Network of Deceit

by Tom Threadgill

  “And . . . ?”

  “He, or for all I know they’re a woman, they call themselves Mighty Mouse 12.”

  39

  Amara rested her forearms on the table and leaned forward. “Mighty Mouse 12? What does that mean?”

  Starsky raised a finger. “Not that I’m old enough to remember, but Mighty Mouse was a cartoon character. Don’t think he’s been on TV in decades, but maybe the show’s in syndication and you can still watch it.”

  “Wow,” Haley said. “Ever hear of YouTube? We went on there when the dude first showed up and watched some of the old shows. Kinda retro, you know? Anyway, no clue who he is.”

  “Wait,” Starsky said. “If he’s Mighty Mouse 12, who are you? Online, I mean.”

  “What’s your social security number?”

  He tilted his head. “I’m not sure I see how that’s relevant.”

  The girl shrugged. “Protecting your identity, right? If I tell you my character name, you know who I am. Not gonna happen.”

  Amara pinched her fingers along her eyebrows. “Let’s back up. This might be easier if we stick to chronological order.”

  Wrinkles appeared on Haley’s forehead.

  “Tell us things in the order they happened,” Starsky said.

  The teenager crossed her arms. “I know what it means. Duh.”

  Starsky nodded. “So go back to the beginning. Zachary, Liam, Matias, and you got together how?”

  She shrugged. “We’re all, I guess, maybe thirteen or fourteen and into computers. It just kinda became a thing.”

  Amara clasped her hands together. “Could you be more specific? Like, did you meet on a hacker forum or what?”

  Haley snorted. “A hacker forum. Yeah, that’s what happens. A bunch of hackers get together in chat rooms. ‘Do you want to break into the Defense Department with me?’ ‘Sure. I’m not doing anything else this weekend. Maybe we can hack a bank after that?’”

  Starsky chuckled and Amara shot a glare his direction, silencing him instantly. “Fine. How did you four first get together then?”

  “Different ways, I guess. Trolling online, RPGs, whatever.”

  “Role-playing games,” Amara said for Starsky’s benefit. “Those things have thousands of players, don’t they? Kind of strange four people from San Antonio happened to run into each other.”

  “Not really,” the teenager said. “Back then, games let you sort players by all kinds of stuff, including location.”

  Starsky grabbed another slice of pizza. “Is that something you would normally do? Find people close by, I mean.”

  “Sometimes. You can spend a lot of time in these games just running around and exploring. Helps to have things to talk about. Being from the same area makes that easier. Course, you still can’t be sure who you’re talking to. That’s why we agreed to meet in person. Only way to verify who we were dealing with.”

  “Understood,” Amara said. “And how long after you four met did the first in-person meeting occur?”

  “Not for a couple of years at least. We’d figured out by then that we had, um, common interests.” She picked all the pepperoni off a slice and tossed the spicy stack into her mouth. “What you really want to ask is when we decided to get into ransomware, right? That’s why we met. Exchanged IDs, took photos of each other and our vehicles, visited our homes, anything we could think of. We had to make sure we could trust each other.”

  “I guess that’s one way to earn trust,” Starsky said. “And that’s when your merry band of hackers was formed? TOXICftw.”

  “Yeah,” Haley said. “We wanted something that sounded dangerous. TOXICftw was my idea. We all came up with a suggestion and voted on the one we liked best.”

  “And you were the lucky winner,” Starsky said.

  The girl frowned. “Not really. We all voted for ourselves, so we had to use an RNG to pick a winner.”

  “RNG?” Amara asked.

  “Are you even serious right now?” Haley said. “Random number generator. Let the computer decide.”

  Starsky grunted. “What happened to drawing names from a hat?”

  Amara glanced at him and gave a quick shake of her head, then turned back to Haley. “What next? Did you choose a leader?”

  “Nah. Doesn’t work like that. We made a few rules like not doing any hacking on our own and being careful how we spend our money. Our targets were all small, mostly local. The fee was paid in Bitcoin back then.”

