Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series)

by Ian Sutherland

  You recall the last one.

  The cellist.

  It wasn’t as good as you’d expected. As you’d planned. She’d wanted it too much, the slut. You knew that now with hindsight. Someone like that could never make the grade.

  Even in the middle of her ‘recital’ the tart was trying to tease you.

  The way she spread her legs either side of the cello – such a blatant come-on. And then her hand movements with the bow. She knew damn well they were suggestive. She wasn’t just playing the cello. She was trying to play you too, but her music was so fucking boring. She was into it though. She closed her eyes tight as she concentrated, her body swaying, arm sliding backwards and forwards.

  You didn’t waste the opportunity. You snuck up behind her and smashed her over the head just as she finished playing. You even laughed out loud as she fell to the floor, the crappy music silenced once and for all.

  It took ages for her to come back round.

  You’d already tied her hands together, dragged her up onto the table, sliced off her clothes and entered her. You weren’t far off coming when she regained consciousness. It hadn’t even been a minute. Nowhere near long enough. You tried to hold back, but you wanted her to scream.

  It was so much better when she screamed.

  She wailed loudly when you grabbed a clump of hair with one hand and yanked her head back. She shrieked even louder when she felt the sharp blade you held at her throat with your other hand. You felt it then, the tightening of her muscles around it. But that was too much. You couldn’t hold on anymore. You climaxed and scythed open her neck at the same time.

  A double release.

  But you’d rushed it. You weren’t sure why. You could have prolonged it. Strung it out. Made it last like it should have.

  Next time you wouldn’t knock her out cold. Or if you did, you’d wait until she came round before getting it on properly. There really was no need to hurry. After all, you’d planned it that way. The whole point was to enjoy it. Enjoy it slowly. For her to experience pleasure and pain intensified by the dawning realisation that she was at death’s door. Combined with the sex, it was overpowering. For her too, you briefly wonder? And then you chide yourself. Who cares?

  Opposite from where you sit you can see the house numbered 85. The next slut lives there. It’s time to invite her to the best experience of her life.

  And her last.

  CHAPTER 4

  As a paying customer, the site now presented Brody with a graphical menu of purportedly live webcam locations listed by vague but mostly humorous names. These included, Wannabe Lesbians, Au Pair Affair, Boring Fart Toiletcam and many, many others. Brody clicked on Au Pair Affair and was presented with three video streams. No audio. He was surprised at the sharp resolution and smooth motion quality. Video is one of the hungriest consumers of bandwidth — the amount of network space that a data stream has to be squeezed through — and, as a result, many CCTV and webcam feeds suffer from poor image quality or resort to sending still snapshots every few seconds. The site must be employing a codec with high compression similar to YouTube, the popular video site.

  One of the three video streams displayed a modern, well-appointed kitchen. A young woman wearing a white dressing gown was feeding a baby in a highchair from a bottle. The camera was up high, probably hidden in the ceiling. Another image, again from above, showed a bedroom with a single bed. It was empty. Brody thought he could make out U2 posters on the wall. The third image showed what looked like the baby’s bedroom. A cot in one corner, teddy bears everywhere, and a playpen in the centre with plastic toys in it. But no sign of life.

  There was movement on the kitchen cam. Brody clicked in and the video feed filled his screen. The image quality lessened a little, but it was still very clear. A tall, middle-aged man in a navy suit had walked in. He kissed the baby on the head. He looked out the kitchen window quickly and then leaned forward and kissed the young woman hungrily. She responded eagerly, opening her dressing gown to reveal that she was naked underneath. The man fondled her breasts while the baby watched obliviously. Abruptly, the man withdrew and pointed to his watch. He spoke a few words, but the audio was silent. He leaned in for one more quick kiss with the young woman, patted the baby on the head and left the room. The girl tied her dressing gown around her and resumed feeding the baby.

  The scene captivated Brody.

  He shrunk the video footage back to thumbnail size and looked around the rest of the Au Pair Affair webcam location. He noticed that there were upgrade options. One option was to pay more to receive footage from the four remaining webcams at that location, labelled as premium. These claimed to be the master bedroom, its en-suite bathroom, the main bathroom and the living room. Each had a still picture hinting at what the live feed would contain. Another upgrade option was to receive audio from the webcams at this location. Both upgrade options were fifty-nine pence each. Or the two for ninety-nine pence. The price was certainly low enough to tempt. Undoubtedly the same upgrade approach was repeated on the other video feeds throughout the site.

  Brody realised he was intrigued by the two people he’d just spied on. Three if you included the baby. And if Au Pair Affair was an accurate description then there would also be a fourth to increase the drama: the unsuspecting wife. Just that thought alone made Brody realise how addictive this site was likely to be.

  And how financially successful.

  Brody forced himself to click back to the main menu. He skimmed through the webcam locations. There seemed to be about two hundred or so locations, each with two or three feeds and all with at least two or three additional premium feeds for anyone tempted enough to upgrade; for the additional fee of course.

  If the other webcam locations were as intriguing as Au Pair Affair, then SWY was a money-making machine.

