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

by Ian Sutherland

  Back at his keyboard, he entered the serial number into the password field and was immediately given access to the router’s configuration settings.

  O’Reilly said, “Okay. What’s the story now?” He was genuinely interested, clearly having no idea what Brody was trying to achieve.

  Brody worked through the menus to the command which listed every device that had connected via Wi-Fi to the router and been given an IP address so that it could communicate on the network within the house. Many were showing as disconnected. He assumed most of these were the laptops and smartphones of the other students in the house.

  Of the remaining ones, he settled on the one that had been active on the network the longest. He ran a ping command against it. It immediately replied, meaning it was definitely active. It could be anything — a phone, an iPad, a laptop or even the Sky satellite box he could see under the television — but he figured that if there really was a PC receiving webcam streams, as in the Saxton house earlier, it would have been active on the network longer than the other devices.

  Brody brought up the Windows Remote Desktop application on his own PC and told it to connect to the target IP address over port 3389. His logic was that if there really were webcams in this house, the PC they connected to would be configured in the same way as in the Saxton house, especially if it had been installed by the same company. And if that were true, then it would also have remote desktop control to enable remote support by the webcam installers. But if he pointed at the IP address of some other device, then an error message would be displayed.

  On his computer’s display, a second Windows screen appeared. It was in locked mode with a username called WPike. He was now remotely connecting to a PC located somewhere within the house, using his own tablet PC’s keyboard and mouse to control it from afar.

  Brody caught Kim’s eye. “Any of your housemates called W Pike?”

  Kim shook her head.

  “Do you know anyone called Pike?”

  “No, I . . . hold on a second.” There was a note of recognition in her voice. “I have an idea. Give me a minute.” She ran out of the room. Brody heard her footsteps climbing the stairs two at a time.

  Jenny and O’Reilly were standing behind Brody, looking over his shoulder at his screen.

  “Now then, how were you after knowing to use an RDC?” O’Reilly asked.

  Ah, so O’Reilly did know something about what Brody had just done, referring to the Remote Desktop Client by its acronym. Brody ignored him again, clicked on the ‘switch user’ button and typed in ‘Administrator’ in the username field. Leaning slightly forward so that Jenny and O’Reilly couldn’t see his fingers on the keyboard he quickly typed in a password and pressed enter. The mouse pointer turned into an hourglass. This was the moment of truth.

  “How do you know the password?” O’Reilly asked, oozing suspicion.

  “I don’t,” Brody lied. “I’m guessing. Come on Harry, what’s the most common password people set for the Windows administrator account?”

  “Well now . . . I suppose it’s password. Or it’s left empty.”

  “Exactly.”

  Brody didn’t want to have to explain himself to O’Reilly. Telling the truth would require him to own up to hacking into the webcam concentrator PC located in the Saxtons’ house earlier today. That time he had been privy to Derek Saxton’s username and password and had broken in effortlessly. But this time he had no idea who ‘W Pike’ was. But what Brody did know was that every Windows PC had an Administrator account that gave full control over the PC. Saxton had told him that the company that had installed the webcams in his house had also provided the PC. Brody’s theory was that if the same company had installed webcams in this house, then they would probably have supplied a PC set up with the same Administrator account password. The webcam installation company would have done this for ease of support across all of their installations, to save having to maintain records of every administrator password in every location around the country. Earlier, while remotely logged into the Saxtons’ PC as Derek Saxton, Brody had, as a matter of course, installed and run a freely available password cracking program called John the Ripper. It employed dictionary and brute force-based attacks to crack every password on the machine. From this he had found out that the password for the Administrator account on the Saxtons’ PC was ‘McCarthy123’, which was what he had really just typed in a second ago.

  The hourglass disappeared. The password was accepted.

  “There you go, you were right first time, Harry.”

  O’Reilly commented, “Password? That was lucky.”

  “Yeah, I was born lucky.”

  “So where is this PC you’re remotely controlling?” Jenny asked, looking around the living room.

  “I don’t know. Definitely somewhere in the house as it’s on the local network. But I have an idea as to how we can find it without tearing the house apart.”

  “I had a feeling you might,” O’Reilly muttered. He clearly didn’t like being shown up.

  Via the remote desktop program, Brody brought up a web browser on the remote PC. He pointed it to the BBC news website and clicked on live news. As it began streaming, he clicked on the icon that controlled sound on the remote PC and set it maximum. The news began playing. Ironically, it was a story about the Audri Sahlberg case. The footage switched from the news anchor to a serious looking journalist outside the Flexbase headquarters.

  …Police have now linked the brutal murders of music student Anna Parker and babysitter Audri Sahlberg. Both crimes were committed in offices owned by a building services company called Flexbase. Although they were carried out in two different Flexbase locations, one in Docklands and another in Watford, both victims were killed in meeting rooms within the Flexbase owned buildings…

  “Shit,” Jenny blurted, “Tick-Tock will go mad.”

  “Who’s Tick-Tock?” Brody asked.

  “The Chief Super,” explained O’Reilly. “DCS McLintock.”

  Brody muted the sound on his own computer.

