“No worse. I thought he was a British nerd!” He laughed at his own joke. “OK, I didn't think he was a fifteen year old British College student.”
“But …”
“He made a reference to the weather that it was raining a few days ago and when I looked at the historical weather data, it was only raining in Scotland, the Peak District and the South East. So I'm thinking London.”
“But that's …”
“He also made a reference to Boris. He said 'she's definitely having affair after affair. Probably being porked by Boris.' Why would he say that if he wasn't London-based.”
“Right. So we have a bit of a picture,” Jack muttered. “But …”
“Just listen,” Andre interrupted, clearly exasperated. “Just listen to what I am about to say. I had all of this on a wall chart and I did this methodologically. So let you take me through it. I created a user on the board called 'cptn_kirk' and populated my profile moaning about something called 'noobz' and lots of sci-fi references. Then I posted into the forum a couple of publicity photos of the band.” His eyes fleeted for a moment. “They were taken for publicity but we never used ‘em, so that was fine, and then I put on the board the photos Jack sent me.”
“Yeah,” Jack hummed. “Private, naked photos taken 'backstage'.” He laughed loudly. “Taken in the studio. But not public.”
“Bloody public now,” Paige moaned. Jack raised his eyebrows at his girlfriend and she sighed. “Go on.”
“Right, well, 'hacker_i_am' gets in touch when I suggest that I've got access to all the Bare Necessities private files. I make him wait for a day or two and he gets desperate. So I release a couple of more pictures from my phone of Hazel and I ...” He looked at Paige. “Don’t worry, I got permission from her. And we weren’t naked. But it was to prove to him I was on the level and we got talking. I told him there's a storage device which has two hidden wireless networks and that I know the password to one. I told him that I couldn't crack the other one and needed help from an elite cracker. I also reveal that I think it might be going soon as the manager is moving house so time is of the essence. But if he comes to where it is located, we can gain access. He agrees and I told him the best place to get access to it is that spot there.”
He pointed to a piece of wasteland just outside the gated community. “Clever,” Paige mused.
“Where did you get all this from?” Jack asked.
Andre blushed. “Hackers. The 90s film with Angelina Jolie. Hackers have egos too. I just stroked his and said I'd meet him out there as I needed his help. I set up a hidden camera on my balcony. He messaged back and said that it is near the Bare Necessities ex-agent’s flat so he believed me.”
“So what?” Paige argued. “We have a picture of a hacker and we won't recognise him. But at least we can go to the Police although they should be doing this.”
“Open the envelope,” Andre demanded.
“What?” Paige squealed, scowling at the smug gentleman.
“You'll recognise him.”
“Let me guess, you think it's one of my eco-liberal friends? They …”
“Open the goddam envelope!” Andre thundered, keen for his dramatic moment to unravel as he had planned. Paige snatched at the envelope tearing it open. She pulled out the photo and held it in front of her face, and gasped.
“The snivelling little …”
“Quite,” Andre added. “The Police have been told. I think,” he said as he looked at his watch. “That an arrest is due at any moment.”
“But that means I don't get to hurt him,” Paige muttered in a disappointed voice as Claire smiled. “I want to hurt him. You know, lead piping, library.”
“Police’ll do it for you.” Claire nodded towards Andre. “Thanks. That was good of you.”
“Yeah thanks mate,” Jack added.
“You’re a bastard!” Paige snapped. “You could have at least waited until I had battered him.”
Andre held his hands up. “Paige, I would really like to not have to go to the Police Station and sit in on an interview with you because you battered someone for wronging you, your friend and your sister. I deliberately didn’t tell you until I had already had the discussions with the Police and they told me that they would be enacting an arrest today.”
Paige glared at him.
“Fancy a rhubarb scone?” Andre offered; he reached for his ringing phone in his jacket pocket.
“Excellent idea!” Claire interrupted and took her second scone of the morning.
“Hazel?” Andre answered, and Paige’s head turned.
Chapter IL
Hazel
The knock on the door was officious; Hazel listened from the study as the young maid bustled to the door.
Hazel was suspicious of Charlotte ever since Ricky had hired the eighteen year old. Her outfits were becoming increasingly scandalous, and Hazel was certain that her husband was choosing many of them. If he wasn't, he certainly was not objecting to the vivacious and garish displays of eroticism.
It had started with tighter tops and plunging necklines. With one outfit, her bosom was as visible as those of her sister when performing. The stockings replaced socks, thigh high boots replaced ankle boots and the length of the skirts edged closer to single digits in inches.
The final display was a French Maid’s outfit: the shortest of black skirts accentuated by stockings, suspenders, and a tight white top. The brunette girl had a cheeky demeanour and the erotic outfit was complimented by her cherub face and sneaky grin.
It's not that Hazel disliked her; Ricky made it clear that he was responsible for the hiring of staff. Hazel certainly disliked her brazen sexuality, especially when it was mixed with her faux-innocence and mischievous personality.
The talk with Ricky elicited a row. He pounded his fists at the table as she tried to elucidate her discomfort at Charlotte's state of dress. Ricky wanted to be surrounded by decadence and sexuality. Hazel had always known this. He liked “the filth” as he called it, and Charlotte was just a part of that. Hazel had to understand his “masculinity.”
