Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (62 page)

Jenny couldn’t help herself. Interview be damned. “Well, thanks to you, one of your website customers really did stick the knife into her.”

“Yeah, I do feel bad about that.” But he wore a cold smile and Jenny didn’t believe a word. He’d said it for the benefit of the tape. 

“Anyway, so I planned my first encounter with Kim carefully. There was this karaoke restaurant she liked to go to. I’ve always been able to knock out a tune — I was once likened to Frank Sinatra and so that’s why my online handle is Crooner42, Fingal was right about that — and so I stood up and belted out her favourite song. It had the desired effect and before she knew it, we were seeing each other.” Adopting a sarcastic tone, he threw one hand forward limply, an over-the-top effeminate gesture. “You wouldn’t
believe
how much we had in common.”

“And no doubt you were able to keep refining your act based on feedback you heard through the webcams.”

“You got that right. Our whole relationship has been founded on lies and deceit. It’s amazing how easy it is to manipulate someone when you know her intimate thoughts. Her hopes and dreams.”

“I know what you mean,” agreed Jenny, deadpan, holding his eye. “There’s a murderer out there using the exact same trick, only he lures unsuspecting women to their deaths.”

Harper sat back in his chair. He held his tongue, but she could see that he was annoyed with her for demeaning his story. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

This time Jenny bit her tongue.

“How much money is the site making, Patrick?” asked Fiona, appealing to his ego once more.

He grinned before speaking, obviously very proud of what he was about to say. “It’s been growing at about fifteen per cent per month for the last year. I’ve been growing the number of locations on the site at a rate of two or three per month, each one a net new revenue stream. At the moment, there are over twenty thousand monthly subscribers. And that equates to a turnover of about £100,000 a month. And costs are minimal, so profit is high.”

“Hence the 911 and the penthouse apartment.”

“Yeah, well. No point earning the money without spending it.”

“I take it you pay your taxes,” said Fiona.

“Actually, I do. I didn’t want to come a cropper like Al Capone.”

“But you have come a cropper, haven’t you?” jibed Jenny deliberately. 

“Yeah,” he reflected. “That’s partly my own fault. I put my head in the lion’s mouth and got bit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Fingal,” he said, a despairing tone creeping into his youthful arrogance. “I dragged him into this and it’s backfired on me.”

“Go on.”

“I tricked him into doing a pentest on SWY. I sent out a request for help on CrackerHack —” Noticing the confused expression on both women’s faces, he explained, “It’s one of the places where hackers get together on the deep web, the secret area of the net hidden under the regular Internet. Anyway, I made it look like the request had gone out to everyone, generating buzz all over the forums about it. But in reality only Fingal had received it. He took the bait. But then I pretended to choose someone else for the job, making it look like Fingal was second choice. As expected, the community did what they always do and turned the whole thing into a contest between him and the other guy. With that much focus, I knew that Fingal would give it his best shot. His elite status in the hacking community was totally at risk if he failed to hack into SWY. And to a computer hacker, status is worth more than anything. We’ll do anything to protect that. Including, so it seems, ” he gave a contemptuous smile, “getting into bed with the police.”

Jenny’s fists clenched. For a brief moment, she thought Harper’s comment was alluding to her and Brody’s night together. That somehow her apartment was also on SWY and he’d been spying on them. But then she realised he’d meant the police in general and not her specifically. She unclenched her fists and calmly laid her palms on the table. 

“You said earlier that Fingal and Brody were one and the same. What makes you think that?” Jenny tried to ask the question in the same light tone as every previous question, trying not to let on that this, for her, was the most important topic.

“Easy. He tried to hack into SWY on Monday and Tuesday, using all the usual tricks of the trade. He attacked it with everything he could think of. But no luck. Like I said, I did a good job on the site’s defences. And on Wednesday, you show up with Brody at the Saxtons’ and then at Kim’s. He’s obviously looking for a backdoor into the site, it’s the logical next step, although admittedly I didn’t think of it at the time. Only he can’t find a route in and that’s because he’s so fixated on what he can see in front of his nose, a red herring called HomeWebCam.”

