by Ryan Schow
Instead he approached Héctor and said, “I don’t have an escort, but I’m told you might have room for one more. You’re Héctor, yes?”
“Piss off.”
“I can pay,” he said. “I have money.”
“You don’t pay, you don’t go, and everyone’s already paid.”
This is where his deep knowledge of human trafficking would either pay off or cause a scene. Leaning in, but not too close, he said, “I can pay for any kids that happen to get liberated from their parents.”
He held his breath, then watched slowly as the coyote turned and looked at him. He dipped his eyes, tried to look subservient. But he had the coyote’s attention.
Héctor casually glanced at his group, specifically Eliana and the boy she was with, and he said, “Everyone’s already got claim to a kid who deserves one.”
“When I said I’d pay for the liberated kids, I meant to say I would be the one liberating the parents from their lives. After you’ve received payment, of course.”
This changed things.
“One thousand for yourself, and two thousand for the girl over there,” Héctor said, discretely pointing to a ragged looking girl of maybe eight or nine. “Girls fare better at the border, although if you’re caught, you’ll be held by border guards. All you have to do is tell the child to lie or you’ll kill her. When the border guards try to take her, just refuse to be separated from your ‘daughter,’ even if you have to make a scene. Border patrol will do a DNA swab and fingerprint you, but they can’t hold anyone long enough to get the DNA results back anyway, so you have nothing to worry about.”
The problem was, they already had Isadoro’s DNA and fingerprints in their database. He was likely listed as deceased. And when they realized that he was indeed still alive, they’d quickly find his information in the Federal database, specifically under Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was once a model ICE agent.
Of course, that was right before everything went down the way it did.
Chapter Six
Twenty-two year old Draven Alexander couldn’t seem to focus. Between checking his internet ads, his business page and trying to maintain his grandmother’s website, he didn’t have time for drama. His grandmother, Eudora, was a seventy-five year old wheelchair-bound gossip queen giving him the play-by-play of the neighbor’s family drama. The problem was he was upstairs and she was downstairs, so she wasn’t exactly using her indoor voice.
“He’s hiding something in his car from her!” Eudora said.
Draven had a crush on their next door neighbor, Adeline, and her daughter, Brooklyn—a girl whom he was certain was going to grow up to be a man slayer. But the bills weren’t going to pay themselves, so…
The pinging sound of an email coming in focused him.
He saw it was from Carver Gamble, an old friend now working at Stanford University. It was titled, HOLY COW – DID U C THIS???
Draven opened the email, saw it was with attachments. He opened up two photos of the skies over downtown San Francisco. They were covered with tons of black dots. He saved the pictures, tried to zoom in using his Photoshop program. The image blurred. He ran the pictures through a filter, sharpening the lines, but there were too few pixels to really clean it up so what he got was simply a blurred image.
Another email pinged; he closed Photoshop, changed windows.
The email was titled: NY 2?
Draven opened the email and the attachments, saw more of the same type of scene, just with a different skyline.
The message read, EOTWAWKI? End of the world as we know it?
Draven replied, WTF?
He closed the pics, tried to imagine it was some kind of drill. The military did them all the time, especially now that so many different industries were adding robotics to their work force. Why shouldn’t the military add unmanned planes to theirs? It would certainly limit the loss of human life in a real military response.
Wait a second...
He closed the windows, opened his internet browser. He typed CHICAGO DRONES into the search bar, then saw listings for the new drone laws in Illinois as well as two sites with views of Chicago from a drone. This wasn’t what he was looking for. After a few minutes of seeing nothing about any kind of drone presence over the city, he took a different approach. Draven typed in several other inquiries and found that a few other major cities were having an increased drone presence over their downtown areas, too.
He got on the 4Chan boards, checked the threads, saw nothing alarming.
He rattled out a reply to Carver’s email: Aerial drone shows most likely. No chatter on Russian, Chinese or North Korean infiltration.
The text came in on his cell phone almost immediately.
He left his computer to check the text. Carver worked security for the high tech division of Stanford University, something that was supposed to be very hush, hush. So hush, hush that much of Stanford, including the tenured teachers, knew nothing about it. Or perhaps this was a cover for Carver’s real job, whatever that may be.
The man could keep a secret better than most.
If Carver was texting, it meant he was out of the office or trying for a more private connection. The incoming text read: WHERE R U LISTENING 2 CHATTER?
Draven typed in the reply: I HV MY SOURCES.
After that he didn’t hear anything long enough to set his phone back down and return to his computer.
Strange.
Downstairs, where Draven knew his grandmother was most likely in her wheelchair at the side window, Eudora called out and said, “Yeah, that’s definitely him. Although he looks like hell!”
“Who?”
“Adeline’s dead-beat hubby.”
He grimaced at the volume in her voice. For being three quarters of a century old, time had done nothing to diminish the volume of her voice.
“Use your indoor voice,” he called back, low and sizzling.
“I am!” she replied even louder.
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll hear you screaming up to me about their business?” he finally asked, but in a voice that was as low as possible to communicate the message.
