Jenny raised one eyebrow. Surprise or scepticism? He wasn’t sure.
“Take a look.”
He crossed over and, choosing the sturdier wing of the car, sat next to her. He brought up SecretlyWatchingYou and selected the Au Pair Affair location. All seven video feeds were still running. He scanned the thumbnail feeds and spotted Hilary Saxton in the daughter’s bedroom. He clicked in and the scene filled the screen. She lay on a single bed reading a picture book to her daughter.
“And Thomas saw Percy steaming ahead of him. He tried to catch him up but he was pulling too many coaches —”
Brody muted the sound.
“Do you see?” he asked.
She turned to him, a look of exasperation. “So what? The network PC video whatchamacallit has turned itself back on.”
“It hasn’t. It’s still powered off.”
“Okay . . . Look Brody, all this techie stuff is way beyond me. Make it simple, will you?”
Brody had always loved Sherlock Holmes. One of his favourite quotes was, “… when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. He had always hoped that one day he would be able to personally apply this impeccable logic to a real-world situation. And that moment earlier in the day, when he’d noticed Hilary Saxton on SWY long after he’d remotely powered off the PC in the Saxton household, had afforded him his first ever ‘Sherlock Holmes moment’. His brain, suddenly cleared of all his previous assumptions, rapidly rewired itself.
The majority of IP network traffic is sent from one point to another point. One sender and one receiver. Called unicasting, it’s the backbone of most Internet communications. Brody had assumed that the IP webcams were configured to send their data to a single point: the receiver in the network video PC.
This was where he’d been wrong. They were not unicasting; they were multicasting. He’d never considered, until earlier, that the webcams would be configured to multicast their feeds over the Saxton’s local area network. Obviously, the streams were picked up by the network video PC installed by McCarthy’s business. But it wasn’t the only PC receiving the streams.
Brody tried to keep it simple. “The webcams broadcast their video streams on the home’s Wi-Fi network. It turns out there is more than one network video PC receiving their broadcasts.”
“Why would the Saxtons have more than one of those?”
“They don’t. The second one was added afterwards without their knowledge.”
“Hold on a second. Let me understand this.” Jenny squinted her eyes shut. “There’s a second network video PC in the Saxton house?”
“No. Not inside the house. Outside.”
Jenny looked all around. “Where? It would need a power source.”
On the drive over to Bushey, Brody had stopped by Spymaster on Portman Square, a shop that supplied surveillance and anti-surveillance equipment. He’d rented a cellular activity monitor. Although it was primarily used to check for unauthorised use of mobile phones in prisons, hospitals, exam halls and offices, it also had a Wi-Fi mode. Using it to prove his new theory, he had traced the Wi-Fi signals to the boot of a car parked outside.
Brody pointed at the cheap, dull grey SEAT Toledo parked opposite them.
“Inside that car is a laptop powered by car batteries. It’s connected to the Saxton’s Wi-Fi network. See that antenna on the rear parcel shelf?” Jenny nodded. “It’s directional, allowing it to easily pick up their signal even though its good fifty yards from the Wi-Fi router in the house.”
“But car batteries don’t last forever.”
“Exactly. Every now and again they need to be recharged or replaced. Someone must come here on a regular basis to sort them out.”
“That’s crazy.”
Which is exactly why Brody had never considered it in the first place.
Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Brody felt like kicking himself. Yesterday, when they’d disabled Walter Pike’s network video PC, the webcam streams from Anna and Kim’s home had not continued to be broadcast on SWY. He and O’Reilly had manually searched through every location on SWY before it had been turned off. They had not found them because Crooner42 had already stopped displaying them on the site, despite his shadow PC still being active. As to why Crooner42 had done this, Brody could only speculate. The most likely scenario was that he’d noticed the police involvement at two of the webcam locations and so, by deactivating the feeds from the first, had made them doubt whether SWY was a factor. But this had also prevented Brody from deducing that the two sites, HWC and SWY, had different network video PC sources. He knew now that if he drove over to Anna and Kim’s house or the office address for Sarah McNeil, he would find a shadow PC hidden nearby.