  The fee. Not the ransom. Just a normal business transaction. “Makes sense. What would you say your average fee was?”

  “Anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand. Not like we were getting rich on it. Worked fine for a while, until we decided to go after bigger clients.”

  “Why change what was working?” Amara asked. “More money?”

  “More challenge,” Haley said. “Got bored. Too easy to hit the small companies. Yeah, a bigger payout was nice, but that’s not what we were after. Not at first. Plus, hard to make a name for yourself when nobody’s heard of you.”

  “Forgive me,” Starsky said. “Maybe I’m missing something here, but why would you want people to know who you are? I mean, you’re breaking the law. Isn’t the whole point to remain anonymous?”

  Haley stared at him for a moment before looking back at Amara. “Was he, like, around with the dinosaurs or something?”

  “Close. Humor him.” And me.

  “It’s a business,” the teenager said. “You want to get some cred, you gotta grow. People need to know they can trust you. TOXICftw had to move on to bigger customers. It’s the way things work.”

  Starsky rubbed his nose. “Credibility and trust for the people who are robbing you. Makes perfect sense.”

  “We do what we say,” Haley said. “You pay, we release your files. You don’t pay, good luck trying to recover them. A few times we lowered the amount after the customer explained their situation, but nothing was ever free. Do that once and word gets out. The next client might not be so willing to cooperate.”

  “Okay,” Amara said. “I can see that. So what changed? You’re cruising along, things are going good, and what? Mighty Mouse 12?”

  “There was a, um, complication, I guess you could say.” She slid the pepperoni-less slice back into the box. “One night a year or so ago, me and Dexter are chilling at home and Liam calls. Says there’s a problem and to check out our Bitcoin address. I log on and see a message there telling us we screwed up, but it’s cool.”

  “Screwed up how?” Amara asked.

  “By using Bitcoin.” Her nose scrunched as Starsky bit into her picked-apart pizza. “Turns out some governments can now track it and find out where the money goes. No big deal for us though, ’cause we figure they’re looking for terrorists and mega dollars. No way they’re coming after us.”

  Starsky held his hand in front of his mouth. “Bigger fish to fry.”

  “What?” Haley said. “Forget it. Anyway, this message says not to worry but might want to change to a privacy coin to cover our tracks. That’s why we switched to Zcash before our next, uh, customer. The weird thing was that whoever sent the message knew our Bitcoin address. No way that could happen unless they’d been one of the people we already hacked. See, Bitcoin changes addresses after every transaction. The old addresses are still good, but you really don’t want to use them more than once. Helps with the secrecy and all.”

  Amara rubbed her dry eyes. Way too late at night for this technical talk. “So were you able to figure out which previous ‘customer’ they got the address from?”

  “Yeah. It was really old. One of the first ones we did, like almost two years before we got the message. Place isn’t in business anymore. A pool supply store. The paper did a story—who even reads the paper?—anyway, they did a story on ransomware and this place was included. Had a screenshot of the monitor, so that’s probably where MM12 got the address. Not long after that, a couple of white vans pulled into the store’s parking lot and the place
was gone.”

  “Immigration,” Starsky said.

  Haley sneered at him. “Thanks, Captain Obvious.”

  Starsky winked. “No sweat, Sergeant Sarcasm.”

  The girl turned away and hid her grin from him.

  Amara stood and arched her back. “Write down the name of the pool store. The date too. What happened next?”

  “Like I said, we switched to Zcash. Then, I dunno, maybe a week or two later another message comes in. He wants to meet with us and we’re all, like, for real? But he says he can help us get bigger scores without more risk. Says we can pick the time and place to meet. Liam said not to trust him ’cause if he can really do that stuff, why not do it himself? He’s got a point, you know, but Zach says we should meet him online. That way we stay anonymous.” She crunched her Dr Pepper can and held it up. “Any more of these around?”

  “We’ll find a vending machine in a minute,” Amara said. “So the four of you agreed to an online meeting?”

