Onderwêreld deur Fanie Viljoen | Brute Force | English Summary | Onderwereld

 

Onderwêreld deur Fanie Viljoen

Brute Force

Nicole calls on Wednesday evening and Greg could not wait for the end of the conversation because he has “more important” things to think about. He lies about having a prefect meeting to go to, thinking about how easily the lies come to him these days. He thinks that police’s search for Eckhardt in the pipes resulted in a dead-end because if something had turned up, he would have heard word going around the boarding house. Kwanele knocks on his door and when Greg lets him in, he tells him that he heard rumours going around and that if Greg needs anything, Kwanele will support him because that is the promise they made to each other when they were in grade 8. When Kwanele leaves, the fear sets into Greg’s soul. He cannot bring himself to phone home because he does not want to disappoint his mother, who expects so much of him in a way that is different from his father’s heavy expectations. He tells his mother that the police suspect him in the case of Eckhardt’s disappearance and makes her promise not to tell his father, at least not until he has tried to do something about it.

Later in the night, Greg leaves his room to go to the Hang-Out, where he logs into one of the computers there. With Eckhardt’s blog open and his notes nearby, Greg decides to take a look at the IP address that Doc Pienaar typed into his computer the previous night, but he is at a dead-end when the page brings up a password- input field because he did not see the password that Doc Pienaar used to log in. He remembers that he installed a keylogger on Doc’s computer and within moments, Greg receives Doc Pienaar’s SSH password in his email inbox. The connection leads him to Doc’s computer at PlusUltraMed and Greg downloads all the documents he sees. Every noise he hears in the ill-lit boarding house causes Greg to look up in paranoia – he cannot afford to get caught now. He believes that if he finds something that ties Doc Pienaar to Eckhardt’s disappearance, he will be pardoned for the messy way in which he did so.

He decides to obtain administrator access by using brute force to crack Doc Pienaar’s computer after failing to progress through dictionary and hybrid attacks. He realises that the process of obtaining all the passwords will take a long time, so he opts to run the program on all the computers in the Hang-Out at the same time, using each one to determine a portion of the administrator password. Hours pass and Greg can feel the fatigue catching up with him, making his paranoia worse. He thinks back to the night when he had a mysterious visitor at his door whom he chased through Da Vinci House in the middle of the night, wondering if he was that individual’s target. He wonders if it was Inspector Cele because she called his cell phone that night. He also thinks about the message he found on his bag, wondering if Kwanele was the one behind it. Eventually, the computers crack the password, and Greg logs into the system as administrator.

With root access, Greg scours the system for anything about the virus that “Butcher” and his accomplices are creating. He comes across a backup folder and after clicking through the various folders therein, Greg comes across a folder titled “PNR” – Project Nursery Rhyme. The folder contains a huge number of documents, but Greg starts to become wary of his dwindling time. He decides to send the folder to an FTP dead drop, opening a few of the documents to skim through their contents. The documents contain information about the virus’s incubation, symptoms, and even the monkeys that were experimented on in the cultivation of the virus. Their symptoms included bleeding from orifices, red eyes from swollen arteries, and a quick but weak heartbeat. Death occurred within 7 to 14 days after the emergence of the first symptoms.

The information shakes Greg to the core – it is inescapable evidence for anyone, even someone with connections like Doc Pienaar. After the last few files are downloaded, Greg logs off the PlusUltraMed servers and prints the emails from the dead drop. He reads through some of the conversations as they emerge from the printer, seeing talk of a designer virus used for military purposes. He reads further, discovering that Doc Pienaar and his accomplices wish to create the virus so that they can profit from the vaccine. Greg’s mind spins in disgust – it is all about money, there is no concern for the people who could be affected or even die because of such misdeeds. Poor people will not be able to afford to pay for the medication that they would need to survive a haemorrhagic virus like the one Doc is constructing. The printer stops because it has run out of paper, so he quickly goes back to his room to get more, but his blood runs cold when he returns to find someone standing in front of the computers with the print-outs in his hand: Doc Pienaar.

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