All that Glitters

by Les Cowan

  So little Tati. She’s one I took a particular interest in. Most of them won’t look you in the eye. You are the driver taking them where they want to go, but they know you’re not their friend. So they look at the ground or the footsteps of the girl in front. But Tati looks you straight in the eye and tells you she’s going to be a big success. She was so confident it almost made me believe her. Maybe she will be, but I doubt it. She was bright, cheerful, organized. She had enough food and water for the trip and even enough to share with some of the girls who didn’t have enough. They all spoke some local dialect so I didn’t understand them but she cheered them all up and told them jokes. She made it feel like a Sunday School trip. In the space of a couple of hours she had already become their big sister. She comforted the ones who were crying, encouraged the ones who were sad, and reassured the ones who were worried. Of course that made my job a lot easier so I was nice to her. Then, pretty soon I was treating her like an assistant, not like a package to be taken from A to B – no different from 10,000 cigarettes or a couple of kilos of dope. I don’t know how she did that. She was good-looking enough but this wasn’t anything to do with skin or hair. She had something in her spirit you don’t often see. Naturally I would have liked to have got to know her a bit better – if you take my meaning – but somehow I didn’t dare. For the first time in years she made me feel like I could be a better man if I wanted to. I treated all the girls well on that trip. I don’t know what they have in store for her but I can guess. Picking a beautiful orchid blossom and stamping it into the ground isn’t a good thing to do. I have to admit that sometimes I’m not as sure about it all as I like to sound. Taking Tati was one of those times.

  Chapter 9

  CYBERSPACE

  Spade wasn’t used to this. Normally he had no visitors at all – none, nada, nie, nyet, nikto. Who’d want to visit an internet recluse who lived in a slum? But that didn’t really matter. You didn’t have to see people face-to-face to communicate nowadays; face-to-face was old-fashioned and inefficient. He had plenty of other ways to communicate. It wasn’t a bad thing – it was just different, that’s all. Despite all of that, he’d been surprised how much he’d enjoyed an evening of normal chat with affable guests who had turned up in person and were neither computer geeks nor dysfunctional neighbours. Then, not content with that, within the week they were back again. This might be worth a post on the “Sociopaths Anonymous” subreddit.

  Now he held up the little red memory stick David had handed him; not because he thought looking at it would convey any more information, just to absorb the disproportionate impact such a small device seemed to have had. He was perfectly used to tiny bits of code that unlocked powerful secrets, but he’d never come across a computer virus that might have killed a man. Now he was holding it in his hand. He wouldn’t have been surprised if it had started vibrating slightly. David had explained that Mike Hunter had been investigating a dodgy account that might be connected to the proceeds of crime. Shortly afterwards he’d been found hanged. It seemed at least plausible that these two things might be linked, but the only tangible connection was the tiny memory stick before them. What they needed to know was, could a USB stick have directly uploaded a collection of images onto Mike’s computer without his knowledge, or maybe even allowed third-party access to deliver the files some other time?

  “Of course. Totally. Either,” was his immediate response. “A few years ago two big American power companies had critical systems infected from a USB stick. Probably some dipstick that wanted to play Tetris at work and brought a copy from home. Cost them megabucks to fix. Then there’s a thing called Stuxnet. Supposedly developed as a cyberweapon by the US and Israel – naturally denied by both – aimed at Iran’s nuclear research programme. It got in on a USB stick, then it grabbed control of a centrifuge used in fuel production and made it run so fast it blew itself to bits – which is kinda cool. You wouldn’t want to be at work that day though. So – yes to both questions. It’s absolutely routine.”

  “So the next thing is, how exactly did it work in this case?” David pressed him. “I mean, can we tell whether it introduced the files then and there or just opened the machine to outside control? And if it was from outside, who was doing the controlling?”

  “We can certainly look and see what it installs and what that does – sure. As regards who, if it’s a trojan we can get the IP address it links to – it has to say hello to somebody – but after that it gets a bit more complicated.”

  “Meaning what exactly?” Gillian asked. “Isn’t there any sort of list of who uses what address?” Spade rearranged himself slightly in his massive office chair, took another bite of a caramel wafer, and tried to imagine what it must be like to not understand even the basics of internet connectivity.

  “Well, we call it an address but it’s not really like the address you live at. For a start, computers can share IP addresses but then, on the other hand, a single machine might get a new address every time you reset the router. So it would be like everybody in Gorgie swapping flats when the music stops – plus a few of them deciding to move in together. An IP address doesn’t necessarily always link to a single consistent entity.”

  “Is that as far as we go then?” David asked, still trying to nail it down.

  “No,” Spade said slowly. “We can go a bit further. IP addresses are issued by ISPs. We can certainly find out which service provider issued the address and which country they’re in. It’s then that things get more complicated. ISPs are pretty sensitive about releasing who’s been allocated a particular address. Normally it needs a court order – at least in the countries that have any legal system in place, and half of them don’t.”

