Dance Moms - Claudia (2) Sand and Wave

Chapter 19 : Hack

Raz got off his motorcycle and fished out the keys to his apartment. He just enjoyed an expensive dinner, celebrating his ransomware successfully attacked a German resources company. Soon people from all over the world will come to buy his products for their criminal plans, and he will become rich.

He turned on the light in his living room and froze. What he saw sent a chill up his spin, shivering though it was a hot night in Baghdad.

"No! They killed you! They killed you!!" Raz began to shake, like he just saw a ghost.

"Raz." Chloe was sitting in his work station, her right eye empty and hollow.

The man dropped his things and made a run for the door, instead he ran into a wall that wasn't supposed to exist.

"Going somewhere?" Masha looked down on him.

Chloe grabbed the man from behind, slammed his head into a wall, then sent a knee to his abdomen, so hard the man vomited, spilling out his celebration dinner across the floor.

"Wow! Here's a side I don't see every day!" Masha amused by the violence.

The team stood and watched Chloe beat down the man until he was spitting blood, picked him up again and pinned him to a chair.

"Please! I swear I didn't know! They forced me to do it! I had to tell them where you were, or they kill me!" the bleeding man begged.

"He's lying." Emira shrugged casually from a corner.

"And I'm going to finish their work!" Chloe pushed her haunting face to him, pulled out a knife from her sheath, pressing the tip below his right eye. "Every day I look at a mirror I think of this moment!"

"No! No! Stop her!!" the man cried in panic.

"That's genuine." Emira approved. "He's about to piss his pants."

JoJo stepped forward before Chloe went any further. This place has gotten into her.

"No one can stop the White Jackal." JoJo told the man. "But you can."

Thirty minutes later, Raz was tapping rapidly on his keyboard, to his left was a stack of cash, to his right stood a blade that went into his work desk. The White Jackal gave him the choice of finding the information, or losing all his fingers.

"I can't access the cameras of the restaurant, so what we're looking at is the traffic cams outside." explained the trembling hacker. "You'll have to tell me who you're looking for."

"Go back."

Under instruction, Raz dragged the cursor to an earlier time frame, Tilly saw herself shooting the power lines. Further back they watched Sam rode out her 4x4, then further back they watched the man getting into a Volvo.

"Can you identify his face?"

"I'm a hacker, not a magician..." Raz then saw Chloe twisting the knife on his desk. "But if I can get his license plate..."

Tracing back a vehicle was not as easy as it showed in movies, especially for an old city like Baghdad, where roads don't line up in formation, but stretch out randomly. Traffic cams were poorly maintained, some were out of service, others have blind spots. Couple of times the vehicle just disappeared between cameras, and Raz had to anticipate its move, checking the next and the previous footage, back and forth.

After much effort, Raz finally got a good shot, capturing the license plate and began hacking the Motor Vehicle Registration, printing out the information on a sheet of paper.

Chloe snatched it from him, yanked out the knife and shoved it back in her armor, leaning over and whispered to his ear.

"Don't die just yet. We still have unfinished business."

She and her team left without another word, and the hacker just realized he wet his pants.