“Are you saying that every location on SWY has a car parked outside like this?”
“Most, I would think. Certainly all the private locations. Where there’s public access maybe they’re plugged into the mains supply somewhere in a secret place where the laptop can’t be disturbed. Whoever’s behind this needs access to them in case anything goes wrong. Computers break down all the time. If they were stored inside the premises, then how could they gain access to fix any issues?”
“But SYW has hundreds of locations. It would cost a fortune.”
“Not compared to the amount of money the site’s making. And anyway, that car is worth no more than a few hundred quid.”
Jenny stepped out from between their cars to get a better look. “Right, I’m doing a PNC check on the number plate.”
She pulled her mobile phone out of her coat pocket and made a phone call. After a short wait, she had an address.
She sighed. “It sounds suspect. The car is registered to John Smith at an address in Stratford. 6E Appleton Avenue.”
“Give me a moment.” On his tablet computer, Brody searched for the address on Google Maps. He switched to Street View, found the number six and zoomed in. He handed her the tablet.
“Do you see what I see?”
It was a large terraced Victorian house that had been converted into flats: four of them, numbered 6A to 6D.
“There is no 6E.” She looked closer. “And there’s only one letterbox for all four flats. So any post for number 6 gets delivered. The DVLA would probably be none the wiser.”
“Sounds like too clever a scam to have only used it once,” Brody suggested.
Jenny nodded her understanding and made another call. “Can you find out how many vehicles are registered to 6E Appleton Avenue, E20 9RP?”
She waited. After a minute she had the answer, thanked whomever she’d called and disconnected. “There are over a hundred cars registered to that address. All cheap and old. Just like that one.”
“Very clever.” Brody nodded in admiration. “They couldn’t afford to use stolen cars. Your lot are bound to stumble across them. But this way, they’re registered to what looks like a legitimate address. They’re not reported stolen. And no way to trace whoever really owns them.”
“Unless . . . I’ll get someone round to Appleton Avenue anyway. The people who live in the flats must have spotted all the post piling up for the non-existent flat. Or someone there is collecting it all for him.” She made another call and gave instructions.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“I need to get a forensic team up here to take a look at that car.”
“But that will take ages. And even if they find fingerprints or DNA, what then?”
“There’s the computer . . .”
“Yes there is,” he smiled, “isn’t there.”
She narrowed her eyes, unsure where he was going. “We’ll need them to break into the car to gain access to it.”
“Well, it seems like someone’s on your side.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you noticed the driver’s side window?” he asked, faking innocence.
Jenny walked over to the car. The window had been smashed
in. A brick lay in the passenger seat. She bent down, examined the interior by eye and then peered over its roof at him.
“Brody, please tell me you didn’t do this.”
“It was like that when I got here, honest officer.” He held up his gloved hands and grinned from ear to ear to let her know that he was lying through his teeth. “But as the car was accessible, I thought I might as well take a look inside.”
“Brody . . .” she warned.
“Here, let me show you.”
Brody joined her by the driver’s side of the car. He reached inside the broken window underneath the dashboard and popped the boot. They walked around to the back of the car.
Brody had already seen the contents earlier. Jenny’s reaction was similar to his own. “Fucking hell!”
Inside the boot, a large milk crate contained two rows of car batteries all connected together. To the right was a laptop computer on its side. It was connected to the run of batteries. Another wire ran from the laptop back through the rear seats to the directional Wi-Fi antenna.
“Quite impressive, eh?” said Brody.
“How long would this last?”
“I reckon that lot would do a whole month. Maybe two. The power draw on that model is pretty low, especially with the screen closed.”
“So let me get this straight. This laptop receives all the feeds from the webcams across the road.” Brody nodded. “So how does it broadcast them up to SWY?”
