#RedTeam Attack

by S J Grey

Jonathan nodded. “Very considerate. Did he do it alone?”

  “He could have,” said Mitch, as though musing the question. “But it’s unlikely. I think he had an accomplice. Don’t you?”

  “I know so.” Jonathan flashed the shark smile at Erich again. “Tell me, Erich. Who are you working with?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Erich drummed the desktop with one finger. “No comment.”

  “You own a motorbike as well, don’t you?” Mitch asked. “A Ducati Panigale. It’s registered to your Lowry Bay house. That’s the same bike you rode away from Rush’s house on, when you raced to a good distance before you called the fire in. The tyre tracks in the mud will match the tyres on your bike. It’s a formality, before you’re charged with murder.”

  “No comment.”

  “Thing is, Erich,” said Jonathan, “in this office, we don’t care so much about Nicole Golden’s rape or Freddie Sparks’s murder. Or even defrauding the Inland Revenue Department. Our remit is to protect national security. To protect our government and ministers from threats. Threats like you.”

  Erich licked his lips. “No comment.”

  “Why were you blackmailing the Minister of Immigration, Erich? What did you want from him?”

  “No comment.”

  “You wanted him to stop an investigation. Why? How were you going to benefit from it?”

  “No—”

  “How, Erich?” Mitch slammed the desk with his hand again. “Was it your idea, or were you working for someone else?”

  “No—”

  “Are you going to take the fall for someone else? That’s not big balls, Erich. That’s stupidity. Or blind faith that your leader will find a way for you to wriggle off the hook.”

  “More than one hook, though,” said Jonathan. “Freddie Sparks’s murder.” He held up one finger. “Nicole Golden’s rape.” He held up a second finger. “Blackmailing Edmund Collier. Tax evasion. And your residency permit is under scrutiny too. In a few hours, we’ll have the name of your sponsors, as well as the forensic evidence we’re looking for.”

  “No comment.” Yes, Erich was rattled.

  “We’re this far”— Mitch opened his thumb a forefinger a little way—“from figuring out who they are. If you want to make things easier for you, tell us their name. We don’t have to look at the other charges. Give me their name, and you can walk out of here.”

  Jonathan and Mitch gazed at Erich, who stared at his hands, clenched in a fist on the desktop. Nobody said anything.

  “Will they let him go?” Caleb asked Devin. “Don’t they have any evidence? Is it all a bluff?”

  “Yes and no. They might let him go from here, technically, but it’ll be straight into police custody.”

  “They’re lying bastards,” said Caleb.

  “They’ll do whatever they need to.”

  Didn’t that say it all? Once again, Caleb was grateful he was on the right side of Jonathan and his team.

  “I had a message from the office.” Devin looked up from his phone. “Andi’s back. Dane hasn’t woken yet. She wants to hit the club tonight, to check it out.”

  “She wants to go to a strip club?”

  Devin snorted as he read something on his phone. “She says—and I quote—if you bunch of wankers are planning to go there without me, you can think again.” He looked up at Caleb. “It’s not just a strip club. The website says there’s dancing as well. I guess we’re all going?”

  “It’s our best chance to sniff around.”

  “Hang on,” said Devin. “They’re coming out.”

  Jonathan and Mitch stood. “We’ll leave you to have think about this,” said Jonathan. “Back soon.”

  They left Erich alone, and moments later, the agents appeared in the doorway.

  Jonathan grinned. “We’re going to leave him to stew for a few hours, while we get the initial forensic results. There’s another team interviewing the previous Minister of Immigration, by the way, to see if he was under similar pressure. It feels like we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Do you believe Erich killed Freddie, or was that a line?”

  Jonathan twisted his lips. “It was a punt. I hoped for a better reaction from him. You never know what forensics will uncover. Anyway, I need to check in with the team for a progress report. You wanna come with?”

