The Spine Collector
On the morning of March 1, 2017, Catherine Mörk and Linda Altrov Berg were in the offices of Norstedts, a book publisher in Sweden, when they received an unusual email.
2017 年 3 月 1 日上午，Catherine Mörk 和 Linda Altrov Berg 在瑞典图书出版商 Norstedts 的办公室里，收到一封不寻常的电子邮件。
A colleague in Venice was asking for a top-secret document: the unpublished manuscript of the forth-coming fifth book in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” series.
威尼斯的一位同事要求提供一份绝密文件：斯蒂格·拉尔森“千年”系列即将出版的第五本书的未出版手稿。
The books, which follow hacker detective Lisbeth Salander, have sold more than 100 million copies.
这些讲述黑客侦探莉丝贝斯·萨兰德 (Lisbeth Salander) 故事的书已售出超过 1 亿册。
David Lagercrantz, another Swedish writer, had taken over the series after Larsson’s death, and his latest — The Man Who Chased His Shadow — was expected to be one of the publishing events of the year.
另一位瑞典作家戴维·拉格克兰茨 (David Lagercrantz) 在拉尔森去世后接手了该系列作品，他的最新作品《追逐影子的人》预计将成为今年的出版活动之一。
Norstedts was guarding the series closely.
Norstedts 密切关注着这个系列赛。
Lagercrantz wrote his first “Millennium” book on a computer with no connection to the internet and delivered the manuscript on paper, at which point Norstedts mailed a single copy to each of the book’s international publishers.
拉格克兰茨在没有连接互联网的计算机上写下了他的第一本《千年》书，并将手稿写在纸上，此时诺斯特茨向该书的每个国际出版商邮寄了一份副本。
With the new title, Norstedts wanted to streamline the process — Lisbeth Salander’s publisher, they figured, should be able to protect itself from hackers and thieves.
Norstedts 希望通过新书名简化流程——他们认为 Lisbeth Salander 的出版商应该能够保护自己免受黑客和小偷的侵害。
Mörk and Altrov Berg, who handle foreign rights at Norstedts, consulted with other publishers of blockbuster books.
Norstedts 负责外国版权事务的默克和阿尔特洛夫·伯格与其他畅销书出版商进行了协商。
The translators working on one of Dan Brown’s follow-ups to The Da Vinci Code , for instance, were required to work in a basement with security guards clocking trips to the bathroom.
例如，丹·布朗（Dan Brown）的《达芬奇密码》后续作品之一的翻译人员被要求在地下室工作，保安人员对上厕所的情况进行计时。
Norstedts decided to try sharing the new “Millennium” book via Hushmail, an encrypted-email service, with passwords delivered separately by phone.
Norstedts 决定尝试通过 Hushmail（一种加密电子邮件服务）分享新的《千年》一书，并通过电话单独发送密码。
Everyone would have to sign an NDA.
每个人都必须签署保密协议。
The unusual email came from Francesca Varotto, the book’s Italian-edition editor, and arrived shortly after Norstedts sent out the manuscript:
这封不同寻常的电子邮件来自该书的意大利语版编辑 Francesca Varotto，是在 Norstedts 发出手稿后不久收到的：
I hope you are well.
我希望你一切都好。
Could you please re-send me the link to the manuscript of The Man Who Chased His Shadow?
您能重新发给我《追逐影子的人》手稿的链接吗？
Minutes later, and a few blocks away from Norstedts headquarters in Stockholm, Magdalena Hedlund, the agent representing the book, received a similar email from Varotto.
几分钟后，在距离 Norstedts 斯德哥尔摩总部几个街区的地方，该书的代理 Magdalena Hedlund 收到了 Varotto 发来的类似电子邮件。
It was strange that Varotto had lost something so valuable, but she and Hedlund were old friends, and the email struck a familiar tone.
瓦罗托失去了如此贵重的东西，这很奇怪，但她和赫德伦德是老朋友，这封电子邮件的语气很熟悉。
Plus everyone was scrambling: The book was set for release in 27 countries simultaneously, and the translators had to get started.
另外，每个人都在手忙脚乱：这本书预定在 27 个国家同时发行，翻译人员必须开始工作。
Hedlund sent her friend the link to the manuscript.
赫德伦德向她的朋友发送了手稿的链接。
Varotto replied instantly.
瓦罗托立刻回答道。
“I’m sorry M,” she wrote.
“我很抱歉，M，”她写道。
Varotto said that her password was “disabled/expired.” Could Hedlund send a new one?
瓦罗托说她的密码“已禁用/过期”。赫德伦德可以寄一份新的吗？
Back at Norstedts, Mörk also received an email from Varotto.
回到 Norstedts，Mörk 还收到了 Varotto 发来的电子邮件。
“Sorry Catherine,” the message read.
“对不起，凯瑟琳，”消息中写道。
“Could you please give me the Hushmail code?” Altrov Berg dashed off a separate message to Varotto, asking if everything was okay.
“您能给我静默邮件代码吗？”阿尔托夫·伯格向瓦罗托单独发了一条信息，询问是否一切顺利。
Suddenly, her phone rang.
突然，她的手机响了。
“Why are you sending me this?” Varotto asked.
“你为什么要给我发这个？”瓦罗托问道。
Altrov Berg explained what was happening.
阿尔托夫·伯格解释了发生的事情。
Varotto was confused.
瓦罗托很困惑。
She hadn’t sent any emails to Norstedts all day.
她一整天都没有给诺斯特发任何电子邮件。
With Varotto on the phone, the two Norstedts employees scrolled through the messages.
瓦罗托打电话时，诺斯特的两名员工滚动浏览了消息。
The emails looked like ones Varotto would send: The text used the same font, and the signature at the end was styled just like hers.
这些电子邮件看起来就像瓦罗托会发送的电子邮件：文本使用相同的字体，末尾的签名样式也与她的一样。
Then, with Varotto still on the line, Mörk got yet another email asking for the password.
然后，由于 Varotto 仍在通话中，Mörk 收到了另一封询问密码的电子邮件。
They scanned the messages again.
他们再次扫描了消息。
Only now did Varotto notice that the signature listed her old job title; she had been promoted two months earlier.
直到现在，瓦罗托才注意到签名上写着她以前的职称；两个月前她已经升职了。
The subject line also misspelled the name of her company .
主题行还拼错了她的公司名称。
Finally, they realized the email address wasn’t hers at all: The domain had been changed from @marsilioeditori.it to @marsilioeditori.com.
最后，他们意识到该电子邮件地址根本不是她的：域名已从@marsilioeditori.it更改为@marsilioeditori.com。
Everyone deleted the emails.
每个人都删除了电子邮件。
What other malicious tricks were lurking inside?
里面还潜藏着哪些恶意的伎俩？
The IT department at Marsilio Editori began investigating and found that the fraudulent domain had been created the day before through GoDaddy.
Marsilio Editori 的 IT 部门开始调查，发现该欺诈域名是前一天通过 GoDaddy 创建的。
It was registered to an address in Amsterdam and a Dutch phone number.
它注册到阿姆斯特丹的一个地址和一个荷兰电话号码。
When an employee tried calling, it went straight to a recording: “Thank you for calling IBM.”
当一名员工尝试打电话时，系统直接显示录音：“感谢您致电 IBM。”
The “Millennium” team was in a panic.
“千年”团队一片慌乱。
The thief didn’t yet have the password, as far as they knew, but was clearly determined to get it.
据他们所知，小偷还没有密码，但显然决心要得到它。
Publishers around the world depend on a best seller like this, and an online leak of the manuscript could derail its release.
世界各地的出版商都依赖于这样的畅销书，而手稿的在线泄露可能会导致其发行脱轨。
But the book’s publication came and went without a hitch.
但这本书的出版进展顺利。
The manuscript never reappeared.
这份手稿再也没有出现过。
What was Fake Francesca Varotto after?
假弗朗西斯卡·瓦罗托到底在追求什么？
Much more than Lisbeth Salander’s best-selling exploits, it turned out.
事实证明，这比莉丝贝斯·萨兰德最畅销的作品要多得多。
On the same day as the “Millennium” emails, Fake Francesca asked someone else in publishing for an early look at Lot , Bryan Washington’s story collection, as well as a debut novel about an accountant who becomes a fortune teller.
在“千禧年”电子邮件发出的同一天，假弗朗西斯卡请出版界的其他人提前看看布莱恩·华盛顿的故事集《洛特》，以及一部关于一名会计师成为算命师的处女作。
Even stranger, the thief had other identities.
更奇怪的是，小偷还有其他身份。
Later that day, a fake Swedish editor went to the Wylie Agency in London to request a copy of Louise Erdrich’s just-announced novel, and someone pretending to be Peter van der Zwaag, a Dutch editor, asked a colleague in New York for the same fortune-teller book.
