The Intrusions

by Stav Sherez

  Unlike most of the other booths, which were crammed with high-tech boxes and trailing wires, this one contained only a large oak table and a single wireless computer terminal. Neilson nodded to the woman behind the screen and she got up and vacated her seat. ‘Plug your name into this,’ Neilson said to Geneva and Geneva sat down and entered her name into a blinking grey box.

  The screen flashed once, then twice, and words began to fill it. Geneva leaned in closer. She saw her name at the top. Below it was her home and mobile numbers, the names and addresses of her next of kin, her NI details and sergeant’s number. There was a list of the last hundred shops and cafes she’d visited and every single item she’d bought there. Her complete Internet search history. Her email and banking passwords. She looked away, her face drained of colour.

  ‘Don’t you just love it?’ Neilson beamed. ‘You get a suspect’s name and plug it into InfoCatcher – within seconds you know almost everything you need to know about them.’

  Geneva looked at the screen, her entire life rendered in blocky green letters. ‘That scares me a little.’

  ‘Scares the judges too,’ Neilson replied. ‘But soon it won’t matter. The crims will have so much technology in their hands that only something like this will give us the slightest chance of catching them.’

  ‘Stalin would have loved this.’

  ‘He managed pretty well without it,’ Neilson snapped back. ‘It’s here. Nothing’s going to change that. The only thing we can do is learn how to use it to our advantage. Criminal intrusion, government intrusion – it’s all going to get a lot worse in the coming years. The technology is still in its infancy – imagine what it’ll be capable of in five, ten, fifteen years?’

  ‘We’re always being told criminals have some new unbeatable technology that’s going to destroy the world. What’s so different about this?’

  ‘It’s totally different. A quantum leap. Extremism, for example, was never that big a problem for us – some nutter on a soapbox, how many people is he going to reach? Maybe a few hundred at most. Now, on the net, they can reach millions of like-minded idiots, form a critical mass and cause major grief. We saw it with the English Defence League, we see it with jihadis, and it’s no different with common criminals – gangs getting together to perpetrate transnational smuggling and trafficking – as the web brings them into contact we’re going to experience an exponential rise in crime. It’s the future, Carrigan, whether we like it or not. We’re throwbacks. They’ll look back at our methods of detection with pity and wonder.’ Neilson pointed to the computer. ‘Try it, if you don’t believe me.’

  He sat down behind the computer and stared at the blinking cursor. He was genuinely interested in what it would say about him. Sure, it would have his details and habits but would it have Africa? The third song on his debut album? The last thing he’d told Louise? He typed in his name. The screen flickered rapidly. Carrigan looked up at Neilson. Neilson looked over at the saleswoman. The computer beeped again – a series of high-pitched notes, the intervals between them steadily decreasing, and then the screen blinked once more and turned blue. The saleswoman ran over, frowned at Carrigan and ushered him from the chair. She began frantically punching different combinations of keys and muttering under her breath. She looked up at him. ‘You’ve broken it.’

  Carrigan shrugged. The woman continued staring at the screen in utter bewilderment as Neilson tugged at Carrigan’s sleeve and led him away.

  ‘Hackers have access to that?’ Geneva asked, rattled by what she’d seen – the key to so many lives nestled in undersea cables and the veiny tangle of fibre-optics. So many interconnection points and so many vulnerabilities.

  ‘They’re often the ones who developed it in the first place. We’re always late to the party.’ Neilson allowed a smile. ‘But we catch up pretty fast. Soon every member of the force will be fitted with body cams. Ninety-five per cent of all Scotland Yard cases last year used CCTV as evidence. At the moment we’re not sure if technology is better for them or for us. It’s always a double-edged sword but pretty soon we’ll be able to see everything that goes on at the click of a button.’

  ‘And that doesn’t scare you?’ Geneva had grown up with her mother’s fear of a police state. It was one of the main reasons she’d taken this job.

  ‘Not as much as not being able to see what’s going on.’

  ‘Look,’ Carrigan interrupted. ‘This is all very interesting but we’re in the middle of a case. We came here because we were told you had an in to these forums and all we’re doing is wasting time looking at bloody gadgets.’

  Neilson turned to face him. Her voice was calm and even and totally uncowed by Carrigan’s stern expression. ‘I’m not wasting your time. I took you around here because you need to understand what we’re up against. The kind of resources these crims can draw upon. You have to realise this isn’t like any other investigation you’ve pursued before. And the reason I don’t want to hear more about your case is because I’ve decided we’ll take it and I’d rather read everything myself in the right order.’

  Carrigan nodded, muted by her logic and by having got what he wanted. ‘I take it that means you think it’s possible Anna’s image ended up on one of these forums?’

  ‘More than possible,’ Neilson replied. ‘It’s like the tree in the forest. A hack doesn’t exist until other people have seen and commented on it.’

  34

  The first thing Carrigan did when he got back to the office was pull up the Anna file. He flicked through the first few pages – lab reports, forensic results, autopsy findings – until he reached her passport. They’d copied the entire document once the SOCOs had analysed it for fingerprints and other trace evidence. But the missing photo wasn’t what interested Carrigan now. He looked at the print-out of the beach photo. The image of the two girls, existing in the same frame, unsettled him and made him realise how wrong he’d been. Where were they? What were they doing there? Did they know each other or had they simply stumbled into the same photo?

