In the real world, the activist was not a big deal. But online, he was huge. Thousands of people followed him. And most of them fucking hated him.
He lived to piss off the people who were already clenched-teeth angry over gay rights. He made jokes, he argued, he insulted, he belittled. In return, he got pictures of loaded guns, targets drawn on his face, and misspelled threats.
At this point, Vincent was intrigued, but not necessarily ready to call it a conspiracy. Most of the old-school agents took threats on the Internet about as seriously as crank calls. Those guys barely used email, so the Internet was a distant galaxy to them. Even his coworkers closer to his own age dismissed social media. Many FBI agents are strongly discouraged from having a social-media presence; there’s just too much potential to screw up active investigations, or worse, drag the agency into a lawsuit. So a lot of them don’t know anything about it. They think it’s for posting pictures of your kids or your lunch. A waste of time, in other words.
Vincent knew better. He looked up the accounts that were posting the threats. Most were anonymous. He put in a request for their IP addresses with Facebook—the company has a dedicated support page for law enforcement—and went back to his other cases. When he got the records, he had a few minutes at his desk, so he began searching for some of the email addresses associated with the accounts. Nothing too complicated— just entering the emails and usernames into Google or law enforcement databases and seeing what came back.
An hour later, he found himself deep into message boards on the Net— places like reddit, and 4chan, where people type back and forth about whatever they want.
That’s where he found the photos.
One of the people who’d posted a threat on the activist’s Facebook page had been dumb enough to use the same username on a message board. (I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: in real life, most criminals are not Lex Luthor.) And on the board, he posted pictures of the gay activist beaten and bloodied on the sidewalk.
These were not crime-scene photos taken after the fact. Vincent checked, because there are cops out there who like to thrill their friends by taking those photos and showing them around. No, these pictures were taken during the beating. They were taken by whoever did the beating. They clearly showed three guys in masks jumping the activist outside the club. People complained about the terrible resolution and the camera angles (LANDSCAPE YOU IDIOTS! ALWAYS LANDSCAPE!) but most of the other posters on the board gave them the virtual equivalent of applause:
yeah man that fag had it coming
probably enjoyed it LOL
too bad you didn’t kill the little bitch
Vincent wasn’t surprised by this, not really. He’d already spent enough time down in the sewers of the Net. He was getting used to the things that floated around there.
He took down usernames and locations, but he knew there was almost no chance of ever finding these people down in real life. They could post anonymously, leaving almost no digital records. He was about ready to give up.
But then someone typed a response that caused him to pause.
dude, wtf you doing posting from downvote? you know that stuff is supposed to stay on-site, asshole
Downvote. The photos came from Downvote. Whatever that was.
He kept searching.
He found out the hard way that Downvote was the common term for disliking something. There were literally millions of hits. But as he piled through, he narrowed down his results.
And found a website called Downvote.
I get a good look at the site in his memories. It’s bare-bones, minimal design, but not at all homemade or generic. There’s a weight to it. Everything looks stark and heavy. Close your eyes, and you could still see the words from the screen burned into your retinas.
It wasn’t much to look at. I can see it in his head as he tells me all this. No animation or instant-on video or stylish design. It’s mostly just a list of names under a big slogan in block letters.
SHOW THEM WHAT YOU THINK OF THEM
It took Vincent a minute to realize what he was seeing. He explains it to me now, though I get the picture in sharp detail from his mind.
“Downvote is a hit list,” Vincent says. “The most hated people on the Internet at any given moment.”
Downvote had its own message boards, where the members of the site would debate who should be on the big board on the front page. Whoever got the most votes got on the list. Then the Downvoters were encouraged to do something about them—to Downvote them in real life.
Some of the Downvotes were a lot like junior-high pranks. The spokeswoman for a weight-loss company got a hundred pizzas delivered to her home. A banker who was briefly famous for saying poor people should “just get more money” when he appeared on CNBC found himself with all his credit cards hacked and maxed out.
But the other Downvotes were like the beating of the activist. People got hurt.
A loudmouth talk-show host was SWATted—someone calls 911, gives another person’s address, and then tells the police he’s holding hostages and he plans to kill anyone who comes near the house—which led to an armed response team breaking down his front door with guns drawn. A video-game developer who insulted console gamers on Twitter had his car torched. A female comedian found a pipe bomb waiting for her on her doorstep, which fortunately failed to go off.
All of this was supposed to stay strictly on the Downvote site, but it leaked out onto the message boards. People bragged. They were proud of it.
And, Vincent noticed, it was getting worse.
By scrolling back through the messages, he could see that the site started a little over a year earlier. Back then, it was mostly pizza deliveries. But it escalated quickly. The number of users was going up. People were looking for a place where they could settle scores. They were suggesting more names all the time.
Vincent finishes his drink, sucking down the last of it through his straw, before he says, “I’ve been monitoring it ever since. I was afraid something like this was going to happen.”
