“So you think you have something for us, Chuck?” said Emily.
Instead of saying anything, Chuck handed us a photograph. It was a shot of a cluttered table with papers and books piled on it. There was a pair of glasses, a magenta Sharpie, and a crumpled napkin on an egg-crusted paper plate. Beyond the messy table was a room with bare, paint-chipped plaster walls and dirty hardwood floors. The space struck me as vaguely industrial.
In the top left-hand corner of the photo, you could see a shadeless window. In the window was the stone edifice of an old office building on the other side of a narrow street.
“This is the PC where the ransom demand originated from,” Chuck said. “This shot is from the PC’s webcam.”
“Where is it?” I said.
“That’s the rub,” Chuck said. “We don’t know. They sent the signal through Tor, the underground computer network. It bounces things around so you don’t know the actual physical location or owner of a particular computer. Basically, we can find the original computer. Unfortunately, we just don’t know whose it is or where it is. That’s why we turned on the PC’s camera to get a clue from the room.”
“You turned on the camera on the bad guy’s computer? How?”
“After the judge gave us a warrant, we sent in our Trojan horse,” Chuck said.
“Trojan horses are the investigative malware we use,” Emily explained. “It looks like a regular program on the surface, but behind the scenes, it’s secretly able to contact the PC’s internal controller to allow backdoor access to the target PC.”
“Like a virus or something?” I said.
“Technically, no,” said Chuck. “Technically, a virus attempts to inject itself into other files. A Trojan is its own file.”
“But how do you get in?” I said. “What about firewalls and stuff?”
“Most people have one or two popular antivirus programs, so we usually send the Trojan through a pretend update to one of them,” Chuck said. “But in this case, the target didn’t seem to have an antivirus program on the list, so we used an exploit in their browser’s PDF parser.”
“A what in the what?” I said.
Emily rolled her eyes.
“Does it matter, Mike? They went around it with some computer stuff. Bottom line, we can look at a bad guy’s files, even turn on his webcam and microphone, which is what they did here.”
“And you searched their files?” I said to Chuck. “Did you find the ransom video?”
“No, it’s not there. They must have removed it,” he said, squinting.
“What about encryption? This guy is a hacker himself,” I said. “He has to use encryption, right?”
“He had layers upon layers of it, but we looked at the PC’s recorded keystrokes and got the passwords to the encryption software he used.”
“Got it,” I said, gazing at the picture again.
I concentrated on the building beyond the window. It had setbacks and some fairly elaborate ornamentation in the stonework. Some stone wreaths and a lot of fleurs-de-lis. Where was this building? It definitely seemed familiar.
“Hey, wait. Did you get any audio?” Emily said.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Chuck said with a mischievous smile as he clicked a terminal’s button.
“We picked this up just three minutes ago,” he said. “This is a live feed. Listen carefully.”
We did. There were sirens and traffic, and then we heard it. A soft, rhythmic buzzing sound.
“No,” I said. “That’s not what it sounds like, is it?”
“Oh, yes, it is,” said Chuck, rubbing his hands together. “Someone is close to that computer, and they’re snoring. We heard a door open ten minutes ago, then somebody creaking down onto what has to be a bed or something.”
“Yevdokimov! Has to be!” Emily said. “He’s there right now!”
“Wherever the hell ‘there’ is,” I said as I gazed at the photo again. “This building in the window here. I feel like I know it. I just can’t place it.”
“It’s definitely in Manhattan, definitely somewhere below Ninety-Sixth Street,” Chuck offered.
“Old, dirty, once-grand office buildings. Where in the city do you have these old, dirty buildings? Basically all over the damn place,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Tribeca, maybe?” Chuck said. “Or SoHo?”
“Yes, kind of,” I said. “But in SoHo, the buildings are usually older and have elaborate fire escapes and all that painted castiron cladding. With all these setbacks, this building is prewar—classic-Superman era.”
“It looks huge,” said Emily.
“It also looks high up,” Chuck said. “Ten or twelve stories, maybe.”
“Wait. I got it!” I said, violently shaking the photograph. “The fleurs-de-lis!”
“The what?” said Chuck.
“The fleurs-de-lis. The intricate stonework design here under the windows. And the setbacks. I used to work in Midtown South. I know where this is!”