Zero Days, page 18
Vika poured herself another whisky. ‘He was one of the best fucking software engineers in Silicon Valley. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple. A bunch of start-ups. Even Efren Bell. He’s worked for them all.’
‘And now he boxes. Interesting career move,’ Drayton said, and then when she didn’t immediately respond, he asked, ‘How did you guys meet?’
‘I had a company. In Kiev. We looked for flaws in software. In systems.’
‘Zero days?’
‘They were always the most valuable. The big tech companies were among our best customers in the early days, paying us for finding bugs they didn’t know about. Paid us a lot. For a while, Bret was the guy we dealt with.’
‘Bug bounties?’ said Drayton.
She nodded. ‘Then when he left the Valley, we still worked together from time to time. And boxed. We boxed a lot.’
Bret returned to the room bringing a tray of snacks – dried banana and mango, prawn crackers, long chewy strands of dried fish – which he laid on the table beside the whisky.
‘So why did you leave Silicon Valley, Bret? That must have been a great gig.’
Bret lit a cigarette, handing one to Vika.
‘It was, for a while. The stuff I was working on, it was cutting fucking edge. Artificial Intelligence. I was living the life, driving a Porsche, earning so much fucking money, man. And it wasn’t just the money, I thought we were building the future, empowering people. Google’s motto, ‘Do no evil’. Remember that? At first I actually believed that shit, but the only people we were empowering were ourselves. We thought we were gods, a new priesthood, and in a way we were. But I began to see Silicon Valley’s dream for what it was, a fucking nightmare.’
‘That’s a big call.’
Brett poured another whisky, adding ice. Well into the second bottle now.
‘You remember Steve Jobs once boasted about knowing what people want before they even know it themselves?’
Drayton said he remembered something like that from the Apple founder.
‘Well, that’s what I was doing my friend. That’s what I was doing for those companies, but especially at the end for Efren Bell. We called it behavioural algorithms, algorithms that tell what you want before you even know it yourself. Give you stuff before you’ve even thought about it. Enhancing your experience, they call it.’
He laughed. A contemptuous laugh.
‘Those algorithms are hungry, man. They need data, shit-loads of data. Goodbye privacy. Big Tech is one big spying empire, tracking everything you do, and you know what they say? “Your data’s safe with us.” Sure, it’s safe, just until the moment it isn’t. Until it’s stolen or sold. Used to manipulate you. Advertisers, politicians, any creep who can get his hands on it. To serve you better, they say. “Our intentions are good. We’re good guys.” Sure, just until the day they aren’t, and then it’s too late. It’s the behaviour of dictators, cults. You know what I’m saying, Drayton? And you ask me why I wanted out.’
He was ranting, slurring his words.
‘Remember the early days of the internet? All the promise? Now it’s one big fucking sewer, destroyed by fake news, trolls, spammers and big corporations. Especially big corporations. Code is power, man.’
Bret’s toddler was screaming again, the noise cutting through the building’s flimsy walls as if they weren’t there. Its mother was screaming too, at the child and also for Bret to get his arse upstairs and help her out. But Bret hadn’t finished yet. He was on a roll, talking about creepy men in white coats.
‘Imagine you’re in a mall and you’re followed everywhere by a man in a white coat with a clipboard, recording everywhere you go. Everything you do. I mean everything. He’s right on your shoulder, noting down how long you stop, what you pick up. You grab a coffee, he’s noting the brand, counting the sugar. Blow your nose, he’s got that too. Creepy yeah. Well that’s what trackers do when you’re online. Fucking cookies. To improve your experience. Fuck that.’
Bret said that after he escaped Silicon Valley, he went off the grid. ‘One big fucking computer detox, man. Came to Thailand, didn’t look at a screen for months and felt a whole lot better for it. Met my girlfriend and started the boxing school, investing some of the cash from the Valley. Tip-toed back online, doing stuff with Vika.’
‘What sort of stuff?’
‘Stuff,’ said Bret, sitting back down because the toddler had stopped crying. And Vika was giving him a look. The kind of look that said, ‘shut the fuck up.’
