Ch. 65 – The Scrapbook in His Head

The message to Maxine had sent maybe fifteen minutes ago, and Derrick’s butt was already getting sore from leaning on the railing.

When was the last time he’d been waiting in front of Maxine’s hideout door for this long? Probably back when they had first met face-to-face. His heart had dropped when that security door opened, and a young woman in a pair of jean shorts came out from around the corner.

The place had been even messier back then: piles and piles of cables, batteries, and equipment for setting up externally mounted solar panels were all sitting in the corridor, and the faint smell of the sea breeze wafted from the entrance.

After they’d shaken hands—the feel of her smooth skin and firm grip set his nerves on fire—his lizard brain had taken over. He’d tried to show off, mentioning that he knew a bit about network intrusion too. Her face brightened, and she practically pushed him out of the front door again.

It was the same, absolute unit of a door that he was waiting in front of now. Unchanged—and undented even—in the years since they’d met. The door was steel, perfectly fitted to the frame, and mounted on solid hinges. The type that might need explosives, or something like a portable ram, to break by force; a fireman might be confident busting it down, but Derrick wasn’t.

After she’d moved them both out of the door, she had closed it and locked it again, inviting Derrick to try hacking it, and even showing him a few tools of her trade to get him started. ‘It’s free pen testing for me,’ she’d remarked, as if she’d just gotten a free donut with her coffee.

Her front-door’s security had seemed unbreakable to him, and she’d seemed to realize it too, scratching her head and clearing her throat while sweat dripped down Derrick’s nose and onto the laptop’s keyboard. The door remained stubbornly closed, despite all the faffing around he’d done with the shop laptop he’d brought with him. The moment he looked back up at her with furrowed eyebrows and flushed cheeks, Maxine broke into laughter. ‘Don’t beat yourself up, I can tell you really tried—you look like you just ran a marathon!’ Her smooth hand had pulled him back up to his feet with explosive strength. ‘Feel free to try and break in any time, as long as you don’t make a mess,’ she had said with a smirk, before unlocking the door and ushering Derrick back inside.

He’d never taken her up on the offer.

That was back when Maxine had seemed like some invincible super hacker. She was very, very smart, but her careless and forgetful side surfaced as Derrick brought her job after job. This carelessness had never affected the job itself, but she’d once asked Derrick to drop off an envelope of cash at her front door as payment, and by the time he’d returned with another job, the envelope was still there, tucked in a crevice on the landing where he’d left it.

And so he waited. And waited. And waited. He waved at the camera as he waited, as if waving hard enough would wake it up. He rapped on the front door. He checked for Maxine’s messages, again and again, but nothing came. She would usually be fast to respond if he came to her with a true emergency, but there was nothing.

Half an hour had passed, and Derrick was mid yawn when something creaked deep down in the stairwell beneath the landing. A chill ran up his spine, and he whirled around, fumbling his cell phone to tap the flashlight on. Eyes seemed to glitter in the dark, but they were just the reflections from his flashlight as he waved it around, scanning along the glass-lined stairwell that he had ascended earlier. No one was there, but the tension that had set his heart pounding never left, as if someone was watching him, and they were just out of sight, wherever he looked.

Derrick wiped the beads of sweat off his forehead and held his breath. There were no footsteps in the distance, no motorboat pulling up to the building. He’d been careful to watch for people following him, both on the drive toward the seawall, and when paddling his boat out past the Chunk.

But what if someone was waiting in the bottom of the stairwell, or hiding in some dark corner in the building? Or what if they’d seen him on drone camera footage? Maybe it was only a matter of time until some gun-toting paramilitary in body armor came storming up the staircase.

Regardless, waiting in front of the door, waiting for Maxine to reply, was getting him nowhere.

He needed to do something to get past the door, get info on the Drifter, and get the hell out of the building.

The note advised not to bother breaking into the room. But if there was some useful tech inside that would help find the Drifter, it was worth a shot. After all, Maxine had literally invited him to try breaking in again. Years later, it was time to take up her offer.

The camera stayed still while he walked up to it, but Derrick waved at the lens anyhow and stood up on his tip-toes. There was no sign that the camera was recording anything, but it felt only polite to try and leave an explanation for Maxine. “Hello there,” he half-whispered to the camera, hopefully quietly enough that someone at the bottom of the stairwell would have trouble hearing him. “I’ve been trying to reach you, but I didn’t get any response. And I found this note under the staircase,” he said. If Maxine could see and hear him through the camera, then she’d understand why he was breaking into her hideout. If she couldn’t check the camera footage, well, she was in for a surprise when she came back. “You weren’t responding, and I really need some information, so I’m going to test your security system again, just like I did when we first met.” He sent the same message via the anonymous contact method, and got to work.

