The Messiah Secret Read Online Free PDF Page A

knew that American law enforcement would find it difficult, or even impossible, to track him, and used those as the apparent origin – the technical term was a ‘zombie server’ – for his probes. He’d even set up an account that purported to be located in North Korea – a country that offered no internet access at all to its population – just to see what the Fibbies would do about it. They hadn’t noticed.
    And so, every night, while he slept peacefully in his penthouse, the sound of waves breaking on the shore below him, his untraceable electronic proxies trawled theweb, probing systems and networks and looking for any references to whatever subjects the founder and majority shareholder of NoJoGen, John Johnson Donovan – known simply as ‘JJ’ – had asked him to locate.
    His proxies never left any evidence of their intrusion, and merely copied whatever data they could find that related to the search string McLeod had loaded into their programs. When they’d completed their mission, each proxy automatically accessed one of several web-based email accounts and pasted the results into email messages. But these messages would never be sent, because all emails leave an electronic trail across the internet. Instead, all the messages were left on the servers as drafts, and McLeod was then able to access each email account, copy the contents of the draft messages and afterwards delete them, which left no trace at all.
    The whole process was automated, and McLeod would only get personally involved if the hacking software he’d designed failed to breach the defences of a particular network. Then he’d flex his hacking muscles and spend a pleasant few hours working out how to get inside that system. But normally, he just scanned the results when they were displayed on his monitor, weeded out the obvious rubbish, and sent the rest up to Donovan’s workstation on the top floor of the building.
    Because it was a Monday and the offices had been closed since Saturday morning, there were dozens of results to analyse. As usual, most of them were of neitherinterest nor relevance, but when McLeod looked at the nineteenth search result he sat back in his seat and whistled.
    ‘I’ll be damned,’ he muttered to himself.
    He checked the source of the data, but that turned out to be no surprise at all. He’d seen immediately that the information had been posted on the front page of a small local newspaper, and the version his proxy had located had been in the on-line version of the journal, hosted on an entirely unprotected server.
    McLeod read the article in its entirety, and one short paragraph caught and then held his attention. He sat in thought for a minute or so, then clicked his mouse button a couple of times to bring up an internet search engine. He entered a simple search term and looked at the results, which gave him the name of the website he was interested in. He opened up one of the hacking programs he’d written himself and started probing the distant server, looking for a way inside. There was something there he definitely needed to get a look at.
    In less than fifteen minutes he was looking at a list of police case files, listed by number. Then he changed the parameters and generated an alphabetical list of the names of the claimants or victims. Most of the files were small, the incidents fairly pedestrian – muggings, car thefts, burglaries, and so on. And then he saw something big. There were numerous statements, reports by the attending officers, forensic analyses and the like, and a whole sheafof crime-scene photographs, all neatly labelled and catalogued.
    He flicked through the forensic stuff until he found the one that related to the paragraph in the newspaper story, and made a copy of it on his hard drive. Then he glanced through everything else he’d found, and despatched the original newspaper report up to Donovan’s computer with the rest of the stuff. When his boss got in, he guessed he’d get