“That’s a bit thin. Brody being there on Wednesday could be a coincidence. Nothing to do with Fingal.”

“Did Brody tell you why he was looking into SecretlyWatchingYou?”

“Yes, but it’s none of your business.” 

Jenny recalled Brody’s barefaced lie in their very first meeting in the coffee house in Docklands. His story about helping out a friend whose girlfriend was being stalked because of secret webcams at work. And when she’d pressed him on it later that night over drinks, he’d changed it to a story about him and his flatmate fooling around on the Internet. But, now that she thought about it, her memory sharpening, he’d diverted her attention by saying how much he’d been enamoured by
her
. Flattered, she hadn’t pursued it at the time. She felt her cheeks colour.

“Hah!” shrieked Harper. “He lied to you. No surprise there then. He’s well known for being one of the best social engineers in the game.”

Fiona asked him to explain.

“A social engineer is a computer hacker who hacks the weakest link in all computing systems. Humans. They’re like a cross between a hacker and a conman. They gain your confidence so that you divulge sensitive information they can then use to complete the hack. Usually it’s passwords and stuff. But Fingal failed to hack SWY directly, so he reverted to type and hacked the humans. In this case, it was the people in the webcams. He would have figured that if he tracked them down to a location in the real world, he could follow the webcam streams back to SWY. Only the location he chose was the Saxtons’, which just happened to be crawling with police. So he did what came naturally and social engineered you lot as well.” Harper sat back and folded his arms. “You’ve got to admit, he’s got some front.”

“Everything you just said is completely circumstantial.”

“All right, try this for size.” Visibly enjoying himself now, Harper leaned forward. “You were at Kim’s the other day, tracking down the webcams. Yes, yes, I was watching you all. Well, when you lot left the room to go search for tools to break through the padlocked door hiding Walter Pike’s HomeWebCam network video recorder PC, Brody took a call on his mobile. I heard his whole conversation. It was Dwight Chambers, the CTO of HomeWebCam. But get this: Brody answered the phone as ‘DCI Burnside’. You remember, that dirty TV cop from
The Bill
years ago? Turns out Fingal was in the middle of social engineering Dwight Chambers, pretending to be the police to get them to check their firewall logs for connections between HomeWebCam and SecretlyWatchingYou. Of course, there were none. He was still barking up the wrong tree at that time. But the point is that he’s always had his own agenda. You were just a means to an end.”

“And you can prove this, can you?” 

“Uh, actually I can. I recorded that little exchange.” His confidence was formidable. If half of what he had told them was true, she would be devastated. To have been manipulated so totally. So completely. 

He continued. “The file is stored on my tablet PC . . .” Suddenly, Harper smashed his fist on the table violently. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Of course! It won’t be there now. Fingal was in my secret room. He’ll have found that already and deleted it. God, he’s a clever bastard.”

“Why do you care so much about Fingal?”

“Revenge. Nothing more, nothing less. When you read my juvenile record you’ll see I’ve been inside before, well in youth detention centre. Before I was eighteen. But the reason I got caught then was because of that bastard. He tracked me down in the real world and gave my details to the police. Next thing I know, I’m arrested and my life is ruined. All thanks to him. I vowed to get revenge.”

His logic was completely twisted to justify his motivation. No acceptance that whatever he’d been doing at the time was justification enough for what happened to him. 

“And have you?”

The leer that split his face was deeply chilling. “Yeah, I think I have.”

He wouldn’t offer any more explanation. Given that he’d been open about pretty much everything else, Jenny was suddenly concerned for Brody. If there really was any truth to him and Fingal being one and the same, then whatever Harper had done sounded ominous.

“Yet you’re in here. You’ve lost everything. SecretlyWatchingYou. Kim. Everything.”

“Still worth it. Just to bring that bastard down.”