*****
Drayton woke the following morning fully dressed, on top of his narrow bed, with a brutal hangover. His head throbbed and creaked each time he moved it. Like there was something in there hammering away, straining to get out, and it might burst at any moment. A Mekong whisky hangover.
So he lay as still as he could, watching the fan on the ceiling above and surveying the inside of his mosquito net for signs of life. He seemed to have done a good job closing the net before he passed out and could see no sign of any sneaky bloodsucker staring down at him. Maybe they just didn’t like blood laced with Mekong whisky.
He hadn’t done so well with the door of the room. It was slightly ajar and one of the dogs from the yard had crept in and was curled up asleep at the foot of his bed. He reached out of bed to find something to throw at it, but the movement was too painful. He’d have to put up with the dog, at least for now.
Bret knocked and entered the room looking much healthier than he deserved to. He was carrying a tray with a mug of coffee for Drayton, milk, sugar and painkillers on the side. ‘Man, you look so fucking bad,’ he said.
‘Yeah, sure. Thanks man,’ was the best Drayton could do by way of a reply.
He sat with his laptop on his room’s small terrace, intending to check the Berlin Group account, but then slammed the lid shut and hit it hard with the flat of his hand. ‘What the fuck?’ Remembering that Vika had changed the password. He hammered on the door of her room. ‘Vika, Vika, we need to talk.’ There was no response. Then he spotted her across the yard, a solitary figure in the main building of the boxing school, pounding another punch bag. He tried to attract her attention, shouted again, but the words came out as a painful rasp, and anyway, she was too absorbed with herself, with her swinging fists and legs, to notice.
He almost fell over one of the sleeping stray dogs, kicking at it as he returned to his terrace, and to his computer.
At first he didn’t see the message from Tun Zaw, buried amid the clutter of his private email account. It caught him by surprise. He’d asked the Burmese boy to be in touch if he heard more, hinting at further cash for his computer course, but hadn’t really expected to hear anything, at least not so quickly. The message was titled ‘Professor Pendleton’, Tun Zaw saying he’d hacked the hospital’s computers and accessed Dr Shwe’s notes, sounding matter-of-fact about it, as if breaking into the hospital’s system was the most natural thing in the world.
‘The notes were a bit of a mess. The professor’s body was found near a temple wall, been there all night, so the dogs had made a mess of him. He’d had a massive heart attack.’
No surprises there, thought Drayton, not even the dogs. It was what came next that really got his attention, Tun Zaw writing that soldiers had collected the body from the hospital and had also demanded all the old man’s possessions and the autopsy report. They’d been particularly concerned about what the Burmese boy called ‘all his pacemaker stuff’.
Tun Zaw ended by saying his computer studies were going well. ‘Though still short of money for the course’.
Drayton wrote a brief note back. ‘Thanks. Good job. Anything more, especially about the soldiers, would be useful.’
Then he looked again at the faxes Morgan had sent to him in Bagan, concentrating on the technical spec about the pacemaker. It described the device as a prototype, containing a new chip with military grade security. It said the pacemaker was unhackable.
*****
When he could no longer hear the pounding of the punch bag, Drayton crossed to Bret’s office, expecting to find Vika there. But Bret was alone in front of his computer screens, wearing a big pair of headphones and drumming hard on the desk, following the beat of whatever was blasting into his ears.
‘You seen Vika?’ Drayton shouted, a hand on Bret’s shoulder.
‘Sit down,’ Bret said, removing the headphones. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
Each computer screen was a mosaic of small video windows. Bret clicked between them, each click enlarging a window, bringing the video to full frame. First up was a wide shot of a windy beach in Alicante, Spain, where a man was walking his dog. The dog taking a crap and the man pretending not to notice.
‘I hate it when they do that,’ Bret said.
Then a mall in Berlin with shoppers laden down with bags. A woman accidentally knocking over a pile of clothes, but walking on because she thought nobody had seen. Next, a couple browsing in a Paris book shop. The fine arts section. Students perhaps, getting affectionate between pulling out books, stealing a kiss behind the shelves where they thought they couldn’t be seen. Then a Boston coffee shop, where a young woman at the counter seemed like she was complaining about her drink, handing it back. The barista turning to make her another. Not looking happy.