当天晚些时候，一名假冒的瑞典编辑前往伦敦的 Wylie Agency 索要一本路易丝·厄德里奇 (Louise Erdrich) 刚刚出版的小说，还有一个冒充荷兰编辑彼得·范德兹瓦格 (Peter van der Zwaag) 的人向纽约的一位同事索要一本算命书。
Fake Peter then introduced his new assistant to request that she be added to a private mailing list filled with confidential publishing information.
假彼得随后介绍了他的新助理，要求将她添加到包含机密发布信息的私人邮件列表中。
The assistant followed up with a friendly note: “It’s so busy and overwhelming now with the London Book Fair, isn’t it?” The assistant didn’t exist.
助理接着友好地说道：“现在伦敦书展真是太忙了，让人不知所措，不是吗？”助理并不存在。
This was a setup Stieg Larsson would have admired: a clever thief adopting multiple aliases, targeting victims around the world, and acting with no clear motive.
这是斯蒂格·拉尔森（Stieg Larsson）会钦佩的设置：一个聪明的窃贼采用多个化名，针对世界各地的受害者，并且没有明确的动机。
The manuscripts weren’t being pirated, as far as anyone could tell.
据任何人所知，这些手稿并没有被盗版。
Fake Francesca wasn’t demanding a ransom.
假弗朗西斯卡并没有索要赎金。
“We assumed it was the Russians,” Mörk said.
“我们认为是俄罗斯人干的，”默克说。
“But we are the book industry.
“但我们是图书行业。
It’s not like we’re digging gold or researching vaccines.” Perhaps someone in publishing, or a Hollywood producer, was desperate for early access to books they might buy.
这不像我们在挖金子或研究疫苗。”也许出版业的某个人或好莱坞的制片人迫切希望尽早获得他们可能购买的书籍。
Was the thief simply an impatient reader?
难道小偷只是一个不耐烦的读者？
A strung-out writer in need of ideas?
一位精疲力尽、需要创意的作家？
“In the hacker culture that Stieg Larsson depicted, they do a lot of things not for financial benefit,” Mörk pointed out this spring, “but just to show that they can do it.”
“在斯蒂格·拉尔森描述的黑客文化中，他们做很多事情并不是为了经济利益，”默克今年春天指出，“只是为了表明他们可以做到。”
When I first heard about the scheme in February, four years after the attempted “Millennium” heist, the thief was still on the loose, exhibiting behavior that was even bolder and more bizarre as they chased after everything from Sally Rooney’s latest to novels by obscure writers never published in English before.
当我第一次听说这个计划是在二月，也就是“千禧年”抢劫未遂事件四年后，窃贼仍然逍遥法外，他们的行为更加大胆、更加怪异，他们追逐着从莎莉·鲁尼的最新作品到以前从未以英文出版过的无名作家的小说。
This sounded like a fun challenge, a digital mystery to obsess over at a time when the real world was shut down.
这听起来像是一个有趣的挑战，是一个在现实世界关闭的时候令人着迷的数字谜题。
I texted a friend in publishing to find out more.
我给一位从事出版业的朋友发短信以了解更多信息。
She quickly replied, “The culprit has been identified.” This was unexpected.
她很快回复道：“凶手已经查出。”这是出乎意料的。
The New York Times had two reporters on the case last year, and the FBI had been called in to investigate, but no charges or accusations had been leveled publicly.
《纽约时报》去年有两名记者报道此案，联邦调查局也被请来调查，但尚未公开提出任何指控或指控。
One of my colleagues, Lila Shapiro, looked into the scam in 2019 but dropped the story after concluding the case might be too baffling to crack.
我的一位同事莉拉·夏皮罗 (Lila Shapiro) 在 2019 年调查了这一骗局，但在结案后放弃了这个报道，因为这个案子可能太令人费解而难以破解。
Many in publishing were too paranoid to discuss it.
许多出版界人士都过于偏执，不愿讨论这个问题。
One literary agent, who had become obsessed with solving the mystery, had declined to talk because she feared Lila herself might be the thief.
一位沉迷于解开这个谜团的文学经纪人拒绝透露此事，因为她担心莉拉本人可能就是小偷。
And yet my contact was certain — or “like 85 percent sure” — that the thief was a particular person, a man who had worked in New York publishing for a decade.
然而，我的联系人确信——或者“85%确信”——窃贼是一个特定的人，一个在纽约出版业工作了十年的人。
He was an outsider in the industry with a reputation for becoming pushy when he didn’t get what he wanted.
他是这个行业的局外人，以在得不到自己想要的东西时变得咄咄逼人而闻名。
He seemed to conduct his business almost entirely over email.
他似乎几乎完全通过电子邮件开展业务。
What did seem sophisticated was the thief’s knowledge of the business.
看起来确实很复杂的是小偷对行业的了解。
The culprit wrote like someone in publishing, abbreviating to “MS” for manuscript and “WEL” for world English-language rights, while exchanging insider chatter, telling one victim that a publisher was pitching a book as a comp to Pachinko and expressing surprise to another that a novel had recently sold for a shocking amount.
罪魁祸首的写作风格就像出版界的人一样，缩写为“MS”（手稿），缩写为“WEL”（世界英语语言版权），同时交换内部闲聊，告诉一名受害者，一家出版商正在推销一本书作为弹珠机的赠品，并向另一名受害者表示惊讶，因为一本小说最近以惊人的价格出售。
The thief sent messages in the wake of announcements on Publishers Marketplace, a subscription website that tracks deals, but they also asked about books that the thief’s marks didn’t even know existed.
小偷在出版商市场（一个跟踪交易的订阅网站）上发布公告后发送了消息，但他们也询问了小偷的标记甚至不知道存在的书籍。
The mimicry wasn’t always perfect — an assistant at the talent agency WME realized her boss was being impersonated because she would never say “please” or “thank you” — but the impression was good enough.
这种模仿并不总是完美的——人才机构 WME 的一名助理意识到她的老板被冒充了，因为她永远不会说“请”或“谢谢”——但给人的印象已经足够好了。
What’s more, the thief seemed to have a strong grasp of the rarefied world of international publishing.
更重要的是，窃贼似乎对国际出版的稀有世界有着深刻的了解。
The first emails, in the fall of 2016, traveled almost exclusively among the small group of people who handle the flow of manuscripts between countries, including a foreign-rights manager in Greece, an editor in Spain, and an agent selling international writers in the Chinese market.
2016 年秋天的第一批电子邮件几乎只在负责国家之间手稿流通的一小群人中发送，其中包括希腊的一名外国版权经理、西班牙的一名编辑以及在中国市场销售国际作家的代理商。
In the attempted “Millennium” heist, only a few dozen people in the world knew the book was being shared with foreign publishers and that Mörk and Altrov Berg controlled access to it.
在未遂的“千年”抢劫中，世界上只有几十人知道这本书正在与外国出版商共享，并且莫克和阿尔特洛夫·伯格控制了对它的访问。
Suspicion quickly fell on literary scouts, whose work involves getting early access to books in order to advise foreign publishers and Hollywood studios whether to buy the rights.
怀疑很快落在了文学侦察员身上，他们的工作包括尽早获得书籍，以便向外国出版商和好莱坞制片厂提供是否购买版权的建议。
“We’re the ghost in the publishing machine,” Jon Baker, who works as a scout, said.
“我们是出版机器中的幽灵，”童子军乔恩·贝克 (Jon Baker) 说。
“If anybody is going to be randomly asking you about something that’s coming out, it’s a scout.” The job requires finding books that match a client’s taste — a German publisher that wants historical fiction, a streaming service looking for strong female protagonists with a drinking problem — but scouts mostly try to get everything.
“如果有人随机向你询问即将发布的东西，那一定是球探。”这项工作需要找到符合客户品味的书籍——一家德国出版商想要历史小说，一家流媒体服务寻找有酗酒问题的强势女性主角——但星探大多试图获得一切。
Because agents often want to control who sees a book and when, a scout’s ultimate coup is a “slip,” or a manuscript obtained surreptitiously from a friendly source, cultivated over cocktails and coffees, giving the scout’s client a few extra days, or hours, to consider a book before the competition gets ahold of it.
因为经纪人经常想控制谁看一本书、什么时候看，所以童子军的终极妙招是“失手”，或者从友好来源秘密获得的手稿，在鸡尾酒和咖啡中精心培育，给童子军的客户额外几天或几个小时的时间，在竞争对手拿到手之前考虑一本书。
The most common shorthand is to say that scouts are the book world’s spies.
最常见的简写是童子军是图书世界的间谍。
If the thief were a scout using digital espionage to get books that couldn’t otherwise be acquired, then that narrowed the list of suspects.
