WRAITH CASE STUDY AUGUSTA PINE #2
That security guard has had two restraining orders brought against him by previous girlfriends.
Attached are copies of the orders, along with a formal reprimand from his old boss.
You will use these to show a pattern of behavior.
He could have injured those women. You were using appropriate force to disable his vehicle in order to protect them.
I gaped at the phone, then held it up. Prefect read over the message, his dark brows drawn tight.
“Well,” I said. “I think we’ve established two things.”
“First, the app has definitely been hacked,” said Prefect.
“Agreed,” I said. “But, more importantly, the basic tier of Lawyerbot isn’t an algorithm. That’s a person.”
In the end, I didn’t need Lawyerbot to walk out of jail. Prefect made a call and had the arrest expunged, cleared out any evidence that I’d ever walked into the precinct, and then we grabbed dinner at a local Italian restaurant.
There are some benefits to working for the feds.
“What’s going to happen to that security guard now?” I asked, chewing a bite of my pizza. We’d taken a table in the restaurant’s courtyard. It was warm enough that the evening breeze was pleasant. And I’d had enough of the indoors for one day.
Prefect was eating pasta with military precision. He even cut his noodles with a knife and fork. My nonna would have been horrified.
“He’ll probably go back to work,” said Prefect.
I scowled. “And if his boss gets an email with those restraining orders and reprimand attached?”
He drank delicately from a glass of ice water. “Well, that would be unfortunate. For him.”
It was as close to permission as Prefect would ever give me.
“Anyway, while you were fixing my legal problems, I was digging into Lawyerbot,” I said. “I looked at its source code.”
“And how did you manage that?” asked Prefect mildly.
I pulled the crust off my pizza. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much immunity I have for this mission,” I said.
“Let’s say none,” he replied.
I popped a piece of crust in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed.
It gave me time to compose an answer. “So, hypothetically, if a person wanted to dig into an app, they’d use a decompiler—an app that can break any program down to its source code.
Some applications are obfuscated to prevent that kind of thing, but hackers are always coming up with ways to break encryption. ”
“And, hypothetically,” said Prefect, his tone utterly dry, “where would one get such a decompiler?”
I shrugged. “All sorts of places. They’re perfectly legal. It’s just copying and screwing with copyrighted source code that gets legally dicey.”
“And, hypothetically,” said Prefect, “what would a person find if they did dig into the source code of Lawyerbot?”
I grinned. This was the fun part. “Nothing. Because it’s not Lawyerbot.”
His fork froze on the way to his mouth. “What?”
“It’s not Lawyerbot,” I repeated. “It looks like Lawyerbot. It works like Lawyerbot. But the company hosting it isn’t the actual company that owns it. Someone impersonated the app, took the original down from the app store, and then replaced it with an identical one. Logos, trademarks, everything.”
“Where’s the money going?” asked Prefect.
I shrugged. “No idea. But definitely not into the real company’s bank accounts.”
“The CEO has to know,” said Prefect. “But he’s keeping it a secret instead of letting Lawyerbot’s subscribers know. Divulging that their entire app has been replaced would be rather alarming to their shareholders.”
“So the CEO brings us in rather than using his own cybersecurity experts. Less chance of the news leaking,” I said. I wadded up the last slice of my pizza and crammed it into my mouth. “There’f one fing I don’t get.”
Prefect winced at my lack of table manners. “And what’s that?”
“What’s the point of the app replacement?” I wiped my mouth with a napkin. “If someone wanted to damage the company’s reputation, they would be tanking cases. Or publicly claiming that they were responsible for the takeover. Or selling the information from the cases.”
“The hackers are making money,” said Prefect.
“Yeah, but there are easier ways for a hacker to make money,” I said.
Then added, “Hypothetically.” I took a sip of water to wash down the pizza.
“It takes education and experience to pretend to be a lawyer. Hijacking an app and providing legal advice is overly complicated if the only motive is money.”
One of the golden clocks along his arm glowed red. Prefect glanced down at the tattoo and tapped it twice. The clock’s color returned to gold. He picked up his phone and glanced at it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“One of our investigators managed to trace the address of the new ‘company,’” said Prefect. “You’ll be going undercover.”
I perked up. “As a lawyer?”
I rang the door buzzer in a food delivery T-shirt. “Hi, this is Augusta from Shrewd Food,” I said, with the bored intonation of a gig worker.
