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PROLOGUE

And Iceman was fed up.

For months, he’d been popping merchants around the country, prying out piles of credit card numbers that should have been worth hundreds of thousands on the black market. But the market was broken. Two years earlier Secret Service agents had driven a virtual bulldozer through the computer underworld’s largest gathering spot, arresting the ringleaders at gunpoint and sending the rest scurrying into chat rooms and small-time Web forums—all riddled with security holes and crawling with feds and snitches. It was a mess.

Whether they knew it or not, the underworld needed a strong leader to unify them. To bring order.

Off the elevator, Max idled in the hallway to check for a tail, then walked to his apartment door and entered the oppressive warmth of the rented studio. Heat was the biggest problem with the safe house. The servers and laptops crammed into the space produced a swelter that pulsed through the room. He’d brought in fans over the summer, but they provided scant relief and lofted the electric bill so high that the apartment manager suspected him of running a hydroponic dope farm. But it was just the machines, entwined in a web of cables, the most important snaking to a giant parabolic antenna aimed out the window like a sniper rifle.

Shrugging off his discomfort, Max sat at his keyboard and trained a bead on the Web forums where computer criminals gathered—virtual cantinas with names like DarkMarket and TalkCash. For two days, he hacked, his fingers flying at preternatural speed as he breached the sites’ defenses, stealing their content, log-ins, passwords, and e-mail addresses. When he tired, he crashed out on the apartment’s foldaway bed for an hour or two, then returned bleary-eyed to his work.

He finished with a few keystrokes that wiped out the sites’ databases with the ease of an arsonist flicking a match. On August 16, 2006, he dispatched an unapologetic mass e-mail to the denizens of the sites he’d destroyed: They were all now members of Iceman’s own Cardersmarket