如果窃贼是一名侦察兵，利用数字间谍活动获取原本无法获得的书籍，那么嫌疑人名单就缩小了。
“I always joke that scouting is like 40 people on earth,” said Kelly Farber, a New York–based scout.
“我总是开玩笑说，童子军相当于地球上的 40 个人，”纽约童子军凯莉·法伯 (Kelly Farber) 说道。
“It’s probably more like 60, but it’s not in the triple digits.” People eyed less-established players with suspicion.
“可能更像是 60，但不是三位数。”人们用怀疑的眼光看待不太成熟的球员。
“I just thought it was a very bad scout who couldn’t get manuscripts,” Lucy Abrahams, a scout who lives in Tel Aviv, told me.
“我只是认为这是一个非常糟糕的童子军，拿不到手稿，”住在特拉维夫的童子军露西·亚伯拉罕斯告诉我。
The person I’d been urged to look into was also a scout.
我被催促去调查的人也是一名侦察员。
The charges against him were vague — bad email manners, unusually aloof among his peers — but a source told me they had heard that a literary agency in New York had “hired an investigator” to look into the case and found something damning.
对他的指控含糊不清——电子邮件礼仪不佳，在同龄人中异常冷漠——但一位消息人士告诉我，他们听说纽约的一家文学机构“聘请了一名调查员”来调查此案，并发现了一些令人震惊的事情。
My source was light on details, but the suspect had apparently been sloppy, attaching his real name and email to one of the fake domains registered early on in the scheme.
我的消息来源透露的细节很少，但嫌疑人显然很草率，将他的真实姓名和电子邮件附加到了该计划早期注册的虚假域名之一。
Intrigued, my colleague Lila agreed to take up the case again with me.
出于好奇，我的同事莉拉同意再次和我一起处理这个案子。
If the evidence was good, the mystery could be solved.
如果证据充足，这个谜团就能解开。
Actual proof was harder to come by.
实际证据更难获得。
No one I spoke to at the literary agency seemed to know anything about it.
我在文学机构采访过的人似乎都不知道这件事。
Other domains were being registered with enough security to protect the thief’s identity, and when people reached out to GoDaddy about shutting them down, the company often did so, but declined to share any information, citing its privacy policy.
其他域名的注册具有足够的安全性，可以保护窃贼的身份，当人们联系 GoDaddy 请求关闭这些域名时，该公司经常这样做，但以隐私政策为由拒绝分享任何信息。
It did seem curious that some of the domains appeared to be registered in the Netherlands and that the thief wrote to one person in passable Dutch.
确实奇怪的是，一些域名似乎是在荷兰注册的，而且窃贼用流利的荷兰语给一个人写信。
Several scouts noticed that a former colleague had recently started an e-book company that would presumably need content.
几位星探注意到，一位前同事最近创办了一家可能需要内容的电子书公司。
He happened to be from Holland.
他恰好来自荷兰。
But the registrations appeared to be a red herring.
但注册似乎是转移注意力的事情。
Domains popped up with no clear pattern, registered to the address for a gay men’s health clinic in London, an H&M; in Copenhagen, a housing development in Harlem, a bookstore in Melbourne.
弹出的域名没有明确的模式，注册地址为伦敦一家男同性恋健康诊所（H&M）；哥本哈根的一个住宅开发项目，哈林区的一个住宅开发项目，墨尔本的一家书店。
The scouting theory also had considerable holes.
侦察理论也存在很大的漏洞。
Many of the books were ones that any scout could get without much trouble.
其中许多书是任何侦察兵都可以轻松获得的。
While agents and publishers tightly guard big titles like the “Millennium” series, which prop up the entire business, the challenge with most books is getting anyone to read them.
虽然代理商和出版商严密保护像“千年”系列这样支撑整个业务的大书，但大多数书籍面临的挑战是让任何人都阅读它们。
One of the thief’s early targets — “a modestly selling author’s fifth novel,” as the book’s agent put it — sold fewer than 2,000 copies.
小偷的早期目标之一——正如该书经纪人所说，是“一位销量不大的作家的第五部小说”——销量不到 2,000 册。
The scheme seemed like a lot of work for little reward.
这个计划看起来工作量很大，但回报却很少。
And it came with great risk.
这也伴随着巨大的风险。
While riding the TGV from Paris to Germany in October 2018, a scout I’ll call Natasha — she requested a pseudonym in order to more freely discuss industry spywork — sent an excited email to her clients.
2018 年 10 月，在乘坐 TGV 从巴黎飞往德国时，一位我称之为娜塔莎（Natasha）的侦察员（她要求使用化名，以便更自由地讨论行业间谍工作）向她的客户发送了一封兴奋的电子邮件。
A few days earlier, she had received a message from a scout named Jane Southern offering a trade.
几天前，她收到了一位名叫简·萨瑟恩（Jane Southern）的球探发来的消息，提出了一份交易。
Southern had Ian McEwan’s new novel, Machines Like Me, and said she would slip it to Natasha, perhaps in exchange for another big release.
南方有伊恩·麦克尤恩的新小说《像我一样的机器》，并表示她会把它交给娜塔莎，也许可以换取另一部大书的发行。
Scouts don’t often swap manuscripts, which amounts to giving intelligence to the enemy, but this was an unusual case.
侦察兵并不经常交换手稿，这相当于向敌人提供情报，但这是一个不寻常的例子。
The foreign rights to a title by a big-name writer like McEwan are spoken for well in advance, which made the book less valuable to Southern’s clients around the world.
像麦克尤恩这样的大牌作家的作品的外国版权是提前很久就获得的，这使得这本书对于南方公司在世界各地的客户来说价值较低。
Natasha, however, was among a growing number of scouts who work exclusively on behalf of Hollywood producers and studios, and the film rights to a new McEwan could be snatched up fresh each time.
然而，娜塔莎是越来越多专门代表好莱坞制片人和电影公司工作的星探之一，新麦克尤恩的电影版权每次都可能被新抢到。
The book would be a trophy for Natasha to show her clients as she arrived at the Frankfurt Book Fair, international publishing’s Davos, and she was especially grateful to Southern for the offer because they had never met in person.
这本书将成为娜塔莎抵达法兰克福书展、国际出版达沃斯时向她的客户展示的战利品，她特别感谢南方的邀请，因为他们从未见过面。
Natasha saw Southern at a dinner and thanked her for the slip.
娜塔莎在一次晚宴上见到了南，并感谢她的失言。
After a quiet summer, the thief was back with a new tactic.
经过一个平静的夏天后，小偷带着新的策略回来了。
They didn’t just want the McEwan.
他们不只是想要麦克尤恩。
The McEwan was bait.
麦克尤恩是诱饵。
And if the thief were trading in books that were of great interest to Hollywood, the money involved might change the risk-reward calculus for a scout.
如果窃贼交易的是好莱坞非常感兴趣的书籍，那么所涉及的金钱可能会改变星探的风险回报计算。
Studios and production companies depend on their film scouts for early access to books in order to start wooing a director and identifying star-worthy roles that would make for an enticing package.
电影公司和制作公司依靠他们的电影星探提前获得书籍，以便开始吸引导演并确定值得明星出演的角色，从而打造出诱人的套餐。
Maria Campbell, the scouting world’s biggest player, made her name in part by getting Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in front of Steven Spielberg; today, she scouts for Netflix.
玛丽亚·坎贝尔 (Maria Campbell) 是童子军界最顶尖的球员，她的成名部分是因为将迈克尔·克莱顿 (Michael Crichton) 的《侏罗纪公园》带到了史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格 (Steven Spielberg) 面前。今天，她在寻找 Netflix。
The thief’s earliest emails hit just as the streaming wars began and the hunger for content with a built-in audience ramped up.
窃贼最早的电子邮件发出之际，恰逢流媒体战争开始，以及对内置观众内容的渴望加剧。
A producer landing early access from the thief would still need to buy the rights through proper channels, but a head start would make them ready to pounce when the time came.
从窃贼那里获得抢先体验的制作人仍然需要通过适当的渠道购买版权，但先机会让他们准备好在时机成熟时发起突袭。
The thief did possess a tenacity more common in Hollywood than the book world.
小偷确实拥有一种在好莱坞比在书界更常见的坚韧。
If a target didn’t respond, the thief would often follow up with an identical request several hours later.
如果目标没有响应，窃贼通常会在几个小时后提出相同的请求。
One person received nine emails from the thief in a single day.
一个人一天内收到了窃贼发来的九封电子邮件。
Some insiders speculated the thief was servicing multiple Hollywood clients — scouts, producers, studios — none of whom knew, or wanted to know, where the material was coming from.
一些内部人士推测，窃贼正在为多个好莱坞客户——星探、制片人、工作室——提供服务，但他们都不知道，也不想知道这些材料来自哪里。
“Maybe it’s another level down,” one literary agent whispered.
“也许又低了一层，”一位文学经纪人低声说道。
“A subcontracted service.”