  “Sure. Then later, we’re going to hit the one nightclub that looks like a possibility. Triple-X-Girls.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Jonathan led the way along a corridor, up a couple of floors in the elevator, and into a wide office, filled with people. They tapped on keyboards, spoke into headsets, and stared at monitors. A control centre?

  “This is the Ops Hub.” Jonathan nodded to Mitch. “Let me know if there’s any change, and I’ll be right back.”

  Mitch walked away, and Jonathan turned back to Caleb. “Grab a seat at this breakout table. Devin, would you sort out some coffee, please?”

  “On it.” Devin left them too.

  Caleb took the offered chair. “Okay. What’s up now?”

  “Now?” Jonathan looked surprised. “Like I said, I need to check in. What do you mean?”

  “I thought you were sending them away so you could break some bad news to me.”

  A grin flashed over Jonathan’s face. “Nah, mate. You’ve been watching too many good-cop-bad-cop movies. You can’t wander, though. This floor is restricted. If I let you out of my sight, I’m liable to lose my job. Okay?”

  That made sense. “Trouble is, I never know when you’re lying and when you’re telling the truth.”

  “Please, just sit here and give me a couple of minutes. Okay? Look. Here’s Devin with the coffee. It’s not brilliant, but it’s drinkable. I’ll be right back.”

  True enough, he was back before Caleb’s drink was cool. “I’ve got good news,” he said. “Nat’s found CCTV footage of someone who looks like Kaali, heading towards Chaffers Dock, like you thought. Good call on that. The first sighting is Wakefield Street, and she’s already dressed, so the skip you found in Fowlers Lane seems the best bet. The police have an investigation running into an unregistered brothel with underage girls, but they don’t have a location yet. It might be the same place Kaali was held. And the visa place you found, is registered as—get this—a dry-cleaning business. We’re checking if Erich is linked to it.”

  Caleb drank the mediocre coffee and mulled over the state of play. “We carry on with our plan for the club tonight. Is there any chance you could try to get into the visa place? You and Mitch look like city businessmen.”

  “We can give it a try.”

  “I have to head home for a couple of hours,” said Caleb. “We’re going to be out late, and I need to feed my cat.”

  Jonathan narrowed his gaze at him. “Is that code for something?”

  Caleb’s turn to grin. “Nah, mate. You’ve been watching too much TV.”

  “Very funny. Let’s meet up at the office at ten. I’ll set it up with the others. Devin can see you out.”

  It wasn’t strictly a lie. Minerva did need feeding, and some company, but there was also an Immigration server to break into. And this was probably the best time to do it.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Caleb collected his motorbike and rode home slowly, his brain churning over the day’s events.

  Andi’s incursion into the Immigration server had been, at best, a random grab of data. There was more information now—more data points to plot. Erich Morgen. Edmund Collier. The names of the nightclubs and the dry-cleaning business that Erich used as a front.

  Minerva was delighted as always to see him. She curled around his ankles when he went inside, and scrambled onto the nearest counter before jumping to his shoulder.

  “Hey, Min.” He rubbed the soft fur under her chin. Her purrs were loud in his ear, and he left her perched like a stripy parrot while he closed blinds and curtains, and checked his security measures.

  Everything was as he left it this mor
ning. What a fucked up day it was. He cleaned Min’s litter tray, changed her water bowl, and dispensed a sachet of ludicrously overpriced sardine-flavoured food onto a fresh saucer. Only then, did she deign to climb down to the floor.

  The souvlaki felt like hours ago, so he dug in the freezer for some of the leftovers Sandra gave him. Lasagne. Awesome. While that reheated in the oven, he fired off a text to her, to say thank you for dinner, and another to Emma, to see how she was.

  Emma replied a few minutes later.

  Emma: Hey you. When are you going to teach me this fighting stuff, huh?

  He smiled.

  Caleb: Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow?

  Emma: Promises, promises.

  There was a pause, and then another message.

  Emma: Have you spoken to Mark recently?

  Shit. He should have expected this. He wasn’t quick enough to reply, and Emma phoned him.

  “Hey,” he said. “I talked to him earlier and gave him an update on the exercise. You?”

