moving.’
Jason’s ears pricked up. A valuable painting wouldn’t be stuffed on the back of a lorry full of women, but it might be part of a smaller haul. Jason itched to know the details of those local drop-offs, but Frieda had to weave her spell in her own sweet time.
She might be an ice-cold bitch, but Jason liked the way she worked. And he wanted to see a lot more of her in action.
Chapter 16
Hide and seek
Teenagers were a hacking goldmine.
They were power users of social media, always connected and sharing everything about their lives 24/7. A young person couldn’t eat a meal without taking a picture on Instagram, couldn’t stop at a shop without checking in on Foursquare. They exchanged cats on Tumblr and collected clothes on Pinterest, all while browsing Twitter for the latest unfiltered news.
Which made investigating a teenager something like child’s play to Amy Lane.
The first step was identifying the school uniform. After trying and failing to focus in on the badge, she turned instead to the colour scheme. She found the culprit – a Welsh-speaking secondary school in Cardiff.
Schools rarely networked their pupils’ information in a readily accessible way, but the pupils themselves were expert in shouting that from the rooftops. She found several Facebook users who had added their school, as well as some groups and events connected to it. But Facebook was fading in popularity with teens. If she didn’t find what she needed there, she had several other social media avenues to explore. Teens were all too eager to vomit out information, to be known, a habit rarely broken in their twenties and thirties.
She estimated the girl’s age as somewhere between thirteen to sixteen to narrow her search. As Amy got older, it was getting harder and harder to distinguish ages. No wonder aged shop assistants were IDing up to twenty-five. Not that Amy had ever been ID’d, but she’d heard Lizzie and Jason whine about it enough to know the score.
Scanning the pictures, she narrowed down a type – white, shoulder-length dark hair, no glasses, around five foot. But she didn’t recognise their suspect, and AEON couldn’t muster up more than a fifty per cent match on facial recognition. Perhaps teenagers involved in high-risk art heists managed their privacy a little better than the average social media user.
Amy slipped down into the next layer, the bowels of Facebook’s machinations, but even the locked-down accounts didn’t yield a positive match. Next she turned to Instagram, hoping that the glut of photographs would widen her window into life at the school – and let her find her mark.
Of course, the uniform could be a ruse, getting in under the radar by appearing as an innocent schoolgirl. However, given the general suspicion around teenagers in society, the girl was more likely to be watched in that uniform than if she’d dressed older, more like a college or university student.
Instead of searching by school identifiers, Amy looked at the upload location for the photos, narrowing it down to the area immediately around the school. Even if the pupils weren’t allowed mobile phones in class, the teachers could never keep them locked down during break and lunch.
The pictures were mostly of food – what else? – and selfies, groups of friends, laughing and chatting. Some pupils were more artistic, playing with composition and filters, but replicating supposedly ‘unique’ experiments that Amy had seen repeated a hundred, a thousand times.
She found her by accident. Skimming through one user’s detailed account of the first day of term, Amy caught sight of a face in the background and stopped. She was out of focus, but she fitted the type exactly. Amy browsed photographs around that time and caught her turning towards the camera, a frown at the antics of the girls taking selfies, as if she was above all that.
The girl had her phone clamped to her ear. Amy itched to trace the outgoing call activity
Jason’s ears pricked up. A valuable painting wouldn’t be stuffed on the back of a lorry full of women, but it might be part of a smaller haul. Jason itched to know the details of those local drop-offs, but Frieda had to weave her spell in her own sweet time.
She might be an ice-cold bitch, but Jason liked the way she worked. And he wanted to see a lot more of her in action.
Chapter 16
Hide and seek
Teenagers were a hacking goldmine.
They were power users of social media, always connected and sharing everything about their lives 24/7. A young person couldn’t eat a meal without taking a picture on Instagram, couldn’t stop at a shop without checking in on Foursquare. They exchanged cats on Tumblr and collected clothes on Pinterest, all while browsing Twitter for the latest unfiltered news.
Which made investigating a teenager something like child’s play to Amy Lane.
The first step was identifying the school uniform. After trying and failing to focus in on the badge, she turned instead to the colour scheme. She found the culprit – a Welsh-speaking secondary school in Cardiff.
Schools rarely networked their pupils’ information in a readily accessible way, but the pupils themselves were expert in shouting that from the rooftops. She found several Facebook users who had added their school, as well as some groups and events connected to it. But Facebook was fading in popularity with teens. If she didn’t find what she needed there, she had several other social media avenues to explore. Teens were all too eager to vomit out information, to be known, a habit rarely broken in their twenties and thirties.
She estimated the girl’s age as somewhere between thirteen to sixteen to narrow her search. As Amy got older, it was getting harder and harder to distinguish ages. No wonder aged shop assistants were IDing up to twenty-five. Not that Amy had ever been ID’d, but she’d heard Lizzie and Jason whine about it enough to know the score.
Scanning the pictures, she narrowed down a type – white, shoulder-length dark hair, no glasses, around five foot. But she didn’t recognise their suspect, and AEON couldn’t muster up more than a fifty per cent match on facial recognition. Perhaps teenagers involved in high-risk art heists managed their privacy a little better than the average social media user.
Amy slipped down into the next layer, the bowels of Facebook’s machinations, but even the locked-down accounts didn’t yield a positive match. Next she turned to Instagram, hoping that the glut of photographs would widen her window into life at the school – and let her find her mark.
Of course, the uniform could be a ruse, getting in under the radar by appearing as an innocent schoolgirl. However, given the general suspicion around teenagers in society, the girl was more likely to be watched in that uniform than if she’d dressed older, more like a college or university student.
Instead of searching by school identifiers, Amy looked at the upload location for the photos, narrowing it down to the area immediately around the school. Even if the pupils weren’t allowed mobile phones in class, the teachers could never keep them locked down during break and lunch.
The pictures were mostly of food – what else? – and selfies, groups of friends, laughing and chatting. Some pupils were more artistic, playing with composition and filters, but replicating supposedly ‘unique’ experiments that Amy had seen repeated a hundred, a thousand times.
She found her by accident. Skimming through one user’s detailed account of the first day of term, Amy caught sight of a face in the background and stopped. She was out of focus, but she fitted the type exactly. Amy browsed photographs around that time and caught her turning towards the camera, a frown at the antics of the girls taking selfies, as if she was above all that.
The girl had her phone clamped to her ear. Amy itched to trace the outgoing call activity
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