“No worries,” Vector said with a laugh. “Take your time. Enjoy it.”
As she installed each application, each new package, visited sites for updates, she felt herself get sucked into the screen. Swimming in it all. Flying from site to site, trying to absorb everything she’d missed. She drifted off, weaving her way through discussion threads and talk-tracks, new concepts and old, and found her place back where she loved to go: in the middle of everything she loved.
The hotel room’s door clicked open and Haylie snapped back to reality, looking over to see Vector entering, cradling a few cans of energy drinks in his arms. She snuck a peek at the clock in the top right corner of the screen—she had just lost twenty minutes. She sat back, her eyes glazed over with an electric glow.
“Ok,” she said. “I’m ready.”
“Your fingers all working and everything?” Vector asked. “Remember how to type?”
She brought up a browser window and closed her eyes for a moment, taking herself back to the van in Chicago, where she was watching the Endling cut and paste his login credentials to his online workspace and log in. She breathed slowly, trying her best to recall the text from his window.
“I remember the username,” she said, typing it out into her TextEdit program. “It’s the password I can’t quite get. I think there were three 4s in there, somewhere. Let me try a few different variations.”
After a few attempts, Haylie found the right combination. The workspace homepage appeared, showing a file repository, active messages, and a list of users with access to the account.
“I’m going to check the message history,” she said.
Each note back and forth was between the Endling and one other user: someone named Nomad22. Nomad22 had sent messages a few times a week over the past few months, including cryptic lists of sites, plaintext words and phrases, and a few image files.
“There’s not much to go on here,” Haylie said. “It’s pretty sparse. Even if this Nomad22 guy is Caesar, I’m not seeing anything that gives me a clue about where he might be.”
“We could just send him a message from this account, right?” Vector said, scratching at his new buzz cut. “Try and get him to respond, to tell us something?”
“I don’t want to risk it,” she said. “Once the NSA checks the video from Chicago, they’ll be in here pretty fast. We don’t want them to know that we’ve been in here, too.”
Vector walked to the window, looking down on the Bourbon Street crowds below, and took a sip of his energy drink. “We’ve got nothing,” he said, reaching into the bag to fetch the box for a new phone. “We’re running for our lives, and we don’t even know where we’re running to. Nice one.”
“Calm down, drama queen,” Haylie said. “We’ll figure it out. There’s got to be something in here. Let me look again.”
Vector pulled a phone from the bag, tossing the plastic wrap on the bed and pulling the SIM card slot out. “This is such a pain, this whole thing. Can you imagine living like this? Changing our names every few days? New phones? New identities? I’m the kind of guy who just likes to get something set up and roll with it.”
“Who knows,” Haylie said, still searching the file repository. “Maybe you’ll like it. You never know until you try.”
Vector booted up the phone, staring down at the “Set Up Your New Device” screen. “Ugh. Setup. Setup is the worst.”
“Oh, please,” Haylie said, growing annoyed. “Just think what Caesar has been going through—he’s been living like this since London. We’ve been on the run for less than twenty-four hours. Eight months of this can’t be any sort of picnic.”
Vector stopped in his tracks, looking down at the phone, and then back over to Haylie. “Wait a minute,” he said, walking over to the desk and gesturing at the machine.
Haylie twisted back to give him a view of the laptop. He hovered over the screen, scanning the message list up and down, tracing the right column with his finger. “There, that one,” he said with an excited point. “The most recent note from Nomad22 to the Endling, the one with the attachment.”
Haylie resumed control of the machine, clicking the message open. It contained no text, only a photo of a white sheet of paper with ‘crp78rt90’ printed in messy handwriting across its face.
“It’s a username or password—they put it on a piece of paper to mix up the communication pattern. Probably written with his left hand to avoid identification. Standard stuff.”
“It’s not the password I care about,” he said. “It’s the image file. Caesar’s on the run, right? Just like us. He’s probably setting up new hardware—laptops, phones—a few times a week, you just said it yourself. Well, when you’re doing that, there’s a chance you could forget things sometimes. You don’t take the time to adjust every setting, every time.”
“Sure,” Haylie said, looking back to the picture of the password. “But who cares?”
“Do you remember a few months back?” he asked, his voice growing with excitement. “That hacker in Finland who got busted for leaving calling cards with all his exploits? He would leave pictures of trains for some reason?”
“Sure, I think I remember you saying something about that.”
“Ok,” Vector said. “He got busted because he got sloppy. For his last hack, he took a picture with a burner phone, but forgot to turn off the GPS.”
Haylie nodded. “GPS is embedded by default in every photo unless it’s disabled. To turn it off you have to go way down in the settings.”
“So,” Vector said. “Maybe Caesar made the same mistake.” He pointed to the screen. “Check the meta data on this image file.”
She did a search for the image analysis application that had always been her go-to, downloaded it, and got it up and running. “If it’s really this easy, the NSA won’t be far behind us.” She loaded the image into the application and hit the ‘Submit’ button. “Here—the results are up.”
“What’d you get back?”
