Massive Attack (A Guy Niava Thriller Book 1)

by Dana Arama

  “Actually, yes,” she said, waving her hand dismissively, “There is no need for a hotel, thank you. It’s nothing to do with the danger.” She sat on the corner of the bed and crossed her shapely, tanned legs. I glanced over at Jonathan. His eyes were transfixed between her legs, as if there was a hidden treasure there. His hormones were working overtime. He caught my disapproving look and blushed.

  Ashley said, “The last time I spoke with my father, we had an argument. I left in anger and disappeared. He never forgave me because of it. I know that he left Texas and I don’t know where to. Steve Holding is his name.” She turned to Jonathan. “Do you think you could try and locate him with that?” She pointed at Jonathan’s bag. Inside, I was sure, was his laptop.

  “I understand from the difficulty of tracking him, that he doesn’t use social media. Facebook, Twitter, anything else?” Jonathan asked.

  “Ri-i-ight.” She drew out the single syllable and shook her head vigorously, probably to accentuate just how much. “His world is far removed from that kind of thing. There is no way he would join social media. Still, every day I find myself looking for him there. Isn’t that silly? But it’s the only way I know how to search for him. ”

  “His is a very common name. Do you have his social security number? Or any other identifying details?” I asked.

  “I never asked him,” she answered quietly. She lowered her eyes and bit her bottom lip. I saw the desperate pain in her eyes when she looked back up at us.

  “Give me your social security number and telephone number,” Jonathan said, smiling reassuringly at her. “Maybe I will be able to find him some other way.”

  Ashley smiled back at my nephew, and with that became a good American girl. Her sheer robe, the unmade bed, the scent of the men who had been there before -- all of it disappeared. She stood up with a renewed sense of energy and approached the plain desk near the window. On the desk stood three styrofoam heads and on them sat a red wig with curly hair, a straight black wig and a short brunette wig. Ashley wrote out the details she was requesting on a small piece of paper and gave Jonathan the note.

  “Please be careful.” She rose on the tips of her toes, hugged him and kissed his cheek, “I don’t want to hear that you got into trouble again.” Jonathan blushed deeply.

  ***

  “When you entered the apartment, I thought at first that you were my father,” Jonathan said as we got into the elevator.

  “Why?”

  “I hadn’t realized how much alike the two of you are.” He looked at me again and asked, “How come you seem so young, but he is so old?”

  “He’s not ‘so old’...” I said, imitating the way he spoke. “He seems old to you because he is your father.”

  I left Jonathan in the lobby and glanced outside again. The street was empty. If he had been followed, they hadn’t done a good job. I returned and signaled for the boy to follow me. A cold breeze greeted us when we left the building and he wrapped himself tighter in his coat. As we sat in my car, I noticed he was shivering. I chalked it up to tiredness and adrenaline and turned up the heat.

  “Firstly, I‘d love to hear how you managed to sneak into the casino in the first place,” I said, once we were on our way and I was certain we weren’t being tailed. “Are kids your age even allowed in a place like that?”

  “Fake ID’s.” Jonathan glanced at me, clearly frightened, and quickly added, “Please don’t tell my parents about this.”

  “Listen to me,” I paused, I asked myself if I could make such a promise, but continued anyway, “Right now, your parents are the least of my worries. Once we get home, I want you to show me the files you found in the computer and what got you into trouble. Since we have another hour’s drive, I suggest you start telling me what happened there.”

  “Okay,” Jonathan answered, and I knew he was agreeing not because he was afraid, but because he needed to share. I liked the fact that he seemed to think that I was the right person. It made me feel proud.

  Jonathan said, “Jeremy found someone who makes fake driving licenses. We decided to try our luck at the casino and that’s it.”

  “And that’s it?” I raised my eyebrows at him to show my dissatisfaction with the phrase. “How do you know Jeremy?”

  “From our math group.”

  “A group of good kids who decided to try their talent at counting cards in blackjack.” I glared at him. “Didn’t you think they would catch you in the act?”

  “They didn’t pick up on us calculating the odds.” he answered, too quickly, “And my friends are okay… they made sure to lose most of the money they won.” He smiled apologetically. “They kept just enough to cover the cost of the gas.”

  Smart kids. Still, I hoped for their sake that no one had picked up on their little trick. I carried on with my interrogation. “How did you find out that they were onto you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I asked. How did you find out they were looking for you?”

  “Because, first of all, you don’t just gather information when hacking into a foreign site. After the gathering, the first thing one does is link up with the security system. In their case, I logged into the security system of the casino to figure what they are protecting their information against. I wanted to find their weaknesses and attack them. That’s how hackers work. We learn defense systems and then launch an attack. Because of that, I was able to read their messages about being hacked and saw the orders they received to search for someone with a laptop. Through their video surveillance cameras, I saw they had sent out people to start looking.”

  I smiled. The cyber world was not so different from the world of espionage. This was the first time Jonathan had felt the danger of it all. “So what happened when you found out they were looking for you?”

