SILENT AS THE DEAD: A Deadly Cyber Chase Begins

by Sanjib Sinha

  PG entered the empty flower shop and asked the girl on the counter, “Can I use your space for a minute? I need to cancel my air ticket; it’s urgent.” He waved his laptop.

  The girl lifted her plucked eyebrow and smiled sweetly, “Yes sir. You’re most welcome.”

  PG placed the laptop on the counter and put the pen-drive on one USB port. For the first time Rahela saw him handling a computer. He started keying furiously. Rahela had never seen anyone typing so fast. In a flash of a second he opened up several black windows on the monitor. While he was typing he murmured and nodded simultaneously as if he was appreciating something. In a minute he was done. The whole monitor turned black. He put the laptop into his backpack and said, “Let’s go.”

  At the same time, almost simultaneously, one monitor went black in Yelagiri, Tamilnadu. The fat ugly looking man was watching the movements of some dots on the monitor. Suddenly it went blank. He was perplexed.

  In a minute he started typing furiously on his keyboard. But no response. He cursed first. A very loud sound of frustration came out. Next he was busy dialling a number. He called his contact in Mumbai, “Where are you?”

  The response came in small voice, “Sir, I have lost the target. I am in Crawford market. It’s too congested. Can you please check the device tracker? He entered here, I saw him for a few minutes then he suddenly disappeared behind the flower market.”

  The ugly cracker started shouting, “My device is not working any more, you son of a bitch, bloody fool. How did you lose track of a limping old man?”

  Sammy went mad in fury. He was cursing everybody including himself. He should have stayed back in Mumbai – he thought; he though that could be a difficult decision. He managed a large network through this Yelagiri warehouse. It was impossible for him to stay outside this place for a long time.

  Now he had to find out another method to track that limping old hacker.

  29. Monday, 3.25PM, Calcutta

  “You are the second person.”

  PG said to Rahela, “Only Vicky knows this secret place. Now you are added to this exclusive list.”

  As always he ended his sentence with a sweet smile while Rahela was struggling to adjust with the sudden stream of light that fell on her eyes. While coming to this place from Calcutta airport she had been blindfolded and sat in the car silently. But it was better than the BDSM she had to face in her early days as a sex worker.

  Rahela tried to smile and protested in mild voice, “You cannot say that PG. I saw the airport and it went blank after that. Now I can see where you live but if you ask me about the place I can not say a word. I don’t know how I have reached here. In fact I don’t want to know. A secret should always be secret.” There was a hint of disappointment in her voice.

  It was true. When she was blindfolded she forgot to count minutes. It seemed like she had been travelling though a black hole for her whole life. It had happened before. There were strange customers who would cover her eyes and tied her hands and legs and she started counting seconds.

  Only after entering the flat the strip of cloth was removed. She found herself in the middle of a museum-like-place where lots of computers working silently. Was it a computer showroom? She got confused first. Then she discovered a big painting on the wall facing her where a white horse was running alone in front of a distant blue mountain. There was a large sofa set where she was seated her comfortably and took a deep breath to adjust with this strange situation. On her opposite the ex-army man sat and kept watching her like she was a criminal. He folded the strip of the black cloth so tight around her face that it almost pained. It seemed he hadn’t handled any woman before. He touched her as if he was touching an inanimate object.

  PG said, “I am sorry for that Rahela. I have to take that precaution. You’d know why I did that; it was essential for keeping the anonymity. I hope you’d understand; after all you’re a very sensible girl.”

  A lump of tear choked her throat. This man talked to her so gently and always praised her. And it was genuine, she knew. He got a mischievous sweet look in his eyes but it was friendly after all. It didn’t hurt. “But you can believe me. I’m not that bad you think about me.” She thought. Suddenly she remembered her dead sister. How pathetic it was. Tears filled her eyes. She forced her to think something else.

  They were two friends but they were so different in nature – she thought. She spent almost twenty four hours with them and couldn’t complain about their behaviour except that ex army man’s hard-stare. He always looked at her as if she had just done some nasty job.

  “Yes, I did something wrong. But you need to understand it from my perspective. What could I have done?” She thought, “It’s destiny. Can we change our destiny?”

  They were sipping coffee while they talked.

  What Rahela didn’t know - PG’s flat was not very far from the Calcutta airport. He chose this place wisely. Now he didn’t have to travel a lot to get a flight. It took only ten minutes by car to reach the airport. When Rahela first entered the flat she was amazed. She had never seen so many computers in one place except the showroom. The flat was quite big. But it looked bigger with this hall where several desktop computers and laptops were working silently. In a corner there was a panel of monitors placed one after another. It looked like an aircraft cockpit.

  Another thing Rahela understood about that mysterious person PG. He had once claimed that he knew some computer jobs. In actual life that job had many complexities beyond her perception. In the Mumbai Crawford market she saw him keying in lightening speed. His fingers were dancing on the keyboard like ballerinas. The counter girl was equally awestruck by the speed. They didn’t see his fingers for sometime. They were so fast and furious.