“分包服务。”
By the fall of 2018, the thief had made off with dozens of books, although no one knew how many times people had fallen for the scam, so the total haul was likely much higher.
到 2018 年秋天，小偷已经偷走了数十本书，尽管没有人知道有多少人上当受骗，因此总偷窃量可能要高得多。
A literary agent in New York didn’t realize until this summer, when I helped her look through her inbox, that for seven months she had been sending manuscripts to the thief, rather than a scout she thought was simply dying to read her books.
纽约的一位文学经纪人直到今年夏天我帮她查看收件箱时才意识到，七个月来她一直在向小偷发送手稿，而不是她认为只是渴望阅读她的书的星探。
Several people decided it was time to ask for outside help.
有几个人决定是时候寻求外部帮助了。
A scout broke the news to The Bookseller, a British trade publication, and Publishers Weekly spoke to Ziv Lewis, who works for an Israeli publisher and said that he had threatened the thief with “Mossad-style cyberwarfare.” Erin Edmison, a scout in New York, even approached someone at the state attorney general’s office, only to be told that the potential for criminal rather than civil charges, not to mention the jurisdictional quagmire — how do you prosecute someone impersonating a Romanian asking a Swede for an American novel?
一名侦察员向英国贸易出版物《书商》透露了这一消息，《出版商周刊》采访了为一家以色列出版商工作的齐夫·刘易斯，并表示他曾用“摩萨德式的网络战”威胁窃贼。纽约的侦察员艾琳·埃德米森（Erin Edmison）甚至找到了州总检察长办公室的某人，却被告知可能会受到刑事指控，而不是民事指控，更不用说管辖权的泥潭了——你如何起诉一个冒充罗马尼亚人向瑞典人索要美国小说的人？
— meant she might be better off trying the FBI.
- 意味着她最好尝试联邦调查局。
To many in the industry, the case felt like one that book people, having sold no shortage of spy novels, could solve on their own.
对于许多业内人士来说，这个案子就像是那些售出了大量间谍小说的图书人可以自己解决的案件。
“There’s a bunch of us amateur Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys who have made our versions of the Claire Danes Homeland wall,” said Baker, the scout.
“我们一群业余 Nancy Drews 和 Hardy Boys 制作了我们版本的 Claire Danes 家园墙，”侦察员贝克说。
In the spring of 2019, Baker conducted a sting.
2019 年春天，贝克进行了一次诱捕。
After the thief emailed a European client asking for Of Women and Salt, one of the season’s hottest novels, Baker mocked up a PDF with the book’s cover page — followed by the text of Pride and Prejudice.
小偷给一位欧洲客户发电子邮件索要本季最热门的小说之一《女人与盐》后，贝克用该书的封面制作了一份 PDF 文件，后面是《傲慢与偏见》的正文。
Baker told his client to slip the Austen mash-up to the thief and then alerted others to their plan.
贝克告诉他的客户将奥斯汀的混搭作品偷偷交给小偷，然后提醒其他人注意他们的计划。
If the thief was a scout, Baker hoped, they would unwittingly send the fake book to their clients.
贝克希望，如果小偷是一名侦察员，他们就会在不知不觉中将这本假书寄给他们的客户。
But the PDF never turned up.
但 PDF 从未出现过。
Others tried similar gambits to no avail.
其他人也尝试过类似的策略，但没有成功。
Three years into the crime spree, an industry based on trust and relationships faced a growing paranoia.
犯罪猖獗三年后，一个以信任和关系为基础的行业面临着日益严重的偏执。
Agencies started password-protecting minor books.
各机构开始对未成年书籍进行密码保护。
(“I got a 70-page Dutch novella with an NDA,” one scout said.
（“我收到了一本 70 页的荷兰中篇小说，附有保密协议，”一位星探说道。
“An NDA for a 70-page Dutch novella!”) A scout and an agent developed a code word they included in emails to authenticate their conversations.
“一部 70 页的荷兰中篇小说的保密协议！”）一名侦察员和一名特工开发了一个密码词，他们将其包含在电子邮件中以验证他们的对话。
People were suddenly distrustful of colleagues they had worked with for years.
人们突然对共事多年的同事不再信任。
The attacks felt personal.
这些攻击感觉是针对个人的。
It was violating to men and women of letters to have their words appropriated — especially once authors themselves became targets.
文人的言论被盗用是一种侵犯——尤其是当作者自己成为攻击目标时。
Many writers were vulnerable to the ruse, eager to please someone they thought was their agent or editor.
许多作家很容易受到这种诡计的影响，渴望取悦他们认为是他们的经纪人或编辑的人。
Others experienced it as yet another letdown.
其他人则将其视为又一次失望。
The thief reached out to an Icelandic author, expressing interest in representing that person’s work abroad, only to disappear with their manuscript.
小偷联系了一位冰岛作家，表示有兴趣在国外代理该人的作品，结果却带着他的手稿消失了。
In 2019, the thief found out that Eka Kurniawan, an Indonesian novelist who was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, had a deadline looming and decided to impersonate his agent.
2019年，窃贼发现获得曼布克国际奖提名的印度尼西亚小说家埃卡·库尼亚万(Eka Kurniawan)的截止日期迫在眉睫，决定冒充他的经纪人。
“You told me the manuscript would be ready before the 18th of July and it’s now the 14th,” the thief wrote, applying pressure on Kurniawan to hand over the draft.
“你告诉我手稿会在 7 月 18 日之前准备好，现在已经是 14 日了，”小偷写道，并向库尼亚万施加压力，要求他交出草稿。
Kurniawan is now two years late, and his agent, Maria Cardona, said the stress was partly responsible.
库尼亚万现在晚了两年，他的经纪人玛丽亚·卡多纳(Maria Cardona)表示，压力是部分原因。
“He’s been quite stuck,” she said.
“他陷入了困境，”她说。
Multiple people told me they were convinced the thief was someone they knew pursuing a personal vendetta.
许多人告诉我，他们确信小偷是他们认识的人，正在追求个人恩怨。
But the breadth of the scheme suggested a grudge against the entire industry — perhaps an underling whose career hadn’t panned out was spoiling a party they weren’t invited to.
但该计划的范围之广表明了对整个行业的怨恨——也许一个职业生涯没有取得成功的下属正在破坏一个他们没有被邀请参加的聚会。
A few months after his foiled sting, Baker sent a snarky reply to the thief in which he concocted another fake book.
刺杀失败几个月后，贝克给小偷发了一封尖刻的回复，其中他炮制了另一本假书。
“There’s a new submission over here that’s the talk of the town,” Baker wrote.
贝克写道：“这里有一份新的提交材料，引起了人们的热议。”
The book, he said, was called Anatomy of a Fraud.
他说，这本书的名字叫《欺诈剖析》。
Baker told the thief it was “epistolary, a series of email exchanges.” The thief’s response suggested they were either oblivious to the innuendo or taking a sly delight in the chaos they were creating.
贝克告诉小偷，这是“书信体，一系列电子邮件交换”。小偷的反应表明，他们要么没有注意到这些暗示，要么对自己制造的混乱感到狡猾的高兴。
They asked, “Can you share the MS pls?”
他们问：“你能分享一下 MS 吗？”
Our investigation was moving slowly.
我们的调查进展缓慢。
More leads were coming in, each less helpful than the last.
越来越多的线索涌入，但每一条线索的帮助都比上一条更小。
A new suspect would surface, only for the evidence to fall apart under minimal scrutiny.
一个新的嫌疑人将会浮出水面，但证据在最低限度的审查下就会分崩离析。
The smoking gun I’d been promised remained elusive.
我所承诺的确凿证据仍然难以捉摸。
The closest I could get was a former assistant at the literary agency in question who recalled the damning domain registration, but only in part.
我能找到的最接近的是相关文学机构的一位前助理，他回忆起了那次该死的域名注册，但只是部分回忆。
The domain had been registered to an address in Manhattan, somewhere above Central Park.
该域名已注册到曼哈顿中央公园上方某处的一个地址。
I turned to the emails themselves.
我转向电子邮件本身。
Textual analysis came naturally to the industry’s sleuths, some of whom claimed to detect a Germanic cadence in the thief’s writing or an idiomatic French syntax.
文本分析对于该行业的侦探来说是很自然的事情，其中一些人声称在小偷的写作中发现了日耳曼语的节奏或地道的法语语法。
But each victim had only a tiny glimpse of the thief’s body of work.
但每个受害者都只能瞥见小偷的作品。
I started collecting dozens and eventually hundreds of emails, from all over the world, hopeful that patterns would emerge.
我开始收集来自世界各地的数十封电子邮件，最终收集了数百封电子邮件，希望能够找到规律。
It was difficult to find anything meaningful.
