DUDE YOU FUCKED UP

the first wave of DarkMarket arrests. It was bad enough having to deal
with an uncooperative Secret Service. The German police from the
federal state of Baden-Württemberg (LKA) had heard that their French
colleagues were preparing a DarkMarket related bust, but the French
police had snubbed them, saying that their presence at a planning
meeting in Paris with Britain's SOCA and the Secret Service would
be unnecessary.

The anonymous hushmail sent to Matrix001 triggered an anxiety
among the investigating police forces that would linger for many
months. They needed to know whether the leak was a result of care-
lessness or an inside job, or indeed whether a hacker had penetrated
one of the investigating teams' computer networks. Every time some-
thing went wrong, the suspicion that there was a traitor among the
ranks bubbled up to the surface. Morale could not help but suffer.

Mularski's attempts to coordinate the first arrests were proving
difficult. The fear for any cybercop is that, if one fraudster is taken in
without the others, news will spread like wildfire across the boards that
something bad is going on and targets will simply disappear. Hence
the Secret Service's obsessive secrecy...

Wait a minute, thought Mularski, that's probably where the leak
came from — the Secret Service! He carefully considered the possible
culprits: a) the Secret Service; b) someone from inside his own oper-
ation, which he doubted because the FBI's security had been ratcheted
up since Iceman had spotted the Fed involvement; c) SOCA knew
about Matrix, but the British were always the most tight-lipped of the
lot; and d), of course, the Germans — he simply didn't have enough
experience to judge the Germans, although had he detected a slightly
abrasive relationship between the regional force in Stuttgart and the
Federal Police Agency a couple of hours' drive to the north in Wies-
baden, both of which had been privy to the DarkMarket story? He
couldn't be sure.

For the moment, speculation had to go onto the back burner. Mular-
ski's immediate concern was to get in touch with Frank Eissmann of
the regional police in Stuttgart and discuss the Matrix investigation
before the young German did a runner. Stuttgart decided it was time
for the case to go on steroids and Eissmann brought forward Matrix's
planned arrest date. This in turn created problems for the police in
London, Calgary and Paris, who had finally agreed at the London