by Glenn Carter
‘Remember that stuff about digital fingerprints?’ Sharav asked. ‘There was one class where we learnt that sometimes it is easier to find digital information than physical information. Maybe we should go after that? Although Esmee says it can’t be found.’
Paul frowned. ‘Hmmm yeah. Well there are a number of explanations. One, the evidence isn’t there. Two, Esmee isn’t skilled enough to find it. Three, Esmee did find it and didn’t tell us.’
Sharav looked at Paul, ‘Well we both know Rachel is telling the truth. So, we can rule out option one. In order to investigate option two or three we would need some professional IT skills, which, no offence, neither of us has.
Paul agreed, ‘Yep we need help. Someone we can trust and who has some serious kick-ass hacking skills.’ There was a momentary pause then the boys looked at each other with huge smiles on their faces, ‘Terry!’ they said in unison. At that Sharav fell asleep.
The next day the boys were in William’s office early. Paul told William that he was really home sick and really wanted to go and see his Mum and visit Rachel who was transferred up to Edinburgh that day. And would it be possible for Sharav to come as well because he needed some company? William paused and eyed them suspiciously. He was quiet, then finally said, ‘Okay boys, you can have the leave, but not for long. I’ll give you leave for this weekend. I expect to see you first thing on Monday morning for classes as normal.’
The next two days passed like a month. Paul was desperate to get home and meet up with Terry to see what he could do. He recalled the last time he had seen Rachel. She had seemed really low, but Sharav managed to make her smile when he fell asleep and banged his head on a low shelf. They were really careful about what they said to her in the room, because they knew everything was being monitored. As Paul had left, he had hugged her and whispered in her ear, ‘Don’t give up hope. I’ve got a plan. We are going to clear your name, track down Sabre and hopefully find Dad.’ Paul remembered the hope in Rachel’s eyes and had immediately felt guilty. He knew he had said too much. Did he have a good plan?
Sharav and Paul spent Friday night with Paul’s Mum who was really happy to see Paul and took every opportunity to hug him. Paul felt the loss of not having his watch with him, but they had decided to leave the watches at MI2 just in case their movements were being tracked. On Saturday at 10am they arrived at Terry’s house. They knocked on the front door and a minute later heard a muffled voice coming from inside saying, ‘What’s the password, strange visitors?’ Paul and Sharav looked at each other, confused.
‘Is this the right house?’ whispered Sharav.
‘Yep, number sixteen,’ said Paul.
‘What’s the password, strange visitors?’ came the voice again, but quicker this time.
Sharav and Paul stared at each other unsure what to do.
Paul took a shot at it, ‘Open sesame?’
The voice on the other side of the door laughed quietly and said in a lower voice, ‘That is incorrect, stranger. Try again.’
Sharav smiled, ‘Okay how about, ‘Alakazam?’
‘That is incorrect, second stranger. You have two more chances.’
‘Is that you, Terry? Please let us in?’ Paul called out impatiently.
The voice laughed again, ‘Okay how about I give you a special clue. What if I said I have very woolly hair?’
Paul was frustrated, ‘Sheep, camel, llama, woolly mammoth!’
‘Wrong, you have lost this challenge, please wait.’
Ten seconds later a small piece of paper was passed under the door. Sharav picked it up and read the word ‘ulotrichous.’
‘Correct!’ said the voice, and the door opened. There before them beamed Terry who was wearing jeans and a dinosaur t-shirt.
‘Captain and his first mate, you are very welcome. I hope you enjoyed that little game.’
‘Well Terry, how on earth were we supposed to get Ulotikos,’ Paul replied.
‘Ulotrichous’, corrected Terry. Actually, I thought that was very easy. I enjoy unusual words. Ulotrichous can be defined as ‘having woolly or curly hair.’ Sharav and Paul stared at Terry wide eyed for a few seconds before he turned and ran off. They followed him upstairs to his bedroom. Neither Paul nor Sharav had been in Terry’s room before. As they walked into his room their eyes were treated to a feast of dinosaurs. Dinosaur bedspread, wallpaper, stuffed toys, anatomical posters, money box and even some dinosaur confectionery.
