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

by Ian Sutherland

  Doc_Doom: Have you talked to them?

  Fingal: You mean phone their helpdesk and say, “Hi, just wondered if you realised some of your webcam feeds are being rebroadcast on a dodgy website called SecretlyWatchingYou?”

  Doc_Doom: I see your point. But anyway, what if you phoned the guys at the top? I’m looking at their website now. Their CTO is called Dwight Chambers. Give me a minute and I’ll track down his mobile number for you.

  Fingal: How’re you doing that?

  Doc_Doom: Trade secret ;-)

  Fingal: Touché!

  Brody really would be impressed if Doc_Doom could pull that off. Brody had already done a preliminary background check of the HWC owners, including Dwight Chambers, the Chief Technology Officer. The best he’d managed to get so far was his email address. However, Brody hadn’t got serious yet.

  Brody’s laptop beeped with another instant message. It was from Doc_Doom. He shook his head in disbelief. It contained an American mobile phone number for Dwight Chambers followed by a smiley face. How the hell had Doc_Doom done that, and in less than a minute? It reminded Brody that perhaps he didn’t know every trick in the book. Brody thanked him.

  Brody checked his watch. It would be morning in the USA. He inserted an unused pay-as-you-go SIM into his phone and dialled the number.

  The phone was answered immediately.

  “Dwight here.”

  Brody thought swiftly. “Hello Mr Chambers. This is DCI Frank Burnside with the Met Police in London.” Brody had automatically recalled the name of a well-known character from an old police British TV series called The Bill.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re investigating a site called SecretlyWatchingYou.com. Have you heard of it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” Suspicion oozed over the line.

  “Mr Chambers, do you offer any content sharing services to partners for video feeds on your HomeWebCam site.”

  “Of course not. Our customers expect a fully secure and private service. Why on earth would we share their content? It would completely ruin our credibility.”

  “Well sir, that may be so. But we have reason to believe that video feeds from your webcam sites are being rebroadcast on their site.”

  “That’s impossible! What’s the site again?”

  “SecretlyWatchingYou.com.” Brody could hear the CTO type on his keyboard. Brody assumed he was online, looking at the SWY site.

  “I see it.” There was a pause while Chambers looked around and whistled. “What a strange site. Is it legal?”

  “No. It’s breaking every invasion of privacy law here in the UK.”

  “So you think that some of these video streams are sourced from HWC cameras?” Brody liked that Chambers also shortened his own site’s name for convenience.

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, theoretically speaking, the only way that could be achieved is if this SecretlyWatchingYou site was also accessing the HWC server based in the same location as the webcams, forcing the PC to send its feeds to two places.”

  “We’ve checked that, Mr Chambers. It isn’t, yet the feeds are on both sites.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Can I ask you to check your network and firewall logs, please?”

  “You think this site is somehow getting its feeds from us? That’s ludicrous!”

  “We’re just trying to eliminate all possibilities, sir.”

  “Fine. I’ll check it out, but it will take a while. Can I get back to you?”

  “That would be great. Can you ring me on this number? Look for any activity to the IP addresses for SecretlyWatchingYou. Do you want me to give them to you?”

  “Mr Burnside, I’m the CTO of a publicly listed company. I think I can handle looking up an IP address.”

  Chambers put the phone down.

  Before he had time to bask in his own glory for his intuitive improvisation, Brody’s phone rang. He picked it up, thinking Dwight Chambers had been far too quick, but it was silent. Then he realised it was his other phone ringing.

  He saw Jenny Price’s name on the cheap handset’s screen and answered it without hesitation.

  “Brody, I think you’re right about the site being used by the killer to stalk his victims,” she stated.

  “How come? You didn’t seem that convinced earlier.”

  “Yeah, well that was before I discovered that the first victim I told you about had a webcam in her bedroom that she didn’t know about.”

  Brody thought for a second. That would mean a second location. This was perfect. If he was able to visit this second location, he could determine if it was set up the same as the Saxton household and whether its video streams were also being sent to HWC. And SWY.

