Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (7 page)

He pressed submit. His account was created. He was inside.

* * *

The man who called himself Crooner42 on the CrackerHack forums scanned the SWY system logs in real time. Every action that users took on the website was recorded in the system logs. Crooner42 often whiled away time watching the logs fill with the activity of tens of thousands of paying subscribers. It was amazing to observe how addictive the site was. His site. It made him feel proud.

It was also making him very rich.

A new entry appeared in the log. Damn, it was just one of the regulars logging back in. A few more entries appeared as the same user navigated through the site and chose a video feed. The log entries highlighted that this user had all the options turned on for the location he was viewing. Perfect, a high-paying customer. Crooner42’s favourite type.

But Crooner42 was growing impatient. He’d set the trap perfectly. Fingal had taken the bait and then he’d had no choice but to accept the challenge. He knew Fingal would waste no time. 

Crooner42 was fully aware that the first step on any pentest was to passively scan the target. In the case of SWY the only information available in the public domain was the site itself. Unlike websites for bricks and mortar businesses, SWY had no published list of employees, office addresses or any contact details from the physical world. 

That meant Fingal would have to jump to the next step and familiarise himself with the site itself. Crooner42 had set the site up so that some of the webcam locations had looping teaser video feeds, just enough to give future customers a taste of what was inside if they parted with their money. As a non-registered customer, Fingal wouldn’t really be able to find out much. Certainly not enough to pull together enough information to formulate an appropriate pentest strategy. 

No, Fingal would have no choice but to register as a new user on the site. That’s what Crooner42 was looking out for in the logs: the creation of a new account. The only problem was that the site was becoming so popular that he was getting hundreds of new user registrations every day. But whoever registered in the next few minutes was bound to be Fingal, hiding behind a fake email address. After all, that’s what Crooner42 would have done.

So where the hell was he? 

Crooner42 glanced at his Breitling. It had been thirty minutes since Fingal had accepted the challenge on the CrackerHack pentest forum. And, so far, no new users had registered in that time.

Crooner42 had snorted out loud when Fingal had tried to lighten the seriousness of the challenge with his impudent, “Sure, sounds like fun” acceptance. That hadn’t fooled Crooner42 at all. He knew that Fingal would be shitting himself. 

And so he should be. 

Public humiliation in the global hacker community wasn’t trivial. It takes months, if not years, to fully recover. Crooner42 knew this better than anyone. He’d been through it, and much, much worse. All thanks to Fingal. 

Now it was payback time.

Come on Fingal. Register for fuck’s sake.

Crooner42 was in his two-bedroom penthouse apartment that overlooked the Thames to the south. Not that he ever went out on the balcony to take in the expensive views. He had used some of the income from the site to buy the flat. He’d hired an interior designer and given her the brief to design the world’s best bachelor pad. She’d not let him down. Everything was stone, leather or glass. The colour spectrum supposedly ranged between ecru and burnt umber, which turned out meant off-white to dark-brown. Huge prints of French art-house movies dominated the walls. A reconditioned
Adams Family
pinball machine sat next to classic
Asteroids
arcade machine. He enjoyed playing those. But the American-style pool table in the centre was purely for show. 

The main bedroom had a huge circular bed, with masculine covers and cushions. It had seen plenty of action over the last few months. The second bedroom, however, was hidden behind a false wall. None of his guests even knew the room was there. He’d had the doors ripped out and replaced with a fake, modern looking bookcase. The interior designer hadn’t even asked why. She’d taken it as a challenge and had delivered a neat solution. When he keyed the code into an app on his iPhone or pressed the button on his key fob, the bookcases swung outwards to reveal a state of the art home office. 

Here he observed and controlled every aspect of SWY via thirty-three LCD computer displays mounted floor-to-ceiling on the wall opposite his glass desk. He’d arranged it like a CCTV control room. The screen in the centre was a massive sixty inches. It was surrounded with smaller thirty-six-inch screens in a six-by-six grid. The displays slowly cycled through the hundreds of video feeds from the website, allowing Crooner42 the opportunity to freely survey what his customers paid for. 

