by BRM Stewart
We could hear a whispered conversation at the other end, and then the sound of a phone dialling. ‘Hi…’ and the person turned off the microphone.
Grosvenor and I looked at each other. I raised my eyebrows, but he shook his head. We waited.
Then the voice was back. ‘Goodbye, Mr Martin McGregor. For now.’
‘Hang on a minute. There’s no problem. Yes, the police were here but…’
The reply was garbled, unintelligible – bandwith problems?
Claire appeared at the door. ‘Internet’s down,’ she said. ‘I can’t get anything done.’
‘Oh fuck,’ I said.
Grosvenor stood up, pulling out his mobile and dialling. ‘Hi, Steve. Where are you? … It’s urgent now, we have a problem. The plan hasn’t worked, and I think we’re currently undergoing a DDoS attack. What should we do? … OK, I’ll tell him – get here soon as you can.’
I went back to my Mac, opened the terminal and typed DDoS-catcher, and sat back. The screen exploded with text and symbols and angled brackets, scrolling up fast. I switched off the PC and pulled out the USB stick.
Claire was still there, waiting for a response from me. ‘Someone’s started a distributed denial of service attack, a DDoS. It’s flooding our servers with requests, so fast that nothing works – it can’t deal with it. I’m going to let it happen for a while, ride it out. Then we’ll re-boot everything.’ I turned to Grosvenor. ‘I’m letting the attack happen, trying to capture any details from the computers doing it. I know they’ll all be hijacked as part of a botnet, but maybe we can get something.’
‘Steve will be here in an hour – you’re doing what he suggested.’
I stood up, unsettled, edgy, and started pacing the room, glancing back at the screen and the scrolling text, with some IP addresses appearing amongst it all.
Grosvenor had said ‘the plan hasn’t worked’ on his mobile. That would be the plan to put me back in touch with the dark network out there. And if that wasn’t going to work, then he didn’t need me. And if he didn’t need me, then he might choose to just take me to jail as an example, along with the other hackers that the US had ruthlessly prosecuted over the years.
‘Let’s leave it till Steve gets here,’ he said to me.
‘We’re fucked,’ I said again, rubbing my face with my hands, raising my eyebrows at Claire’s look of concern: she was still standing, watching us. What I meant was: ‘I’m fucked.’
‘Not yet,’ Grosvenor said. ‘Steve is good – no offence, Martin, but you’re a self-taught amateur. Steve is a pro. He’s worked with the NSA – he knows how computer attacks work. He’s fended them off many times on behalf of the homeland.’ He checked his watch. ‘I suggest we let Claire here get home – come back in tomorrow morning. OK? We’ll wait for Steve.’
I nodded to Claire. ‘Yes – good idea. We’ll be up and running tomorrow.’ My voice didn’t sound convincing, and she didn’t look convinced, but she tried a smile, and switched off her computer – not bothering to try to shut it down properly – and let herself out after a quiet: ‘I’ll be in around eight thirty’.
I looked again at the text scrolling up my screen, and turned away in anger. Strangely, Grosvenor’s words had cut me: yes, I was an amateur – I had no qualifications, no proper education; I was the lucky amateur who had stumbled into this through a series of circumstances. I’d maybe always been out of my depth, but Jesus, I really was now.
I went through to sit on Claire’s chair, and slumped back as much as I could, with my feet up on her desk. Within moments, I was asleep.
*
I dreamed of Orkney and the evening with Nicola – except that she was really Fiona, and she was in my bed. I made love to her over and over; she left the room, closing the door loudly behind her and speaking through it in an American accent, and then came back into the room: ‘Martin… Martin…’ I could feel her breath on my cheeks and I reached for her, falling towards her. ‘Martin. Hey, Martin – careful,’ she said in a deep American voice.
I opened my eyes and saw the office sliding sideways and the floor coming up to me, strong arms catching me. I blinked away sleep and stood up, helped by Grosvenor.
‘Hey, you were gone there, son.’ He pulled me to my feet.
