“I told you. I know…people.”
“People,” she chimed in as she laid the CD down, glad the boy was on her side.
“I thought it might come in handy,” he added, continuing to work.
But after thinking about it, Jess took a second look at his pricy digs and wondered.
“That’s not how you make a living, is it? ’Cause you wouldn’t be livin’ here on the coin I pay you. You do know identity theft and fraud are against the law, right, Seth?”
He stopped what he was doing and glared at her. Jess stood her ground with arms crossed, returning his stare. Deadly serious.
“I can’t believe you had to ask.” He softened his stern expression. Hurt swept over his face. “I get that we really don’t know each other, but what do your instincts tell you?”
He held her gaze without flinching. Seconds on the clock dragged through the quagmire of time, not cutting her a break. She felt the weight of her accusation. Heat rose up her neck and spilled onto her cheeks.
“We’re good.” She nodded. “I mean, yeah, I trust you.”
After a long awkward moment, Seth turned back to his work and Jess breathed a quiet sigh of relief. She didn’t want to live in a world where innocents like Seth Harper could be seduced to the dark side, but that was the reality of it. Good judgment filtered through her powerful cynicism, a reliable measure of human nature until now. She only hoped she wasn’t wrong about him.
“So did you find out anything else?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think so.” He sat with his back against the fancy sofa and his eyes glued to the glowing monitor, ignoring her as she sat across from him in a wing-back chair.
“I sniffed out this strange IP Baker visits. The guy’s not stupid enough to bookmark it, but I noticed he comes to this site—a lot.”
“Strange IP, huh?” She couldn’t resist moving closer, unsure whether he’d let her. “What the hell is an IP? Translate, genius. ’Cause I’m gonna need subtitles in Harperworld.”
The intrigue of Baker’s files drew her in. She invaded Seth’s personal space by sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him on the carpet. The kid was so enthralled with the computer that he didn’t seem to mind. And apparently he didn’t hold a grudge.
“Harperworld.” He grinned with eyes on the monitor. “Good one. Well, an IP is an Internet Protocol address. It’s unique. The computer version of X marks the spot in cyberspace. Only it’s not that simple.”
With a bad case of the yammers, he went on, working the keyboard and waving his hands in the air as if he could blow the confusion off her face. When he looked at her, he stopped and took a different tack.
“Every Internet provider tags their users with an address or block of codes. Every time the user gets on, the ID can roll and change through a shared block. If you query the IP number, the physical location might bounce to different locales. In other words, there are limitations on what you could learn about an IP. And this information will only take you so far…”
When he went into a spiel on proxy servers, routers, ISPs, reverse DNS lookups, and anonymizer services, she felt her eyes glaze over. For all she knew, the kid made it all up, except no one could fake the kind of enthusiasm he held for all the technogeek speak.
“Yeah, but did the pervert leave any incriminating proof we can turn over to the cops?”
Jess knew the chain of evidence had been broken and any proof on Baker’s laptop would be inadmissible in court, unless she found a clever way to turn over his property and still keep her and Seth out it. When the time came, she knew what had to be done and would see to it.
“I’ve got nothing so far, but like I said, Baker had plenty of trips to this one strange site on the Internet, an IP address through something called ‘Globe Harvest.’ The site’s under construction. But I took a look at the source code behind the site and found an embedded login if you hit the control shift key and type in the letter O. Here, let me show you.”
Seth pulled up a Web site with the name Globe Harvest emblazoned across the screen. A note indicated the site was under construction. But after he hit a few keystrokes, a box popped up, requesting the user to log on.
“I don’t have the login yet, but I’m working on it.”
“For a site under construction, that seems weird.” She narrowed her eyes.
“That’s what I thought. Usually a site like this is a blind to allow the Web designer to work behind it until the site is officially published and operational.”
“If you get into this thing, can you get a physical location for these people?”
Seth shrugged, disappointment in his eyes. “Like I said, simple it ain’t. An IP address might be a stand-alone proxy or it could be shared by multiple client devices, part of a common hosting Web server.”
The kid was speaking in tongues again, and she knew her face reflected her confusion. He tried another explanation.
“Okay, okay. Think of this like one big telephone system. The use of a main number can act as the proxy, with extensions behind it that are shared. You get it?”
“That kind of makes sense…in a geek alternative universe.” She raised an eyebrow, clearly content in her ignorant bliss.
He continued, “These unique addresses are created and managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or the IANA.”
“Can we cut with the alphabet references? I think I’m developing a tumor.”
Seth ignored her and went on.
“Superblocks in cyberspace are kind of like real estate. They can be subdivided into smaller lots and distributed to various Internet providers. What I’m trying to say is, it’s gonna take time to dig through the spiderweb of info he left behind.”
Seth looked her in the eye and kept going.
“Even if I narrow it down to a real network and registration, we might be dealing with a server out of the country that allows anonymous e-mails. If I was working it, that’s what I’d do. If the U.S. government can’t coerce another country to cooperate, what are the odds we’re gonna do any better in getting a physical address on Baker’s organization? It’d be like fishing for Moby Dick with a cane pole.”
When he started to talk about real people and fishing analogies, she interrupted him.
“Harper? Let me worry about concocting a fish story. If you give me the phone numbers to contact these cyberspace realtors and I can talk to a live human being, I’ve got skills you haven’t seen yet. Trust me, I’ll get what we need if I have to speak Swahili.”
“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” It was his turn to smirk. “Any woman who’d bulldog a moving SUV earns
“That’s about the nicest thing any man has ever said to me. Thanks, Harper.”
“But here’s the bad part. Baker knows we’ve got his shit.” Seth turned toward her. “While I’m dicking around with this, I’m afraid he’s shut it all down. From anywhere, this guy can make contact and change passwords, he can get the word out. Hell, for all we know, he may have already closed shop.”
Jess gritted her teeth, knowing he was right. But she did have one advantage.
“There’s one thing we can count on, Seth. Maybe this organization is international and pretty computer savvy, but I know Baker. He’s a friggin’ idiot. Most criminals are. People like him are not exactly MIT material. You feel up for the challenge?”
“To beat an idiot?”
“Worded like that, I have complete faith in you.”
“Thanks.” He furrowed his brow. “I think.”
Jess tried not to smile. “The point is, we’ve got Baker’s portal to a bigger organization. Find me the hole in his dike, Seth.”
“Ditch the dike hole analogy, will ya? It scares me.”
He hit a few keystrokes and pulled up a file.
“Before I forget, I got something else for you.” He grinned, a crooked lazy smile. “Baker had a digital photo open when he tore out of that room, something sent via e-mail. So far, I’ve got nothing on the origin of the e-mail itself, but embedded at the end of this picture file was a message. I figured these jerks wouldn’t be sharing their Alaskan vacation slides for nothing, so I looked for a reason he’d have this one open and found the embedded message. I saved it to the drive.”
