Fishing

"If I do this I want to see that picture," Dale said with a smirk cut through his thin lips.
"Don't be gross," I said.

Dale shrugged, and spun his chair around and faced his computer screen. Amy walked over to the bed and sat down on the end of it, straightening the green, denim-looking bedspread around her with one hand. She bounced slightly on the mattress a few times then said, "Maybe we could just give him a private show."

Dale looked sideways at her, then craned his neck to look over his shoulder at me. "I like her, Chris," he said. I just grinned weakly.

Amy seemed to be enjoying her new role, I hadn't seen her this happy to be someone else since she was Sarah from Fraud Prevention atComstock's bank. Maybe she could be an actress, I though. Most of them come from broken homes; perhaps there's a reason for that. Me, on the other hand, when I thought up this ruse I overlooked the fact that it would also require me to have no sense of personal shame. This bucked against my typical, "reserved" mindset.

"Reserved" means "prude".

"What's the email address?" Dale asked, staring at his computer monitor. I walked forward and stood over his shoulder, then repeated the email address from memory.
"Alright, lets try the obvious route," he said. At the Hotmail homepage, he clicked "Forgot your password" and entered the address I gave him. To restore access to your account, the website asks you to verify your state and zip code, then asks you a custom question that you set up when you open the account. Dale explained that most people, thinking they'll never forget their password, make the question something easy like "What's your name?" not knowing that anybody who can answer that question can get your password. Other people, also feeling they'll never forget their password, make the security question something silly with a dumb answer that they forget.

After telling him Mr. Comstock's zip code, the security question came up.

"Damn it," Dale whispered. The question on the screen was "What's the last 4 digits of my ssn?" I definitely didn't know his Social Security number; though ideas started racing through my brain as to how to obtain it. Credit card applications, employee records, Selective Service listing, student loans, medical records, invoices from insurance companies... I wasn't exactly sure how I came up with all of those, but they rattled through my brain as if rote; like the list of U.S. Presidents. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison... Nothing I could think of would be easy to come by, though.

"Don't fret, young Padawan," Dale said, reading my frustration. "That was just the obvious route. There are still more routes."
"Like what?" Amy asked, still sitting on the edge of the bed.
"Like... phishing," Dale said; then, almost to himself, he continued, "though I don't think it's technically phishing if you're only targeting one person. Then it's phish in a barrel," he laughed.
"Fishing?" I asked, deciding my character wouldn't know what he was talking about.
"Phishing. With a 'ph', where you pretend to be someone official to get a mark to reveal personal or secure information."
"Huh. Stuff like that actually works?" Amy asked. She was grinning at me.
Dale ignored her. "I can make a fake web form," he said toward me, "make it look like it's a Hotmail page. Then send him an email, make it look like it's from Hotmail itself, saying he needs to go to this page to verify his password or something. When he 'verifies' his password, it sends it to me. Or you."

I scratched at the back of my neck. The idea was pretty much the same thing I'd been doing over the phone, just having a web page do the lying instead of me or Amy.

"Why would he have to verify his password? When would that occur in real life?" I asked.
Dale thought for a moment, then said, "If his account was going to expire, or something. Or it could say he won some stupid contest, and he just needs to log in to claim his prize."
"Would anybody buy that?"
"Probably not," Dale said with a frown.
"It should be something that would get his attention, something that would scare him or make him think it was urgent that he type his password--" I trailed off for a while, then had an idea. "What if he didn't have to verify his password, but change it? Like, the email could say that someone tried to access his account, tried to hack it or something, so he should change his password. That would take him to a form where he'd enter his 'old' password then pick a new one. We'd get both, then we could change the password ourselves so he'd never realize anything had happened."
Dale made a circle with his eyeballs, thinking. "That's good," he said.
"And you can make the email so it looks like it's a notice from Hotmail itself?"
"I can make it look like it's from Shirley Temple."
"Ok," I said, "how fast can you do that and make the form?"
"The form I can do right now, just copy something from Hotmail's site and just change where the form submits to; and the email I can send as soon as I can find a mail server that's still open. The longest part will be writing the email and the page text."
"I can write that while you do the rest," I said, pulling the laptop from my backpack and taking a seat next to Amy on the bed.
"Is that new?" Dale asked, looking at the computer as I opened the lid.
"No," I said, hesitating. "It was my dad's."
He didn't say anything, just turned back to his screen and started copying source code from Hotmail pages.

