by Sijal Aziz
“Well this is interesting”
Derek, Jeff and the captain asked in unison, “What?”
Kate turned around to look at them, “His files on this laptop, the files that I can see, have taken up 80GB space, while the hard disk shows that 2 terabytes have been used”
“What does that mean?”, the captain asked.
“It means that Cooper has either hidden the files, which I suspect he hasn’t, or he has partitioned the hard drive and hidden his files in another operating system within this laptop”
“Good work! Carry on”, the captain said to Kate and then asked, “Derek where are you on the suspects that Alexander Cooper is supposedly working with?”
Derek hadn’t even started working on that yet, “I am sorry captain I will start on it right away”
“What the hell are you waiting for? Get on it now!”
“Yes, captain”, Derek said getting off the chair.
Captain Todd went back to his room and started pacing there. Captain Todd was in a dilemma. As per procedure he was supposed to inform the FBI about Simon Carter and also report a possible terrorist threat.
But he did not want the FBI to steal his limelight. He had to put up with Markus nonsense for this long and now when the pieces were finally falling into place, it was him who deserved all the credit. He thought about the situation from every angle and then made a call to his friend special agent Fisher at the FBI.
“Hi there, Fisher. What’s going on?”
“Hi Todd, nothing much, just reached home. Have to work long hours nowadays because of the kickoff event for the drone policing software”
“It’s big, isn’t it. Half of my team is to be deputed there on the day. I don’t know how I will handle everything. We are already down to 50% of workforce because of the budget cuts and the hiring freeze”
“Same here!”
“So, what made you call?”, Fischer had known Todd for over a decade now and he knew that Todd will never call him for just a chit chat.
“Nothing important, just wanted to catch up. How is Jonathan?”
“I do not know. The son of a bitch is on vacation till next week. The lucky bastard selected a good time to go on a vacation. When he will return it will be back to normal working hours”
Captain Todd got the information he needed, “Ok. Talk soon”
Special Agent Fisher put the cellphone back into his pocket, wondering what Todd had wanted.
Special agent Jonathan Kinley worked in the FBI’s cybercrime branch.
Captain Todd, dialed Jonathan’s number knowing beforehand that it would be switched off. Jonathan never kept his phone on during his days off, fearing that if it was on, the bureau will call him back again. Captain Todd called him twice and left a voice, “Jonathan, this is captain Todd, something important has come up. You need to get in touch with me as soon as you hear this”
Relieved with what he had done, captain Todd then sent an email to FBI’s generic email address and cc’d special agent Jonathan Kinley. In the email he briefly mentioned Simon Carter and another case, which he wrote he could not discuss over the phone or email.
He knew Jonathan wouldn’t check his email until he was back, and it always took FBI at least two working days to read and respond to the emails sent to their generic email address.
Once done, captain Todd congratulated himself on his thoroughness and foresight and turned his computer off. If Markus and Hawkins failed to identify the terrorists working with Cooper before they launched the attack, there will be hell to pay.
If they did manage to capture the terrorist, Captain Todd will be famous, but there would have been hell to pay, once it was established that he hid things from the FBI. So, he had to make sure that his call records and email records showed that he did indeed contact the FBI. He just hoped that Markus delivered.
CHAPTER 31
“Pat, I need detailed records on Cooper’s travels. I want to know where he has gone in the past four years, what he has done there, what activities he has taken part in, who he has met and which people he has come across more than once. Start with the FAA first. Once you have his records, I want you to focus on Iraq”, Derek said looking at his watch. The event inauguration seemed to be approaching at sonic speed.
“On it, detective”
Pat went over the phone and started making calls.
“Carson, I want you to check the financials for Cooper and his company. Is he paying anyone by going out of his way, which charities is he or Kent and Cooper donating to, which countries are those charities located in? I want you to focus specially on Iraq”
“I will need a lightning cable and another laptop, Jeff. The laptop should have assembly, Unix, C++ and python compilers in it”, Kate said hoping that Jeff had something like that lying around.
“We have just the thing”
Jeff went out of the room almost running and came back in less than a minute.
“Here you go”, Jeff looked like a little kid, looking up to his mentor.
Kate hooked up the lightning cable into the laptop Jeff had brought and then to Cooper’s laptop.
She went into the Unix mode in Jeff’s laptop and started trying to break into the hard drive on the Mac. It was not that simple.
She went back to the assembly compiler and wrote a short program. Hoping that it would get her into Mac’s hard drive. It did, the hard disk was divided into two partitions of 2 terabytes each. The first partition contained apple IOS system files and harmless files from the office, some music files, pictures and movies.
The second partition contained Linux operating system which was built upon Unix programming language.
Unix had been in existence since the mid 90s. Kate’s very first phishing software was developed in Unix. Unix was a great language offering a wide variety of options.
The problem was that if a programmer was good at Unix, it would be virtually impossible to go into his system. This was a challenge Kate lived for. Her first order of the day was to break into the root. If she could go into the root, she would have access to all the files. The root access was protected by a password.
