Thanatos. Another name from hacker lore. It figures he’d be buds with Ferox. God, I wish I had hours to root through this guy’s drives, but as it is I’ve got ten minutes.
I run a search for the most recently accessed files and quickly find the Synergis documents, extracted from the doctored zip file I created last night. I check my watch again and glance out of the windows at the gravel path. If I hear footsteps on that, I’ll know it’s already too late.
We’ve got nine minutes left. The question is whether I should search further while I’m here, or just install some remote-access programs that will allow me to poke around from a safe distance. I decide I’ll try for the latter. As a hacker, you seldom get unrestricted physical access to a target’s computer. This means I can disable his defences while I install my full repertoire of dirty tricks, though there is still a risk that my malware will be detected when I try to run it remotely later.
I slip a memory stick from my pocket and slot it into a port in the front of the Proteus. Lansing’s security scanner has a fit, warning me against what I’m trying to install, but I give it the green light.
‘Who is Ferox?’ Jack asks.
He is crouching in front of a steel cabinet at the end of the building, probing delicately at a lock with two slivers of metal. I’m not exactly sure what he’s hoping to find in there, but I’m guessing a V mask, an electroshock device and a silver flight case would be a decent result.
‘He was a hacker legend in the early days of the internet. Before that, even: all the way back in the time of ARPANET and the first bulletin boards. He hacked a radar array and caused RAF jets to be grounded. He even hacked NASA, looking for proof of whether Roswell was true.’
‘Spoiler alert: it isn’t.’
‘And as that press clipping on the wall would tell you, he once caused a major incident when he hacked into a nuclear power station.’
While my spyware is installing, I open up Lansing’s email and search for messages from Winter. His name gives us nothing. This is why I need remote access, so I can sift through it more carefully later and identify an alias Winter might be using, or a coded exchange.
I check the time again. We’ve still got seven minutes.
‘Why the hell did he hack into a nuclear power station?’ Jack asks.
‘The usual reason. To find out if he could. He was fifteen.’
‘He’s put his talents to more lucrative use since then, it would appear.’
‘Yeah, but he must have kept a hand in the game, made sure he’s up to speed with the latest scams. No wonder he was able to infiltrate Uninvited. It’s his business to be one step ahead of us, and he’s been doing this shit since before most of us were even born.’
Jack lets out a sigh of frustration and changes his grip on the picks. It doesn’t look like he’s getting anywhere.
‘We’ve found a hell of an opponent to be up against,’ he says. ‘Even his locks are state-of-the-art and super-secure. All of which begs the question … oh fuck.’
‘What?’
I swivel in my chair and it rolls backwards, my feet kicking out in reflex. Gary Lansing is standing in the doorway. He is pointing a compound bow at Jack, an arrow nocked and the string fully drawn.
There were no footsteps on the gravel. He hasn’t come from the house – maybe a side door to the garden.
Jack doesn’t finish his question. He doesn’t have to. I realise a guy like Lansing would not leave his computers on and his door unlocked any more than he would unthinkingly download and extract my Stoolpigeon malware.
He did this to draw us into the open, and now he’s got us right where he wants us.
DEADLY TENSION
‘I spoke to Mrs Orton, the school secretary, when I dropped off the kids this morning. She’s pushing sixty, by the way, so she’s had all the maternity leave she’s ever going to need.’
Parlabane watches Lansing step through the doorway, keeping the arrow pointed at him. He is aware that at full draw, a compound bow can fire an arrow more than three hundred feet per second, and with the right tip could penetrate bullet-proof Plexiglas. At this range it would go through his skull and out the back again.
As Lansing speaks he glances briefly at Sam, who has turned around and is rolling back in her chair. Parlabane spots the briefest flinch in his reaction, like he is surprised, which doesn’t tally with the fact that he has lured them into a trap.
Parlabane has his hands in the air and is standing perfectly still. The situation is more precarious than the threat of someone pulling a trigger. The slightest slip or startlement could cause Lansing to let go.
‘Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to step slowly over to the desk, pick up that handset and dial the police. You’re going to tell them to come to this address, where two burglars wish to surrender themselves, then you’re going to hang up and we’re all going to wait.’
This is not what Parlabane was expecting. If this truly is Zodiac, his first enquiry would surely be regarding the prototype; or maybe he’d shoot both of them so that they couldn’t talk. If the people apparently responsible for Cruz’s murder broke into his house, it wouldn’t be a tough sell to plead self-defence.
Parlabane takes a breath.
‘I’m not making any moves with that thing pointed at me,’ he says, as calmly as he can manage. ‘I don’t want anything happening through panic.’
Lansing points the arrow towards the floor, but keeps it drawn.
‘Thank you,’ Parlabane says. ‘And I’m happy to cooperate. But I’m not sure you really want me to call the police.’
Lansing’s eyes narrow in anger, a twitch of his shoulder suggesting he might be about to raise the bow again.
‘I went to bed last night after hearing on the news that the electronics entrepreneur Leo Cruz had been murdered during a robbery at his premises. This morning I received a link to download what turned out to be confidential files pertaining to the secret project Cruz was developing at Synergis: files evidently acquired and subsequently uploaded by you. Why the hell wouldn’t I want to call the police?’