“What did you say?”
He stood and went to the top of the stairs, peeved that he was now putting off work to deal with this and with her.
“I said, ‘Grandma, I don’t care what they’re doing or how he looks.’”
“He’s got to be some kind of criminal. That’s why she never tells us what he does for a living. Probably something scandalous.”
“Today’s criminals are tomorrow’s heroes, Grandma. Leave them be.”
“They’re tomorrow’s what?”
He stole a deep breath, blew out a sigh. They should have never rented a two story home together. Then again, when he had girls over—on that rare occasion he actually got out and went on a successful date—he didn’t want his Grandmother rolling into his room asking how things were going.
Eudora was like that. She had a gigantic personality, tons of spunk, and a very low threshold for boundaries, which was hilarious considering her past and the circumstances that put her in the wheelchair in the first place.
“Isn’t there something on TV?” he called out.
“I’m pretty sure there is.”
“Then watch it,” he said as politely as he could.
“There are too many channels. Besides, I’d rather read.”
“No, you’d rather stare at the neighbors.”
“He looks like a dirtbag, and he’s all beat up. I bet he’s dealing.”
“Dealing cards?”
“Meth, pot, crack, coke, fentanyl…that kind of dealing. Drugs is what I’m trying to say. Come down here. I think he’s going to hit her.”
He heard another text come in. He went and checked it.
BRO, THEY’RE BRINGING A BUNCH OF HOT OLDER WOMEN TO THE SERVER ROOM.
Draven text back: WHY?
DON’T KNOW. DUDES TOO. I’M CONFUSED…
He got a ping on
his computer. A new message. He opened up the dedicated email inbox for his online business and retrieved the stolen password he’d been waiting on.
“Bingo,” he said. He pulled up the Facebook account he’d hacked yesterday and tried the password.
It let him in.
“Come see this guy!” Eudora called up again. Nails on the chalkboard… “He’s definitely going to hit her now!”
Grumbling to himself, he got up, stomped down the stairs, joined her at the window where their neighbor and his absurdly hot wife were indeed arguing. “Fine, I agree. He looks like a dirtbag. But we have no reason to believe he’s planning on hitting her.”
“Look at his eyes. They’re wild, like your grandpa’s used to get when he’d get ready to haul off.”
“Did Grandpa ever hit you?”
“‘Course not.”
“But he had that same look?” he said.
She turned her watery eyes on him, fixed him with a stare.
“What’s your point?”
“My point is you have a problem. You’re living your life like this is the Jerry Springer Show, but there is no show, just an audience of one. Now please, I have work to do.”
“Big case?” she asked, turning back to the scene.
Trudging back up the stairs, he said, “They’re never big cases, Grandma. I’m not a real detective and I don’t have a real practice. I’m a digital detective.”
“How many guides did you sell today?”
Referring to the survival guides Eudora and Draven’s grandpa produced before she was shot and his grandpa was killed, Draven said, “It shows that you have three sales today.”
“You need to do a better job of marketing.”
Oh, my God!
“Grandma, I love you, but you’re grating on my last nerve right now.”
“At least you have all your nerves,” she said, patting her legs.
Feeling the strain pulling at his spine, then branching out through his muscles to the point of cursing, he wondered where she got such boundless energy.
It didn’t matter.
He reminded himself she was a seventy-five year old opinionated woman who put up with crap all her life and now had the right to say whatever it was she wanted. Then he reminded himself to breathe, that it could be worse.
They could be talking politics...
Feeling the tension abate, he returned to his work pouring over the new Facebook account he recently hacked. Forty-nine year old Sandra Barnhart. In going through her page, he found bikini pics, pics with the family, recipes posted, dog pictures and cat videos she’d posted, lots of conversations with old friends.
He went to “Messages” and found she did a lot of private messaging with friends. They talked about their “stupid” husbands, her close friend’s husband’s porn addiction, how he had skid marks in his underwear and had been wearing the same socks for a week and a half.
Draven frowned.
A few minutes later, he saw Sandra’s message to a man named Tyler. He scrolled down until he saw the tone of the conversation change. A few more scrolls and he saw the onset of nudity from both parties. He screenshot the pics, smiled, then added them to the case file. He then copied the entire thread, which was three months long, and pasted it to the file in a read-only format.
Draven then closed out the page, drafted a bill for $250 and sent it to his client along with the message: “The info you were seeking is ready.”
A few minutes later Draven’s PayPal account showed the payment. Draven then sent off the case file along with the pricing option for deeper research. He was often asked for more information, so he offered a service called “Deeper Research” which he listed as a $500 service. This service guaranteed the client a full internet history on their target of choice.
A few of his clients could only handle a single indiscretion. Most of the time, though, his clients wanted to know if there was a history of transgressions.
He got another ping on his personal email account.
Draven opened it up.
He was looking at another email from Carver Gamble. No heading this time. Inside there was a pic of a large gray drone someone had caught on video in San Francisco. Carver’s message read, Dude…
He closed the file and went back to looking at his open client list and the names of targets he needed to hack. On his computer screen, four files were open. They were blank slates. Starting points. He needed to procure passwords, gain access to these accounts.
