Evil Without a Face (8 page)

But a part of her suspected she shouldn’t envy him. Appearances weren’t always what they seemed. He had an inherent sadness behind those incredible eyes. And that was something she knew about. The kid was a kindred spirit with an ancient soul. Cutting him slack, she changed the subject to relax the poor guy.

“I see you’re working on Baker’s laptop. Does that mean you got through his ID and password?”

He brushed by her, pumped with a sudden rush of adrenaline. He flopped to the carpet sitting cross-legged with the computer propped on his lap. He was wearing thin gloves, no doubt to keep fingerprints off the computer keyboard while trying to unlock Baker’s secrets.

“Yeah, sort of,” he said.

“Let’s hear the ‘yeah’ part first. I’m not in the mood to deal with ‘sort of.’”

“Well, to get past all the security on the laptop, I took out his hard drive and hooked it up to another computer as a second drive, using my own operating system, not his. That bypassed the need to hack into his passwords.”

“Wow. That seems simple.” She grinned. “Does that mean you got the key to his magic kingdom?”

Seth scrunched his face. “Not exactly. Once I got into his hard drive, there were plenty of files to access, but every last one of them was encrypted, of the 256-bit encryption variety. He’s a pretty cagey bastard. Definitely paranoid.”

“256 sounds like a lot of bits.” She pretended to understand his geek speak. “You have any luck hacking into his business?”

“I’m working on it.” He frowned and shrugged. “But can you please refrain from using the word hack in my presence? When cats cough up a hair ball, they hack. What I’m doing takes a little more finesse.”

“Well, excuse me, Mr. Sensitive.” Jess narrowed her eyes at him. “I’ll try and remember your skill level is a stroke above a cat with a fur ball.”

“Apology accepted, I guess.” He gave her a sideways grimace. “Normally, getting into a computer is no big deal, not with some of the software I’ve got. But the guy sure knows how to lay down barriers.”

Standing over him, Jess absentmindedly checked out the CDs strewn along the carpet. She had originally thought they were music CDs, but after a closer look, she noticed the shiny disks were marked with black scrawl. Nothing legible, only a cryptic numbering system to identify the bootlegged software, all except for one. But she knew enough about what a crimeware program did to wonder how the hell Seth got his hands on the stuff.

“I thought only identity thieves used crimeware.” She reached down to pick up one of the CDs. “How did you get your hands on this sort of program?”

Seth barely looked up, pretending to focus on his keystrokes.

“I told you. I know…people.”

“People,” she chimed in as she laid the CD down, glad the boy was on her side.

“I thought it might come in handy,” he added, continuing to work.

But after thinking about it, Jess took a second look at his pricy digs and wondered.

“That’s not how you make a living, is it? ’Cause you
wouldn’t be livin’ here on the coin I pay you. You do know identity theft and fraud are against the law, right, Seth?”

He stopped what he was doing and glared at her. Jess stood her ground with arms crossed, returning his stare. Deadly serious.

“I can’t believe you had to ask.” He softened his stern expression. Hurt swept over his face. “I get that we really don’t know each other, but what do your instincts tell you?”

He held her gaze without flinching. Seconds on the clock dragged through the quagmire of time, not cutting her a break. She felt the weight of her accusation. Heat rose up her neck and spilled onto her cheeks.

“We’re good.” She nodded. “I mean, yeah, I trust you.”

After a long awkward moment, Seth turned back to his work and Jess breathed a quiet sigh of relief. She didn’t want to live in a world where innocents like Seth Harper could be seduced to the dark side, but that was the reality of it. Good judgment filtered through her powerful cynicism, a reliable measure of human nature until now. She only hoped she wasn’t wrong about him.

“So did you find out anything else?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so.” He sat with his back against the fancy sofa and his eyes glued to the glowing monitor, ignoring her as she sat across from him in a wing-back chair.

“I sniffed out this strange IP Baker visits. The guy’s not stupid enough to bookmark it, but I noticed he comes to this site—a lot.”

“Strange IP, huh?” She couldn’t resist moving closer, unsure whether he’d let her. “What the hell is an IP? Translate, genius. ’Cause I’m gonna need subtitles in Harperworld.”

