Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (22 page)

“Deepak tells me you’re trying to wade in on my turf with some bullshit about a similar crime yesterday.”

“The similarities are way beyond coincidence, sir.”

“You sure you’re not just trying to get yourself linked to a serial killer case?” His eyes narrowed as he spoke. “A bit of buzz from something like that helps build careers.”

“With respect,” Jenny looked him squarely in the eyes, “but fuck you. Sir.”

Hamid raised both eyebrows and looked up at the ceiling, as if some spot had suddenly gained interest. To her side, Selby, still on his knees, lowered his head back under the table. Jeffries looked at her and nodded to himself, weighing her up. He chuckled.

“Okay, DI Price,” he said, sportingly. “You’ve got my attention. Now what have you got?” 

Jenny explained about the Anna Parker case, labouring the similarities. The location being a meeting room in a Flexbase office block. The sliced throat. The bound wrists. The rape. 

“We don’t know yet that this girl’s been raped,” said Hamid.

“She will have been.”

“And you say that your victim from yesterday was tricked into going to the office?” asked Jeffries.

“Yes. I’m guessing that bit of paper on the floor is something along those lines for this girl.”

“Maybe, but let’s wait for my SOCO team to get here first, eh.”

“Any idea of the victim’s identity?” asked Jenny.

Jeffries looked at Hamid, who looked at Selby. Selby shrugged.

“Her name is Audri Sahlberg.”

They all turned to the sound of a female voice behind them. 

“Thanks, Fiona,” said Jenny to her teammate. “Gentlemen, this is DC Jones.”

“According to the signing-in book in the reception downstairs,” Fiona explained, “Miss Sahlberg arrived at 7:50 last night. She was here to see a Derek Saxton.”

* * *

Brody had abandoned his full frontal assault on SWY yesterday evening. The site was far too well protected and nothing less than a brand new, indefensible zero-day exploit would break through. And he certainly didn’t have weeks of time at his disposal to create one. Doc_Doom and Brody’s other friends on the CrackerHack forums had been unable to help. He just hoped that Matt_The_Hatter didn’t have access to a relevant new zero-day, either self-developed or from one of his allies.

With no direct attack vector available, Brody was forced to come up with a flanking strategy. His theory was that the video feeds streamed into the site through an alternate route over the Internet, a different way in than the front door used by visitors to browse the site. If he could find this back door, then it might be less well defended. He realised that relying on an
if
and a
might
was not necessarily the most robust approach, but it was all he could come up with. The first step was to follow the route the video feeds took to get into the site. And to do that, he needed to find the webcams themselves. In the physical world.

Which meant he had to track down the Saxtons’ home.

The commercial people-finder site gave up no hits for Saxton in London or the Home Counties using Derek or Hilary as forenames. The family seemed to be off the grid. Perhaps they weren’t married, though they certainly acted like a married couple. He wondered if they were famous in some way — though he didn’t recognise them; not that he was an expert on celebrity culture — as household names take massive steps to hide information about themselves from the prying public, especially their home address. Or maybe the Saxtons were simply ex-directory, rented instead of owned their home and were new to the area in which they lived. That would explain the lack of footprint in the phone, property and electoral records.

By far Brody’s easiest option was to just sit and watch, hoping that across the hundreds of virtual locations on SWY, someone would divulge a phone number or address out loud. If he waited long enough perhaps someone, somewhere would order a pizza and state the address out loud for its delivery. Or answer the home phone by repeating the last part of their phone number in a tuneful ditty, like his mother still did to this day. Or give some other clue to their physical location. He only needed to find the real-world location for one of them. It didn’t have to be the
Au Pair Affair
location, although at least they were active right now and, he had to admit, their antics intrigued him. Like Hilary, Brody was interested in finding out where Audri had got to, especially after seeing the way she had dressed — or rather
undressed
— to go out last night.  