很难找到任何有意义的事情。
The thief largely emailed on weekdays, during New York working hours, but there were exceptions.
窃贼主要在纽约工作时间的工作日发送电子邮件，但也有例外。
They asked for “favours” and spread “rumours,” but also wished American victims a Happy Fourth of July.
他们寻求“帮助”并散布“谣言”，但也祝愿美国受害者国庆节快乐。
They wrote poorly in many languages: Hebrew, Icelandic, Korean, Swedish.
他们的多种语言写得很差：希伯来语、冰岛语、韩语、瑞典语。
(A Brazilian caught on when the thief wrote to him in European Portuguese.) The thief’s English, meanwhile, could be crisp and formal; clumsy and stilted; playful and clever; sometimes unreadable.
（当小偷用欧洲葡萄牙语给巴西人写信时，一位巴西人明白了。）与此同时，小偷的英语可能干净利落、正式；笨拙、生硬；顽皮又聪明；有时不可读。
They mostly wanted to get their hands on adult fiction, with occasional forays into YA and just enough nonfiction to make their taste in books inscrutable.
他们主要想接触成人小说，偶尔涉足青少年小说和足够的非小说类书籍，以让他们对书籍的品味变得难以理解。
Their favorite emoticon was ;).
他们最喜欢的表情符号是;)。
With no pattern emerging, we looked to one of the thief’s biggest attacks for clues: an attempt in 2019 to steal The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
由于没有发现任何模式，我们从窃贼最大的一次袭击中寻找线索：2019 年企图窃取玛格丽特·阿特伍德的《使女的故事》续集《遗嘱》。
Over several months, emails were sent almost every day to pretty much anyone associated with the book: Atwood’s agent, her publishers, their assistants, even judges for the Booker Prize — along with many others who had no connection to the book at all.
几个月来，几乎每天都会向与这本书有关的几乎所有人发送电子邮件：阿特伍德的经纪人、她的出版商、他们的助手，甚至布克奖的评委，以及许多其他与这本书根本没有关系的人。
“If it is a scout, then they’re often getting it spectacularly wrong,” Karolina Sutton, Atwood’s agent, said of the spray-and-pray approach.
“如果是侦察员，那么他们经常会犯大错，”阿特伍德的经纪人卡罗琳娜·萨顿(Karolina Sutton)在谈到“喷雾和祈祷”方法时说道。
“It’s almost like they’ve hired someone else to do it.”
“这几乎就像他们雇佣了其他人来做这件事。”
The attack presented new wrinkles.
这次袭击带来了新的皱纹。
The thief began employing a devious deception that involved creating a fictional exchange between two people — an editor and an agent, say, talking about changes to a manuscript — then including the imaginary back-and-forth at the bottom of their email as if the thief were forwarding a conversation.
小偷开始采用一种狡猾的欺骗手段，在两个人之间创建一个虚构的交流——比如说，一个编辑和一个代理人，谈论手稿的修改——然后在他们的电子邮件底部加入想象中的来回对话，就好像小偷正在转发一个对话一样。
The attacks concerned Atwood’s agency so much that it decided not to share the final version of the book with some publishers until after its domestic release, disrupting the book’s global unveiling.
这些攻击让阿特伍德的代理机构非常担忧，因此决定在国内发行之前不与一些出版商分享该书的最终版本，从而扰乱了该书的全球发布。
Atwood’s representatives assumed that piracy was the goal.
阿特伍德的代表认为盗版是他们的目标。
Her foreign publishing rights were spoken for, and Hulu was airing The Handmaid’s Tale, meaning the streamer was likely first in line for the film-and-TV option.
她的外国出版权已被争取，Hulu 正在播放《使女的故事》，这意味着该流媒体可能是第一个获得电影和电视选项的人。
An IT consultant for Atwood’s agency developed a related theory, positing that snippets of the manuscript were being used as bait to trick readers to turn over their credit-card information.
阿特伍德机构的一名 IT 顾问提出了一种相关理论，认为手稿的片段被用作诱饵，诱骗读者交出信用卡信息。
But, yet again, no pirated manuscript appeared online.
但是，网上再一次没有出现盗版手稿。
(The only leak came from the industry’s other disruptor: Amazon accidentally shipped 800 copies early.)
（唯一的泄露来自该行业的另一个颠覆者：亚马逊意外地提前发货了 800 份。）
Some in publishing were beginning to question whether manuscripts were even the end goal.
出版界的一些人开始质疑手稿是否是最终目标。
How else to explain why the thief would want sample pages of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite storyboards and a ten-page book proposal for Michael J.
不然怎么解释为什么小偷想要奉俊昊的《寄生虫》故事板样本页和迈克尔·J·肯尼迪的十页书提案。
Fox’s memoir?
福克斯的回忆录？
After a rights manager in Germany got hit, she speculated that a security company was stress-testing publishers in the hopes of later selling them protective software.
德国的一名版权经理遭到袭击后，她推测一家安全公司正在对出版商进行压力测试，希望随后向他们出售保护软件。
Several friends I spoke to who consider themselves the good kind of hackers said this sounded like a cybergang’s training program: The stakes were low, the targets weren’t especially tech savvy, and there was a deliverable target — the MS — that a new recruit could bring home before moving on to stealing login credentials from employees at a nuclear reactor.
我采访过的几位自认为是优秀黑客的朋友表示，这听起来像是网络帮派的培训计划：风险很低，目标并不是特别精通技术，而且有一个可交付的目标——MS——新员工可以在继续窃取核反应堆员工的登录凭据之前将其带回家。
In the wake of North Korea’s alleged leaking of emails from Sony Pictures, could this be another attempt to destabilize western culture?
在朝鲜涉嫌泄露索尼影业的电子邮件之后，这是否是另一次破坏西方文化稳定的企图？
Dramatic, perhaps — but then again, I had found nearly 200 companies in more than 30 countries that the thief had impersonated, and none of them was Russian.
也许很戏剧性——但话又说回来，我发现窃贼冒充了 30 多个国家的近 200 家公司，而且没有一家是俄罗斯公司。
If the thief were really multiple thieves working from a dark warren somewhere, how did they know so much about book publishing?
如果这个小偷真的是在某个黑暗的沃伦里工作的多名小偷，他们怎么会对图书出版如此了解？
In early 2020, an explanation presented itself.
2020 年初，一个解释出现了。
Virginia Ascione, an Italian editor, sent an email to Mira Trenchard, her scout in the U.K. Minutes later, another scout Ascione works with received an identical email — only this one was sent by the thief impersonating Ascione.
意大利编辑弗吉尼亚·阿西奥内 (Virginia Ascione) 向她在英国的球探米拉·特伦查德 (Mira Trenchard) 发送了一封电子邮件。几分钟后，与阿西奥内共事的另一位球探也收到了一封完全相同的电子邮件，只不过这封邮件是冒充阿西奥内的小偷发送的。
Somehow, the thief had instantly re-created a private message between two real people.
不知何故，小偷立即在两个真实的人之间重新创建了一条私人消息。
Several months later, Trenchard was emailing with an editor friend when she realized her friend was being impersonated.
几个月后，特伦查德在与一位编辑朋友发电子邮件时意识到她的朋友被冒充了。
Trenchard sent a separate email asking if she knew about the scam.
特伦查德单独发送了一封电子邮件，询问她是否知道这一骗局。
“I didn’t!” the friend wrote back.
“我没有！”朋友回信说。
“How sinister.” The thief then replied to the message Trenchard had sent to her friend with a gonzo version of the same response.
“好险恶啊。”然后，小偷回复了特伦查德发给她朋友的消息，并给出了同样的奇闻趣事版本。
“NO, I didn’t!!!” the thief wrote.
“不，我没有！！！”小偷写道。
“How sinister!!”
“好险恶！！”
The thief, it seemed, was somehow reading Trenchard’s emails.
看来窃贼正在阅读特伦查德的电子邮件。
(Trenchard has changed her password and hasn’t had any such incidents of late.) Several people told me about similar experiences with other publishing companies.
（特伦查德已经更改了密码，最近没有发生任何此类事件。）有几个人向我讲述了其他出版公司的类似经历。
Perhaps the thief had seemed at home in the publishing world not because they were a part of it but because they had been lurking inside people’s inboxes all along.
也许小偷在出版界似乎很自在，不是因为他们是出版界的一部分，而是因为他们一直潜伏在人们的收件箱里。
This suggested an operator that textual analysis wasn’t going to unmask.
这表明文本分析无法揭露操作员的身份。
We had no choice: Bring in the hackers.
我们别无选择：引入黑客。
We consulted several cybersecurity experts, who found that the thief had upgraded their security starting in 2019, albeit only slightly.
我们咨询了几位网络安全专家，他们发现窃贼从 2019 年开始就升级了安全性，尽管只是小幅升级。
They had registered more than 300 fake domains — 13 for the Wylie Agency alone — using digital security certificates for an additional layer of privacy.