‘Because, Mr Lansing, if we’ve been able to tie you and your computers to what happened to Leo Cruz last night, how hard do you think it’s going to be for the police to tie you to it? Or to put it more bluntly, if we’re going down, you’re going down. So I reckon we should talk.’
‘You didn’t tie me to it. You sent me a link.’
‘No, that’s the point. We didn’t send anyone the link. So how did you get it?’
He raises the bow again. He looks scared and confused, neither of which augurs for this ending well.
‘Of course you’re the ones who sent me the link. How else would I get it?’
He looks across to Sam, whatever troubled him before seemingly compounding his confusion now. There are certainties crumbling on both sides.
‘Mr Lansing, I don’t believe either of us is who the other thinks he is. I suspect we have a common problem and I really, really reckon we should talk.’
Lansing stares back and forth at the pair of them, then lowers the bow, easing the tension on the string but keeping the arrow nocked.
‘You both stay where you are, though,’ he warns.
‘Believe me, mate, we’ve got nowhere else to go,’ Sam tells him.
‘Okay, so talk. Who are you?’
Lansing’s eyes are fixed on Parlabane as he asks this. He gets the impression he means ‘you’ singular, which is when Parlabane works out why Lansing seems uneasy about the sight of Sam. Lansing already knows who she is.
‘My name is Jack Parlabane. I’m a journalist. This young lady enlisted my assistance when she was blackmailed by someone calling himself Zodiac. He wanted her to break and hack into Synergis, in order to acquire a new prototype and the blueprint documents for it. We executed this last night, but then the lights went out and I was Tased and battered unconscious. When I came to, I found myself locked in a freezer with the body of Leo Cruz.
‘How were you contacted?’ Lansing asks Sam.
‘It was all done through IRC channels. Zodiac also demanded to know how I was planning the job and when I intended to go in. It was a frame-up from the start.’
‘And have you found any clues as to who this Zodiac might be?’
Parlabane intervenes before Sam can answer.
‘Mr Lansing, I appreciate you must have lots of questions, but I am particularly intrigued by the one you’re not asking.’
‘Which question would that be?’
‘Who I am,’ answers Sam, who has sussed it too.
‘I’m sorry. As you say I’ve got lots of questions,’ he dissembles. ‘So what is your name?’
‘The point is that you already know,’ says Parlabane. ‘And we’d like you to tell us how come.’
‘I truly don’t. This is the first time I’ve seen either of you in my life.’
‘Mr Lansing, my associate and I are what I would call ultra-fucked at the moment. In a matter of time, maybe already, the police are going to connect both of us to what happened last night, and we will end up in custody, charged with murder. We have nothing to lose from telling them that you were balls-deep in this conspiracy, and the electronic trail will back that up, so I would strongly recommend you cut the shite and start telling us your end of the story.’
Lansing’s body language changes, the tension going out of his stance like it went out of the bow-string.
‘You know what I do, right?’
‘You’re a pen tester,’ Sam replies. ‘A whitehat.’
‘I was contracted to infiltrate Uninvited and other hacker collectives, in order to uncover hackers’ real-world identities.’
‘Contracted by whom?’
‘Same as you, I never got a real name. He called himself Zardoz. I think we can assume it was the same person. He wanted the details on hackers who could then be tied to specific attacks. From what you’ve told me, I now realise that this was for leverage.’
‘I think the word is blackmail,’ says Sam. ‘And once you had found out their real-world identities, what then? Were you the one who reached out to me? Are you Zodiac and Zardoz is the guy pulling your strings?’
‘I’m not Zodiac, I swear. Exposing the hackers was my end done.’
‘So how come you got sent the link?’
‘I don’t know.’
Parlabane looks at his watch.
‘The school run is approaching, Gary.’
As he says it he can’t help but steal a glance towards Sam. She glances back, biting her lip.
‘So unless you’re planning on introducing us to the family and explaining what we’re doing here, I’d say the time we’ve got left to help each other is running out. Give.’
‘Okay. He told me that I would receive a download link, and my instructions were to download the files, check them for spyware and then pass them on.’
‘To where?’
‘To an address he hasn’t given me yet. To be honest, I’d forgotten all about this. My work on exposing the hackers ended weeks ago; some of it goes back months. Then I got the link this morning. Even then I had no idea it was related to the Cruz thing until I checked the files. I can prove this. I kept chat logs and screenshots of everything.’
Sam sits forward in her chair, no longer quite so frozen since Lansing removed the arrow from the string.
‘You hired that Chinese guy to say he was Stonefish, but you were Stonefish. That’s how you drew me out.’
‘No,’ Lansing counters. ‘Stonefish is a Chinese guy: how do you know that?’
‘Don’t bullshit me. You set up that meeting. You drew out me and you drew out Cicatrix, who’s now in jail because he wouldn’t play ball for Zodiac.’
‘I didn’t. I did identify Paul Wiley, the Scouse kid, but he wasn’t Cicatrix. I was Cicatrix. You remember I arranged to meet you in a café at Euston Station?’