The problem with audio was that he couldn’t listen to more than two or three feeds at once before it became confusing. Choosing the right ones to listen out for that kind of titbit would be a lottery. He supposed he could download a speech-to-text converter utility, feed it all of the locations on SWY as different audio inputs and then search the outputted text logs en masse, but that would be prone to transcription error and would take him hours to set up. And even then, there was no guarantee that anyone would actually give details about their location.

He thought about what he knew so far. He knew their names. He knew their general location in Watford. And then, he realised, he knew something else. 

Hilary Saxton was a florist.

Brody’s fingers flew to his keyboard.

A few seconds later, his screen displayed a Google map with all the florists in the Watford area plotted neatly. He picked the centremost one and clicked through to its website. It was a basic one-page HTML site that listed the shop’s address and phone number in front of a photograph of a colourful bouquet of flowers.

He rang the number.

“Rosita’s Flower Shop. Can I help you?”

“Hi. Is Hilary there?” Brody asked.

“Who?”

“Hilary Saxton?”

“Sorry, no one of that name here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number.”

He disconnected and moved onto the next one.

The same conversation repeated itself. The next two didn’t answer, but it wasn’t yet 9:00 a.m. He would try them again later when they were open. And then he heard the magic words, “Sorry, Hilary’s not in yet.”

Brody punched the air in triumph.

Of course she wasn’t there. He was looking at her in her home right now, through a webcam connected to the Internet, broadcasting live.

“Oh, no problem, I’ll phone back later.” He disconnected.

Hilary’s flower shop was imaginatively entitled, ‘Forget-Me-Not.’ It was located in Bushey High Street, in a smaller town on the outskirts of Watford. In an hour, he could be parked outside the florists, staking it out, waiting for Hilary to show or, more importantly, leave so that he could follow her home. That would probably work, assuming she went to work today, but the downside was that he’d lose most of the day waiting.

Forget-Me-Not had a website. Brody checked it out. It was a cleanly designed, static site with tabs to click on for bouquets, weddings and funerals, each with sample pictures and nice, descriptive passages. The site had no online ordering capability; it was just a digital brochure. The ‘About’ page provided the history of the shop. It had been there for six years and stressed the quality and freshness of the stock and the creativeness of the florists. There was a generic ‘info’ email address. Not much use.

He ran a
Whois
command on the website address, to identify who had registered its domain name. Hilary Saxton’s name came up as the registrant, but the physical address provided was for the shop. He ran an online company check against the shop’s name and found the company registration details. Under the company directors was listed a Hilary Bone, presumably her maiden name. It provided an address in Reading, Berkshire. 

That must be it. Brody was getting excited now. 

But then he recalled another detail and told himself not to get carried away. Last night, Audri had left the family home to go out in Watford, something you were very unlikely to do if you lived in Reading, about fifty miles away. He copied the postcode into Google Maps and used the Street View facility to check it out. 

Brody loved Street View. It allowed him to take a virtual walk down almost any street in the world. When he’d first heard that Google were going to send fleets of vehicles through street after street around the world, photographing everything they saw through a unique 360 degree camera mounted atop the car and subsequently making the stitched-together images available to everyone for free, he had been awed at their audacity, the sheer scale of their undertaking. He’d never even noticed the Google-branded car slowly pass through Upper Street but, zooming in to Bruno’s coffee shop when Street View was first launched in the UK, he was fairly sure it was him captured that day, sitting in his usual window seat, his head in his laptop. 

From the Street View images of the address in Reading, Brody immediately realised he was in an industrial trading estate. He zoomed in and saw from the overhead sign that a firm of accountants inhabited the building. Typically of many small businesses, Forget-Me-Not’s company registered address was that of their accountant. 

He’d drawn a blank. Again.

Brody decided working on an empty stomach wasn’t helping. Twenty minutes later, showered and changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a plain cotton shirt, he sat in the window seat at Bruno’s, a perfectly steamed cappuccino and a warmed almond croissant on the table in front of him. As if Brody’s abruptness yesterday had never happened, Stefan had greeted him as warmly as ever and had correctly guessed Brody’s choice of beverage. 