The intrigue of Baker’s files drew her in. She invaded Seth’s personal space by sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him on the carpet. The kid was so enthralled with the computer that he didn’t seem to mind. And apparently he didn’t hold a grudge.

“Harperworld.” He grinned with eyes on the monitor. “Good one. Well, an IP is an Internet Protocol address. It’s unique. The computer version of X marks the spot in cyberspace. Only it’s not that simple.”

With a bad case of the yammers, he went on, working the keyboard and waving his hands in the air as if he could blow the confusion off her face. When he looked at her, he stopped and took a different tack.

“Every Internet provider tags their users with an address or block of codes. Every time the user gets on, the ID can roll and change through a shared block. If you query the IP number, the physical location might bounce to different locales. In other words, there are limitations on what you could learn about an IP. And this information will only take you so far…”

When he went into a spiel on proxy servers, routers, ISPs, reverse DNS lookups, and anonymizer services, she felt her eyes glaze over. For all she knew, the kid made it all up, except no one could fake the kind of enthusiasm he held for all the technogeek speak.

“Yeah, but did the pervert leave any incriminating proof we can turn over to the cops?”

Jess knew the chain of evidence had been broken and any proof on Baker’s laptop would be inadmissible in court, unless she found a clever way to turn over his property and still keep her and Seth out it. When the time came, she knew what had to be done and would see to it.

“I’ve got nothing so far, but like I said, Baker had plenty of trips to this one strange site on the Internet, an IP address through something called ‘Globe Harvest.’ The site’s under construction. But I took a look at the source code behind the site and found an embedded login if you hit the control shift key and type in the letter O. Here, let me show you.”

Seth pulled up a Web site with the name Globe Harvest emblazoned across the screen. A note indicated the site was
under construction. But after he hit a few keystrokes, a box popped up, requesting the user to log on.

“I don’t have the login yet, but I’m working on it.”

“For a site under construction, that seems weird.” She narrowed her eyes.

“That’s what I thought. Usually a site like this is a blind to allow the Web designer to work behind it until the site is officially published and operational.”

“If you get into this thing, can you get a physical location for these people?”

Seth shrugged, disappointment in his eyes. “Like I said, simple it ain’t. An IP address might be a stand-alone proxy or it could be shared by multiple client devices, part of a common hosting Web server.”

The kid was speaking in tongues again, and she knew her face reflected her confusion. He tried another explanation.

“Okay, okay. Think of this like one big telephone system. The use of a main number can act as the proxy, with extensions behind it that are shared. You get it?”

“That kind of makes sense…in a geek alternative universe.” She raised an eyebrow, clearly content in her ignorant bliss.

He continued, “These unique addresses are created and managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or the IANA.”

“Can we cut with the alphabet references? I think I’m developing a tumor.”

Seth ignored her and went on.

“Superblocks in cyberspace are kind of like real estate. They can be subdivided into smaller lots and distributed to various Internet providers. What I’m trying to say is, it’s gonna take time to dig through the spiderweb of info he left behind.”

Seth looked her in the eye and kept going.

“Even if I narrow it down to a real network and registration,
we might be dealing with a server out of the country that allows anonymous e-mails. If I was working it, that’s what I’d do. If the U.S. government can’t coerce another country to cooperate, what are the odds we’re gonna do any better in getting a physical address on Baker’s organization? It’d be like fishing for Moby Dick with a cane pole.”

When he started to talk about real people and fishing analogies, she interrupted him.

“Harper? Let me worry about concocting a fish story. If you give me the phone numbers to contact these cyberspace realtors and I can talk to a live human being, I’ve got skills you haven’t seen yet. Trust me, I’ll get what we need if I have to speak Swahili.”

“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” It was his turn to smirk. “Any woman who’d bulldog a moving SUV earns
my
respect.”

“That’s about the nicest thing any man has ever said to me. Thanks, Harper.”

“But here’s the bad part. Baker knows we’ve got his shit.” Seth turned toward her. “While I’m dicking around with this, I’m afraid he’s shut it all down. From anywhere, this guy can make contact and change passwords, he can get the word out. Hell, for all we know, he may have already closed shop.”

