Stealth Associates Pt. 03

He picks up a glasses case and snaps it open. Inside is a pair of specs, a selection of lenses ranging from clear, through smoked to sunglasses and a USB cable.

"The days when you lot had a wire trailing from your ears are lost and gone forever," he announces, "these are VocalSkull bone conduction smart glasses. There's speakers built into the earpieces and a microphone in the bridge. The speakers work by transmitting sound vibrations through your cheekbones instead of your ears. They connect by Bluetooth to the phone."

Again VJ and I do our nodding dog impressions. Ryan conveys his complete and utter scepticism at our comprehension with a sneer, but presses on.

Ryan packs the kit into a plastic clip crate and hands it to me.

"That's your lot, have fun and if you break it..." he grins malevolently, "...you buy it."

+++

39 - The Capitol

The Bishop's Avenue oozes north from Hampstead to East Finchley. It's the only place in London where an oligarch can buy somewhere with with ten bedrooms, a swimming pool, gym and garaging for all their supercars and have change from fifteen million quid.

The houses themselves all look similar. They've been designed in the tasteless-but-ostentatious school of architecture. Everything that can have a pillared portico does. But bizarrely the windows all seem to be cheap, tacky, white UPVC double glazing.

VJ and I are in a knackered-looking Fiat Ducato van. Bomber and Viki aren't included in this jaunt down to the smoke. Bomber's taking it particularly hard. It's something to do with London being his home town, he thinks that ought to make him a natural choice for this job.

It's striking that most of the houses look uninhabited. Not just the derelict ones but even the houses that are in good nick.

"Bugger me," I gasp, "does anyone actually live here?"

"I suppose someone must, I mean, these houses can't all be unoccupied," VJ answers, 'but there's not a lot going on that proves the area's inhabited.'

"I think they look like mausoleums," I muse.

My comment makes him chuckle out loud.

"You might be onto something there," he replies. "Do you think that when some rich bloke snuffs it he's bricked up inside his ugly great house with his servants, mistresses and favourite Ferrari? You know, like the ancient Egyptians in the pyramids."

"Who knows," I answer, "but it wouldn't surprise me."

We lapse into silence. It weighs down oppressively and lasts until it becomes so unbearable that someone has to break it.

"Did you know I've been arrested," he announces out of the blue.

"Arrested?" I'm gobsmacked, "was it for anything serious?"

"Yeah, a breach of the Misuse of Computers Act," he says matter of factly. "When I was fifteen I was in an online hacker group for about six months, they arrested me five years after I quit."

"So what happened?"

"We were good," he says, there's an unmissable hint of pride in his voice. "We would hack US government computers. We didn't do it because we were anarchists or anything. Let me put it this way, quite a few of us, me included, were trying to suss out just how much the Americans know about UFOs and what they're really doing at Area 51."

"Right," I nod to keep him talking.

"We had this unofficial leader, Wraith, who used to direct us to sites. Turns out she was an FBI agent. She took us down. Everyone went to prison except me."

"How come you didn't?"

"Combination of it being my first offence, I wasn't a member of BL4NK for very long and I was young at the time of the offence, he shrugs nonchalantly, trying to style it out.

"So what happened after you got nicked?"

"Suspended sentence, I got kicked out of university and had to live at home with me mum. Staying at home wasn't a problem coz that's what I was doing anyway, but getting sacked from uni was really annoying."

"So how come you ended up at Stealth then?"

"They came after me. Head-hunted me I s'pose you could say."

I recall the way Alasdair Lennox approached me last December. It seems Stealth is a creature of habit.

"Dirty Harriet turned up on our doorstep. She looked as out of place in a Wolverhampton council estate as a bacon butty would at an Eid buffet."

I throw my head back and bark out a laugh.

"Anyhow, she offers me one of those modern apprenticeship thingies. Basically the firm will employ me as a trainee analyst and cyber security guy, and I'd get paid and get qualified - a BSC in Intelligence and Cyber Security from Staffs Uni - provided I got through selection. It sounded like a win-win situation to me so I bit her hand off."

We lapse back into silence as I pull up at the side of the road. I break it when a thought occurs to me.

"Just a thought mate," I say quietly, "but have you considered that this Wraith did to your group what Valkyrie's doing to X Korps?"

"Yeah it has crossed my mind," he replies. "In fact it's also a lot like what we're doing with Stealth, but I'm working to the assumption that we're the good guys."

"I hope you're right," I say and open the van door. 'Let's get on with it shall we?"