The door was a solid one, and had some sort of electronic system controlling the lock. Derrick was no hacker, but Maxine was a careless one. Despite being able to squeeze her way into almost any system that Derrick had seen her attempt to penetrate, she had neglected her own operational security in some uncharacteristic ways. She’d let Derrick bring Xavier over to her base, after all, exposing its location to the client of a client. Even if it was for a job, common sense would dictate that they met in a neutral spot, far from where Maxine made her home. But it was almost like she was ready to throw away this hideout in an instant, as if it was just her stepping stone through the flooded Old City.

And if she wasn’t that careful with her operational security, then there was a chance that she’d left some flaw in the security for her face-scanning camera or front door. The latter was definitely networked, since she had opened it with her phone, back then. And if it was networked, it was vulnerable.

He’d dabbled a bit more with network penetration in the years since he’d first tried himself against Maxine’s door; it was just script kiddy shit, but every bit counted, right? Shit, if only he had held onto the tool that she gave him to use on Xavier’s job. Well, there was always the tool that everyone had: a cellphone.

The glow of his phone was piercingly bright in the dark. Derrick squinted as he opened the Wi-Fi cracker app—one that Maxine had shown him, ironically—and watched as the various access points populated it.

Passwords. Some folks left the manufacturer’s default password, often because they didn’t know any better. The careless or busy might use some easily-researched fact about themselves or their family as the password: a birthday, for example. If luck had it, Maxine set her passwords like a ‘busy person.’ She definitely kept herself busy with something, after all.

There were a few access points in Maxine’s hideout. Derrick had even seen what he had suspected to be routers, lurking in the gaps in the ceiling tiles, their green and orange LEDs blinking, as they transmitted the orders for mysterious tasks that Maxine always seemed to be using her equipment for.

The Wi-Fi cracker app detected three networks:

- Thinksys743

- Alliance 2.4 GHz

- Lucky Bastard

Heh. Maxine was the type who liked to have a little fun on the job. And if she were to name something, it would probably be her main network, to which the most important devices were connected.

Derrick selected the “Lucky Bastard” network, and set the Wi-Fi cracker app to try running through a list of default router passwords—she was using commercial hardware, from what he could remember. Dictionary attacks could be computationally expensive, and kill his phone battery, but it was worth trying one while he prepared a more targeted approach.

Derrick sat down on the cool metal strip on the landing, and laid the phone down to keep his body heat from overheating it while it ran through the password lists. He closed his eyes, and something deep within his brain shifted, as he dredged up every insignificant memory of Maxine that he had. Derrick had never been the nosy type, so the nooks and crannies of her hideout were unexplored, but he’d caught glimpses as they had walked through it while preparing for one job or another.

He and Maxine had been in a working relationship for a while now, but she’d kept her past well-guarded. It was smart, of course, but awfully inconvenient at the moment.

Had she ever mentioned her birthday? No. Although there was that one time he’d visited . . . when she’d been smiling and staring off into space, in between the quick commands she’d typed on her keyboard as she collated the available information on bypassing a Stoneridge Prosthetics mod’s security. He’d luckily brought a six pack of beer that day, and they’d sipped some, enjoying the buzz until she handed the bypass script to him on a data stick—

Derrick, focus.

Okay, well maybe it wasn’t her birthday, and she’d just been in a good mood, but he typed the date they’d gotten drunk together into his phone’s notes app anyway, and set it back down on the floor.

Had she ever mentioned her hometown? No. She’d never talked about her parents. Derrick was an orphan, so he had a good reason for not talking about his parents. If she’d been living out in the Old City for a while, there was a good chance she was an orphan too. Or at least estranged from her parents. Huh, so the two of them might have that in common at least—

Come on, back to the task at hand.

Name of her pet(s)? This one obviously didn’t apply to Maxine, unless she had a pet lizard hidden somewhere in the sunken building.

Name of best friend or . . . boyfriend? Did she have one? He’d never seen anyone else over at her hideout. But she was a professional. Of course she wouldn’t have a partner over while she was working. But then again, the building was big enough that there could be a whole other apartment setup in the upper levels. It seemed almost obvious that Maxine would sleep in her shop, like Derrick and Tony sometimes did, but what if she had a cozy love nest above it, with a romantic view of the water below—

Ugh. Focus! The flooded city isn’t romantic anyways, it’s full of debris and dead bodies, probably—BEEP

The noise from his phone pierced the otherwise quiet stairwell. Oh. It had gotten a hit! The Wi-Fi menu’s loading symbol disappeared, and he was finally fully connected to “Lucky Bastard.”

The app began listing all the connected devices:

- DELUXE ALL-IN-ONE COLOR PRINTER SCANNER C6370

Wait. That was it? The only device connected to Lucky Bastard was a wireless printer? Shit, he’d messed up. But in a sense, it’d been lucky that he was able to crack into her network at all via brute-forcing, so he might as well check out the printer anyways while the next round of brute-forcing ran.

