Hacked

by Ray Daniel

“Where did it come from?”

  “It first appeared on the Internet on CapnMerica’s feed.”

  “CapnMerica,” I said. “God, I hate that guy.”

  We crossed the Charlestown Bridge, the GPS lady guiding us.

  “You know, that is what they pictured,” I said pointing at the GPS.

  “Who?”

  “The people who invented the Internet.”

  “They pictured a GPS?”

  “They pictured people being able to access a service like this anywhere.”

  “Did they picture porn?”

  “Back then they would have had to upload their own.”

  “You think he did it?” asked Mel.

  “Did CapnMerica kill Peter and Earl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No idea. Once he put that picture up, anyone could have grabbed it.”

  We bumped over the railroad tracks on Second Street. Mel parked in front of the warehouse, and we walked through the front door into the little office. It looked the same as before: same crappy desk, same creepy paneling. The computer at the desktop sat with its Windows desktop exposed. I tapped a key a few times to keep the screensaver from kicking in, then checked its settings.

  “This is supposed to lock the computer if it’s left alone for a half hour.”

  “How long had it been sitting there?”

  “Less than a half hour.”

  “Duh.”

  “Duh yourself,” I said, disabling the screensaver so the screen wouldn’t lock. “We might want to look at this later.”

  We opened the door to the back room. Slipped inside. Lights were on, nobody was home.

  Mel saw me about to shout Xiong’s name. “Shh!”

  “We don’t want to find him?”

  “We don’t want to be found. I have a bad feeling.”

  We moved to the door leading to the warehouse. Cracked it open. Lights glared over rows of tchotchke-laden shelves. We slipped into one of the rows. A box of South Boston commemorative plates had been pulled off a shelf and smashed to the floor. We moved past it, trying to keep from making crunching noises as we walked over the shattered china. We failed.

  “Shh!” Mel and I hissed at each other. Somewhere in the warehouse metal clanged on metal. Something had touched one of the shelves. A sword? We ran to the end of the row, peeked around the corner at row upon row of shelving. Saw nothing. Stepped out. Mel motioned that she would walk down this row and I should walk down the next.

  “Split up?” I mouthed.

  Mel nodded. Pulled me close, whispered in my ear, “Can’t shoot both of us.”

  Great.

  We walked down the row, me staying level with Mel by watching her through the spaces in the shelves. Walked past the Italian section. We reached the end. Continued our peeking and walking exercise for a few more rows: Portuguese, Spanish, Croatian. Never Chinese. One more row and I hit the Manchester United paraphernalia, then Liverpool, then on to baseball. I stopped us at the next row.

  I whispered to Mel, “I think we’re alone.”

  “Can’t assume.”

  Mel took the next row, I took the one after that. That was when I saw it.

  This row had holiday lawn ornaments. I could tell because several pink flamingos wearing Santa hats lay in the row. Several had their little Santa-hat heads cut off. Farther down the row, a giant inflatable snowman lay deflated in a pile. The pile formed a puffy barrier across the row.

  I shouted, “Over here!” to Mel. Ran down the row to the deflated snowman. Pulled at the material as a shadow fell across me. I looked up, expecting Mel. Instead, I stared down the barrel of a black gun, its barrel rock solid.

  Behind the gun stood Jael Navas.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Mel rounded the corner, gun drawn. “Drop the gun!”

  Jael didn’t waver, didn’t jump. “What are you both doing here?”

  “Drop the gun!”

  Jael executed a quick movement and suddenly the gun had disappeared, probably into her handbag. She raised her hands, looked at Mel’s gun, then pointedly at Mel. Mel kept her gun out, finger along the barrel.

  I said, “Can we stop now?”

  “Why is she here?” asked Mel.

  “More important question,” I said. “Who is that?”

  A body lay outlined under the snowman. I grabbed the snowman fabric, pulled.

  Xiong’s head appeared. Then the rest of him.

  “Shit,” Jael said.

  SIxty

  We replaced the snowman fabric and stepped away, careful to avoid the pool of blood.

  Mel said to Jael, “You know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know him?”

  Jael took a deep breath, looked back toward the body. “Football.”

  “Football?”

  “You call it soccer.”

  “How do you know him from soccer?”

  “He was a midfielder. He was quite good.”

  “You play soccer?”

  “Striker.”

  “How did you wind up playing soccer with a Chinese spy?” I asked.

  “It is a friendly game.”

  “That doesn’t really answer the question,” Mel said. “How did you even find each other?”

  “He texted me that he was in danger,” Jael said.

  “No, I mean to play—”

  “Me too,” I said. “He asked for help.”

  “Wait a minute. I’m still trying to figure out how they know each other,”Mel said.

  “Soccer,” said Jael.

  “You just randomly play soccer with a Chinese spy?”

  “He said one of his assets had gone mad,” Jael said to me.

  “Assets?”

  “Someone he had recruited. Someone he worked with.”

  “What was he working on?”