  Haley shook her head. “First we voted. Two to two. Used the RNG again and that’s when we set up the meet. Told him we’d be on TM the next night at ten. Gave him our screen names but nothing else.”

  “TM?” Starsky asked.

  “Dude, seriously? Tango Murked. The game? Hello?”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Just wanted to make sure.”

  “Ignore him,” Amara said. “Go on.”

  “We’re standing around in an open area and this noob comes up—we could tell he was new ’cause he still had on the basic gear—and tries to talk to us. MM12. We shoot off to a private chat room and invite him in. That’s the first time we talked. Guy says he wants to be like our manager. Get better gigs for us. Course, he’d want his cut, but we’d never have to meet in person. Whole thing stays anon.”

  Starsky surveyed the pizza bones in the box before choosing the crust from a slice Amara had abandoned. “Did you ask why he didn’t just do it himself?”

  “Yeah. No skills, he said. At least not like ours. He’s more of a sales guy. Finds us new customers and we go in and close the deal.”

  Amara glanced at Starsky as he finished the last of her crust. For most people, someone polishing off your half-eaten food would be a sign of either a close relationship or a person with no table manners. With Starsky, it could be either, neither, or both. She turned back to the teen. “Sounds like he wanted you to take all the risk. Couldn’t you find your own, um, ‘customers’?”

  “Sure, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Most of the ones we’d already done were small-time stuff, like the pool guy. The bigger you go, the more work involved in the hack. Problem is that if you spend all that time and then the customer refuses to pay, everyone loses. You trash their files, they lose their data, and you’ve wasted your time.” She flicked her finger against the crushed soda can and sent it skittering across the table. “And if you want cred, you’ve got to eventually get your name out there. The only way to do that is with a big payday or two. MM12 said he could deliver that.”

  “You trusted him? How did you know he wasn’t FBI?”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t, so we set up a test. Told him to give us the names of a couple potential customers and we’d look into them and pick one and let him know. No problem, he says, and we agreed to meet same place and time the next day. We all drop offline and, like, an hour later two company names show up at our old Bitcoin address. The four of us talk it over and choose this podunk town in Indiana. Barstow, wherever that is. But we told MM12 we picked the other option, some lawyer group in Phoenix.”

  “Smart,” Starsky said. “If it is the FBI and they’re watching for you on the network, you’re not there.”

  “Yeah.” She reached for the Dr Pepper can. “I’m getting that d-peps or what?”

  He stood and frowned. “D-peps. You’re just messing with us now, aren’t you? Making stuff up?”

  Her lips remained in a thin, straight line. “It’ll catch on. How much longer is this gonna take?”

  Amara sat again. “It takes as long as it takes. What was the name of the legal firm in Phoenix?”

  “Why does that matter? Lawyers are lawyers. Unity Legal, maybe?” Haley said. “MM12 said to let him know when we were ready. Set the fee at thirty-five k. Way more than we’d ever been paid. After a couple of weeks, we were good to go. Had access to everything we needed in Barstow’s network, so we contacted MM12.”

  “How?” Starsky asked.

  “Same as always. His Zcash address. Send him a few pennies and attach a message to it. Told him to meet us online again and let him know that we’d be flipping the switch in five minutes, but we didn’t do the lawyers. Did Barstow instead and put his old Bitcoin address on there. Money goes to him, so if anyone’s tracking it, he gets nailed.”

  “Let me guess,” Amara said. “If he sends the money to you on Zcash, you can claim you don’t know where it came from. If he doesn’t send the money, you’re out a bit of work but that’s it.”

  “Yep. Barstow went off as planned, so we gave him our Zcash numbers, and less than two days later, eighty-five hundred shows up in each account. He kept a thou for himself and sent the rest on. After that, more of the same. Bigger jobs, more money. Even splitting the pot five ways instead of four, pretty soon we had some decent funds.”

  Starsky scratched his cheek. “Define ‘decent funds.’”

  “A little over a quarter mil.”

  He held out his hand. “Divided five ways, that’s—”

  “Quarter mil each,” Haley said. “Like I said, decent. Not that we actually got that much in payments. Value grows, you know?”