Indeed, none of the visitors to the house or Charlotte cared that there were naked photos on display and erotic statues placed around the house, or that the housekeeper and maid looked like an extra from a 1970s pornography film. It was part of Ricky and Ricky's life. The latest addition was a fifteen-inch bronze figurine of Ricky, naked except for his underwear, and taking pride of place on a plinth in the corner of his room.
The erotic overtones to everything her husband did had become part of Hazel's life the day she married Ricky.
She listened as the knock was repeated and Charlotte gave an audible squeal as the front door was opened. Hazel looked down the hall and saw the Police officers standing in front of their maid.
“We've come to speak to Richard Nicholls.”
She squeaked. “Oh my! You better come in.”
Chapter L
Emit
The bright lights of the windowless square room burned into Emit's eyes. He shivered; he was cold and scared and the brash demands of the two policemen made him nervous.
They were confident; extolling a fierce, uncompromising demeanour through their battle-scarred faces and firm tone of voice. The arrest was quick; he cried and shouted as they took his computer from his bedroom, carrying out four boxes of hardware from his mother's house and past a line of gawping neighbours and journalists.
He had barely been made aware that the pictures he had taken when Claire had collapsed and which Lars had stolen, had made their way to the newspapers before the Police came to arrest him in a morning raid.
His mother was in tears and wailed at the coppers, demanding an explanation; she'd never heard of the Computer Misuse Act. He heard the loud mutterings from the neighbours with each person straining to get a better view of his life being carted away in the back of a Police van. They’d tittle-tattle, of course. The reasons of his arrest would be speculated upon, even after the truth was public knowledge.
Two hours later he was in the interview room; bereft of his mobile phone, belt and shoelaces, but it was only his phone that he objected to being parted from. He demanded it back, repeatedly, but the Police refused to return any of his confiscated possessions to him.
Indeed, the anger in his voice at the check-in desk was not unexpected; the two officers gave him ninety minutes in his cell for his emotions to cool before he was taken to an interview room.
He had declined the use of a solicitor. He didn't want it. “I don't want fucking legal advice. Just give me my fucking stuff back, you fucking thieves.” He continued to object angrily, and his vociferous shouts carried from his interview room.
The two specialist officers opened a Manila file on the table. “When we inspect your computer, what are we going to find?”
The leading question was deliberate; it was an attempt to give Emit a chance to incriminate himself. He shrugged.
“Ain’t gonna find nothin’ ‘cause it’s encrypted. And it’s using ECC encryption pushed through a …”
The Police Officer raised his eyebrows. “Then we will seek a court order to obtain the credentials from you. If you refuse then we can and will claim that we have a belief that you may have terrorist materials on your computer and seek a 25 year jail term.” Emit gulped.
“You can’t do that.”
“I can do that,” the officer lied. “I can do that and I will do that. I want to see the insides of your hard drive and I want it examined by my experts.”
The policewoman glanced at the file. “We’ve picked you up because we have reason to believe you have been illegally accessing computer accounts contrary to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and Communications Act 2003. The top end of the sentence you would be looking at is two years in prison. If you assist with the investigation, this would be reflected in the sentence, typically by a third. So that’s sixteen months, which becomes eight with good behaviour. And that’s the very worst. But you need to cooperate.”
“But it’s my data. You can’t force me to hand over the keys.”
“We can send your hard drive to GCHQ. Ian Watkins, the child abuse sexual predator, had his hard drive decoded by them and he …”
“I’ve not done anything like that!” Emit cried. “I just have stuff.” He waited. “Private stuff. I'm allowed private stuff ain't I?”
“Indeed,” the female police officer agreed. “You are. But would we find, say, private pictures of celebrities?”
Emit shrugged. “They’re everywhere. They're on the net and anyone can get hold of them.” Emit shouted; his anxiety was undeniably apparent.
“But some were from the celebrities themselves. Like Claire Baynes.”
“Hey, if I've been picked up because you think I had anything to do with that article, I got stitched up by Lars. He took stuff from me and ran off to the papers. And I ain’t managed to get hold of him. I’ve left a hundred messages on his phone and messageboard account. I got drunk, fell asleep and he stole from me. I ain’t goin’ down for that.”
“We are not …”
Emit interrupted; his cheeks flushed red and his hands thumped the table. “I ain't taking the rap for that. I ain't taking the flak for some bastard tapping me up and then running off to shout his mouth off. That ain't me. I had nuttin' to do with that! I would never have done that to Claire. You can arrest ‘im not me.”
“We are not interested in the kiss and tell story!” The policewoman barked. “At all. We are about the private media stolen from the celebrities.”
“They weren't stolen,” Emit snapped. “A copy may have been made. Cloned and liberated to the 'net, but the originals still exist. They ain't been stolen at all. They've been set free.”
“Set free?”
He smiled. “Yeah. They've been set free. And they get liberated for us. That’s all I've got, freed content. I’ve not got terrorist material or child abuse stuff or anything like that. I’m just a techno-anarchist. I have some private photos and pictures but nothing really bad.”