他们注册了 300 多个假域名（仅 Wylie Agency 就有 13 个），并使用数字安全证书来保护额外的隐私。
This was enough to prevent our hackers from identifying the thief, but it didn’t suggest a sophisticated operation.
这足以防止我们的黑客识别窃贼，但这并不意味着操作复杂。
For one thing, the certificates confirmed that the domains were controlled by a single entity, if not a single person.
一方面，这些证书确认了这些域名是由单个实体（即使不是一个人）控制的。
Many of my fellow sleuths asked me if there was credit-card information to find, not to mention how much the thief was spending on all this.
我的许多侦探同伴问我是否可以找到信用卡信息，更不用说小偷在这一切上花了多少钱。
But GoDaddy confirmed it had repossessed a number of the domains, many of them likely owing to payment fraud — the thief seemed to be using stolen credit cards.
但 GoDaddy 证实它已经收回了一些域名，其中许多可能是由于支付欺诈——窃贼似乎使用的是偷来的信用卡。
Others decided it was time to bring in the big guns.
其他人认为是时候引进大炮了。
Last summer, several people approached the FBI, sharing the thief’s emails with the bureau.
去年夏天，有几个人联系了联邦调查局，向该局分享了窃贼的电子邮件。
But if this were a crime of which the primary consequence was annoyance, it wasn’t clear how high the case would rank on the FBI’s priority list.
但如果这是一种主要后果是滋扰的犯罪行为，那么目前还不清楚该案件在联邦调查局的优先处理名单上会排在多高的位置。
(The bureau declined to comment.) The names of the two G-men publishing people spoke to — Clay Chase and Boris Klyuchnikov — highlighted the absurdity of it all, as if we were living out a cheap le Carré imitation in which none of the clues added up.
（该局拒绝发表评论。）采访的两位 G-men 出版人员——克莱·蔡斯和鲍里斯·克柳奇尼科夫——的名字凸显了这一切的荒谬性，就好像我们生活在廉价的勒卡雷模仿中，其中没有任何线索相加。
The pandemic disrupted the book business just like everything else.
就像其他事情一样，大流行扰乱了图书行业。
The only constant was email, and the thief took advantage.
唯一不变的是电子邮件，而小偷就利用了这一点。
After learning that a British agent had contracted the virus, the thief emailed the agent’s assistant — “[He] told me he has caught COVID, jeez, that’s awful!” — to ask if the assistant might have Joshua Ferris’s new novel.
在得知一名英国特工感染了病毒后，小偷给特工的助理发了电子邮件——“[他]告诉我他感染了新冠病毒，天哪，太糟糕了！” ——询问助理是否有约书亚·费里斯的新小说。
The thief began sending intra-office messages between colleagues who could no longer see each other face-to-face and buttered up targets by asking the difficult questions facing publishing’s elite: “Are you staying in the city now or have you gone upstate?” In another message, the thief explained that speaking on the phone was out of the question because they were only working European mornings before taking over child-care duty in the afternoon.
窃贼开始在无法面对面见面的同事之间发送办公室内信息，并通过询问出版界精英面临的难题来讨好目标：“你现在留在城里还是去了北部？”在另一条消息中，小偷解释说，打电话是不可能的，因为他们只在欧洲早上工作，然后在下午接手照顾孩子的工作。
To their victims around the world, the thief expressed empathy:
小偷向世界各地的受害者表达了同情：
“Are you in Italy now?
“你现在在意大利吗？
I heard things are now opening up there which is great!!”
我听说那里现在正在开放，这太棒了！！”
“How’s working from home for you?
“你在家工作怎么样？
For me it’s getting a bit stressful …”
对我来说，压力有点大……”
For most of the pandemic, the thief’s scheme looked like a game, a way to pass the time.
在疫情的大部分时间里，小偷的阴谋看起来就像一场游戏，一种打发时间的方式。
During the height of lockdown restrictions in London, the thief impersonated a U.K. scout to ask for Kevin Kwan’s forthcoming sequel to Crazy Rich Asians.
在伦敦封锁限制最严重的时期，小偷冒充英国侦察兵索取关凯文即将上映的《摘金亚洲人》续集。
“I’d like to take a look at it over the weekend,” the thief wrote.
“我想周末去看看，”小偷写道。
“Getting bored here.”
“在这里无聊了。”
I was getting bored, too, and had to admit the investigation had become a welcome distraction from the state of the world.
我也感到无聊，不得不承认调查已经成为人们对世界现状的一种受欢迎的消遣。
Every day brought a new domain to investigate, and I now had my own version of the Homeland wall: a spreadsheet filled with 400 of the thief’s emails and counting, organized into dozens of categories I hoped would reveal something before the scheme swallowed me whole.
每天都会有一个新的域名需要调查，现在我有了自己版本的国土墙：一个电子表格，里面有 400 封窃贼的电子邮件，并且还在计数，被组织成几十个类别，我希望在这个计划吞噬我之前能揭露一些东西。
I did find one unusual sequence of events.
我确实发现了一系列不寻常的事件。
During the third week of last August, the thief seemed to snap.
去年八月的第三周，小偷似乎崩溃了。
It was six months into the pandemic, and for the first time I could see, they were angry.
大流行已经过去六个月了，我第一次看到他们很生气。
On multiple occasions that week, they emailed literary agents threatening to leak unpublished manuscripts they claimed to already have unless the agents handed over another book the thief was after.
那一周，他们多次向文学代理人发送电子邮件，威胁要泄露他们声称已经拥有的未出版的手稿，除非代理人交出窃贼想要的另一本书。
In several cases, they pasted text from the manuscripts they had in order to make the threat real.
在一些情况下，他们粘贴了手稿中的文本，以使威胁成为现实。
They signed one such email “xxx.”
他们在一封这样的电子邮件上签名为“xxx”。
The most menacing message came on August 17.
最具有威胁性的消息是在 8 月 17 日传来的。
Linda Altrov Berg, who had dealt with the “Millennium” attack back in 2017, received an email impersonating an editor in Spain, asking for a book that Altrov Berg instantly knew that particular editor would never want.
琳达·阿尔特洛夫·伯格 (Linda Altrov Berg) 曾在 2017 年处理过“千禧年”攻击，她收到一封冒充西班牙编辑的电子邮件，要求提供一本阿尔特洛夫·伯格立即知道该特定编辑永远不会想要的书。
The thief, it seemed, didn’t actually know her world all that well.
看来小偷其实并不了解她的世界。
Altrov Berg sent a defiant reply: “Keep on dreaming!”
阿尔托夫·伯格给出了挑衅性的回复：“继续梦想吧！”
In the past, the thief had retreated from confrontations, skulking back into the digital shadows once the jig was up.
过去，小偷会从对抗中撤退，一旦吉格起来，就躲回数字阴影中。
This time, however, they shot back a reply: “Hoppas att du dör av coronaviruset.”
然而，这一次，他们回击了一条回复：“Hoppas att du dör avcoronaviruset。”
In English, the message translated to: “Hope you die of the coronavirus.”
该消息的英文翻译为：“希望你死于冠状病毒。”
COVID was bringing out a more vicious side of the thief.
新冠疫情让小偷更加恶毒的一面暴露出来。
They convinced several translators to write reports on manuscripts in various languages, promising to pay $150 per book, then ghosting the translators once the work was done, an attack on some of the field’s lowest-paid people.
他们说服几位译者用各种语言为手稿撰写报告，并承诺每本书支付 150 美元，然后在工作完成后对译者进行鬼魂攻击，这是对该领域收入最低的一些人的攻击。
There was no telling who they might go after next.
不知道他们下一个会去追谁。
In late April of this year, a scout named Liz Gately, whom I had recently interviewed, received an email from the thief impersonating another scout named Bettina Schrewe:
今年四月下旬，我最近采访过的一位名叫 Liz Gately 的球探收到了一封来自盗贼冒充另一位名叫 Bettina Schrewe 的球探的电子邮件：
Someone named Reeves Wiedeman contacted me to talk about the publishing scammer and he said you gave him my name.
一个名叫里夫斯·维德曼 (Reeves Wiedeman) 的人联系我谈论出版骗子，他说你给了他我的名字。
Who is he?
他是谁？
Do you know him?
你认识他吗？
Is he someone legit?
他是合法的人吗？
The email wasn’t accurate.
该电子邮件不准确。
Gately hadn’t given me Schrewe’s name.
盖特利没有告诉我施雷的名字。
How did the thief know I was on the case?
小偷怎么知道我参与了这个案子？
I had spoken to more than 50 people in publishing, some of whom were suspects themselves.
我曾与 50 多名出版界人士交谈过，其中一些人本身就是嫌疑人。
And earlier that week, I had emailed with Mira Trenchard, the scout whose inbox had seemingly been compromised.
