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

by Ian Sutherland

  They needed someone who would take a more direct approach.

  They needed a hacker.

  “I can help,” said Brody, stepping forward.

  The four officers turned to face him.

  “No way,” said Jenny and O’Reilly in unison.

  Da Silva lifted his eyebrows. He was giving it consideration.

  Brody justified his offer. “You need to move quickly in case the killer begins to cover his tracks. He’ll soon know the site is down. The data you need is stored in the SWY database. All you need to do is search through it, cross-referencing customer viewing habits with the three victim locations. That will give you a short list of paying customers. From there, you can see what personal details are stored, although I suspect not much given the nature of the site, and then maybe track down who they are through their payment methods, eliminating anyone not in the UK. Once you have a shortlist, you can then go shake them down.”

  “Who are you again?” asked Da Silva.

  “I’m an independent IT consultant. I do security penetration testing for large corporations to help them defend against cyber criminals. I am good at what I do and I can help you right now.”

  A long pause.

  Fiona spoke up for him. “He’s the one who helped us save Sarah McNeil in Watford yesterday.”

  Jenny shot her a murderous look.

  “Did he now?” said Da Silva.

  “Sir, this is wrong,” warned Jenny. “This is all evidence. We have chain of custody procedures to follow.”

  Da Silva countered, “That may all be true. But in UK law, whether evidence is gathered improperly or not does not mean the evidence can’t be used at trial.”

  “But if you affect the evidence contained within the SWY website, our case against Harper could fall apart,” stated Jenny.

  “I’m less concerned about Harper. Our priority is to put away the culprit for the murders of Anna Parker and Audri Sahlberg, and the attempted murders of Sarah McNeil and you, Jenny.”

  “If it helps,” said Brody, “I’m happy to have O’Reilly observe everything I do. Maybe he can keep me on the straight and narrow.”

  “There’s no danger of that,” grumbled O’Reilly.

  * * *

  Jenny finished freshening up in the ladies’ toilets in Holborn Station and headed to the interview rooms. After having spent the night in Brody’s car, she’d been desperate to freshen up. She was looking forward to getting out of the clothes she was wearing and having a proper shower when she got home to her flat later.

  She and Fiona had returned to the station in her car. She’d left Brody and Harry to it after Da Silva had given his permission for them to proceed with Brody’s plan. Apparently, it would take a good few hours to work through the data. Da Silva had also made his way back.

  When Jenny had originally called Da Silva from Harper’s flat in Docklands to give him the good news that SWY had been shut down and they had the person behind it in custody, he’d initially been annoyed, thinking it would negate the need for his high-profile coordination role with every other force in the country to shut down each SWY location. She reminded him that they still needed to gather all the evidence, which was physically present in the shadow PCs located in the cars parked outside them all. Happy once again, he’d called another press conference. Jenny was convinced that Da Silva saw the whole case as one big PR exercise for his personal profile.

  The fact that he’d blindly relied on her expertise behind the scenes was somewhat reckless, but then he’d not had much choice. He was self-aware enough to recognise his own lack of experience and so he’d made a judgement call that she was his best way through it all. All week she had shouldered the SIO’s decision-making burden, Da Silva acting as little more than a mouthpiece, handing out her orders to the investigation team. She had felt the pressure mounting as the case wore on, but she had come through in the end. Although she realised that most of the breakthroughs during the week had come about thanks to Brody.

  Da Silva had then turned up at Docklands, with the primary motive of being seen to be in charge. And once there, he’d finally done exactly that, and stepped up and made a decision all on his own, taking up Brody’s offer of assistance, despite her very vocal reticence.

  She didn’t know why she was so bothered. She’d relied on Brody all week herself. But a small instinctive part of her suspected that she was on dangerous ground with him. She desperately wanted to trust him, if only to warrant the intimacy they’d shared two nights ago. Everything he’d done had helped drive the case forward. But she’d been unable to shake the feeling that something else was going on.

  She knew where to get some answers.

  She opened the door of the interview room.

  Patrick Harper looked up and grimaced.

  Opposite him sat DC Fiona Jones, perfectly presented, no clues at all that she’d spent last night stuck in Jenny’s Audi with Harry.

  Jenny sat next to Fiona, who led them through the preliminaries, the tape running. She confirmed Patrick’s right to a solicitor. He declined.

  “I take it you want to cooperate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you want me to?”

  “I’m just surprised, given you thought everything was ‘none of our business’ back at your apartment.”

  “Yeah, well that was before that bastard opened my control room and took away any choice I had.”

  “I see.”

  “So what do you need to know?”

  She wanted to know about Brody, but that was secondary. If Harper was going to confess, she needed to get it all.

  “Let’s start at the beginning then. Tell us about SecretlyWatchingYou.”

  Harper stared at them both, one by one. Jenny guessed he was still weighing up the pros and cons in his mind. He knew he’d been caught red-handed and so pleading guilty and confessing was his best chance of a reduced sentence. Although what a judge would make of all this, Jenny had no idea.

