Second Sister

by Chan Ho-Kei

  “Hello?”

  “Please stop loitering outside my flat, it’s unsightly.”

  “Mr. N—How did you get my number?” she stammered.

  “Trade secret.”

  “Mr. N, please hear me out.” She decided to let the question of the phone number slide. “I’m begging you, I’ll give you anything you want, just find this one name for me. This is the only thing I’ll ever ask you for, please …”

  “You can stop your nonsense. I’m taking your case.”

  “Please think about it, Mr. N, I’ll—what?”

  “Come upstairs. Let’s see if you can afford it.” N hung up.

  Nga-Yee was shocked and overjoyed in equal measure. She wolfed down the rest of the burger and ran straight up to the sixth floor. Before she could ring the doorbell, N had opened the door and was ushering her in. He looked exactly the same as before: a mess. There was a little less stubble on his chin, though, so at least he’d shaved at some point.

  “Mr. N—”

  “N,” he snapped, shutting the door. He had the grumpy expression of a boss giving an order.

  “Of course, whatever you say.” Nga-Yee knew she was bowing and scraping, but by now she’d given up every scrap of dignity. “N, you’re willing to help me find kidkit727?”

  He walked over to the desk and sat down. “Let’s see if you can pay my price.”

  “How much?” Nga-Yee asked, agitated. Leaving the sodden umbrella in the vestibule, she walked over to him.

  “Not much, just $82,629.50.”

  Nga-Yee paused. This was a lot of money, but if he was trying to scare her off, why not go straight to a million or ten million? That would definitely be beyond her reach.

  And why such a specific sum?

  Just as Nga-Yee started to feel that something wasn’t right, an image flashed into her mind.

  “Isn’t that—”

  She’d made a withdrawal from an ATM that morning, and the balance on the screen was …

  “You—How did you—” She stopped herself. It was clear that N had hacked into her bank account. She felt completely naked, as if this vulgar man could see every inch of her.

  She knew how Blondie and Tattoo felt seeing their names on those envelopes.

  “Will you pay?” said N, leaning back in his chair.

  “Yes!” Nga-Yee said without hesitation. Now that he’d changed his mind, she wanted to seize the opportunity before his mood shifted again.

  N grinned and stuck out his right hand. “All right, let’s shake on it. This isn’t a legit business, so don’t expect a contract or anything.”

  Nga-Yee stepped forward and took his hand. Although he was scrawny, his grip was firm. She felt strength pulsing through his hand, and she grew even more certain he’d find the person who’d caused Siu-Man’s death.

  “No deposit. I want the whole amount up front before I start work,” he went on.

  “Fine,” said Nga-Yee quickly.

  “And I want it in cash.”

  “Cash?”

  “Yes, or bitcoin,” he said, gesturing for her to sit by the desk. “But I’m guessing you have no idea what that is.”

  Nga-Yee shook her head. She’d heard that word on the news, but didn’t know what it meant.

  “Do you want the exact amount in cash, even the coins?” she asked.

  “Yes. I won’t accept it if it’s short even one penny.”

  “I understand.” Nga-Yee nodded. “But—”

  “But what? If you’re not happy, the deal’s off.”

  “No. I just wanted to ask why you changed your mind.”

  “Do you know why I chose this as my fee, Miss Au?” he asked.

  Nga-Yee shook her head.

  “Because I wanted to make sure that this case was the most important thing in the world to you. You agreed right away. I’ve had a lot of people come to me, but when I demand their entire life savings, most of them immediately back out. If they won’t even go that far, but they expect me—an outsider—to put myself at risk—”

  “So … these last few days, you were testing me?”

  “Do I look like a Good Samaritan?” N snorted. “I’m willing to take your case because it turns out that this is a lot more interesting than I’d first thought. Of course, if you’d valued your money more than getting an answer, I wouldn’t have helped, no matter how fascinating it was.”

  She was baffled. “It’s interesting?”

  “Yes, very. If it was just a question of tracking someone down the way I described, I wouldn’t touch it, even if you stood in the street so long you started to rot and mushrooms grew on you.” N shoved an empty peanut packet and two beer bottles aside and opened a laptop computer, turning the screen to face Nga-Yee. On it was the Popcorn “Fourteen-Year-Old Slut” post.

  “These are the Popcorn log-in details for that day, with every user’s location.” N clicked on another window and brought up rows and rows of dense type in a spreadsheet.

  “You … you’ve already done it for me?”

  “Young woman, let’s get this clear. I didn’t do anything for you. I was just bored,” he said. “Even if I’d found this person’s name, age, address, job, and a family tree going back eighteen generations, I’d still have no intention of telling you.”

  Nga-Yee stayed silent, though she was mentally cursing him. She’d just have to put up with this a bit longer.

  “This is kidkit727’s IP address”—N pointed at a string of numbers—“212.117.180.21.”

  “What’s IP?”

  N eyed her as if she were some sort of rare animal.

  “You don’t know what an IP address is?”

  “I don’t understand computers.”

