White-Hot Hack (Kate and Ian #2)(74)
Kate’s mind raced as she tried to piece together what had happened. Maybe Ian had been right about Charlie. Maybe he and Zach had been working together, and the reason they’d accessed footage of the garage camera wasn’t to see what cars they drove, but to hack the cars’ networks and set up some kind of remote alarm that would let Zach know which car was in use. It had probably infuriated them when they’d switched out the cars and Rob started accompanying Kate everywhere she went. Charlie had been the one to call and summon Ian back to headquarters, and what better time to apprehend Kate than when he’d be totally immersed in his work with the task force? Ian had probably mentioned that Steve planned to meet Kate halfway between DC and Indiana, otherwise how else would Charlie know Kate would be alone on this very stretch of road? Once Zach hacked into the Porsche’s network, he’d have access to her exact route and all the tools he would need to take control of the car the same way Ian had.
“So this is how it’s gonna go down,” Zach said. “Like you said, Ian will give me whatever I want, and what I want is money. Your husband has a lot of it, so it only makes sense. When we get to the airport, I’ll use your phone to call him and give him an amount. He’ll wire me the money, and approximately 2.5 seconds after I receive it, it’ll be gone again. If he tries to put me off or delay payment because he wants to set up some kind of bullshit FBI rescue, you’ll get on the plane with me and we’ll fly to another location. I don’t think he’ll like that at all.”
“You can’t fly,” she said, the words rushing out before she could stop them.
“Why the hell not?”
And then Kate knew.
It wasn’t Charlie after all.
It wasn’t anyone working for the FBI.
The airports that relied on the Eastern Interconnection had surely been briefed and were standing by, waiting for the signal to ground all flights whether their airport still had power or not. It was doubtful the general public would know anything about the warning. But if Zach and Charlie were working together, their plan would not include any kind of air travel, at least not in the immediate future.
“I just meant flights can be delayed.”
“We’re not flying commercial. The pilot will take off when I tell him to.”
Kate didn’t know which airport Zach planned to use or what he would do when he discovered the plane couldn’t take off.
Or what would happen if it could.
Her elation that Charlie was not involved was short-lived, because no matter how happy it made her to know he had nothing to do with it, she still had a frightening problem to solve.
“Are you the one who doxed Ian?” Her right hip had caught the edge of the console when he shoved her, and it throbbed.
“Do you even need to ask? I thought you were brighter than that. I was poking around in a network trying to get past a firewall one night when I encountered another hacker. I wasn’t that surprised actually. We figured the feds were on to us. They’re always hiding behind their aliases, trying to catch us doing something we shouldn’t, and this hacker seemed to know this was someplace he might find one of us.”
Kate remembered when Ian’s laptop alarm had gone off in the middle of the night and she’d been so worried he’d have to leave.
“So we’re battling it out, and I got curious and decided that instead of trying to get past the firewall, maybe I should try to determine who this guy is and where he’s located. I figured the information could be valuable. So naturally he’s hidden his IP address, but I’ve got this amazing tool—it’s like a little cell phone tower—that intercepts Wi-Fi signals and shows me their locations. I bought it off a guy at a hacking convention, and let me tell you, it wasn’t cheap but it sure has come in handy. There’s some triangulation involved, which is a giant pain in the ass, and he must have pulled the battery on his phone because I lost him literally seconds after I homed in on his location, which was your street. I still had some work to do, but once you get that far, it’s really just a matter of legwork and patience.”
Kate remained silent. She would not give him the satisfaction of asking for more information. It didn’t matter though, because he kept on talking.
“There are places where we store facts about our FBI friends. Screen names, aliases, pictures. That sort of thing. I copied all the images on file and I studied them. Once I relocated to your city, I stationed myself outside the apartment buildings on your street, and I observed the people coming and going. Even though the picture’s pretty old, there was no mistaking the man who walked out the front door of yours one morning. By the end of the week, I knew where he lived, the name of his pretty girlfriend, and her job at the food pantry. But would you believe I still didn’t know his name?”
Yes, Kate could absolutely believe it.
“It took me a few weeks to figure it out. I had to be careful not to draw attention to myself from the other carders, because that was the kind of thing a lot of people would be interested in. Eventually, I learned the picture of him had come from an old MIT yearbook. One of the forum members who went to college with him had heard from a friend of a friend that he’d been forced to work for the FBI after getting busted hacking something big.”
With the FBI, Kate thought. Not for.
“That’s when I tracked down that yearbook, found the picture, and learned his name was actually Ian Bradshaw. Not that I can find his real name anywhere online. I mean, the guy has more aliases than anyone I’ve ever known. But after a few more conversations with his college buddy, I discovered Ian Bradshaw had once done some programming for a certain start-up venture. It was all very hush-hush apparently, but where there are contracts and lawyers, there are also records if you’re willing to dig and know where to look. As a former attorney, you probably know all about that. I already wanted to dox him because we knew the feds were starting to close in, and I’m not a big fan of jail. That’s when I realized extortion is a much faster and more efficient way to acquire wealth than stealing credit card numbers, and his lovely girlfriend would make an excellent bargaining chip. My own little distributed denial of service attack. But then Mother Nature had to come along and f*ck everything up with a storm, and the message board blew up with all this chatter about an undercover hacker named Ian Merrick whose car had plunged into the Mississippi. When someone posted that yearbook photo and I realized Ian Merrick and Ian Bradshaw were the same person, you cannot even imagine the extent of my rage.”