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EXIT STRATEGY

Chance was fifty years old and bearded, while Max was clean shaven with long hair—but the fake driver’s license and genuine money order were enough to get him in.

The next evening, Max checked out a red Mustang from his neighborhood Zipcar and packed it with his computer gear. For all his paranoia, he didn’t notice the Secret Service agents tailing him on the drive to the Oakwood and watching from the street as he moved into his new safe house.

A month later, Max jolted awake, shot upright in bed, and blinked into the darkness of the flat. It was just Charity; she had crawled into bed next to him, trying in vain not to wake him. He was growing jumpier every day.

“Sweetie, you can’t keep doing this,” Charity murmured. “You may not realize it, but I realize it. I can see it. You’re getting too sucked into it mentally. You’re losing focus of who you are and what you’re doing.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m done.”

A lot of time had passed since his last prison term, he thought. Maybe he could find honest work again. NightFox had already offered him a legitimate job in Canada, but he’d turned it down. He couldn’t bring himself to leave Charity. He’d been contemplating marriage, playing with the idea of luring her to Las Vegas on a vacation and popping the question there. She was fiercely independent, but she couldn’t argue that he hadn’t given her space.

It was time, he decided, for Max Vision, white hat, to return. It would be official. He visited the San Francisco courthouse and filled out the necessary paperwork. On August 14, a judge approved his legal name change from Max Butler to Max Ray Vision.

He already had an idea for a new website that could catapult him back into the white-hat scene: a system for disclosing and managing zero-day vulnerabilities. He could seed it with the security holes he was