Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (58 page)

“Go on.”

“When we met Magnus Peggler at Flexbase yesterday, he said that he needed to talk to the vendor of the meeting room booking system in order to find out if IP addresses were stored in the database.”

That was true. She remembered that. 

“I got the feeling that he was going to take his time over that so I thought I’d see if I could help. I tracked down the vendor. There was a press release from them on the Internet from a few years back announcing Flexbase as a new customer. It turns out I know someone who works in their support department who owed me a favour. He logged into their system remotely. I know it’s a bit naughty, but he downloaded their booking database and emailed it to me so I could check myself.”

It sounded a bit far-fetched to her, but Brody’s face was totally earnest. 

“Anyway, IP data is stored with each booking. It was the same IP address for both previous bookings. So I ran a search for any other bookings and up popped the one today at Windsor. That’s when I phoned you.”

“What about this IP address, you never mentioned that before? We could be tracking that down as we speak.”

He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “In all the chaos, I completely forgot about that. I’m so sorry. I’ll email it to you now.” He reached for his tablet computer. “The IP address links back to Vodafone, which means the booking system was accessed via a smart phone. But if you contact them with the information I send you now, they should be able to give you the actual mobile phone number. Hopefully, it’ll come with a real-world address. But somehow I doubt it.” His fingers flew across the screen.

Jenny didn’t know what to think. His story was all completely plausible. And if he was lying, he was an absolute master. There was not a flicker. But there was just something in the back of her mind that didn’t feel right. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Could she trust him?

She wanted to. She really wanted to.

She needed to.

“I was nearly killed today.” She surprised herself with the revelation. Even more surprisingly, she felt tears build up. Her body began to shake. She tried taking a gulp of air.

“Huh?” Brody stopped swiping his fingers on the tablet’s glass surface, turned to scrutinise her and, seeing her distress, dropped the computer to the footwell and reached his arms around her. She allowed herself to be pulled towards him. To be comforted. She began to cry hot tears into his chest. 

Objectively, she understood it was delayed shock. She’d been so busy since the encounter that she hadn’t allowed herself to absorb it properly. As a police officer, she’d dealt with her fair share of violent situations, facing up to plenty of overly-aggressive drunks and junkies, a handful of knife-wielding criminals and had once donned protective gear to confront massive crowds of rioters, all overwhelmed with bloodlust. But nothing had ever come close to today’s near-death experience. 

She was overwhelmed with emotions, unsure how to handle them. She allowed the tears to flow. Brody held her tight, despite the awkwardness of his small car. He kissed the back of her head gently.

Slowly she began to retell the events of earlier. And unlike in the version in the pub earlier, which had been full of bravado, she tried to relate the feelings she had experienced. Her adrenalin-fuelled charge into each meeting room; her unnerving flight out into the openness of the atrium, six floors up; her instinctive grab for the glass railing; the humiliation of begging for him not to prise her fingers away; her sheer relief when she’d felt arms grab her legs beneath as she held on one-handed; her utter bewilderment as the killer spoke her name; and the physical pain she had endured as she landed on the fifth floor. 

“He said your name?” Brody asked.

“More than that, he almost apologised for having to push me off. It was as if he had already fixated on me as a future victim and he was gutted he was going to miss out.”

You would have been good. That’s the shame of it. Far better than that whore in there.

She shuddered into his chest at the recollection.

“Maybe that’s how he sees all women. As objects for his weird fantasy.”

“But he knew
my
name.”

“Yeah, from SecretlyWatchingYou, surely. The same way I found out your name.”

“You think? It felt like something more. But I hope you’re right.”

“Me too.”

* * *

You are angry. 

You can hardly contain it. You want to lash out. You want to cry out loud how unfair it all is.

But you contain yourself. You know that if you react spontaneously, if you go on a rampage through the streets slashing at women at random, you will be caught and imprisoned. Like
her
. 

You don’t want to be caught.

You log back into SecretlyWatchingYou and look around. It calms you, spying on them all.

You find the locations where your next three choices are. You’ll need to choose one of them.

But then you remember all your planning was focused around Flexbase. You know that avenue is closed to you now. They nearly caught you today. Why couldn’t they have come just ten minutes later? At least you’d have been finished by then; finished with the telesales whore.

It had been going so well. Everything had gone to plan, just like it always did. You were throbbing with anticipation. And just as you were about to slide it in, your knife at her throat, you’d heard the noise next door. Fortunately, you took control of yourself and got ready for an interruption. You barged her so hard, she tipped over the balcony.

But when you looked over and saw it was the policewoman, you were shocked to the core. That was no coincidence.

And it really was such a shame that you had to let her go, literally. You smile to yourself at your little joke. It calms you. And yet you are sad. She was the most like
her
so far. And you had been working on a plan for the policewoman, only for it all to go to waste. She was dead now. What a shame.

You’re going to need to adapt. You know that. Adapting is what will make you succeed. 

You cannot use Flexbase anymore. Whatever trick the policewoman used to find you was repeatable. You’ll need to find somewhere new. Come up with new locations to lure them to.

At least you’ve still got SecretlyWatchingYou, and an endless supply of women within its many locations. You’ll continue to learn all about them and use that knowledge to trick them into meeting you somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be a Flexbase building. There are plenty of other places. It was just so damn convenient. You knew your way around the systems so well. You were untraceable.

And then you chide yourself. Of course you weren’t. The policewoman tracked your room down, didn’t she?

FRIDAY

CHAPTER 20

Crooner42 dropped the car into second and turned off Bushey High Street. 

The drive up had taken much longer than he’d anticipated. He’d thought heading out of London against the morning rush-hour traffic would have been far quicker, but the North Circular had caught him out. It had been heavily congested, as city-bound traffic skirted round London’s inner ring road in both directions before turning inwards once again. On his return trip, he would take the A41 into the centre of town, and then follow it once more as it guided him alongside the Thames towards Docklands. He would save at least thirty minutes that way. 