  “So a dead end at that point?” Gillian asked. “Country of origin.”

  “Well yes – officially. It doesn’t mean you can’t find out, just that you’re not supposed to. Which is more or less what keeps me in a job. Basically you have to hack the ISP’s own records. It can be done. It just takes a bit more time, that’s all.”

  “Ok then.” David picked up the stick again. “Sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What’s on it?”

  Spade took the stick a little gingerly, as if distasteful of what it might have been responsible for, reached down under the desktop, and pushed it into a slot.

  “Aren’t you worried something might get onto your computer?” Gillian asked as the drive whirred and the stick began winking at them.

  Spade uttered something between a grunt and a laugh.

  “I’d like to see them try,” he said. “I’ve more protection here than GCHQ.”

  From that point on, what Spade was doing, how, and why became impossible to follow. Released from having to explain the obvious to the uninitiated, he lapsed back into normal service. Windows were opened, dialogue boxes popped up, commands and parameters were typed in, lists of results appeared, were noted and then closed, and on to the next one almost before David and Gillian could register that a new application had started. The only sound besides rhythmic keyboard clatter and the stop-start whirr of the drive was an occasional grunt of apparent satisfaction and the odd slurp of coffee. At one point he unexpectedly said “magic756” without explanation, then carried on. His guests might have vanished into cyberspace for all the attention he paid them as he settled into the zone.

  After about fifteen minutes of focused attention but not a single word, Gillian slipped out, braving the bomb site of a kitchen, and came back with three coffees and yet more chocolate biscuits – apparently the staple diet of computer hackers. Nothing had changed. David had given up trying to follow and was reading something on his phone. Half an hour more and Gillian had begun to pace up and down behind Spade and his bank of computers. Spade had made it all sound relatively straightforward, but now the seemingly relentless succession of windows, pop-up boxes, scrolling lists, and warning alerts were starting to look as if it wasn’t proving so easy in practice. He occasionally scratched an ear, scribbled something down o
r grunted – nothing more. Finally, after fully an hour of silence and absorption, Gillian was unable to manage the suspense any longer.

  “Problems?” she asked softly. It took a few seconds for Spade to register. He gave a short laugh.

  “Naw! Baby stuff. I got the IP address and ISP forty minutes ago. Just thought I’d do a bit more roaming around, that’s all. I must have got a bit distracted. Sorry. So… first question: was there something nasty on the stick? Yes. Did it download stuff by itself or actually pass control of the PC to some third party? The latter. Who did it communicate with? Here’s the address.” He held up a scribbled set of numbers on a Post-it note. This IP address was issued three years ago by a service provider called Unibel, which operates from Minsk in Belarus. Can you get a court order to find out who owns the IP address? No chance. You might as well ask for your granddad’s horse confiscated by the Red Army back. However, luckily we don’t need to ask. I’ve found out the address is used by a group calling itself SiS. What that stands for I have no idea but there is a registered address in Minsk. Although the IP address was issued in Belarus it seems to connect to a PC in Britain. The traffic was handled by a server in Basingstoke, then came to Edinburgh. I can’t be more specific than that. As regards the event you’re interested in, it’s impossible to say exactly when the trojan was installed but it began communicating about two weeks ago. Then there’s a huge burst of data on… eh, what’s the date today? Twelfth? Big burst of data on Saturday night. I can track that back to let you see what they sent if you like… No? Right. I didn’t think so. Anyway something like 200 JPGs. So that’s it. Seems you’re on the right track. Sorry for the interruption to normal service.”

  Gillian pulled out onto Gorgie Road with very different emotions from the previous Sunday evening. There was satisfaction of a sort in the fact that Sam had guessed correctly, but that didn’t feel anything like as good as it should have. David had Spade’s printout with all the key data – their tame hacker wasn’t keen on speaking to the police himself and asked them not to say where the information had come from. “It won’t be a problem, though,” he’d reassured them. “Hand them this and their IT guys can follow it up easily enough themselves.” Now, regardless of being right and having a page of numbers to prove it, that didn’t change the reality. Mike Hunter was dead and Sam Hunter was a grieving widow. The damage had been done and all the data in the world wouldn’t change that. It was like knowing the exact thickness of the ice, its chemical composition, breaking point, and all the physics that had contributed to a good friend falling through and being drowned in an icy lake. So what? You could put up a warning sign and catch whoever was responsible for the path across the lake but that wasn’t the problem. What they really wanted was just as inaccessible now as it had been two hours ago. They drove back to Bruntsfield in silence.

  “What now?” Gillian finally asked as she pulled in outside David’s tenement entrance.

  “I suppose I tell Sam. She has the right to find out first. Then a call to DI Thompson. If this doesn’t change it to a murder inquiry and write off the images on his PC then I don’t know what will, though we’re still no further forward in knowing who we’re actually talking about – I mean, which of the three congregations turns out to be not quite what it seems.”

