Page 10 of Her Mercenary
“Which is why we get along so well.”
“Sadly, true. Okay. First off, the anonymous email that was sent to you with the video is totally untraceable.”
“Why?”
“Whoever sent it used a fake IP address and ghost server. Impossible to trace. Same with the video attached. It was an altered file.”
“So what?”
“So, when a file gets edited, it erases the original metadata.”
I lifted my drink. “You didn’t come here to tell me you failed, Kieran.”
“I don’t fail. As I said, the video you sent me was altered—edited for an effect on a cell phone app. This didn’t surprise me, considering the content, but what did is that the location had been altered as well.”
I frowned.
“Let me explain,” he said. “Cell phones use location services to pinpoint your location, using a combination of GPS, Bluetooth, hot spots, and cell tower locations.”
“Geotagging. Get to the fucking point.”
“Right. So, every time you take a photo or video, a whole bunch of information is captured as EXIF data as part of the metadata. This data tells me a shit-load of stuff, like not only when, where, and how the video or communication was conducted, but also who else was involved, who initiated the communication, etc. But thanks to the uproar in privacy issues, phone manufacturers have added options for users to remove the location metadata, making it a hell of a lot harder for people like me to track, and easier for bad guys to get away with shit ... especially when they become crafty.”
“Define crafty.”
“It’s called spoofing, or schema poisoning. Basically, in this instance, instead of turning off their location services, whoever sent the video to you spoofed the metadata by assigning a fake location to the file.”
“To throw me off.”
“Right.”
“Which means whoever sent the video has something to hide and knows he’s being tracked.”
“No doubt about it. The intention can be not only to mislead trackers, but throw off an investigation, or even blackmail.” Kieran sipped his drink. “Or they could just be fucking with you.”
“Someone doesn’t send a video of a kidnapped woman collared and chained just for laughs.”
Kieran shrugged, unaffected. The man had seen it all.
“So, that’s it?” I said. “That’s all you got for me?”
“I’d say that confirming that someone is fucking with you, and probably watching your every move, is information worth delivering.”
“Thanks.”
“Someone doesn’t want you investigating this missing girl case.”
“Someone doesn’t want her found. It’s got nothing to do with me.”
“You sure about that?” he asked.
No, I wasn’t, but spitballing conspiracy theories wasn’t the point of the visit.
“So,” he said, “is the video of her? Of the missing American girl?”
“No. It’s of another victim that was recently abducted from a luxury Mexican resort. A local girl kidnapped exactly fourteen days ago, the same day the American girl went missing. The authorities believe the same group kidnapped three women that night.”
“The Cussane Network.”