Hacking the Naked Princess

Dev Manny - Information Technology Private Investigator

by Andy Kaiser

Chapter 0x01

Rain pounded the pavement as I huddled in the doorway.  There were no streetlights here.  Not in this part of town.  Apart from periodic lightning, my phone's display was a rare flash of illumination.  The weak blue light shone on my face and lit my eyes like anemic sparklers.

I glanced up at the sky and squinted into the darkness.  For early evening it was unusually dark.  The black thunderclouds in the sky made sure of that.

I was outside my client's building and was close to my target: A window one story up.

I stepped out from under the roofline and rain attacked my head and shoulders with thousands of tiny punches.  I held up my phone and shielded the lens from rain with one hand as I took a sequence of infrared pictures.  I fell back under the shelter of the building.  I swiped raindrops off the cellphone screen as I zoomed in to examine the results.

Despite my mood, I smiled.

I never liked working in this part of town and I particularly didn't like this client.  Despite the weather outside, it was more annoying inside.  But I was done.  Mission accomplished.  Time to go back in and collect my due, if I could.

Warren Relegaard was the client today.  He may have been Swedish.  Maybe Greenlandian.  Or he was just an American who dressed weird and used a fake accent.  There were plenty of those around, too.

He sat in a brown, oversized, overstuffed armchair.

Some people looked alike.  A husband and wife who lived together and loved each other for fifty years and had the same conversation a hundred times eventually would become mirror images of each other.  They used the same muscle sequences to talk and gesture, the same thought processes to communicate, the same glazed expression to stare at the TV night after night.  Like perpetuates like.

I'm not saying Warren Relegaard was married to his armchair, but I am saying it had been a significant part of his life for fifty years minimum.  It looked like him, all leathery, worn and overstuffed.  I smelled pizza rolls.  That was usually a pleasant experience, but now it creeped me out because I had no idea where the smell came from.  The more I worked with him the less I wanted to work with him.  Dislike perpetuates dislike.

"This night, Mr. Manny," he said in his possibly fake accent, "I do not think you have found what you claim."

"Sorry.  I did."

Relegaard lifted a single thin eyebrow, which was probably an effort on a face with that much excess flesh.  He gestured grandly at me.

I was fluent in non-verbal communication.  It was a job requirement for us, the elite players of my profession.  But non-verbal was for accidental slips, for finding what people didn't want us to know.  I didn't like it when people used it intentionally.  It always seemed forced.  Arrogant.  So I played dumb and continued to stare.

He exhaled a deep sigh, giving me a possible clue as to the origin of the pizza roll smell.

"Please," he overemphasized.  "Tell me what you've accomplished."

"I hate to tell you this," I said, loving this part.  "But it's true.  Your wife's cheating.  And it's happening right now."

He said nothing.  His face reddened and he began to breathe heavily.  Angrily.

That was the kind of non-verbal communication I could work with.

"Now?" he said.  "Upstairs?"

"Yes," I said, not feeling particularly bad.  I'd seen it plenty of times before.

His face got ugly and he pushed with both arms to lean forward in his chair.  "I ask that you prove it, sir."

"Go ahead and log on," I gestured to his tablet sitting on a side table.  It was an older model.  He grabbed it and turned it on.

"Check the link I just sent you."

He opened an application and waited.  He tapped impatiently on his chair.

"This machine.  It is so slow.  Why is that?  How can I make it faster?"

Check for malware.  Don't have twenty unnecessary programs running at all times.  Pay money to get better hardware.

I shrugged.

He checked his mail.  My message redirected him to a private, secure site I used to give information to my clients.  He stared at the file list contained there.

"What are these?"

"Open the first one."

He did.  Five seconds later he realized what he was looking at.  He gasped.

"She's not -"

"She is.  Second file."

He opened that one, too.  Then the rest.  I kept quiet as the photos did all the talking.  I watched his face get redder and darker as he saw uncensored, candid pictures of his wife in very compromising situations.

"I see it.  But I cannot believe it."

"I'm sorry, Warren.  I know you thought better of her, but she's not what you think.  She's cheating."

"No!"