I swayed and then managed to get my balance back and stand up unaided. I rubbed my eyes, and yawned. It took me a minute to remember where I was, what had been happening. I closed my eyes briefly, wanting to go back to my dream.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Steve is at your computer, working. Come on through.’
I walked stiffly, my body sore and my left leg almost dead below the knee from where it had rested on the edge of the desk.
‘Steve, this is Martin. Martin – Steve.’
I reached to shake his hand, but he gave me only the briefest of glances as he to scrolled and clicked on a laptop open by the Mac; an Ethernet cable ran from it down under my desk, a USB stick was plugged in, its LED flashing. This guy was like the American cousin of the Franks and Davey, separated at birth. He was skinny, wearing a faded corduroy jacket and old jeans, with a dark polo shirt underneath. His hair was black and wild, like he cut it himself. His face was gaunt, a short badly-trimmed beard hiding most of his pale skin, lit by the LED screen.
‘Good program, Martin,’ he said, with a soft accent that I reckoned was from the deep south.
‘Can you do something with it?’ Grosvenor asked.
Steve didn’t reply for a minute, so Grosvenor repeated the question.
‘Think so. Yes, indeed.’ He suddenly sat upright and started typing.
I looked at his screen. He had two terminal windows open. One looked like it was doing what my program on the Mac was – capturing everything from the DDOS attack. On the other he was typing commands.
‘You know what he’s doin’?’ Grosvenor asked me.
I shrugged. ‘A DDoS overwhelms the server with requests from dozens or hundreds of computers that have been hijacked as part of a botnet – probably ones we effectively sold to Gregorius. The standard response is either to go offline and then try to restart, or to heavily filter traffic – even block it all together.’
Steve bobbed his head. ‘Blackholing,’ he murmured.
‘But Steve isn’t doing that. He seems to be letting the attacks carry on but try to capture the IP addresses of the computers – which is what my program did too. That way he may be able to do a reverse attack. I guess governments do this kind of thing when they are under attack.’
Steve glanced up at me with a smile, then concentrated again on the screen. Finally he sat back, still looking at the scrolling white text on my Mac and his laptop.
After a few minutes I said: How long will it take?’
He looked up at me and shrugged. ‘Couple of days.’
‘Oh shit,’ I said.
Grosvenor gestured with his head, and we went through to the outer office. He made another jug of coffee, but I declined: I really needed a beer, and some proper sleep.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked. ‘And what do we do afterwards?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My contact with the dark network has been cut off. Even when Steve sorts the DDoS out, I’ll still have nothing.’
Grosvenor nodded. ‘How about Charlene?’ he asked. ‘Can we find her? She might be involved in this.’ He drank coffee in silence, standing by the window, looking out. ‘Any ideas?’ he asked.
I closed my eyes, trying to think, but nothing came. ‘No.’
Steve came through and helped himself to coffee; he had very long legs which made him surprisingly tall, though he walked with a stoop. He didn’t look at either of us, or say anything, and then went back to my computer. Through the door I saw him staring at the screen, gulping his coffee.
Grosvenor took out his mobile, stared at it, then put it away again and drank his coffee, gazing out at the wet afternoon.
I slumped on Claire’s chair and closed my eyes again.
‘Hey,’ Grosvenor said. ‘Might as well get you home for a proper night’s sleep, and I’ll find my hotel.’
‘Have you found somewhere?’ I couldn’t recall him organising anything.
‘Booked it three days ago,’ he said, and smiled at me through that big white beard.
I nodded glumly. ‘How about Steve?’
‘I think it would be good if he stayed with you for a couple of nights – it’s an intrusion, I know, but it’ll get you two talking about what B&D did, let him tune in, give him ideas.’
I looked through to Steve, and thought back to my time sharing a flat with Davey. ‘OK,’ I sighed.
*
We had a meal in an Italian restaurant just off Byres Road. Grosvenor and I ate hungrily, but Steve picked at his seafood spaghetti dish, reading his iPad beside his plate, occasionally wiping a dollop of sauce from the screen. Grosvenor and I split a bottle of Rioja; Steve drank a Peroni. We were all tired, and the restaurant was busy, so we couldn’t really talk about the reasons we had come together, and weren’t inclined to small talk either.