Haylie scrolled through the list of metadata. “Usage rights, Image Programs, Region … no, no, no,” she read out loud, trying to hear her own thoughts over the music floating in from the street below. “Ok, here’s the geotag.”
She clicked on the field to expand its results. With a few clicks, a map came up. She zoomed out, checking the country.
“Bingo,” she said.
“Where we going?” Vector asked.
“Frankfurt. We’re headed to Germany.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Grandhotel Frankfurt
Frankfurt, Germany
November 2nd, 3:18PM
“Everything’s coming together,” Sean said, rattling down the to-do list on his phone. “I’ll need to tweak some algorithms here and there, but otherwise, the election should be a lock.”
Caesar checked his timetable, his scripts, the clock, and then allowed the reality to flood over him: Sean was right. We’re actually ready for this. He had been keeping a brave face, but it was a face that was hiding piles—hell, mountains—of doubt that they could actually bring everything they needed together in time. But there it was, just staring back at him—the code that would change the world. The code that would change his life.
“Celebration time,” Sean said, rising from his seat with a jump. “I’m starving, and we could use a few hours off before we start running through our tests. There’s a place I’ve been dying to try a few blocks away.”
“Let me just check the access scripts one more time,” Caesar said.
“We need to eat,” Sean pleaded. “How about we just go to dinner and not call it a celebration?”
“Fine,” Caesar laughed. “Dinner time. But we’ll need some cash. Spent the last of it this afternoon.”
“No problem there,” Sean said, opening a window on his laptop. “Checking the bank balance…” He flashed a grimace, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
Caesar walked around the table to get a better look at Sean’s screen. “Wow, I didn’t re
alize it was this low. Not a big deal, let’s do another transfer.”
“You sure?” Sean asked. “We’ll need to create a new set of credentials. I’m not sure that we want to be setting off any alarm bells this late in the game.”
“Eh, it’s fine,” Caesar said. “That system is twenty years old. No one’s paying attention; I doubt anyone even remembers it’s there. Besides, I thought you were starving?”
>>>>>
NSA Texas Cryptologic Center
San Antonio, TX
Where would I go? What would I do?
Mary paged through the files, growing desperate for inspiration with every turn. The NSA didn’t have much to go on, that was for sure. If this was the whole file, Mary suddenly realized how lucky they’d been to catch him in the first place.
I’ve been through this ten times. There’s nothing new.
Where would I go? What would I do?
I’d be moving. I’d be mobile.
Without being able to get inside the hacker’s head—knowing his end goal—Mary knew this wouldn’t be easy. She didn’t see anything for sale in any hacker marketplace—not even the ones that were hidden far away from the prying eyes of government goons—that matched the data they had collected. They were using it for themselves. They were saving it for something big.
I’d need a place to stay. I’d need money.
She brought up the FBI’s financial services desk and checked the notification log. Dozens of bank robberies over the last few days, but no suspects still at large.
They wouldn’t be robbing physical locations—too many cameras, too much security. They’re smarter than that.
She checked the database for online exploits for major banks, but nothing had come up in the past few days—nothing that had been successful, anyway. She scrolled down the list, working bank by bank, until she found an entry at the bottom that read ‘XX_Other.’
Shrugging, she clicked on the folder and found a single entry.
SWIFT_Access
“SWIFT?” she whispered to herself. “I can’t believe they’re still using that old dinosaur.” She clicked into the folder, showing the records from the previous two days, and leaned in. What she saw made her bolt up from her chair.
She waved over to the agents on the other side of the room. “Get over here, you want to see this,” Mary yelled, snapping her fingers in the air.
“What’d you find?” Hernandez asked, stirring a cup of coffee.
“It’s the SWIFT system,” Mary said, watching the screen for new updates. “There’s a new login. From just a few minutes ago. I don’t believe this—I can’t believe I didn’t think about this before.”
“SWIFT system?” Hernandez asked. “What the hell is a SWIFT system?”
Mary sat back from the keyboard and took a breath. “Not a SWIFT system, the SWIFT system. These guys who were paying the Endling—they need money, right? Everyone needs money. These hackers don’t fit the pattern of being financed by a terrorist group or nation-state. Hacking banks directly would be one way to go, but these guys seem better than that. The SWIFT system manages all financial transactions across the world. It’s like a backroom network for banks to move money around.”
“The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication,” Agent Wilcox’s voice drifted from across the room as she approached. She leaned over to look at Mary’s screen with a grin. “But it’s never been hacked before.”
“Sure it has,” Mary shot back. “Plenty of times, I’m sure. And now it’s so old, no one really pays attention to it anymore.”
“If they need money, this is a pretty smart way to get it,” Agent Wilcox said, nodding. “Hacking a bank’s website or ATM isn’t easy—that’s where all the security investment goes these days. No one knows about SWIFT, which means its security is probably terrible.”
“I can verify that,” Mary added, navigating her way through the system logs. “Even back in my day there was a backdoor to give yourself God-like access, but those accounts would expire each month. Hell of a bug, but as long as no one has gone too crazy with it, I’d bet it’s still there.”