I can see the website in his head. The big board with the list of names. Last weekend, Jason Davis said something stupid on Twitter, in response to some random fan complaining about the latest plot twist on his show.
Oh please. We make the show so losers like you don’t have to get a life of your own. Crack a window, fucktard. Get some air.
He shot up to number three on Downvote’s list. The death threats began, he started carrying a gun, and then he took a shot at an autograph seeker. Downvote loved it. The users of the site began an email campaign to get Davis the most severe penalty possible. He moved up to number one on Downvote’s hate list.
Until the news of Kira’s wedding broke. Then she bumped him from the top spot.
There are maybe a hundred questions at the front of my mind. So I’m a little surprised when the first thing I ask Vincent is “Why the hell didn’t you warn her?”
He looks confused. “You mean Kira Sadeghi?”
“Yes,” I say tightly.
He must see the anger on my face, because he gets defensive. “Hey,” he says. “This is not my fault. We were monitoring the situation, as I said. We have a lot of cases to pursue. We use our resources as best we can.”
“Her name was in big letters on a website, and that wasn’t enough?” I don’t bother to mask my sarcasm. “I thought you guys were listening to all our phone calls and tracking everything we did on the Net. Do you actually need the bad guys to send you an invitation now too?”
He considers saying something really impolite. I’m going to write that off to the lack of sleep.
“The site isn’t just out there for anyone to see. It’s on the Dark Net. Do you know how much material is hidden there?”
I do, actually. I’ve hung around with enough tech CEOs and attended enough of their meetings to pick up some of this stuff. The Dark Net is the name for the underside of the Internet. Every time we go
online and type a search term into Google, or like something on Facebook, we think we’re seeing the whole World Wide Web. It’s in the name, right?
Not even close. Something like 90 percent of the Internet is hidden, accessible only by special software called Tor, a browser that enables secure, encrypted web access. These websites are private and unlisted, completely invisible unless you know exactly how to find them.
And down there, in the depths where nobody is looking, the Net is crawling with all kinds of unpleasant things. Sites that sell drugs or child porn or weapons, or all three. Users are completely untraceable by standard methods. They can swap bootleg movies or bomb-making recipes, or hire hit men, and nobody can track them.
Vincent is saying Downvote is one of those sites, down there in the dark. And there’s no way to find out who’s behind it either.
He did what he could. He gave the site address to the FBI’s tech nerds, who told him he might as well ask Santa for a pony. The actual people sending the messages could be anywhere in the world. Untraceable, more or less.
“It could be based on a server in Russia or China or in Burbank,” Vincent says. “We’ve got no way of knowing.”
His frustration is smoke floating in the air around him.
And then I see it, behind the careful spin coming out of his mouth. He tried. He did. He keeps saying “we,” but it’s not really a team effort. It’s just him.
It’s replaying in his head: the meeting where they turned him down. He piled all his research into his computer folder and took it to his supervisors. He made his case in a presentation in one of the conference rooms. He had PowerPoint and everything.
His bosses were skeptical, to say the least. They thought it was a video game. A joke. They thought the pictures of the activist were Photoshopped.
The SAIC—a guy who needed help getting documents to print on the office network—was still up to his eyeballs in the aftermath of San Bernardino. He had congressmen threatening his budget, wondering why the FBI wasn’t busting sleeper cells like they did on Homeland or 24. “People talk a lot of shit on the Net,” the SAIC told Vincent. “But at the end of the day, it’s usually some lard-ass who’ll never leave his parents’ basement.”
Even now, with Kira’s shooting, his bosses are still skeptical. They’re more interested in the terrorism angle. Maybe Kira’s very existence was an insult to some jihadi lunatic. They are dug in against his theory now, because if they admit it, then they have to admit they ignored a potential threat.
Vincent can feel the case slipping away from him. He needs something they can’t ignore.
And he’s running out of time.
Someone in the media is going to make the connection between all of these crimes, or someone from Downvote is just going to send an email to the New York Times or put up a public website that announces the whole thing.
Because once the word about Downvote goes public, it’s going to spread like Ebola. It’s the perfect story. It combines paranoia about the Internet with jealousy and fame. It’s reality TV with a body count instead of ratings.
Vincent is doing his best, but he knows he can’t keep the lid on it much longer.
If he doesn’t find a way to stop them, everyone will know about Downvote soon. And these dipshits will finally get what they’ve always wanted. They’ll be famous.
Even worse, they’ll find a whole new target audience. A whole new world of players who will want to join their game.
More people will die. He knows it.
And almost as important, the case will certainly be taken away from him and given to a multi-agency task force with some big swinging dick from Washington at the top of the org chart. Any chance to make a name for himself will disappear in the scrum of bodies the FBI will throw at the problem.