  “I do not know.”

  “How can you not know?”

  “We never talk about our work.”

  I said, “You never talk shop at the soccer game?”

  “Correct.”

  “Is this a spy soccer game?”

  “If it were a spy soccer game, I would not admit it.”

  “So it is a spy soccer game.”

  “He must not have expected to be killed,” Jael said. “Or he would not have met the person.”

  Sirens sounded in the distance, a response to Mel’s call for backup. I needed to check something on the Internet. Pulled out my phone … Friggin’ flip phone! Dialed Xiong’s number.

  An old fashioned ringer sounded out in the office. We followed the sound to drops of blood and followed the blood to a closet. Opened the door. Full of computer servers, the phone rested on the floor, next to Xiong’s hand.

  “He must have run in here to hide,” Mel said.

  I fiddled with the door. “It had no lock.”

  “Shitty hiding place,” said Mel.

  The servers blinked at us from their rack.

  “Why would he have these?” I wondered. “Everybody uses the cloud.”

  “Except spies,” said Mel. “How is it that you play soccer with spies?”

  “I do not.”

  “You just said you did!”

  I said, “She told you that if she played soccer with spies, she would not admit it.”

  “I swear, if I have to arrest you, Jael, I will. How do you know him?”

  Jael pursed her lips. “Let us leave the crime scene.”

  We walked out into the front office just as Everett police came through the door, followed by EMTs and a medical examiner. Mel pointed them in the right direction and they headed out.

  “Out with it. Soccer,” Mel said.

  “Do you have gloves?” I as
ked Mel. “So I can use the computer and not leave prints.”

  “No.”

  Jael reached into her handbag of horrors and pulled out gloves. “They are latex. Are you allergic?”

  “No.” I took the gloves, donned them, and started poking around Xiong’s computer.

  “Tell me about soccer,” said Mel.

  Jael said, “You are new to this job.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m twenty-five. Can we get past that?”

  “It is a lonely life.”

  I looked up from the computer. “But you’re retired.”

  “I have a set of skills and some enemies. It is best to stay … disconnected.”

  “So you play soccer?” asked Mel.

  “Do you think Xiong’s government will admit his role here?” Jael asked.

  I paused, thinking about it.

  “They will not. They will say they have never heard of him,” she said.

  “But we have pictures of him in uniform.”

  “It will not matter. No government admits the existence of people like Xiong, or like me.”

  “How does soccer help that?” Mel asked.

  I said, “They’re in the same boat.” I opened pastebin.com. Copied a text file to it.

  “Yes,” said Jael.

  “But don’t you spy on each other?”

  “We do not talk about work,” Jael said. “And I am retired.”

  “This doesn’t—”

  “There it is,” I said, pointing at the screen.

  “What?” asked Mel.

  “The senator’s video. Right on the desktop.”

  “So Xiong had it after all.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t explain how he got it. I’ve looked through his files here and on the servers. There’s no evidence that he knew how to set up a phishing scam and trick Kamela into giving him the password. There’s not even any evidence that he uploaded it anywhere.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that he had a helper. Maybe this mad asset.”

  “How will you find him?”

  I pointed at the file on pastebin.com. “I’ll crack these passwords, log in as one of these people.”

  It was a short list of usernames: xiong, farli, sarah, roger, chao. “I’ll bet one of these people is our asset.”

  We walked back out to the warehouse. The medical examiner called us over. She had pulled back the snowman shroud revealing Xiong’s headless body, or bodiless head, depending on how you looked at it.

  “Who found the body?” she asked.

  Mel pointed at me.

  I stuck out my hand. “I’m Tucker.”

  The medical examiner waved her gloved hand, pointing at the blood on the fingers.

  “Right,” I said and converted my handshake to a little wave of my own.

  She said, “I’m Maura Williamson.” Maura stood about five feet tall, brown hair, blue eyes, delicate gloved hands. “So you found him?”

  I nodded.

  “What happened here?” Mel asked.

  “There was definitely a fight,” Maura said, pointing at the flamingo. “I guess he was using that as a shield.”

  “How did he get those cuts on his chest?” Mel asked.

  “I’ve got a better question for you.”

  “What?”

  “Where’s his hand?”

  “It’s in the server closet in the other room,” I said.

  “With his cell phone,” Mel said.

  “He called for help?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he ran out here,” Maura pointed around, “and started grabbing things to block the sword.”

  “Sword?” asked Mel.

  “For sure. Probably the same one that killed those kids.”

  “Same person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “Different MO. None of those kids had defensive wounds. None of them were attacked like this. They were all killed in their homes and were near a doorway. Someone had knocked on the door, stepped inside, swung the sword. This guy had warning.”

  I asked Mel, “Could you check 4chan for me?”

  “Already did,” she said.

  “And?”

  “No pictures of a decapitated Xiong.”

  “So this wasn’t a planned killing.”