C6370. Hm, the model number sounded familiar. Where was it from? A web search for ‘C6370’ linked directly to the manufacturer’s website, and a video banner ad started playing. The 3D model of the printer rotated 360 degrees around as Derrick scrolled down the site, past row after row of marketing buzz language, until the view zoomed in on the front of the printer, where there was some sort of lens.

Oh, it was one of those instant-scan printers. Since smartphone camera software had gotten better at smoothing and evening out pictures of pages, scanners were only used for the most important documents, or sensitive image-related work, since using a tray or flat-bed was much slower than snapping a photo. Of course, all-in-one printer scanners were still sold, there were enough small businesses that needed them, but the newest versions came with what was effectively a smartphone camera at the front of it. You just held a page up to the camera, and it could snap a picture of the page, sending it wirelessly to whatever computer it was connected to.

So this is what he had to work with.

What information could he get out of a printer . . . If she had printed or scanned anything important recently, it might still be in the printer’s non-volatile memory—the type that didn’t get wiped after a power cycle or outage. This buffer of maybe five or so recent documents wasn’t available to view normally, but if the C6370 had any known exploits, then Derrick might be able to access it and view the old documents in their original size.

Derrick crossed his legs, leaned over the blue glow of his smartphone, and began sending whatever documented commands he could find to the printer. His eyes began twitching as the minutes passed by, and he found that each of the typical printer exploits for additional network intrusion appeared closed off. Any exploits specific to the C6370 hit a brick wall, and had likely been patched out by software updates. Shit.

Derrick eased himself back onto the landing, and breathed in the dusty, humid air as he stared up at the ceiling. There wasn’t a clue hidden atop the rafters, pointing him in the right direction, like there usually was in the movies.

With the tools and network access he had, he could at most maybe try and print a page from the printer. Hell, he might as well try. He printed a page with just a period on it, and listened for the sound of a printer starting up.

Nothing. The walls were too well insulated. But a notification popped on his phone, telling him his page had finished printing.

Okay. That wasn’t doing anything for him. Well, what else could he do? Scan the empty flatbed? No, that was silly. Try and view the front-facing camera, maybe? If it really worked, then he could try and see what was in the room.

It took a few minutes of sweaty typing on the hot glass surface of his phone to coax the printer to send over an image from its front-facing camera. The image was dark, but something vaguely white covered its entirety. Shadows stretched along some creases on the object, which Derrick after staring for a few seconds, recognized as the page that he had just printed out. Well fuck. It must’ve gotten stuck on something when it printed out; maybe one side of the page was resting on the paper output tray that he’d seen on the 3D model of the printer on its webpage. The camera worked, but the paper was blocking everything worth seeing.

Hm. Well maybe if he printed another page, it would push the first one away? Derrick locked his phone screen to avoid tapping something by accident, and then wiped off the oily smudge on it before waking the screen again. Working on a smartphone screen was the worst.

He printed another page, and the print completion notification came through. The image from the printer’s front-facing camera loaded in, and this time . . . the image was dark, but there were various items in the background, of various shapes and sizes. He finally had an unobstructed shot of the room, but it was too dark to make anything out. It figured the cheap-ass printer didn’t have a good low-light camera.

Derrick scowled. Wasn’t there some sort of flash function on this camera? It would be sorely needed if you owned one of these printers, and wanted to scan something via the front-facing camera; just holding a page up to it would make for a dark scan. Slightly modifying the command, Derrick sent it again, and another image came in. The image was streaked with white, thanks to the camera flash, which had given the previously shrouded figures definition, although they were still fuzzy. Judging by the low, squat shape, and the high, multi-tiered one, some of the items were probably the room’s furniture, and any other random stuff Maxine had decided to store there. A glowing white strip lined the bottom of the image: the paper that’d Derrick had printed earlier. It was reflective as if it was glossy photo paper.

But wait. At the left side of the image, where the darkness was the strongest, there what seemed like a diagram of sorts. The edge of it was crooked on the wall, and the top corner curled down, as if it had been pinned up in a hurry. The edge of the diagram was filled with colored blobs, and what seemed to be grids of straight and curved lines crossing through the blobs. Shit, if only he could see what it was. What would Maxine put on her wall? A picture of family? No, a family photo wouldn’t have colored blobs and grids. A reference chart for some helpful terminal commands? Maybe it was some sort of message for herself that she’d coded in a strange cypher.

But why would she leave a cyphered message up in front of the printer camera? Wireless printers were notoriously unsecure. Maybe she was that careless? Was it a trap? Derrick put the phone down and massaged his eyebrows. No. Think like Maxine would. She was always in a rush to get things done. If she needed to print out a diagram in the first place, she would pin it up right as it came out of the printer. And maybe, after that, she left the room in a hurry. She might be away from her hideout because she was on the run, after all.

It was all possible.

Derrick grunted, and swung his arms to sit up in one smooth motion. He had come this far hoping against hope he’d be able to break into her hideout and find some info on the Drifter. He might as well follow this attempt to the end.