  “Like interest at a bank?” he asked.

  Haley released an exaggerated sigh. “A year ago, one Bitcoin was worth four thousand. Today it’s close to ten. Seen some people say it’ll go up to twenty within another year or two. Zcash works the same way. Of course, it’s entirely possible the bottom falls out and my quarter mil is worth half that by the time I wake up in the morning.”

  Amara planted her forearms on the table. Sounded a lot like playing the stock market. “Why not just withdraw it? Convert some of it to dollars to protect yourself?”

  “Not how it works. There are ATMs that can do some transactions, but they have dollar limits, plus the fees are ridiculous. Oh, and can’t use an ATM without being videoed. And if you convert your digital money into dollars online, it almost always has to be linked to a bank account. Can’t do that, obviously. Too many questions.”

  Starsky held up his hand. “Can I ask a stupid question?”

  Haley giggled. “Better than anybody I know.”

  He licked his finger and dragged a “1” in the air. “That’s one for you. What good is having all this money, and I’m still not convinced it’s real, if you can’t use it?”

  “Didn’t say you couldn’t turn it into cash. Just meant you have to be careful how and when you do it. Besides, who needs paper? You don’t think Zcash and Bitcoin and all the others are real? My truck real enough for you? Bought it with digital funds.” She stood and picked up her phone. “Everything else I could tell you is more of the same. If you want details on our customers and more info, I’m gonna need to see my deal first. I’ve told you everything I can at this point.”

  “Not yet,” Amara said. “Why were the four of you at the Cannonball Water Park that day? And don’t tell me it was just a coincidence you all went on the day Zachary Coleman was killed.”

  Her lips turned down and she stared at the table. “That was the day we were going to make the water park our newest customer.”

  So it was them. No surprise. “And you wanted to be there so you could, what? Watch it happen? Why?”

  “Why not? We’d been playing around in their system for weeks, making sure everything was ready. We gave MM12 instructions and he was gonna activate the attack. Plan was to shut down a few rides, disable some of their security systems, stuff like that. Nothing that would put anyone in any danger.”
/>
  “Wait a minute,” Starsky said. “This Mighty Mouse character. He knew you would all be at the water park on that day. That’s why you think he had something to do with Coleman’s death?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know how he knew who we were or what we looked like. We screwed up. That’s the first time we could be connected to a physical location.”

  “I get that,” Amara said. “But assuming he’s responsible for the murder, I still don’t understand why.”

  “Me neither,” the teenager said.

  “Humor us,” Starsky said. “I’m certain you have some theories.”

  She nodded. “I’ve thought about it. A lot. I think MM12 was afraid Zach was going to talk. Tell the cops what we were doing.”

  “Why would he think that?” Amara asked.

  “Because of that nursing home where Zach’s grandmother lives. Should’ve skipped it, but it was on our list from way back. We broke their network before we even met MM12. Weren’t going to set them up as a customer or anything. Just wanted to see if we could do it. Somebody, Liam I think, says we should go ahead and collect since we did the work. Zach said no way, so we voted. Two to two—I didn’t want to do it either—so we asked MM12 and he says, yeah, go for it but keep the price low. Made the vote three to two.”

  Amara swept crumbs into the pizza box. “So Zach disagreed. Doesn’t seem like a lot of motive to kill someone, especially considering you voted against it and you’re still here.”

  The girl lifted her face. “That woman died. Zach said it was our fault. Said he was thinking about getting out. We were all cool with that as long as he kept quiet. Guess MM12 wanted to make sure.”

  “At the water park,” Amara said, “why did you all separate? Why not stay together?”

  “We were going to record it when it happened. Not for anyone to see except us, of course. We all had our assigned places where we could shoot our videos and not be seen on the park’s cameras.”

  She clicked her pen twice. “Who was supposed to be where?”

  “Um, I was Aqua Attack. I don’t remember where the others were.”

  “Don’t remember or won’t tell us?”