Hunter frowned.
‘I’m going to need your full attention for the next few minutes.’
Hunter cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t 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 caller’s 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.
Hunter’s partner, Detective Carlos Garcia, was sitting at his desk, which faced Hunter’s, 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 partner’s conversation. He had pushed himself away from his desk and leisurely interlaced his fingers behind his head.
Hunter snapped his fingers to catch Garcia’s 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.
‘I’m assuming you have a computer on your desk, Detective,’ the caller said. ‘And that that computer is connected to the Internet?’
‘That’s correct.’
An uneasy pause.
‘OK. I want you to type the address I’m 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, I’m 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.’
The FBI Cybercrime Division’s 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 FBI’s ‘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. It’s 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.
Sitting there, tied to a heavy metal chair, was a white male who looked to be in his mid to late twenties. His hair was light brown and cut short. The only piece of clothing he had on was a striped pair of boxers. He was a chubby man, with a round face, plump cheeks and chunky arms. He was sweating profusely, and though he didn’t look hurt there was no doubt about the expression on his face – pure fear. His eyes were wide open, and he was taking in quick gulps of air through the cloth gag in his mouth. Hunter could tell by the fast ‘up-and-down’ movement of his belly that he was almost hyperventilating. The man was shivering and looking around himself like a confused and frightened mouse.
The entire image had a green tint to it, indicating that the camera was using night-vision mode and lenses. Whoever that man was, he was sitting in a dark room.
‘Is this for real?’ Garcia whispered to Hunter, covering his mouthpiece.
Hunter shrugged without taking his eyes off the screen.
As if on cue, the caller broke his silence. ‘If you are wondering if this is live, Detective, let me show you.’
The camera panned right to a nondescript brick wall where a regular, round wall clock was mounted. It read 2:57 p.m. Hunter and Garcia checked their watches – 2:57 p.m. The camera then panned down and focused on the newspaper that had been placed at the foot of the wall, before zooming in on its front page and the date. It was a copy of this morning’s LA Times.
‘Satisfied?’ The caller chuckled.
The camera refocused on the man inside the box. His nose had started running and tears were streaming down his face.
‘The container you’re looking at is made of reinforced glass, strong enough to withstand a bullet,’ the caller explained in a chilling voice. ‘The door has a very secure locking mechanism, with an airtight seal. It only opens from the outside. In short, the man you can see on your screen is trapped inside. There’s no way out of there.’