-month lease.

Once his computers were plugged in and his antenna was latched on to some patsy's network, Max wasted little time in getting back on the job.