Читать книгу Sam Bourne 4-Book Thriller Collection - Sam Bourne - Страница 63
ОглавлениеMonday, 2.25pm, Brooklyn
Will maintained his perch by the window, regularly peeling back the curtain to look out onto the street. He knew it was foolhardy. If anyone was following him, there could hardly be a better way to attract their attention. He flapped the material back and forth so often, he looked as if he were sending a coded message.
He had said goodbye to his father only minutes after they had met up. Monroe Sr had looked at him blankly when Will called up the Bitensky story on the BlackBerry, as if the whole business was just too deranged to take seriously. He had made a gesture with his face and hands – let’s put all this nonsense aside – and asked Will to come back home with him. There he would have a chance to shower, sleep and generally calm down. Linda would look after him. For his own part, he had an important case to prepare for that morning, but he would be back in the evening. Then father and son could put their heads together and work out how they were going to get Beth back. It was a tempting offer, but Will declined. He had wasted enough time already. With thanks he sent his father back to his car – and fired off a text message to TC.
To his great relief she called back. She had been released at nine that morning. Police had just viewed the CCTV tapes from her building. The footage from Saturday night included a sequence shot by the camera above the back entrance: it showed Pugachov helping TC and an unnamed man into a large bin and wheeling them out of sight. It then showed him re-entering the building a few minutes later. Not only did it confirm the admittedly strange story she had told detectives – it also showed that when TC had left Mr Pugachov, he was alive and well.
There was something in the dead man’s trousers which helped, too. In his right pocket was the spare key for TC’s apartment. He would surely only have needed to use that if she was not in and the door had been locked. With that second alibi, the police released TC. They even thanked her for her time – doubtless, thought Will, with a scripted paragraph from the NYPD customer care manual.
It was Will’s idea to meet at Tom’s, in what was a straightforward calculation. Both his and TC’s apartments had been monitored; here, they had at least a chance to meet undetected.
Besides, TC had a plan – just a hunch, she said – that required major computing brainpower. Now she was standing over Tom’s shoulder as he stabbed at the keyboard.
‘So you’re certain of the domain name?’ he was saying.
‘All I can tell you is what it says on the card I took. Rabbi.Freilich@Moshiachlives.com.’
‘OK, OK, that’s what I’ll try. Spell Mosh—, you know, for me again?’
‘For the third time: M-O-S-H-I-A-C-H.’
Will glanced back out of the window. As much as Tom loved Beth, he could not stand TC. At Columbia Will had always put it down to jealousy, the difficulties of being a three. Now he reckoned it was more like organic combustion: Tom and TC were phosphorus and sulphur. They could not meet without sparking up.
In a novel form of coping strategy, Tom chose not to talk to TC at all. He talked to himself instead.
‘OK, so what we need to do is run a host domain name.’ He punched those last three words into the ‘shell’, a kind of empty window on the screen he had created. A few seconds later, a string of numbers appeared: 192.0.2.233.
‘All right, who is 192.0.2.233?’ He said the words as he typed them.
Back came an answer. Among a whole lot of blurb about ‘registrants’ and ‘administrative contacts’ was the address of the Hassidim’s headquarters in Crown Heights. The very building Will and TC had been in last night.
‘Good, now let’s talk to Arin.’
‘Arin? Who the hell is Arin?’
‘ARIN is the American Registry for Internet Numbers, the organization which allocates IP addresses – you know, the string of numbers we had before.’
‘But I thought you already had that for this, you know, domain.’
‘I had one of the numbers. ARIN will give us all the numbers allocated to this company or organization. We will have the number for every machine they have. Once we have that, we can get to work.’
Soon the screen was filled with numbers, dozens of them. This, TC realized, was the entire Hassidic computer network, expressed in numerical form.
‘All right, this is the range we’ll scan.’
‘What does that mean, “scan”?’
‘I thought you didn’t want me to get too technical. “Save the geek stuff, Tom.” Remember?’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘We wait.’
TC headed for the couch, laying herself flat out, using Tom’s overcoat as a blanket, before falling into exhausted sleep. Tom was working away on a different computer, hammering at the keys. Will alternated between staring out of the window and at a photograph on the wall: a picture of himself, Tom and Beth, wrapped up in thick winter gloves, scarves and coats in what looked like a ski resort. In fact it was the centre of Manhattan, early on a Sunday morning after a night-long blizzard. The smile on Beth’s face seemed to register something more than laughter: there was, what was the word, appreciation, for the fact that life, despite everything, could be wonderful.
An hour and a half later, the computer beeped; not the trill of a new email but a simpler sound. Will turned around to find Tom jumping back to the machine he had left running.
‘We’re in.’
Now all three were gathered round, staring at a screen that only made sense to one of them.
‘What’s this, Tom?’ It was Will, deciding to get the question in first – and phrase it politely – before TC had a chance to bark.
‘These are the system logs for the machine we’ve just hacked into. This way we should be able to tell who’s been in and out.’
TC was biting her nails, willing everything to happen faster. Will was scanning not the screen but Tom’s face, looking for any sign of progress. He did not like what he saw: Tom seemed puzzled. His lips were pursed; when he was on the brink of a breakthrough, they would part, in readiness for a smile.
‘Nothing there. Damn.’
‘Look again,’ said TC. ‘You might have missed something. Look again.’
But Tom did not need to be told. He inched closer to the screen, now slowly going through each line that appeared in front of him.
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘This might be nothing.’
‘What? What?’
‘See, that line in the log. There. Time service crashed. 1.58 this morning. It might be nothing. Programmes often crash and restart automatically. No big deal.’
‘But?’
‘It could indicate something else.’
‘Yes?’
Tom was not doing well under TC’s interrogation. Will stepped in. ‘Sorry, Tom. For a know-nothing like me: what’s a time service?’
‘It’s just a bit of the networking set-up that some people forget about. They don’t turn it off so it just sits there, keeping track of the time of day.’
‘So?’
‘The important thing is, people forget it’s there. So they don’t give it the tender loving care they give to the rest of the system. Old security holes that may have been closed elsewhere in the system sometimes get left in the time service bit.’
‘You mean, it’s like a hole in the garden fence, round the back where no one notices?’
‘Exactly. What I’m wondering is whether this time service crashed through, you know, natural causes – or whether somebody bust right through it. If you know what you’re doing, you can send in a buffer overflow, a huge bunch of data in a specific sequence, which totally screws up the time service. If you really know what you’re doing, you can not only make it crash but kind of bend it to your will.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Will.
‘You can make it run your commands, which effectively gives you access to the server.’
‘Is that what happened here?’
‘I don’t know. I need to see the time service’s own access log. That’s what I’m waiting for now . . . whoa, hold on. This is good. See that, right there?’
He was pointing at a string of numbers by the time, 1.58am. ‘Hello, stranger.’
It was a new IP address, a string of numbers different from all the others allocated to the Hassidim and their network. This was the signature of an outsider.
‘Can you see who it is?’
‘That’s what I’m asking right now.’ He typed: whois 89.23.325.09?
‘And here is our answer.’
Tom was pointing at the line on the screen. It took Will a second to focus on the words. But there they were, words which changed everything. Neither he nor TC could make a sound. The three of them stood in silence, looking at the address in front of them.
The organization which had hacked into the Hassidim’s computer – reading everything they were reading, looking over their virtual shoulder to see every one of their calculations, including those that revealed the exact locations of the righteous men – was based in Richmond, Virginia and there, on the screen, was its full name.
The Church of the Reborn Jesus.