‘I think she was telling him the cappuccino was all froth,’ Bret said. ‘Sure looks like froth.’
He clicked another and up came a London launderette, with a couple of customers sitting and watching their clothes going round and round in the wash. Then a mass in a church in Rome, a priest giving a sermon, the congregation bopping up and down in their pews. Kneeling, sitting, standing, kneeling again.
It took Drayton a while to realise what he was looking at. ‘Surveillance cameras, right?’
‘Right,’ said Bret, clicking again on the one in the laundry and taking control of the camera. Moving it side to side, up and down. Stopping on a guy pulling sheets out of a drier. Then putting them back in because they weren’t dry. Feeding in more money, but then thumping the coin slot because his coin had got stuck.
‘Do you know how many surveillance cameras are sold around the world each year Chuck? One hundred million. And do you know what most have in common? Zero security. Security cameras with zero fucking security.’
Bret clicked through to the home page of the website with all the videos. The site’s logo was a cartoon image of a faceless spy in fedora hat, dark glasses and with a raised collar. Beside it were the words, ‘WATCHING THEM WATCING YOU’
It was Bret’s website, and he described it as his playpen. ‘It’s hosted in Moldova, one of those East European dives that don’t give a shit, and I run it anonymously, through a network of proxy servers. I’m not even sure that what I’m doing is hacking. This isn’t Jason Bourne, Drayton. Breaking into these things is child’s play. These are mostly IP cameras. You know, the picture streamed via the internet. Very few are encrypted. So, once you’ve located them, sniffed them out, it’s pretty easy to tap in.’
He said that controlling the cameras was straightforward too, since most had no password, or they used the login and password out of the box. ‘Even when they change passwords, most are so stupid, they’re easy to crack. I’ve got almost 100,000 online security cameras on the website.’
He showed Drayton how he’d indexed them by country, city and type. Shops, bars, clubs, traffic junctions, airports. Even animals. A camera watching horses. Offices. A few barbershops too. Everywhere. ‘I draw the line at baby-cams and home security. I don’t want to help perverts or get folk burgled.’
‘Now I see why they call you Fisheye,’ said Drayton. ‘But why? What’s the point?’
‘To show how internet security sucks. And how they don’t give a shit about privacy. People have a right to know they’re being watched. And they can come to my website and search their neighbourhood. See who’s monitoring them.’
‘Pretty spooky,’ said Drayton.
‘That’s my point,’ said Bret. ‘That’s precisely my point.’
To Drayton, there was something compelling in their ordinariness. Addictively mundane. Regular people just doing regular stuff and with no idea they were being watched. Permanently monitored.
Bret crossed to a big fridge, collecting a couple of beers, saying it would help with the hangover.
‘Did you work with Vika in Kiev?’ Drayton asked.
‘A little. Though mostly I did my work from here.’
‘And what sort of work was that?’
When Bret didn’t answer, Drayton said, ‘Grom, Ghoul, Tox, Bubblegum, Dim sum, they were part of the Kiev team too? And Razor, and another hacker called Neo?’
Bret sat down with the beers. He didn’t answer directly. ‘Vika always had a good eye for talent. But organising hackers is like herding cats. The Kiev company belonged to her and her brother Thomas. They were the best. Still are.’
‘The best at finding zero days?’
Bret shrugged. ‘That’s where the money’s at.’
Then Vika came into the office. She sat down at a coffee table, placing her open laptop in front of her, the online edition of the Bangkok Post on its screen. ‘Shut the fuck up, the both of you, and come and sit down.’
She pointed at a headline, ‘Police hunt hit and run driver’. It reported that a stolen pick-up truck hit a motorbike in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand. Slammed it hard. Killing the driver and his passenger, who were thrown across the road. It identified them as two young tourists. There was a large photograph of a woman, who was British and had only been in the country for a few days.