With Jeff looking at her screen intently, Kate wrote a 7 page code, burnt it on a CD and booted the system through the CD. She then went to the linux system files, made a directory, saved the login files in the directory and booted the system again.
Then she went straight into her file and saw the password file there. She deleted the X in front of the password file and booted the system again. She was in, the system did not ask her for a password. She explored the files that Cooper wanted to hide from the viewer. Besides the drone policing software, the laptop had pictures of Jasmine Al Abdali. She was a beautiful woman. There were files on some of the students that Alexander Cooper had provided scholarship to.
“Derek, I am in his system, but what I do not understand is why he will keep the files of students he had provided scholarship to, hidden”
Derek walked over to Kate and looked at the scholarship students’ files, Kate continued, “There are fifty students he has provided scholarship to in the past six months. They belong to different countries like Iraq, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Myanmar and even United States”
“Let’s take a look at it. Can you please print all the files?”, Derek asked.
“Each student file contains 5 pages. We are talking about 250 pages. Do we have the time to go through all of them?”
“We can try, we are only 18 hours away from the event so we should investigate everything we can”
Kate gave the print command.
“Jeff, I want you to bring around 20 empty folders from the storage”, Derek asked Jeff.
Once Jeff had brought the folders, Derek said, “Jeff and Carson I know Cooper will not be working with any students from the arts, history, economics or medical field. Regarding the remaining scholarships please segregate them all based on which country the students have applied from. Meanwhile Pat, I want you to cross check C
ooper’s visits to the countries where the students are from. If he has travelled once or more than once to any of these countries where the students are from, mark those files as important.
There was a chorus of okays from the room.
Kate found a version of the drone policing software in the hidden files as well.
“I have found another version of the drone policing software in the hidden drive. It is much better than the one at the office.
Instead of having a backdoor it is designed to access the backdoor and then take over. It had the ability to command an unlimited number of drones into doing anything that they were equipped to do including shooting with live ammunition. Kate shuddered at the thought of hundreds of drones attacking the people”, Kate said out loud.
Everyone stopped what they were doing for a minute and then went back to work.
There was a WhatsApp messenger on the laptop. It was not pin protected and there was nothing on the surface that would make anyone suspicious. Just normal everyday conversation between Kent and Cooper top management and Alexander Cooper and some government people.
“Derek there is also a WhatsApp messenger on his computer. But from what I can see so far, the messages are all related to office work”
“Please go through them in detail and let me know if something pops out”
Pat, Carson and Jeff cleared one side of the table and started segregating the student data as per Derek’s instructions. Once there were done and Carson had verified the student’s country of origin with Alexander Cooper’s travels, they were down to five potential suspects. Two were from Iraq, one from Afghanistan, one from Bangladesh and one from Myanmar.
Derek picked up a file and read it, “It will take weeks to get data on these five. No judge in their right state of mind will issue a warrant for these students’ financial and phone records based on the hunch that we have. We need to narrow this list down somehow in”, Derek looked at the watch on his wrist, “under 18 hours.”
Captain Todd appeared again, “What is the update?”
“We are working on it, captain, but we may need to involve the FBI since we don’t have enough resources at hand”
“I have already contacted the FBI and from the looks of it, they may not be able to assist us, so everything has to be done by your team. What’s wrong? You cannot do it? You have two computer experts, and in the words of Jeff here and you, one of them is top notch. You have two detectives in your team along with you and I can assign you Finn as well, if you want”
“Captain, we have narrowed down our list of suspects from 50 to 5. But even 5 is a lot, given that we have only 18 hours to sort through them”
Captain Todd’s face became red and he was about to storm down on detective Derek when Kate suddenly spoke up, “This is strange”
Captain Todd glared at Kate and asked, “What?”
“Well, Cooper has two games installed on the hidden drive in his laptop”
“So, what? The man liked to kill his free time playing games. What’s wrong with that?”, captain Todd retorted.
“Nothing should be wrong with this, except I do not know how and when he would find the time to do it with all the coding, running an office, official events, meetings, travelling etc. and also why he needs to keep these in the hidden drive?”
Derek and captain walked and stood behind Kate’s seat and looked at the laptop screen.
Jeff got up and moved over too, “Which games?”
Kate turned to him and said, “Counter Strike Global Offensive and Dota 2”
“Hmm. These games sure do take up a lot of your time if you are playing them for real. Also, Counter Strike Global Offensive is a game in which you have two teams; terrorists and counter terrorists. I wonder which team Cooper joined”, Jeff quipped.
Kate smiled but captain Todd and Derek kept a grim face.
“How do we know if he was playing them for real?”, Derek asked.
“We can check his game pages on both these games to check which level he is at and for how long he was playing these games”, Jeff said excitedly.
Jeff sat down next to Kate. Kate slid over Alexander Cooper’s laptop to Jeff. Captain Todd and Derek sat down beside Jeff as well.