  “I put my laptop in my bag and hid in the bathroom. I tried to think quickly about where they were most likely not going to look for me and entered the women’s bathroom, which is where Ashley found me. I told her I’d entered the casino with a fake ID and that they were after me. We left together, and drove to her place in her car.”

  “She helped you just like that?”

  Jonathan blushed. “She had a problem with the zipper of her dress. It was stuck. I was the only one there and heard her cursing and then crying, so I asked if I could help her.”

  “And?”

  “She came into my stall and I freed the zipper.” He looked over at me, embarrassed, and seemed to feel the need to explain further. “It was a really tight dress and she was stuck with no way to free herself, with the zipper stuck halfway up and everything…”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “Jonathan!” I was getting pissed off at him, trying to squeeze the information out of him. “You took her clothes off and then what happened?”

  “We didn’t do anything in there.”

  I asked myself if the answer intimated that they did do something somewhere else, maybe in her apartment, but then focused on the angle that interested me. “When you left the bathroom, did she have on her wig or did they see her real identity?”

  “She put the wig on me and some sort of scarf that hid my bag as well. She walked out of the toilets naturally, I mean, as herself. Do you think she is in any danger?”

  I didn’t want to tell him that if they did manage to track her down, she was doomed. Instead I answered, “Depends what you told her.”

  He blushed like a kid caught lying. “Everything...she knows everything.”

  “Everything?” I was insistent, despite his clear embarrassment. “Did you describe everything you found to her?”

  “No.” He became serious. “Just about me, who I am. That I am a hacker and that I broke into their security system. She was rushing home anyway, because she had a meeting...with customers.”

  “Why didn
’t you drive home?” I asked. He didn’t answer, but the blush crawling up his cheeks told me everything, “So you just hid in the closet while the customers were with her in her room?”

  “Yes, it’s a studio apartment…” He sounded dejected. “She was with two men.”

  “The ones that left when I walked in?”

  “Yes. She was with them both at the same time.” He sighed. He looked sad.

  “You do realize that’s her job, right? She’s a prostitute.”

  “Of course I realize that. I’m not a little boy. That’s not the problem.” There was a short pause. Then he snapped, “I think she really enjoyed herself with them.”

  That really wasn’t his business. I hoped he hadn’t fallen in love with her. I said, “They pay her to act like she’s having fun with them…” I trailed off and then decided to change the subject. “So you also counted cards in the casino?”

  Jonathan ignored my question. Even though he was irked, it seemed he couldn’t help himself. He asked, “But sometimes she really does enjoy herself, doesn’t she?”

  I wanted to ask him to promise not to go to her for sex, to instead see her as a person in dire straits. I wanted to tell him that if he did give in to make sure to use a condom. But I decided to avoid the line of thought altogether. Instead I asked again, “Did you count cards or not?”

  “My specialty is not mathematics. Counting cards bores me. That’s why I left them and sat on the side with my laptop. They had free WiFi… so I decided to have some fun.”

  “So you went in to collect intelligence. What did you find?”

  “I always start by checking what’s legal. For instance, the casino’s Facebook and Instagram pages. Afterwards, I enter their systems and check their employees. Like who is in charge of the security. He is always the one I am most interested in. Coincidentally, this time, he was especially interesting because he was also in charge of customer services or something like that. He had a lot of pictures in every possible network. But do you know what was even more interesting than those photos with him posing with tons of hot chicks and heavy gamblers in his casino?”

  I played along. “What was so interesting?”

  “What interested me more was the information he didn’t upload.”

  So you checked his computer?”

  “I started by scanning the casino’s computer. They have a few other businesses. While that was scanning, I searched their limousine rentals. I looked for their VIP customer list to find a name I might recognize, but all I found was a list of expenses and income, a list of permanent customers, and a few more boring lists. There was no one of interest anywhere. So from there I cross-referenced those who were tagged as permanent customers and checked their social networks. I compared them to the list of private computers which were connected to WiFi at the same time. If you have their kids’ names and birth dates it’s not hard to get into their private computers. Most people are careless enough to use that kind of data for their passwords, and it’s easy enough to find it all on social media.”

  “What is so important that you need to infiltrate some stranger’s computer in whom you have no personal interest?”

  “You would think that the most interesting thing is seeing the porn he saves on his computer, but it’s actually a lot more interesting to read the chats with the mistresses and see their hidden photo folders. Not photos with their families, but with personal naked pictures. It’s mainly women that send pictures of themselves in provocative poses. They’re much, much more interesting than the porn sites themselves.”

  He stopped and glanced over at me as if he expected some sort of reproof. I wondered if, as the responsible adult here, I should say something on the matter. I preferred to keep my mouth shut. Jonathan continued. “If I wanted to extort them, I would just put all that data in the cloud, but I am not like that. I continued to surf, because I was trying to get to the computer that really interested me.”

  “The computer of the guy in charge of security?”

