The Ardmore Inheritance

by Rob Wyllie

  'It came from the Manchester boys, or to be more accurate, a Manchester girl. Seems as if our guy Geordie broke into the pad of one of their top brass and has been indulging in a spot of blackmail ever since. Highly embarrassing for the officer in question.'

  'Sweet.'

  Frank chuckled. 'Aye, you could say that. So obviously the mission is to catch this hacker guy before he does any more damage.'

  Having been tipped off by the Manchester affair, Frank had put out some feelers courtesy of his good mate DI Pete Burnside, and found out that Geordie had also been active across London and the South East for at least a year, and always with the same MO. Break into someone's pad, nick a phone or a computer and then leave a signature example of his graffiti artwork on a wall or in some cases, on the front door. The guy was talented, there was no doubt about it, although he'd read a critic in the Guardian complaining that most of his work was highly derivative and he'd blatantly copied the style of his obvious inspiration Banksy. Which had made Frank laugh, because it wasn't as if the street artist was some sort of modern-day Robin Hood. He was nothing more than a common criminal and with an ego the size of St Paul's Cathedral to boot, an ego that Frank predicted would surely be his downfall. It had to take five minutes minimum to do one of these paintings and that made it odds-on that one day he'd be caught in the act.

  But it was what he did afterwards that intrigued Frank the most. Because no more than a few hours after the physical break-in, Geordie would follow it up with a skilled cyber attack, granting him unhindered access to the victim's private documents, photographs and god knows what else besides. At least a couple of celebrities had been done, and a week or two later some rather embarrassing photographs had mysteriously appeared in the seedier tabloids, which had caused their publishers to have some awkward questions to answer as to their source. However as far as Burnside knew, none of the victims known or otherwise had yet lodged a formal complaint. But as Pete said, you wouldn't, would you? Kick up a fuss and you could expect the scumbag to tell the world your most precious secrets, which was the last thing you'd want. That was until ACC Katherine Frost had been targeted and had decided to put her faith in Department 12B.

  And now wee Eleanor Campbell was going to demonstrate how it was done.

  'So Barker's phone,' Frank said, giving her a quizzical look. 'I assume it's got a password or a pin or whatever you call it?'

  'That doesn't matter,' Eleanor said. 'It'll come through as a text notification and we'll be able to see it anyway.'

  'It?'

  'The authentication code.'

  'Aye sweet,' he said, risking mimicking her again. 'But tell me young Eleanor, what's brought on this recent and much welcome hatred of DCS Barker on your part?'

  'He tried to make me look stupid in a meeting. In front of lots of my colleagues. Nobody does that and gets away with it.'

  Frank liked that. Hell hath no fury like a geeky forensic officer who's been made to look stupid by a fat-arsed Detective Chief Superintendant.

  'Fair point well made wee Eleanor,' he said. 'So what's the plan?'

  'We're going to hack into his iCloud account. Zak's given me an app to help.'

  He remembered Zak from his Aphrodite investigation, a capable lad from the Met's Maida Vale labs who was even younger-looking and geekier than Eleanor herself, if that was possible.

  'And this app is legit?'

  She shrugged. 'Suppose. It came from GCHQ or MI6 or somewhere, that's what Zak says.'

  Frank doubted that anything that came from either of those sources was in any way legitimate, morally or otherwise, but he didn't say so. And he wasn't bothered either.

  'Ok, right, let's go.'

  She punched a string of text into her keyboard, bringing up a login screen for the iCloud website.

  'So first we need like a user code and a password. User code is easy, it's always their email, and we know his. Password is more difficult,' she said, frowning, 'but not that difficult. Not when we have Zak's password generator app. It's well wicked. It uses artificial intelligence all through it. A-I. It's way cool.'

  Frank had listened to her explain A-I to him many times before but couldn't remember a thing about it, which would no doubt displease her. So he decided against asking for a refresher, instead allowing her to continue uninterrupted.

  'So you can program it with personal stuff,' she said. 'Stuff you know about the mark.'

  'Mark? That's what you call them do you, the victims?'

  'Yeah, as in a con-artists mark. So as I said, we can program Zak's app with stuff you know about the mark. Like for example, we know Barker supports Spurs.'

  'Arsenal actually,' Frank said, shaking his head with mock disgust.

  'Whatever. I can easily change that.' She furrowed her brow then hastily banged something into her laptop. 'So it also knows his date of birth and the street where he lives and where he works and where he went to uni and his school and where he was born....'

  'Aye, I get the picture,' Frank said wryly, 'but can we get to the point?' He knew from experience that when Eleanor went off on one of her long technical explanations, you were best to set aside the rest of the day.

  'You don't get the picture,' she said, evidently intending to ignore his interruption, 'so from that, Zak's app can web-crawl onto like mega-tons of other databases, like the electoral register, the register of marriages, deaths and births, the land registry....'

  'Eleanor....'

  '...and stuff like that,' she said. 'It's wicked.'

  'Eleanor, where's this all going?' he said, struggling to hide his impatience.