“Well, according to the data sheet, he had played Dota 2 for a total of 90 hours in the past one month. That’s a lot time for someone who doesn’t have any time to spare. But what is strange is that he is still on the basic level. With 90 hours in the games, a kid could have moved over to 3rd of maybe 4th level”
“So, he is bad at playing games”, Captain said to no one in particular.
“Maybe but let’s check into this further”, Kate said.
“Ok. Go on”, the captain said.
Jeff looked at the game page for Counter Strike Global Offensive, the other game that Alexander Cooper was playing, “Hmm. Same thing, he has played the game for a total of 86 hours in the past 30 days and he is still on Silver I, which is the basic level for an entry level player”
“So, what had he been doing with these games?”, Derek asked out loud to no one in particular.
On a hunch, Kate asked Jeff, “If I am not wrong these are MOBA games, right?”
Jeff looked at Kate and nodded.
“What’s MOBA?”, the captain asked.
“MOBA stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Which means that Cooper wasn’t playing these games alone, he must have been playing these games online with other players he didn’t know or with someone he knew. Jeff can you check his chat records?”
Jeff’s eyes brightened up as he knew what Kate was up to.
He opened the chat records, “Cooper with the gamertag ‘Cronus’ has been chatting with ‘Coldfeet’ in Dota 2 and ‘Soreluck’ in Counter Strike Global Offensive. His chat duration is almost as long as the games play history, meaning he chatted all through the duration of the games he played. The bad news is, he used the voice chat”
“What does that mean?”, the captain asked impatiently.
Kate looked at Jeff, who was happy to let Kate explain, “That means that Cooper was neither using his phone nor his email but was using the games voice chat facility to plan his big strike and there is no way we can know what they discussed”
“That is just great”, Derek said and slumped in the chair next to Kate.
“What are we supposed to do now?”, Captain Todd said.
“You know I have been thinking ever since I started working on his laptop, that everything was too easy. I mean Linux is easy to break into if you are not careful, the hard disk partition was easy to spot. He wanted us to find these things, because he knew we wouldn’t be able to make a case against him based on this.
Now all we have is that he gives scholarships to deserving students, plays games and has his dead wife’s pictures.
There is nothing here about where and when he intends to strike. The man is a genius”, Kate said exasperated.
“Does the man inspire you?”, Derek asked.
“He does inspire me but in a creepy murderous kind of way”
“That is good, now we know that Ms. Hawkins is a fan of a sociopath. Now what can we do?”
Kate thought for a moment and then said, “Well we have a list of over 5 students who we have shortlisted. We cannot look into all of them. We have two players here, who, we believe, are working with Cooper”
Captain Todd again cut Kate off, “How on earth do we know that these two, whoever they are, were working with Alexander Cooper?”
Kate answered patiently, “Because he went out of his way to hide the games and the chats. May I continue?”
Captain Todd gave a go ahead to Kate with the wave of a hand.
“So, as I was saying, we can now narrow our search to two people”, Kate touched the screen with her finger, “These two, he has been having chat with”
“But how do we know their real names? They are under their game handles?”, Derek asked.
“We are in luck. We have Cooper’s l
aptop. They are his online friends. We can get their public IPs as soon as they join and then you can get a subpoena for their physical address from the ISP and their other details once we know their IPs.
If their names match the names on our shortlisted students list. We will know who we are working against”, Kate replied.
“Wouldn’t they be suspicious, when they see Cooper online but not voice chatting with them”, Jeff asked.
“We’ll give them a message of some sort like ‘proceed as planned, no more communication now’ so that they are not suspicious”, Derek proposed.
“Makes sense, Jeff can you please keep an eye on the players and see when they are online. I will try to grab their IPs as soon as you invite them to a private chat lobby”, Kate said.
“Sure”
“What about Cooper’s travels? What have you found so far?”, Captain Todd asked detective Derek.
“Well, sir, Pat and Carson have made a timeline of his stay in foreign countries. But all the material we could find is on what a great philanthropist he is. During his various stays in Iraq and other countries, he has attended charity events, donated money for rebuilding Iraq, provided scholarships to kids and last but not the least set up 20 schools there.
Simon Carter is the only one who says he paid him to kill Kate and Simon Carter is a sick murderer who never got paid by Cooper since he did not complete his job. Instead of killing Kate, he ended up murdering Matthew Raymond.
So, we will not have any money trail linking the two. His burner phone, which he just bought four days ago, shows that he called Simon Carter’s number five times, but I am sure if we put him on the stand for this, his lawyers will get him off. So, we have nothing on him except that he tried to kidnap Kate. The only way we can nab him now is through catching his cronies in the act”
“Ok, so we all wait until they are online”
“I can start writing a code on his laptop to grab the players public IP addresses”, Kate said and started writing the code.
In about 15 minutes Kate was done with the code. She ran the file to check if there were any bugs. There were none. She executed the file and waited for the players to join so that she could get their IP address.
