Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (36 page)

He reached the bottom of the logs and suddenly spotted a post from Fingal himself. It was less than five minutes old. Shocked to finally see a communication, he skim read it but didn’t quite take it in. He reread it slowly, not quite believing what he was seeing.

Fingal:
Crooner, your site is pretty secure. But nowhere near secure enough. I will pwn SYW within 48 hours from now. If I fail, I will down tools and leave the hacking community for good. But when I win, I won’t just take root and walk away. I will destroy the whole SWY site. It’s an abomination. You have been warned. Do you accept?

Crooner42 held his head in his hands. This was terrible. He had been moments away from victory and now this. 

Other posts had already appeared in response. He read them quickly.

Mawrpheus:
Yeah sure. You’re just playing for time Fingal. You haven’t got a hope.

Doc_Doom:
Great words Fingal. An increase in the stakes, I like it! And as Crooner42 never set a time limit on the original challenge, your proposal is valid. 48 hours from now. That’s 4:00 p.m. on Friday. 

Random_Ness:
What about Matt_The_Hatter? He needs to agree to the deadline.

Doc_Doom:
Matt? You there?

The chat logs paused while everyone waited to see if Matt_The_Hatter was online and would respond. But what about
him
, Crooner42? It was
his
challenge.
His
rules. This was so damn frustrating. If only he’d set a bloody deadline at the beginning, he wouldn’t be in this position.

What possible angle did Fingal have? He must have something up his sleeve to have raised the stakes like that. Publicly stating that he would withdraw from the hacking community altogether was the ultimate gamble. Crooner42 couldn’t believe Fingal had put everything on the line. Crooner42’s original objective had been to damage Fingal’s credibility beyond repair, but, now that he thought it through, this was even better. Fingal dropping out of the hacking community altogether because of losing a get root challenge to Crooner42 was fantastic. His own status would immediately be elevated among the hacker gods.

Crooner42 tried to determine if there was any substance to Fingal’s claim that the SWY wasn’t secure enough. But he’d scanned all the logs and Fingal had come nowhere near breaking through. Perhaps Fingal’s apparent inactivity had been because he’d been developing a brand new zero-day exploit that would work against SWY. But what were the odds of success? A hundred thousand to one at least, Crooner42 estimated. And to have perfected it inside forty-eight hours? That was pretty much impossible. No, this was a complete bluff. Fingal was buying time in the forlorn hope that he would somehow break through.

He decided to declare his presence and began typing.

Crooner42:
Fingal, let me get this straight. You’ve failed so far and now you want to gamble your elite status for another 48 hours against SWY? This would mean No More Fingal on ANY hacker forum anywhere online. Agreed?

Fingal:
Agreed. But it won’t happen, Crooner. I’m taking SWY down.

Crooner42:
Then we have a parlay.

Doc_Doom:
Okay everyone, the challenge has been accepted. Let’s put the word out folks! There’s a helluva lot at stake here.

Matt_The_Hatter:
Hey, you fucking idiots. I’m still in this challenge. I get the 48 hours too.

Doc_Doom:
Ah, you are there Matt! Okay, agreed. And if you fail? Will you match Fingal’s bet and drop out of the hacking community altogether?

Matt_The_Hatter:
Fuck that for a game of soldiers! Fingal chose to make it personal with Crooner because he’s desperate. I’m not desperate. I’m in this against Fingal. Not Crooner. I’m sticking to the original stakes.

Doc_Doom:
Fair enough, Matt. Shame though, we could all have done with a break from your rants on these forums!

Mawrpheus:
LOL!

Matt_The_Hatter:
Fuck you, Doc.

Crooner42 was delighted with the improved challenge. It was more than he could have hoped for. But something niggled in the back of his mind. Was there some way Fingal could break in that Crooner42 hadn’t considered? 

