Silence.
Hello?
Is this Detective Robert Hunter? The raspy voice on the other end was male, the tone calm.
Yes, this is Detective Robert Hunter. Can I help you?
Hunter heard the caller breathe out.
Thats what were going to find out, Detective.
Hunter frowned.
Im going to need your full attention for the next few minutes.
Hunter cleared his throat. Im sorry, I didnt catch your na
Shut the fuck up and listen, Detective, the caller interrupted him. His voice was still calm. This is not a conversation.
Hunter went silent. The LAPD received tens, sometimes hundreds, of crazy calls a day drunks, drug users on a high, gang members trying to look badass, psychics, people wanting to report a government conspiracy or an alien invasion, even people who claim to have seen Elvis down at the local diner. But there was something in the callers tone of voice, something in the way he spoke that told Hunter that dismissing the call as a prank would be a mistake. He decided to play along for the time being.
Hunters partner, Detective Carlos Garcia, was sitting at his desk, which faced Hunters, inside their small office on the fifth floor of the Police Administration Building in downtown Los Angeles. His longish dark brown hair was tied back in a slick ponytail. Garcia was reading something on his computer screen, unaware of his partners conversation. He had pushed himself away from his desk and leisurely interlaced his fingers behind his head.
Hunter snapped his fingers to catch Garcias attention, pointed to the receiver at his ear and made a circular motion with his index finger, indicating he needed that call recorded and traced.
Garcia instantly reached for the phone on his desk, punched the internal code that connected him to Operations and got everything rolling in less than five seconds. He signaled Hunter, who signaled back telling him to listen in. Garcia tapped into the line.
Im assuming you have a computer on your desk, Detective, the caller said. And that that computer is connected to the Internet?
Thats correct.
An uneasy pause.
OK. I want you to type the address Im about to give you into your address bar . . . Are you ready?
Hunter hesitated.
Trust me, Detective, you will want to see this.
Hunter leaned forward over his keyboard and brought up his Internet browser. Garcia did the same.
OK, Im ready, Hunter replied in a calm tone.
The caller gave Hunter an internet address made up only of numbers and dots, no letters.
Hunter and Garcia both typed the sequence into their address bars and pressed enter. Their computer screens flickered a couple of times before the web page loaded.
Both detectives went still, as a morbid silence took hold of the room.
The caller chuckled. I guess I have your full attention now.
Two
The FBI headquarters is located at number 935 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, just a few blocks away from the White House and directly across the road from the US Attorney General. Aside from the headquarters, the FBI has fifty-six field offices
scattered around the fifty American states. Most of those offices also control a number of satellite cells known as resident agencies.
The Los Angeles office in Wilshire Boulevard is one of the largest FBI field offices in the whole American territory. It controls ten resident agencies. It is also one of the few with a specific Cybercrime Division.
The FBI Cybercrime Divisions priority is to investigate high-tech crimes, including cyber-based terrorism, computer intrusions, online sexual exploitation and major cyber frauds. In the United States, in the past five years alone, cybercrime has increased ten-fold. The US government and its networks receive over a billion attacks each and every day, coming from multiple sources all around the world.
In 2011 a report was submitted to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, estimating that internal cybercrime was bringing in illicit revenues of approximately US$800 million a year, making it the most lucrative illegal business in the USA, exceeding drug trafficking.
Thousands of the FBIs web crawlers, also known as bots or spiders, search the net endlessly, looking for anything suspicious concerning any type of high-tech crime, inside and outside the United States. Its a mammoth job, and the FBI understands that what the crawlers find is merely a drop of water in a cybercrime ocean. For every threat they find, thousands go unnoticed. And that was why on that autumn morning at the end of September, no FBI web crawler came across the web page Detective Hunter and his partner were looking at back at the Police Administration Building.
Three
Hunter and Garcias eyes were glued to their computer screens, trying to take in the surreal images. They showed a large, see-through, square container. It looked like it was made of glass, but it couldve been Perspex or other similar material. Hunter guessed each side to be approximately 1.5 meters wide, and at least 1.8 meters tall. The container was open-top no lid and it seemed to have been handmade. Metal frames and thick white sealant connected the four walls. The whole thing looked just like a reinforced shower enclosure. Inside the enclosure, two metal pipes of about three inches in diameter, one on the left and one on the right, ran from the floor all the way up and out the top. The pipes were sprinkled with holes, none wider than the diameter of a regular pencil. But two things worried Hunter. One was the fact that the images seemed to be streaming live. Two was what was at the center of the container, directly between the two metal pipes.