  “Okay, how can I help?”

  “Can you come over to Charlton? Now?”

  “Sure.” Brody smiled to himself. “What’s the address?”

  A few minutes later, Brody grabbed his jacket and shouted out to Leroy and Danny that he was off out.

  “Really?” asked Leroy, poking his head out again. Seeing Brody grab his jacket and car keys, he said, “Aw thanks, Brody. You’re a real mate. You really are.”

  * * *

  You can’t believe how smart you are. Your new plan is just perfect. You’ve executed it to precision. The wheels are all set in motion.

  This time you’re scheduling it for the morning, not after work. When the building will be full of people and it will all be going on right under their noses. Just the thought of it makes it even more exciting. It will be like having a workplace romance. Albeit a very brief one. You’ve always wanted one of those.

  You feel a stirring down below and smile.

  The police have no idea. You’ve heard them on the TV and radio, you’ve seen them on the webcams, you’ve even seen them in real life. They’re so far from getting anywhere near the truth that you’re feeling invincible. You’ll be able to carry this on for ages. You’ve got three more lined up after tomorrow.

  You wonder about your next choices. They’re all good ones; you’ve studied them for months on the webcams. You even know how you’ll go about luring each of them. You’ve even booked the meeting rooms in advance. But you’ve spotted the policewoman now. You wonder if there might be a way to have her join in the party. She is like her more so than all the others.

  You’ll need to give it some thought.

  You need to come up with a plan.

  * * *

  Jenny handed Brody a transparent evidence bag. As he examined its contents, he was conscious of Harry O’Reilly studying him intently.

  Brody had arrived at the address in Charlton a few minutes before, delighted that his Smart Car had come into its own once again, allowing him to squeeze into the smallest of parking spaces in the congested Victorian terraced road. Jenny had ushered him into the house, up the stairs to Anna Parker’s room and introduced him to O’Reilly, the police’s own IT specialist, and Kim Chang, the victim’s housemate and grieving best friend. She was now downstairs making some tea.

  Brody focused on the evidence bag. It contained the remnants of a wall light. Shards of opaque white glass and bits of pink plastic from its housing littered the bottom of the bag, leaving the light’s main unit exposed. At its base, he could see what looked like a small black hole, the size of a ballpoint pen tip. He held it up and caught light reflecting from it and realised it wasn’t a hole but an incredibly small concave lens. Coloured wires, exposed from the light having been broken ran from below the bulb holder into the light’s housing at its rear.

  “This is really smart stuff,” he commented. He held the bag so that Jenny could see. “See these wires? My guess is that they run from the lens to the main controller. It must have a wireless transmitter within it to send the video feed to a nearby PC.”

  “I take it you don’t just walk into a Dixons store and buy this kind of gear, then?” asked Jenny.

  �
��No. But there are loads of specialist spy gadget shops on the Internet that stock this stuff. You know, voice recording pens you leave behind in a meeting room, miniature GPS tracking devices, semen detection kits, that kind of thing.”

  “Semen detection kits? You’re joking!”

  Brody shook his head. “The biggest market for spy gadgets is people who think their partners are cheating on them.”

  “Sounds typical,” sighed Jenny. “Any chance it’s government issued?”

  From the way Jenny had placed her hand on O’Reilly’s arm as she asked the question, Brody inferred that this was something he had proposed before Brody’s arrival. Brody turned towards O’Reilly, who shrugged defensively.

  “I’ve never seen the like of it.”

  Brody could easily have replied that he hadn’t either, but chose not to. His expertise was why Jenny had called him and admitting that he was winging it would undermine his credentials in her eyes and pass the role of Jenny’s technology advisor back to O’Reilly. He offered a confident but condescending tone, aiming his reply at O’Reilly, “What, you think MI5 or MI6 would be surveilling a house full of female students?”

  “You never know with —”

  Jenny cut O’Reilly off. “So, do you recognise this room at all, Brody?”

