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

by Ian Sutherland

  “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.

  CHAPTER 22

  “The odds are hundreds of thousands to one. Sure it has to be yer man.”

  Harry’s voice emanated from the speakerphone in the centre of the oval table within the small meeting room adjoining the major incident room. The core team sat around the table, DCI Raul Da Silva at the head, his hands clasped together in triumph. Flanking him on
either side were DS Alan Coombs and DC Karim Malik, recently back from processing the SEAT Toledo crime scene. DC Fiona Jones sat next to Jenny. DCS McLintock was also conferenced in. She was surprised he hadn’t popped down; he was only in his office three floors above.

  “I agree, Harry,” said Da Silva confidently. “Have we got Ronald Keeble’s address yet?”

  Despite herself, Jenny was almost impressed with Da Silva’s transformation over the course of this week. She’d kept Da Silva afloat during the early stages of the investigation, when it was nigh on impossible to properly prioritise all the different lines of enquiry. But over the last day, as the case started to narrow to its conclusion, he had taken charge, without her help in the background. He’d even started referring to his officers by their forenames.

  “Yes, it’s in Basildon, in Essex,” said Fiona. “Confirmed from the Flexbase staff database as well as the electoral role. He’s twenty-nine, unmarried and lives alone.”

  “He works in the security centre in the Flexbase head office in Docklands. Spends his day watching CCTV,” offered Harry.

  “And his night watching webcams on SecretlyWatchingYou,” added Karim. “Talk about taking your . . . work home.” He just about managed to drop the swear word he’d been about to include.

  Jenny recalled the quiet CCTV operator from her visit to the Flexbase headquarters the other day. It was hard for her to accept that she had only been a couple of feet from the murderer and not realised it. Surely some police instinct should have warned her. And to top it all, he had brazenly operated the CCTV controls to bring up video images of himself walking through Paddington and Watford receptions, dressed in his cycling gear. And his disguise must have had worked because, a day later, she had come eye-to-eye with the killer herself and hadn’t recognised him beneath the cap and sunglasses.

  But it did explain his unexpected but creepy reaction on seeing her again.

  You would have been good. That’s the shame of it.

  Jenny wrapped her arms around herself, shuddering involuntarily.

  “What else do we know about him?” asked DCS McLintock.

  “No criminal record. Born and bred in Essex. Parents live in Southend. He’s been working for Flexbase for nearly three years,” summarised Harry, clearly enjoying his moment in the spotlight, even though he wasn’t in the room. “Before that, yer man worked at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.”

  “Okay, so where is he now?” demanded Da Silva. “Home? Work? Somewhere in-between?”

  Jenny gazed out of the window. It was early evening, dark outside. The rain had started again. She spoke up. “He’ll be arriving home about now. I phoned David Dawson, the Flexbase CEO. He got Magnus Peggler, the CIO, to check the security system. Apparently, Keeble left the office just after 5:00 p.m. It would take him about an hour to get to Basildon from there. He commutes by train.”

  “Okay, I’ll organise a search warrant and clear things with Essex constabulary,” said McLintock from the speakerphone.

  “Three strands,” ordered Da Silva. “Alan, Karim, you’re with me in Basildon. We’ll request local support from Essex as well.”

  Jenny looked up sharply. Why hadn’t he included her in the take down team?

  He continued. “Harry, now that we have our chief suspect, you can finish processing the crime scene at Patrick Harper’s.”

  “I’m yer man, sir,” Harry responded, cheerfully.

  “Jenny…” She clenched her hands. “You’ve got a relationship with Dawson at Flexbase. We need to seize Keeble’s work computer as evidence. He’s bound to have logged into SecretlyWatchingYou from work, as well as home. You head over there. Take Fiona.”

  Jenny felt everyone staring at her, knowing they’d all be shocked that she was being excluded from the arrest. She studied her fingernails. To be given such a trivial task was humiliating. It was Da Silva finally letting everyone know who was in charge. Just as she’d suspected, he would trample over anyone on his rise to the top. She should have left him to drown at the beginning of the week. But no, she’d seen an opportunity to help herself gain more SIO level experience and had grabbed the opportunity. Except the records would show DCI Raul Da Silva as SIO and the arresting officer of a multiple murderer.

  Not DI Jenny Price.

  No one spoke up. If DCS McLintock hadn’t been on speakerphone, perhaps someone would have jumped to her defence.

  “Everyone clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Right, I’m off home then,” said a new, tired-sounding voice from the speakerphone. “I need a shower.”

  Jenny hid a smile. It was Brody, still in Harper’s flat with Harry. He hadn’t been announced when the meeting began.

  “Ah, Mr Taylor,” said Da Silva, somewhat chagrined. “On behalf of the Metropolitan Police, I’d like to say a huge thank you for your invaluable assistance today.”