I began typing up an email that explained that some nasty person had tried to force his way into this email account, and that as a security precaution you should click here to change your password to something more secure. I then started writing body text for a web page that would explain pretty-much the same thing. Amy said something about being the only one without a computer to stroke, then got up and started picking through the book shelf again.

After a half hour we had a fake form and a fake email ready to send from a fake email address. Dale said he put a tracking image inside the email so that when the email was opened and the image was viewed, the time and IP address would be recorded on a server. Then, when/if something was submitted on the form, it would be saved on the server. He gave me the URL of a page I could view to check the status of the form and the tracking image, then went to send the email.

"Wait," I said, "won't he notice that the form he goes to isn't on hotmail.com if he looks at the address bar?"
Dale scoffed, "People are stupid. Most people don't even know that the address bar is there. They just type whatever they want in the first box they see, which is usually the search bar on MSN or AOL or whatever their homepage is. There are people who think 'go to whatever-dot-com' means type 'whatever.com' into a search box and click the first thing that comes up."
"Not everybody is that dumb," I said.
"True, which is why I changed the window settings in the HTML so the address bar and toolbar will be hidden. As long as he uses IE, at least, and he probably does."
"Alright," I said.

He tested the form one more time for fool-proofing, then sent the email out. He refreshed the status page a few times, hoping to see it updated with Comstock's password. It was silly to hope for any results this soon, but it was worth a shot. After five minutes and no dice, Dale said, "It might even take a few days, most people don't sit around their computers all day with email clients to check for new mail every 60 seconds."
"Alright," I said, making sure I'd saved the URL for the status page on my own computer. "We'll go, then. Thanks for the help."
"What about my private show?" Dale asked, standing for the first time since we'd got there.
"We're leaving!" I said, as Amy walked out the door and down the hall.

As I slipped the laptop into my backpack and stood to leave, Dale checked the doorway and asked, "Where'd you find an exhibitionist-minx-nympho like that?" He had a grin from ear to ear.
"Oh, you know," I said, backing toward the door, "just gotta keep your eyes open."

I unlocked my car and Amy hopped in. I set my bag in the back seat, then got into the car slowly. I sat in silence for a moment, trying to let the "character" slip off me. In the past few days, it seemed like I hadn't said an honest word to anybody. Anybody but Amy, at least. I thought all the lies would be weighing more on my mind, but really the only problem was keeping the lines of deception straight. If it weren't for the fact that I could be mostly honest with Amy, my brain would probably be about to pop. I thought about how lucky I was to know her, to have her. I looked over at her; the colored highlights had mostly washed out of her hair, leaving it all dirty blond with a few dashes of red at the tips. God, was she pretty.

She looked back at me with soft eyes, curious. "What?" she asked.

I thought about it, but the talk from yesterday kept creeping back into my head. About Quantico, about my dad's work, about how Amy grew up in a town I was always locked out of.

"Do you have anything to do today?" I asked.
Amy looked down, then out the front windshield. "No, I don't think so," she said.
"Feel like visiting your old town?"
She looked back at me, stiffled a low chuckle, and said, "Sure."
"I need to get something first, wait here a few minutes." I handed Amy the keys then got out of my car and went back inside Dale Carpenter's house.

Fifteen minutes later, and fifty dollars lighter, I came back outside. Tucked in my pocket was an innocent-looking device that, hopefully, would allow me to commit several counts of high treason which were probably punishable by years in prison.

"Alright," I said, pulling the car into gear, "lets go see daddy's office."