‘Wow,’ said Sharav, ‘what a lot of dinosaurs!’ Sharav went up closer to the wallpaper and pointed at a dinosaur. ‘Oh, nice Stegosaurus.’
Terry let out a huge cackle and shook his head. ‘I can see why you made that mistake. That is an Ankylosaurus. They are both about 9 metres long, but the Stegosaurus lived around 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period, whilst the Ankylosaurus lived about 66 million years ago.’ He pointed at a Stegosaurus and said, ‘You can see the difference. The Ankylosaurus had a massive club tail that could break the bones of other attacking dinosaurs. The Stegosaurus had these plates and spines that ran along its back and tail. That leads me on to something even more enthralling. He pointed at another dinosaur. ‘This beauty was…’
Paul interrupted him, ‘Terry that is really interesting, but we need to talk about something else just now.’
Terry looked crestfallen, but smiled weakly and said, ‘Yes, well maybe another time.’
Terry listened intently to Paul and Sharav as they retold the cover story that they had worked on the night before. They explained that they were continuing with their training in the Territorial Army and as part of their development they needed to undergo field training. They had a fake mission which they needed to complete by Thursday. It involved tracking down evidence to free Rachel from a prison she was being held in. The instructors were playing parts and would not break their cover for the entire mission. They were allowed to seek the help of other people outside the TA but those contacts would need to keep all the information confidential. As the boys explained the objectives Terry’s smile grew bigger. He even let out a chuckle when they explained that they needed IT support and they would like to use him as their data and intelligence analyst.
When they had finished, Terry tried to hide his smile saying, ‘One moment please.’
They watched Terry as he put his hand over his mouth to conceal a grin and then left the bedroom, closing the door behind him. A couple of seconds later Paul and Sharav jumped as they heard Terry shout, ‘I WAS MADE FOR THIS!’ followed by very loud cackles. After the laughing had died down, the door opened and in walked Terry with a straight face. He said, ‘Yes, this is very serious. Okay first things first, what is this mission called?’
Paul and Sharav were quiet for a moment, desperately trying to think of something.
‘I don’t think it has a name,’ said Sharav.
‘How about ‘Operation Sabre?’ blurted out Paul.
‘Why on earth would we call it that?’ replied Terry laughing. ‘Bear with, Bear with,’ Terry continued as he walked over to the opposite wall and, to the boy’s astonishment, tried to do a handstand. He failed several times and kept smashing his legs against the wardrobe. On his ninth attempt he managed an ungainly handstand and then as his face grew a brighter shade of red said, ‘This helps me think.’ After twenty seconds he let out a gasp and collapsed in a heap. He stood up, and as he staggered back to his desk chair said, ‘I’ve got a name’.
He plonked himself into his leather chair and said proudly ‘Operation Hinds! That’s what we should call it. Alfie Hinds was an extremely intelligent British criminal who managed to escape from three high security prisons. During his final incarceration he had thirteen court appeals dismissed, however he eventually won a court case against the officer who had arrested him and went on to get a pardon.’
‘Perfect!’ said Paul. ‘Operation Hinds it is.’
‘Okay,’ said Terry as he swivelled his chair around to face three high definition screens, ‘How can I help?�
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24
Stingray
Sharav and Paul watched in awe as Terry processed huge amounts of data across three screens. His frenetic activity was interspersed by abrupt questions that he threw back at them.
‘Okay, tell me about Rachel’s phone. Smartphone?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul.
‘Which make?’
‘Not sure.’
‘Phone number?’
Sharav looked around for a piece of paper so he could copy the number down for Terry. ‘You got any paper?’
‘Paper! Analogue. I don’t do paper. Just tell me, I’ll remember it.’
Sharav smiled and told him the number.
‘Okay let’s see if we can locate the phone the easy way and just hope that these instructors think you’re dimwits and have left her phone turned on.’ He turned around and smiled at them. ‘Of course, I don’t think you are very stupid. It’s all relative. Compared to me, some people might think you are stupid.’
