Chapter 112: Operation Aurora 4: Caught.

"Now then," Alex muttered, "where are you hiding?"The IP trace had to be as discreet as possible since a single ping would just end up alerting them.

So he leaned back, as he watched the software narrow down their general location. They had done a pretty good in cloaking themselves but not good enough.

The little gap they left open would be fully exploited by him and that was exactly what he was doing.

Alex latched on to each trail he got, making their approximate location narrower by the second.

"Bingo." He said with a grin.

Their exact location was soon made visible to him. This was one of, if not, the fastest tracking he had done and it was all thanks to sentinel.

But he didn’t celebrate yet, Amelia asked for their identities, not their location so he immediately went to work on that.

Getting their location was the hard part, their identities will be a lot easier to find.

All he needed to do now was access the cameras around that general location and their identities would be his.

Now, normally, that’d be illegal since only law enforcers were allowed access to camera feeds of some businesses but as long as no one found out, he’d be fine.

Besides, he was just saving the law enforcers some headache which he knew would be much appreciated...or that’s what he told himself.

Switching to a different software, since the previous had done it’s job. He opened a handy little software him and his team had created as part of a team bonding exercise.

It was capable of accessing all security cameras available within a selected location, so Alex just went ahead and pasted the coordinates of the location of the Elderwood hacker.

The software immediately went to work, scanning for available security and although there were quite a few around, there were none at the exact location.

"Smart," Alex muttered, genuinely impressed. Though, he hadn’t expected the Elderwoods to be careless enough to make their base of operations at a place swarming with security cameras.

But this didn’t mean that he had no way of figuring out who they were, it just became a little bit complicated but nothing for him to give up on.

Accessing the feed of the cameras around the location, searching for any suspicious looking person.

For the next hour, Alex learnt exactly how hard searching for the Elderwood was, especially in a place like China.

Since the country was full of people going about their way every hour of the day. There was no pattern for him to follow, nor was there a clue to how the hacking group looked.

All he had to go off was a group of people moving towards the location he had identified as the base of Elderwood.

But unsurprisingly, there were literally hundreds moving in that direction.

It seemed like he had hit a bigger wall than he anticipated. He was confident that it’d be easy but had just been proved completely wrong.

"Sigh, I need my coffee," he let out as he stood up and walked out of the cyber security room, towards the coffee machine.

"You’re here early," he turned to see one of his juniors walking up the stairs and looking right at him, "good morning, Sir."

"Good morning," Alex responded, about to go make coffee before pausing and looking at his subordinate, "get me coffee with no sugar, I’ll be in the cyber room."


"Yes sir," the junior replied as he walked towards the coffee machine and Alex returned to the cyber room.

Sitting behind the monitor again, he still had no idea how to find his targets so he just let out a groan and put his hand on his face.

"Here you go sir," the junior from earlier said as he placed the coffee by his side and glanced at the monitor.

"Oh, you’re using this software," he commented, "I thought it was discarded after that exercise."

He had been one of the members who were involved in creating it, more specifically, he was the UI designer so it made sense that he immediately recognized it with just a glance.

Alex was about to dismiss him when the kid said something that made him pause.

"If you’re trying to find someone in such a large crowd, I don’t think scanning each face would work," the junior said, "besides, that’ll take forever."

"What do you suggest then?" Alex asked, with a raised brow.

The kid spoke too much but he knew the kid wouldn’t just talk down on a higher up’s idea if he didn’t have a better one.

He was known for that.

"Well that depends, but judging from the way you’re scanning right now, it seems you’re looking for a pattern to a certain location," the Junior started before he pointed at the tiled camera feeds. "try a movement heatmap."

"That should highlight each person with a heat map according to the amount of times they have visited your target location or come from that direction." He added, "that should narrow it down to a handful of people."

Alex paused for a minute before turning to the junior and asking, "what’s your name?"