Brody had deliberately left his tablet PC behind to force himself to think. He stared through the window. A blanket of grey cloud lay low in the sky, but at least it had finally stopped raining sometime in the early hours. Cars passed slowly in both directions, most with their headlights illuminated despite it being daytime, clouds of surface spray in their wake. So much water had fallen over the last few days that the drains underneath were overwhelmed. 

There were lots of approaches he could take. He could focus on the baby, Izzy, searching through birth records. But Izzy sounded like it was short for something, maybe Elizabeth or Isabel. He could get Hilary’s email address and send her an old-school payload, a virus that would open up her PC to him, where he was bound to uncover her home address. The only problem was that most PCs these days had antivirus software running, a strong defence against such an antiquated hack. He could send an email that, when she opened it, gave him her IP address. Armed with that, he could launch any number of forays.

By the time he had finished his Italian breakfast, Brody had thought through three or four lines of attack. Refreshed and refocused, he made a point of politely complimenting Stefan before heading back across the road. 

Walking to the pedestrian crossing, his mind planning the order of bombardment, he was suddenly drenched by a huge cascade of freezing cold water, heedlessly thrown up by a passing car. He stopped, looked down at his soaked clothes and, feeling stupid, stared incredulously at the offending car as it drove on, oblivious to its handiwork. In the rear-view mirror, he thought he saw a pair of sparkling eyes spot him and smirk. Foolishness quickly turned to fury. He made a mental note of the number plate and thought of ways to track the driver down and exact revenge. It was an expensive red Maserati. It probably had a vehicle tracking device fitted — 

And then he had it. Geotracking. That was how he’d find Hilary’s home address.

He rushed back to the apartment, the red Maserati completely forgotten.

Changed once again, this time into a pair of black denims and a plain grey t-shirt, Brody phoned ‘Forget-Me-Not’. On the screen in front of him, Hilary was feeding the baby in the kitchen. 

“Forget-Me-Not, Joan speaking. How can I help?”

“Oh, hi Joan. Is Mrs Saxton there?” Brody was putting on an East Coast American accent. Partly to spice it up, but also to sound different to his brief call earlier.

“Sorry no. She’ll probably be in later. Can I help you?”

“Oh, no problem, ma’am. It’s Geoff here from Interflora. We’ve just completed a rebranding exercise and so I just want to send Mrs Saxton our new logos so she can update the Forget-Me-Not marketing collateral.”

“Okay?” Joan sounded confused. Just as Brody had wanted. He’d noticed the Interflora logo on their website earlier and, having personally used the service to send flowers, Brody knew there would be a business relationship between the small independent flower shop in Bushey and the global flower delivery network. 

“Tell you what, I’ll email them over to her.”

“That’s probably best, Geoff.”

“Let me just check . . . actually I don’t seem to have her email address here. Can you let me have it?”

“Yes, it’s written down here somewhere. Ah, here it is. It’s [email protected]. All lowercase mind.”

Brody knew that the case didn’t make any difference but chose not to correct her. “Thanks a lot, ma’am. I’ll email her now.” He disconnected.

He created a fake Gmail account, yet another free service provided by the ubiquitous Google. He loaded Hilary’s email address as a contact within the Gmail account. He then logged into a spare Twitter account he had lying around. 

In fact, all Brody’s Twitter accounts were spare, as he had never used them for their intended purpose: tweeting. He had never understood why people wanted to share short bursts of information, tweets, with each other in such a public area. At least the forums on CrackerHack had some level of control over who joined. He likened tweeting to shouting at someone you vaguely knew across the other side of a packed stadium. Sometimes they’d catch what you said and shout back. And all the people around, most of them also shouting at each other, could listen in and, if they chose to, join in the conversation. Brody used his anonymous Twitter accounts for one purpose, listening.

Within Twitter, anyone could follow anyone or be followed by anyone.
If they knew their Twitter username.
If his guess was right, Hilary was a tweeter. Derek had mentioned her tweeting Audri earlier and Brody had noticed how competently Hilary used her iPhone. All he needed was her Twitter username.