  “Exactly. Like I said, I’m more interested in what he is hiding, so with him it I knew it would be more challenging. Everything was locked with passwords, but nothing too sophisticated. In the end, I managed to decipher the codes and to get into his photo files. His personal pictures were from lots of different places all over the world. He also took pictures with men holding ammunition and firearms, and all sorts of wild parties. There was a photo of him with a stunning woman. They sat on a couch and on the table opposite them were white lines, which I believe were drugs… As I saw it, the data on his computer was much more interesting than the others. Then I went through the rest of his library and found an Excel file. Most of the files were simple to open, and not encrypted, but this one was password protected, so it intrigued me the most.”

  “And you cracked the code?”

  “It wasn’t really hard. It wasn’t too sophisticated.”

  “The regular 12345?” I smiled. That would be the first thing I would try.

  “No-o-o. A bit more difficult than that.” Jonathan smiled. “The sophisticated combination of 13579.” He rubbed his eyes. He was clearly tired. “And then the list opened up. The sort of list that got my attention, so I dug into it a bit more.”

  “What drew your attention and how did you dig deeper?”

  “Abbreviated words such as RPG.” He smiled, eyes shut, and said, “At first I thought the meaning referred to an IBM computer program, but the rest didn’t match anything, except firearms. And then I thought it was about a computer game, but then what would an Excel file have to do with a computer game? In the end I realized that this is the real thing, so I thought that you’d find it interesting, since you were a combat soldier and would surely know.”

  Jonathan was right. I was a combat soldier and it did interest me. “Rocket Propelled Grenades against tanks and not only tanks.” As he said it, I could hear the whoosh of the rocket pulling out of the pipe and the rolling thunder it sent echoing across on the plains. I could feel the vehicle sway as the rocket flew above it, blowing up a mere half meter away. I could hear the controlled tension in the voice of the commander when he gave the command to hit the launchers. “It is an abbreviation that also catches my attention,” I noted. I also felt the recognizable shiver that ripples down one’s spine when red alert goes off. “What did you do with the list?”

  He said, “What one does with anything of interest that one finds in the network -- I saved it in a secret file in the cloud.”

  “Do you remember other abbreviations you saw?”

  “I think I saw SR-25…” He hesitated. “Or was it ST…” Jonathan’s voice trailed off.

  “Most probably it‘s SR…” I said quietly, “It’s a sniper rifle with a relatively fast fire rate.”

  “Did you use it during your army service?’

  “I wasn’t a sniper, but as a naval commander fighter, I have had the chance to practice with it a few times. Let’s get back to the abbreviations you saw there.”

  “DSR with some sort of number next to it that I can’t remember now,” he added sleepily. “We were up all night.” Once again I glanced over at my nephew. His head lolled against the car door and his eyes were closed. “It’s okay… go to sleep.” I said, mostly to myself, because he didn’t reply.

  The DSR 1 was bad news. It was a German sniper rifle considered to be one of – if not the most -- accurate of them all. Its firing range reaches a kilometer and a half, making it fatal, and the sniper who uses it invisible. Its light weight and short barrel, along with a cartridge that fits in the front rather than the middle of the firearm, made it easy for soldiers to carry or run toward a target. This firearm, like the others Jonathan had mentioned on the list, was a modular piece, meaning that its barrel could be adjusted depending on the circumstances. I hadn’t fired it many times, but the few I had, I’d found it to be accurate. Extremely accurate.<
br />
  I wanted to know what else was on that list and asked myself who this person was collecting all these firearms for expert snipers. Who was he planning to harm without getting caught? I knew that one could easily add a telescopic lens, silencer and night vision to both of the rifles mentioned. The list Jonathan had discovered intrigued me for many reasons, and especially because of the German rifle -- less than a year ago sniper rifles had been stolen from a factory in Germany. Outside of the thief and the factory managers, no one knew exactly how many rifles had been stolen. That theft turned this death list into something viable, which I didn’t like at all.

  Any exchange of firearms interests the state of Israel, and particularly the Mossad. Was the fact that I had already said goodbye to the agency, and was considering changing professions, supposed to prevent me from investigating the subject? I knew the answer was unequivocal. Even though, according to HR, I was on vacation, I was still a Mossad agent, and as such, I couldn’t let this lead go, a lead that may turn into something much more complicated than perhaps it seemed.

  ***

  “I want it to be clear that forging documents and lying about your age is a criminal offense, and I need you to promise me here and now that you won’t do it again.”

  Jonathan raised his hand in a scouts honor and looked down, but only for a second. Enough for me to understand that he was sorry for what had happened, but sorry mostly because he had been caught in the act. I said, ”Let’s get back to this list of yours.” Remnants of fatigue remained in Jonathan’s eyes but I urged him on anyway. The subject was too important and he had enjoyed an hour’s sleep on the way back home. I sat next to him, besides the computer, and we started to examine what he had found there.

  “What is strange,” I said quietly, “is that transactions such as these are done on the dark net. What made him be so careless?”