  She waited patiently. Years of interview experience told her that he needed to be the one to speak next. And once he started he’d not stop. After a long twenty seconds or so, Harper adjusted his glasses and opened his mouth.

  “It all started with Walter Pike.”

  “The landlord for your girlfriend’s flat in Charlton?”

  “Yes, him. But it was the year before Kim moved in. If it weren’t for that pervert, I’d never have had the idea for SecretlyWatchingYou.”

  Harper went on to explain how he had been employed by McCarthy Security Ltd back then, as one of the CCTV fitters, working part time while going to college. At the time, they had been a traditional security services company, fitting proprietary CCTV systems the old fashioned way, mostly for businesses. But Nicky McCarthy stumbled across HomeWebCam and secured their UK franchise. Harper’s computer background made him the primary installation expert. Most of the IP webcam installations were innocuous enough, but Harper smelled a rat when it came to Pike, who ordered cameras for every room of an empty house. As Harper had been the installer, he knew all the passwords and went back a month later and snuck a peak. Pike had let the house out to five female third-year students from the local University and was spending nearly every waking moment secretly spying on them through HomeWebCam. Over the course of the next few months, Pike ordered four more IP webcam installations from McCarthy which Harper installed, feeling more disgusted every time.

  But Pike made him realise that if one person would go to such lengths to fuel his voyeuristic perversions, then maybe there was a business opportunity. Being the expert in the webcam setup, he knew that they could be configured to multi-cast. One night he came up with the idea for the shadow PCs. He tried it out on Pike’s properties and then slowly built a website to coordinate, receive and eventually monetise the webcam streams.

  Patrick bought his cars from auctions cheaply and registered them to a partially fake address in Stratford where he knew someone who used to
live there. It was a house split into four flats, 6A to 6D, all sharing a single front door and mailbox. In the hallway, they had four secure boxes for the post and a trust arrangement amongst the tenants to sort the mail into each other’s boxes. Through his friend, Harper added a fifth and no one seemed to think anything of it, duly dropping any correspondence for the non-existent 6E into his private letterbox. The DVLA was none the wiser, the cars were all registered and not showing as stolen, and he was able to respond to any correspondence. In fact, Harper explained that his friend had long since moved out, but because Harper had kept the key to the front door, he was still able to collect his post.

  Jenny, who knew about the address in Stratford, said nothing. Just let him get it all out. However, she couldn’t help but admire the simplicity of it.

  Once the website was launched, quietly and with no fanfare, not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention, it slowly started to gain an audience. He knew what he was doing probably broke some laws somewhere, and so he hosted it within a bulletproof datacentre in Russia.

  “Bulletproof?” asked Jenny.

  “It means that the hosting company won’t play ball with any law agencies. No police could ever get them to agree to take down my site. Bulletproof.”

  “So the website was a success straight away.”

  “Enough that it covered the initial outlay. I treated it as a proper business, managing the cash flow, only adding new locations as the paying subscriber count increased to match. But within about eight months, I couldn’t keep up with demand. I stopped working for McCarthy and dropped out of college. There was a core audience that would pay for every location, no matter how obscure the content. Even fishcams, would you believe?”

  Jenny had seen the fishcams on the site so yes, she did believe it.

  “I invested a lot of time in securing the site. I realised that it would eventually attract attention from you lot. I just didn’t expect it to stay under the radar for two-and-a-half years.”

  “Where does Kim come into all this?”

  Harper paused in his flow and looked down at his feet. So far he had been happily boasting about his successes. Jenny and Fiona had played up to it, feigning admiration, oohing and aahing at all the right moments. Jenny was surprised at herself. It wasn’t even that hard to be impressed with what he’d done. He’d shown impressive business initiative. If only it hadn’t been completely illegal.

  “Kim and Anna moved into Walter Pike’s property just over eighteen months ago, along with the other four tarts. At first I was just checking the streams, not particularly being nosey. But over time, I found myself captivated by Kim. She’s gorgeous, funny, sincere. And way out of my league. I couldn’t stop watching her.”

  Something about his uncharacteristically tender admission struck a chord with Jenny. Her recollection was hazy, but this wasn’t the first time in recent memory she’d heard a story like this. She said nothing, not wanting to stop him getting everything off his chest.

  “I know what I am, DI Price. At heart, I’m a geek. A nerd. An anorak. I was one right through school and —” he hesitated. “Well, you’ll see my juvenile record soon enough.”

  She had no idea what he was referring to. Earlier in the case she’d requested a search on Kim’s boyfriend, just in case, but nothing had come up on Patrick Harper at all. She made a mental note to look into it.

  He continued. “So, the million dollar question. How does someone like me pull someone like Kim?”

  “With knowledge,” stated Fiona. “Exploiting private knowledge.”

  “In one, DC Jones,” he said, throwing a pointed finger at her as if he was a quiz show host awarding her a prize. “Yes, I studied her and fell even harder for her. Even now, I think she’s wonderful. I love her completely. I’d do anything for her. But I know she’s been having second thoughts about me. I listened to her over the webcam debating her feelings about me with Anna a couple of weeks ago. That cow never liked me, always sticking the knife in.”

  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.”