  “Not since yesterday. I’m worried, Caleb. My danger-radar is pinging all over the place. Did he sound okay?”

  “I only caught him for a moment, but yeah. Sounded normal.” It was a good thing Emma wasn’t here; she’d see the lie he delivered. But he might get away with it over the phone.

  “You’d tell me, right? If he was in trouble?”

  “You can trust me, Em.”

  “You didn’t say yes.”

  “I didn’t say no, either.”

  “Damn it, Caleb. You’ve been spending too much time with Jonathan. That’s how he talks. I swear, he ties me into a knot.”

  “Yeah, he’s good at that.” Quick subject change needed. “Hey, do you fancy going to the movies this week? There’s that new Jurassic Park Number Six-thousand or something that just opened.”

  “Good idea. Tomorrow, maybe? I’m going out tonight.”

  “Dinner at your mum’s?”

  “No. One of my team, Kelly, is moving to Sydney, and we’re having a farewell for her. Ten-pin bowling, and then drinks and maybe something to eat. It’s half-price-cocktail night at Lanes. Should be fun.”

  “Sounds it.” More fun than his plans—that was for sure. “Talking of food, my Sandra-lasagne is about ready. Have a good evening. I’ll text you about the cinema tickets.”

  Caleb thought about the hack while he ate. His usual plan was to disguise his location, to make it appear like he was sitting in a basement in Iowa or an office in Silicon Valley, but this wasn’t a good strategy tonight. The server techs would be on the lookout for incursions. If he appeared to be connecting from central Wellington, he’d have a better chance of staying under their radar.

  With Min curled up and purring at the side of his keyboard, Caleb flexed his fingers and started work. First he needed to add the extra data to his mining configuration. He added searches for Erich Morgen, Edmund Collier, the Triple-X-Girls club, the address of the visa office, and the name of Morgen’s dry-cleaning business. As an afterthought, he also added the name of the Greek restaurant.

  He checked the parameters. Good to go. He wasn’t going to leave this one running all night if he wasn’t here to watch it. This was a ninja operation—sneak in, run a quick search, and then drop out again before he was noticed. Chances were the server would be attacked again tonight, and he wanted to be logged out long before then.

  All his security measures were in place. It was time.

  He tried Andi’s login. It hadn’t been revoked, or at least, not yet.

  Caleb let out a sigh of relief. “Achievement unlocked,” he muttered.

  When Andi created the login, she gave herself Admin rights, which meant he could go higher in the file structure than regular users. Before he went any further, he wanted to see who else was logged in. If he was alone, he’d stand out.

  Maybe because the network had been offline for most of the day, there were over twenty logins active. Good. He oriented himself with the network, identified the SQL database servers, and loaded his mining programme. To an outside observer, it looked like a regular SQL query. If luck was on his side, it’d run before everyone else logged out for the night.

  The query started. It would sift through the SQL databases, churning through the servers as it searched for the keywords programmed by Caleb. He could sit and watch the data scrolling up the screen, or he could kick off another search, this one on the dark web. He had a name to search for now.

  Was Erich Morgen targeting him deliberately? Or was Caleb an easy target? Wrong place, wrong time?

  Either way, he wanted to find out as much about the man as he could. Know thine enemy, and all that.

  The mining exercise on the Immigration server was running slowly. Definitely more slowly than he expected. Didn’t Andi say something about that too? The DDOS attack was in progress when she was running her searches. Was that the case again?

  In Admin mode, Caleb checked the network stats—the amount of free memory and disk space, the number of users, the amount of activity. Everything looked normal. If he was SysAdmin on call, he wouldn’t be concerned by these figures. Most likely, the techs were applying updates, and eating up the system resources while they did so.

  Was there some malware running? A worm, maybe?

  Caleb kept an eye on the clock. He was meeting the others in an hour, and it’d take him fifteen minutes to bike across town. He also needed time to close down the searches and cleanly log out of the various systems he was plugged into. He checked the status of the Immigration network again. It had ground almost to a halt, yet the monitoring software continued to report it as fine. He shook his head. Weird, but not his problem.

