Mad Dog - First Strike Ch. 12

11 - Breaking and Entry:

I'm lurking behind the bins in a narrow back alley in the East End of London. It's the sort of place where you want to wipe your feet as soon as you get onto the main road.

I'm linked to VJ by an app on my phone that turns it into a digitally encrypted walkie talkie. A covert Bluetooth earpiece means that we're permanently linked.

"Remind me again, why am I the one who's got to do this?"

"Climb that fire escape? With my asthma?" VJ replied. "Besides, your military background makes you the logical choice."

It seemed far too bloody convenient the way he became a wheezy nerd when it suited him. And it always suited him to assume that role when there was anything with a vague whiff of physical exercise to it.

In front of me is a metal fire escape that leads up the back of a four story Victorian Gothic monstrosity. I'm interested in the glowing window on the third floor.

Behind me is the back end of a takeaway. I'm lurking between the bins, the kitchen window's open and a radio's tuned turned up to eleven, blasting out UK Grime from a pirate radio station. I didn't know who the track is by, but Dizzee Rascal it aint.

It's drizzling, in London, in the spring, what a surprise. Not.

It's the sort of penetrating wetness that cuts right through supposedly waterproof clothes. I've been here for two hours so far, waiting for the last workaholic to turn out the lights and go home so I can climb in through the window.

Then, suddenly and taking me by surprise, the office window's yellow glow is extinguished.

A couple of minutes later VJ's voice buzzes in my earpiece: "X-Ray is clear of building."

"Thanks mate."

"Don't you mean copy that?" Vik asks.

"Sod off!"

I don't feel any safer knowing I'm not alone. If the bully boys discover me lurking they'll give me a bloody good kicking. If, or when, that happens no one will come to help me.

There's no point in looking to VJ to come charging to my rescue. He's at least two hundred metres away in the back of a Mercedes Sprinter van, nice and warm, with a flask of tea and a stack of sandwiches.

We've set up our own Bluetooth cameras for surveillance. Oh, and he's got the the internet for company. He's dividing his time between covering me on CCTV and standing by for when I gain access to the target.

Or at least he's supposed to be doing that. But I suspect that he's surfing the net. And I know that given the choice between watching my back and watching the shenanigans of busty milfs on Pornhub, the fleshy delights of middle aged sex bombs are going to win out every time.

Besides, he's under strict instructions from Dirty Harriet to make a swift getaway if things go pear-shaped. Yeah matey, you leg it and leave me to face the sodding music eh.

"OK, going in," I transmitted.

"And the best of British luck to you sir," VJ replied in his best officer and a gentleman voice.

I ease out from where I've been lurking and climb up on top of a conveniently parked rubbish skip. From there I climb clumsily onto the fire escape itself.

I go up the metal staircase cautiously, trying to be as quiet as possible. Inevitably I do make a noise though. When I get up to the third floor and was squeezing myself through the half-open window I dislodged a saucer from the window sill.

Who the hell leaves a saucer doing on a window sill? Hang on. Make that a saucer full of fag ends. OK, question answered. Someone who doesn't want to leave the office to smoke when it's pissing down with rain, that's who.

I freeze and glance down as the saucer shatters on the cobbles below. Nobody comes out to see what all the racket's about. OK, it seems safe to continue.

I squeeze through the window on my stomach. There's a desk with three big computer monitor screens on it, blocking my way. There's only one option; I twist and contort myself and do a sort of half-handstand on the office chair at the desk.

The chair's on castors, it rolls away from my when I'm halfway through the manoeuvre. Almost inevitably I end up in a heap on the floor. It is, I notice, covered with those bloody awful, cheap industrial carpet tiles. Oh, and it could do with a damned good hoovering. I'm not, obviously, a happy chappy.

"It's never like this for James Bond," I mutter.

"What's that?" Vikram asks.

"Nothing," I try to reassure him so as not to make him nervous. I don't think I'm successful. "I'm in. What do I do now?"

"OK, just stick to the plan, and switch a computer on for me..." he pauses, "you know how to do that, yeah man?"

"Of course I bloody do!" I sound snippy. It can't be helped. I'm cold, wet and lying in a heap on a filthy office floor. "Stop bloody patronising me."

"Right, switch on a computer and tell me when it's ready."

I fired up the computer nearest to me.

"OK, it's on, and..." I plugged a dongle into a USB port, "...it's ready whenever you are."

"Great, all I need now is the password," his words taper off as he taps away at his laptop's keyboard.

"See, in the films hacking is done by nerds; fat, pizza-faced, ugly slobs with no social skills," VJ's words buzz in my earpiece. "In reality it's all about angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."

"You what?"

"Allen Ginsberg, Howl."

"Never heard of him, what sort of music does he do? Indie?"

"You philistine!" VJ snorted. "Ginsberg was a beat poet. Howl is viewed by some as his greatest poem."

"Like I'd know that," I answered.

The central monitor screen flickers into life. The login page came up.

"It wants the password," I hiss, "and we don't have it do we."

"Don't sweat, just take it one step at a time, right?"

"Right," I acknowledge.

"Passwords are like apples in a fantasy garden; they are perfect, ripe and there for the taking, sunshine," VJ replied. "Well, they are if you know how to pick 'em."

"And you know how of course," I mutter.

"I know that they aren't stored as words but as a set of encrypted characters called hashes."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"I don't really need a password, I just need the thing that lets me decrypt that hash, or at least match it," he was talking about his favourite subject, there was no stopping him now. "Now, to do that we in the hacker community created something called rainbow tables. These are files of common passwords that are pre-hashed. Now sit back and let me just unlock this..."

His words trailed off. In the back of the van he'd be tapping away on Big Brenda's keyboard. VJ had once explained that his trusty Panasonic Toughbook was definitely female.

He'd also explained that if a computer was switched on and connected to the internet, even if it was locked down, he could still access it. I was here, primarily, to switch the bloody computer on.

After that I was to collect any other intel I could find. And that meant old school spying. Or at least using a compact digital camera with night vision mode and an external UV light source, so that I could photograph any documents I found lying round.

"It also helps if you've got the most up to date version of RainbowCrack," VJ chuntered, "and if we'd been up against a Mac I'd have asked DaveGrohl for help."

"Dave Grohl?" I asked, "as in the Foo Fighter's front man."

"No, as in DaveGrohl the brute force password cracker for Mac-OS," he corrected me. "But that's academic, since they're using PCs..." he paused, "AND WE'RE IN!"

"Right, I'll get on with my bit, you know, the risky stuff, while you faff about on a computer in the back of a nice warm, dry van."

I strapped the light to my head and began opening filing cabinets, working up from the bottom drawer, like a pro should.

And when I'd got pictures of about every document in the office it would be time to sanitise the place and exfil. After that we'd drive through the night back to Stafford. Oh the unbounded joy of working on Her Majesty's Secret Service.