22

DUDE YOU FUCKED UP

Baden-Württemberg, 2007

It was a pleasant evening in early May, although it didn't feel much like springtime to Matrix001. The external world receded as his mouth dried and his eyes ran over the email one more time.

Your landline is tapped. Cops in UK, Germany, France are onto you ... Hide evidence. Warn others ... Cops know matrix-001 is detlef hartmann from eislingen ... You only got a few weeks before cops hit in uk and france ... Warn all carders you can get hold of.

What did this mean? Who did it come from? He looked at the sender's address again: [email protected]. That was probably randomly generated. And it was impossible to identify anything about the author, except that his English appeared to be fluent.

Matrix decided he should consult his fellow DarkMarket administrators and a couple of other confidants. What, he asked, did they all make of this? Their replies were oddly bland, in some cases almost indifferent, mere warnings for him to keep an eye out.

In Pittsburgh, Keith Mularski felt anything but indifferent. The email extracts that he and the others had received from Matrix meant only one thing: the operation was being leaked. And if it was being leaked to Matrix, who else was being tipped off? The timing could hardly be worse, as for several months the FBI had been planning