  After returning from the trade fair, Carrigan had gone to see Branch and received authorisation to second DS Neilson to the hostel case. He’d explained to the super that the killer’s computer skills far outweighed their own and that they needed a much deeper immersion into the dark waters of the net than Berman could give them. Branch had only understood half of what Carrigan was saying but he’d grudgingly signed off on it. They both knew they were peering into a future where Murder Investigation Teams would have more geeks than gumshoes and that the next generation would see them as hapless idiots, no better than men in white sheets trying to understand the future from the spilled entrails of a goat.

  Carrigan put down the beach photo as the door to his office opened and Karlson came in, the smell of aftershave instantly swamping the room.

  ‘We’ve been through the list of clients Anna cleaned for.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing so far. She worked at nineteen different addresses. Twelve of these were hospitals, two were schools and two were offices. The remaining three residences were all private and belong to single men. Out of those, two had Anna visit more than once. None of them admitted making a pass at her, which of course they wouldn’t but, and I hate to say it, I believed them. Their alibis have so far checked out but we’re going to have to look at those a bit more carefully.’

  ‘Good. The more we can eliminate from the investigation the better.’ Carrigan looked down at the beach photo. ‘Anything else?’

  Karlson rubbed his stubble with a blackened thumb. Carrigan winced, thinking of the pain the sergeant must have endured as his fingers swelled up like baby bananas then blistered and popped – five days lost in a blizzard high up on K2, two of his fellow climbers dead, an avalanche that severed their guide ropes, scrambling down in the terrifying dark.

  ‘We have managed to verify Max’s alibi,’ Karlson said. ‘That place you told us about in Knightsbridge? Turns out they film their clients, camer
as embedded in the walls, all conveniently time-stamped too.’

  ‘I thought they might. Why give up a good opportunity to make money?’

  ‘Max came in for a cuddling session Friday night after leaving the hostel. Before that, we have several residents who saw him manning the desk all evening.’ Karlson noticed the photo beside Carrigan’s laptop.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Karlson picked up the photo. His eyebrows shot up and his mouth went slack as he recognised Anna and Katrina. ‘Were you even going to show me this?’

  ‘I wanted to hear your information before the photo coloured it,’ Carrigan said. ‘I need you to make a good copy and set up a press conference. We have to get this photo out as soon as possible. We need to find these other girls.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to find out where it was taken.’

  Carrigan waited until Karlson had departed before flicking through Anna’s passport. He had a digital copy onscreen but it only told half the story. The passport smelled faintly of tanning lotion and coconut oil, a lingering reminder of past holidays and blistering beaches. He remembered Geneva mentioning the multitude of stamps, a chronology of Anna’s trip laid out page by page, and he started at the beginning – Anna’s arrival in Singapore.

  The entry visa told him she’d landed in the island-city on a Wednesday and the exit visa showed she’d left three days later. She was in Australia for two weeks, then spent a week in New Zealand. From there she flew to Bangkok. The Thai entry visa seduced him with its cursive script and he felt an unexpected longing for foreign shores.

  Anna left Thailand a week later, spent four days in Cambodia, six in Vietnam, one in Laos then flew to Bali. The Indonesian stamp was the last in her passport. She’d arrived in Bali on 4 August and left two weeks later.

  Carrigan checked through his inbox and found the file containing Katrina’s passport which Forsyth had emailed over. Like Carrigan, he’d also made several copies of the entire passport after seeing the carefully snipped-out photo.

  Katrina travelled before Anna. She went to more places and was more adventurous, crossing the bandit-ridden highlands of Dagestan and sculpted wastes of the Karakum Desert, through the folded Caucasian hills and the huge expanse of the Kazakh Steppe, across plains and mountains and forests and into China. From there she’d dribbled down the South Asian archipelago and visited Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Carrigan flicked between passports comparing dates. The two girls had both started their trips in Europe and crawled up opposite sides of Asia. He knew they’d met on a beach somewhere.

  He clicked open his digital calendar and printed out blank pages for July, August and September. He began to go through each passport chronologically, this time writing the girls’ arrivals and departures in the calendar’s tight square divisions. He made notes, correlated dates and checked atlases and local maps.

  Katrina had left Cambodia a day before Anna had arrived in Phnom Penh. They’d missed each other in Laos, Vietnam and Australia. Carrigan filled in squares until there were no more stamps left.

  He laid out the calendar pages side by side on his desk. There was only one place where the girls’ journeys coincided – Bali.

  Katrina had arrived a week before Anna but both girls had left the island on the same day. They had overlapped for nearly a fortnight in mid-August. It was the only time they were both in the same place and it was the last place they’d visited before heading home.

  Carrigan got up, made another coffee and thought about this and what it could mean.