  “Primitive,” N sneered. “It stands for Internet Protocol address. To put it simply, it’s the serial number that tells us where someone is when they go online. Just like when you go to the bank or the doctor, you get a queue number. When you connect to the internet, the service provider allocates a unique number to you. When you surf the net, play online games, or chat, that all happens through this number.”

  “Bulletin boards too?”

  “I just said, everyone who goes online gets one of these numbers. If you want to post on a bulletin board, the server—I mean, the ‘machinery’ of the board—will make a note of everyone’s IP address. Which means you can do a reverse search on any post to find out which computer it came from. Do you understand now?”

  Nga-Yee nodded urgently. “So you know where kidkit727 posted that from?”

  N smiled wryly. “Steinsel, a town in the central region of Luxembourg.”

  “Europe?” Nga-Yee was taken aback. “Isn’t kidkit727 in Hong Kong?”

  “This fellow’s pulling a little trick on us.” N pointed at the IP address string on the screen. “This is a relay.” He used the English word.

  “A relay?”

  “In Chinese we’d call it a transfer station. If you want to hide your identity on the internet, the simplest and most effective method is a relay, which connects you to an overseas computer. That computer then makes the connection, which registers as coming from that other computer rather than your true location.”

  “So we just need to find everyone who used the computer in Luxembourg on that day, and we’ll know kidkit727’s actual IP address?”

  N raised an eyebrow. “You’re quick on the uptake. Yes, you’re right, that would work in theory, but not in this case.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve checked, and I’m certain this fellow used more than one relay. This Luxembourg IP has appeared in my files many times. It’s a common relay point, and it belongs to the Tor network, or, in Chinese, ‘The Onion Router.’ ”

  “Onion?”

  “The name comes from the network’s fundamental principles. I won’t go into too much detail, but essentially this is a huge, anonymous network. Quite a few people use it only to access the dark web, those underground sites for things like porn or sellin
g drugs, but Tor was invented mainly so people could cover their digital tracks. The easiest way to use Tor is an independent software called an Onion Browser. This automatically jumps between thousands of relays around the world, so even if I hacked this Luxembourg server and got the records for that day, and if I checked every single IP address of that relay, I ought to be able to find whether the user was in America, France, Brazil, or wherever. I’d have to do this over and over many times before I’d have a chance of finding the actual location. And if a single relay doesn’t have recoverable records, the trail ends there. You might as well search for a needle at the bottom of the ocean.”

  Nga-Yee felt deflated.

  “Having hit a wall with the IP address, I tried searching for other clues. Kidkit727 only registered their account on the day the post went up.” N pointed at a line on the screen. “The email address associated with the account is rat10934@yandex.com—yandex.com is a free Russian email service that doesn’t need phone verification to set it up. I’m sure this was just a burner account.”

  N moved his finger along the kidkit727 line, stopping farther along the grid.

  “More significantly, this kidkit727 very carefully wiped away another piece of information. When a user accesses a website, the browser sends a string of characters that reveals what device is being used—known as the user agent—so the other computer knows if you’re on Microsoft or Apple, a smartphone or a tablet, or even which version of a browser you’re using. For instance, Windows NT 6.1 is the name of the seventh version; OPiOS stands for Opera, the Apple iOS browser; and so on. But in the Popcorn records, there’s only one character where kidkit727’s user agent ought to be.”

  Nga-Yee looked at the box for HTTP_USER_AGENT. All the others were long, complicated strings of letters and numbers, as N had said, but on the line for kidkit727, there was only an X.

  “X?”

  “I’ve never seen such a short user agent. This must have been hand-coded by the user. Some browsers allow their users to change this string of characters to hide the device or browser they’re using. Tor is one of them.”

  “Wait—you said ‘one of them.’ Does that mean he might have used another one?”

  “Miss Au, you still don’t understand.” N leaned back, his fingers interlaced on the desk. “Whether or not he used Tor, this person obviously covered his tracks. Kidkit727 registered as a Popcorn user only on the day the post appeared, and he logged in only once, to post it. There’s no record of any subsequent activity. What’s more, he used a relay to do all this, so there’s no trace of what browser or device he was on. That’s a near-perfect erasure of his identity. If all he wanted was to defend Shiu Tak-Ping, why go to such lengths? He’s saying ‘I’m aware this post will get a lot of attention, and people might come sniffing around, but I don’t want anyone to know who I am.’”

  Nga-Yee finally understood what N was getting at. She couldn’t believe it.

  “The person who wrote this post knew exactly what it would lead to. He must have some sort of background in IT,” N said. “Now the only question is, was this mystery person truly trying to prove Shiu Tak-Ping’s innocence, or was this a campaign of internet harassment targeted at your sister?”

  Thursday, May 21, 2015

  I’m home.

  21:41 ✔

  Dad asked why I was so late. I said was studying with friends.

  21:43 ✔

  He thought I was with you.

  21:44 ✔

  Am I a murderer?

  21:51 ✔

  what nonsense is this

  21:53

  it was her own choice to jump

  21:53

  nothing to do with anyone else

  21:54

  people who make up false accusations like that deserve to die

  21:55

  Are you sure no one will know it’s us?

