Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2)

by Jack Lively

  Helen was the woman whom I had met at the fire tower, with her son, Hank. The front door was glass, and gave directly on to the kitchen, which in turn opened to the living room. There were multi-colored crystals arranged in several areas of the house, like small shrines to Alaskan’s mineral heritage. A tie-dyed peace sign was framed above the kitchen sink. So far, so good. Helen offered us her own lemonade. I tried to be polite and show interest. Helen said that she worked on the internet as something called a Mechanical Turk. I asked what that was, and she said, “Anything really, particularly things that a robot cannot do.”

  I said, “Give me an example.”

  “Sure, what I was working on right now. They gave me a bunch of pictures, like three thousand of them, all dogs. My job was to mark out the ones I thought were cute.”

  “A highly subjective task,” I said. “I’m guessing that the least threatening dogs are the cutest.”

  She smiled. “That’s right. Highly subjective, so it depends. The other day I had to take a survey on things I like to do on the weekend.”

  Ellie said, “Do robots have weekends?”

  Helen’s son Hank walked in. He was wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of sheepskin house shoes. Hank was the computer geek. He looked tired but smiled when he saw me. Hank looked out of the big square glass set into the front door. The sky was gray. He said, “Crappy weather, means it’s a good day to stay inside and do computer stuff.”

  Helen said, “Nothing illegal, I hope.”

  Hank said, “Ellie’s the police.”

  Helen said, “Kind of.” She looked at Ellie. “No offense, Ellie.”

  “None taken.”

  Hank’s room was like a computer dungeon. Machines on every available surface. And noisy, not only with the buzzing and cackling of electricity, but the loud whirring hum of cooling fans. If Hank had been a little limp out of the room, in it he gained a whole new aura of confidence. I produced George Abrams’ laptop.

  “We tried twice on the password. I figure maybe there’s one more try left.”

  Hank spoke with authority. “Forget the password. I’m going to get it into recovery mode. Bypass the front end.”

  I said, “You already lost me there, Hank.”

  He said, “I’m trying the back door. No big thing. I do it all the time.”

  Ellie said, “Okay, whatever.”

  Hank placed the laptop on a purpose-built stand fitted to a clean wood board serving as a desk. He examined the accessory ports on the laptop and plugged in the power cable. A tiny green light blinked on to prove the thing had juice. The screen remained blank, like a robot poker player. Maybe it was on, maybe not, it wasn’t saying.

  Hank removed a fist-sized black box from a drawer and connected a cable between the box and the laptop.

  I said, “What’s that?”

  “Like a brain, but not exactly intelligent, more like an idiot savant.”

  Ellie said, “That’s real helpful, Hank.”

  Hank rolled his eyes. “The box goes between the laptop and my other machines. Like a circuit breaker in case there’s something malicious in there.”

  I said, “Malicious how?”

  “You are trying to break into some guy’s computer, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So, the next assumption is that the computer might have belonged to someone engaged in criminal activity.” He looked at Ellie. “I mean, after all, Ellie’s kind of police.”

  “Okay.”

  Hank said, “So the tertiary assumption is that the possible criminal might have installed code that guards against intrusion, right?”

  I said, “Like having a guard dog in a house.”

  “That’s correct. Only that in my world, if you disturb the guard dog, he doesn’t necessarily stay in his house when the intruder runs out of it and shut the door. In my world, the guard dog comes over to your house, burns it down, and kills your family.”

  Ellie said, “So you’re protecting your own stuff with that black box.”

  Hank said, “You done asking questions? Want me to get on with it? I’ve got other boxes that I plan to connect, and if you ask me about each one we’ll be here for a long time.”

  Ellie said, “Go on, Hank, we won’t bother you anymore.”

  Hank turned back to the machines. He connected other boxes to the Abrams laptop, then he connected his own laptop to two of the boxes. Then he flicked a switch and sat back. Hank’s laptop came to life in the form of lines of white text on the black background. Abrams’ laptop remained a blank. Over on Hank’s machine, lines of text began to scroll. Hank was peering closely, surveying the unfolding situation. He seemed pleased.