"Kabir, Sir" he answered, "Kabir Sharma1, junior UI designer and programmer."

"You’re my assistant from this moment," Alex said, "I’ll need that brain of yours."

Kabir froze for a minute, was his prayer to Krishna this morning being answered so quickly?

Because he was just yapping as he usually does and now he had been promoted to assistant to Mr. Alex? Right hand to Ms. Rhodes?

His entire month couldn’t get any better.

’Calm down Kabir,’ he told himself, ’just respond and keep your cool.’

"Yes Sir." He said out loud before screaming at himself internally, ’Yes Sir? You could’ve even gone with thank you sir and that’d work better.’

But Alex had already turned back to the monitor, isolating the people by heat maps. This helped narrowed his search down by a lot.

Though the number was still high, it was better than the amount he previously started with.

"Do you want more coffee, Sir?" Kabir asked, with a smile on his face as he picked up the cup that Alex had quickly emptied.

Alex turned to him with a frown on his face before saying, "stop doing that, go back to how you were."

"And no," he added, "you can get to work now, I’ll call you if I need anything."

With that, Kabir left chiding himself for acting word and Alex focused back on the monitor and started separating the people by the amount of time they had spent at that location.

By the time another hour passed, he was left with only a handful of people....well, a bit larger than a handful but still smaller for him to perform two specific searches.

One, whether they were together at that location or not and two, whether they were at that location during every known Elderwood attack.

And those two searches gave him pretty much the same results, a group of five.

A lady, and four men, one of which seems to be a foreigner.

Taking their images, he ran them through every single database he could, including not so ethical ones and the results were quickly presented to him.

The lady was known as Mei Li — age late 20s, Shanghai origin, her handle was the Redfox across several underground forums. Linked to past dump jobs.

Next were the four men.

Zhou Wei — mid-30s, systems guy, small criminal record for fraud and carding. Operates the tooling.

Lin Jun — late 20s, social engineer and logistics. No forensic fingerprints, but several alias bank transfers point back to him.

Aleksei "Aleks" Petrov — foreigner. Russian passport traces, worked remotely on Eastern EU clusters before disappearing and resurfacing in Asia. Tooling signatures match a Russian-language repo.

And finally a name that matched very poorly, so poorly that there were barely any information on it.

Elder Wood, Likely an alias and the leader of their hacking group since the team name went with his alias.

He had a couple of involvements in the underworld here and there but nothing that revealed his past or anything related to him.

He felt like a literal walking ghost since Alex couldn’t find anything on him, not his real name, family, or anything.

Or maybe he just didn’t have enough data based to run them through and he was sure that something would pop up if he dug deep enough.

But either, he could finally say, "got you."

-----------

"You sure you won’t stay over?" Mei asked Aleks as he took his backpack, prepared to leave the van.

Lin was outside sharing a smoke with Zhou while Elder wood had long left with the information they had gotten, probably to hand over to their client.

"I’ve got something else to handle," Aleks said, "so, maybe next time."

"Sure," the disappointment could be heard in her voice but she quickly masked it, "I guess I’ll start planning that vacation then."

"Yeah," Aleks chuckled before walking to the back door of the van and pushing it open only to be met by a bright light that immediately blinded him.

"Gōng’ān jú! Bùxǔ dòng!" a commanding voice came from behind the lights1.

"The hell?" Alek’s heart immediately dropped as his eyes went to the ground where both Zhou and Lin laid restrained.

He and Mei had no other option but to come out with their hands up.

The first thought was that Elder wood had betrayed them, but they knew him long enough to know that he didn’t work like that, so this was definitely someone else.

"Pā zài dìshàng! Xiànzài!" A command was shouted1.

The two had no other option but to obey and two officers walked to them and cuffed the two and moving them towards the car.

While all this happened, Amelia and Alex watched through a camera on the cop’s car, this definitely was game over for Elderwood hacking group.

Police, don't move.Get on the ground, now!That sounds Indian right ????