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CARDER COURT

KIRE's IP address. Those are my logins, he wrote. I don't know who those other logins are.

Then he spun and attacked. The doubt Iceman had sown about JiLsi worked to his advantage. Things were going crazy, he wrote. JiLsi had been acting suspiciously. For one thing, he'd instructed Master Splyntr not to tell anyone that he was running the server. And while JiLsi cultivated the impression that DarkMarket was hosted in a country out of reach of western law enforcement, he was actually hosting it in Tampa, Florida, where the feds could just waltz in any time and serve a search warrant. It was odd behavior indeed.

JiLsi protested his innocence, but it was looking bad for him. Master Splyntr publicly thanked Iceman for bringing the matter to his attention and said he'd move DarkMarket out of the United States at once.

Mularski reached out to law enforcement contacts in Ukraine, and they helped him quickly get hosting there. In the blink of an eye, Dark-Market was in Eastern Europe. Most of the carders had to agree that no fed would move a sting site to a former Soviet state.

There was no formal verdict, but a consensus formed that Master Splyntr was innocent. They weren't too sure about JiLsi.

When the controversy subsided, Mularski returned to the routine business of running his undercover operation. He was at his desk filling out reports a couple of weeks later when he got a call from another agent.

Special Agent Michael Schuler was a legend among the bureau's cybercrime agents. It was he who'd hacked into the Russians' computers in the Invita sting. Now stationed in the Richmond, Virginia, field office, Schuler was calling about a breach at nearby Capital One. The bank's security officials had detected an attack using an Internet Explorer exploit. They'd sent Schuler a copy of the code, and he wanted Mularski to get one of the NCFTA's geeks to take a look at it.