‘You naughty boy,’ I whisper. I’m almost impressed by his balls.

He’s been discreet so far. Maxim has had meatspace agents on his tail for weeks, waiting for him to slip up, but so far they’ve got nothing. There have even been times I’ve wondered if Maxim’s intel was correct — but not out loud, not even in private to others here in the workshop. Hackers gossip like anyone else. I learned that last year, laughing it off like a silly joke. I’m pretty sure I got away with it, but since then I’ve kept my mouth shut around these loose-lipped motherfuckers.

I also scrubbed my browser history and bookmarks five times over. Just in case.

But it turns out Maxim’s source was right. As well as following the target, the agents have been doing garbage dives. They take at-site photos of everything, steal anything useful, and bring it all to me.

The target and his wife have a four-month-old child. After one recent dive I saw a discarded baby monitor box in a photo. A modern type with camera as well as sound, and more importantly networked so the parents can go out for dinner or whatever and still watch over their little angels.

(Strike one: that box should have been in the recycling, where the agents might not have found it.)

I looked up the manufacturer, a Shenzhen outfit that makes branded goods for big tech companies then uses the same machines and templates to pump out white-label versions to rebadge and sell as own-brand devices around the world. The Chinese government owns ten per cent of the company, but that doesn’t make much difference either way. Design theft like this is standard practice at Asian tech facilities.

(Strike two: never trust a connection inside your house to a generic Chinese manufacturer.)

I asked around the workshop, and the black hat community, but there were no existing hacks or code injection methods for this particular device. So it was down to good old brute force.

I went to a retailer — an actual store, where I had to talk to actual people, hating every actual minute of it — and bought the same model of baby monitor. I took it home, set it facing out the window of my apartment to trigger the motion activation, and hooked it up to my guest network (firewalled off from the real thing) with default settings. Then I returned to the workshop and started poking it over the internet.

By the end of that day I had a crude but effective man-in-the-middle attack that captured every fifth frame of video from the camera, watching people walk by the street below my apartment. No sound, but the video was what mattered. Every fifth frame may not sound like much, but these cameras run at 30fps so it was plenty.

I’d hacked my own monitor. Now it was time to hack the target’s.

I went old-school, locating it by ‘war-dialling’. Back when dinosaurs roamed the internet, war-dialling meant using a program to call every possible phone number in an area by simple number incrementation — 0000000001, 0000000002, 0000000003, and so on — and see if any of them answered with a modulated audio signal instead of a human voice. If they did, the program knew it had found something electronic. Something that could be hacked.

I war-dialled local IP addresses for the baby monitors’ manufacturer code. I found a few hundred in the city, so narrowed it down to the target’s residential area. That left me with a dozen possibles. Half the owners hadn’t changed the default login settings, and the ones who did had used crappy, obvious passwords.

I hacked them all.

That afternoon I piped the output from each camera into separate image directories, then wrote a quick script to automatically stitch the frames into Matroska video files and apply a motion-smoothing algorithm. It’s like watching a 1970s soap opera starring robots, but it’s fine.

At the end of each day for the past week, I’ve played all the day’s files simultaneously, spread over my tri-monitor setup. Because each camera is focused on a crib, it’s mostly sleeping babies. The camera only operates when they move, so they look like the most restless kids in the world. It’s boring as fuck.

But patience is a virtue. Every so often, a parent leans far enough over their baby to be seen. Or they pick up the monitor and move it, to adjust the angle, clean the crib, or place it in a different room where the baby’s fallen asleep. One by one I’ve seen each baby’s parent and been able to eliminate their video feed.

Until yesterday, when I recognised the target’s wife.

I spent the evening disconnecting from all the other monitors, securely deleting their feeds, and covering my tracks. Nobody would know I’d ever been watching. Meanwhile, the stream from the target’s camera has continued recording in the background, waiting for something to confirm the intel from Maxim’s source.

I didn’t have to wait long.

(Strike three: never take your mistress back to your own house.)

‘You naughty boy,’ I whisper, and smile. Today’s video feed shows him leading a young woman by the hand, down the hallway. It’s only visible in the corner of the monitor’s camera, and the image quality isn’t enough to positively identify the woman, but anyone can see it’s not his wife.

I don’t know what Maxim has planned for this unfortunate sucker; what horrible treachery he’ll have to perform to stop this video falling into the wrong hands. But I do know that young woman won’t stay unidentified for long. Maxim will be happy. When Maxim is happy, we’re all happy.

I light a cigarette and take out my phone. At the desk behind me Saskia mutters, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ and I don’t need to turn around to know she’s waving her hands in the air, wrinkling her nose at the smoke.

I laugh, blow a thick cloud at the ceiling, and call Maxim’s number.