  'So from that information it can narrow it down to a short-list. Nearly everybody chooses passwords based on stuff they know, don't they, because it's easier to remember? Stuff like their favourite football teams or players, or kids names or birthdays, or your old school, or your granddad's name blah blah blah. So by knowing all that, it massively cuts the number of possibilities the app has to try. As I said, it's super-cool artificial intelligence.'

  For the first time, he began to understand what she was talking about.

  'Aye I see that, very clever, very clever indeed. So what do we have to do to kick it all off?'

  'We just have to click on this button that says go,' she said matter-of-factly, pointing to the screen. 'But of course before we do all of that, we always try the obvious one first.'

  'Which is?'

  She looked at him as if he was an alien from another planet, which he might as well have been, given how little he understood of what she had been talking about for most of the morning.

  'Doh, password of course. P-a-s-s-w-o-r-d,' she said, spelling it out. And a few keystrokes later, they were rewarded by a message. Usercode and Password accepted. There was no doubt about it, DCS Colin Barker was a genius.

  'So this is the wicked bit now,' she said, picking up Barker's phone in response to a discreet ping, then rotating its screen to face him. 'Now we have the authentication code, we've got admin rights to his account.'

  She punched in the code then navigated her mouse to a link labelled 'Account Settings.'

  'See?' she said, smiling triumphantly. 'Change authentication phone number. Give me your phone number Frank, will you?'

  'What, are you kidding?' he said, shooting her a smile. 'I'd lose more than my pension if Barker ever found out about this. But seriously, I think I'm seeing how this Geordie goes about his business.' He wasn't sure if he did, but he wasn't going to admit that to Eleanor. Luckily she was ready with an explanation.

  'Yeah, so immediately after he steals their phone he goes on to their cloud account and diverts the authentication phone number to one of his own phones. That means that even if the mark reports their phone missing and blocks it, he's got as long as he wants to take whatever he needs from their cloud drives. I mean, nobody checks their cloud drives, or at least hardly ever. So he could have access for weeks and weeks before his marks realise they've been hacked.'

  A thought c
ame to Frank, and even although he knew it would make him look stupid, he asked the question anyway.

  'But what about that password stuff? How does Geordie get round that? Because I don't suppose he has Zak's wee app, does he?'

  She gave him a pitying look. 'Old-school hacking. It's not as clever as Zak's but it uses the same sort of techniques. And also, there's mega-tons of hacked personal data for sale on the dark web and people often use the same passwords across all their sites. Which is a mistake. That's why two-factor authentication was invented.'

  'Because it's now so easy to crack a usercode and password?'

  'Exactly,' she said, her expression betraying disappointment that Frank had worked it out for himself. 'As I said, that's why he has to steal their phones.'

  It was all completely fascinating, but he wasn't sure if it actually helped at all with the main objective, which was uncovering the identity of the slippery artist-hacker.

  'So how do we set about catching this guy?' he asked. 'Any ideas?'

  She gave a grimace. 'He's one capable dude, so I don't think we could track down his IP. That'll be cloaked behind some weapons-grade firewalls on the dark web.'

  'This dark web again?'

  'Yeah, it's standard for these hacker guys.' She made it sound as if everyone should know that.

  'So what's the answer?'

  'Difficult,' she said, giving a perplexed frown. 'There might be something around the triangulation of his mobile phones, but I'd need to think about that.'

  He nodded slowly. 'Aye well that's fair enough Eleanor. Take as much time as you like. You've been an amazing help, you really have.' He was just about to get up to leave when she gave him a pained look.

  'So aren't we going to look at Barker's iDrive? Now that we're like in?'

  His face broke into a wicked smile. 'Of course. It'd be rude not to. Now that we're like in.'

  Which is how they came to know of Barker's big secret, something that might help to explain his inexplicable rise through the ranks and also explain how he'd inexplicably held onto his job for so long, despite his demonstrable and abject uselessness.

  And it also explained that dodgy handshake too.

  ◆◆◆

  Now there was some movement on the Geordie case, Frank could turn his attention to the other matter that had come into the department as a direct result of its new-found fame. A matter that was showing every prospect of being an absolute belter. A gory double murder, a prisoner who had hanged himself in his cell and the subsequent revelation of a massive miscarriage of justice. No wonder Police Scotland had sent the case scuttling down the M74 faster than a hot potato on a hot tin roof, if that wasn't too much of a mixed metaphor.

  Now he was looking forward to his regular Thursday evening couple of pints with his brother in the Old King's Head. And another encounter with the vision of forty-two-year-old loveliness that was Maggie Bainbridge.

  Chapter 4

  For a while it had been touch and go in his mind but on balance he was glad he'd gone through with it in the end. Pulling on one of these old jackets and grabbing a pair of the walking boots, that had been a smart idea, but then he was full of smart ideas, wasn't he? The old labrador hadn't batted an eyelid bless him, when he'd slipped back into the boot-room to collect them, and for a moment he'd considered taking the mutt with him when he left. It got a bit lonely living on your own, and he had a notion a dog would be an amiable companion, not that he'd had any experience of them to judge that. But on second thoughts, they could be a bit of a tie, so he'd quickly expunged the idea from his head.