Paul nodded. ‘Terry, its fine. Keep going.’
The phone network’s server was surprisingly easy to hack and after five minutes Terry swivelled round in his chair to face them again. ‘Okay there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that her phone is switched off and therefore almost impossible to trace. The good news is that your instructors obviously don’t think you’re stupid.’
Paul slumped onto Terry’s bed and bowed his head.
‘So, it’s impossible to trace the phone?’ Sharav said, as he sat on the bed and began to nod off.
‘I said almost impossible.’ Terry smirked. ‘The second piece of good news is that this mission has just got a whole lot more interesting. Impossible for most people. Not for me!’
Paul looked up and smiled. ‘Okay so what’s next?’
Terry leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. ‘Let me think out loud. The only way to locate the phone would be for it to be turned on. The National Security Agency in America, or the NSA as most people call them, have been working on this problem for years. The problem of how to switch a phone on remotely. It’s a beautiful problem that I’ve never had to solve but I’m willing to give it a try. You see smartphones have two computers inside them. The baseband processor is the part of the phone that deals with the radio waves and the operating system processor runs the operating system. When the phone is off, the operating system processor is also off, but there has been some chatter around whether the baseband processor is ever truly off. It could be that it is always in a ready state. This is a reasonable hypothesis because there are rumours that the FBI and the CIA have been able to locate phones when they’ve been switched off. This is obviously handy if you need to locate a terrorist or person of interest.’
Paul interrupted, ‘Terry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I mean the NSA, FBI, the CIA. They must have their brightest and best working on this problem. I just need to know whether YOU can do it!’
‘Hold your ponies Captain. You must allow the flow of thoughts to continue. What we need is to trick the phone into connecting to a malicious tower rather than the carrier’s tower. Then we would need to get the baseband processor to interact with the operating system processor.’
Terry swung around to face his computer again. Sharav was fast asleep by this point. Every time Paul tried to ask Terry a question, he would hold his hand up and continue with his work.
Four hours later Paul and Sharav were still in Terry’s room and Sharav had been awake for half an hour. They received a text message. ‘This could take a while. Please go home. Eat, sleep, drink (not particularly in that order) and come back tomorrow.’ It was from Terry. The boys looked at the back of Terry’s head, smiled at each other and walked out.
The next morning after a pleasant breakfast with Mrs Fox, Paul messaged Terry to ask how he was getting on. He only received one word in reply, ‘COME!’
An hour later they were all standing in Terry’s room. Terry was wearing the same clothes as the day before.
Sharav looked concerned, ‘Terry, have you slept?’
‘Well at 3am my head did hit the desk. A micro sleep, you could call it. So yes.’
‘Are you okay?’ asked Sharav.
‘Okay as the day is long!’
‘Give us an update, Terry. What have you learnt?’ asked Paul.
Terry’s eyes brightened as he talked through all the steps he had taken to investigate the ‘beautiful problem,’ as he put it. How he had read hundreds of conspiracy theories online, read through dozens of hacker forums and had a ‘quick look’ inside some of America’s more important agencies.
Sharav raised his eyebrows at this and said, ‘Terry, please tell us you haven’t done anything illegal or got yourself into trouble?’
Terry smiled broadly, ‘I can assure you I will not get into any trouble!’
Sharav was about to say something else but Terry continued on his monologue detailing all the avenues he had explored. ‘Amongst all the dross that’s on conspiracy theory sites, you occasionally get a nugget or an angle that you would never have considered. However, there are some crazy people out there! Can you believe that some people think that dinosaurs helped build the pyramids or that Michael Jackson was killed by the Iranian government? Or my favourite, that the moon doesn’t actually exist!’
The boys laughed heartily together. In contrast to the intensity of the last couple of weeks this was welcome relief.
Paul looked at Terry. ‘Terry, what I need to know is whether you can find Rachel’s phone.’
‘Well my young friend the jobbie, I think it is possible. The FBI use a programme called Stingray to mimic a phone mast, turn the phone on and then locate it. Give me another ten minutes and we can give it a go.’