“It’s so simple.” He caught her affronted look and changed tack. “What I mean is that it’s impressive in its simplicity. It sends the feeds back over the Saxton’s own Wi-Fi network, through their broadband router, onto the Internet and up to SWY. It works completely independently from the network video recorder PC inside the house that connects to HomeWebCam.”
“Please tell me you haven’t touched the laptop, Brody.”
He’d wanted to. It had been difficult not to. It probably contained the back door into SWY he’d searched for all week. But his motivation to pwn SecretlyWatchingYou was completely at odds with his motivation to help Jenny.
“Of course I haven’t. I called you, didn’t I?”
And anyway, helping Jenny might lead to him still pwning SecretlyWatchingYou.
“Now for my promise.”
Brody reached a gloved hand into the boot and quickly pulled out the power supply and Wi-Fi antenna cables from the back of the laptop.
“What are you doing?” shrieked Jenny. “That’s evidence.”
“I’m getting the person behind SWY to come here in person, just like I said I would.”
Understanding dawned on her face.
“Without power or access to the Wi-Fi network, the feeds will stop being broadcast.”
He reached into his pocket, withdrew his tablet PC again and took off his gloves. He brought back up the Au Pair Affair location on SWY. Jenny leaned in to him to see, placing one hand on his wrist. It was the first time they’d touched. He could feel the electricity.
After a minute, on the screen, all seven video streams had blacked out.
* * *
As the front door slammed shut behind him, Crooner42 pressed a button on his key fob. Across the living room, the bookcase began to silently swing open. One day, he decided, he would upgrade the home automation system to play an excerpt of the Thunderbirds theme tune. Or maybe Batman would be more appropriate. The bookcase always reminded him of Tracy Island and Wayne Manor, completely innocuous on the surface, but with the click of a button swinging open to reveal the camouflaged hi-tech control centre behind. Okay, he didn’t quite have a Thunderbird 2 or a Batmobile, but he did have a massive bank of monitors from which he controlled SecretlyWatchingYou.
He grabbed a coke from the wine fridge and sat in his reclining leather chair at the centre of his secret room. As the bookcase automatically swung itself shut, he picked up the tablet computer he always left on the side table and checked the site’s status.
All locations were online and broadcasting. Well, all except Student Heaven, which had been one of the most popular locations for SWY customers. It had also been his own personal favourite, but it had been necessary to disable it once the police had taken an interest following the death of Anna Parker, one of the students who had lived in the house. He’d watched the police, aided by none other than Fingal, discover the webcams secreted within the house. They would only be able to link the webcams to HomeWebCam. And even if they did realise that the same webcams streams used to be broadcast on SWY, they would naturally determine that the feeds arrived there via HomeWebCam. It was the only obvious explanation once the network video recorder PC within the house was discovered.
No one would ever figure out his shadow network of network video recorder laptops, hidden in plain site outside each of the webcam locations. Which reminded him: he needed to pop down to Charlton tomorrow and remove the car that had been parked down the road from Student Heaven for the last few years.
It was quite timely, as it turned out, because he had recently identified a new webcam location in Brighton to add to the SecretlyWatchingYou site. His original plan had been to pop across the river to Deptford that evening, buy a new car at auction and then drive it to the south coast the next day. But with the vehicle in Charlton no longer required there, he would redeploy it to Brighton instead.
The location in Brighton was a tricky one. He knew he’d need to be patient waiting for a parking spot, free of yellow lines, to appear on the residential back street perpendicular to the main road where his target location lay. If he could get a decent line of sight, then it would work. And the gay massage parlour that offered services way beyond what was written on the price list displayed outside would become a new source of revenue on SWY. While it was not to his personal taste, their hidden webcam streams were bound to become a hit with a fair proportion of his voyeuristic customers; after all, SWY didn’t discriminate.