  He chose some locations at random. The first few seemed to be from other homes, although they all seemed to be deserted. Perhaps they were all at work. That notion made him click on one that looked like an office. People were sitting behind computer desks, most with two screens side-by-side, typing and talking into headsets. It looked like a call centre. Clicking on, he found the fish tank location he’d noticed when he’d first looked at the site during the Atlas Brands presentation that morning. The fish still swam peacefully.

  None of the streams seemed to be showing people sat at their computers, which meant that there were no webcams of the type integrated within laptop computers, typically used to make video calls. They all seemed to be from dedicated standalone network webcams, mostly mounted high in the rooms they surveyed.

  Brody hypothesised whether SWY was a scam; fake feeds to get you hooked and take your money. But the call centre location looked genuine. It would certainly cost too much to pay twenty actors every day to fill out a call centre scene. So, if it was fake, that only left one other option: repeating pre-recorded footage day after day, presenting it as live. But in that case, surely the site’s regular paying subscribers would spot the repetition and complain?

  Which only left one other alternative. The feeds were live.

  How could he confirm one way or the other?

  Although Brody was analysing the site like a normal user, in his mind he was already jumping ahead to identify potential exploits he could use to gain root access. If the feeds were truly live it meant they most probably came from sources external to the SWY site, which meant potential backdoor routes into the site. If they were fake, then the site was little more than a catalogue of repeating video files, which meant it would be self-contained and harder to crack.

  Brody continued clicking around for another twenty minutes, getting a feel for it. Occasionally, he switched modes to read the site’s native HTML, the code that the browser interprets to display the content as a graphical web page. This enabled him to gain a limited understanding of how site was architected. Most modern websites were simply a gluing together of scripts and open-source widgets from all over the world. Each could have
known vulnerabilities he could exploit. But, from an initial scan, he noticed nothing with an obvious exploit.

  From the HTML and the scripts, he could determine the underlying technology components used to make the site work. There was an awful lot of Java, which was being used to give the site its interactive feel and manage the video feeds, along with some python and PHP. Java is a programming language where the human readable source code is compiled into a machine code, which the computer can execute but is impossible for humans to understand. Brody tried a decompiler to reverse engineer the machine code back into a source code format but Crooner42 had professionally obfuscated it, preventing the decompiler from working. The implications weren’t lost on Brody. This challenge might be tougher than he’d originally anticipated.

  It was time to get serious. He would head across the road where he had access to more equipment. Also, the Italian muzak was starting to annoy him. He liked to hack to orchestral music played very loud. One of his movie soundtrack playlists should do it. Stefan was chatting with other customers, his back to Brody. The trainee waitress was making coffee. Brody estimated how much he owed and doubled it. He placed a £10 note on the table.

  Just as he was about to close the PC, Brody noticed something. The call centre location was still on his screen and he’d spotted some pixelated letters moving from right to left in the bottom left corner of one of the webcam feeds. He clicked in and the webcam’s stream filled his screen. The webcam observed the comings and goings of a doorway. He saw a man wearing a business suit exit through the door. But, more importantly, mounted on the wall above and to the right of the doorway was what looked like the bottom corner of a massive digital display. Brody squinted his eyes but it was impossible to make out the text scrolling across it. He was aware that these readerboards were commonly used in call centres to display status summaries about the number of calls in progress, operators free, total calls resolved that day and so on.

  He clicked back to the location summary, hoping to find a better view of the readerboard in one of the other feeds. The last stream was the one. It was from a webcam pointed solely at the readerboard. However, it was a premium stream requiring him to pay an upgrade fee to receive the remaining feeds as video. He clicked his consent and a charge of fifty-nine pence was added to his account. All five of these premium images converted from still to moving videos.

  He maximised the stream focused on the call centre’s digital readerboard. Now filling his screen he could easily read the scrolling text. As he’d thought, it was a massive electronic LED ticker with scrolling call queue metrics displayed for all the call centre operators to see. However, on the left area of the readerboard the time was displayed digitally. Brody compared it to the time being shown on his watch. The readerboard was a minute behind his own. He put that down to the delay of transferring and processing video streams across the Internet. This suggested two things. Firstly, the call centre was situated in the UK, or at least in a country within the same time zone. Secondly, it wasn’t incontrovertible proof of a live feed. If a 24-hour pre-recorded feed looped, then the timeline could easily be synchronised.

  He focused on the information scrolling across the readerboard, waiting patiently. The metrics may have been relevant to the call centre staff, who could presumably look up from their desks to observe their progress against their colleagues’, but they were fairly meaningless to him. He waited, hoping . . .

  . . . and then he saw it. The scrolling text now displayed a date moving slowly from left to right across the board.

  Satisfied, Brody closed the tablet PC and threw it in his khaki man-bag. Stefan was now behind the counter. Brody stood up, pointed at the money on the table and called over to him, “Thanks Stefan.”

  The barista nodded hesitantly and then spying the £10 note, formed a toothy smile. “No problem, Mr Brody. See you tomorrow.”

  Brody turned away with a wave, his mind full of the implications of what he’d seen.

  Today’s date.

  Brody whistled to himself in disbelief.

  The feed really was live.