This was easy enough.
Anyone could hack Facebook without serious software. All you really needed was the Firesheep app and a little patience to learn it. And if that didn’t work, if you needed an email to ride inside but didn’t have one, The Harvester was a program you could use to mine email accounts. You just use the Forgot My Password portal. When you’re asked if you want to reset your password, you say you no longer have access to those email accounts and put in your brand new dedicated email account. This will prompt the user’s security questions. You won’t answer them right most times, so you have them send the user’s friends a security code. Since you’re already in Facebook, you add a fake friend at an offsite server in a different country (there’s a service for providing this), then choose that friend and two or three others to send the code to. Then you wait. Once your fake friend in another country gets the code, someone on that end posts it to an Anonymous board on 4Chan and voilà, you’re in.
But that doesn’t always work.
Sometimes the user changes their password the second one of their friends alerts them. At that point, you need a keystroke logger program to gain access.
Metasploit was easy enough to use, but Draven got tired of updating these programs, or worse, having them discovered with each and every anti-virus update. He ended up using C++ to code his own keylogger program and it hadn’t failed him yet. Even better, he hadn’t been detected once in nearly a year.
With the four accounts in front of him, he had lots of work ahead. Plenty to keep him busy for the day. Another ping from the email.
“Good God, Craven!” he grumbled.
But it wasn’t Craven. The email was from the jealous husband (rightfully so!) who just sent him $250. He wanted the Deeper Research package and asked if he should pay the $500 now.
Draven typed YES, then he hit send.
He took a sip of his iced Cold Brew coffee, cracked his knuckles, then logged into Facebook for next new account, a woman named Natalie Brookshire. Eddie Brookshire was one-hundred percent sure his wife was having an affair. Within minutes, Draven saw pictures of Natalie in her Messenger app of herself in see-through lingerie. At first blush, Natalie wasn’t an impressive looking woman. But her profile was locked to the public, so maybe she was feigning modesty, even privacy. She could definitely turn on the charm for a camera. He wasn’t surprised, though. Long ago, he’d realized a person’s motivations all depended on how much attention and how much validation they needed, or were lacking, in their real life.
“Something just flew by down here!” his grandmother shouted.
“A helicopter?” he blurted out, not really caring as he scrolled through Natalie’s private information.
“No, like a small plane. It was only a few feet off the ground.”
Holy crap, what?
“Like a drone?” he called out as he stopped scrolling and turned his head to the sound of her voice. Now he was thinking about all the pictures Carver had sent him.
“Yeah, but not those propeller ones. Like a jet plane, but small. I’m going out on the porch.”
“Was it gray?”
“Don’t know,” she called up. “I haven’t got my good glasses on.”
“Don’t take the gun,” he said, knowing her.
The neighbors had already called the cops twice last month, and when Chicago PD tried to confiscate Eudora’s shotgun a couple of weeks ago, she told them who she was and they backed off. No one wanted to mess with her again. Not with her histor
y. And it didn’t help that she had no problem going out in a blaze of glory if it meant she could plug two dirty coppers trying to violate her rights. That’s what she told them. Draven heard her say it straight-faced to the cops like it was coffee-table conversation.
Naturally the police reminded her of Chicago’s strict gun laws, and then she asked why there were still so many murders each weekend if the city was safer without armed citizens.
“You’re about to hit three figures a weekend,” she said with disdain. “It was eighty-seven dead last week.”
“That’s not in this area, ma’am,” one of the patrolman said.
“Well if it ever hits this area, you best understand this house is gonna hit back.”
“Ma’am,” the policeman told her, “just keep it inside. You’re scaring some of your neighbors.”
“My neighbors are a bunch of slack jawed pansies. They’re scared of their own shadows for heaven’s sake. If they’re scared of an old lady in a hot rod,” she said, patting the side of her wheelchair, “then there’s nothing neither you nor I can do, God rest their spines.”
The cops exchanged looks. Then one of them said, “Their spines?”
“Officer Danforth, is it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“If they’re scared of guns in a city this dangerous, with this much crime, with enough extra coppers to hassle an old lady in a HOT ROD,” she said, slamming her hand on the side of her wheelchair, “then they ain’t got no spines, so I say bless ‘em because they’re gone. Get on my level, boy.”
Danforth simply smiled a tolerant smile, then said, “Not on the porch.”
“Anywhere I want on my property,” she retorted, white hair and fluffy pink robe notwithstanding.
That’s when Draven intervened. He’d saved his work, walked downstairs and said, “We’ll follow the law, officers.
“Laws are meant to be broken, or else these fine gentleman would be out of a job, am I right boys?”
“Grandma,” Draven said, out of patience, “back inside.”
“These nice young men were just showing themselves to their patrol car.”
“We were actually responding to a call—”
“Our neighbors are a bunch of spineless pussies,” Draven said, wheeling his grandmother inside. “They’re scared of their own shadows on this block.”