  22:00 ✔

  not this again

  22:01

  there’s no way

  22:02

  just trust me, i know what i’m doing

  22:03

  even if the police get involved they won’t find anything

  22:04

  Okay.

  22:05 ✔

  But there’s one more thing I need to tell you.

  22:06 ✔

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.

  “Hey, Nam, the boss is watching.”

  At Ma-Chai’s warning, Sze Chung-Nam hastily stuffed his phone back into his pocket.

  “You keep looking at your phone. Flirting with some girl?” Ma-Chai cackled.

  Chung-Nam shrugged, not denying it.

  They were on the fifteenth floor of Fortune Business Center in Mong Kok. Chung-Nam was at a computer, like his coworkers—all four of them. GT Technology Limited consisted of five employees and their boss, squashed into the six hundred square feet of their open-plan office and conference room. The boss didn’t have his own room—but then Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, didn’t even have a desk of his own. According to him, anywhere could be a workspace as long as he had a laptop.

  Of course, their boss, Lee Sai-Wing, was nowhere near Dorsey’s league—just a crappy knockoff. Mr. Lee had big dreams of taking their company international, but his talent, vision, and motivation simply weren’t up to the task. He’d taken over his family business, a textile factory in Mainland China, but after several years of losses he sold it and set up a tech firm in Hong Kong.

  GT Technology Ltd. was about a year old; its core business was a chatboard called GT Net. Chung-Nam and Ma-Chai, the most tech-savvy of the employees, were in charge of setting up and maintaining the site. The others were Thomas, the graphic designer; Hao, board moderator and customer service officer; and Joanne, a recent college grad who was Mr. Lee’s personal assistant. Not long after joining the company, Chung-Nam had begun to suspect that Joanne’s relationship to Mr. Lee might be more “personal” than “assistant.”

  Hao, a couple of years older than Chung-Nam, was more blasé. “Sure, the boss has a quarter century on her, but they’re both single. No harm, no foul. Anyway, it’s nice to have a babe in the office.”

  Chung-Nam agreed but was still unhappy. Joanne was no supermodel, but she was young, and the only woman in the office. Naturally he’d been interested, until finding out from Hao that their boss had got there first. In fact, Mr. Lee had made his move only a month after Joanne started working there. So Chung-Nam had backed off—he wanted to keep this job.

  In the last half year, even with such a small staff, by combining the best elements of social media and chatboards, GT Net had become the territory’s hottest new website. The biggest section was Gossips Trading, which had its own e-currency—G-dollars. Unlike other paid sites, payment was based on ratings and the number of hits. Like the stock market, there were winners and losers—anything to do with celebrities usually exploded, while duller items plummeted or sometimes went for free.

  “Have you two finished testing the video streaming?” Mr. Lee asked, walking up just as Chung-Nam put away his phone.

  “More or less. We’ll be able to release the beta next week,” said Ma-Chai. At the moment, GT supported images, but videos had to be posted via a third-party platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, which meant that users were able to bypass the payment process.

  “This is top priority. Get it done soon.”

  Although GT had been online a few months, there were still many ongoing improvements. Early on, Mr. Lee had named three key elements: secure payment, a deep search engine, and video streaming. Only the third now remained to be completed.

  Chung-Nam was most proud of the search engine, his brainchild. If you looked up a certain male celebrity, for instance, it would also bring up gossip about every woman he’d ever been linked to. In a world where everyone got fifteen minutes of fame, anything as mundane as a restaurant argument or a lover’s tiff on the bus could be filmed and uploaded to GT. Once logged, it would become an indelible, searchable item. With the ri
se of the “human flesh search engine,” in which people’s real-world identities would be exposed after an online mob went searching for them, everyone was afraid of their privacy being infringed upon. Yet this trend could also be weaponized, and those who understood the rules of the game could profit from it.

  “Don’t worry if you need more manpower. If all goes well, we’ll be expanding soon,” said Mr. Lee, slapping Chung-Nam on the shoulder. “I have a meeting now. Show me the streaming prototype tomorrow.”

  As soon as he was gone, Ma-Chai scooted over. “Why did Lee say not to worry about manpower? Did we come into some money?”

  “Don’t you know who he’s meeting?”

  Ma-Chai shook his head.

  “It’s some new program from the Productivity Council. They line up blind dates for venture capitalists and local tech start-ups.”

  “Oh, like 9GAG got twenty million a few years back?”

  “Twenty mil would be great,” said Hao, who happened to be walking by. “We’d be able to move into a better office and hire more mods.”

  “The world is full of VCs with more money than they’ll ever spend. Maybe one or two will be stupid enough to send twenty mil our way.” Chung-Nam grinned. “Of course, whether they’ll ever get it back is another matter.”

  “Ha, so you think GT has no value?” said Hao, pulling a chair over to sit next to them.

  Chung-Nam glanced at Joanne, the boss’s eyes and ears, making sure she was too busy on the phone to eavesdrop. “It’s not profitable, and too easily replaceable. Right now we issue G-dollars for free, so of course people are happy to spend them. Once we start charging cash, who’s going to pony up? Besides, there’s no way to keep the hot gossip exclusive—everything will end up on Popcorn in less than a day.”