Inside the Phone

After he brought the phone to the hacker, Ursa sat quietly next to the boy, watching curiously as the hacker took action. He pulled a laptop and a short cable out of his bag, opening it before starting to connect the phone to the cable. The bright screen flashed, reflecting the hacker's glasses for a moment before his fingers started dancing over the keys. Ursa was dumbfounded to see how quickly the hacker was when operating his laptop.

"So, what are you doing now?" Ursa asked, curious. The lines of code that kept popping and getting pushed upward by the new one kept flashing so quickly, not giving him any chance to read, let alone understand it. Not that he could understand the code, of course, since he knew next to nothing about programming.

"Well, the phone is still locked right now, so I am trying to brute-force my way to unlock it, " the hacker answered. Receiving Ursa's confused gaze, he continued, "I am connecting the phone with my laptop, then running a self-made program by me to try systematically every possible combination of passwords until it meets the right one."

Ursa was dumbfounded at the explanation. "Isn't that like… Throwing every key you have into a lock while hoping that one of them finally matches, but on a far larger scale?" He asked, hesitated.

"Exactly."

"But that would take forever!" Ursa cried in disbelief.

"This is the best method I could do for now!" The hacker clicked his tongue, annoyed by Ursa's nonchalant comment. "Do you think doing this is easy? Well… It is not that hard, but that is not the point! I have to consider what kind of files are saved inside of the phone and whether my method would corrupt them or not. Also, I only bring a laptop here, so any other advanced method is not going to work. This is the best method I could think of for this situation, and the only downside is that it takes a bit too long, so I won't receive any complaints here!"

The image of a hacker who was always a genius who could magically breach any electronic devices easily shattered instantly when he heard that. However, he didn't dare to voice that thought since he himself didn't know anything about it at all.

Fortunately, it didn't take a long time for them both to wait before the laptop let out a loud 'Ping' sound, indicating that the program was successful. Both Ursa and the hacker jumped immediately, accessing the phone to see the content inside it. Ursa was a bit disappointed when he found that the phone was empty, but when he saw the hacker turn his attention back to the laptop, he knew this wasn't over.

"Can you restore the files inside?" He asked curiously.

"It should be easy." The hacker said firmly. "Even if the owner deleted the backup data on the cloud, due to the high percentage of criminals who couldn't be convinced because of the lack of evidence that could be solved if only their phone didn't 'accidentally' break, now every phone is now required to have a failsafe that could be accessed by the company and the cops when it is necessary, and if I break through its defense… Voila!"

Then, like magic, one file after another suddenly appeared on the phone. Ursa felt his jaws dropped at the sight in front of him. Hell, even the deleted chat also appeared there, and it took another thirty minutes before the phone finally stopped buzzing from all the data that had just been recovered by the hacker.

"Holy shit…"

Ignoring the flabbergasted reaction from Ursa, the hacker turned his attention to the phone. "Now, let's see what this Mister Kidnapper has for us…"

-0-

It turned out that the phone itself didn't have that many shady files in it. Just like any other ordinary user, the kidnapper had a lot of short videos saved inside it with one or two photos popped occasionally. However, the real treasure was in the messenger apps, which Ursa found pretty overwhelming.

16 / 09 / 2018 – Coordinating five grunts to create chaos in the complex housing in the South River district, coincidentally one day after those who lived there refused to leave even after getting bribed with a good amount of money. Now, that place has already turned into a successful mall managed by the Mayar Group.

02 / 10 / 2018 – Receiving 80,000 Gold Sham from Harisa Real Estate Group to get the council's approval for their project without having to go through the environmental impact assessment.

29 / 10 / 2018 – Blending into a group of activists who were protesting about the new rule that allowed the members of the city council to receive more allowance from the people's tax and create chaos, clashing with the cops deliberately to drag the activist's reputation down to the south.

14 / 11 / 2018 – Paying the local newspaper to smear Lawyer Hasan's name after the lawyer found out about his bad deeds, creating a controversial issue about Lawyer Hasan who is a womanizer and has about 5 secret girlfriends outside here.

21 / 11 / 2018 – Kidnapping Lawyer Hasan's daughter in an attempt to threaten the lawyer to stop his investigation toward Golak Mayar. Failed.

Ursa dropped his pen after re-reading the note he took after looking at the content of the chats inside that phone. By the date mentioned in all cases, Ursa could guess that the kidnapper was a new player in Golak Mayar's team, but he was very effective in his job. Just in two months, the kidnappers had already taken five big actions for Golak Mayar's sake with only the last one failing. Most of the cases were also pretty big, which would bring chaos instantly to the veteran council if it was spread on the Internet.

The hacker himself was also too stunned to say anything about it. He knew that Golak Mayar was a dirty man, but he didn't know the old man was far dirtier than he imagined. He could see his knuckle go white as he clenched it too tightly, blocking the blood from rushing through it. However, right now, he didn't care about that. He just turned his attention to Ursa and asked with eyes solemn, "So, what do we do about all of this shit?"

Ursa pondered for a moment, glancing at the hacker hesitantly before asking, "Can I trust you?"

"Definitely." The hacker nodded firmly. "For saving my little sister and for the sake of taking revenge on that bastard Golak Mayar, if you have a good idea, I am in."

"Well… If that is so, let's do this…"