“It’s about tricking a person into giving up personal information,” he said. His voice didn’t crack as much as before. Nor did he push it deeper. I wanted to think he trusted me enough to just be who he was, but I suspected defiance was at play. Whatever, he seemed more focused on content than style. “Once you have that, you’re in.”
“But how do you get it?” I asked, treating it like a hypothetical discussion. We weren’t talking about a crime Christopher Emory was accused of committing, simply what hacking was about, and I was curious.
We passed the farmhouse. Several weak lamps appeared in the windows, along with the vivid color of a flat-screen. For a split second, I wondered whether Devon was in the news again tonight, but the colors were quickly gone. As we drove on, the landscape was increasingly shadowed.
“First, you make a mock-up of a Twitter log-in,” he said and snorted. “Takes maybe an hour to do that.”
“Seriously? And it looks like the real thing?”
“The URL is different, but just a little, so most people don’t notice. They’re annoyed, they’re in a rush, they see the little blue bird.” He retreated to the side window again.
“Then what?”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a minute, like he was suddenly not sure he should be telling me this. But I sensed he couldn’t hold it in anymore. Knee going up and down, up and down with the jiggle of his leg, he faced me again. “You write something that looks like an official message from Twitter. It could read, ‘Maggie Reid just asked to follow you. Log in to approve.’ You send it to the target.”
“So you need either an email address or a phone number,” I said. Grace would have both for Ben Zwick. “But if a person has a public account”—which I was sure Ben did—“wouldn’t he question why he’s being asked to approve a follower?”
“He’d think it’s just a security precaution. Or maybe he recognizes the name of the person who wants to follow him. You can get names like that in a few clicks.”
I bet. High school classmates, work colleagues, relatives—Google had it all. Someone as ego-driven as Ben Zwick wouldn’t be able to ignore the lure of a long-lost friend or, even more, a professional rival who wanted to follow him.
“So,” I said, “the target types in his log-in information. Then what?”
His shoulder moved under the gray hoodie in a dismissive shrug. “Thehacker has what he wants, and the target is redirected to the real site. That’s it. That’s how you hack.”
“Just like that?”
“Yuh.”
“Is this, like, common knowledge?”
He focused on the windshield.
“Do all your friends know how to do it?”
He frowned.
“You do know it’s wrong.”
That earned a defensive, “I didn’t say I did it.”
“But just so we’re sure, Chris, you do know it’s wrong.”
The guilty look on his face said he did. I left it at that.
We approached the ski slope, which seemed ridiculously innocent compared to the thoughts in my truck. So late in the day, it was a shadowed mass of evergreen spikes and gloomy swaths, some wide and straight, others narrow and curving out around the sides. Cables ran up the center of the hill, chairs dangling in a mild breeze, but otherwise all was still. That should have been ominous, but I had skied here enough for memory to add a gaggle of brightly colored parkas.
Chris Emory had taught me to ski. Oh, Grace would say it was her. And yes, she was the one who had made me do it. But after she got me outfitted and gave me brief instructions, she was skiing off, leaving bunny-land for steeper slopes.
Chris stayed with me. He wasn’t the best skier—wasn’t terribly coordinated, which was why Grace insisted he play hockey, like it would make him an athlete, like the coaches could make him a man. He did need male role models. But he never excelled on the ice any more than he did on the slopes. I always suspected that he loved teaching me to ski simply because it gave him an excuse to stay easy and slow.
The ski slope came and went. We drove on until I reached my turnoff, then the white post that marked Pepin Hill. I signaled, made the turn, and started up, all the while growing surer that this had been a confession. I should have been shocked, but was not. An odd part of me was proud that he excelled in this, at least. And to mess with the press? What he’d done to Ben Zwick was awful. But maybe, just maybe Ben deserved it.
Who to tell? Absolutely no one. Unless Michael had bugged my car, Chris’s confession went nowhere.
I was concerned about him, about Grace, about me. But I was also flattered that he had confided in me, regardless of what Michael Shanahan said. I had my reasons for hating the press. If Chris had done what he was being accused of, he had his. Sometime, somehow, they would come out.
Right now, my caring gene said that Chris needed a breather. In that regard, my pets were a godsend. He stayed outside while Jonah bounded in and out of the woods, then came in and gave Hex and Jinx two lanky legs to wind around. I could hear their purring from the kitchen. The therapy they offered was priceless.