  In the two hours flight she watched him typing in the air sometime. Probably it was dome forgetfully. As time passed by curiosity began storing inside her mind about this strange guy. On the contrary she didn’t feel any interest about his ex-army-man friend. Vicky was very sharp and agile. His movements were immaculate and perfect. It was matchless. But he could become rude any time and too tough to handle. You needed to handle such rough guy with kid gloves.

  PG was friendly and sometimes it seemed he was absent minded too like a child. He was simple in his nature and very helpful.

  “They are very strange people.” Rahela thought. She stood up and while moving towards the large window she watched tons of paper piling up from two printers.

  She turned back and asked, “Can I help you organize these papers?”

  Vicky stared at PG and Rahela watched his hard face softened for once. PG smiled as usual and said, “You are my guest. How can I ask you to do that? You can relax Rahela, I’ll do that myself.”

  She blushed for the first time in her life and said, “If you need any help please tell me. I’ll be really glad to help you. I mean it.” She gave extra pressure on her last sentence to establish that she had really meant it.

  She had in truth no other meaning. She had decided it already. She would ask him if she could stay here until the case solved. She loved this atmosphere. She loved him watching while he was working on the keyboard. She felt a silent change taking place inside her.

  The trickle-down effect worked slowly. She began to understand that it was a different type of crime that she had never heard of. Now you could watch moving people from a distance. You could hear people talking and recorded the whole conversation from a distance. You could find what people were doing right now sitting thousand miles away. It was truly an amazing world of computers and networks.

  The steady drizzle stopped while they were coming from airport. Now it started again. She could see the huge chunk of grey clouds floating past the window. For the first time she realized this world was sheer magic. Clouds were carrying water. Water was not supposed to fly. But it was flying before her eyes – right now!

  She heard some sound behind her and turning back she found two friends were watching something on the monitor. Somethi
ng went wrong in that cockpit like corner – the ‘penetration lab’ as PG had described to her. Three large monitors placed side by side there. PG sat in the middle and he was keying in a furious speed. A headphone covered his each ear and he was dictating something very fast.

  What was happening? She wanted to ask Vicky. But she hesitated before that stony-faced army man although she could guess something had gone wrong.

  Sensing she stood behind, PG turned his head and said to her, “Rahela, you’ll find a door beside the window. Push it open and you’ll find another apartment where you can change yourself. Please feel at home.” Having said that he forgot about her and got busy with his computer.

  Rahela pushed the door and entered into another apartment as he had told her. This apartment was completely different from the one where she had been few moments back. This one was pained pink and a feminine touch in everything made her feel like a girl had lived there for some time before she left. She turned up the light and a whole new world opened before her.

  As if she bumped into her own world. It was a big room with an attached bath. She opened up the built-in cupboard and was shocked to find everything she needed now – bra, panties, stockings, dress, sari, vest.

  The ruthless male world snatched every feminine curiosity from her. After a long time it started coming back from deep inside her soul. She felt curious about the man – PG. Was he married? Divorcee? Hopefully he was not a cross dresser. She smiled while she was thinking about it.

  She needed a bath very badly though she had one in the morning in Mumbai. She locked the bathroom door and in front of a wall-to-wall mirror she began undressing.

  She opened up the knot and her hair was hanging loose about her shoulders. It rolled down to her waist. After many days she began watching her bare body with a keen interest. She didn’t know why she was looking at her own body. It was not new. Her long and fragile neck, small but tight breast, flat stomach with deep belly button and finally the curly hair down the navel between her well shaped thighs – caught her attention as it had never happened before. She always hated her body. She would always think if they were not pretty girls her step mother would have spared them. That bitch would not have forced them to take this profession.

  If she didn’t meet these guys she would stick to her old views. You needed a right person to show you the magic of world. It had been there. She didn’t feel. She had lost the zeal for life which was coming back.

  A sudden burst of emotions overcame her; she couldn't contain herself. She buried her face in her hands and wept.

  30. Monday, 4.15PM, Calcutta

  A red light was blinking madly in the penetration lab.

  It was a highly trusted connection which was trying to join in with him. Who that could be? PG logged in to his system and read the message.

  His Ukrainian friend Lavrov. Through Internet Relay Chat he sent an SOS: is there any war going on against you PG?

  This IRC channel was extremely secured and limited to their community. PG built special web architecture and layer so that no outsider could penetrate into it. This community was open but before joining here one should pass many hard tests.

  “Why?” PG asked his hacker friend. He was equally worried.

  Lavrov was much junior but he was a smart kid. He was a direct disciple of PG and loved to claim that he was PG’s student. Lavrov was his great admirer.

  Lavrov wrote back: your voice sampling search had been ordered few hours ago in the dark web. In the dark web? PG felt curious. Dark web was an interesting place. It was a web sphere marked as underground of web activities. Experts believed the surface web consisted of only five to six percent of data. The rest was hidden in the dark web. Cyber criminals met there exchanging hidden data.

  Lavrov gave him all the details. This boy hooked to his computer for twenty hours everyday; if not less. Sometimes it extended to two three days at a stretch. But that happened to every genuine hacker.