那周早些时候，我给米拉·特伦查德（Mira Trenchard）发了一封电子邮件，她的收件箱似乎被泄露了。
However they knew, the thief was aware of my efforts and reached out directly a day later:
然而他们知道，小偷知道了我的努力，并在一天后直接伸出援手：
We might know who the phisher is!
我们可能知道网络钓鱼者是谁！
Apparently a few days ago he sent an email asking for a manuscript but he forgot to sign with the agent/victim’s name and put his own …
显然，几天前，他发送了一封电子邮件，要求提供手稿，但他忘记签署代理人/受害者的名字并写上自己的名字......
Even in my heightened state of alertness, I had to scrutinize the phony email address several times to see that the “r” and “h” in Schrewe had been swapped.
即使在我高度警惕的状态下，我也不得不多次仔细检查这个虚假电子邮件地址，看看 Schrewe 中的“r”和“h”是否被交换了。
I called Lila to workshop a response.
我打电话给莉拉，要求她做出回应。
Should we let the thief know we were onto them?
我们应该让小偷知道我们已经找到他们了吗？
Or play along?
还是一起玩？
We chose the latter.
我们选择了后者。
“It definitely makes me feel anxious,” Fake Bettina wrote back when I asked about the effect of the ongoing scheme.
当我询问正在进行的计划的效果时，假贝蒂娜回复道：“这确实让我感到焦虑。”
(She said that she had recently heard that “the phisher got hold of an early draft of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel from the production department at PRH here in NY.”) Fake Bettina declined to say anything over email about the name in question, other than to note that it was a common one.
（她说她最近听说“网络钓鱼者从纽约 PRH 的制作部门拿到了 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 新小说的早期草稿。”）假贝蒂娜拒绝通过电子邮件透露有关该名称的任何内容，只是指出这是一个常见的名称。
She wanted to print the damning email and send it via FedEx; when I suggested our company mailroom, she said the material was too sensitive for that.
她想打印这封该死的电子邮件并通过联邦快递发送；当我建议我们公司的收发室时，她说这些材料太敏感了。
Could we provide a home address?
我们可以提供家庭住址吗？
“I’ll pay the postage of course,” the thief wrote.
“当然，我会支付邮费，”小偷写道。
After a brief silence — when I followed up several days later, my email bounced back — the thief returned wearing a new costume.
经过短暂的沉默后——几天后我跟进时，我的电子邮件被退回——小偷穿着一套新服装回来了。
Now impersonating a Dutch editor, they sent four different emails: one each to my personal and work accounts and to Lila’s.
现在，他们冒充荷兰编辑，发送了四封不同的电子邮件：各一封发送到我的个人帐户、工作帐户和莉拉的帐户。
Each was a warped but nearly identical version of the others.
每一个都是其他版本的扭曲但几乎相同的版本。
Three of the four cut off mid-sentence; one ended in the middle of a word, reading in full:
四个人中的三人说到一半就打断了；一个词在中间结束，全文如下：
I heard you’re working on an article on the publishing scammer and I w
我听说你正在写一篇关于出版诈骗者的文章，我想
What on earth was going on?
到底发生了什么事？
I continued to play dumb, still hoping to glean something revelatory.
我继续装傻，仍然希望能收集到一些启示。
But the thief quickly dismissed all of this as pointless.
但小偷很快就认为这一切都是毫无意义的。
“It’s stupid and ridiculous,” the thief wrote.
“这既愚蠢又可笑，”小偷写道。
“Only a waste of time.”
“只是浪费时间。”
Was the thief referring to our investigation, I asked, or the caper itself?
我问，小偷指的是我们的调查，还是偷盗行为本身？
“The third option,” they wrote.
“第三种选择，”他们写道。
I asked what they meant.
我问他们是什么意思。
“It’s only a publicity stunt set up by the Publishers and Editors Association,” the thief said, citing an organization that doesn’t exist.
“这只是出版商和编辑协会设置的一个宣传噱头，”窃贼说，并引用了一个并不存在的组织。
“They’re fooling you.”
“他们在愚弄你。”
As the conversation stretched over several days, other strange things occurred.
随着谈话持续了几天，其他奇怪的事情发生了。
The thief impersonated my book agent for the first time.
小偷第一次冒充我的图书经纪人。
Anonymous accounts tried to connect with me on LinkedIn.
匿名帐户试图在 LinkedIn 上与我联系。
One morning, I woke up to an overnight alert on my phone that someone was trying to log in to an online dating profile that had not been active for years.
一天早上，我醒来时发现手机上有一则夜间警报，有人试图登录一个多年未活跃的在线约会资料。
Lila, meanwhile, had begun her own exchange with the thief.
与此同时，莉拉也开始与小偷交谈。
Our approaches diverged.
我们的方法存在分歧。
While I was happy to methodically collect emails, hoping the next exchange would provide a case-breaking clue, Lila was eight months pregnant, and every time she returned from a doctor’s appointment, she grew more exasperated at my increasingly chaotic Homeland wall.
虽然我很高兴有条不紊地收集电子邮件，希望下次交流能提供破案线索，但莉拉已经怀孕八个月了，每次她看医生回来时，她都会对我日益混乱的国土墙感到更加恼火。
She wanted to be more direct.
她想更直接一些。
“Would you be up for a phone call?” she wrote to the thief.
“你愿意接电话吗？”她写信给小偷。
The thief suggested an in-person meeting instead.
小偷建议进行面对面的会面。
When Lila said she lived in Brooklyn, the thief said they did, too.
当莉拉说她住在布鲁克林时，小偷说他们也住在布鲁克林。
Lila then suggested meeting in Cobble Hill, at which point the conversation turned.
莉拉随后建议在科布尔山见面，此时话题发生了转变。
“How about Fuck You Hill?” the thief wrote back.
“操你的希尔怎么样？”小偷回信说。
“Or can I meet you at Silly Cunt Square?”
“或者我可以在傻逼广场见你吗？”
The message went on.
消息还在继续。
“TAKE MY ADVICE,” the thief wrote.
“听听我的建议，”小偷写道。
“DROP THIS STUPID ARTICLE AND STOP WITH IT IMMEDIATELY!!!”
“扔掉这篇愚蠢的文章并立即停止！！！”
The thief wasn’t the only one who wanted me to stop.
小偷并不是唯一一个想让我停下来的人。
Two of this magazine’s editors sat me down and said that I couldn’t spend all year investigating a crime with no real victims.
这本杂志的两位编辑让我坐下来，说我不能花一整年的时间来调查没有真正受害者的犯罪行为。
The world was sick and on fire with actual cyberattacks knocking hospitals and pipelines offline.
实际的网络攻击导致医院和管道瘫痪，世界陷入了困境。
It was time to write the ending.
是时候写下结局了。
In the course of reporting this story, more than a dozen people in publishing told us they believed a single suspect was behind the whole thing: the person I’d been told about at the outset.
在报道这个故事的过程中，十几位出版界人士告诉我们，他们相信整个事件背后有一个嫌疑人：就是我一开始被告知的那个人。
Most people couldn’t tell me much about him, but the details they shared fit the thief’s profile.
大多数人无法告诉我太多关于他的信息，但他们分享的细节符合小偷的个人资料。
He was from another country, and his English wasn’t great.
他来自另一个国家，他的英语不是很好。
His manner, in person and in writing, could be brusque.
他的态度，无论是在面对面还是在写作中，都可能是粗暴的。
His client list was small, and his scouting business was sometimes a struggle: One former client told us that after parting ways with the scout, he sent her so many texts she had to block his number.
他的客户名单很小，他的星探业务有时很困难：一位前客户告诉我们，在与星探分道扬镳后，他给她发了很多短信，她不得不屏蔽他的号码。
He wasn’t on the literary social scene, which made people presume he was resentful.
他不在文学社交舞台上，这让人们认为他心怀怨恨。
Then again, one scout admitted to me, “Do we all just think it’s him because he’s weird?”
话又说回来，一位球探向我承认，“我们只是因为他很奇怪才认为是他吗？”
The smoking gun — the mistaken domain registration teased by my friend — was meant to provide more substantial proof.
确凿的证据——我的朋友嘲笑的错误域名注册——旨在提供更实质性的证据。
After a seemingly endless game of tag, we finally got to the source.
经过一场看似永无休止的捉人游戏，我们终于找到了源头。
In the summer of 2017, Laila Lalami, the award-winning novelist, had been approached by the thief, who was impersonating someone at her literary agency.
2017 年夏天，窃贼冒充获奖小说家莱拉·拉拉米 (Laila Lalami) 的文学经纪公司人员接近她。
Lalami figured out something was wrong, and her husband, an IT engineer, looked into the domain and found that it was registered to a particular Gmail address.