+++

40 - Stakeout

I'm lurking in the shrubbery behind the bins. It's just started to rain and the sparse foliage of a privet hedge isn't doing anything to keep me dry. More to the point raindrops keep splashing on the lenses of my VocalSkull smart glasses. I keep wiping them clear with a tissue but it's largely in vain.

"Remind me again, why am I the one that's got to do this?" I ask bitterly over the comms net.

"Are you kidding? You don't seriously expect me to climb that fire escape. I mean, not with my asthma."

It seems too bloody convenient the way that he becomes a wheezy nerd whenever it suits him. Oh, and it suits him whenever there's anything to be done with the vaguest hint of physical exercise involved.

I'm at the back of the McMansion on Bishop's Avenue where the server farm's located. There's a metal fire escape at the back of the building that leads up the three storey post-modern architecture monstrosity. There's one window up in the top floor that's glowing yellow in the evening gloom. Proof that someone's in residence. Though to be honest we had no idea anyone was in residence until it got dark this evening.

"So what do we do if they stay here all night?" VJ asks.

"Then that's it," I answer, "game over and we go home."

"You could sneak up to 'em and zap them with the stun gun in your phone," VJ suggests, "that'd be like real deal James Bond stuff yeah."

"Yeah, so there's a couple points against that plan. First, the client was kind of clear in the pre-op briefing, no loss of life - I take that to also mean no risk of hurting anyone too. Oh and secondly, how do I secure him in case he comes round before I'm gone?" I ask, "the one bit of kit we haven't been issued is handcuffs."

"Ah spoilsport," VJ snorts.

We sink back into silence and wait. And then wait some more. But then, suddenly, and taking me by surprise, the light in the window's extinguished. I wait with baited breath until I hear from VJ five minutes later

"X-Ray is clear of the building," VJ transmits.

"OK, I'm going in," I tell him.

"And the best of British luck to you sir," he replies in his best posh officer and a gentleman accent.

I squeeze out from cover and jog across the back lawn, skirting the empty swimming pool littered with junk. Next I climb up on top of a conveniently placed skip. From there I scrabble clumsily onto the fire escape.

I'm climbing cautiously, trying to be as quiet and as stealthy as possible. When I finally reach the third storey, I shuffle along a narrow pierced steel landing, clinging on to a horizontal drainpipe until I reach my target.

The only way to get through the window is by a gymnastic routine that I'm not truly confident about. I slither over the windowsill and bend at the waist until I'm doing a half handstand with my palms on the floor.

Walking on my hands and twisting my hips painfully, I finally get myself entirely inside and end up lying on my back in the gap between the wall and the desk.

"It's never like this for James Bond," I mutter bitterly while standing up.

"What'd you say?" VJ asks.

"Nothing!" My annoyance makes me snap back sharply. I take a deep breath, hold it for a heartbeat, exhale, then say; "right I'm in, what do I do now?"

+++

41 - Tiptoeing in the Dark

"So what do I do now?" I repeat myself, "c'mon clever clogs, tell me."

"Switch a computer on," he chuckles, "the sooner we get this done the sooner we can get out of here."

"What's all this we?" I ask as I struggle to my feet and squeeze out from behind the desk. "I'm the one taking all the risks while you sit nice and cozy in the back of the van, in case you hadn't noticed."

I fire up the first computer I come across. As it warms up I tear up the Velcro flap on my cargo pants and fumble inside until I find what I'm looking for.

"OK, it's on, and..." I plug a wifi dongle into the USB port and flick the antenna into the vertical, "...it's ready whenever you are."

"Great, all I need now is is a password and we'll be in."

His voice fades off as he taps away at the keyboard of his Panasonic Toughbook laptop in the back of the van.

"See, in movies hacking is done by fat, ugly slobs with absolutely no social skills," he tells me. "In reality it's all about angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night."

"You what?"

"Allen Ginsberg, Howl."

"Never heard of him,' I snap back, "so what sort of music does he do? Indie?"

"You bleeding great philistine," he snorts derisively. "Ginsberg, you know, the beat poet."

"Nope," I wind VJ up with a little white lie, "still never heard of him, he must be new on the scene."

The monitor flickers into life. The log on page comes up.

"It wants a password," I hiss, "and we don't have one, do we?"

"I tod you, don't sweat," he replies.

"That's reassuring," I say. "So what're you going to do? Guess randomly until you either get the right password or get locked out of the computer?"

"Patience Grasshopper," VJ comes back with his best impression of the master from the TV show Kung Fu. "Passwords are like apples in a dream orchard; they are perfect, ripe and there for the taking."

