Specifically...wait a minute. No way."
"What? What is it?" She peered over his shoulder at the screen but couldn’t make heads or tails out of any of the gibberish she saw there.
"I know this guy."
"You do? Who is he?"
"A fellow hacker. You think I'm bad? This guy's got no scruples whatsoever. And he isn’t that smart. He leaves trails everywhere he goes. He’ll get caught one day, no doubt."
"Ok," said Allie, "so what does he have to do with my guy?"
"Nothing. He's a hired gun. He does small jobs for people like this. He did some work for politicians in the last election. Fake robo-calls to the constituency of the opposition. He worked both sides of the ticket. I told you, no scruples."
Allie patted the boy on the back. "Your kind."
"Yeah, maybe. So are we done?"
"Done? No. We need to find out who hired him."
Without a word, Jimmy Welles typed quickly. A small window appeared onscreen. He typed a few more strokes.
"Jimmy, what are you doing?"
"Finding out who hired him."
"Yeah, but...are you doing what I think...?"
"You know a better way?"
Jimmy typed: Who hired you to do the robo calls to...
What better way to find out than to just ask the guy? This is why Jimmy Welles was a genius. A real genius knows he doesn’t always have to use genius methods.
The answer came back quickly: guy didnt say name. wanted proxy server.
"Look at that," Jimmy said. "Doesn’t even use punctuation. What did I tell you? No scruples. Anyway, there's your answer."
"What's a proxy server?"
"I don’t feel like explaining it to you all day, so I'll just say that you can use it as a sort of disguise to make it look like your communications are coming from somewhere else. It's like using someone's mailbox."
"Jimmy?"
"Yes?"
"You're a sexist, condescending piglet."
"Thank you. Now about my dinner."
"Hold on. Where did this person, your hacker friend's client, where did he want the calls to appear they were being made from?"
"I'll ask."
Jimmy typed. And a moment later the answer came: some chick in verdenier heres the ip...
"One more thing," Allie said. "I have reason to believe there were supposed to have been eight calls in total. There were only six. Can you find out why they stopped?"
Jimmy typed the question. The answer came: guy only want six calls.
Jimmy typed, Thanks. By the way, maybe you should learn the proper rules of grammar.
Jimmy's hacker friend returned with a suggestion to engage in an act that no normal human being is capable of performing.
Jimmy laughed while he resumed typing furiously.
"Here's the address. It belongs to Sally Kane. Who's that?"
"You don’t need to know. So you’re telling me that Sally Kane had nothing to do with these calls whatsoever?"
"I don’t know about whatsoever. But if you put two and two together, you can pretty much surmise that whoever got my friend to do this was doing it without this girl's knowledge. This guy wanted it to look like the calls were coming from her. But they weren't. They came from my friend, who