The Greatest Heist in American History

In Nathaniel Rich’s unsettling thriller, “Cloudthief,” the most valuable loot is us.

The Tuesday Review

(MCD/FSG)

Blue diamonds. Vermeer paintings. Gold bars.

These are the treasures of great heist novels.

But Nathaniel Rich’s new thriller isn’t eyeing anything so quaint — or, frankly, any thing at all.

Cloudthief is a novel scheming in the modern age when our wealthiest companies lay up their treasures in heaven, where thieves do not break through nor steal.

God help us.

Nowadays, the most precious treasure is, of course, data — that incalculably vast stream of bits and bytes ascended to the cloud. It holds our retirement savings and our angry tweets, our medical records and our selfies, including every email, website, message and video, a trove of secrets capable of securing or destroying every nation, corporation, and person on earth.

Except it turns out that “the cloud” is a somewhat fanciful metaphor. As straining towns across America are discovering, our data doesn’t actually hover in some cumulonimbus mind. Instead, that invaluable information is encoded on millions of hard drives spinning away in sprawling data centers here on terra firma. Where thieves do, indeed, break through and steal.

I asked Nathaniel Rich: “What’s the scariest thing most of us still don’t understand about data centers?”

Tim, the narrator of Cloudthief, had no intention of ever becoming a crook, petty or otherwise. When we meet him, he’s looking back more than two decades to a time when he worked as a journalist. “It was one of the ancient trades driven into obsolescence by digital technology,” he explains. “It disappeared not long after the phrenologist, the broomsquire, the VCR repairman.” That voice, locked in sardonic mourning, is our guide through this tale of bizarre derring-do.

It begins, as so many bad ideas do, with a desire for easy money. Tim’s friend, Ces, is “an inveterate conniver and hustler” with a penchant for mangling idioms and ethics. Stealing from mini storage facilities, he claims, will be as simple as “falling on a log.” It’s not even really illegal, or if it is, “just barely, by the skin of its eyes.”

For all his incompetence with the English language, Ces is right about the penetrability of mini storage units. A little surveillance, a little planning, and they’re in. “I’m conducting research for an article,” Tim tells himself, and soon they’re pawing through strangers’ old photo albums, board games, baseball cards, and hi-fi equipment. “The owners of these units, I decided, deserved to have their superfluous possessions confiscated. We were doing them a service.”

What Ces and Tim never expect to find, though, is a young woman living inside one of the mini storage units. Virginia — not her real name — has been driven to this Thoreauvian extremity by a desire to remove herself from modern society and its obsessive surveillance.

If you’ve ever used a computer, a credit card, or a phone, indeed, if you’ve ever left the house without wearing a paper bag over your head, you may have some vague idea of how elaborately our lives are tracked and recorded. (Depending on your browser and your network provider, more than a dozen companies have just noted that you’re reading this review.) Stepping out of that modern-day panopticon is practically impossible. But Virginia — whoever she might be — has managed to do it, and Tim is first fascinated and then besotted.

Rich is particularly deft with the ever-shifting and unequal balance of this relationship between two poseurs, the discouraged journalist and the paranoid hermit. “We have an infrared sensor for each other,” Tim says. “Lonelies know Lonelies.” But Virginia is not looking for a soulmate; she’s looking for a collaborator — or a mark.

That painful ambiguity runs through the novel as Tim describes their most audacious scheme: a plot to steal servers from “the world’s second-largest data center.” If they can pull it off, it will be “the greatest heist in American history.”

In Rich’s telling, it’s a tremendously exciting crime — and a ludicrous one, I thought, until Sunday when I read his crazy true story in the New York Times Magazine about a gang of thieves with names like Micky and the Tall Fella who stole 80 servers from a data center in London in 2007.

What’s so striking about Cloudthief, though, is how little Rich leans on his considerable skill as a thriller writer. This will disappoint some readers and please others. Like the Wi-Fi at the airport, there are some slow spots. And the inescapable claustrophobia of the first-person narrator is not alleviated much by this cloistered man who commits a series of secret crimes against secret information.

“I won’t bore you with the additional technical challenges,” Tim says, at precisely the moment some modern-day Tom Clancy would savor every grain in the hourglass of disaster.

But what interests Rich and what fascinated me is the complicated tension between being seen and being unseen. What does it cost, he wonders, to have our lives so intricately recorded and known? And what are the countervailing costs to being unknown?

In a brilliant and harrowing subplot that helps explain Tim’s need for extra money, his sister is gradually losing her hearing and her sight. She is, in a sense, being removed from the world, thrust into a kind of cerebral hermitage. What wouldn’t Tim do to help her, even if it means exposing the data of untold strangers? “The only thing that matters is the crime,” he writes. “The crime, and what it did to us: what it gave us, and what it took away.”

Cloudthief is a rare and curious novel that seems to resist its own commercial potential in favor of exploring the challenges of intimacy and trust in the Silicon Age. While bolted to the most esoteric technology of our era — those voracious data centers swallowing up land, water, and funding — the story soars through questions about who we are, what can be known about us, and what, in the end, we can know about each other. ◆

Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (MCD/FSG, 304 pp., $28)

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