The Florentine Deception (12 page)

I walked through the double doors and up to the department's front desk.

“I'd like to report a kidnapping,” I said, choking on the last word.

“One second.” The woman behind the desk, a middle-aged Latina decked out in a crisp blue LAPD uniform, picked up her phone, punched in an extension, and waited a few seconds.

“Hey Leonardo, someone here wants to give a kidnapping report.” She paused. “Okay, thanks.”

“Officer Flanco will be out in a second. You can sit over there for the time being.”

I took a seat on the bench and began nervously picking at my cuticles.

“Excuse me, are you here to report a kidnapping?”

I jumped, startled.

“Uh. Yes.”

“Hi, I'm Officer Flanco. You are?”

“Alex.”

“Okay, please follow me.”

Flanco led me through a security door, which he opened with a keycard, down a hallway and into a large room with six paperwork-strewn desks. He then walked to the farthest desk, by far the messiest, dragged a chair over and gestured to it. A half-finished cup of coffee sat on the tallest pile of manila folders, easily eight inches high and covered in a pattern of coffee rings strangely reminiscent of the Olympics logo. Flanco then eased down behind his desk, placed his hands on his keyboard, and said, “Okay Alex, who's been kidnapped.”

“I think a guy named Ronald Lister was kidnapped.”

“You think?” He took his hands off the keyboard and reclined in his seat, causing it to squeak. “Why do you think that?”

“A few weeks ago, my father bought a computer at an estate sale. I work with computers so he wanted me to refurbish it so he could give it to a needy family. So I started cleaning the computer up, cleaned some viruses from it, that kind of stuff.”

Flanco reached for the coffee cup, sniffed, grimaced, and then took a hesitant sip.

“At some point I loaded up the web browser and accidentally pulled up the previous owner's email account. The owner was the guy that had died.”

Okay, so technically “accidentally” was a fib. I continued: “So I pulled up his old email account and found this email.” I handed Officer Flanco a printout of the kidnapping email. He leaned forward in his chair and lowered a pair of brown-plastic reading glasses from his forehead to inspect it.

“How do you know this email isn't a prank?”

“I'm pretty sure it's not. I googled the dead guy and he was apparently an antiquities smuggler, so it makes sense that someone might be trying to blackmail him.”

“You're quite the Sherlock Holmes,” he said facetiously. “What's the former owner's name? This antiquities smuggler?”

“Richard Lister,” I said.

He jotted that down on a notepad, then reread the printed copy of the email. “That's all you have?”

“Yeah.” I shifted uneasily.

“Nothing else you want to share with me?”

“No. Do you think you'll be able to help?”

“Alex, right?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Alex, first we've got to verify that this is real. We get hoax reports all the time. It could be two guys joking around.” Flanco paused, saw the look on my face, and frowned. “Problem is, we've got seven kidnapping cases open right now.” He pointed to the stack on his desk, and I wondered if Ronald Lister's folder would soon have coffee rings on it too. “I can't make any promises. But based on the amount of information we have, the odds aren't great. I'm going to need to talk with the LAPD Computer Crimes division, and since this is a potential kidnapping, the FBI.”

Flanco spent the next ten minutes transcribing my story, then escorted me to the station's entrance.

“If we need any more information, someone from the office here will contact you. And if you think of anything else, please call me.” He handed me his card.

Chapter 21

“How did it go?” asked Steven.

“As well as can be expected, I guess. But the cop was pretty skeptical, and based on the stack of files on his desk, I'm not holding my breath.”

Steven nodded sullenly. “So that's it?”

“No way in hell.” I shook my head. “There is no way I'm going to let Ronald Lister die.”

Steven turned his head and stared at me.

“What are you thinking?” he asked. “Email Khalimmy from Richard Lister's email account and tell him we'll trade Ronald for the diamond, then bring the cops in?”

“No. The last thing I want to do is directly engage him. Plus, if we start sending emails from Lister's account and the police look into it, things get complicated.”

Steven nodded and kept driving. “Then what?”

“We need to find out more about who we're dealing with before we go any further. I want to do some reconnaissance.”

“Recon? Interesting!” he said, perking up, “But we have no idea where this guy lives.”

“Digital recon,” I said. “You remember that spyware we found on Richard's machine?”

“Yeah.”

“I saved a copy before I removed it from the PC. You remember what it did?”

“Recorded everything you typed and sent it to Russia, right?”

“Right. It sent everything Richard typed to an email account—which, as you correctly remembered, was hosted in Russia. I'm going to modify the spyware software so it sends all of its recorded keystrokes to us instead. Then I'm going to send it to Khalimmy.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“It's easy. The thing has the old Russian email address embedded inside it. I'm going to sign up for a new dummy email account and then reprogram the spyware so it forwards the transcripts to my dummy account instead of the account in Russia.”

“It's really that easy?”

“It'll literally take about ten or fifteen minutes to change. Plus the five minutes it'll take to register for a new email account. That's where we have to be careful. I don't want this guy to be able to trace it back to me, so I'm going to register it under your name.”

Steven gave me an “are you serious?” look.

“I'm just kidding. I'll sign up with a fake name.”

“So once you jimmy the spyware, then you just send it to him in an email?”

“Well, I can't just send it to him from my email account, and he'd never click on it if it came from some random user. So I'm going to forge the
From:
address in the email so it looks like it's from a legit source.”

“You can do that?”

“Why not?”

“You're shittin' me. It can't be that easy.”

“Yes it can. You can do the same thing with snail mail. Anyone can write any return address they like on a piece of mail and drop it into a mailbox. Same with Internet email. You'd be surprised how much of the Internet is built that way—the thing was originally designed for nearsighted college professors to pontificate. Who needed security?”