  “Brody, I need to hear this,” Jenny demanded.

  Brody leaned his head to one side and made a show of listening. “I think you still can.”

  The news item was muted on Brody’s PC but could still be heard faintly. The source was coming from outside the living room.

  At that moment, Kim came bounding back down the stairs. “I’ve figured out who W Pike is,” she said breathlessly, handing the policewoman some papers. “This is the rental contract we each signed with the letting agent. The letting agent is in Charlton High Street, just around the corner, but look at the name of the actual owner of the house.”

  Price scanned the document and looked up. “Walter Pike. And there’s an address in Dartford.”

  “That’s about nine miles away,” stated O’Reilly.

  “Let me get this straight, Brody,” said Price. “You think there’s a computer hidden somewhere in this house that belongs to the owner?”

  “Looks like it.” He pointed at the doorway. “You can hear it faintly somewhere in the hallway, playing the BBC live news feed.”

  As one, they left the room in search of the PC.

  * * *

  Unbeknownst to Jenny, Brody, O’Reilly and Kim, Crooner42 was observing them via the webcam feeds still coming into SWY from the Student Heaven location. Although he had disabled the location from the website earlier today, Crooner42 still had his own private access to the video streams, prompted by overhearing the conversation on the Au Pair Affair feed earlier. He had monitored the two techies, Brody and O’Reilly, trawl through SWY and fail to find anything. At that point, he had thought, rather smugly, that would be the end of it. The Irishman hadn’t even been convinced that the light fitting the girl had broken was even a webcam.

  But then the other techie had smartly traced the concentrator PC on the house network, and they were now physically searching for it. Crooner42 wasn’t overly concerned about its discovery. All it would pr
ove was that there were webcams in the house connecting to HWC.

  But this Brody character was interesting. He was smart and resourceful, and he knew what he was doing.

  “It’s coming from a padlocked cupboard under the stairs.” O’Reilly’s voice was picked up by the webcam in the living room. Crooner42 couldn’t see them and there was no webcam in the hallway he could switch to.

  “We’ve never had access to that cupboard.” Kim’s voice now, slightly fainter. Crooner42 increased the volume on his computer. “The agents told us that the owner kept some private things in there.”

  “Well, we’ll see about that.” The policewoman’s voice. “I don’t suppose you or the other students have any tools lying around?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Harry, let’s go see if we can find something. I’ll take the kitchen. You look in the car, see what you can find.”

  Crooner42 heard a faint buzzing sound. He saw Brody, still in the living room, remove a mobile phone from his pocket and study it. He quickly walked over to the door, peered into the hallway and then gently pushed the door shut.

  He doesn’t want his colleagues to overhear him.

  He answered the phone and spoke quietly, while heading to the window, the farthest point in the room from the hallway.

  “This is DCI Frank Burnside.”

  What the hell was this? Crooner42 knew the man’s name was Brody – he’d heard the policewoman introduce him to the others earlier. And thinking about it, wasn’t DCI Burnside the name of a dirty copper from some old television series he’d seen reruns of?

  “Ah, Mr Chambers, thanks for getting back to me. Did you get a chance to check the HomeWebCam firewall logs?”

  What the . . . HomeWebCam? And in a sudden moment of clarity, Crooner42 knew what Brody was up to. He listened intently, seeking confirmation of his suspicions.

  Brody was obviously surprised by the response. “What, no traffic at all?” A pause and then the clincher. “Are you sure you checked the right IP destination address? SecretlyWatchingYou.com . . . Oh, okay . . . That’s so strange . . . Okay, thanks for checking.”

  Brody disconnected the call just as the door to the living room opened.

  Crooner42 was dumbfounded. Could this Brody actually be . . .

  “Well now, who was that?” asked O’Reilly, staring at the mobile phone in Brody’s hands.

  “My sister’s mother’s son. What’s it to you?” Brody’s tone was deliberately confrontational.

  O’Reilly hesitated, unsure. He dropped his challenge. “We’re after finding the PC. It’s a Dell laptop, about four years old.”

  “Well done, Harry. You should get a gold star.”

  “Feck off, Brody.”

  The two women walked in. “So are there cameras here or not?” demanded the policewoman.

  “We could all squeeze into the cupboard under the stairs to do this but as I’m already controlling the PC remotely, shall we just take a look at it from here?”

  Seeing a nod from Jenny, Brody sat down in front of his own computer. The others all crowded around him. His fingers moved across the trackpad, clicking occasionally. He narrated his actions.

  “This is the webcam server app that controls the webcam configurations. It defines how much footage should be stored on the computer, frame rates, audio and so on. See?”

  “Yes, okay. But are there more cameras?” pressed the girl.

  Brody clicked and her sharp intake of breath was answer enough. Simultaneously, they all turned around to stare at the hidden webcam in the living room, high above them on the wall opposite the room’s entrance. Crooner42 felt disconcerted – it was almost as if the four of them were looking straight at him.

  “I thought that was some sort of electrical junction box,” said Kim.