  He said, “I’m in.”

  I said, “Back door?”

  “Back door. Easy. Now I’ll be able to get the files off of this computer, and onto one of my external drives. Then we’ll have them in quarantine.”

  “In case they are infected with something?”

  “Yup. They’ll be all locked away and harmless.”

  Hank manipulated his laptop, a flurry of fingers flying, clicking and dragging and scrolling and entering codes and commands. He sat back and watched for a minute. The cursor on his laptop was blinking in place, a small vertical yellow rectangle. We were watching Hank’s screen. I looked closer. Lines of text were writing themselves, then moving up a line while a new line was written below. The text was computer gobbledygook.

  I said, “What’s it doing?”

  Hank pointed at the lines of text as they formed. He said, “It’s just copying locations on this laptop, and replicating the file structure on the drive. That way, we have an exact copy.”

  “Will that take a long time?”

  Hank shrugged. "Might take some time, depending on the speed of your drive.” He pushed his chair back and swiveled to get up out of it. Walked over to a two-seater couch and picked up a guitar. I stood up and looked around his room, which despite the computers was still the room of a teenager. There were black light posters of women with panthers, stuff like that. Hank noticed me looking.

  “Want to see it in the black light?”

  “Sure, why not.”

  Hank stretched out for a remote control. He pushed a button and the room lights went off. Another button activated ultraviolet tubes secreted into the edges of the ceiling. Hank’s computer cave was suddenly some kind of rock and roll fantasy land. He strummed enthusiastically.

  Then Ellie said, “Hey.”

  I said, “What?”

  She said, “This red light is on. I don’t know if it’s been on the whole time, or if it just started now.”

  Hank dropped the guitar and came over. The screen on Abrams’ laptop was still blank, but now a tiny red light was pulsating, hidden in some recessed area of the plastic bezel frame. For a moment, none of us moved or said anything. And then Hank reached over and slammed the laptop shut, cutting off the red light. “Shit!” He quickly ripped cables from Abrams’ computer.

  I said, “What?”

  “Hold on.” Hank typed furiously on his laptop. “Fuck.” He looked at me, then to Ellie. “Oh shit. Turn the light on.”

  I walked over to the remote control and reset the lights.

  Ellie spoke slowly. “Hank? What’s going on?”

  Hank ignored her and looked at his own screen, scrolled around, clicked and tapped for maybe two minutes without speaking. Shook his head and cursed again. He turned to us. His face had gone even more pale yellow than it had been.

  “That red light was the laptop camera. I think it was recording us.”

  Ellie said, “Why was it doing that?”

  Hank said, “I don’t know why, Ellie. I think it was sending out.”

  I said, “I thought everything was quarantined by your black box? How did it send out?”

  Hank was scrutinizing his own laptop, clicking around rapidly. He pulled a phone from of his jeans pocket and examined it for a minute, tapping and swiping with fingers and two thumbs
. “I think it spoofed the Wi-Fi.” He looked at George Abrams’ laptop, sitting on the desk. No longer just a slab of expensive plastic and silicone, more like a menacing object heralding an invasion. Hank glanced at Ellie. “What the fuck is this?”

  Ellie was cool. She said, “I have no idea what’s going on. Take it slow, Hank, and explain simply.”

  Hank ignored her and re-opened George Abrams’ laptop. The red light was now off. Hank leapt up and scurried to a work bench, retrieving a tiny screwdriver and a roll of electric tape. When he had returned to the laptop, Hank ripped off a piece of tape and stuck it over the pinhead-sized camera. He unscrewed the top plate where the keyboard sat. The keys came up, connected to a thin multi-colored ribbon. Hank lay that against the screen. A rectangular hole now gave access to the internal components of George Abrams’ laptop. Hank examined the contents. To me, it looked like the inside of any computer, all wires and computer chip boards, but not so to Hank. To him it looked special. He pointed at a tiny gray box, attached to the circuit board by a couple of dozen nano-sized legs, like an evil insect.