Most of the webcam locations held little personal appeal. His attention was generally focused on ensuring the feeds kept on working. But there was one location that held his interest. It was the one that had given him the idea for SWY in the first place and he retained a soft spot for it. For this location, he reserved the four top centre screens of the grid to permanently display its webcam feeds. On the public website, he’d assigned the moniker
Student Heaven
to it. 

The log display on the large screen in the centre scrolled upwards. New lines of text appeared at the bottom.

A new account had been created.

Just as Crooner42 was about to congratulate himself, more log entries appeared. Within two minutes there were eight new user accounts. Damn, which one belonged to Fingal? Or was Fingal being extra clever? Perhaps all eight were his.

Crooner42 rolled up his shirtsleeves. He had some work to do to check out the email addresses, payment details and IP addresses of all eight accounts to see if he could narrow down which of them belonged to everyday users, and which belonged to Fingal. Any typical Internet user should be relatively easy to trace back to the real world. Fingal's user account would be the one that was absolutely impossible to trace.

Crooner42 raised his hands in the air, as if conducting an orchestra.

One or more of the eight was Fingal, he was sure of it.

* * *

You slowly cycle down the affluent residential street as if you’re one of them. No one gives you a second look. You pass within inches of a woman pushing a baby stroller. She is under an umbrella and is plugged into some white earphones. You catch the tinny sound of music. You look back as you pass. Naturally, you want to see if the swivel of her hips has returned following childbirth. You want to see if she’s back on the market, asking for it already, but the music — and the baby, if you’re really honest with yourself — puts you off. You ignore her. You choose not to take an interest.

Yes, you choose. You are the one who decides. You’re like a Roman Emperor selecting who lives and who dies. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Regardless, you’ve already chosen your next one. She’s been really begging for it. She might even be The One. You can’t wait. The anticipation is a pleasure. You can feel it forming between your legs. You try to push it away, back down through your black cycle-shorts but, as usual, it seems to have a life of its own. 

You spot a residential green on the corner opposite your destination. You dismount and sit on the bench under a tree. The tree gives a little shelter from the rain. You cross your legs and wait patiently for the hardness to subside. You try to take your mind off it. You look up and concentrate on the wind blowing through the branches. You focus on the dampness of the bench seeping through your Lycra shorts. You hear the slow tap tap tap of raindrops on your cycling helmet, larger for having first collected on the leaves and branches before falling.

You recall the last one. 

The cellist. 

It wasn’t as good as you’d expected. As you’d planned. She’d wanted it too much, the slut. You knew that now with hindsight. Someone like that could never make the grade.

Even in the middle of her ‘recital’ the tart was trying to tease you. 

The way she spread her legs either side of the cello – such a blatant come-on. And then her hand movements with the bow. She knew damn well they were suggestive. She wasn’t just playing the cello. She was trying to play you too, but her music was so fucking boring. She was into it though. She closed her eyes tight as she concentrated, her body swaying, arm sliding backwards and forwards. 

You didn’t waste the opportunity. You snuck up behind her and smashed her over the head just as she finished playing. You even laughed out loud as she fell to the floor, the crappy music silenced once and for all. 

It took ages for her to come back round. 

You’d already tied her hands together, dragged her up onto the table, sliced off her clothes and entered her. You weren’t far off coming when she regained consciousness. It hadn’t even been a minute. Nowhere near long enough. You tried to hold back, but you wanted her to scream. 

It was so much better when she screamed. 

She wailed loudly when you grabbed a clump of hair with one hand and yanked her head back. She shrieked even louder when she felt the sharp blade you held at her throat with your other hand. You felt it then, the tightening of her muscles around it. But that was too much. You couldn’t hold on anymore. You climaxed and scythed open her neck at the same time. 

A double release.

But you’d rushed it. You weren’t sure why. You could have prolonged it. Strung it out. Made it last like it should have.

