Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla

that the hackers used to move around in the system. That way, if the worst should happen, someone would be able to work backward to fix the problem.
    When New York Telephone's union employees went on strike in August, Staples's strike assignment was to move down to the desk next to Kaiser's. It was close quarters in Kaiser's office, which except for the spectacular view looked perfectly ordinary with its Max Headroom coffee mug and standard-issue bookshelves spilling arcane technical manuals, just like any other sugar cube of a workspace in rnidtown Manhattan. With all the high-tech activity, you'd expect to see something like the war room of the National Security Council. You'd certainly expect to see something with more bells and whistles than Kaiser's ancient black computer terminal, so clunky it could have been manufactured in Russia. The walls of the office were dirty white, or maybe clean gray. Two battered metal desks sat in a space so tight that their edges almost touched a space that, come to think of it, wasn't any bigger than Mark Abene's bedroom. But it was the antithesis of Mark's bedroom.
    Kaiser and Staples got along well. Both were life-long members of the phone company family, workers who got their first entry-level job with New York Telephone in the late 1960s, back when the phone company was expanding every day and career opportunities seemed limitless. Back then, AT&T owned the whole phone system, including New York Telephone, and it was easy to get a job.
    Kaiser was one of the first males hired to handle customer complaints in AT&T's downtown office at 195 Broadway. He worked his way up to management, and in the 1980s was transferred first to the regulatory department, which dealt with companywide complaints, and then to the toll-fraud department.
    As a young man, Staples had worked as a stagehand, fitting together pieces of scenery like so many pieces of a puzzle.
    He'd always liked to build, had always seen the world as being divided into units that could be assembled. The phone company hired him as a communications serviceman in the late 1960s, when rapid expansion had overwhelmed AT&T's mechanical capabilities. Customers complained about bad service. Staples learned to repair teletype machines. As the phone system changed, and grew, so did Staples.
    Around the same time that the boys in Eli's room were crashing the Anarchy system, the DNRs were leading Kaiser and Staples to two more phone lines. By now, the pattern was familiar. By now, it was not such a shock to learn that there was a whole group of trespassers out there. By now, the lawmen had gotten used to a word: conspiracy.
    The two new phone numbers were ones that Abene dialed frequently, repeatedly, in between calls to phone company computers. So now the black box watched the lines of Elias Ladopoulos and Mrs. Jean Stira as well. You wouldn't believe the stuff that was turning up on the morning logs. Dial hubs were the least of it. The Technician had turned into small fry, bait to catch bigger fish. Kaiser and Staples feared they might be dealing with a widespread threat to their network's security, that there was nowhere the hackers couldn't and wouldn't go.
    During the strike, Kaiser and Staples worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week on the hacker case. Staples sat by the window, chain-smoking Marlboros, trying to get inside the hackers' heads.
    The situation was quite impossible. The hackers were probably kids, just like The Technician. But maybe not, maybe they were drug dealers. Should Kaiser and Staples shut down the hackers now, just block their access to the phone computers? Of course, if they did that, they wouldn't know how far the intruders had gotten, nor what they were after. But if Kaiser and Staples allowed the hackers to continue, couldn't some awful consequence result? What if the hackers crashed a system? It was kind of like having a tarantula crawl up your leg. If you shook it off too fast, it would escape into