Lalami 发现出了问题，她的 IT 工程师丈夫查看了该域名，发现它注册到了特定的 Gmail 地址。
When Lalami shared the address with her agency, they saw the email seemed to belong to a scout — our original suspect.
当拉拉米与她的机构分享该地址时，他们发现这封电子邮件似乎属于一名侦察员——我们最初的嫌疑人。
But upon closer inspection, I found the proof was a mirage.
但经过仔细检查，我发现证据只是海市蜃楼。
The address wasn’t the suspect’s.
该地址不是嫌疑人的。
It was yet another fake email, missing a single letter, the same one the thief had used to impersonate the suspect himself all the way back in 2016.
这又是一封假电子邮件，缺少一封信，而窃贼早在 2016 年就曾用这封信来冒充嫌疑人本人。
Lila and I scrambled for an explanation.
莉拉和我争先恐后地寻求解释。
Wasn’t it suspicious, at least, that the thief had used this particular address?
至少，小偷使用了这个特定地址，这难道不值得怀疑吗？
Maybe our suspect was being framed?
也许我们的嫌疑人被陷害了？
What a twist!
多么扭曲啊！
But when I showed the evidence to Chad Anderson, a senior security researcher at DomainTools, he scanned some of the thief’s other domain registrations from the time and found that almost all of them were registered with fake Gmail accounts loosely connected to people and companies in publishing.
但当我向 DomainTools 的高级安全研究员查德·安德森 (Chad Anderson) 出示证据时，他扫描了窃贼当时的一些其他域名注册，发现几乎所有这些注册的都是假 Gmail 帐户，与出版业的人员和公司松散地联系在一起。
Our smoking gun had misfired.
我们的确凿证据已经失败了。
I had come too far not to close the loop.
我已经走得太远了，不能不关闭循环。
In early August, I spoke to the suspect on Zoom.
八月初，我在 Zoom 上与嫌疑人交谈。
He was sitting in the garden of his home wearing a blue polo shirt with the sun setting behind him, causing the screen to flare around him.
他穿着一件蓝色马球衫坐在自家花园里，夕阳在他身后落下，屏幕在他周围闪闪发光。
He was shocked to hear that his colleagues in the industry suspected him and denied the accusation.
当他听到业内同事怀疑他并否认这一指控时，他感到震惊。
Over the next 24 hours, he sent me 64 emails frantically laying out his case: messages that showed he could get books legitimately from agents all over the world, an email exchange from when he was impersonated and considered paying $2,000 to an anonymous hacker-for-hire for help, and several notes he had sent to the thief at the time: “I hope the new year brings you the end of your career and a big lawsuit.
在接下来的 24 小时内，他给我发了 64 封电子邮件，疯狂地阐述了他的案情：显示他可以从世界各地的代理处合法获取书籍的消息，当他被冒充并考虑向一位匿名黑客支付 2,000 美元寻求帮助时的电子邮件往来，以及他当时给窃贼发送的几张便条：“我希望新的一年给你带来职业生涯的结束和一场大诉讼。
In other words, all you deserve.”
换句话说，这都是你应得的。”
The suspect said he had a simple explanation for why people thought there was something odd about him.
嫌疑人说，他对为什么人们认为他有些奇怪有一个简单的解释。
He was, by his own admission, kind of an odd guy.
据他自己承认，他是一个有点奇怪的人。
He was shy and had never fully assimilated into the New York scene he was supposed to become a part of.
他很害羞，从未完全融入他本应成为其中一部分的纽约场景。
He rarely got invited to parties and wasn’t the type to crash them.
他很少被邀请参加聚会，也不是那种破坏聚会的人。
His clients couldn’t spend big money, which meant sometimes agents ignored him, and he admitted that his position in the industry was sometimes frustrating.
他的客户不能花大钱，这意味着有时代理商会忽视他，他承认他在行业中的地位有时令人沮丧。
He had chosen a profession he thought was for bookish people like him, only to realize that in publishing, as in everything else, the extroverts still ruled.
他选择了一个他认为适合像他这样的书呆子的职业，却发现在出版界，就像在其他一切领域一样，外向的人仍然占主导地位。
“Even if I’m an introvert,” he said, “I’m not a hacker.”
“即使我是一个内向的人，”他说，“我也不是一名黑客。”
This felt like the final chapter.
这感觉就像最后一章。
The suspect’s manner had been strange, but he had also presented more evidence in his defense than anyone had mustered in his prosecution.
嫌疑人的举止很奇怪，但他在辩护中提供的证据也比任何人在起诉中收集到的证据都多。
I felt less like Lisbeth Salander than one of M.
我觉得自己不像莉丝贝丝·萨兰德，而更像是 M.
C.
C.
Escher’s monks, wandering endlessly in circles.
埃舍尔笔下的僧侣们，无休止地兜圈子。
Maybe the thief was right.
也许小偷是对的。
This was pointless.
这是毫无意义的。
Or …
或者……
was the pointlessness the point?
重点是毫无意义吗？
The one thing that seemed to tie all these tiny acts of deception together was a sense that the thief was in it for the pleasure of the act itself.
将所有这些微小的欺骗行为联系在一起的一件事似乎是一种感觉，即小偷是为了行为本身的乐趣而参与其中的。
Whoever they were — a disgruntled scout, a basement full of hackers laughing to themselves — they cared enough to keep at it for years, devoting countless hours to sending endless emails — all seemingly for nothing.
无论他们是谁——一个心怀不满的侦察员，一个充满自嘲的黑客的地下室——他们足够关心并坚持了多年，投入了无数的时间来发送无尽的电子邮件——所有这些似乎都是徒劳的。
I imagined that some in publishing could feel a certain empathy for a person engaged in an effortful obsession that produced little profit; after months of fruitless investigating, I certainly did.
我想象出版界的一些人会对一个努力痴迷却几乎没有利润的人产生一定的同情心。经过几个月毫无结果的调查后，我确实做到了。
“If you try to find financial and economic gain, it’s of course hard to see,” said Daniel Sandstrom, the literary director of a Swedish publisher hit many times by the thief.
“如果你试图寻找财务和经济利益，那当然很难看到，”多次遭遇小偷袭击的瑞典一家出版商的文学总监丹尼尔·桑德斯特罗姆(Daniel Sandstrom)说。
“But if the game is psychological, a kind of mastery or feeling of superiority, it’s easier to visualize.
“但如果游戏是心理性的，是一种掌握或优越感，那就更容易想象。
This is a business full of resentment as well, and in that sense, it becomes a good story.”
这也是一个充满怨恨的行业，从这个意义上说，它成为一个好故事。”
Last week, in one final attempt at cracking the case, Lila and I sent an email to 89 different addresses the thief has used.
上周，在破案的最后一次尝试中，莉拉和我向窃贼使用过的 89 个不同地址发送了一封电子邮件。
Did they care to comment?
他们愿意发表评论吗？
The thief hasn’t written back.
小偷还没有回信。
But just a few minutes after the message went out, I got an unusual text from someone hoping to talk off the record — a person in publishing equally obsessed with solving the case.
但就在消息发出几分钟后，我收到了一条不寻常的短信，来自一个希望私下交谈的人——一个同样热衷于破案的出版界人士。
“It’s me!” they said, jokingly admitting guilt, after I asked whether they had just received my email.
“这就是我！”在我问他们是否刚刚收到我的电子邮件后，他们开玩笑地承认有罪。
“Wouldn’t that be the best twist of all?”
“这难道不是最好的转折吗？”
I wasn’t kidding.
我没有开玩笑。
I had walked so deep into the dark labyrinth of this mystery that rounding every bend seemed to reveal another uncertainty.
我已经深深地走进了这个谜团的黑暗迷宫，每一个拐角似乎都揭示了另一种不确定性。
Just last month, the thief expanded their scheme yet again: For the first time I knew of, they were impersonating someone in Hollywood rather than a book person.
就在上个月，窃贼再次扩大了他们的计划：据我所知，他们第一次冒充好莱坞的某个人，而不是一个书人。
And now, here was this source, beckoning me to join them even deeper in the maze.
现在，这个源头在召唤我加入他们，进入迷宫的更深处。
They were calling to tell me a story they hadn’t told anyone else.
他们打电话给我讲述一个他们没有告诉过其他人的故事。
For two years, they had harbored a suspicion about a widely respected figure in the industry.
两年来，他们一直对业内广受尊敬的人物心怀怀疑。
The suspicion was based on one curious moment that could only make sense, they thought, if this new suspect were the thief.
他们认为，这种怀疑是基于一个奇怪的时刻，只有这个新嫌疑人就是小偷，这个时刻才有意义。
It could mean everything, my fellow obsessive said.
我的同伴说，这可能意味着一切。
Or it might mean nothing at all.
或者它可能根本没有任何意义。