  “It’s made to look like one, for sure,” said O’Reilly, walking towards it. He grabbed a chair, positioned it underneath and then his face filled the camera feed. Crooner42 could see acne scars on his cheeks. “Ah, yes, there’s a lens here, in the centre.” So close to the microphone, O’Reilly’s voice boomed in Crooner42’s speakers. “From down there you might assume it’s the screwhead holding the cover of the box on.”

  “And because you think it’s a junction box, you don’t think to question the electrical wires going to it from the ceiling.” This was Brody’s voice, although Crooner42 couldn’t see anything other than the hair on the back of O’Reilly’s head, as he had turned around to face the others.

  O’Reilly jumped down from the chair, allowing Crooner42 to see the whole room again.

  “Is there one in my room?” The girl spoke hesitantly.

  “I’m afraid so. Here it is,” said Brody.

  She looked over his shoulder and slowly shook her head. Slowly wrapping her arms around herself, she lowered her head. “Yuck, I feel so dirty. Disgusted. All these people watching me in my own room? That’s sick.” She fled from the room, clearly distressed.

  Crooner42 checked the other webcams to see where she showed up. He heard a door bang and presumed by her absence in any of the feeds that she’d locked herself in the downstairs toilet, the only room in the house other than the hallway without a webcam.

  The others all looked at each other helplessly.

  After a minute’s silence, the policewoman asked a question. “But I still don’t get it. We’ve got webcams all over this place, just like in the Saxton house. But none of them are on SWY. I thought that was the common link, Brody?”

  “I can’t explain that,” said Brody. Crooner42 smiled. His act of disabling the Student Heaven location on SWY had really paid off. “But the configuration is exactly the same as the Saxton house. That’s too much of a coincidence. And the HomeWebCam site is linking to the webcam concentrator PC at both houses. It’s exactly the same in every way. Except for not being on SWY.”

  “Maybe the location has been removed from SWY?” suggested O’Reilly.

  “Why?” asked the policewoman.

  “To stop you linking the two crimes, DI Price,” offered Brody noncommittally. And then he leant forward with more assertion, “To stop you investigating SecretlyWatchingYou.”

  Crooner42 felt a chill down his spine.

  “But how would the people behind SWY know to do that?”

  Brody turned his head towards the webcam, his stare burning all the way through. Price and O’Reilly also turned.

  “They’re watching us!” gasped Price.

  Brody nodded, maintaining his stare.

  “Right then, I’m powering off the PC under the stairs. That’ll stop ’em, for sure, and anyway, we need it as evidence,” said O’Reilly, already striding purposely towards the hallway.

  “Good idea, Harry,” said Price. “I’ll go see if I can help Kim.”

  Brody was left alone. He put his arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair away from his PC, still staring straight into the webcam.

  Crooner42 felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Brody, Brody. Are you who I think you are?

  Crooner42 knew he wasn’t a police officer; that was certain. His behaviour and the technical one-upmanship between him and O’Reilly confirmed that. And then there was the conversation between them earlier; hadn’t O’Reilly asked him something about why he’d came forward? Yes, Brody had said something about having met DI Price for the first time that morning. In fact, Brody had said that he was an independent security consultant — no, better than that, he’d said he was a penetration tester.

  It had to be. It was the only thing that made sense.

  And there was that secret conversation on the phone where he pretended to be a police officer. He was trying to find a link between HomeWebCam and SecretlyWatchingYou. But he hadn’t mentioned HWC to O’Reilly or Price at the time, even though he clearly knew all about it. Which meant he was already one step ahead and was withholding information for his own purposes.

  Crooner42 was now certain what that purpose was. Brody was trying to find out h
ow the webcam feeds found their way into SWY. He was looking for a back door, the clever bastard. And there was only one reason why Brody would be doing that.

  Crooner42 held Brody’s stare and spoke in a low, menacing tone, even though Brody couldn’t hear him. “Hello, Fingal.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “Thanks for all your help today, Brody.”

  Jenny pulled up outside Charlton Station; her foot on the brake, ready to move off as soon as Brody exited the car. About half an hour ago she had phoned Alan back at base and asked him to meet her at Walter Pike’s address. Pulling in Pike, the landlord of the student house and, far more significantly, the owner of the understairs PC that controlled the webcams, was now the most promising lead in the case.

  Instead of opening the door, Brody, his head nodding as if settling his mind on something, turned towards her, an ear-to-ear grin plastered on his face. It occurred fleetingly to Jenny that this was probably the first natural smile she had seen him give, as if everything before now was some kind of act.

  “You know, I’ve enjoyed doing this far more than I thought I would.”

  She suppressed her frustration at his delayed exit. “You sound surprised?”

  “I guess I am. Look, I was wondering . . . maybe I could help you some more?”

  “We’ll take it from here, Brody. Look, I’ve got to go . . .”

  “If you ever want to talk all the technical stuff through, I’d be happy to help.”

  “Thanks, Brody.” Jenny dropped into neutral, took her foot off the clutch and slowly engaged the handbrake, deliberately not pressing the release button so that, as she pulled it up, each ratchet clicked noisily. “I’ve got your number.”