The Schwarzschild Radius (33 page)

She searched again. Same thing. There were dual two-hundred Gig hard drives. She performed a “dir” search on all directories, looking for anything with “girls,” “fuck,” and “sex.” Nothing. She repeated this on the other drive. She searched on “jpg,” “gpf,” and “bmp” extensions. There were only stock Windows images such as flowers and wallpaper. According to the results of this search, there were no photos on this machine. It was risky being in graphic mode as the user might realize there was an ongoing attack, so she marked five large directories for download and started copying data to her own laptop.

The data transfer speed was slow and took three hours to complete. When she opened up the downloaded files, there were still no photos of any kind. The few text files had nothing significant―no perverted notes, no twisted commentary. Was her firewall preventing her from seeing the files? She disabled it and tried again. Same thing.

She penetrated Perlman’s machine. There were a lot of docs in Hebrew. Some regular porn and a lot of business stuff. There were lists of girls who worked at Pleasure Palace with their personal information and pictures. Nothing else. She tried connecting to Armand Greyson’s PC, but there was no response. This was unbelievable. Was it possible that all this was for nothing? There was no more time to figure this out. She needed Joules’ help, but how could she ever explain what she was doing in the homes of these men? She’d die of shame. It was decision time. 3:00 p.m. and Joules would be leaving Cooper Union to get back to the Island within a few minutes.

Rachel lay in her bed with her face buried in her pillow. She had betrayed Sonia and abased herself to no purpose. How could so much effort yield so little result? She couldn’t accept it. All she had done had to count for something. She picked up her cell phone.

“It’s me. I need your help.”

et’s start from the beginning,” said Joules, tossing his knapsack on the bed. “You’re hacking into a bunch of machines because you think one of them might contain something about Olivia?”

“Right.”

“How did you decide on these particular targets?”

“Let’s just say I was led to them by someone.”

“And how did you get their IP addresses?”

“I installed a RAT on their computers.”

“As in Remote Administration Tool.”

“Right.”

“Haven’t used that term in a while. You had physical access to these machines?”

“Yes.”

“So you were in their homes?”

This was the question she had dreaded. There would be a price to pay for Joules’ help. “I was. And I’m convinced there has to be child porn of runaway kids on at least one of these machines, but I can’t find it.”

“It could have been deleted.”

“Don’t even say that. Give me another outcome.”

“The files could be encrypted.”

“Elaborate.”

“There are any number of ways to encrypt data―text data and graphic data. Text can be embedded in photographs and photos can be embedded in other photos. It may be that the files are unscrambled before every use. This way, even if the PC is confiscated, incriminating files won’t be seen.”

“Joules, you have no idea what I did to get near these PCs. The men who own them are evil. I’m convinced one of them knows where my sister is. At least one of them knew the Schrodinger girl who was found dead. I need help.”

“How big are the data directories?”

“Combined? Hang on, I wrote them down. Fifteen Gig, twenty Gig―I guess about forty Gig.”

“How much room do you have on your hard drive?”

“Um. About one-ninety left. I downloaded some directories and it took like three hours. This could be really time-consuming. Can you―stay over?”

“Let me take a look.”

Joules went through the directories that Rachel had downloaded. There was nothing incriminating on any of them.

“It could be child porn, but I’m looking for anything else―a diary, an email―anything that would point to Olivia’s whereabouts. I know she was in the homes of these men. I found photos.”

“Who were these guys?”

Please don’t go there.
“Joules. I don’t want to get into it too much. It’s really unpleasant. I just need you to help me get these files. These men knew her. That much I know.”

Joules connected to Dr. Sartorius’ PC.

“Bit Torrent.”

“Huh?”

“Bit Torrent. It’s a program that takes pieces of files downloaded from several peer-to-peer servers and assembles them into a coherent image. None of the contributing machines has a full copy.” Joules went into a mind-numbing explanation of the protocol.

“Joules, Joules―I grasp the concept. Can you assemble the files?”

“It looks like they’re already assembled. We need the decrypt key, and most people would keep that somewhere on the PC.” He found ten password-protected directories. John the Ripper broke the passwords and, sure enough, the decrypt key was in one of them.

Two hours later, he had over twenty images of child porn belonging to Sartorius.

“The PC I really need to get into is Massey’s, the priest who runs Transcendence House where Olivia tutored.”