"Yes.  When you go online to play TekMage with her, she wins every time because she's been using a programmable keyboard meant for online gaming.  She cheats.  You never found out, because by the time you got upstairs," I imagined his huge frame navigating a stairwell, "she'd have hidden everything.  She'd have unplugged the gaming keyboard and swapped it out for a five dollar generic keyboard.  After you go back downstairs and keep playing, she's back to cheating."

"That's why she never wanted to play in the same room as me!"

I took shallow breaths in order to avoid the smell of pizza rolls.

"Yeah.  Maybe."

The reason I kept coming back to Warren Relegaard was that while he was cheap and annoying and mysteriously odorous, he paid me in cash and seemed willing to hire me again.  Though this job had been far more personal than the others.  I hoped it hadn't killed our business relationship.  I made a mental note to make up an impressive-looking coupon for future services and send it to him later.

"Okay," I said, readying myself for the next phase of our conversation.  "I'll leave it to you to get the situation under control.  I have the bill.  You get the surveillance photos of her using the device, as well as millisecond-stamped, in-game screenshots to prove she couldn't physically type some commands without special gaming hardware.  I worked for five hours on this.  You know my rates.  I'd like -"

"Yes, yes.  Now we discuss your payment."

Then he tried to justify why my time wasn't worth what I knew it was.

I'm regularly amazed at the number of people who think it's socially acceptable to regularly haggle with someone who makes their living charging by the hour.  It didn't quite convince me to get a normal, dependable salaried job as Information Systems Director at the Corporate Office, but on days like this I gave it a second and third thought.

My name is Dev Manny.  I'm an Information Technology Private Investigator.  My clients call me when they have technological problems.  Some people assume I'll fix their broken printers and upgrade their equipment, and I do: It's easy and routine, part of the occupational churn that pays my bills.

I preferred the exotic cases.  I've been pulled in by the police when they got in over their head.  I've been hired by corporate CEOs when they needed IT covert assistance without having to alert any of their staff.  I had friends in the industry, many of them as good as me or better in information technology.  But while many of them actively looked for complexity, mysteries, and problems the way I did, not many addressed the human element.

IT workers need a primary toolset of intelligence, best practices and the ability to find information online.  I went outside that zone and focused on people.  Their behavior, their personalities, why they behaved the way they did.  Throw in fraud, theft, and, yes, sometimes murder, and you needed more mental tools to handle those situations.  That's where I came in.

Out of all the people I knew in the industry, no one did what I did.  I like to think it was because I was unique, the special little snowflake my mother always told me I could be.  I've also had people tell me it was because no one was stupid enough to drop to my pay scale and undependable wages.

Speaking of income, I was indeed in a dry spell.  I'd had limited work for too long now, nothing I could label a case.  Relegaard's issue might be moderately intriguing, though having to deal with the man himself put this work firmly in the "do not want" category.

I left Relegaard's place shivering and cold from the rain, and also from my wallet's latest addition: A limited number of small bills.

Still, in this case, the exchange of money for information was worth it.  I had a new ability compared to just a few minutes ago.  A power-up, a financial mod, a new level of achievement which put me in a class of people I rarely got to join.

I now had the ability to purchase dinner

Chapter 0x02

I levered myself into my completely untrustworthy 1999 Nissan Sentra and turned the key.  After a blast of automotive profanity which I'm sure would fog the mirrors of any nearby cars, my car grumbled out of Relegaard's snakelike driveway and shuddered in fear as I gained the open road.

I had decided long ago that I liked this car.  Loved it, in fact.  Because the alternative to not having it was to use my feet.  My Sentra was like my first high school relationship: Something that had no business being in public and was in desperate need of lubrication.

My car allowed me to get to one on my favorite haunts, a scummy bar called "Downway," I walked in and dropped into a sticky booth in the corner.

A large, thick roll of brown, misshapen carpet walked up to me and bent over the booth.

"Hey, Manny," it rumbled.

After a second glance, I realized the carpet was actually Ron-Don, the judge, jury, and executioner at Downway.  More importantly, he was the barkeep.  Most importantly, he was the owner.

