Gellar—easily recognizable from a picture on the town’s website—who was sitting with a gentleman in the back corner. They were both too involved in their conversation to notice me.
I walked into the partially enclosed bar area and made myself comfortable in a booth with my backpack next to me. Reaching inside, I pulled out my own laptop and got to work. By the time I’d ordered coffee and a sandwich to-go so I wouldn’t look suspicious, I was done setting up.
Since Buddha claimed Gellar was in the club’s pocket, my goal was to crack his email accounts and look for clues as to why he’d risk getting on their bad side. Breaking into them remotely would have been easy enough to do, but it was a tedious process and I was on a time crunch. On top of lost profits, food spoiled and utility bills still had to be paid. I had plenty of cash stashed away, but knew Torch wouldn’t take it even if offered. The best way to help was just getting the place up and running again.
I was starting at the top, with the man who’d signed off on the suspension, hoping to kill two birds with one stone by hacking the laptop he more than likely used for both work and personal activities. And the easiest way to do that was by having him connect to an open wifi network, which was exactly what he was using at the moment. Lucky me.
I found the restaurant’s network and cloned it to create an evil twin hotspot on a different frequency. It was called that because by renaming a new access point to match the original, a person or computer could be tricked into connecting to a hacker’s machine instead. Not only would every keystroke and website Gellar used while connected be routed directly through my laptop, but I could push spyware onto his.
The next step was getting him to switch over to it since he was already connected. I looked inside the backpack and rummaged around for my wifi jammer. Setting it to the frequency Aspen Grille’s hotspot was running on, I blocked the signal and booted every user off the original network. They would have to either manually re-connect to my access point since it was the only one now visible or—like most of them did these days—the laptops would do it automatically.
Within seconds, I had access to Gellar’s machine and embedded a remote access trojan—a RAT in tech lingo—into a pop-up that mimicked a software update notification. If that didn’t work, my backup plan was to send a ghost email with the trojan attached and make it look like it came from the mayor.
I glanced over the half-wall encircling the bar area and watched. Gellar, in his nonexistent wisdom, immediately clicked on the pop-up.
And that was it, he’d obliviously downloaded malicious code giving me backdoor access to his hard drive, including his files, webcam, and microphone. I’d be able to see and hear everything he did on that computer and capture his passwords. If there was anything of value, I’d find it. It would have to wait until I got home though, I still had to swing by the bar and grab the surveillance footage before bunkering down to comb through it all.
My sandwich arrived just as I finished covering my tracks by getting rid of the cloned access point and switching off the jammer. I packed up my shit, left cash on the table, and walked out. The entire operation had taken fifteen minutes.
: : : :
I walked out of Crow’s Nest with a flash drive containing the security feed from the last two weeks. There was some kind of bazaar happening at an elementary school nearby, so parking spots on Main Street were nonexistent and I’d had to leave my car six blocks up. I grumbled under my breath almost the entire way, irritated at myself for not having switched into more comfortable footwear back at the house. This right here was another reason I preferred the bike for day-to-day transportation; you never had to pray to the parking gods to intercede.
With two blocks left and a break in traffic from a red light up ahead, I decided to cross the street. Wincing through the foot discomfort, I darted across the road and looked back to make sure none of Linwood’s finest were out looking for jaywalkers. It was the petty shit like not using a crosswalk that brought in most of their