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ONE PLAT AND SIX CLASSICS

Once he was back in Pittsburgh, Mularski began working a new, far-fetched theory about Iceman. He’d been running down every “Iceman” he could find—there’d been an Iceman on Shadowcrew and others on IRC. They always turned out to be red herrings. Now Mularski was toying with the idea that his Iceman didn’t really exist.

It was Iceman’s supposed collaboration with the Canadian informant Lloyd “Silo” Liske that intrigued him. Silo had worked with Iceman to try to expose Mularski. That, in itself, didn’t mean much—informants often call out suspected cops and snitches to deflect suspicion from themselves. But Silo had told his handler at the Vancouver Police Department that he’d hacked Iceman’s computer, yet when push came to shove, he couldn’t produce Iceman’s real name or even a good Internet IP address. And it turned out that Silo had dozens of e-gold accounts—one of them under the name “Keyser Söze.”

If Liske was a fan of The Usual Suspects, it might occur to him to create a phantom criminal mastermind and then feed law enforcement false information about the supposed kingpin in his role as an informant.

Mularski flew to Washington and presented his theory to the Secret Service at their headquarters. It was shot down at once. They were working closely with Silo’s handler at the Vancouver Police Department, and they knew Silo as one of the good guys.

The Secret Service had run down some false leads themselves. In a lab in the Pittsburgh field office, the agents had a whiteboard scrawled with handles and names connected by squiggles and lines. Many of the names were crossed out. It was their ever-changing road map to Iceman and his world.

Mularski returned to Pittsburgh, and both agencies resumed their search for the real Keyser Söze of the cyberworld—the elusive hacking kingpin Iceman.