The Schwarzschild Radius

by Gustavo Florentin

  First, she started CommView, a network packet sniffer and analyzer which captured packets of wireless information. CommView and Aircrack-ng were open source and downloadable off the web. She selected Summit network and started capturing data packets. When the packet collection completed, she launched Aircrack-ng. This ran a cracking program on the data packets. After breaking the encryption key, Rachel launched Internet Explorer and entered the standard IP address for a Netgear router. The login screen didn’t come up, so it wasn’t a Netgear.

  She disconnected and repeated the process with the other two networks. Only one was a Netgear MRE814. That meant Icarus was Massey’s network. She connected to Icarus and brought up the router login screen. The factory ID and password didn’t work. She ran John the Ripper password cracker and thirteen minutes later it gave her VICTORY1. She enabled remote management and gave access to “everyone.” Now she’d be able to access the router from any PC on the web. It took three hours and twenty minutes. Just past two in the morning, Rachel took off for Columbia. At this hour, there was plenty of street parking.

  The next day, she plugged the flash drive into her laptop and checked her emails. Yes! The IP addresses had been mailed to her. She selected Dr. Sartorius’ IP address and launched the SubSeven client on her laptop. If his college notebooks were so twisted, he must have something incriminating on his hard drive. As the screen populated, her pulse quickened. She browsed through directory after directory, finding medical and patient records. Billing records. There was no porn.

  She searched again. Same thing. There were dual two-hundred Gig hard drives. She performed a “dir” search on all directories, looking for anything with “girls,” “fuck,” and “sex.” Nothing. She repeated this on the other drive. She searched on “jpg,” “gpf,” and “bmp” extensions. There were only stock Windows images such as flowers and wallpaper. According to the results of this search, there were no photos on this machine. It was risky being in graphic mode as the user might realize there was an ongoing attack, so she marked five large directories for download and started copying data to her own laptop.

  The data transfer speed was slow and took three hours to complete. When she opened up the downloaded files, there were still no photos of any kind. The few text files had nothing significant―no perverted notes, no twisted commentary. Was her firewall preventing her from seeing the files? She disabled it and tried again. Same thing.

  She penetrated Perlman’s machine. There were a lot of docs in Hebrew. Some regular porn and a lot of business stuff. There were lists of girls who worked at Pleasure Palace with their personal information and pictures. Nothing else. She tried connecting to Armand Greyson’s PC, but there was no response. This was unbelievable. Was it possible that all this was for nothing? There was no more time to figure this out. She needed Joules’ help, but how could she ever explain what she was doing in the homes of these men? She’d die of shame. It was decision time. 3:00 p.m. and Joules would be leaving Cooper Union to get back to the Island within a few minutes.

  Rachel lay in her bed with her face buried in her pillow. She had betrayed Sonia and abased herself to no purpose. How could so much effort yield so little result? She couldn’t accept it. All she had done had to count for something. She picked up her cell phone.

  “It’s me. I need your help.”

  et’s start from the beginning,” said Joules, tossing his knapsack on the bed. “You’re hacking into a bunch of machines because you think one of them might contain something about Olivia?”

  “Right.”

  “How did you decide on these particular targets?”

  “Let’s just say I was led to them by someone.”

  “And how did you get their IP addresses?”

  “I installed a RAT on their computers.”

  “As in Remote Administration Tool.”

  “Right.”

  “Haven’t used that term in a while. You had physical access to these machines?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you were in their homes?”

  This was the question she had dreaded. There would be a price to pay for Joules’ help. “I was. And I’m convinced there has to be child porn of runaway kids on at least one of these machines, but I can’t find it.”

  “It could have been deleted.”

  “Don’t even say that. Give me another outcome.”

  “The files could be encrypted.”

  “Elaborate.”

  “There are any number of ways to encrypt data―text data and graphic data. Text can be embedded in photographs and photos can be embedded in other photos. It may be that the files are unscrambled before every use. This way, even if the PC is confiscated, incriminating files won’t be seen.”

  “Joules, you have no idea what I did to get near these PCs. The men who own them are evil. I’m convinced one of them knows where my sister is. At least one of them knew the Schrodinger girl who was found dead. I need help.”

  “How big are the data directories?”

  “Combined? Hang on, I wrote them down. Fifteen Gig, twenty Gig―I guess about forty Gig.”

  “How much room do you have on your hard drive?”

  “Um. About one-ninety left. I downloaded some directories and it took like three hours. This could be really time-consuming. Can you―stay over?”

  “Let me take a look.”

  Joules went through the directories that Rachel had downloaded. There was nothing incriminating on any of them.

  “It could be child porn, but I’m looking for anything else―a diary, an email―anything that would point to Olivia’s whereabouts. I know she was in the homes of these men. I found photos.”

  “Who were these guys?”

  Please don’t go there. “Joules. I don’t want to get into it too much. It’s really unpleasant. I just need you to help me get these files. These men knew her. That much I know.”

  Joules connected to Dr. Sartorius’ PC.

  “Bit Torrent.”

  “Huh?”

