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Henry snorts. “Hardly a long-term solution.”
Okay, I’m listening.“Do you have something better?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” he says. “If you give me access to those feeds, I might be able to pinpoint who it is. In order for those cameras to feed the information to the server, they use a range of code. And when someone taps in to access it live, they add a code to the metadata. It’s automatic. Most people don’t even realize they’re doing it.”
“So, you want me to give you access to my bar’s camera system because youmightbe able to find out who has been hacking in?”Hardly sounds like a good deal.
He shrugs. “From where I sit, you don’t have anything to lose. Your buddy here already ripped the cameras out of the wall. Besides, if I can’t pinpoint them, the least I can do is lock out their signal and strengthen your firewall to make it harder for them to get back in.”
Well, he has a point. It’s not like I plan on putting the cameras back in until I know this has been dealt with. The irony of how it’smoredangerous to have them is not lost on me right now. But it wouldn’t hurt for the firewall to be stronger so no one else can get into it.
“Okay, fuck it,” I tell him. “Mali, go grab my computer.”
“Me? Why me?”
Plastering a fake smile on my face, I blink at her. “Because you have such a love for computers and the dark web.”
She huffs, getting up and grumbling to herself as she goes upstairs to get my laptop. It’s awkwardly quiet as we wait for her to return, and when his eyes move over to Laiken, I cough.
“Don’t look at her.”
He may be just doing the job Mali contacted him for, but I don’t know this man. And until he shows me otherwise, he’s just some fucking weirdo that met someone on the internet and came over their house. He probably thought he hit the jackpot when they answered the door.
Seriously, I wonder if Cam is reallythatinto Mali, or if he’d get over her if she, let’s say…disappeared.
Mali comes back down and hands me my computer, giving me her bestgofuck yourselfsmile as she does. I chuckle, opening it and putting in my password. It takes a minute to log into the server, especially since we haven’t accessed it in a while. There’s been no reason to. But once I’m in, I pass the computer over to Henry.
“Okay,” I tell him. “Do your thing.”
He takes it into the kitchen and we all follow him, standing behind as he sits at the island. I don’t worry about what he might see on the feed. We already erased the video from the morning of the dead body incident. There was nothing useful on it anyway. It looked like the cameras glitched. One second it wasn’t there, and the next second, it was.
My guess is they had access and turned them off before they went in, and back on when they left. Which means I can only imagine what footage they have of that. But I’m guessing that’s the least of our worries, with how much they seem to have on Monty’s death.
Henry presses a few buttons, and a bunch of code that looks like gibberish to me appears on the right-hand side, while the video stays on the left. He starts to play the first one and shows us how the code scrolls at rapid pace, and he’s looking for a certain line of it to see when the person taps in.
He makes it sound easy, yet something tells me it’ll be anything but.
ONE VIDEO TURNS INTOseven, and honestly, I’m getting bored of this. Either this guy has no idea what he’s doing, or our littlefriendhas gone through great lengths to cover their tracks.
“Okay, last one we’re trying,” I say, going to the video where I know they were watching because I got a text. “I know for a fact they were tapped in during this one because there’s no other way they could’ve known I was looking at Laiken.”
She glances back at me, the corners of her lips turning upward slightly. God, things would be a lot more convenient for me if I was able to stay mad at her. But I totally get what Cam meant when he said he’s weak when it comes to Mali. Laiken has the same effect.
We all watch the video together, looking for anything different in the coding we’ve been staring at for the last two hours, but there’s nothing. Even as we see the moment Cam grabs my phone from me, which I know is when I was being watched.
“Yeah, you’re not going to find anything on here,” I say. “If you were, it would’ve been there.”
Henry hums, pressing a few more keys. “It doesn’t make sense. In order for them to block out this code, or remove it from every video, they’d have to be a very experienced hacker.”
“Yeah, well,” I drawl, “you win some, you lose some.”
The only thing this has told me is why the hacker we used for the Monty thing was taken and then killed. They needed something from him, and once he was done, they disposed of him.
Or rather, madeusdispose of him.
“Thanks for trying, Henry,” I say, placing my hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate it.”
I don’t, really. He was relatively useless, and I feel like I wasted the last two and a half hours of my life. But it is what it is at this point.
