The Intrusions

by Stav Sherez

  There were forty-nine comments below the clip. They ranged from Hilarious, bro! to That bitch deserved everything she got to things much worse – each successive poster bragging what he’d like to do to Anna, torrents of fantasy and humiliation lashed in pain and sex.

  The user who’d uploaded the clip had also uploaded twenty-two other clips, all of them featuring Anna. The entire batch had been posted over a week ago, four days before she’d disappeared.

  The clips were low-lit, fuzzy and distorted but, Geneva had to admit, there was something compelling about them. Some showed Anna typing, others Anna walking around the dorm, singing or trying on clothes, examining herself, squeezing different parts of her body and making faces at the mirror. The early clips all ran four or five minutes and nothing much happened.

  The first intrusion was recorded on Clip 13.

  Anna Becker clicked the mouse and began reading. She had no idea she was being watched. She had no idea she was being filmed.

  The camera was located on the top bar of her laptop. You could see a slice of bright green poster behind her. Light streamed in from the dorm windows and highlighted her hair as she idly surfed away her evening.

  And then it began.

  Anna was staring at the screen, reading something, when she started blinking rapidly and her mouth fell open. A yelp crackled through the speakers. Anna pushed her chair back. She reached for the laptop lid and the video cut to black.

  The next intrusion came two days later.

  Anna stared at the screen. Anna typed. Anna bit her lip and scrunched her forehead. Anna resumed typing. She looked up and jumped almost an inch off the chair. Her eyes grew wide and wet. The webcam caught two minutes and twenty-three seconds of Anna sobbing and shaking. There was no question of it being fake. If Anna had been that good an actress she wouldn’t have had any problem getting a place at RADA.

  They continued watching in silence, uneasy at their complicity in viewing but unable to take their eyes off the screen.

  Clip 18 showed Anna sleeping, the image pixelated and tinted blue. Anna tossed and turned, the sheets rippling and folding like waves. All of a sudden Anna sat bolt upright and screamed. She scanned the room wildly, her chest rising and falling, then buried her head in the pillow.

  Clip 20 depicted Anna on hands and knees, searching for something on the floor, her head jerking up every few seconds, her eyes quick and alert as any hunted animal’s.

  Clip 21 caught Anna crawling into the wardrobe, crouching beneath her clothes and shutting the door on herself.

  With each successive clip, Anna’s appearance deteriorated. Dark swollen pouches showed up under her eyes. Her hair lost its lustre and hung limp and frayed. She’d stopped putting on make-up and her lips became chapped and cracked.

  Geneva remembered the destroyed laptops in Anna’s locker. She couldn’t begin to imagine the panic and hope which came with booting up each new laptop, only to be crushed a couple of days later by the next intrusion.

  ‘They get progressively worse,’ Neilson said, her face strained and lined by the hours and by what they’d seen. ‘It’s rare to get this level of sophistication and organisation in a Ratter. He’s calibrated his torments precisely so they’d be most effective.’

  ‘You’ve not seen this kind of thing before?’ Carrigan hunched over the desk and squinted at the screen.

  ‘No. Not this organised. Most Ratters tend to cut out the boring bits. They’re only interested in naked walk-bys. This is something altogether more complex and planned. Kids don’t have the patience for this. This is someone older. Someone used to setting a trap and lying in wait.’

  When they’d finished watching, they turned to the comments below the clips, a repository of sickness, rage and bitter entitlement. Each clip had nearly fifty comments. They were on the fourteenth clip when Carrigan pointed to the bottom half of the screen.

  Geneva scanned the comments. There were the usual gripes and raves and boring rants, flame wars and digressions that spiralled out into the far reaches of obsession and madness, but it was the last set that drew her attention.

  More!

  This chick is spooky!

  Fake!

  I want me some of her!

  > So do I, but she’s been claimed.

  36

  Neilson caught the startle in Geneva’s eye. ‘That last one means something to you, doesn’t it?’

  Geneva reread the comment. ‘It’s what two of the women said before they disappeared. That he was coming to claim them. But I don’t understand its context here.’

  ‘It’s a common term in Ratting,’ Neilson explained. ‘It means she’s a slave.’

  ‘A slave?’ Geneva said.

  ‘That’s what they’re known as,’ Neilson replied. ‘The hackers get into your computer or phone and install the RAT software. Once that’s done, you become their slave. Hackers collect them.’ Neilson seemed pleased by the expressions of shock she’d managed to elicit from Carrigan and Geneva. ‘We’re coming across it more and more. Reality TV opened the gates, it conditioned us into thinking the recorded life was the only one worth living. RAT tools are easily available online. They even come in packages so you don’t need to know anything about computing apart from how to install a program.’ Neilson clicked on an icon and the screen in front of her divided into six equal squares. Each square displayed a room. Two were empty but the other four contained women looking directly into the screen.

  ‘These are just some of the slaves currently available for general viewing on this particular forum,’ Neilson said. ‘Anyone who has a username can access them at any time. They’re streaming in real time so what you’re seeing is happening right now in someone’s flat or house.’