Next time you wouldn’t knock her out cold. Or if you did, you’d wait until she came round before getting it on properly. There really was no need to hurry. After all, you’d planned it that way. The whole point was to enjoy it. Enjoy it slowly. For her to experience pleasure and pain intensified by the dawning realisation that she was at death’s door. Combined with the sex, it was overpowering. For her too, you briefly wonder? And then you chide yourself. Who cares?

Opposite from where you sit you can see the house numbered 85. The next slut lives there. It’s time to invite her to the best experience of her life. 

And her last.

CHAPTER 4

As a paying customer, the site now presented Brody with a graphical menu of purportedly live webcam locations listed by vague but mostly humorous names. These included,
Wannabe Lesbians
,
Au Pair Affair
,
Boring Fart Toiletcam
and many, many others. Brody clicked on
Au Pair Affair
and was presented with three video streams. No audio. He was surprised at the sharp resolution and smooth motion quality. Video is one of the hungriest consumers of bandwidth — the amount of network space that a data stream has to be squeezed through — and, as a result, many CCTV and webcam feeds suffer from poor image quality or resort to sending still snapshots every few seconds. The site must be employing a codec with high compression similar to YouTube, the popular video site.

One of the three video streams displayed a modern, well-appointed kitchen. A young woman wearing a white dressing gown was feeding a baby in a highchair from a bottle. The camera was up high, probably hidden in the ceiling. Another image, again from above, showed a bedroom with a single bed. It was empty. Brody thought he could make out U2 posters on the wall. The third image showed what looked like the baby’s bedroom. A cot in one corner, teddy bears everywhere, and a playpen in the centre with plastic toys in it. But no sign of life.

There was movement on the kitchen cam. Brody clicked in and the video feed filled his screen. The image quality lessened a little, but it was still very clear. A tall, middle-aged man in a navy suit had walked in. He kissed the baby on the head. He looked out the kitchen window quickly and then leaned forward and kissed the young woman hungrily. She responded eagerly, opening her dressing gown to reveal that she was naked underneath. The man fondled her breasts while the baby watched obliviously. Abruptly, the man withdrew and pointed to his watch. He spoke a few words, but the audio was silent. He leaned in for one more quick kiss with the young woman, patted the baby on the head and left the room. The girl tied her dressing gown around her and resumed feeding the baby.

The scene captivated Brody. 

He shrunk the video footage back to thumbnail size and looked around the rest of the
Au Pair Affair
webcam location. He noticed that there were upgrade options. One option was to pay more to receive footage from the four remaining webcams at that location, labelled as premium. These claimed to be the master bedroom, its en-suite bathroom, the main bathroom and the living room. Each had a still picture hinting at what the live feed would contain. Another upgrade option was to receive audio from the webcams at this location. Both upgrade options were fifty-nine pence each. Or the two for ninety-nine pence. The price was certainly low enough to tempt. Undoubtedly the same upgrade approach was repeated on the other video feeds throughout the site. 

Brody realised he was intrigued by the two people he’d just spied on. Three if you included the baby. And if
Au Pair Affair
was an accurate description then there would also be a fourth to increase the drama: the unsuspecting wife. Just that thought alone made Brody realise how addictive this site was likely to be. 

And how financially successful.

Brody forced himself to click back to the main menu. He skimmed through the webcam locations. There seemed to be about two hundred or so locations, each with two or three feeds and all with at least two or three additional premium feeds for anyone tempted enough to upgrade; for the additional fee of course. 

If the other webcam locations were as intriguing as
Au Pair Affair
, then SWY was a money-making machine.

He chose some locations at random. The first few seemed to be from other homes, although they all seemed to be deserted. Perhaps they were all at work. That notion made him click on one that looked like an office. People were sitting behind computer desks, most with two screens side-by-side, typing and talking into headsets. It looked like a call centre. Clicking on, he found the fish tank location he’d noticed when he’d first looked at the site during the Atlas Brands presentation that morning. The fish still swam peacefully.