  “It’s got its own sat link.” I saw that Hank was sweating. He looked at me, then at Ellie, eyes wild. “You guys brought me a Trojan horse.”

  Hank hunted around inside the laptop. Found something else and tapped on it with the screwdriver. It was another tiny computer chip, blue and brown. He retrieved a pair of needle-nose pliers from the work bench, clamped the blue and brown chip between the two steel mandibles and pulled and twisted until the tiny thing popped out of Abrams’ laptop. He gently laid the chip onto the desk. Then did the same thing with the gray box. Afterwards, he sat back gasping for breath.

  I put a hand on Hank’s shoulder, squeezed firmly. I said, “Slow it down, kid. Explain this calmly. Assume that we don’t know what you know. Like we’re dumb and ignorant old people, like we are your mom.”

  Hank took a deep breath. “I would never try and explain this to my mom.” He picked up the jewelers’ screwdriver. Tapped the gray box resting on the desk. “The little box there. It communicates to satellite. Which means it connects to its own internet network, doesn’t need mine. Doesn’t need anyone else’s.” Then he pointed the screwdriver at the blue and brown chip he had removed. “This is a Wi-Fi spoofer. Neither of them have power now because I removed them from the motherboard.”

  Ellie said, “I can guess about the satellite link. But what is a Wi-Fi spoofer, Hank?”

  Hank took another deep breath. “I have Wi-Fi in the house, like a normal person, right?”

  I said, “Right.”

  “All of my devices and computers connect to my home Wi-Fi, and that’s how I get online.”

  I said, “Yup, still with you.”

  Hank tapped the little blue and brown chip. “This thing identified my home Wi-Fi, learned all about it, and then pretended to be it. So all the other things that connect to my Wi-Fi, like my computers and my phones and my mom’s stuff, maybe even the TV, they connected to this little box here because they thought it was kosher.”

  Ellie said, “But it’s not kosher, Hank, is it?”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  I said, “What did it do?”

  He said, “Remember the little red light that was on?” We nodded. “Well, that was taking our picture and sending it to someone.”

  Ellie’s eyes were wide. “Let me guess, we don’t know who?”

  “No.”

  I said, “And the Wi-Fi spoofer, what did that do?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at his laptop screen, blinking blankly. “It was operational for what, a minute, thirty seconds? Maybe even two or three minutes. I guess it could have done a lot, could have sucked out all kinds of information from me and my mom’s stuff.”

  I said, “And sent them to that same someone, right?”

  Hank looked very scared. “Right.”

  Helen came into Hank’s room then. She said, “Honey, the internet is out. Do you need to reboot it or something?” Hank looked at me, I looked at Ellie, Ellie looked at Helen. Ellie looked back at me. Helen said, “What’s going on?”

  I said nothing.

  We stood next to Ellie’s pickup truck.

  She was nervous. “What the hell was that, Keeler?”

  I shrugged. “I guess it was a trap.”

  “What do you mean by a trap?”

  “The laptop was left in George Abrams’ apartment in case someone came snooping around. Then, they would know who was looking. Open the laptop and get it to turn on, thing takes a picture of you and they suck down your location and whatever other information it can get.”

  Ellie said, “Jesus. Who are they?”

  “Same people who did Valerie Zarembina and her friends out at Beaver Falls Lodge,” I said coolly.

  Ellie looked into the gravel of the driveway. She said, “We can’t know that, Keeler. It’s conjecture.”

  I locked my eyes on to hers. “No. It’s not conjecture. There aren’t two things going on here, Ellie, there’s one. We just haven’t connected the dots yet.”

  She pursed her lips and scratched her ear. Like a tell. Then she looked at me and gestured to the trailer. “I don’t think we can leave them here alone. What do you think?”

  I said, “Do you have anywhere you can put them?”

  “How much time do you think we have?”

  “None. We need to go, right now.”

  “Let’s take them to my place.”

  I shook my head. “Bad idea, Ellie. Somewhere else.”

