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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 carelessness or an inside job, or indeed whether a hacker had penetrated one of the investigating teams' computer networks. Every time something 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 operation, 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 Wiesbaden, 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. Mularski'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

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