  He’d done enough. He killed the mining programme and waited for it to confirm it was done. It was supposed to do a clean-up and delete any references to it being there, as part of the exit routine, but that wasn’t happening. Instead, a little blue circle spun on the screen. Processing.

  The system was slow. It’d take longer.

  Processing.

  Caleb swallowed his impatience and switched his attention to his other machine, the one planting search seeds across the dark web. That was spinning out nicely, but he’d stop it, to save it running while he was out.

  Several minutes later, he turned back to the Immigration network.

  Processing.

  This was a problem. He could pull the plug on his login, but like leaving random pieces of cutlery on a restaurant table, it wouldn’t be tidy. If the server techs found any of his markers, how far back could they trace them? Could they identify him?

  No. They’d see an unusual SQL query was running, and they might try to link it to the current outage, but that was all.

  He could wait ten, even fifteen minutes. It was tempting to stare at the endlessly spinning circle on the screen, but that was pointless. He logged in and checked his email, surfed the news channels, and looked at cinema listings for the rest of the week.

  No change. Processing.

  Damn it. He couldn’t wait any longer. He’d have to go back later or even tomorrow, and do a clean-up.

  *

  The one time Caleb went to a strip club, he was still at university. It was a rite of passage. A group of young men would get inebriated while cheering on girls and begging them to remove their thongs. Even then, he hated the crowds and the artificiality of it. He didn’t look forward to going tonight, but this was different. It wasn’t for his supposed enjoyment, but to rescue a young woman. That was what he had to focus on.

  He was a few minutes late getting to the office. “Sorry,” he said as he walked in. “Any updates?”

  “Nothing yet,” said Jonathan. “Our boy is silent as a mouse. Hasn’t even asked for his lawyer.”

  “Here’s your comm.” Devin held out a black earbud with a short wire hanging from it. “We’re all wearing them. Just tap the centre”—he showed Caleb where—“to activate it.”

  “Griff’s meeting us there,” said Andi. Shadows hung under he
r eyes. She looked ready for sleep, rather than for a few hours of noise. “We need all the help we can get.”

  “You look wiped out,” said Caleb. “Sure you want to go?”

  She tightened her jaw and thinned her lips. “I’m the only one who’ll recognise Kaali if we find her. Besides, if you guys need a diversion, Griff and I can have a fight or something.”

  “Only if you’re sure,” said Caleb.

  “We already had this conversation,” said Jonathan. “Right before you walked in. Andi wants to go with us.”

  “Less talk, more action,” she said, her voice sharp. “Are we going or what?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Jonathan was casually dressed in jeans and a padded jacket.

  Caleb had only seen him in business clothes before. “What happened to the suit?” he asked. “I thought you were going to try and bluff your way into the visa office?”

  “Not without any intel.” Jonathan looked around the assembled group. “Remember, guys, we’re supposed to be enjoying ourselves, alright?”

  Grunts and muttered yeps replied.

  They talked through the plan as they went. They had two objectives. The first was to locate the basement where Kaali had been held, by finding an entry point from the club. The second was to engage the staff, in order to gain access to the special girls. Nat and Jonathan would do that, while the others pretended to enjoy the show and explored the floor for the way into the basement.

  “If this was a movie,” said Devin, a wistful note in his voice, “we’d have wireframe floorplans of the entire building, and little moving dots showing us where everybody was. Thermal imaging and stuff.”

  “This is real life,” snapped Andi, “and instead of actresses, there are real girls, being abused. Is that enough incentive for you?”

  “Whoa. Cool it, Andi,” said Caleb. “We’re a team, okay? That means we don’t attack each other.” Did he say that? Maybe Jonathan and Mark’s influence was rubbing onto him, after all.

  Andi scowled at him, but stayed quiet until they got close to Courtenay Place. “There’s Griff.” She waved.