The Ardmore Inheritance by Rob Wyllie (reading the story of the .txt) 📕

But it was what he did afterwards that intrigued Frank the most. Because no more than a few hours after the physical break-in, Geordie would follow it up with a skilled cyber attack, granting him unhindered access to the victim's private documents, photographs and god knows what else besides. At least a couple of celebrities had been done, and a week or two later some rather embarrassing photographs had mysteriously appeared in the seedier tabloids, which had caused their publishers to have some awkward questions to answer as to their source. However as far as Burnside knew, none of the victims known or otherwise had yet lodged a formal complaint. But as Pete said, you wouldn't, would you? Kick up a fuss and you could expect the scumbag to tell the world your most precious secrets, which was the last thing you'd want. That was until ACC Katherine Frost had been targeted and had decided to put her faith in Department 12B.

And now wee Eleanor Campbell was going to demonstrate how it was done.

'So Barker's phone,' Frank said, giving her a quizzical look. 'I assume it's got a password or a pin or whatever you call it?'

'That doesn't matter,' Eleanor said. 'It'll come through as a text notification and we'll be able to see it anyway.'

'It?'

'The authentication code.'

'Aye sweet,' he said, risking mimicking her again. 'But tell me young Eleanor, what's brought on this recent and much welcome hatred of DCS Barker on your part?'

'He tried to make me look stupid in a meeting. In front of lots of my colleagues. Nobody does that and gets away with it.'

Frank liked that. Hell hath no fury like a geeky forensic officer who's been made to look stupid by a fat-arsed Detective Chief Superintendant.

'Fair point well made wee Eleanor,' he said. 'So what's the plan?'

'We're going to hack into his iCloud account. Zak's given me an app to help.'

He remembered Zak from his Aphrodite investigation, a capable lad from the Met's Maida Vale labs who was even younger-looking and geekier than Eleanor herself, if that was possible.

'And this app is legit?'

She shrugged. 'Suppose. It came from GCHQ or MI6 or somewhere, that's what Zak says.'

Frank doubted that anything that came from either of those sources was in any way legitimate, morally or otherwise, but he didn't say so. And he wasn't bothered either.

'Ok, right, let's go.'

She punched a string of text into her keyboard, bringing up a login screen for the iCloud website.

'So first we need like a user code and a password. User code is easy, it's always their email, and we know his.Password is more difficult,' she said, frowning, 'but not that difficult. Not when we have Zak's password generator app. It's well wicked. It uses artificial intelligence all through it. A-I. It's way cool.'

Frank had listened to her explain A-I to him many times before but couldn't remember a thing about it, which would no doubt displease her. So he decided against asking for a refresher, instead allowing her to continue uninterrupted.

'So you can program it with personal stuff,' she said. 'Stuff you know about the mark.'

'Mark? That's what you call them do you, the victims?'

'Yeah, as in a con-artists mark. So as I said, we can program Zak's app with stuff you know about the mark. Like for example, we know Barker supports Spurs.'

'Arsenal actually,' Frank said, shaking his head with mock disgust.

'Whatever. I can easily change that.' She furrowed her brow then hastily banged something into her laptop. 'So it also knows his date of birth and the street where he lives and where he works and where he went to uni and his school and where he was born....'

'Aye, I get the picture,' Frank said wryly, 'but can we get to the point?' He knew from experience that when Eleanor went off on one of her long technical explanations, you were best to set aside the rest of the day.

'You don't get the picture,' she said, evidently intending to ignore his interruption, 'so from that, Zak's app can web-crawl onto like mega-tons of other databases, like the electoral register, the register of marriages, deaths and births, the land registry....'

'Eleanor....'

'...and stuff like that,' she said. 'It's wicked.'

'Eleanor, where's this all going?' he said, struggling to hide his impatience.

'So from that information it can narrow it down to a short-list. Nearly everybody chooses passwords based on stuff they know, don't they, because it's easier to remember? Stuff like their favourite football teams or players, or kids names or birthdays, or your old school, or your granddad's name blah blah blah. So by knowing all that, it massively cuts the number of possibilities the app has to try. As I said, it's super-cool artificial intelligence.'

For the first time, he began to understand what she was talking about.

'Aye I see that, very clever, very clever indeed. So what do we have to do to kick it all off?'

'We just have to click on this button that says go,' she said matter-of-factly, pointing to the screen. 'But of course before we do all of that, we always try the obvious one first.'

'Which is?'

She looked at him as if he was an alien from another planet, which he might as well have been, given how little he understood of what she had been talking about for most of the morning.

'Doh, password of course. P-a-s-s-w-o-r-d,' she said, spelling it out. And a few keystrokes later, they were rewarded by a message. Usercode and Password accepted. There was no doubt about it, DCS Colin Barker was a genius.

'So this is the wicked bit now,' she said, picking up Barker's phone in response to a discreet ping, thenrotating its screen to face him. 'Now we have the authentication code, we've got admin rights to his account.'

She punched in the code then navigated her mouse to a link labelled 'Account Settings.'

'See?' she said, smiling triumphantly. 'Change authentication phone number. Give me your phone number Frank, will you?'

'What, are you kidding?' he said, shooting