Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

new line was written below. The text was computer gobbledygook.

I said, “What’s it doing?”

Hank pointed at the lines of text as they formed. He said, “It’s just copying locations on this laptop, and replicating the file structure on the drive. That way, we have an exact copy.”

“Will that take a long time?”

Hank shrugged. "Might take some time, depending on the speed of your drive.” He pushed his chair back and swiveled to get up out of it. Walked over to a two-seater couch and picked up a guitar. I stood up and looked around his room, which despite the computers was still the room of a teenager. There were black light posters of women with panthers, stuff like that. Hank noticed me looking.

“Want to see it in the black light?”

“Sure, why not.”

Hank stretched out for a remote control. He pushed a button and the room lights went off. Another button activated ultraviolet tubes secreted into the edges of the ceiling. Hank’s computer cave was suddenly some kind of rock and roll fantasy land. He strummed enthusiastically.

Then Ellie said, “Hey.”

I said, “What?”

She said, “This red light is on. I don’t know if it’s been on the whole time, or if it just started now.”

Hank dropped the guitar and came over. The screen on Abrams’ laptop was still blank, but now a tiny red light was pulsating, hidden in some recessed area of the plastic bezel frame. For a moment, none of us moved or said anything. And then Hank reached over and slammed the laptop shut, cutting off the red light. “Shit!” He quickly ripped cables from Abrams’ computer.

I said, “What?”

“Hold on.” Hank typed furiously on his laptop. “Fuck.” He looked at me, then to Ellie. “Oh shit. Turn the light on.”

I walked over to the remote control and reset the lights.

Ellie spoke slowly. “Hank? What’s going on?”

Hank ignored her and looked at his own screen, scrolled around, clicked and tapped for maybe two minutes without speaking. Shook his head and cursed again. He turned to us. His face had gone even more pale yellow than it had been.

“That red light was the laptop camera. I think it was recording us.”

Ellie said, “Why was it doing that?”

Hank said, “I don’t know why, Ellie. I think it was sending out.”

I said, “I thought everything was quarantined by your black box? How did it send out?”

Hank was scrutinizing his own laptop, clicking around rapidly. He pulled a phone from of his jeans pocket and examined it for a minute, tapping and swiping with fingers and two thumbs. “I think it spoofed the Wi-Fi.” He looked at George Abrams’ laptop, sitting on the desk. No longer just a slab of expensive plastic and silicone, more like a menacing object heralding an invasion. Hank glanced at Ellie. “What the fuck is this?”

Ellie was cool. She said, “I have no idea what’s going on. Take it slow, Hank, and explain simply.”

Hank ignored her and re-opened George Abrams’ laptop. The red light was now off. Hank leapt up and scurried to a work bench, retrieving a tiny screwdriver and a roll of electric tape. When he had returned to the laptop, Hank ripped off a piece of tape and stuck it over the pinhead-sized camera. He unscrewed the top plate where the keyboard sat. The keys came up, connected to a thin multi-colored ribbon. Hank lay that against the screen. A rectangular hole now gave access to the internal components of George Abrams’ laptop. Hank examined the contents. To me, it looked like the inside of any computer, all wires and computer chip boards, but not so to Hank. To him it looked special. He pointed at a tiny gray box, attached to the circuit board by a couple of dozen nano-sized legs, like an evil insect.

“It’s got its own sat link.” I saw that Hank was sweating. He looked at me, then at Ellie, eyes wild. “You guys brought me a Trojan horse.”

Hank hunted around inside the laptop. Found something else and tapped on it with the screwdriver. It was another tiny computer chip, blue and brown. He retrieved a pair of needle-nose pliers from the work bench, clamped the blue and brown chip between the two steel mandibles and pulled and twisted until the tiny thing popped out of Abrams’ laptop. He gently laid the chip onto the desk. Then did the same thing with the gray box. Afterwards, he sat back gasping for breath.

I put a hand on Hank’s shoulder, squeezed firmly. I said, “Slow it down, kid. Explain this calmly. Assume that we don’t know what you know. Like we’re dumb and ignorant old people, like we are your mom.”

Hank took a deep breath. “I would never try and explain this to my mom.” He picked up the jewelers’ screwdriver. Tapped the gray box resting on the desk. “The little box there. It communicates to satellite. Which means it connects to its own internet network, doesn’t need mine. Doesn’t need anyone else’s.” Then he pointed the screwdriver at the blue and brown chip he had removed. “This is a Wi-Fi spoofer. Neither of them have power now because I removed them from the motherboard.”

Ellie said, “I can guess about the satellite link. But what is a Wi-Fi spoofer, Hank?”

Hank took another deep breath. “I have Wi-Fi in the house, like a normal person, right?”

I said, “Right.”

“All of my devices and computers connect to my home Wi-Fi, and that’s how I get online.”

I said, “Yup, still with you.”

Hank tapped the little blue and brown chip. “This thing identified my home Wi-Fi, learned all about it, and then pretended to be it. So all the other things that connect to my Wi-Fi, like my computers and my phones and my mom’s stuff, maybe even the TV, they connected to this little box here because they thought it was kosher.”

Ellie said, “But it’s not kosher, Hank, is it?”

“No. It isn’t.”

I said, “What did it do?”

He said, “Remember the little red light that was on?” We nodded.