The experienced detective smiled; he tapped a red pen on the desk and told Emit a story that ended with a “Captain Kirk” tricking an arrogant hacker, and showed him the grainy picture Andre’s hidden camera had taken, along with the chat logs of the user interactions on the message board.
Emit crumbled. He sobbed and he broke down, putting his head in his hands as his small amount of confidence deserted him. The officers reiterated their promise that if he cooperated they would tell the judge, and it would result in a more lenient sentence.
“I hacked into a couple,” he admitted. “And released those on the image forum. But it's only to show the world what a dangerous arse Ricky is.”
“And Paige Simmons?”
He blushed. “... and how wonderful Paige is. I've not done any real harm!”
“Go on.”
He sighed. “Ricky's password was easy,” he explained. “I just needed to reset it and the system asked for his mothers maiden name and the name of his childhood pet. I sat on the table next to his grandmother, and he told me his pets name in the speech. That was all I needed.”
“And Paige Simmons’s?”
“Her reading came from Bob Marley. Her password was 'bobmarley!' so that was easy.”
“And Claire Baynes?”
He bit his lip. “I never touched Claire’s accounts for anything. The only pictures I had were from her phone. When the ambulance took her, I picked up her phone. But Lars took that. I was trying to give it back to her when Lars stole it from me. She wasn’t answering my texts. You can’t do me for that.”
The two officers looked at each other. “Anyone else you want to confess to?”
“I ain’t done anything else! I was silly to release Ricky and Paige’s stuff but I only did that to show what Ricky was like and what Paige was like.”
“Shall we see what else we find on the computer?”
Emit screeched. “Hey, I've confessed, you don't need to look now.”
“Let's just see what we find.”
“But … you only arrested me for the Bare Necessities stuff, right?”
The police officer sat back on his chair, twirling a red pen between his fingers. “We’ve had quite a few of our celebrities in the UK that have been targeted the same way. Well I say celebrities but it’s everything from politicians to actors, to singers, to pornography stars. People in the public eye. People who need to have a good concept of IT security but are completely inept at it. Now, we’ve picked up those people releasing those pictures on the message boards. Script kiddies and the like. Noobz, you’ll call them, I’m sure. And when we’ve been investigating we know they had help from someone else. A collective on the ‘net who was in the victim’s files weeks before and had merely shown the script kiddies how to access them. Boasting, no doubt. And I’ve thought that the master hacker lived in this city. Little things. The compromised machines which our hacker routed the traffic through were London or UK institutions. Not to mention the words and phrases they used when teaching the noobz we’ve picked up. Doesn’t mean anything concrete, but I had a hunch. And my boss has been breaking my balls to find that master hacker. And I think my prayers have been answered because I think that hacker is the fidgeting, scared, awkward man in front of us, right now. So we will take a trawl through your files. We might find that you did nothing more than you’ve mentioned or we might find that you’ve got a library of hundreds of stolen, sorry, freed files.”
Emit squirmed. “OK. I’ve been into one or two others,” he stammered. “But I didn’t release them.” He gulped. “I kept them private. I just helped someone for months and taught them IT security and then they went crazy and just dumped loads of the private files and emails on a server. That wasn’t me! I don’t do that … apart from Ricky.”
The officers smiled. And Emit said nothing further. In the coming days, the P
olice would find proof that Emit was a member of a hacking collective and he had numerous logins to picture boards around the world. They would find terabytes of pornography and they would find thousands of other victims of the hacking into people's personal accounts amongst Emit's personal files, including two ex-girlfriends and one ex-colleague.
Emit was in a world of trouble.
Chapter LI
Hazel & Ricky
For the first time since the maid had been employed by her husband, Hazel was appreciative that the scantily-clad and erotically-attired woman was in her house. She comforted the shocked wife, made her lunch and kept her company. She had just witnessed her husband arrested for assault and frogmarched out of their home in handcuffs.
Hazel rang Andre immediately after the police had left her apartment; her friend, employee and Ricky’s agent-cum-manager promised to let their usual solicitor know.
Hazel heard Paige’s voice from the other end of Andre’s phone. “Oh, the Emit thing. You were doing that today?”
“Yeah,” Andre replied, frantically telling Paige in the background to be quiet. “I’ll go down to the station now. Presume it will be your local unit.”
“I know the Police'll be tipping off the press,” she added as she heard Paige again from the other end of the phone. “What should I do?”
“Sit tight. Just sit tight and say and do nothing.”
Sitting tight was not what Hazel wanted to do; her husband was languishing in the arms of the police and there was little she could do about it. She moped around the house and then slouched in front of the television.
The live chat show had none of their clients featured, but she left it on anyway. When one of the clients of Incredible Talents was on television she grimaced with every sentence they uttered, and shuddered whenever they gaffed. It was a different experience being able to sit on the sofa and watch the inane conversation without rushing to get newspaper editors on the phone to spin a falsified version of the truth.
Bare Necessities 2 (The Bare Necessities) Page 21