  “And how do we do that? We can’t go around accusing innocent churchgoers of money laundering and murder.”

  “And likewise we can’t ignore the guilty. It’s telling the difference that’s the problem.”

  “As it always is.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Isn’t it just what you were preaching about the other week – the parable of the wheat and the tares? Everything goes on growing together until the end of the age when the angels gather it all in then separate things out. We don’t have that luxury.”

  “Well, I suppose this is less a theological problem than a criminal one.”

  “Except that they’re posing as a church. That’s the bit that gets me. There are going to be real people involved who haven’t any idea of what’s going on behind the scenes. I suppose they listen to the sermons week by week, send their kids to Sunday School, put their fiver in the plate, and think they’re doing what they should. All the time what they’re really doing is supporting a criminal enterprise that’s responsible at least for disseminating images of child abuse and for murder, and maybe a bunch of other things besides. I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t just the tip of the iceberg.” Gillian sounded perplexed but also personally aggrieved.

  David sat quietly, looking ahead of him, thinking about the guilty and the innocent. Beyond Bruntsfield Links and the Meadows further away lights were just beginning to come on in the smart apartments now occupying what used to be the old Royal Infirmary. That was where his mother had been working when his dad turned up drunk and bleeding one night. Getting plastered and banging your head on a lamp post wasn’t entirely recommended, yet it had resulted in – well, resulted in him, among other things. And he had resulted in Warehouse 66 in Madrid in a roundabout way. And Warehouse 66 had saved innumerable lives through its drug rehab programme, even though it had then cost the one life dearer to him than any other. But through that horrendous bereavement he had come to Edinburgh and met Gillian. And because of that he had been able to help find Jen MacInnes, who would now almost certainly be dead if they hadn’t got involved. In another sense than intended, maybe the parable was right enough, even in this life. You simply couldn’t pull things apart and say with any certainty what was going to be irredeemably wicked or undeniably good in their consequences. Sometimes what looked the most horrendous could bring about inexplicably good results – or good intentions all go wrong. Despite being the closest of friends, there were times David had to confess he found Juan’s absolute faith that “El Señor” was at work in ways we couldn’t guess bordering on the idealistic. We just had to do our best, he maintained, surround everything with prayer, and somehow God would work it out. But idealistic or not, it gave him a solidity of faith David often envied. It was Joseph and his brothers again. You meant it for evil – God meant it for good. David hoped there might be something – anything – good that could come out of this. Right now it didn’t seem very likely.

  Alexander Benedetti had spent most of that week in a daze. He drove to work, dealt with his in tray, went to meetings, and drove home again without Mike Hunter’s death ever leaving his mind. He cooked and washed up, read the kids their bedtime stories, and did a bit of hoovering while Sonia studied, all on autopilot. Sometimes she would ask him something or make a comment, but it all passed right through him like antimatter. “Are you all right?” she finally asked him. “I really think you’re working too hard, Sandy. You need a break.”

  Of course Mike Hunter was all the talk around the water cooler. Did you hear what happened to Mike? Incredible. Apparently his laptop had been full of child pornography and he thought he was about to be exposed, so he wrapped one end of a tow rope around a beam in the garage and the other end… well, you know. Just goes to show. You never really know someone like you think you do. One or two in the section seemed strangely silent on the subject of what he had on his computer but Alexander was silent for another reason. His problem wasn’t the what, the how, or the why; it was the who. Although he’d been nowhere near the Hunter household he felt just as implicated as if he had been. And he had a deeply worrying feeling that he knew exactly who had been there. He called the Prophet as soon as he’d got his head together but was met only by what sounded like mild surprise and sympathy – or maybe that was what it was meant to sound like. He should “put it out of his mind”, he was told. Look on the bright side. At least there wasn’t going to be any more scrutiny of the accounts now. If he started delving into what had happened, that would probably only focus more attention on him and that was what we all wanted to avoid, wasn’t it? Alexander couldn’t be quite sure if that was a threat but it sounded like it might be. Funny how concealing the true nature o
f the account being illegal hadn’t cropped up until now. In the meantime, being personally safer gave him no comfort whatsoever. A man had died. A colleague. Maybe he could even say, a friend. Mike’s workstation was empty and his emails were going unanswered. His responsibilities were being shared around. But this wasn’t a case of nipping off for a fortnight in the Maldives. Mike Hunter wasn’t coming back and Alexander had a feeling he understood why.

  Then there was the problem of the church. He thought he understood about the kingdom of God being bigger than human affairs, but did that include ignoring the banking laws and maybe even murder? And if that really was what had happened, how should he now regard the people he had trusted, confided in, and who’d personally helped him in so many ways? Were they all just being conned? And maybe the entire message was just as much of a con as the leaders. Perhaps most worrying of all, maybe it was going to be a bit more tricky getting out than it had been getting in.