“What was the problem accessing it?”

“It wasn’t responding. Must be turned off.”

“SubSeven will alert you when he comes online. There’s a setting for that.”

Joules continued downloading the directories. An alert went off. Massey was online.

“Wait, abort this and get into Massey’s machine,” said Rachel.

“We’ll connect in command line mode. Later, we’ll take a chance and go in via graphic mode. Meanwhile, we download everything we can.”

After downloading dozens of directories, Joules connected in graphic mode.

He scanned the directories for the ones with the most potential. After ten minutes of searching, he clicked on an executable file called fun.exe. Two full minutes passed, then the screen briefly said,
verifying login ID and password,
even though they had entered none.

A menu appeared.

YOUNG ASIAN

PRETEEN

ROMPER ROOM

Joules chose Romper Room.

“Everything’s slowed to a crawl. The response time is horrendous all of a sudden,” said Joules.

“Why?”

“Not sure. The download speed should be uniformly fast or slow. I see from his Programs menu, he’s using photo stacking software. It allows you to layer multiple images onto a single file and the outer layer would be something harmless like a family photo. It’ll simplify matters if we can get a hold of the same stacking software to reverse the process. We can probably download a trial version or find a Bit Torrent of a pirated copy. He’s also using encryption.”

“How can you tell?” she asked.

“File size gives it away. Any kind of encryption adds to the size of a file due to the scrambling algorithm that has to be added. If you see a text file and it’s two gig, you know something’s wrong. When you consider that you could put Moby Dick in a text file of one and a half megabytes, something which is a thousand or two thousand times bigger can’t be a real document. A photo could easily be several gigabytes in size. A video file like an .avi file could be much bigger.

“He’s using Arcsoft Photo Studio―that’s the photo stacking software. I’ll download a demo copy from their website,” he said.

“This’ll probably go on for a few hours. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

“You better stay―it’s like two a.m. Too late to take the train. I have an extra pillow and toothbrush and stuff. If you don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”

After Joules was settled in for the night, Rachel went down the hall to brush her teeth and change into a sweat suit. When she returned, she couldn’t help feeling a sense of accomplishment that she was finally in a position to complain about a man’s snoring.

She was wiped out, but there was one more duty to attend to. Achara. She logged onto Yahoo Messenger and waited.

U there? PLEASE BE THERE TONIGHT.

I’m here,
replied Rachel. She looked at her watch. 3:05 a.m.

Where have you been??? I thought you forget about me.

Really sorry. I went away to get the money for you. Your passport arrived,
wrote Rachel.

O good. Such good news.
:)

And I have the money too.

How much?

$3,222 USD

You so good. Cam?

Still no cam
, said Rachel.

Rachel accepted Achara’s cam invite.

The girl had visibly aged since she last saw her. The reflection of the computer screen on her face gave her a stark paleness. But there was something Rachel hadn’t seen before. A smile.

Where you go?

I had to go far away to get the money,
wrote Rachel.

I will make it all up to you. I know I trouble for you.

Don’t say that. U r my sister.

OK. We have to hurry. This Friday they move us
, Achara wrote.

Give me the address again so I can overnight you the passport.

OK I have.

An address appeared.

Send to that address and they will get to me.

You can trust them?
asked Rachel.

She my aunt. She won’t betray.

I’ll send the money by Western Union tomorrow. You’ll have that by Wednesday, your time. You have a WU nearby?

Yes.

I’ll send it through a friend. Her name is Lisa Barino. Write down that name. So the money will come from her, OK?

OK.

You need the entry stamp on the passport to show when you entered Thailand.

Yes. I get.

You know someone who can do this for you?

No, but I bribe at airport.

And you need to show where you stayed for that time.

I say I stayed at aunt’s house. u r generous.

I’m your sister. Here is my cell phone number 01-631-555-1756. I sent you an email with different dates to travel and the web site where you can pick flights. Do you know how to use the site?

Yes, I saw flights. When I get money I tell you when I arrive in New York.

OK. I’m going to send you an email with all the information you need here at the airport. They will ask you questions when you arrive. Where you live, why you went to Thailand. OK? Don’t worry. We can fool them. But you have to memorize it. I’ll go over all that with you next time.

Thanks you. I go now before they miss me. Love you. Bye
:)

Love you too.