He has to crack Downvote open before that happens. This is why he’s here, talking to me. He thinks maybe if I go blundering around, I might shake something loose. Then he might get the evidence necessary to get his supervisor on board. Get some resources. And run the investigation himself as the lead agent.
He sees himself bringing it to his boss:
In other words, he’s trying to use me.
But like I said before, I’m using him too. And I’ve already got everything I need.
“Well, good luck,” I say, and stand up. “Thanks for the coffee.”
He looks confused. “What?”
“I’ll relay your requests to Mr. Sadeghi. I know he’ll want to do everything he can to help.”
“All right,” Vincent says. He’s instantly suspicious. His radar is telling him something just went wrong—he really is a smart guy—but he doesn’t know what. There was more he wanted to say. He has ideas, a hunch, leads. He was going to point me at them, like a trained dog.
But I don’t really care. He saw me taking notes. He just didn’t know they were about more than what he was saying out loud.
“Be sure you stay in touch,” he says. He stands and walks out of the coffee shop with me. His mind is churning.
Before we go our separate ways, he can’t help asking, “So what are you going to do?”
I shrug. “I’m not sure,” I say. “I mean, if the FBI can’t stop these guys, I don’t know how I can.”
Now he suspects I’m just screwing with him. I smile and shake his hand.
“But I’ll try to think of something,” I tell him.
///8
Clark Kent Was Right
Our brains are busy little places, processing millions of bits of information every minute. That’s a lot of work, so they cheat wherever they can to save time. They ignore anomalies and fill in the same background details whenever possible. They can be blind and deaf to things that are right in front of our faces. People see what they expect to see. They operate on autopilot until something comes along to jolt them out of it. That’s one reason why when a driver plows over an elderly grandmother in a crosswalk, the first thing he always says is “I didn’t see her!”
With my talent, I can exploit those vulnerabilities in our cognitive infrastructure, the same way a hacker can exploit openings in computer code. I can bypass what their eyes are telling their brains. I can hide in plain sight.
Which is why I’m walking into one of the largest jails in the nation with nothing more than a blank piece of paper for ID.
The shooters are being held at the Twin Towers facility downtown. It’s run by the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and holds about twenty thousand inmates at any given time, either waiting for trial or serving out their misdemeanor sentences. You might see it in the background on the news when a celeb is released from jail for their latest DUI.
The Twin Towers include the medical facilities for the prisoners. And from what I read in Vincent’s thoughts, they’re all still recovering from what I did to them.
I’m trying not to be too proud of that. There are guys I used to know who would have put them in the morgue, not the hospital.
Then again, if I’d killed them, I wouldn’t have a chance to question them now. So, silver lining, I guess.
I’m wearing a cheap suit and glasses—my Clark Kent disguise—as I join the line of people waiting to go back into the jail on official business: attorneys waiting to see their clients, cops working cases and getting statements or evidence.
And FBI agents about to interview the suspects in the latest mass shooting.
The line moves, and the sheriff’s deputy behind the check-in window finally calls me forward.
A quick scan tells me she’s already tired at ten thirty in the morning, doesn’t sleep well due to anxiety and apnea, and is more than a little irritated at her husband, who left for work without getting the kids dressed for school. Bored, drowsy, and distracted. Perfect for me.
I hold up my blank papers and tell her I’m FBI agent Greg Vincent. I’m here to see the suspects fro
m the Sadeghi case. I list them off by name, along with their prisoner numbers and the name of the sheriff’s chief deputy who’s authorized my visit, all taken out of Vincent’s memory.
I can feel a slight spike of interest from the deputy—her name is Ronda—when she hears the names of the shooters.
She barely glances at my papers. I project, as hard as I can, the image of legal forms and proper ID.
She barely even sees them. She hands them back and taps a few keys on her keyboard. I’m about to turn for the metal detectors when she suddenly stops and frowns. “Wait,” she says.
Not a good sign. This whole trick of mine depends on people sticking to their routines. Anything unusual wakes up the conscious thought processes, and those are a whole lot harder for me to hack.
I try to look both calm and slightly annoyed, as if this were just one more bureaucratic obstacle preventing me from serving the cause of justice. “What?”
“You’re early,” she says, like I did this on purpose to screw with her. She points at her screen. “Two of the prisoners aren’t available. Says here Baldwin is with his lawyer and Andrews is in with the doctor.”
Well, shit. Should have realized there might be some scheduling problems. I shrug, like this is most obvious thing in the world. “Yeah. So? I’m here to see Goetz.”
She narrows her eyes. “You’re here to talk to Goetz.” Her tone is flat, but I can see suspicion lighting up her brain.
I see it inside her mind just before I say anything else.
Goetz is the guy I punched in the throat. He can’t talk. He nearly choked to death on the damage I did to his windpipe before a paramedic did an emergency tracheotomy in the ambulance. He’s still breathing through a tube.
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