He recalled Fingal’s strange focus on
Au Pair Affair
. What was it about that particular location that was so fascinating for Fingal? Crooner42 looked up at the wall of screens.
Au Pair Affair
was on one screen to the bottom right. He grabbed the tablet PC he used to control the screens and brought up all the
Au Pair Affair
feeds. He saw movement in the kitchen-cam and popped it onto the large central screen.

The last time he had done this, he had observed police informing the owners of the house that their au pair had been killed. It had been morbidly fascinating to watch. 

This time, there were four people in the kitchen. Two he recognised as the husband and wife, who were sitting at the kitchen table with their backs to him. A laptop sat between them on the table. He wasn’t sure, but the other woman, who was sitting opposite the husband, might have been one of the police officers from the other day. The last man he hadn’t seen before. He was standing behind the couple with his back to the webcam. Crooner42 could only make out the back of his head.

The husband and wife were gesturing animatedly. He turned up the volume.

“Oh, that’s just fucking great, that is.” It was the wife. Her tone was angry. 

Crooner42 wondered what was going on.

The husband ran both his hands through his hair. “I can’t believe this! How could this happen? I didn’t mean for this. Oh my God. This is awful!”

The wife turned around to the other man. “So, anyone could have been watching?”

“Yup.”

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck.” This was the husband again.

“How could you Derek? People have been watching us in the privacy of our own home! Doing private things, for God’s sake. I feel so violated.”

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean for —”

“— How did this happen?” asked the wife, turning to the man who had his back to the camera.

“Right this minute, I’ve no idea.” 

The policewoman spoke, saying something that nearly made Crooner42’s heart stop dead. “So you’re saying, Mr Saxton, that you had no idea about SecretlyWatchingYou.com?”

Crooner42 couldn’t believe it. The police had discovered SWY? How the hell had they done that? And they were discussing it in one of the broadcast locations? Crooner42 had always known that it was statistically possible for someone somewhere in the many locations he had feeding the site to stumble across SWY on the Internet and discover themselves, but the odds were so infinitesimally high that it was ridiculously unlikely. So how come the police had found it? And, more importantly, that they had figured out that the Saxton household was one of the locations feeding the site?

“Honestly, no,” said Saxton. “Have we been hacked?”

“I don’t know yet,” said the other man still with his back to the camera. “Who installed the webcams in your house?”

“A firm called McCarthy Security Ltd. They’re based in Slough.”

“How did you find them?” asked the policewoman.

“I just searched the Internet.”

“Did you check them out?”

“Yes, they had references and everything. I even went to their showroom. They’re a legit firm. They mostly do corporate CCTV surveillance systems, but they said the home market is where they’re focusing these days.”

The other man commented. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. Now that we have cheap IP cameras and high bandwidth Wi-Fi networks and broadband, it’s definitely a booming market.”

“But how does any of this relate to Audri’s death?” asked the policewoman.

“Yeah,” echoed Saxton, turning to the man who was not visible.

“Well, I have a theory, but I need to check it out.”

“Hold on a second,” said Saxton. “You come into my house, spouting all this crap about my webcams, in front of my wife, and you’ve no idea if any of it’s even related to Audri’s murder? That’s just fucking rich, that is.”

“I’ll tell you what’s rich, Derek,” shouted Mrs Saxton standing up. “You! Thinking I’m some kind of idiot.”

“What?” 

“You’ve been fucking her, haven’t you?”

“Hilary, no,” pleaded the husband. “Of course not.”

Crooner42 saw the policewoman avert her eyes from the arguing couple. 

“I knew it,” Mrs Saxton railed. “I fucking knew it. I should have known better. You’ve never been able to keep your dick in your pants.”

“No Hilary. It’s not like that.”

“Well, what
is
it like, then? Eh?” She lowered her voice and scathed, “You disgust me, Derek.”

Mrs Saxton flew out of the kitchen. A few moments later, Crooner42 saw her appear on one of the other streams, her bedroom, where she flung herself onto the bed and heaved sobs into the pillow.