“Is that right?” Agent Hernandez asked, studying Mary carefully.
“Allegedly,” Mary corrected herself. “So I’ve heard.”
“Keep going,” Agent Wilcox said, gesturing over to Mary’s laptop.
“If we assume these guys know about the SWIFT vulnerability,” Mary said, “they’d need to sign in as admins and create a new account if they want to move any money around.”
“And that’s what you’re seeing?” Hernandez asked.
“A new one just popped up,” Mary said. “And there has been one created each month for the past eight months. What these guys don’t know is that the SWIFT system gathers an IP on the other side. It sets up its own connection—won’t work without one.”
“You’re kidding,” Wilcox said.
“What does that tell us?” Hernandez said.
“They’re in Frankfurt,” Mary said, looking back at the screen, showing a map. She pressed her finger onto the glass on a blinking dot hovering over the map. “They’re in this hotel right here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Approaching the Central Station
Frankfurt, Germany
November 2nd, 3:32PM
Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Haylie felt the train slowing as the buildings outside the window grew closer, their sides growing taller and forming a grid around them. She looked over to see Vector coding away, still connected to the train’s Wi-Fi.
“This GPS location should be extremely accurate,” Vector said. “We can be pretty sure that he’s here.” He pointed at the Google Map, angling the 3D view in her direction to show a hotel poised over a twisting knot of roads, directly across from the Frankfurt Central train station. “We know he’s in the hotel, but I don’t know which room. There must be two-hundred rooms in this place. It’s huge.”
“Two hundred and sixty-six,” Haylie corrected him. “I grabbed the current register for the day when the image was posted.”
“How’d you manage that?” Vector asked.
“Their entire network is built on an operating system released in 2001,” Haylie said with a chuckle. “It’s not even getting security updates anymore, it was ‘end-of-life’d last year.”
“So there’s no way that Caesar signed in with his real name, right?”
“No chance. If I were him, I wouldn’t be using any real name,” she said. “I compared the hotel guest list with manifests from Frankfurt airport and rail systems for recent visitors to the city.”
“But how did you…”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Cross-checking the lists, all but three guests staying at the hotel traveled here on valid passports in the past week.”
“So we have three rooms to check?”
“Two of the names are female,” Haylie said. “My brother’s good, but not that good. The third name—staying in room 1710—has to be him.”
“What’s the plan? Do we just walk up to his room and knock?”
Looking back out the window, Haylie had been wondering the same thing. She knew they couldn’t just sit around waiting for him in the lobby or a nearby coffee shop—the clock was ticking. But walking into a hotel meant cameras and security and maybe even questions from curious staff members. It made her more than just a little nervous.
Vector typed away at his keyboard, squinting to read the small text on the screen. “I’m looking for anything on the HackBot boards around new hotel security exploits, but I’m not seeing anything new. The past few months have been quiet—nothing that would get us in. Just the same old stuff.”
Just the same old stuff.
She turned back to her machine and started a fresh search, seeing the high arches of the Frankfurt Central train terminal appearing through the window. She scanned the results, grinning.
“Just like I thought—this hotel chain hasn’t updated their syst
em in years. Their head of technology left a while back, and they still haven’t filled the position. I’m seeing complaints from guests about outdated tech all throughout every location.”
“So?”
“So, we should be able to get into any room we want,” she said, scanning the search results. “We don’t need a new exploit; we can use an old one. Here—this one—from a few years back.”
She moved the screen over to Vector, who quickly read the top paragraph and smiled.
“We need to find an electronics store,” she said.
Bringing up a new search window, Vector gave her a sideways glance. “Do you really think something this stupid is going to work?”
“Please,” Haylie said. “The stupidest way in is the best way in. Always.”
>>>>>
Grandhotel, Frankfurt
Haylie stepped across the elevator threshold and into the hallway of the hotel’s seventeenth floor as Vector held the door and treaded behind her. She snaked her head around the corner to check for anyone in the hallway; it was empty and still. She pointed at the sign affixed to the wall, showing that room 1710 was down the hall to the right.
“Let’s go,” she whispered. “Get the thing out of your bag.”
Vector nodded, hunched over as they inched forward. “Hey, Crash, when we plug this thing in—”
“Shut up. And don’t use that name while we’re out doing this kind of thing.”
“Right, my fault, just kind of slipped.”
“No more slipping. Just get the thing and let’s go.”
She tiptoed past each door, reciting the numbers in her head as she moved forward with soft steps.
Seventeen oh four.
Seventeen oh six.
Seventeen oh eight.
As they approached 1710, she stretched her hand back to Vector, making a “give it here” motion with her fingers. He slid the small device into her palm. She could feel the rough edges of the breadboard cut against her skin as her fingers wrapped around its frame, the thin cord dangling off to the side. She brought her new creation forward, inspecting it to make sure nothing had been damaged in transit.
Crash Into Pieces (The Haylie Black Series Book 2) Page 21