Paul and Sharav spent a tense ten minutes sitting on Terry’s bed. Paul eventually stood up and paced up and down, remembering the promise he had made to Rachel.
Terry suddenly leaned back in his chair. ‘Okay well luckily the code in the baseband processor has loads of bugs, which has made it easier to hack. Are you ready to execute?’
‘Yes!’ said Paul and Sharav in unison.
Terry’s forefinger hovered over the enter button and then he pressed it. They all stared intently at the screen as a map of the world span around. Twenty seconds later the screen started to zoom in. ‘Oh’ said Terry. ‘I’ve managed to turn it on!’ The map zoomed in further. First to Europe, then to the UK, then to the boys’ relief, Scotland. Slowly the programme homed in on the east of Scotland and finally stopped on the east coast over North Berwick.
‘North Berwick!’ shouted Paul. That must only be thirty miles from here!’
‘Twenty-four miles actually,’ corrected Terry. ‘I’d estimate forty-five minutes by car or fifty-seven minutes by train.’
Paul froze. The blood drained from his face as he stared at the floor.
‘You okay Captain?’ asked Terry. ‘Interesting carpet isn’t it?’
Paul put his hand to his forehead, ‘Of course, North Berwick. My Dad said, ‘you’ll find me in North…’, he didn’t get to finish the sentence. He was going to say, ‘North Berwick.’
‘Your Dad’s in North Berwick!’ exclaimed Sharav studying the map. ‘Can you get a more exact location Terry?’
Terry shook his head, ‘No sorry, I’ve only been able to triangulate the location using three masts, which gives a radius of approximately eight miles. We would have to travel to North Berwick and then hopefully get a more accurate location using my laptop and some cool tech I picked up six months ago. And yes, you may say it now.’
Paul looked at him, ‘Say what?’
‘I am a genius, of course!’
The boys laughed. Sharav slapped him on the back, ‘Terry, there is no doubt that you are a genius. Thank you so much. Right, how are we going to get there?’
‘Hmmm, I wonder if my sister is about.’ Terry said.
At the mention of Terry’s sister, Paul’s eyes lit up. All the b
oys in their school fancied Jessie. She was the total opposite of Terry. She was popular, dark haired, not very clever, but very beautiful. Terry stood up from his chair and walked off purposely.
There was a pause and then an almighty scream, ‘GET OUT OF MY ROOM! YOU SMALL EYED, GINGER SKUNK!’ There was a moment of silence followed by, ‘No of course I won’t drive you and your revolting friends to North Berwick! Are you mental?’
Sixty seconds later Terry re-entered his room, ‘Well that went well.’
‘Do you think?’ said Sharav, looking alarmed.
‘She’s going to take us.’
Paul laughed, ‘We heard her screaming and calling you a small eyed skunk.’
Terry smiled, ‘Yeah but I’ve got something she wants.’
‘What?’ asked Paul.
‘Money!’ I’ve said I’ll pay her to take us. But she takes about two hours to get ready so let’s go down and have some lunch. We have an exciting day ahead of us. I can feel it in my toenails!’
25
Nano
Jessie was introduced to Sharav and Paul in the kitchen. Paul stood up from the kitchen table and tried to say something, ‘I… it…. we saw… I like… I mean… I like your shoes.’ Sharav looked quizzically at Paul and smiled before saying, ‘Thanks for agreeing to take us to North Berwick.’ Jessie looked them up and down like she was surveying joints of rotten meat and then walked off. Terry followed her with a spring in his step and said over his shoulder, ‘She doesn’t really talk to anyone before 1pm.’
Jessie reversed her very old Toyota out of the driveway without looking behind her. This gave Paul and Sharav their first clue that Jessie may not be the best of drivers. As they joined the Edinburgh by-pass Terry started talking about how the by-pass reminded him of a particular dinosaur called Dreadnoughtus that was twenty-six metres from head to tail. Everyone jumped as Jessie turned to Terry and screamed, ‘NOOOOOOOOOO!’