  “No.” Mel tapped at her smartphone, placed a call. “Kamela, this is Special Agent Hunter. We’ve secured the senator’s video … ”

  I drifted away from the phone call, walked over to Jael, touched her hand. “Are you okay?”

  Jael crouched next to Xiong. Closed her eyes, sighed, looked up at me. “He tried to stop the killer.”

  Was that a glistening in her eye?

  “I know,” I said.

  “Now more people will die.”

  Sixty-One

  There is no technology, no matter how wonderful, no matter how useful, no matter how frivolous, that cannot be turned to evil. Atomic energy can be used for bombs, a video can be used for blackmail, a chia pet can be used as a club. Or in my case, graphics cards intended to make video games go faster can be used to crack passwords.

  Contrary to the claims of TV, encrypted information cannot simply be decrypted by wicked smart hackers. “This is military-grade encryption. It will take me twenty minutes to hack,” is one of the stupidest things you’ll hear during an evening of television. Given a file full of usernames and encrypted passwords like the one I got from Xiong Distribution, the only way to crack the passwords is by guessing. Lots of guessing. That’s where my massively powerful guessing engine comes in. You guess a password, encrypt it, and see if it matches the gobbledygook in the password file.

  I had created the guessing engine for a start-up called PassHack, whose mission was to show you that your weak password could be hacked. Turned out that nobody wanted to know that their password could be hacked, and PassHack went out of business. But I had kept the password hacking engine. Sort of a combination souvenir and nod to the same technology-hoarding tendencies that cause me to save old power cables. The thing was a little old: it could only make a billion guesses a second, but it still had some game. With that kind of speed I could guess every possible seven-character password, then every password that had ever been cracked, then all the words in the dictionary with the Os converted to zeros, etc.

  I sat in my office, the last of my Green Monsta IPAs at my side, and fired up my password cracker. In a few minutes it had started to work on the Xiong password file.

  My stupid flip phone rang. No idea who it was; I hadn’t bothered to load names into the thing.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Adriana. Is Maria with you?”

  My brain stalled. “What?”

  “Is Maria with you?” she repeated.

  “With me?”

  “Maria’s taken off.”

  “Taken off?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “She ran away?”

  “Catherine and I were having a fight, then we called her and she wasn’t in her room.”

  “Maybe she went for a walk.”

  “She’s ten.”

  “Ten-year-olds can walk.”

  “We’ve looked all over the neighborhood.”

  “Did you try calling her phone?”

  “She left her phone here. Why would she do that?”

  “She knows we have a GPS on it.”

  “Dammit!”

  “Did you check Caffe Vittoria?”

  “Of course we did!”

  “Don’t yell at me. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Do you think this has to do with #TuckerGate?”

  I turned the question over. Internet trolls have done some horrible thi
ngs, driving people to suicide, forcing them to move, enticing them into sexual liaisons. But I’ve never heard of them kidnapping a kid as part of an online war. Still.

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  “You have to do something!” She hung up.

  Do something.

  I opened Twitter and looked at #TuckerGate. The same long stream of vitriol and death threats scrolled by. I didn’t even process it. Some people seem to be able to make an online fight their raison d’être, waking up every morning ready to do online battle for some obscure issue that has taken hold of their minds.

  But I can’t. I burn out. The arguments, counter-arguments, threats, insults, memes, and unfiltered meanness rub a raw spot in my brain, raising a blister then forming a callus. After that, I don’t care anymore.

  I skimmed the scummy discourse looking for any mention of Maria. Headed over to 4chan, and, eyes half shut, ran through the top pictures. I threw together combinations of #TuckerGate and “Maria” and did searches.

  Came up empty.

  As far as I could see, the writhing mass of trolls was still sure that I was a murderer, perhaps even a mass murderer, but if they had taken their hatred out on Maria, nobody thought to mention it.

  What now? Wander the streets yelling her name? Ask these morons for help? Wouldn’t that be a heartwarming end to this tale? Internet trolls discovering their inner humanity by helping their target find a runaway girl.

  Fat chance.

  The rage was back: churning stomach, twitching hands, the fervent wish that CapnMerica would try to arrest me right now so I’d have a reason to pound him into pulp. I sat at my kitchen nook and looked at Click and Clack, who ignored me.

  Who has fucking crabs as pets?

  Dark images of a smashed crab tank flashed through my mind, followed by horror, guilt, and self-loathing. The hamster wheel in my mind cranked and clattered, spinning in a loop of abuse, slander, and decapitated corpses. I looked up at my cabinet full of whiskey. Pregame drinking? Maybe sit alone in my kitchen and drink rye whiskey out of a jelly jar? I could just flat out declare myself an alcoholic.

  Fuck that. I hate meetings. If I was going to drink, I’d do it in a bar. Bukowski with its craft beer, loud music, and twenty-something vibe would do nicely. I grabbed my coat, opened my newly installed front door.

  Maria sat on the steps in my hallway, chin in her hands. She looked up at me with red eyes.