—
Perry and I had been monitoring the IRC chat room **bike for sale** for the last week, waiting for some movement. Watching Internet traffic is probably the most mind-numbing job out there. Cataloging script. Sifting through data logs. It’s boring as shit.
And it was going nowhere fast. All had been silent, and then everything seemed to open up. Quite by chance, through a routine database scan, I was suddenly able to access chat records that had been buried under mountains of encryption.
When I saw the hacker’s handle I almost lost it.
I noted that the chat records went back only a few days. But it was something, at least. The first shred of hard information that took me that one step closer.
The records showed an ongoing conversation between Freedom Overdrive and another cracker with an unreadable moniker. A series of numbers that was vaguely familiar.
I stared at the handle for a long time. How did I know the numbers?
06050900.
I got a pen and paper and wrote out the numbers in a different order.
06050009.
00000659.
And then it hit me.
I pulled up the information retrieved from the Ryan Law exploit. The embedded signatures, one belonging to Freedom Overdrive.
The other I hadn’t been able to decipher.
Until now.
06050900.
A separate signature.
As I read through the transcripts I found what I had suspected all along. Freedom Overdrive was working with someone else. He had found himself a partner.
And they were plotting.
Ryan Law was only one of their crimes.
There had been others.
There would be more.
I had been right.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” I called out loudly.
Perry’s head popped up from behind his monitor, his thinning hair sticking out in all directions. His eyes were sunken and he looked as though he was coming off a three-day bender. His pasty complexion looked shiny beneath the lights. He had been glued to his computer for days and it was showing.
“What? Did something happen?” he asked, appearing startled.
I waved him over impatiently and he hopped up and all but ran to my desk.
“Check this out.” I pointed to the screen. Perry leaned over my shoulder and I could smell his body odor through his cologne.
“Okay, not that close. Back up a little,” I told him.
