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The Florentine Deception Page 9


  “Slowly,” reiterated Steven. I took it two frames at a time. Using both hands, Richard grasped either side of his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger and began leaning into the mirror.

  “Stop!” Steven yelled. I’d gone too far, so I jogged the wheel back a few frames and brought the image to a shimmering pause.

  “Let’s look at his teeth,” he said.

  “The guy must be British.” His teeth wore an uneven patina of tea-stained yellow. Steven turned and gave me a look.

  “They’re dirty, but there’s nothing unusual about them,” I said. “That can’t be what he’s looking at.”

  I continued shuttling through the frames, a few every second. After about sixty frames, Lister let go with his left hand and it began a ten-frame journey to the keypad; his right hand stayed put, still firmly clamped onto his stubbly lower lip. Richard started number punching in slow motion, tilting his head from mirror to keypad to mirror, but as I discovered during my first viewing, only the press of the four-key was visible behind his thick neck.

  “What’s the deal with the lip?” Steven asked, genuinely puzzled. “He’s definitely looking at something in his mouth.”

  I shuttled through the frames until we arrived at the best view of his mouth in the mirror.

  “As far as I can tell, there’s nothing there.”

  “It’s not the teeth. Definitely not the teeth.”

  “What about the lower lip?” Come to think of it, the exposed inside of his lip did seem to have an unusual texture.

  “There’s definitely something there, on the inside,” said Steven excitedly. “Let me see the inside of your lip.”

  I repeated Richard’s ritual and exposed my gums to Steven.

  “Flesh-colored. Check mine.”

  I investigated the inside of Steven’s mouth, as instructed.

  “Rosy,” I concurred.

  “But his lip is definitely discolored. Grab the other tape.” Steven pointed to a Post-It-covered tape on my coffee table. I inserted it and we repeated our frame-by-frame advance until Richard flashed his gums again.

  This time, we had it.

  Chapter 20

  “The guy’s got digits tattooed on the inside of his lip!” Steven ejaculated. “He can’t remember the combination, so he keeps it where he’ll never lose it.”

  “No wonder he’s got such bad teeth. He didn’t want anyone to know what was there. It’s right out of a movie.”

  “They’re not really that legible,” Steven said, leaning forward.

  “C’mon, for a five-million-dollar diamond, you can read them. But if you’re not up to it, maybe I can.”

  I gave Steven a playful shove, crouched in front of the TV and stared for a good three minutes, but for the life of me, I couldn’t pick out a single shimmering digit.

  Rubbing my eyes, I said, “You take over. I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll give you an extra five percent of the booty if you find the code before I get back.” Steven had already returned to the screen, oblivious to my offer. If anyone had the patience and obsessive-compulsive personality to find this needle in a haystack, it was Steven.

  After a brief visit to the bathroom, I grabbed my laptop and a bag of baby carrots and sat back down on the couch. While Steven continued his scrutiny of the videotapes, I logged into my Gmail account to check my mail. As usual, nothing. But that reminded me. I wondered if Richard had received any new emails in his ZeusMail account, perhaps containing new clues we could use to locate the diamond. I hadn’t checked the account in days, so it was worth a try.

  I pulled up the ZeusMail website into a fresh copy of the browser and keyed in Richard’s credentials.

  “I found another sequence of him opening the panic room,” bellowed Steven.

  “I’m right here, Holmes.”

  “Oh.” He swiveled his head around and gave a sheepish grin. “Still no keypad though.” He returned to the TV.

  I directed my attention back to my laptop, and, now that the page had loaded, was ecstatic to find that Richard had received another email from the enigmatic Khalimmy: the buyer interested in the Florentine. It had been sent yesterday. I clicked to open it.

  From: Spirited One

  To: Antique Collector

  Subject: No more games

  Clearly, you think this is a game. I do not share the same thoughts.

  Just in case you need any motivation, your brother has decided to disappear for a while. If you don’t deliver by Thursday, he may disappear for good.

  “Oh shit. We have an unwelcome turn of events,” I said seriously.

  “Huh?” Steven mumbled, still fixated on the grainy video.

  “Come over here. This is not good.”

  Steven rose from his haunches, walked over and plopped down on the couch next to me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Take a look at this.” I pointed at the email. “The bastard kidnapped Richard Lister’s brother.”

  “Holy shit,” said Steven. “This is bad.”

  “Yeah, but what can we do?”

  “We have to go to the police.”

  “And say what? ‘Excuse me Officer, I broke into a dead man’s email account and read his private mail and found out his brother’s been kidnapped? Oh and by the way, I bought his two-point-seven-million dollar house and am hunting for a black-market diamond’? That’ll go over real well—”

  Steven shoved his hand out. “Just give me the phone. I’ll call Andy.” Hillary’s brother Andy worked for the rape unit down in Torrance.

  “Okay, but I’m not telling him anything about the diamond,” I said. “Just that we discovered a threatening email by accident.”

  Steven nodded, then dialed the eleven digits and hit the speakerphone button. A few rings later, Andy picked up.

  “Torrance Sex Crimes Unit, Officer Jensen speaking.”

  “Hey Andy, this is Steven.”

  “Oh, hey Steven. What’s up?”

  “Got a second? It’s pretty serious.”

  “Yeah, shoot.”

  “Thanks. I’ve got Alex here too.”

  “So what did you want, guys?”

  “Alex, you found it, you tell him.”

  As ordered, I proceeded to tell Andy about the threatening email.

  “You found the email in the dead guy’s computer you were fixing up? Seriously? That’s right out of a movie.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “And it’s clear that it’s a kidnapping threat?”

  “It’s pretty unambiguous.”

  “You need to file a kidnapping report.”

  “But where? I have no idea where this guy Ronald Lister lives.”

  He hesitated. “You’re still living in Northridge, right? Just go to Devonshire Station and report it there. They’ll figure it out.”

  Steven dropped me off outside the front entrance to Devonshire Station.

  “I’ll wait for you in the car,” he said. “No need to complicate things by involving both of us.”

  I nodded. “Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck.”

  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?”

&nbs
p; “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 fidel2@correio.br—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 Ri
chard’s spyware file, searching for the original email address, OXOTHИK@flavmail.ru, and replacing it with my updated fidel2@correio.br 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 securityadmin@freemail.com! 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.