  The two girls had both spent the third week of August in Bali. It was not so unusual, the island was a hub for backpackers traipsing across the wilds of South East Asia, a place to recuperate and party, to meet others and discuss plans and escapades. Carrigan tried to imagine the scene, the way in which the two girls might have met, the things they would have had in common. He googled photos of beaches in Bali, trying to recognise either the beach behind the group of girls or the beach in the final tweet Anna had received, but all beaches looked the same. He saw a link to an English-language Bali-based newspaper, catering to expats and ravers, and used his credit card to gain access to their archive. He plugged in the dates of Anna and Katrina’s visit and searched through the two editions that bookended it. He started reading, forcing himself to slow down, to pay attention, going through every story, paragraph and sidebar.

  There were elections coming. There was violence and insurgency in the remote islands, bombs going off in the jungle and a story about a priest who’d been boiled alive. Carrigan read about drunken Brits getting into fights with locals, women being arrested for wearing skimpy clothes outside the designated tourist areas, drug smugglers receiving the death penalty for an ounce of weed – and then his eyes focused on a small column in the bottom right-hand corner.

  BRITISH GIRL DIES IN BALI

  The body of British tourist Lucy Brown was found by a fisherman on Balangan Beach early this morning. The beach is well known for its ‘Full Moon’ parties and it is believed that the victim had been attending one the night before. Her body was discovered ten metres from a migrant workers’ camp on the beach. Witnesses report seeing the girl wandering around intoxicated and naked the previous night. Jokar Mahinidi, the fisherman who found her body, said, ‘At first, I thought she was sleeping it off, she looked so peaceful, but when I got closer I saw what had been done to her.’ The initial report from the coroner states that Brown had been repeatedly raped and that her throat was cut. Bali police raided the migrant camp this afternoon and two Laotian migrants were taken into custody.

  Carrigan read over the piece twice. He plugged Lucy Brown’s name into the paper’s search box and found two more follow-up articles. The first was dated a month after the murder.

  TWO MIGRANTS SENTENCED TO DEATH

  Two unnamed Laotian migrants pled guilty today to the rape and murder of British tourist Lucy Brown. The judge, in his remarks, condemned the crime and, unsurprisingly in a place where tourism is the major source of income, sentenced both men to death. The sentence will be carried out at Indonesia’s notorious Nusa Kambangan island where the two will be executed by firing squad.

  The second follow-up article was from a couple of months later, the story by now reduced to one column, stating only that the two men had been executed for their crimes.

  35

  The next morning, Carrigan burst into the incident room impatient to tell them what he’d found – but Geneva and Neilson had news of their own.

  Carrigan took a seat and stared at the flickering bank of screens.

  There were far more Ratting forums than he’d expected. Neilson and Berman had managed to narrow the search to ones based in the UK or with significant UK traffic. They’d spent the night logging in under some of Neilson’s previously established accounts and running image recognition software through the files. When that hadn’t worked, they’d scanned them by eye, playing each video on the large monitor above their heads, a rolling inventory of the missing and lost.

  They had mugs of tea, biscuits and bottled water on the table. They had the slitted eyes common to those who spend their waking hours staring at screens. Neilson and Berman had been working for twelve hours straight, logging into forums, folding back into fake identities, scanning and scouring the web for images of Anna.

  They found her on a forum called whatyoudontknowcanthurtyou.com.

  Carrigan looked at the plain homepage. Nothing to indicate what lay beneath. He thought about the Bali information and how it fitted in. He knew what Geneva would say. He had too little to go on and decided to keep it to himself for now. There were a couple of things he needed to check first. ‘How did you manage to find Anna?’

  ‘A mixture of logic and software.’ Neilson had a box of wet wipes by her side and she pulled one out and quickly rubbed it across her hands.

  ‘You can just google this stuff?’

  Neilson shook her head and tilted a screen packed with tightly bun
ched code towards Carrigan.

  ‘Deep web, the Internet’s subconscious. All the stuff Google and other search engines can’t find. The searchable web’s only ten per cent of the net, and the really nasty stuff, the stuff we’re looking for, is often found within that, on the dark web, but it’s all connected – everything can be traced back to everything else. You just need to know what you’re looking for.’

  They watched footage of women walking across rooms. Women typing or staring into screens. Women kissing boyfriends, women crying, women applying make-up. Some clips were as boring and uneventful as life, played out in real time, while others were highlight reels of late-night undressings and naked walk-bys. This was how people behaved when they thought no one was watching.

  Geneva pumped her stress ball, Neilson by her side, her own Virgil guiding her through this binary inferno. ‘Warhol would have loved this,’ she said, a weak attempt at distancing herself from the reality of what they were seeing. Someone had filmed these women without their knowledge and posted it online. Others watched and got their kicks.

  The site they were on was a Ratting forum, password protected, based on a UK server. The thread containing the clips hid behind the innocent banner Check This Out!

  There were twenty-three clips of Anna. The user had not uploaded anything else. They watched them in chronological order, an escalating narrative etched out in fear and binary code.

  The first clip showed two minutes and twenty-three seconds of Anna staring at the screen, her face in close-up. It was unsettling to finally be face to face with Anna but unable to do anything to help her, separated by both time and space. Geneva thought of stricken families crammed into small steamy living rooms watching hostage footage of their loved ones. The mute agony and impotence. How image becomes merely another form of torture.