  ‘Why don’t you stop them?’ Geneva said as she watched women pounding keys, talking to loved ones, crossing empty rooms in the nude.

  Neilson laughed. ‘It would require at least a week to hack even one account and trace it to a real-world address. It’s too time-consuming and as soon as we’ve cracked one system, the hackers will develop a better one. It makes more sense to watch what they’re doing, learn their tricks and collect information. Everything you see is being recorded for later use.’

  ‘So, basically, they just get away with it?’

  Neilson shot Geneva a sharp look. ‘If this was a perfect world and we had a hundred times more personnel and a fuck lot more money, we could do something about it – but this world isn’t even halfway to perfect. It’s only when they step across a certain line that we bring it to the attention of other squads.’

  Geneva knew that what Neilson was saying was right but she also knew it was wrong. ‘How often does it spill over into the real world?’

  ‘Very rarely in terms of violence. These are teenagers. Cowards, geeks and nerds. This is their preferred battleground. What we mainly see is extortion, or sextortion as the press love to call it. The Ratter gets into your system, pokes around until he finds jpegs or videos, the ones you took of yourself naked and sent to your boyfriend one drunken night so long ago you don’t even remember they’re on there. The Ratter then contacts you and threatens to upload the photos to all your Facebook friends if you don’t deposit a certain amount in his PayPal account. Or they demand payment in kind.’

  ‘And women fall for that?’

  ‘What would you do?’ Neilson said. ‘Imagine you had some compromising photos on your hard drive and someone accessed them and threatened to send them to your parents? Imagine you’re an eighteen-year-old girl. Imagine your reputation is staked on this. You do what you have to do. Unfortunately, like all blackmail, it never stops. They take the money, shut up for a while, but eventually they contact the person again or sell the slaves on.’

  ‘Sell them to who?’

  ‘There’s a big market for slaves. If you happen to have someone who is either very good-looking or spends a lot of time naked in front of their laptop you can sell or trade her to someone else. These are teenage boys, remembe
r. They get bored very quickly so they swap a lot.’

  ‘But we’re still talking virtually, right?’

  Neilson nodded. ‘There’s entire wikis on the forum expressly for the trading of slaves. Ratters spend a lot of time seasoning their slaves so they’ll fetch the highest price.’

  ‘Do I even want to know what that is?’

  Neilson shook her dreads back and hunched her shoulders. ‘Generally speaking, the more broken down a slave is, the more they fetch. The more compliant they are, the more they’re worth.’

  ‘Can anyone view these?’ Carrigan looked down at the trailing tangle of wires snaking out the back of the screen.

  ‘Anyone who’s a member.’

  ‘Shit,’ Carrigan said as the pieces clicked into place. ‘This is what Farouk must have seen. He said she was fully clothed and that it had nothing to do with sex – which means anyone who saw these clips could have become fixated with Anna and tracked her down.’

  Geneva shook her head. ‘That’s highly unlikely. It’s far more probable that whoever made the clips followed it through to its conclusion. It fits the profile. This is exactly what he would do. It’s the logical progression – first he intimidates her on Twitter, then he starts Ratting her, slowly breaking her down through these intrusions. It’s a campaign, a war of attrition. This is what he has to do to them before he can snatch them. It’s as much his signature as it is his MO.’

  ‘I agree,’ Neilson said. ‘Ratters are very territorial in that way and for someone else to find out Anna’s real-world address would be very difficult and time-consuming – it makes much more sense if it’s the other way around.’

  Carrigan thought about this. ‘When were these clips posted?’

  ‘Eleven days ago.’ Neilson smiled and pointed to a line of spidery text. ‘The person who posted them goes under the username PANOPTEASE.’ She switched back to the Anna videos. ‘He’s quite a presence below the line.’ She pointed to a running list of comments under the username.

  I think I scared the shit out of her. LOL

  Hey, more please. This one really got me going. Yes.

  Some of these girls are pigs but, hey, a slave’s a slave, right?

  ‘These guys are real charmers,’ Geneva said but Carrigan wasn’t listening. He was reading a comment from PANOPTEASE in reply to someone asking if they could post the Anna clips on another forum. He pointed it out to Geneva.

  PANOPTEASE: Anyone, and I mean ANYONE who rips off my stuff or posts it elsewhere or tries to capture it, I will find what you love most and take it away from you. That is my word and guarantee. So, please, before you do anything rash, take a moment to think about whether you really want me inside your life?

  ‘Lovely.’ Geneva looked over at Neilson. ‘That definitely sounds like him and it fits the profile, but how the hell are we going to find him?’

  ‘We’re not.’ Neilson smiled for the first time that afternoon. ‘He’s going to find us. We’re going to sell him some slaves.’

  37

  They were closing in – he could feel it. A sensation he couldn’t put into words, it was all nerve and hunch, yet over the years he’d learned to trust it. The technology the killer had used to ensnare the girls was now being turned against him. Like any weapon, its power lay only in the direction in which it was pointed.

