📸 Photo

PROLOGUE

The taxi idled in front of a convenience store in downtown San Francisco while Max Vision paid the driver and unfolded his six-foot-five frame from the back of the car, his thick brown hair pulled into a sleek ponytail. He stepped into the store and waited for the cab to disappear down the street before emerging for the two-block walk to his safe house.

Around him, tiny shops and newsstands awakened under the overcast sky, and suited workers filed into the office towers looming above. Max was going to work too, but his job wouldn’t have him home after nine hours for a good night’s sleep. He’d be cloistered for days this time. Once he put his plan into motion, there’d be no going home. No slipping out for a bite of dinner. No date night at the multiplex. Nothing until he was done.

This was the day he was declaring war.

His long gait took him to the Post Street Towers, from the street a five-by-fourteen grid of identical bay windows, trim painted the color of the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d been coming to this apartment complex for months, doing his best to blend in with the exchange students drawn by short leases and reasonable rents. Nobody knew his name—not his real one anyway. And nobody knew his past.

Here, he wasn’t Max Butler, the small-town troublemaker driven by obsession to a moment of life-changing violence, and he wasn’t Max Vision, the self-named computer security expert paid one hundred dollars an hour to harden the networks of Silicon Valley companies. As he rode up the apartment building elevator, Max became someone else: “Iceman”—a rising leader in a criminal economy responsible for billions of dollars in thefts from American companies and consumers.