The other tourist, a man, had been driving the motorbike and was described as her boyfriend, though it seemed they’d only hooked up in Chiang Mai. His photograph was smaller, taken by an immigration camera as he arrived from Myanmar. It named him as Eduardo Neves, twenty-seven years old and from Brazil.
‘It’s Grom,’ Vika said. ‘They’ve killed Grom.’
Drayton recognised him too. The dour pool player from the bar beneath the Digital Futures office in Yangon.
They sat in silence, staring at the newspaper.
‘Perhaps it was just an accident,’ Drayton said.
Bret was already at his computers.
‘Is there a precise location?’ he asked.
Vika gave him the name of an intersection, on the edge of the city, and within five minutes Bret had identified seven surveillance cameras in and around the area.
‘Shit,’ he said, finding that a police traffic camera monitoring the junction was out of action. It seemed to have been down for days. Another was focussed on the entrance of a bank. A third in a coffee shop. Two more in a mall and, anyway, too far from the junction. A sixth covered what looked like the yard of a factory.
The last was monitoring a petrol station forecourt.
‘Yes,’ said Bret, banging a hand on his desk.
Vika and Drayton joined him at his computers.
‘It’s a bunch of petrol pumps Bret,’ Vika said.
‘Look! Look! The petrol station is on the intersection. And the intersection is right there,’ he said, pointing to the top of the screen, beyond the pumps.
It took him less than a minute to take control of the camera.
‘What time did it happen?’ he asked.
‘Early afternoon is all the paper says,’ replied Vika.
Bret accessed the camera’s memory, and looked back at the previous day’s video, starting from midday, scrolling quickly.
‘There,’ he said, as the camera’s clock registered 13.42. He scrolled back and then zoomed in to the top of the image, where it showed the intersection, slowing it down. It was not the best-quality camera and by zooming in, an already grainy image became fuzzy and washed out.
But it was enough.
The motorbike came from the left, the pick-up truck from the right, the truck veered across the road, like it was targeting the bike, which flew into the air as it was hit, the two fuzzy blobs that were its passengers, thrown violently and in different directions.
The truck left the frame and the two bodies lay motionless a few metres apart. Moments later, a tall figure walked to one of the bodies, leaned down for a moment and picked something up. Perhaps a bag, it was hard to tell. The man’s head was all black, as if he was wearing a ski-mask. He then left the frame, carrying whatever he’d taken. He ignored the other body.
‘You want to see it again?’ Bret asked.
‘Not really,’ said Drayton. ‘I think we can safely say that wasn’t an accident. What do you suppose the guy took?’
‘Phone. Laptop. That would be my best guess,’ said Vika, sitting back down at the coffee table.
‘Hey Bret,’ she said. ‘You got another one of those beers?’
Bret crossed to his fridge, and as he returned with more beers. Drayton said, ‘I think you guys gotta level with me.’
‘Level with you Drayton?’ said Vika, ‘About what exactly.’
‘Let’s start with Bagan, Professor Richard Pendleton’s pacemaker. It contained an advanced chip. Military grade. Unhackable, the company said.’
‘Nothing’s unhackable,’ Vika said.
‘But you didn’t just hack the pacemaker, sending the professor a little jolt from time to time, to remind him who he worked for. Whatever you installed was smart. It disguised itself, it adapted, it hid. It kept sending bullshit to his doctors, telling them whatever they wanted to hear. Why go to all that trouble for a few Buddha heads?’
Bret looked at Vika, who sat staring coldly at Drayton, saying nothing.
‘Tell him,’ said Bret.
Vika looked out towards the yard where the steady pounding of gloves on punch bags had started up again.
‘We were testing a zero day,’ she said. ‘It was a trial.’
‘And this trial, it worked, didn’t it Vika. Because Dmitry now has what he wants, that’s what you told me. The professor was no longer needed. He was shut down. And so was Razor, and so was Grom. You too, almost. And maybe your brother, Thomas.’
Vika looked across the room at Bret’s computers, the screens still showing the images from the surveillance camera at the intersection in Chiang Mai. Drayton’s words had blown away the lingering fog of their hangovers a good deal more effectively than the beer.