‘You got a GPS tracker app on your phone?’ Grosvenor suddenly asked.
I shook my head. He asked me to download one, and then we set up permissions to track each other’s phone.
‘Why am I doing this?’ I asked him.
‘Just in case.’
We checked it was working.
‘You’re in a restaurant just off Byres Road, Glasgow,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Hey. Well done. So are you. Isn’t technology wonderful.’
We both looked at Steve, gulping Peroni and swiping his iPad, and we shook our heads.
Afterwards, Grosvenor grabbed a taxi to his hotel in town, agreeing to meet at St Vincent Street at around nine the next morning, and Steve and I traipsed across to my flat.
Inside, I showed him the spare room – the sheets would be clean, but probably could have done with being aired – and grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge and offered one to Steve; he declined, so I put it back and went through to the lounge, slumping on the couch with the TV on, trying to let my body and mind to relax. My PVR had been religiously recording the crime programmes I liked, so I started playing an episode of CSI, feeling my eyelids droop.
Steve came in with a thin laptop open on his arm – he’d left his other one at my office, connected to the network – and he sniffed the air and frowned. I sniffed too, but couldn’t detect anything other that pretty stale air.
‘Wi-Fi?’ he asked.
‘Code’s by the router,’ I said, nodding to the corner.
He frowned more, and went over to key in the wireless key code from the sticker by the router, and sat down on the chair opposite me, typing on his machine. My eyes dropped again.
I jerked awake when he jumped up and went to the window again. ‘Neighbours?’ he asked.
I nodded, baffled. ‘Yes, I have neighbours.’
‘All flats occupied?’
‘Yes – as far as I know.’
He scanned the street for a minute, and then sat down again, put a USB stick into his laptop, and started typing.
I sniffed the air again, but still could detect nothing.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Have you used your computer since you got back?’
‘No.’
‘Someone’s monitoring your Wi-Fi. A woman.’
I stared at him. ‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘Perfume – not yours.’ He sniffed again. ‘Broke in, read the code.’
‘Shit. How do you know about the monitoring?’
‘Not passive - there’s someone probing.’ He frowned at his screen. ‘Shoot,’ he said, and leapt to his feet and went over to pull out the leads from the box on the wall that connected me to the Internet, and stood up. ‘Need to change the router password. Change the channel too.’ He stood at the window again, looking out.
I joined him at the window, not perfectly sure what we were looking for, but guessing that the eavesdropper was in a car out in the street, though I supposed they might have broken into a neighbour’s flat. The street, as ever in this part of Glasgow, was lined on both sides with parked cars, nose to tail; I had no idea how these people got parked or how they got back out again. At this time of evening most cars were there for the duration.
‘Dark VW Rabbit,’ he said.
I looked down and saw the Golf he meant. ‘What about it?’
‘It was parked six cars down earlier on.’
‘So? They may have gone out and then come back.’ But I doubted that myself – not at this time of evening: when you went out, you went out till late.
He pressed his face to the glass, cupping his hands around his eyes. ‘Someone in the car.’
This was flimsy – a product of Steve’s over-deductive brain – and I wasn’t paranoid enough to phone Amanda Pitt. ‘I’ll go down,’ I said. ‘You fix the router. Admin password is Fiona#01 – capital F.’
He immediately plugged an Ethernet cable into the router, and I went out of the flat and down to the street, pausing at the bottom of the main steps.
I casually looked up and down the street like I was expecting someone, and stepped into the road, still scanning but taking a few steps towards the Golf, trying not to stare at it.
A car engine started up, and now I could look: it was the Golf. I got an impression of a big man behind the wheel as the car went back and forth, edging itself out from the cars hedging it in. Back and forth.
I continued my pretence of scanning the street, and pulled out my mobile and pretended to talk to someone.
