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THE RAID

of the Web at will. Gembe’s confession in the Valve hack provided the FBI with a golden opportunity to snare one of the innovators most responsible. The FBI tried to lure Gembe to America with an Invita-style job offer from Valve. After months of negotiations and telephone interviews with Valve executives, the hacker seemed ready to hop a flight to the States.

Then the German police intervened, arrested the hacker, and charged him locally as a youthful offender. Gembe was sentenced to one year of probation.

The raid on Max’s house shook him, filling his head with unpleasant memories of the FBI’s search warrant over the BIND attacks. Max decided he needed a safe house in the city, a place where he could ply his trade and store his data free from the threat of search warrants—something like Chris’s Villa Siena plant.

Under an alias, Chris rented a second apartment for Max, a spacious penthouse in the Fillmore District, with a balcony and a fireplace—Max liked working by an open fire, and he’d joked that he could burn the evidence in an emergency.

Max tried to get home to Charity daily, but with a comfortable hacker safe house to retreat to, he began disappearing for days at a stretch, sometimes only emerging when his girlfriend interrupted his work with a prodding phone call.

“Dude, time to come home. I miss you.”

As money started to flow into Max and Chris’s joint operation, so did the mistrust. Some of the cashers in Chris’s crew liked to party, and the constant presence of cocaine, ecstasy, and pot called to Chris like a forgotten melody. In February, he was pulled over near his home and arrested for driving under the influence. He began routinely vanishing with his comely employees for weekend-long bacchanals in Vegas: The day was for shopping; at night, Chris would snort some coke and take the girls out to the Hard Rock to party or snag a VIP table at the sleek Ghostbar