  Brody looked around Anna Parker’s room. It felt strange to be in a young woman’s bedroom with all her private belongings on show. He wondered if his uneasiness was because of being in a girl’s bedroom in her absence or because everything he saw in the room spoke of a life lived to the full by a girl who was now abruptly dead. There were musical items everywhere: instruments in every corner, sheet music on the desk, an old-fashioned record player and posters of bands on the walls. He saw clothes discarded across a chair, as if the outfits had failed to offer the right look for her last outing, and glitzy shoes piled up under a desk. But all of it was made impersonal by the yellow numbered crime scene markers, something he’d only ever seen before on TV.

  “I’m not a hundred per cent sure . . . I think so . . . maybe,” he said. And then, with greater confidence, “How about if I sit down and scan through SWY now that I’ve seen Anna’s room? If it’s on there, then we’ll see a still image at least.”

  “Even though the webcam is banjaxed?” asked O’Reilly sardonically, pointing at the broken camera in the evidence bag.

  “The site’s configured with static images to tempt you. Once you click on one, the video stream is displayed. Of course, the feed will now be dead, but the static image might still be there. And anyway, if we find it we’ll also see the other webcams that are bound to be all over this house.”

  “What?”

  The three of them turned around to see Kim standing in the doorway, holding a tray with mugs of tea, a look of bewilderment on her face.

  Brody spoke to Jenny. “You haven’t told her, have you?”

  “Told me what?” demanded Kim. The mugs on the tray began to rattle.

  Jenny threw daggers with her eyes at Brody and then walked over to Kim. “Here, let me take that.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Brody and Harry O’Reilly begrudgingly sat beside each other at the dining table in the living room, both pairs of eyes on Brody’s computer screen as they scanned through all two hundred locations on SWY looking for images of the house they were in. Three empty mugs and one full of lukewarm tea, Kim’s, had been set down on the wooden table top amongst its many scratches and heat rings.

  Kim had gone deathly pale when Jenny had explained their suspicions that there were other webcams hidden in the house.

  “You mean there could be one in my bedroom?”

  “It’s possible, yes,” confirmed Jenny.

  “But I don’t have any wall lights in my room.”

  “They could be hidden anywhere,” Brody said. “In the other house, one was in the smoke alarm on the ceiling.”

  “What other house?”

  Jenny raised her eyes upwards as if seeking divine intervention. Brody realised he had said too much again.

  “Anna’s death might be linked to another case we’re working. I can’t go into it right now.” Jenny then changed the subject. “Why don’t we go see if we can find one in your room?”

  They left the room, leaving Brody and O’Reilly to scan through the SWY site.

  “So how are you after knowing Jenny — I mean DI Price?” asked O’Reilly after a couple of minutes, still staring at the screen as Brody clicked into each webcam location.

  “I don’t. We met this morning.”

  “So you’re telling me you just came forward after seeing her on the SWY webcams in the Saxton house? Like some kind of good Samaritan?” It was more of an accusation than a question.

  “Uh, yes.” Brody turned to O’Reilly and, with a straight face, stated, “I felt it was my civic duty.”

  “Hold on now. So, when I conveniently didn’t show up this morning, you were after helping her out at Flexbase.”

  “Yes.”

  This was unexpected. Techie or not, O’Reilly was still a copper. Did he suspect something?

  “What do you do for a living, Brody?”

  “I’m an independent security consultant.”

  “What kind?”

  “I help organisations understand if their security measures are strong enough to keep out the bad guys.”

  “So you’re after being a penetration tester?”

  “That’s one of the services I provide, yes.”

  “Now, what’s an independent security consultant doing hanging out on SecretlyWatchingYou?”

  He was persistent, that was for sure. Brody didn’t know if he actually suspected Brody of something or whether it was professional jealousy because Jenny had called Brody in. Brody decided on a new tack.

  “You’ve had a good look at it, haven’t you?”

  O’Reilly shifted in his seat. “Looked? I have, but only this morning when Jenny told me about the site.”

