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“What do you mean ‘us,’ white man?”
    Sam took the back off his cell phone and removed the battery and SIM card and made sure Fargas did the same before they made their way across the road to the warehouse.
    Defcon had been a big, glamorous three-day affair with huge competing sound systems, overseas speakers, competitions, giveaways, and even a formal dinner.
    Neoh@ck Con was another story altogether. A convention that Sam had heard whispers about but had never been close to. Until now. A convention for the elite, the discreet. The dark figures who moved through the shadows of the Internet.
    Hidden, encrypted three times over, in the code of an e-mail about Defcon had been the address of a Web site. A highly secure Web site. Hack into that Web site and you found the date, time, and location of Neoh@ck Con.
    If you weren’t smart enough to break the codes and hack the Web site, then you weren’t invited to the convention. It was that simple.
    There were two guards just inside the door. Clean-cut, broad-shouldered men with marine-style haircuts. Hired security. They looked serious and they looked mean.
    The guards stopped them with raised hands.
    “Are you a law enforcement official or in the employ of any government department?” the first man asked. He said it as if reading by rote. A muscle on the side of his jaw twitched as he spoke.
    Sam shook his head. Would you admit it if you were? he thought.
    “I didn’t hear that,” the man growled.
    “No,” Sam said.
    “Are you a representative of the news media?” the second man asked.
    “No,” Sam said again.
    They turned to Fargas. “Are you a law enforcement official or in the employ of any government department?”
    “Talk to me when you lose the—” Fargas began, but stopped when Sam kicked him on the ankle, hard. “No,” Fargas said.
    They entered a large storeroom lined with unused storage racks. It was dusty, decrepit, and smelled faintly of sawdust and machine oil.
    Thirty or forty people were milling around a row of computers at one end. Behind them, a data projector was casting blue nothing onto a large screen.
    So this was Neoh@ck Con.
    Everybody wore a disguise or face covering of some kind. Some people wore masks, Buzz Lightyear and Darth Vader being the two most popular. Sam noticed one person had his face entirely swathed in bandages, like a mummy, with just a slit for his eyes. Others hid their faces with makeup. To their left was a tall, strong-looking punk, his head clean-shaven, his face painted into a grinning skull. He wore torn jeans that seemed to be held together with chains and safety pins, and a leather T-shirt covered in zips. A tattoo of a biohazard symbol on his forehead was not quite concealed by the white face paint of the skull. He stood with a girl in a denim miniskirt and a low-cut white vest, with tattoos of intertwining dragons down one arm. Her face covering, incongruously, was a lacy wedding veil.
    Freaks and geeks, Sam thought. Freaks and geeks.
    A few more people drifted in, and the convention got under way, not with a fanfare and a formal announcement, but simply in the groups of people that converged around the various computer workstations.
    One of the larger groups was congregated around the mummy. Sam heard the word “Telecomerica.” He motioned for Fargas to follow, and they wandered in that direction.
    Sam found himself standing behind Skullface Punk; unable to see, he moved to stand behind Rock Chick Bride.
    “But there’s no way to beat the IPSec on that model firewall without setting off the zone alarm,” the mummy was saying. “So even if they’d used malformed TCP packets to exploit a vulnerability in the firewall and made it into the DMZ, they’d have been shut down before they could infiltrate any further.”
    “That’s me ’ole bleedin’ point,” Skullface said emphatically, stabbing a finger into the air.
    He was English, Sam thought, judging by his accent. Maybe even a London