"How's life, Ron-Don?"

He shrugged.  If any normal human tried the same thing with the same amount of weight, their shoulders would snap.  He made lifting a metric ton of solid muscle look easy.  He'd been some kind of weightlifter years ago, and he still kept in shape.  Seemed like a lot of unnecessary work to me, but, on the other hand, no one caused trouble in Downway, at least not more than once.  It was one of many reasons I liked coming in here: I could use the free wireless in peace.

"I'm living," his voice rumbled.  "You?"

"I won't complain."

"So you got problems then?"

Ron-Don might not look like the most intelligent guy, but you'd be surprised.  He didn't miss much.

"Who doesn't?" I said.  "I won't bore you.  Besides," I pulled out my wallet and flashed him my wad of singles, "I've recently come into some money.  I'd like a burger and your finest glass of caffeine."

"Go crazy, man."

Floorboards protested as he left to place my order.

While I waited, I checked my cellphone and flicked through my existing workload.  I was done with Relegaard.  In the meantime, I was waiting for payment on a few closed cases.  Apart from that, I had nothing else in the hopper.  I'd have to find more work soon, assuming I still wanted to eat in the daily way I'd been accustomed to.

"He's watching you."

I was so intent on staring at my phone, I didn't notice Ron-Don had returned until he spoke.

I blinked up at him.  "What?  Who?"

Ron-Don placed a burger and drink on my table and cocked his head to the side.

"Over there," he muttered.  "Dude in the other corner.  He's by the window."

He was indeed.  He was facing away from me at the moment, and was staring out of the dirty, smudged window.  His face was in partial shadow, so I couldn't see him well.

I slurped what I assumed was warm coffee and began to eat.  Halfway through my burger I pretended to resume work.  I popped open my laptop.  I used the screen as cover as I started my cellphone's camera app.

I casually lifted the phone.  I pointed it towards where the guy was sitting and pretended to examine and frown at something on the screen while I took a movie.

It was the best I could do on short notice.  My actions were probably as transparent as a giggling fanboy who just saw that hot DS9 actress (and let's be honest - there is only one).  But I had to do it - I liked to get things recorded before I did something about them - it was insurance if I needed to get others involved, like the law, or Facebook.

I quickly finished eating.  Strange mysterious watcher or no, dinners I could pay for were rare enough that I didn't want this one interrupted.

I snapped my laptop shut and got ready to go.  I left a depressing ratio of Relegaard's bills on the table, then I headed over to where the guy had been sitting.

He was gone.

I sighed.

What's wrong with our society?  Can't people just talk anymore?

I took out my phone and checked the video I'd just recorded.  I brightened the movie, increased the contrast, and zoomed in to get a better view of the guy.  I played it back.

Ron-Don was incorrect.  He'd used the wrong word.  This was no dude.  It was a kid.  High school at most.  He was dressed like he was homeless, which, combined with the nice cell phone and the ear buds stuck in his ears, meant a rich kid with richer parents.

I was only twenty-six.  I was too young to be called "old" by most, and could sometimes get away with looking younger.  This kid had the opposite trait.  He had something that made him older.  It was written in his appearance, not just his limp dark hair and pale skin, but his attitude, punctuated with an oddly-thin body and gaunt stare.  This kid was messed up.  He'd been through something, and it was big.

I realized what I was doing.  Great Old Ones, I was thinking of this kid as the stereotypical antisocial computer nerd.  I sensed the ghost of Steve Jobs above me, sadly shaking his head.  Well, I mentally shrugged back at Steve, stereotypes are self-perpetuating.  Steve rolled his eyes and disappeared in a puff of cloud computing.

As I watched the video, the kid was working on his phone, just like I'd pretended to do.  He pointed his camera at my own.

He was taking shots of me, just as I'd done to him.

I revised my earlier theory.  The kid hadn't been through something big.  He was in the middle of something big.  And it ended with me.

This is the first in a series of chapters from the newest Dev Manny, Information Technology Private Investigator story.  You can find the first book (Superliminal) on Amazon and other places.  Please let us know if you want to see more - or if you want us to stop.  Write to letters@2600.com.
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