I stood by the door of an office building. The area was heavily industrial, a far cry from the brick buildings and gardens of Alexandria. My visor was connected to the stakeout van that Prefect currently occupied, so he could see everything that went on.
I buzzed again. “Hello?”
The food order was real. The hackers had a regular café they ordered from—but this time, Prefect had impounded the two plastic bags laden with food and given them to me. I wore the branded orange-and-white T-shirt, the shorts, and worn sneakers. My smart-dyed hair was a dark green.
There was no answer at the front door. Maybe the hackers had somehow realized I was an imposter.
“Sorry,” said a voice behind me.
I turned and saw a young man approaching. He wore a suit, but it was far cheaper than one of Prefect’s. It sagged a little around his shoulders, as though it had been meant for someone wider. He had the bright-eyed look of someone eager to help.
“That door only opens when Helena remembers to buzz people in,” said Mr. Bright Eyes. He was carrying a tray of coffees. “Or if you’ve passed the bar.” He balanced the tray with his right hand, then flashed his left over the scanner.
“You programmed the tattoo scanner to check for a law license?” I said. It wasn’t the best form of security I’d come across.
“Yup.” He beamed at me. “Sorry for the wait—Hel must be in the bathroom or something. Mind carrying that in?”
Prefect’s orders had simply been to pass off the food. There was a bug hidden in the handle of the takeout bag. But if I got inside, maybe I could do my own investigating.
“Sure,” I said, imagining Prefect face-palming as I went off script.
Mr. Bright Eyes led me past the desk and into a large conference room.
The office had been set up as an open floor plan and there were perhaps forty people at work.
But everything had a haphazard feel to it.
The desks were little more than folding tables and chairs, and the computers were cheap; an arterial system of extension cords ran along the floor.
I stepped over one of the cords, careful not to trip.
The workers were milling about with boxes and tape.
“Just put the food over there,” said Mr. Bright Eyes, gesturing at a half-empty table. I set down the plastic bags with no small relief; my left shoulder was beginning to throb with a familiar ache. “Hey, Avery! Lunch!”
A woman with inky hair and a light complexion rose from her table. She had been working diligently on a tablet, but the moment she set it down, the glass turned transparent and the work vanished. My fingers itched to pick it up and see what she’d been doing.
“Thanks,” said Avery, reaching into her pocket. She withdrew a cash tip. I blinked. That was rare—and a little weird. I’d used enough food delivery apps to know that most people tipped through the app.
But hey—free money is free money, right? I reached out to take it.
And then she snapped a plastic handcuff around my wrist. It was so quick I didn’t have time to jerk away. Then the other half of the handcuff was around the back of a metal chair. It wouldn’t stop me from escaping, but it would make running much more difficult.
I gaped down at the handcuff. “Um. Is this because I forgot the chicken salad?”
“No,” said Avery, leaning against the table.
She crossed her arms. “It’s because there’s a surveillance van parked two blocks away, because most gig workers can’t afford a visor with facial recognition, night vision, and recording software.
And because our food was supposed to be delivered by someone called Doug.
” She reached up and pulled my visor off.
I blinked. I felt strangely vulnerable without it—a knight deprived of her armor. “Who are you?”
It had been a trap. Mr. Bright Eyes lured me in here with his deceptively cheerful attitude and polite request to bring in the food. Normally I wouldn’t fall for such a thing, but he was just so earnest-looking.
And then I realized what they were doing.
Everyone except Mr. Bright Eyes and Avery was packing.
Computers were loaded into boxes, packing tape screeched across cardboard, and tables dismantled.
There were so many people, no wonder there wasn’t tighter security.
It would’ve been a nightmare to program new places for each person’s tattoo.
They were running. Because they’d made us before we’d made them.
“Temporary office?” I asked. “That’s why the Lawyerbot people can’t find you. You’re probably moving every other month. That way no one can track your IP address.”
Avery gave a little shrug. “We can access their servers remotely. It’s hard to keep us out when I helped build the system.”
“Ah,” I said. “Problem is, now I’ve seen your faces. So we’re going to find you again.”
Avery raised one brow. “You’re not giving us a lot of incentive to let you go.”
“You’re not going to kill me,” I said. “You’re hackers, not murderers.”