Crooner42 checked the customer count and nearly choked on his coke. He almost had to pinch himself at the numbers. It was a brand new record, well over six thousand viewers active concurrently. He checked the total number of paid registrations and saw that it had increased by nearly a thousand new registrations since he’d last checked the day before. At this rate, he’d have over one hundred thousand paying customers by the end of the week.
Satisfied that SWY was in good shape, he moved on to his next task, the one he had been savouring the thought of all day.
Crooner42 sat at his desk, using a proper computer with a keyboard, rather than the tablet PC he used to control SWY. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation and, tunnelling through VPN server and TOR, logged into the CrackerHack forums, confident that his IP address could not be traced. He navigated to the discussion area entitled ‘Vorovskoy Mir’s Cyber Most Wanted’. The third name on the list was labelled ‘Fingal’ and the reward for information leading to his capture was $1 million in bitcoins; no questions asked. Crooner42 had no idea what Fingal had done to upset the Russian Mafia so badly, but nor did he care. This was revenge. Soon enough, instead of a silhouette, Fingal’s real face would be displayed with the word ‘ELIMINATED’ across it, just like the four losers at the bottom of the list.
Crooner42 clicked on a button to submit a tip. On the form that was presented, he entered the identity information he had uncovered for Brody Taylor earlier that day. His Upper Street address, his passport number; everything he had found. Crooner42 also entered his own bitcoin wallet address, the only linkage back to himself and even then it was almost impossible to trace. Although Crooner42 would have happily offered up Fingal’s identity for free, if the Russian Mafia wanted to pay him for the information, who was he to object?
Just as he was about to press the submit button, an alert sounded on his tablet PC.
He picked it up and quickly navigated to the issue. It was the Au Pair Affair location. According to the error message, the shadow PC had gone offline. He brought it up on the centre screen on the bank of screens
opposite. Sure enough, the video streams were completely black.
He ran through the usual recovery processes. He sent a reboot command via the pay-as-you-go mobile phone connected to the computer at the location. He gave it a minute but nothing happened. He tried remotely connecting via the broadband router in the Saxtons’ house. Again, no joy. He started to resign himself to a physical site visit.
It wasn’t that concerning, just an inconvenience. Every now and then, a location would go offline and require in-person recovery. Most often it was a fault with the laptop or the batteries. One time, he’d arrived to discover the car had been stolen. He wondered what the thieves had made of the boot full of batteries and the laptop.
He looked up the address of the Au Pair Affair location on the system. It was in Bushey in Hertfordshire. He recalled the location. It was a well-to-do residential street with his car parked on the cul-de-sac opposite the massive detached house.
He temporarily disabled it from the SecretlyWatchingYou site. That way his customers would no longer see Au Pair Affair listed and wouldn’t then complain about a series of black screens. But the problem would need to be dealt with swiftly.
It was looking like he would need to visit Bushey.
Crooner42 returned his attention to the Most Wanted list. All the identity data he’d filled in about Fingal was still there. He took a deep breath and, with a flourish, clicked the submit button.
* * *
As the taxi disappeared down the road, Derek Saxton fished his keys out of his pocket. They spilled out of his hands and dropped to the ground. He bent down to pick them up but lost his balance, falling forward and crashing into the front gate outside his home.
“Oops-a-daisy,” he slurred to himself. He grabbed hold of the gate and slowly pulled himself up, only just remembering to grab the keys.
This time, he concentrated harder. He pressed the remote control button on the key fob. The electric gate obligingly slid to one side. Tentatively, he made his way across his driveway, careful to put one foot in front of the other.
He reached the porch, assiduously selected the right key and attempted to push it into the Yale lock of the grand double door. It took him three attempts to pinpoint it correctly, but even then it wouldn’t go in more than halfway. Confused, he examined his keys. He’d correctly chosen the shiny silver one. The others were all brass or mortice keys. He tried again.
Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) Page 44