The Golf was now free, and I stepped out of its way as it accelerated hard up the street. I got the number, and noted what I could of the driver behind the raindrop-covered windows: a tall man hunched over the wheel, short dark hair –really nothing else beyond that impression. But I had the registration, safe in my phone, and I was sure Steve had been right.
I ran back upstairs. ‘Has the monitoring stopped?’ I asked.
He typed at his laptop. ‘Can’t tell yet.’
I phoned Amanda Pitt. She answered after many rings, with a sleepy, exasperated voice. ‘Yes, Martin.’
‘Sorry to disturb you, but there was someone eavesdropping on my Wi-Fi. They’ve been in my flat. They were outside in a car – I’ve got the number.’
I heard her yawn and cover the mic and murmur something to someone who was with her, and there was a distant – sexy – female chuckle from someone else. ‘OK, I’ll get it traced. What is it?’
I read it out.
‘I’ll get back to you when I know something.’ And she hung up.
Steve was reconnecting the router and restarting it, and he typed and watched his laptop. Finally he nodded.
‘Are we OK now?’
He nodded. ‘Pretty sure.’ He began typing furiously again.
I phoned Grosvenor and told him about the eavesdropping.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I’m sure this is Charlene. Gregorius would be confident that the DDoS would knock you out.’
‘So what can we do?’
‘My guess is she’s on her way to Glasgow – maybe to try to salvage some of her grandfather’s business, maybe talk to him. She took two hundred British pounds out of an ATM in Dumfries an hour ago. She might easily have had someone local ready to do the surveillance when you resurfaced.’
‘Should I be worried?’ I thought of the dead bodies that followed Charlene around. OK, I still didn’t believe she actually killed anyone, but there was too much of a correlation between her and dead people.
He laughed. ‘Relax, Martin. You’re safe.’
I hung up, not believing him for a minute, for all sorts of reasons. He wanted the big international men driving the major cybercrime, and he didn’t care about me. Amanda and the Scottish police wanted to finish off Talbot’s empire and get him in jail before he died, so they didn’t really care about me either. Charlene was someone who looked after he
rself.
I was alone on this.
I finished my beer and went to bed, leaving Steve pale and wide-eyed in the darkening evening, staring into his laptop, typing, scrolling and clicking.
Chapter 29
Glasgow
Amanda Pitt heard the buzzing of her mobile and slipped naked out of bed, padding softly through to her lounge and retrieving the phone from under Claire’s green top. She sat on the sofa.
‘Yes?’ Her voice was soft. She still couldn’t believe how the evening had worked out. Normally it took days or weeks of patient seduction, and Claire was massively heterosexual and engaged. But the phone call had come early in the evening – ‘Can I ask about what’s been going on? Martin and that American haven’t told me the whole story, have they?’ – and they’d met for dinner and talked, got on famously, discussed the events around B&D and Talbot and Sandy Lomond, and then about Claire’s controlling fiancée and her deep underlying unhappiness with the relationship.
And now Claire was in her bed, sound asleep with a mass of red hair on the pillow, and Amanda just felt so… satisfied.
So the voice on the phone wasn’t welcome: ‘What’s been happening?’
Amanda shivered and pulled Claire’s discarded top across her lap. ‘The FBI are here, and they’re trying to get Martin to get everything up and running again. They’re in control, and they know everything that’s been going on – Martin told them everything. I don’t know what they’re doing exactly – I just know it’s proving difficult for them. I don’t know what they plan to do with Martin afterwards. I suppose you know he found out you were eavesdropping on your Wi-Fi. I’m supposed to be tracing a VW Golf.’
‘Oh dear, that’s awkward.’
‘Yeah, look – I suggest you just go away and hide somewhere. It’s not working out for you here, and I can’t protect you. The FBI guy is smart; he might suspect me.’
The voice was more seductive. ‘Don’t you miss me?’
Amanda reflected on that for a moment. ‘I’ve moved on – I had no choice.’
‘We had some good times.’
‘Tell me about Romania and what you did with Martin McGregor. Tell me about the dead people, Rose. Or Charlene, or Charlie.’