"I worry about you sometimes, I really do," I mutter. "And I suppose you know just how to pick these dream apples then."

"Of course," he says smugly. "Passwords aren't stored as words but as a set of encrypted characters called hashes."

"Tell me something I don't know," I mutter snippily.

"OK, try this for size. We don't really need a password to get in," he says, "did you know that?"

"No, I didn't," I'm forced to admit, "but then, since I'm not all that interested into gaining illegal access to other people's computers, I've never felt the need to know."

He ignores my sarcasm.

"All I really need is something that lets me decrypt the hash and match it." VJ's talking about his favourite subject, there's no way to shut him up now. "Now, to do that the hacker community created something called rainbow tables. These are files of common passwords that are pre-hashed. Now don't worry just sit back and let me do my thing."

He's explained during the pre-op briefing that so long as a computer's powered up and connected to the internet, even if it's locked down, he can still access it. I'm here, primarily to switch the machine on. Oh, and then infect the server with a nasty virus. Just so that X Korps get the message - we are Stealth Associates, we came to your server farm and kicked your damn ass.

"Of course, it also helps if you've got the most up to date copy of RainbowCrack," VJ interrupts my train of thought, "and if we'd been up against a Mac-based system I'd have asked DaveGrohl for help."

"David Grohl?" I ask, "as in the front man with the Foo Fighters? What the hell's he got to do with all this malarkey?"

"Nah, this has got nothing to do with rock music and everything to do with DaveGrohl, the brute force password cracker for Mac OS. But that's academic anyway as these guys are all using PCs, yeah..." VJ's voice fades away until he pauses for a very long moment leaving me holding my breath, "...AND WE'RE IN!"

+++

42 - Smash and Grab

The server's in an attic room running the length of the building. I gain access via a narrow flight of stairs. What little light there is in the makeshift server room comes from a couple of dormer windows. I reach into my coat pocket and pull out a small tactical torch. Holding it up at shoulder height but aiming it low so that its bright white LED beam isn't seen outside, which is just good professional practice but probably unnecessary in the largely deserted Bishop's Avenue.

The attic's clean and uncluttered. There's a dustpan and brush propped against the wall along with a bulging black bin bag. Somebody inside Sokolov's organisation takes server room tidiness seriously. Professionalism amongst cyberterrorists, now that's a turn up for the books.

The only noise in the room comes from a small free standing air conditioner by the back wall. It hums cheerfully to itself as it keeps the servers cool.

"How's it going?" I ask VJ.

"It's going OK, I'm downloading files, it'll take a while," his words buzz in my head via the smart glasses, but the absent minded tone of voice tells me VJ's concentrating on the incoming captured data. "Yeah, we're getting some good stuff. It'll be interesting to go through this in detail back in the bunker."

The servers are not what I expect, as in no black metal cabinets with glass fronts. I scan my torch over the front of the server nearest to me. Its a shelf rack loaded down with dozens and dozens of elderly-looking PC towers, connected by an ugly spaghetti mess of wires.

"Bloody marvellous," I sigh with irritation.

"What's the problem?" VJ asks with a sudden note of alarm in his voice.

"I'm looking at a sodding Beowulf," I reply, "a homemade, jury-rigged server."

"So?"

"It's going to take me at least a couple of minutes to locate enough free USB ports," I tell him, "have we got that long?"

"Yeah, yeah," he replies vaugeley, "don't sweat it, we've got bags of time before this lot finishes downloading."

I go from one row of computers to another attempting to identify the location of the unused USB ports. What it means is going to the back of the stacked computers and using a latex gloved forefinger to move wires aside then shining the white LED torch beam over the gubbins.

"How are you doing?" VJ asks.

"I'm ready any time you are sunshine,' I reply, "how about you?"

"Any second now..." he drags the last syllable out before saying quickly, "...right the download's done!"

"OK, I'll get on with doing my bit, shall I?" I ask.

I pull a small zip up storage case out of my coat. Unlike the flash drive dongle that's allowing VJ to access the proxy server farm's Local Area Network the thumb drives inside have to be kept separate for safety reasons. Once I plug the USB's in it's going to be goodnight and goodbye for the server farm

The virus begins to take hold of the servers almost immediately, not that I can see any external signs of this. In fiction malware can cause a computer to blow up. It's all very dramatic and makes for good viewing at the movies.

Meanwhile, in the real world there's no big boom. No dramatic cinematic explosions. But then, who needs plastic explosives to take out computers when malware will do the job?

Now all I've got to do is retrace my steps and we can go home.