  As he'd sprinted up the stairs, he'd tried to prepare himself for what he might find. He'd not expected it to be pretty, but the scene of carnage that awaited him in Roderick Macallan's bedroom was like something from a horror movie. For a moment he thought he was going to throw up and that would have been a frigging disaster, spraying a shed-load of his DNA about the place. But he just about held it together, long enough to take some photographs, not that he saw himself looking at them any time soon. No way.

  It was the son Peter who was the real puke-inducing mess, the side of his face having being blown off by the sawn-off shotgun that now lay cradled in his father's arms, finger still on the trigger from when he had shot his own brains out. There had been blood all over the floor but he had been super-careful not to have trodden on any of it, not that it mattered since he'd already figured out that these boots and jacket were going into the middle of the loch as soon as he was finished here. And he'd rapidly resolved not to hang about a second longer than was absolutely necessary.

  But then just as he'd been about to disappear, he'd made a spur-of-the moment decision. Now that he was there, it would have been a shame not to at least try and complete the original mission, not that he'd thought there was much chance of success. But nothing ventured nothing gained, that's what they said, wasn't it? So he'd turned his back on the horror show and crept along the upstairs landing, trying each of the twins' bedrooms in turn. He hadn't been sure which one was which, not that it had mattered. A quick scan of the first one had drawn a blank, pretty much as expected. Nothing on either bedside table other than a glass of water and a crumpled fashion magazine, the bed not slept in. Shrugging to himself, he'd crossed the landing and cautiously pushed open the second of the bedroom doors, and there it had been. A top-of-the-range iPhone 12, sleek and expensive. He'd covered the short distance from door to bedside in just three strides before slipping it into his pocket and retracing his steps down the stairway and into the kitchen. Opening the door to the boot-room, he'd called quietly to the labrador, not that there was anyone around to hear them. The dog had given a muffled bark and padded through to him, nuzzled his head against his leg, then flopped down in his bed-basket.

  Back in the Audi, he'd quickly fired up each of the Macallan twins' iCloud accounts, expecting one of them to deliver an authentication code to the phone he had just nicked, so that it could be diverted to one of his burners kept specifically for the purpose. He waited expectantly for at least five minutes, figuring that the slow delivery could well be down to the variable 4G signal, but nothing came through. Shit. So this must be someone else's phone. A minor set-back, but perhaps he would find a way to profit from it nonetheless, when he was back in his London flat and had time to think it all through.

  He'd taken the boots and coat off before getting in, obviously, not wanting to risk depositing any fibres or suchlike in his nice motor, and now they needed to be safely disposed of. He'd jumped out and wrapped the boots in the coat, bundling them up as tightly as he could. And then he'd sprinted across the road, leapt the low crash barrier and made his way down to the water's edge across the pebbly beach. It wouldn't have been enough to just throw them in from there, he'd already figured that out, so after first removing his wicked Nike Air Max's, he'd waded in, wincing as the icy water sent shivering spasms through his body. And then when it reached his waist, he'd began to swim. It had brought back sweet memories of his brief sojourn in the Special Boat Service, before Commodore Macallan had bankrolled that smooth and lucrative transfer to civvy street. He'd swam for a few minutes, covering a couple of hundred metres before pushing the bundled coat and boots under the surface, watching for a moment as they began to sink. And then he'd broke into a smooth front crawl and headed back to the shore.

  Setting the powerful heater to maximum, he'd blasted off along the lochside and in no more than an hour he'd been cosily warm and dry again. It was a couple of hours later, just as he was crossing the border into Cumbria, when it had suddenly come to him, something he hadn't registered at the time. That just before that hot hatchback had roared off into the night, he was now pretty sure he'd heard two car doors slamming. A rather interesting fact, which he could see opened up a fund of fascinating business opportunities. Especially since he, better than anyone, knew the precise motive for the murders of Roderick and Peter Macallan.

  Chapter 5

  Thursday night had become their nigh
t, Maggie, Jimmy and Frank, and for the eighteen months or so it had been extant, their get-togethers had followed a strict routine. No matter how early Maggie and Jimmy arrived at the Old King's Head from their tiny serviced office on Fleet Street, Frank would already be there, and no matter how much progress he'd made with his first pint, he always instructed his younger brother to head to the bar and get another round in, the instruction generating first complaints and then grudging compliance.

  But since their earlier meeting with Asvina Rani, Maggie had been observing her partner's mood, and the cloud of dark foreboding that had enveloped him did not seem to have lifted appreciably. She knew that getting back together with Flora meant everything to him, and so she would have expected that an opportunity to be working so close to where his estranged wife lived would have raised rather than dampened his spirits. But she suspected she knew what it was. His affair with the irresistible temptress Astrid Sorenson, the beautiful Swedish country music star, had broken Flora's heart and she knew that the shame and regret lived with him constantly. And today, rather than being buried deep in his brain in a file labelled too difficult, it had been brought to the forefront of his thoughts.

  'How's it going wee brother and Maggie?' Frank said, as they settled down at the table he had bagged for them. He telegraphed a glance at his half-empty glass. 'I was just hoping you were on your way to the bar Jimmy mate.'