  PG explained it to Vicky, “The cracker is desperate. He wanted to track me through the Mumbai girl’s laptop but failed. Now he has nothing about me except a vague description. He has another thing that I also forgot. It’s my voice sample. I talked to Jacky. I talked to the assistant commissioner of Mumbai police. I talked to Rakesh. He has got the sample. Now he starts a VSS or voice sampling search.”

  Vicky asked, “Will that help him finding your exact location?”

  PG explained, “It will help him to track my voice quickly. He knows that I am from Calcutta. So it’s become much easier.”

  Vicky asked, “But what is that VSS or voice sampling search?”

  PG explained happily, “It’s a piece of stolen code from an ongoing project. Some computer scientists in Finland started this project way back in 2009. In the Dark Web it was first auctioned for sale by a cracker named ‘VOD’- valley of death. As usual some people wanted to grab it by paying through dark coin. But the price was too high. VOD wanted to spread the news. He actually wanted to sell it to any giant IT corporation.

  After that the researchers contacted the hacker’s group ‘IFUK’ – ‘identify, find, unanimous, kill’; and sought help from them.”

  He gave more details about this whole hacking business, “This group usually tries to do some good jobs. They prevent crackers from stealing code. They identify bad guys and black list them in web. They destroy racist web sites so that they couldn’t spread hate and violence. The ‘IFUK’ group first located that stolen software in the Dark Web. It was then put up for sale.”

  PG didn’t mention that he was one of the co-founders. In a covert operation he was the first man who had first located the software in the dark web.

  Dark web or Deep Web was a strange place. The digital thieves, crime lords, drug Mafia, arms dealers, and child abusers – the list seemed endless. The contents were robot-resistant. One needed special software to privately browse the content.

  The computer scientists from Finland had also personally contacted PG – ‘the perfect gentleman’ of the hacking world – to help them in busting the web site that was trying to sell the code illegally. While trying to penetrate into that rogue web site PG found that the server’s security had been pretty tight. It was encrypted by a type of very advanced code written in Pascal – an almost obliterated programming language. VOD stole the code and created an encryption with a definite purpose – he wanted to be noticed by some big corporations.

  With assistance from PG the hacker’s group ‘IFUK’ mashed the portal and damaged the server that was selling the illegal source code of VSS. PG explained that brief history to Vicky. He didn’t notice there was another keen listener standing behind his chair. Rahela came and stood behind him. In a white sari she looked taller and beautiful.

  It was evident that the cracker had a copy of that source code or he had a live contact with the ‘Valley of Death’. They had had a good rapport otherwise he would not have got that precious code.

  PG opened up a secured web chat with Lavrov through IRC. Internet relay chat or IRC was a protocol used by both groups and for one-to-one conversations. It was often utilized by hackers to communicate or share files. There were hidden dangers also. Since the protocol was unencrypted, crackers try to steal personal information from there. PG and Lavrov had made their IRC encrypted for security purpose.

  Now Lavrov could save him from this imbroglio. This Voice Sampling Search might track his voice and locate the region where he was staying now. The cracker knew that PG stayed in and around Calcutta. All he wanted was to locate the exact region. Once it was detected, the software would automatically encircle all the calls which were generated or received by this voice.

  Vicky sounded tough, “We should terminate his every activity for ever.”

  PG hurriedly typed in and a sent a message to Lavrov: there is a hole in the software as you know, can you divert this search?

  Lavrov replied instantly: the search is progressing in snail’s speed. It stays seven kilometres away from
your current location.

  PG wrote: yes, I can see it now.

  Lavrov: how did this rascal get it? Any idea?

  PG: it’s a long story. I’ll tell you later. Can you divert the search?

  Lavrov: I’m trying to do that.

  PG: should I send a sample now?

  Lavrov: no need. I got one. Forgot the ‘cat episode’? We have a video chat? You instructed me to trap the virus that the Russian spy wanted to spread?

  PG: Huh… that was a fun.

  Lavrov: it’s a fun time too now. Whenever you are around me it’s fun PG. This time it’s my turn to pay my respect. Oh, at last I have captured it. Look the way it behaves. He is running after my sample now. The hungry monster!

  PG was watching it too. The slow search suddenly gained a vicious momentum as it sniffed the voice near it and ran after it madly.

  Lavrov was smiling behind the monitor as he was sending the signs of victory and a lot of smiley. He was able to lure the VSS software to a different target which was thousand miles away!

  PG felt relieved. He was almost caught – courtesy a stolen software. He thanked Lavrov again, “You saved me, Lavrov. Or I have to shift my location permanently.”

  Now he was safe for a moment but it was not a permanent solution. Next time he would be careful. Next time he would have to change his voice with the help of artificial intelligence.

  He turned to them and announced, “This guy is dangerous. Few things we can conclude now.” He breathed heavily and said, “It’s a large international network. This guy is not alone. There must be big fishes behind him. Otherwise he couldn’t have got this stolen software.”

  His anxious voice was interrupted by Vicky’s mobile. It was ringing.

  Vicky said to PG, “Rakesh is calling.”

  PG said, “Give him a secret message to meet you somewhere.”

  Vicky nodded and said, “Rakesh, read the story of Bishop.”