  * * *

  The windscreen wipers flew side-to-side, mesmerising him. A horn beeped behind and he realised with a start that the lights had changed to green. Brody forced himself to focus and turned into Upper Street. A few hundred yards later, he slowed to a stop in the middle of the road, indicating right, although all the resident’s parking spaces outside his apartment were occupied. He glanced left and saw a car pull away from outside Bruno’s. Fate was telling him something again. He flipped the indicator left, checked his mirror and drove frontwards into the spot.

  His usual seat was taken. He didn’t care. He was too tired for anything. Without the adrenaline-fuelled rush from his earlier exploits, the lack of sleep was getting to him. He was also starving.

  “Ah, Mr Brody, Mr Brody,” greeted Stefan, who then halted mid-track when he saw Brody’s dishevelled state. “Mr Brody, is everything okay?”

  “It’s been a long day, Stefan. I’m tired and hungry, what can you do for me?”

  “Here, sit, sit.” Stefan showed him to a sofa in the centre of the room, facing the back of the coffee lounge. Brody dropped into the sofa and fought the urge to curl up and go to sleep. “We have good panini, Mr Brody. Prosciutto, pepper and basil, or maybe chicken, olive and artichoke?”

  “I’ll have one of each, thanks Stefan.”

  “And for drink?”

  “Surprise me.”

  Brody pulled his tablet PC out of his man bag and lazily connected to his private Wi-Fi network across the road.

  He logged onto CrackerHack. As expected, he was the talk of the town. He read through the posts congratulating him on pwning Crooner42’s site. He began typing, announcing his presence.

  Fingal: Thanks guys.

  He waited, and his screen soon filled with congratulations and questions.

  Mawrpheus: You d’man, Fingal.

  Random_Ness: Great work. How’d you do it? What exploit did you use?

  What exploit indeed. He didn’t answer. Not answering would let the buzz about him grow. Allow his elite status, that had so nearly been ruined, to elevate to an even higher plane.

  Mawrpheus: Where’s Matt_The_Hatter? He’s a bit fucking quiet since he’s been beaten.

  Random_Ness: Yeah, Matty boy. Where are you, man?

  Brody laughed at their bravado now that Matt_The_Hatter had been beaten. Just the other day only he and Doc_Doom had dared to stand up to Matt_The_Hatter. But Brody had discovered something all the others didn’t know. There was no way Matt_The_Hatter would be joining the conversation. He couldn’t. He was currently locked up in a police cell in Holborn Station.

  Patrick Harper had more than one online handle. He’d been building them up over years. Crooner42 was his primary one, but Matt_The_Hatter was one of his others. Earlier in the week, when Crooner42 had initially awarded the work to Matt_The_Hatter, everyone had been shocked, including Brody. Why would passive Crooner42 award the work to the overly aggressive Matt_The_Hatter? But Harper had cleverly awarded it from one of his personas to another. Brody recalled that Matt_The_Hatter had been the first to ask Crooner42 who’d been awarded the work. It had
come across as a self-serving request designed to feed his own ego, but it had been asked to prompt the community to draw the information out, resulting in the predictable conversations that had forced Fingal into a public contest against Matt_The_Hatter.

  Only there had been no contest. Matt_The_Hatter already had full access to SWY. Harper had this as insurance. If, somehow, Fingal got close then Harper would quickly login as Matt_The_Hatter and pwn the site in his name. Either way, Harper would have won, humiliating Brody. Either by Brody failing or by Matt_The_Hatter apparently winning. One of Harper’s handles, Crooner42 or Matt_The_Hatter, would have risen up the ranks of the hacking community while Fingal’s credibility plummeted.

  The fact that Harper’s original request for help on pentesting SecretlyWatchingYou had been sent to him alone had been hidden in the noise that came afterwards, all generated by Harper and the rest of the online rabble. But if Brody hadn’t responded that morning, then he was sure that Harper would have tried again another time.

  And Brody knew now why Patrick Harper had singled him out. Revenge. Brody had once known of him as Patrick Smith, aka Zyr0ss, when he had been a sixteen-year-old hacker behind a gambling scam that Brody had been paid to unmask. Brody had never met him then, or even seen a picture. Which was why Brody still thought it strange that he’d recognised Patrick Harper when he’d first seen him earlier.

  Brody had done his job at the time and provided the information to the gambling site owner, and had never thought about Patrick Smith again. Until today, when he’d looked through Patrick Harper’s computer while hiding in the secret room. Brody had discovered details about his personal history and put it all together. Then he’d found login credentials stored for multiple sites, for both Crooner42 and Matt_The_Hatter, and replayed the chat logs and worked out how Harper had put it all together.