He needed to save as much time as possible; he had a busy day ahead. Once he dumped his car back at his flat, he would take a taxi across the river to Charlton and pick up the car outside what used to be called
Student Heaven
on SWY. From there, he would drive it to its new destination in Brighton. Once the shadow PC was set up outside the gay massage parlour, he would take the train back to London. With any luck, he would be back home for the evening.

He turned left into the road where the Saxton house was located. It had been over a month since he’d last been here to switch the batteries in the boot of the car. He wasn’t actually scheduled to come here again for at least another six weeks, so the signal dropping completely was concerning. He just hoped the car hadn’t been stolen.

He drove slowly along the road. Further down where the road curved, he could make out the Saxton residence, the imposing house protected by massive security gates. Opposite was the cul-de-sac where he’d parked the SEAT Toledo. 

He indicated right. As he approached the junction, he glimpsed a flash of something bright orange. Metallic orange and black. 

It couldn’t be.

It wasn’t possible.

He quickly flipped off the indicator and continued straight on, deliberately maintaining his meandering speed. As he passed the junction, he stole a long look up the dead end road. Yes, just as he’d thought. A two-tone, garish orange and black Smart Fortwo coupe. And inside he could make out the outlines of two passengers. 

With his heart pounding, he drove on slowly, confident that he hadn’t caught their attention. His indicator had been turned off before they would have seen the car appear and so, to them, he would have looked just like any other car driving down the residential road.

It was Fingal. It had to be. He recognised the distinctive car from the other night in Upper Street, when he’d watched him bound out of Bruno’s coffee shop. 

Crooner42’s mind began processing the implications.

Somehow, Fingal had discovered the car containing the shadow PC. It was no coincidence that it had stopped broadcasting. Fingal had done that. And the reason was to draw him out. The fact that he was there waiting in person meant that he didn’t know who he was. That was something.

Crooner42 checked his rear view mirror, searching for Fingal’s car. He could see a silver car behind him, but there was nothing behind that. Certainly not the ridiculous Smart car.

All this week, Fingal had been searching for a way into SWY. He’d never given up. On Monday and Tuesday he’d been doing a classic frontal assault. Crooner42 remembered all the unusual network activity that signified his attempts to break in. As expected, his defences had held. And then on Wednesday morning, when he’d thought Fingal had given up, he’d bounced back with his forty-eight hour challenge, risking his whole reputation. 

At the same time, there was all the police activity at two SWY locations,
Student Heaven
and this one,
Au Pair Affair
. Crooner42 remembered identifying Fingal at
Student Heaven
but now, as he thought back, there had been another man, a techie, at the Saxtons’ house on Wednesday morning. It was obvious to him now he had also been Fingal. He’d been the one guiding the police all along. Perhaps Fingal was some kind of IT police detective pretending to be a hacker. Damn, that was concerning. But it explained why they were waiting there, trying to capture him in person. Rather than — 

— And then it hit him. Backdoor. He’d provided Fingal a viable backdoor.

The PC in the boot, assuming it was still in the boot of the Toledo, had direct access to SecretlyWatchingYou. It tunnelled straight through all of his firewalls and his intrusion prevention system right into the heart of the site. He’d set it up like that because it was a trusted source and because he needed to limit the amount of latency when streaming the video feeds. On the PC were the login credentials that Fingal could use to break into the site. In fact, it was the same set of credentials on every shadow PC in the boots of cars stranded all over the country. He realised now that he’d made a huge mistake.

But it was only a mistake if Fingal followed up on it quickly enough. Right now he was sat in his stupid little car waiting for Crooner42 to show up and fix the shadow PC. But once he realised Crooner42 wasn’t coming, it wouldn’t take someone as smart as Fingal long — and yes, he had to admit, he was definitely a smart cookie to have figured out his network of shadow PCs — to figure out the backdoor contained in the shadow PC. But, even then, it would still take Fingal a good few hours to crack the hash-password on the PC. 

Crooner42 still had time to sort this out.

He had to get back to his apartment in Docklands. Once there he would lock down the
Au Pair Affair
location completely and change the password on the account used by the shadow PCs. He’d need to write a script to remotely connect to each of them, one by one, and change their passwords to match. But once done, the backdoor would be blocked.

And Fingal would fail. His forty-eight hours would pass and Crooner42 would be declared the winner on CrackerHack. His status would go through the roof while Fingal would disappear forever. And all that was unrelated to whatever the Russian Mafia would do with information Crooner42 had provided them about Fingal’s real-world identity. 

Fingal had come close to beating him; he had to admit that. But not close enough.

He turned left and put his foot on the accelerator.

* * *

Kim awoke in Patrick’s plush double bed. As she yawned, she could feel dried tear tracks pulling at the skin on her face.

She hadn’t expected to fall back asleep when Patrick left for work early this morning. But without him around, she’d felt able to cry again. And she’d cried herself back to sleep, lucidly dreaming about attending her best friend’s funeral in a few days. It was so final. So permanent. Even in her dream, she’d felt tears bubbling up again. Deep down she knew that she needed to find a way to say goodbye to Anna. Maybe travelling down to Torquay and standing at Anna’s graveside beside her grieving family was the best way to do it. 

Kim threw back the covers and headed for the en-suite bathroom.

A few minutes later, scalding hot water showered over her. She raised her face to meet the cascade.

If she were being forced to find a way to live without Anna, then maybe she should step up and deal with the other issue in her life. Her feelings about Patrick.

Finally, Kim was admitting to herself that their relationship wasn’t quite right. There was one fundamental flaw. She didn’t love him.