Page 35 of Just Hide

"We'll soon find out."

She felt a chill in the air as they knocked on the door and waited. The neighborhood was quiet, clouds were looming, and it was starting to rain lightly. The drops pattered into the pot of an ornamental pine tree near the door.

Connor shifted from foot to foot before knocking again. The sound was very loud. The impact from the steel knocker would definitely be heard from inside the house. But it seemed that Jack wasn't in or wasn't answering.

Cami was beginning to wonder if he'd had some kind of a heads up on their arrival at the work premises. Was he home but laying low? Was he trying to avoid them, and if he was, could she see any online activity from inside?

"I thought I saw him watching us," Connor said. "I'm going to take a walk around the house and see if there are any other doors. I don't want him doing a runner."

"I'm going to see if I can access his Wi-Fi," Cami said. "If he's using it here, then he's in, right?"

She quickly opened her phone and did a search, feeling more confident to be on familiar ground in a place where she could at least use her own skills. This was way more comfortable to her than standing on a sidewalk and waiting for a fleeing suspect to run her down. That had been a horrible moment, but she knew that time was as important here, and this was just as pressured.

Here was his Wi-Fi. She guessed that Jack had never thought someone would be standing right outside his front door, just within range of it, and looking into it. But even though she wasn't getting a full signal as it didn't stretch very far, she was getting enough.

She could see "JC Home 1," and she started up a program to try and hack the password. She was going to go for a brute force approach, simply running her program to try different passwords, lightning fast, starting with the premise that because this was his home security and this was a pretty good neighborhood, the password would not be overly complicated. And that meant there was a good chance of cracking it in the next few minutes.

Cami waited, listening to the tread of Connor's footsteps around the house, feeling tension build, because she was starting to feel exposed and very out of place, standing outside his front door and peering at her phone. And then, she did it.

"I'm in!" she said.

She might be outside the front door, but she was inside the network.

And Jack Charter was there. She could see him online.

CHAPTER TWENTY

"He's here," Cami hissed to Connor as he reappeared around the other side of the house. "He's inside and busy online!"

"He is? I didn't see any sign of him from the windows," Connor said.

"He's interacting online. He's uploading something," Cami said. There was high-speed communication going on inside the house, that was for sure.

“You’ve got a way of getting to him?” Connor asked.

"I'm going to see if I can hack into his device," she said. "It's not difficult because I can see it on the Wi-Fi, and he's very busy on it. He shouldn't spot me if I'm careful."

What was he doing? For a man who wasn't at work, Cami could now see that he was transferring reams of coding. Reams of it.

"It seems like he's copying something over to an outside source," she said. "I'm wondering how legitimate this all is. Do his bosses know he's doing this, locked up in his house?"

The fact he wasn't even answering the door was definitely another red flag.

"Wait a minute. I'm seeing where he's sending this to," Cami said. "It's going through to a man called Don Andrews, and he works for a different tech company."

Now, she was frowning deeply. No way was this legitimate! How could it be? He was transferring masses of code to a man who worked for a different tech company.

"I think I need to stop this," Cami said. "I can get into his router. I'm going to change the password. That will mean he can't access his Wi-Fi anymore. And maybe, this time, he'll come out when we knock?"

This, at least, was easy. Hacking the password had been hard. Changing it was a piece of cake. She changed it to a complex, twelve-digit password that included letters, numbers, and capitals, as well as other keys. That couldn't be brute forced in a hurry—it would take months to crack.

Watching her phone, Cami felt a sense of satisfaction to see the stream of data stop abruptly.

She guessed that he'd realize what was happening in a very short time. He'd be trying to fix it. And maybe, also, he'd put two and two together about the knocking on his door.

"Try again," she encouraged Connor.

He lifted the knocker and brought it down in a long, rhythmic rap. Cami felt as if the knocker was banging out the words, "We know you're in there, we know, we know."

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