“Seriously?”

“Trust me, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Actually …” I zoned for a second, the plan crystalizing in my mind. “Come to think of it, I don't think I'll even need to bother forging the return address. Anyway, I'll send the spyware to him in an email and make it look important. He'll double-click on the attachment, install it, and we'll be in business.”

Steven turned his head from the road to look at me. “You think he'll bite?”

“Why not? Corporations get infiltrated that way every day. Then maybe we can get some information to help the police. And we can remain anonymous.”

“I like it,” said Steven.

“Good, then it's agreed. So now what are we going to do about that panic room?”

“No idea. Those tapes were next to useless.” He pulled up to my house.

“All right, well, give it some more thought. Let's regroup in a few hours when I'm done sending the spyware.”

“Roger,” he said. “See you in a bit.”

After grabbing a microwave burrito from my freezer, I logged into my laptop and began searching for foreign email hosting services. It took just a few minutes of googling to find a good candidate: a Brazilian email provider, Correio Brasil, that offered free, advertisement-supported email accounts with no phone number or address required to sign up. So, with the help of an online Portuguese-English dictionary, I created a new account and registered it to Fidel Castro. By three p.m., I was the proud owner of [email protected]—and untraceable. I'd use this account as a drop box for our kidnapper's keystrokes.

Next, I needed to doctor the spyware program I found on Richard's computer so it would forward its transcripts to Fidel's new email account. Using a program called a hex editor, I edited Richard's spyware file, searching for the original email address,
OXOTHИ[email protected]
, and replacing it with my updated
[email protected]
address. The spyware would now send all recorded keystrokes to my Correio Brasil email account instead of its original mailbox at Flavmail. I also made one additional modification to the spyware program—I added several new instructions to the file so the first time it ran, it would pop up a window containing the words “Repairing virus infection,” then show an hourglass for about ten seconds, and finally pop up a second window stating, “Your machine has been disinfected. Thank you for your cooperation—
Freemail.com
security staff.”

Finally, to complete my digital ambush, I needed to send the spyware in an email that looked like it came from the security staff at
Freemail.com
—the email service used by the mysterious Khalimmy. I surfed to
www.freemail.com
and, after a bit of hunting, found and clicked the “Sign up for a FREE account” link. The new-user signup screen popped up and asked me to pick my new email address, so I entered “admin” on a lark and then clicked the “Submit” button. Predictably, the website returned quickly with “Another user has already reserved an email account with this name. Please try again.” I tried several others including “administrator” and “support” with the same result—these email accounts had all been reserved, likely for the email provider's own staff. Finally, after about a dozen tries I picked a winner that hadn't been taken: “securityadmin.” I then registered the new account to a Mr. Manny Vandervelde (that sounded like the name of a security administrator, didn't it?), typed in a random ten-digit number in the phone number field, and selected a password I'd remember. An instant later,
Freemail.com
greeted me regally: “Welcome to
Freemail.com
, Manny, where EVERYONE gets FREE mail! Your new email address is
[email protected]
! Tell your friends!”

Tell my friends? Maybe not
.

Now all I needed to do was send the spyware file to our kidnapper, get him to double-click on it, and we'd be in business. This was the tricky part: the social engineering. Fortunately, I'd seen hundreds of these ruses during my time at ViruTrax, so I knew exactly what to do.

With a bit more sleuthing, I located the
Freemail.com
1-800-number and jotted it down on a Regina Flowers Real Estate notepad; I also lifted the
Freemail.com
logo (an angelic-looking F with wings) from the website and saved it to my hard drive.

I clicked the “Compose a new ‘freemail'” button and began writing my magnum opus, hoping our assailant's name was the same as his email address:

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Infected computer

Dear Mr. Khalimmy
,

Our email security filter has detected that your computer appears to be using our email service to send computer viruses to other users. As you may be aware, sending viruses through email is a violation of our licensing policy and also a violation of the Federal Fair Computer Use Act. Therefore, we ask you to please remove the infection from your computer as soon as possible, or we will have to disable your account. We recommend a popular, freeware antivirus program like Dr. Finnigan's Antivirus, if you don't already have antivirus protection.

Manny Vandervelde—Freemail Computer Security Manager

Freemail.com
—where EVERY email is FREE

I finished it all off with a flourish, pasting the picture of the Freemail logo at the end of the email—I was all about the details—and then clicked “Send.”

That was the teaser—just enough to get him worried, but not enough to raise any suspicions. Within seconds, the enigmatic Khalimmy would have a very authentic-looking yet disturbing email in his inbox from “[email protected].”

About two hours later, I finished the one-two punch with a follow-up email, again from the concerned Freemail security administrator:

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject: Mass-infection of freemail users

Dear Mr. Khalimmy,

As we indicated earlier, we still believe that your machine was infected with a virus sometime during the week of the 20th. However, we have reason to believe that at least 60 other Freemail customers are also infected. Therefore, as a service to our customers, we have created a virus fix tool to clean up the infection (you will find it attached to this email). To activate the program, please double-click on the provided repair program.

I have asked my network security team to work overtime today and tomorrow (Aug 29 and Aug 30) so if this tool fails to resolve the issue, please feel free to call us for support. Our twenty-four-hour support number is 800-555-4974
.

Manny Vandervelde—Freemail Computer Security Manager

Freemail.com
—where EVERY email is FREE

With a few clicks of the mouse, I attached my doctored spyware program to the email and forwarded it on its way. The net was unfurled, the chum dispersed, and all we had to do was wait for the shark to take the bait.