  “Shit, Keeler. I can’t put them in my office either. Maybe the police station and I’ll ask Smithson what he thinks.”

  I agreed.

  Twenty-Six

  But Helen didn’t agree. She didn’t want to leave. Not just yet, she wasn’t done with her work.

  Ellie tried to explain it to her, that there was danger, without the details. But Helen wasn’t listening. The situation alarmed her, but so did her work. And Helen was an optimist who believed in the healing power of crystals. Plus, her online reputation was at stake. As a Mechanical Turk she received reviews from her clients, for each task. Apparently that was important.

  Hank got the Wi-Fi working, and Helen wanted to finish up her computer tasks. She was stubborn, and Ellie relented. I agreed to stay with Helen and Hank while Ellie ran into town to confer with Smithson. Ellie was hoping that the Port Morris police would come on board and offer protection to Helen and Hank, at least for a couple of days. Her going back to town was my idea. After what had happened with the laptop, I didn’t figure that phones were safe. Not that I had thought they were safe before. Ellie would come back in a few hours and we could drop those two off somewhere before heading over to Guilfoyle’s boat as planned.

  Helen closed herself in her study, worried and eager to get to work. Hank came into the kitchen where I was drinking a glass of water. He was sullen and withdrawn. I figured he blamed me for what had happened, which I thought was unreasonable. Sometimes the chain of causality is tough to call, too far gone to assign responsibility to any individual person or thing. At that point it’s in the ‘shit happens’ category.

  Hank wanted to make a sandwich. He put two slices of bread in the toaster, then went to the small bathroom off the living room. I walked over to look at the tribal artifacts hanging above the sofa. Two carvings, like a short totem pole sliced vertically in half. Each half hung next to the other. The carvings were distorted faces, one on top of the other. Like a stack of cartoon ghosts, or gods. I smelled burnt toast. Smoke curled out of the kitchen into the living room. Hank came out of the bathroom and went into the kitchen. He called out to me. “Can you open the window?”

  I opened the window. It swung in on noiseless hinges. The rainforest was quiet, not much wind. The temperature was chilly but comfortable. Crisp. I lay down on the sofa and closed my eyes.

  An hour later, my eyes clicked open all by themselves. They were catching up with my ears, which had been awake longer, communicating with t
he back of my mind. The ears had caught on to something far away, and tracked it as it came in, even as I slept. The ears were hearing a buzzing sound like a mosquito, but getting louder than that. From where I lay on the sofa I was looking out the open window into the white nothingness of an autumnal Alaskan sky. The thing appeared as a speck at first. Just a tiny black dot, barely moving in one corner of the window, like a far away gnat.

  But the gnat was getting bigger. Not really big, but bigger than it had been, and bigger than a gnat, definitely. And I realized that it was not a gnat or a mosquito, it was a drone.

  When it was still far away, I could see from its profile that the drone was a consumer model, the kind that can be purchased in stores or online. Not the cheapest model, but a high-end drone. Exactly what the enemy in Syria had been using when I was there. In Syria the ISIS drones had often been strapped with a load of explosives, like remote-controlled flying IEDs. Or sometimes they had just dropped grenades from really high up. Those drones had terrorized the Syrians we worked with.

  In places like Mosul, the front lines were close. ISIS fighters were dug into the ruins of destroyed cities. Bombed out neighborhoods where progress was measured in buildings taken, tunnels destroyed. The problem for them was that the drones didn’t have any kind of long range. The flying part wasn’t a problem, the video part was. Those ISIS drones were not flown from a hundred miles away, not even five. The video signal stopped working after less than a mile.

  I watched the incoming drone. I was thinking about the people operating it. The drone would arrive in a few seconds. If the range was a mile or less, the corollary was that those people were less than a mile way. Trouble was already here. Faster than expected.

  Hank came into the room. He said, “Keeler, you see the drone?”

  I said, “Not a neighbor?”

  “We don’t have neighbors.”

  I had already moved off the sofa, in a crab like scuttle. I was crouched against the wall under the window. I said, “Don’t talk to me, do something normal.”