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EXIT STRATEGY

On Wednesday, September 5, 2007, Max dropped Charity at the post office on an errand and directed his cab driver downtown to the CompUSA store on Market Street. He picked up a new fan for his CPU, walked to his apartment, stripped down, and crashed out on his bed amid a tangle of unfolded laundry. He settled into a deep slumber.

Max had stopped hacking, but he was still disentwining himself from his double life—after five years, he had a lot of relationships and ventures that he couldn't just sever overnight.

He slept right through the knock on his door at about two p.m. Then the door flew open, and a half-dozen agents rushed into the room, guns drawn, shouting orders. Max bolted upright and screamed.

"Put your hands where I can see them!" an agent yelled. "Lay down!"
The agent was positioned between Max and his computers. Max had often thought that, in a raid, he might be able to pull the plug on his server, making his already formidable cyberdefenses completely bulletproof. Now that it was really happening, he realized that diving for his machines wasn't an option, unless he wanted to be shot.

Max recovered his composure. Unplugged or not, his machines were locked down, and his encryption was rock solid. He managed to relax a little as the agents let him get dressed, then walked him down the hall in handcuffs.

On the way, they passed a three-man team who'd been waiting for the Secret Service to secure the safe house. They weren't feds; they were from Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team, and they were there to bust Max's crypto.

It was the first time CERT had been invited to a raid—but the circumstances were special. Chris Aragon had employed the same DriveCrypt whole-disk-encryption software that Max used, and neither the Secret Service nor CERT had been able to recover anything from the drive.