Jess gritted her teeth, knowing he was right. But she did have one advantage.

“There’s one thing we can count on, Seth. Maybe this organization is international and pretty computer savvy, but I know Baker. He’s a friggin’ idiot. Most criminals are. People like him are not exactly MIT material. You feel up for the challenge?”

“To beat an idiot?”

“Worded like that, I have complete faith in you.”

“Thanks.” He furrowed his brow. “I think.”

Jess tried not to smile. “The point is, we’ve got Baker’s portal to a bigger organization. Find me the hole in his dike, Seth.”

“Ditch the dike hole analogy, will ya? It scares me.”

He hit a few keystrokes and pulled up a file.

“Before I forget, I got something else for you.” He grinned, a crooked lazy smile. “Baker had a digital photo open when he tore out of that room, something sent via e-mail. So far, I’ve got nothing on the origin of the e-mail itself, but embedded at the end of this picture file was a message. I figured these jerks wouldn’t be sharing their Alaskan vacation slides for nothing, so I looked for a reason he’d have this one open and found the embedded message. I saved it to the drive.”

Seth flipped the monitor toward her. Jess read the message on the screen. One line from a man named Ivan Andreyevich Krylov.

“A Russian?” She cocked her head and stared at the screen. “And maybe a connection to Alaska.”

“Actually, I Googled the name and got some Russian fables and folklore dude. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. We’re not gonna find these guys using their real names.”

Seth shrugged and kept talking.

“On the surface, this message isn’t incriminating. Granted, the wording is a little cryptic, but for all we know, he’s addicted to the Home Shopping Network or he’s got an eBay delivery coming from Alaska. However, when you couple the way this message was transmitted in a digital photo file with the use of aliases and international IP addresses, I’d say the whole setup reaches outside the U.S. in an impressive array. At the risk of using a redundant fish analogy, I’m thinkin’ Baker may be a guppy in a very big pond.”

Jess reread the embedded message from the Russian.

“ETA two days.” She backtracked the date and looked at her watch to confirm her suspicions. “That means whatever is being delivered to Chicago is coming in today.”

If Seth was right and Baker closed up shop, this last bit of intel might be the only link she would have to his organization. This so-called shipment had been set in motion. Did the bastard have time to call it off or would this be her best shot at nailing him?

“I’ve got to play a hunch, Seth. It might be a stretch, but I’d bet money he’s bartering in human lives. The delivery may be some poor unlucky kid caught up in Baker’s web of lies.”

A worried look spread across Seth’s face. “So what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know yet. I gotta think.”

A scheme started to form in her mind. Baker would still want his property back, so his laptop could be a bargaining chip. She touched Seth’s arm to get his undivided attention.

“Hypothetically speaking, I may be forced to return Baker’s property to get another crack at this guy. And that thought makes my blood boil unless I have the upper hand.” She took a deep breath. “If I knew someone really connected to certain people, could this computer-savvy guy install software on this laptop? I want to track Baker’s movement in the cyberworld from inside his own computer.”

Seth stared at her a long moment.

“I see you’ve got pliable ethics when it comes to turning the tables on Baker using my crimeware bootleg stuff. The all-important end justifies the means, is that it?”

He didn’t let her squirm long. Fighting a smirk, he cocked his head and raised an eyebrow in a good-humored challenge. What the hell could she say?

“Hey, you got me. When it comes to Baker and his perverted world, I guess my ethics take a backseat. Sue me.”

“That’s okay. I understand. I’m just sayin’…” Seth grinned, a totally wicked smile, and let it go. “Hypothetically speaking, of course, such an absolutely freaking genius could load a Trojan horse the guy would never see coming. Keystroke loggers can collect sensitive data, steal his new passwords and store them on his own system, leaving cyber bread
crumbs to follow. Once Baker accesses those encrypted files I was telling you about, we’re in too.”

Seth’s eyes radiated light. This stuff really turned the boy on.

“Plus, we could add bells and whistles to allow us remote access or even redirect his browser to a counterfeit link of our choosing. He’ll think he’s logged into his site, but he’ll be talking to us. Very cool stuff. And I may have one or two other tricks I can add. Is that covert enough for you?”