  “Bit Torrent. It’s a program that takes pieces of files downloaded from several peer-to-peer servers and assembles them into a coherent image. None of the contributing machines has a full copy.” Joules went into a mind-numbing explanation of the protocol.

  “Joules, Joules―I grasp the concept. Can you assemble the files?”

  “It looks like they’re already assembled. We need the decrypt key, and most people would keep that somewhere on the PC.” He found ten password-protected directories. John the Ripper broke the passwords and, sure enough, the decrypt key was in one of them.

  Two hours later, he had over twenty images of child porn belonging to Sartorius.

  “The PC I really need to get into is Massey’s, the priest who runs Transcendence House where Olivia tutored.”

  “What was the problem accessing it?”

  “It wasn’t responding. Must be turned off.”

  “SubSeven will alert you when he comes online. There’s a setting for that.”

  Joules continued downloading the directories. An alert went off. Massey was online.

  “Wait, abort this and get into Massey’s machine,” said Rachel.

  “We’ll connect in command line mode. Later, we’ll take a chance and go in via graphic mode. Meanwhile, we download everything we can.”

  After downloading dozens of directories, Joules connected in graphic mode.

  He scanned the directories for the ones with the most potential. After ten minutes of searching, he clicked on an executable file called fun.exe. Two full minutes passed, then the screen briefly said, verifying login ID and password, even though they had entered none.

  A menu appeared.

  YOUNG ASIAN

  PRETEEN

  ROMPER ROOM

  Joules chose Romper Room.

  “Everything’s slowed to a crawl. The response time is horrendous all of a sudden,” said Joules.

  “Why?”

  “Not sure. The download speed should be u
niformly fast or slow. I see from his Programs menu, he’s using photo stacking software. It allows you to layer multiple images onto a single file and the outer layer would be something harmless like a family photo. It’ll simplify matters if we can get a hold of the same stacking software to reverse the process. We can probably download a trial version or find a Bit Torrent of a pirated copy. He’s also using encryption.”

  “How can you tell?” she asked.

  “File size gives it away. Any kind of encryption adds to the size of a file due to the scrambling algorithm that has to be added. If you see a text file and it’s two gig, you know something’s wrong. When you consider that you could put Moby Dick in a text file of one and a half megabytes, something which is a thousand or two thousand times bigger can’t be a real document. A photo could easily be several gigabytes in size. A video file like an .avi file could be much bigger.

  “He’s using Arcsoft Photo Studio―that’s the photo stacking software. I’ll download a demo copy from their website,” he said.

  “This’ll probably go on for a few hours. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

  “You better stay―it’s like two a.m. Too late to take the train. I have an extra pillow and toothbrush and stuff. If you don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”

  After Joules was settled in for the night, Rachel went down the hall to brush her teeth and change into a sweat suit. When she returned, she couldn’t help feeling a sense of accomplishment that she was finally in a position to complain about a man’s snoring.

  She was wiped out, but there was one more duty to attend to. Achara. She logged onto Yahoo Messenger and waited.

  U there? PLEASE BE THERE TONIGHT.

  I’m here, replied Rachel. She looked at her watch. 3:05 a.m.

  Where have you been??? I thought you forget about me.

  Really sorry. I went away to get the money for you. Your passport arrived, wrote Rachel.

  O good. Such good news. :)

  And I have the money too.

  How much?

  $3,222 USD

  You so good. Cam?

  Still no cam, said Rachel.

  Rachel accepted Achara’s cam invite.

  The girl had visibly aged since she last saw her. The reflection of the computer screen on her face gave her a stark paleness. But there was something Rachel hadn’t seen before. A smile.

  Where you go?

  I had to go far away to get the money, wrote Rachel.

  I will make it all up to you. I know I trouble for you.

  Don’t say that. U r my sister.

  OK. We have to hurry. This Friday they move us, Achara wrote.

  Give me the address again so I can overnight you the passport.

  OK I have.

  An address appeared.

  Send to that address and they will get to me.

  You can trust them? asked Rachel.

  She my aunt. She won’t betray.

  I’ll send the money by Western Union tomorrow. You’ll have that by Wednesday, your time. You have a WU nearby?

  Yes.

  I’ll send it through a friend. Her name is Lisa Barino. Write down that name. So the money will come from her, OK?

  OK.

  You need the entry stamp on the passport to show when you entered Thailand.

  Yes. I get.

  You know someone who can do this for you?

  No, but I bribe at airport.

  And you need to show where you stayed for that time.

  I say I stayed at aunt’s house. u r generous.

  I’m your sister. Here is my cell phone number 01-631-555-1756. I sent you an email with different dates to travel and the web site where you can pick flights. Do you know how to use the site?

  Yes, I saw flights. When I get money I tell you when I arrive in New York.

  OK. I’m going to send you an email with all the information you need here at the airport. They will ask you questions when you arrive. Where you live, why you went to Thailand. OK? Don’t worry. We can fool them. But you have to memorize it. I’ll go over all that with you next time.

  Thanks you. I go now before they miss me. Love you. Bye :)

  Love you too.

