Rue d’Antibes
Ingrid probed the defenses of the Wi-Fi networks within range of her computer while the maid tidied up the room. There were twenty-two networks in all, with signal strengths ranging from one bar to four. Most bore the names of businesses along the rue d’Antibes. The rest appeared to be personal. One was called schmidtnet. Another was designated ashworth. There was one network with no apparent name, just a seemingly random series of letters and numbers. Ingrid reckoned it was the one that belonged to the hacker in Apartment 3B.
When the maid had gone, she returned the camera to its place in the window and reattached it to her computer. Gabriel met her downstairs in the lobby and escorted her across the street to one of the boutiques on the ground floor of the apartment building—the one directly beneath 3B. While pretending to shop, Ingrid checked the available Wi-Fi networks with her phone. There were now only nineteen in range, but the networks called schmidtnet and ashworth had gained strength. So, too, had the one with no apparent name.
“Four bars,” she said. “That has to be him.”
Leaving the boutique, they walked down to the Croisette and took a table at one of the restaurants along the beach. Gabriel ordered a bottle of Bandol rosé, then listened while Ingrid explained what she proposed to do.
“Hack the hacker?”
“Not his computer,” she replied. “Just his network.”
“Won’t he notice?”
“Eventually, I suppose. But it’s the only way to determine whether it’s safe for one of us to enter the apartment and have a look round. If he’s a professional hacker, it will be obvious.”
“To you, perhaps. But I might mistake him for one of those idiots who spends his evenings playing video games.”
“Which is why I should be the one who goes in there.”
“I got a good look at the passcode on the street-level door this morning. I’m fairly certain it’s—”
“Five, one, seven, nine, zero, two, eight, six.”
“What about the door to his apartment?”
“I’m sure it’s just an ordinary French lock.”
“Which means you won’t be able to open it without a bump key or a hand grenade.”
“There’s a locksmith up in Grasse who sells bump keys and other unlocking tools.”
“You’ve done business with him in the past, I take it?”
“Monsieur Giroux is a fellow traveler. There isn’t a villa on the Côte d’Azur that he hasn’t robbed.” She opened her menu. “Have you been to this restaurant before?”
“Once or twice.”
“Did you kill anyone while you were here?”
“Not that I can recall.”
* * *
The picturesque town of Grasse, sometimes referred to as the perfume capital of the world, was a half hour north of Cannes at the foot of the French Alps. Monsieur Giroux’s shop was located on the Route Napoléon. Gabriel waited in the rental car while Ingrid went inside. She emerged ten minutes later with a set of professional-grade bump keys that, in the right set of hands, would open any lock in Europe in a matter of seconds.
“He threw in a lockpick gun as well.”
“Perhaps there’s honor among thieves, after all.”
They stopped at a nearby hardware store long enough for Ingrid to purchase a screwdriver and a roll of gaffer tape, then started back to Cannes. It was late afternoon by the time they were back in their rooms at the hotel. Gabriel attached the camera to his computer and kept an eye on the feed while Ingrid made her first tentative moves against the nameless network. By eight that evening she was in.
“How?” asked Gabriel.
“It’s impossible to explain the process to someone like you.”
“A moron?”
“A layman.”
“Try.”
She spoke for several minutes in a strange and foreign tongue. Derivation function, cryptographic hashing algorithm, wired equivalent privacy, deauthentication frame, medium access control, physical layer protocols, something called “evil twin access points.” The upshot of all this gibberish was that she had deceived the network into surrendering its own password.
“Are you still connected?”
She shook her head. “It’s not safe for me to be logged on while he’s working.”
“Did you happen to notice anything interesting before you took your leave?”
“Two desktops, two laptops, four phones, and an alarm system.”
Gabriel swore softly.
“It’s not a problem. I’ll disable the alarm before I go in, and I’ll reset it on my way out the door. He’ll never know I was in his apartment.”
“Unless you happen to bump into Madame Martineau or Herr Schmidt on your way out.”
