To become invisible you don’t need magic or super powers. What you need to do, and this isn’t necessarily easy, is to blend in with your surroundings to such a degree that you become completely unremarkable to an outside observer. If you can merge with the faceless mass of others, no-one will ever remember seeing you. Jake Sullivan had turned this ability into an art form. Currently he was dressed in the same business-casual uniform – blue jeans, button up shirt, and brown leather shoes – as every project manager and technical sales rep around him. He was seated at a table by the window in the West Field technology park Starbucks, with his Macbook and a latte in front of him; he even had a PowerPoint presentation full of jargonese open, just in case anyone should glance at his screen. If anyone paid attention – though of course they never did – they would notice that he spent more time looking out the window than at his screen. When he saw a pod taxi pull up in front of the Stellar Dynamics lobby, on the other side of the plaza, he perked up. He waited until the  passenger stepped out – it was a man in a dark suit, clearly someone in management – and opened the pod taxi app and ordered a car. When he saw the taxi  swing round and head towards the Starbucks entrance he packed up his laptop – making sure to seem unhurried – grabbed his to-go cup and headed for the exit. As he was walking out, he reached into his pocket, grabbed a small flat-head screwdriver and hid it in the palm of his hand.

He entered the taxi, keeping his head down to avoid the on-board camera; he was confident he could remain functionally invisible to anyone viewing the footage as long as he avoided looking directly at the lens. He confirmed the ride on the app then started fumbling to get his airpods into his ears with one hand, dropping one in the process. “Damn it!” he muttered, then bent down to retrieve it. Using the screwdriver he quickly pried the maintenance hatch open and checked inside. Behind the hatch was a network port, but instead of a standard RJ45 socket, it was a proprietary 8-pin M12. Jake was ready for this. He picked up the airpod then moved his backpack from the seat down to the floor to obscure the view of the camera. He put the remaining airpod in his ear then turned on a podcast, lowering the volume so he could still hear his surroundings.

After a couple of minutes he looked down at his phone, pretended to notice the low battery status, and started searching in his bag for the charging cable. With his hands hidden from view inside the bag, he palmed his little interface module – it was fitted with just the right type of plug – before pulling out the charging cable, making a show of unraveling it. He then bent down, but instead of plugging the cable into the charging port, he plugged the interface module into the port behind the maintenance hatch, and connected the USB cable to the output side of it. Sitting back up, he plugged the cable into his phone then put it face down on the seat beside him. He let a few minutes pass before casually checking his phone, starting the data transfer, then went back to looking out the window.

They were getting close to Downtown when he got the notification. He checked it, closed the connection, then proceeded to ignore his phone for another minute or two. When enough time had passed he bent down to unplug the charging cable and took the interface module along with it. He quickly slipped the interface module into his open bag then spent the next minute carefully rolling up the charging cable in view of the camera. While putting the cable neatly back into its pocket – at least, that’s what it looked like to the camera – he put the cover of the maintenance hatch back into position and gave it a firm tap with his hand to close it securely. He then sat back in his seat and actually relaxed; there was nothing more he could do until he got out of the taxi.

When the taxi pulled up in front of the Hartford department store, he got out and started walking towards the entrance at a calculated leisurely pace, casting a quick glance over his shoulder to see the taxi moving off. Following a busy looking man in through the doors, he merged with the crowd of shoppers; letting the flow of people move him along through the department store, down the escalator to the subway station and onto a train.

Back in his apartment he connected his phone to the computer and checked the files he had extracted from the taxi. As he had been careful to avoid detection, he hadn’t taken the time to select which files to copy, so he ended up with a whole mess of them. It took him an hour to sort through everything – most of it was uninteresting for his purpose – and find the customer log file. What surprised him was that the file was in plain text; they hadn’t even attempted to obfuscate any of the data. The guy in the suit who had been in the taxi before him was called David Byrnes, born in 2002, and had used his Stellar Dynamics email address to register his account for the taxi app. David had started his trip at an address out in the industrial zone and the whole journey had lasted 36 minutes and 19 seconds. It had cost Stellar Dynamics $32.56 with their company discount rate. Jake sat there just staring at the file for several minutes. He couldn’t believe the guys at the pod taxi company were so incredibly careless. Sure, no-one outside the company was supposed to know about the maintenance hatch and even fewer about the pin-out of their proprietary plug, but leaving the customer data in plain text was reckless all the same.

David was lucky that he wasn’t on the list of subjects provided by Jake’s employer. However, Jake did a quick reference search just in case. He was a bit too young to remember a time when FaceBook was popular but some people still used it. He managed to find a profile for David Byrnes but it hadn’t been updated since the guy was in high-school. LinkedIn gave a few more clues, David had been at Stellar Dynamics for little over three years and his title was listed as Account Manager, but he didn’t have any interesting connections. No matter, David wasn’t important. What was important was that Jake had figured out two key details: where all the important files were located, as well as the fact that they completely unencrypted. Now he could set up his software to automatically scan for the files he needed and directly upload them to his encrypted server.

The Starbucks approach had worked well but he couldn’t use it again, at least for a couple of weeks; the barista would eventually take notice if he did it too frequently. The ideal would be to find a way that would let him pinpoint the targets on his employer’s list. Given the current circumstances, that seemed almost impossible if he wished to remain unnoticed. However, Jake always kept his eyes open for any opportunity, and those had a strange habit of arising just when he needed them. For now, this scatter shot approach would have to do. Luckily for Jake, Starbucks wasn’t the only business facing the West Field plaza. Now he just had to figure out what type of people were likely to be hanging around in Seven Eleven on a Tuesday afternoon.