  Massey hadn’t slept. He was waiting for a phone call from a computer expert he had called last night when his firewall alerted him of a penetration. He then noticed that many of his files had been accessed at one in the morning. He had been told to run several commands, take screen shots of the output and send them.

  Though he had deleted his incriminating photos, he had put one thing back on his PC that could send him to jail for the rest of his life. It was an icon to login to a child porn site. The priest’s mind was short-circuiting. Who had violated him? He expected the police to come bursting through his door at any moment. Massey had envisioned getting caught in several ways, but this wasn’t one of them.

  The phone rang.

  “I tracked down the intruder,” said the voice.

  “Is there any way of getting their identity?” asked the priest.

  “Oh, I have their identity. They were still logged into your machine when I was able to penetrate their PC. The firewall was disabled―pretty careless. I downloaded a bunch of files. I’ll encrypt them and send it now. You have the decrypt key, right?”

  “Hang on. I haven’t used it in a while. I do have it. So it wasn’t police?”

  “Nope. It was a chick. Looks like a student. I geolocated her IP address to 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.”

  “I owe you one.”

  Massey was relieved and at the same time intrigued. A few moments later, the email arrived. When decrypted, one file revealed a word document with a student schedule for Columbia University. A picture of the girl appeared. His eye scanned the page until it fell on a name:

  RACHEL WALLEN

  Massey had just a few hours to do the killing.

  nd what will you be hunting, sir?” asked the kid behind the counter.

  “Big fish,” answered Massey. “Tarpon down by the Keys. But I want to be prepared in case I run into something bigger.”

  “Sure. Well, we carry pneumatic and band spear guns, several sizes.”

  “I’m new at this. What are the advantages of each?”

  “Pneumatic guns are compact, not much recoil and have a little more range. But they’re noisy and need more maintenance than band guns. Band guns are nearly silent, accurate, and you can increase the power by using more bands―up to three.”

  “And what are the ranges?”

  “Accurate to about fourteen feet. In murky water or below a certain depth, you’re not going to see much farther than that.”

  “Let’s go with band. I’ll take two.”

  He paid cash for the weapons, so there would be no record of the purchase. Massey loaded the gear into his trunk, then proceeded to steal two license plates. Next stop was Home Depot. He disguised himself with a mustache, sunglasses, and baseball cap, remembering that police often use the security cameras of stores to prove that a suspect was buying the things they would need to dispose of a body. To camouflage his purchases, he also bought a gallon of white paint, rollers, work gloves, and twenty feet of rope. He was never in this Home Depot and it was at least five miles from his house, so it’s unlikely they would ever check there.

  Handling the guns with the deer skin work gloves, he loaded each and set up a target of Yellow Books at one end of his basement. Fourteen feet, the kid said. He paced it off, took aim and fired. The recoil was surprising. The spear entered the first Yellow Book and embedded itself about half-way through. He carefully removed it and added a band to the spear gun. This time he missed altogether due to the recoil. Under water you could support the weapon with a single hand because of the buoyancy. On dry land, it was different. He fired again, this time holding the weapon with both hands. It went clear through the first book and stopped about an inch into the next one. That would go well into a human body. Three bands and the spear traveled clear through both Yellow
Books. The recoil was substantial. Massey loaded the other gun with three bands and fired several times until he got the feel of the range and could hit the target consistently from twenty feet. It had a lot more range in air than under water and was very quiet. Good. He had considered getting a gun to be on the safe side. He knew enough street people who could arrange that for him, but it would leave a clue, and guns were too easily traced.

  He went on Mapquest and prepared the routes he would take. To create an alibi, he signed up for a real estate seminar at the Meadowlands Hilton for the next day and booked a room. This would jive with his recent real estate searches on the Internet when he was researching places to retire abroad.

  Massey put on the black turtleneck and black pants that would make him invisible until the last moment. It was remarkably similar to what he might wear as a priest, except for the collar. In his study, he sat for a moment collecting himself. He read a passage from The Seven Storey Mountain as he often did before violating the laws of God.

  When he was ready to go, he loaded his purchases into a large athletic bag: a large plastic drop cloth and thick rubber gloves, a box of contractor grade plastic garbage bags, and a hacksaw.

  he vehicle tooled down the block, stopped, then backed up until it was directly in front of Rachel’s home at 114 North Cyrus Street in East Northport. It then proceeded around the block, returned, and parked with the engine off some fifty yards short of the address.

  The driver reviewed Rachel’s class schedule and personal information. Heavy course load. Biomedical Engineering major. He reviewed her transcripts from Northport High. Straight A’s, early admission to Columbia, Intel Award.

  He read the essay she had written in her admission application. It was entitled, “The Purpose of My Life.” Moving. Even more so, as that purpose would never be fulfilled. He usually spoke at length with his victims before slaughtering them. The more he knew about his prey, the more aroused he got. Unlike Mafia hitmen who killed dispassionately, he made the greatest effort to get close to the doomed, to give them the most hope, so that he could then take away that much more. It was the crushing of desperate hope that he so loved.