Sam gapes.
‘That’s right. But you never showed up.’
‘Oh, but I did, in a manner of speaking. I had people waiting in that café. I sent you a message that I wasn’t coming, then they watched to see who got up and left. They tailed you, followed you home, and from there I found out everything I needed.’
‘That’s why you bailed out of the RSGN hack at the last minute. You knew it was going to be used against everyone who took part.’
Lansing nods solemnly.
Sam looks annoyed with herself, but also a little confused.
‘How did they know they were following the right person? Someone else could have left at the same time. I could have stayed for a coffee and five different people might have left before I finished it.’
‘Because you’ve got it the wrong way round. With the others, my job was to find out their real-life identities, but in your case I was tasked with finding out Samantha Morpeth’s current online hacker alias.’
Parlabane watches her physically shrink back in the chair, her eyes widening with a shock she can’t hide. She steals an anxious look back, anxious about what he might have seen.
‘Why?’ Parlabane asks. ‘I mean, how would you or anyone else know she had an online hacker alias?’
‘Because she and I have more in common than she has seen fit to reveal. Haven’t we, Sam?’
RECKLESS YOUTH (I)
Jack’s looking at me like WTF, searching for a signal that the guy is bullshitting. The shock on my face must give me away – that and the fact that I instantly feel guilty. Jack’s going to think I was holding out on him, but it’s not like that. I’m not allowed to talk about this stuff, and what’s really got me floored is that nobody is supposed to know about it.
‘What am I missing here?’ Jack asks. ‘What have you got in common?’
I want to be the one who answers, but I feel like I’m crawling up inside myself again. Scared and pathetic Sam is back, banishing Buzzkill just when she’s most needed.
‘We both pulled off some audacious hacks in the dizzy naivety of our mid-teens,’ Lansing says. ‘Doing it to see if it was possible, driven by anger and ego and not thinking for a minute about the consequences. Difference is: I never got caught.’
Jack is looking at me like he’s afraid the rug is about to get pulled.
‘What did you do, Sam?’
I want to speak, but I feel my throat swell up and my eyes fill. I feel bad that I couldn’t tell him, but I hate the idea that he thinks this is shame. It isn’t. It’s the memories of my fear flooding back in. It mixes with my fear right now and my shock that Lansing – and by the sound of it Zodiac – knows about this.
‘She hacked the official website of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia when she was fifteen. She caused an international diplomatic incident.’
Lansing says this with a hint of triumph, but it’s not like he’s playing a card that smacks me down. He doesn’t sound sneery or judgemental. He sounds admiring.
‘Oh, Christ, you didn’t redirect their address to tentacle porn and bestiality videos, did you?’ Jack asks.
I still can’t find my voice, but to be honest, Lansing is doing a better job than I could of selling it.
‘No, I think they could have more comfortably written that off as mindless vandalism. She replaced every picture on the site with photos of women in action: politicians and leaders giving speeches, scientists working in labs, athletes on the track, singers, footballers, astronauts.’
‘Could have been worse,’ Jack suggests. ‘You could have shown a woman driving.’
‘Oh, she did. Formula One.’
‘You hacked a foreign government website when you were fifteen?’ Jack asks. I can’t decide whether he sounds impressed or appalled.
I offer him a nod
and a glum smile. Somehow I find my voice, through the need to clarify something.
‘Strictly speaking, I didn’t hack the Saudi government. I hacked the third-party developers they had contracted to build the English-language part of the website.’
‘So why didn’t I hear about this?’
‘Precisely,’ Lansing replies.
‘It was covered up,’ I mumble.
I swallow and clear my throat.
‘They took the site down within minutes. I’ve since learned ways to prevent that, but it was up long enough. The hack was traced to an address in the UK and the Saudi embassy demanded an investigation.
‘It didn’t take them long to find out whodunit: I learned the hard way about covering your tracks. But then somebody else in the Saudi government, who better understood the Streisand effect, leaned on the British authorities to keep the whole thing quiet so the world never found out their website had been hacked by a fifteen-year-old girl.’
‘So there was no court case? No charges?’
‘No.’
I swallow again, feeling the memory well up inside, threatening to drown me from within. I can’t talk about this part. I don’t know why, but I feel as though telling someone else lets it in and makes it real again.
I spent the worst three days of my life on remand in Graythorne Young Offenders Institution. I was easy meat, fragile and defenceless. It’s what made me such a quivering and pathetic specimen. To this day I can sense that menace, that predatory violence in people who are instinctively drawn to weakness.
‘Although, my mum did ban me from using computers or the internet,’ I add. ‘To this day she doesn’t know I’ve got my own laptop, as I was only allowed to use her iPad with her watching. But officially the whole incident was airbrushed out. Nobody is supposed to know it happened and I signed documents preventing me from talking about it.’
‘Presumably you weren’t calling yourself Buzzkill.’
‘No, I didn’t have an alias and I didn’t leave a signature. Apart from the trail that led to my IP address, obviously.’
The Last Hack Page 32