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EXIT STRATEGY

The day after Max announced his retirement, Secret Service agent Melissa McKenzie and a federal prosecutor from Pittsburgh flew to California to tie up some loose ends.

The investigation was nearly complete. The Secret Service had gotten ahold of Digits’s e-mail from a contact at the Vancouver Police Department—Silo’s handler. Max had been using a Canadian-based web-mail provider called Hushmail that provides high-security encryption, using a Java applet that decrypts a customer’s messages right on his own PC instead of the company’s server. In theory, the arrangement ensures that even Hushmail can’t get at a customer’s secret key or incoming e-mail messages. The company openly marketed the service as a way to circumvent FBI surveillance.

But, like e-gold, Hushmail was another formerly crime-friendly service now being mined by law enforcement. U.S. and Canadian agencies had been winning special orders from the Supreme Court of British Columbia that forced Hushmail officials to sabotage their own system and compromise specific surveillance targets’ decryption keys. Now the feds had Max’s e-mail.

At the same time, the agency had located Tea living in Berkeley serving a probation sentence—it turned out she’d been caught using Aragon-produced gift cards at the Emeryville Apple Store months earlier. It was supposed to be a training run for one of Chris’s new recruits, but Tea had never cashed before, and when she impulsively added a PowerBook to her iPod purchase, she was arrested along with the trainee. Eager to avoid more trouble, she told the Secret Service everything she knew.

Meanwhile, the Secret Service had begun sporadic physical surveillance of Max. From Werner Janer’s proffers, Mularski had learned that Max had a girlfriend named Charity Majors. Public records provided her address, and a subpoena of her bank records showed she had a joint account with Max. The Secret Service staked out the house and eventually trailed Max to the Oakwood Geary.