Back in the kitchen, Saxton stood up and addressed the two police officers: “There was no fucking need for any of this. You had nothing to gain from bringing this up in front of Hilary. You should have talked to me discretely. Now look what you’ve gone and done.”

He stormed out, after his wife.

At the retreating Saxton, the policewoman said in a voice deliberately too low for Saxton to have heard, “I think you’ll find you’re the one who went and did it.”

On the feed from the bedroom, Crooner42 saw Hilary fling a pillow at her husband, who had arrived in the doorway. Although the audio feed was still coming from the kitchen-cam, he still heard her hollering, “Get out!”

Back in the kitchen, the man sat down opposite his colleague, his back still to the camera.

She spoke first. “So, this theory of yours. . .”

“Yes?”

“You think the killer watched the goings-on in this house and used the information to lure her to her death, don’t you?”

“Basically, yes. It fits what you said in the car earlier, DI Price. If it wasn’t Derek, then how else could her killer have known so much about her to set up the trap?”

DI Price must be the lead detective on the murder case. The other man talked like an IT guy. He was most likely a police IT specialist assigned to the case. Crooner42 picked up the tablet controller. He’d seen enough. They may have found out about SWY, but they were hardly going to focus on it as a major line of enquiry. 

“But if your theory is right, that means there must be a webcam at Anna Parker’s place as well.”

“That’s what I want to check out.”

The tablet controller dropped from Crooner42’s hands, crashing to the floor. He ignored it. He was in shock. While he was aware of the two murders and the fact that both victims lived in locations that happened to be broadcast on SWY, he’d just assumed it was a macabre coincidence. He’d had no idea they were perpetrated by the same killer and that SWY might be a factor in how they were chosen.

But that led to a more chilling supposition. If a murderer really was using SWY to select his victims, then that meant one of his hundreds of thousands of customers was a serial killer. And SWY was his hunting ground.

Shit, what had he done?

And if all that were true, wouldn’t the police focus all their energies on SWY itself? Maybe even bring in the National Cyber Crime Unit? The NCCU were the leading computer crime specialists in the UK with access to huge resources. They could pose a serious threat to him.

No, he was overestimating the police. Fingal was one of the world’s elite hackers. If he couldn’t break through SWY’s defences then the police had no hope. But even so, Crooner42 felt uncomfortable being in the sights of the police.

“But you’ve looked around the site a lot. Haven’t you seen Anna Parker’s place?” asked DI Price on the kitchen-cam.

“I might have, unknowingly. I don’t know what it looks like. I’ve not been there. I take it you have?”

“Yes.”

“We could look through the locations on SWY now, he said pointing at the laptop, “and see if you recognise any.”

DI Price held up her phone. “I really need to get back to the station. I’ve been away all morning and I’ve got loads of texts here from the team about both cases. Can we do this later?”

“Sure, if you like.” Crooner42 could hear the disappointment in the man’s voice.

“I guess we’ll have to let ourselves out,” joked the policewoman.

Crooner42 allowed a smile to slowly spread across his face. He realised they hadn’t yet proved that the house where Anna Parker lived was one of the SWY locations. If they weren’t able to find it on SWY, then they’d hit a dead-end and would no longer focus on SWY as a common factor between the cases. Then the police would leave his money-spinning site alone. 

He knew how to handle it. He’d completely disable the
Student Heaven
location on SWY. He’d remove any trace of the location where Anna Parker had lived from the site.

He reached for his tablet computer.

* * *

Brody cursed under his breath. Two young mothers, overloaded with prams and babies, sat chatting in his usual seating area. Annoyingly, his favourite high-backed chair in the window recess was actually free, but he could hardly position himself in the middle of their group, breaking up their gossip. The coffee lounge was very busy. Just as he was resigning himself to ordering a takeaway coffee instead, he noticed someone waving at him from one of the expansive three-seater sofas . He looked over and saw it was Leroy, with Danny beside him. And an empty space next to him.