* * *

Brody had been at it for two hours now, with O’Reilly observing every move. Most of that time had been spent familiarising himself with the structure of the site, focusing primarily on its underlying data model. He needed to understand how to join the tables within the database in order to be able to construct sensible queries against it. 

Crime scene technicians had been working around them, processing the apartment for physical evidence. More than once, O’Reilly had to step in to stop them touching any of Patrick’s IT equipment.

“This is fierce sophisticated.”

“Yeah, it is,” agreed Brody. “Such a waste of talent.”

O’Reilly’s animosity towards Brody had subsided as he watched him work, admiring the skills of the more experienced computer technician. 

“Okay, I think we’ve done enough reconnaissance. Let’s make a proper start.”

Brody queried the number of registered users on the site. They both whistled in surprise at the result displayed.

“So, somewhere amongst these ninety-eight thousand email addresses is the murderer. We just have to narrow it down.”

O’Reilly nodded.

“Shame, Harper didn’t set up the system to store the IP addresses of users each time they logged in. That might have made it easier.”

“How come?”

“Didn’t DI Price tell you? We’ve got hold of the IP address used by the killer when he booked the meeting rooms on the Flexbase website.”

“She didn’t.” O’Reilly’s reaction was more petulant at being out of the loop than angry.

Brody ran a query to list everyone who had ever visited the three webcam locations of interest,
Student Heaven
,
Au Pair Affair
, and
Sales
Floor
, the name for the location where Sarah McNeil had worked. 

“That’s still over fourteen thousand email addresses,” commented O’Reilly.

“I know, but watch this.” Brody then modified the query to list only the account IDs that were present in all three lists.

“Fair play, although there’s still two-hundred and fifty-two.”

Brody scanned the list to see if anything popped out. He spotted one of his own temporary email addresses there, but kept that to himself.

He narrowed it down to visits within the last two weeks.

O’Reilly kept up his running commentary. “Nineteen accounts. That’s grand.”

Brody brought up the payment details of everyone in the shortlist.

“Okay, five of them,” including his own, he noticed, “paid with bitcoins. We’re not going to have much luck tracing them. You’ll need your friends at NCCU to make any headway there, but that will take them weeks. The rest have used PayPal, so all we’ve got is their email address. But at least we know it’s not a disposable email address, because it’s linked to that payment system.”

“So now, do we just contact PayPal and ask for address details?”

“Yes, but again, it will take some time. Probably a good few days.”

“What else is there?”

“Most of these email addresses are full names. Let’s see how many we can narrow down by searching for them on social media.”

Over the course of the next hour, Brody ran searches across the Internet based on each of the remaining fourteen email addresses. He was trying to reverse engineer the name and any associated details of its owner. Out of the fourteen, he had hits with four, three of which were people located outside the UK. For the remaining ten accounts, he ran searches through every social media site using name variations derived from each email address. The downside was that so many people shared the same names that his list got much longer. He made a spreadsheet containing all the candidates found to be living in the UK. Where any were listed on LinkedIn, he noted the company name they worked at. His plan was to correlate the candidate names and companies against the Flexbase customer database he had taken a copy of when he’d hacked in there the previous day. 

It was laborious work, and Brody was starting to get dejected. His eyes glazed over. He was tired from not having had much sleep during the previous night, as he and Jenny swapped shifts during the stakeout.

“Aye, aye,” said O’Reilly, impersonating an English bobby. “What ’ave we ’ere?”

Brody refocused his eyes. His last search result was listed on the screen. It was from LinkedIn. 

From the picture displayed on the profile, the man looked to be in his late twenties. He had brown hair, short and cropped. The name against the picture was Ronald Keeble. But the killer piece of information was the name of the company he currently worked at.

Flexbase Ltd.

Brody recognised the man. He was the CCTV operator from the Flexbase CCTV control room, introduced at the time as Ron. The one that Ray Stone, the Flexbase Head of Security, had proudly mentioned as having come from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Ron had coolly helped them analyse the video footage of the killer dressed as a cyclist entering the Flexbase receptions at Paddington and Watford. 

The footage of himself.