  “But you’ve seen enough to know that it’s a voyeur’s wet dream, right?”

  “It is that.”

  “Well, there you go. I’m an independent security consultant and a part-time voyeur.”

  O’Reilly screwed his face up. “You’re telling me that you pay money to this site for your personal entertainment?”

  “Yup. Doesn’t cost that much. There’s a couple of locations on here with some really fit women, Harry. Sometimes they even get naked and, if you’re lucky . . . well, you can guess. You should try it out. You never know, you might enjoy it.”

  O’Reilly folded his arms and leaned towards the screen.

  “There —” O’Reilly pointed at the screen.

  Brody clicked on the static image. It filled the screen. It was a girl’s bedroom but not Anna’s. They studied it closely anyway.

  Jenny and Kim returned from upstairs.

  “Is this one of your housemate’s bedrooms?” Brody asked Kim. Kim hadn’t been able to show them all of her housemates’ rooms as they were padlocked.

  She leaned over and then shook her head. “No, I don’t recognise that at all.”

  Brody exited back to the location list. He carried on scanning through. “Any luck finding a webcam?”

  “Not sure. There’s a mirror fixed to the wall that might have one hidden in it. And then there’s a double plug that is mounted unusually high on one wall. But it’s hard to tell for sure.”

  Brody sat back from the computer, perplexed. “Well, that’s all the locations on SWY looked at and no sign of this place.”

  O’Reilly stood up and, unable to hide his triumph, crowed, “Ah well, Brody, it looks like your theory’s fierce wrong, so it is.”

  “It was a possibility.”

  “Well, it was worth following up on,” Jenny said. She turned to Kim and said, “I’m sorry to have worried you unduly. Looks like the webcam thing is a red herring.”

  “Thank God.” Kim was visibly relieved.

  “I’d be
tter phone Da Silva and bring him up to speed,” Jenny said to O’Reilly. She headed for the hallway.

  “That’s it?” asked Brody, incredulously. “That’s the extent of your investigation into these webcams?”

  Jenny halted.

  “Well, what else would you be having us do?” O’Reilly countered. “We’re after looking through SWY and Anna Parker’s room is not there. Sure, that there wall light might not even be a camera. There’s no proof yet that the glass yoke is actually a lens.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Brody’s voice became unexpectedly loud. “You’re a Met Police computer expert and you think that’s the end of it?”

  “Well now, what else is there?”

  “Bloody hell, O’Reilly. Do you actually know anything about technology? Or is your job limited to running forensic analyses on PCs recovered from crime scenes?”

  O’Reilly bristled and Brody realised he’d hit a nerve. Perhaps the police techie really was only used to safely analysing data found on computer hard disks. The police had very strict processes to image-copy hard disk data from suspect computers so that all their investigative work was done on copies, which helped them avoid changes being made to the original, stored separately as evidence. It was a skilled job with specialised tools but if that’s all O’Reilly did every day, he’d be next to useless on this case.

  “Come on boys,” said Jenny. “Play nicely.”

  Brody glanced at his watch. “Jenny, give me five minutes before you make that phone call. Let’s make sure first, okay?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  Unimpressed, O’Reilly folded his arms and pushed out his bottom lip.

  Brody fired up a command console on his tablet PC. He ran a command to display the IP address he’d been given when he’d connected his computer to the wireless network in the house earlier. Next to it, as expected, was the IP address of the router within the house. He opened up an Internet browser and typed in the router’s IP address. Up popped a login box asking for a username and a password. He entered ‘Admin’ into the username field.

  “You’re logging into the broadband router,” said O’Reilly. “But how’re you after knowing the password?”

  Brody ignored him. He walked out of the living room, into the hallway and headed for the small table just inside the front door. On it, he’d noticed earlier, perched the home’s broadband router, a small white box with a plastic aerial sticking out the back. He picked it up, careful not to disconnect the lead that went into it from the telephone point, studied its base and memorised the serial number. O’Reilly had followed him into the hallway but had to jump out of the way as he stomped back into the kitchen.