  Neilson had told them that this stage of the operation would take several hours. Carrigan had retreated to his office and tried filling out another report but his eyes kept drifting back to the photo. Anna and Katrina still alive, smiles and suntans and white teeth in the setting sun. If PANOPTEASE went for the bait, they had him. It was as simple as that. But the photo complicated things. The photo didn’t fit. It turned what they’d assumed was a territorial serial killer into something else. Of course, it could mean nothing. The random often confused us by hiding under the cloak of purpose and every investigation had its own peculiar anomalies, clues they never understood even long after they’d solved the case. The law of unintended consequences was entropy in action. Seepage and chaos were inevitable and secrets always found a way out.

  Carrigan fired up his laptop and reread the Bali news articles. Questions popped and rattled. How did the death of an English tourist connect to this? Did it even have anything to do with the case outside the coincidence of geography and time?

  He searched through the national newspapers’ coverage of the death. None of the articles gave him what he needed. None of them told him anything new. He looked up the beach, the town closest to it, and checked police and Interpol databases until he found the sub-station responsible for the region and the name of the acting police chief. It never failed to amaze him how much information was available at the click of a button. Everything was now logged and itemised, the entire world encapsulated in anonymous servers hidden deep inside the elephantine legs of abandoned oil rigs. The problem was that there was too much information. The digital Enlightenment was in danger of blinding us.

  Carrigan clicked the browser shut and looked at the name and number he’d written in his notebook. He rechecked dates and entry visas against his calendar. Anna and Katrina had left Bali three days after the murder of the British girl. Had it frightened them off the island?

  The phone rang for a long time, the tone languorous and hypnotic. A gruff man answered in a language Carrigan couldn’t make sense of.

  ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Carrigan told the police chief who he was and why he was calling. The man didn’t say anything but Carrigan could hear the stutter of his breath and knew he was still on the line. ‘The article says that the girl, Lucy Brown, was found naked on the beach.’

  ‘Yes, that is so.’

  ‘That she’d been raped and murdered.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Why are you asking this now? The case is closed. We found the killers. Two migrants admitted to stumbling on the girl. She was out of her mind like all the tourists and they couldn’t help themselves. We charged them, they went to trial and received the death penalty and were executed. What else is there to say?’

  ‘There were a couple of details in the report that didn’t make sense.’

  ‘Well, that is your problem, then. Thank you for calling, detective, but there’s not much else I can help you with and I need to get back to work.’ The chief cut the call and Carrigan listened to the dead tone for a few moments then phoned Geneva. Berman told him she’d popped out for a cigarette. The sergeant reported no online developments. Carrigan put down the phone and, as soon as he did, it rang.

  ‘Geneva?’

  There was a brief burst of silence at the other end and Carrigan thought he’d caught her in the act of lighting a cigarette but the voice, when it came, wasn’t Geneva’s.

  ‘You called here a minute ago?’

  The woman on the other end of the line had the same sing-song accent as the man but none of his gruff wariness.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did.’

  ‘I can’t talk long. I heard my boss speak to you. I heard the name Lucy Brown.’

  ‘Why did you call me back?’

  ‘I wanted to know why you wanted to know about her.’

  ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘Perhaps because I’m curious why a London detective should call several months after the case was closed?’

  Carrigan cleared his throat. ‘I read the reports and there were a couple of things that didn’t make sense to me. Your boss declined to discuss them. I’m guessing the reason you’re calling me is they didn’t make sense to you either?’

  ‘You should be a detective,’ she said and laughed, a lovely high-pitched sound that made Carrigan feel a curious thirst for languages he couldn’t understand, the caress of foreign air on bare skin. ‘Tell me what you know about the case.’

  Carrigan looked over his notes. ‘Only what I’ve read. That the body of Lucy Brown was found in the early hours of Sunday morning. That she’d been repeatedly raped then killed. That
the killers were found the next day, two migrant workers who were squatting in a refugee camp by the beach. That they confessed to the murder, were tried and executed.’

  ‘So, you know all the facts. Why then are you calling?’

  ‘The facts don’t add up. You were on the case?’

  There was a slight hesitation and Carrigan knew this was the moment he could lose her.

  ‘I was taken off it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Probably because I asked the same questions you’re about to ask.’

  Carrigan smiled. ‘It says she was discovered naked. Did you ever find her clothes?’

  ‘That is a strange question but no, we didn’t.’

  ‘And that didn’t strike you as weird?’

  ‘No. You should come down here in the summer. These kids get so out of it on drugs, they often tear their clothes off. Or perhaps the migrants, once they’d realised what they’d done, got rid of the clothes?’

  ‘Why go to all that trouble when they could have left them on the body?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Did you do a tox test to see what drugs she was on?’

  ‘No, there was no need. Several witnesses reported seeing her before she disappeared, walking around in a daze, naked, singing to herself.’

  ‘And they didn’t try to help her?’

  ‘They didn’t want to ruin their evening.’

  ‘Did you ever suspect she’d been spiked? As in date rape?’

  There was a pause. ‘No, we didn’t and perhaps that was a mistake, but everyone who comes here, comes here to do drugs. Finding out which ones is not standard procedure for us.’

  Carrigan scanned his list of questions. ‘She was discovered with her eyes closed. Why would these migrants who’d raped and killed her bother doing that?’