  Which strongly indicated that all two hundred locations were live. At an average of five cameras per location, that equated to around a thousand live feeds. The magnitude was enormous. Especially if, as the site claimed, the people being observed in the feeds had no idea they were being filmed.

  * * *

  I’m really worried about Anna now, Kim Chang typed into the Facebook chat box on her mobile phone.

  She had said the same thing numerous times since Friday, but she meant it now. She never goes an hour without texting me or updating her status on Facebook. Never mind three whole days. She pressed ‘Send’.

  Patrick’s response came back. She can take care of herself.

  Kim paced up and down the kitchen floor. Seeing a mark on the kitchen counter, she grabbed the cloth and wiped it clean. Normally, the kitchen was piled high with used plates, empty takeaway cartons, and unwashed cups and glasses. The kitchen hadn’t been this clean since she and the other four girls had rented the house together eight months ago. Cleaning was all she could do to distract her mind from worrying about Anna.

  She tapped into her phone, If only I’d written down the address of her audition. Then I could go see if she turned up or if they know where she went afterwards.

  Kim racked her brains. She could remember that an agency working on behalf of the Royal Opera House orchestra had invited Anna to an audition somewhere near Paddington Station. On Saturday afternoon, a day after Anna had left, Kim had googled ‘Royal Opera House’ and ‘Paddington’ but only the famous landmark in Covent Garden came up. She had phoned them anyway but they told her they were not currently auditioning for their orchestra. That was odd. And no, they had no offices near Paddington. Odder still. Yesterday, Kim had even called Shirley, Anna’s mum, but Anna hadn’t shown up there either. Of course, that had set Shirley off as well. Yesterday evening, she finally rang the police.

  Patrick’s words appeared on the screen. I bet she met some other people at the audition, most probably some bloke – you know what she’s like – and went off partying for the weekend.

  Automatically, Kim felt the need to defend her friend. Anna’s not really like that, Patrick. Her thumb hovered above the ‘Send’ button.

  But, he had a point. Pretty much ever since Kim had got together with Patrick a year ago, Anna had been blatantly putting herself about. Lately, her behaviour with men had been getting even worse. She’d brought back at least four different men over the last few months – all one night stands. And then there were countless nights where she didn’t come home at all. Anna was completely blasé about it all. When talking about it with Kim, she openly shared the sordid details of these nights of passion, with no apparent regret and certainly no desire to form a more substantial relationship with any of her partners.

  Kim backspaced through the message she hadn’t sent and replaced it with, You could be right. I hope that’s all it is.

  The year before had been different. It had been their first year at Trinity College and she and Anna had met as neighbours in the halls of residence. They had quickly become firm friends. The relentless studying and practice associated with their respective courses — Kim’s was dance and Anna’s music — kept them apart during the day. But most evenings, when the social side of university life kicked in, they went everywhere together. They mixed with larger groups of friends, but it always came down to the two of them at the end of the night, frequently propping each other up as they giggled and staggered their way home from the campus bars. Their first year was relatively tame as far as the other sex was concerned. Just the odd brief encounter, not much to speak of. Then in the second year, they had had agreed to move off campus with three other friends. Five girls. They had found the delightful five-bedroom house near the centre of Greenwich that they now shared. It was a far better standard than everything else they’d seen for the same money and so, deposit paid, they moved
in immediately. The three other girls turned out to be much more studious and so it was still mostly Anna and Kim that partied regularly.

  After a few months of a similar lifestyle to when they’d been in the halls of residence, Kim had met Patrick, and everything started to change with Anna. Whenever Kim and Patrick stayed in Anna would go out, coming home very drunk or stoned. She and Kim even began to argue, usually over Patrick.

  Patrick Harper was not Kim’s normal type. Most of the men she went out with were other dancers, fit and incredibly strong, but mostly dull. She found she’d been drawn in by his intelligence but had been captured by his intenseness. His unwavering focus on her needs and wants. He seemed to innately know her innermost desires. And they had so much in common. Everything from their taste in music, ballet and opera, to their political views, to the places they wanted to visit someday, to walking across Greenwich Park, and even down to their sexual likes and dislikes. Anna often joked that Patrick must be a closet homosexual to have so much in common with Kim.

  Even the night Kim met Patrick was based on a common interest. She and Anna were in a karaoke restaurant in Plumstead with a group of friends, taking turns with the other diners to sing. At one point, she heard the introduction to Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Unwritten’, her favourite song. She looked up, surprised to see a young man, instead of a woman, holding the mic. He was average height and quite plain-looking, with pockmarked skin, dark cropped hair and round wire-framed glasses. He must have noticed her staring because he overtly began to sing to her, ignoring the rest of the restaurant. His voice wasn’t bad, considering the song was an octave higher than most men’s voices could reach. She found herself captivated by his singular focus and the passion in his smile. As he finished, Anna, who knew it was Kim’s favourite, pushed her up onto the floor and she fell clumsily into his arms. Initially embarrassed, with everyone staring and clapping, he led her by the hand to the bar area and they began chatting. He explained that it was his favourite song of all time. She couldn’t believe the coincidence. And over the rest of that night, and the year since, she and Patrick discovered they had so much more in common.