Maybe this is what Godwin was talking about, the distance between me and the rest of you. Because as I listen in on Sara’s internal monologue, I can’t imagine what else she could have done to protect herself. Sometimes I just don’t know how you regular people manage to stay alive.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” I tell her. “You’re not a spy. You don’t spend your life looking over your shoulder. Ninety percent of the time, you’ve got no way of knowing if someone is behind you in a crowd.”
She grits her teeth. “Would you please not do that?”
“Do what?”
“Talk to me without me saying anything.”
Oh. Right. “Sorry. It happens.”
That was a mistake. I need a drink and my pills. I can feel the damage I did to Jezebel creeping up on me. Not to mention the memories of what she’s done to other people. I wonder exactly how much Scotch it’s going to take to keep her victims from crawling into my dreams.
“Whatever,” Sara says, a note of irritation in her voice as she forcibly derails that train of thought. “He thought you’d come to see Aaric, because he knew Aaric is one of the only people who can give me a lead on him. That means he must be pretty worried about you, if he’s got a hired killer ready just in case you show up.”
“No,” I say. I turn and look at her. Ordinarily, I’d like to believe that. I’d love to be so impressive that the bad guy trembles at the mere possibility of my crossing his path. But after my conversation with Godwin, I don’t think so. “He seems like he’s got a plan. And he’s prepared to do whatever it takes to keep anyone from messing with it.”
“But why?” she asks. “Why go to all this effort? All this expense? What does he get out of all this? What is he planning?”
I think about the software voice speaking Godwin’s words. Nobody has ever really thought about you before. Not like I have.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I think I’m just another contingency to be managed. I don’t think he’s scared of me at all.”
That’s not what she wants to hear.
We’re both silent for a moment after that. Sara keeps thinking about what she could have done to prevent Jezebel from ambushing us. I try to figure out what Godwin gains from all of this.
Neither of us comes up with any answers.
“So what do we do now?” Sara finally asks.
I stand up. “For starters,” I say, “call the chopper back here. We need to go back to the boat and tell your boss I’m taking the job.”
///14
This Is Still America
We meet with Stack again on the Nautilus, and I formally agree to work for him. We shake hands and everything. Seems a little redundant, since someone has already tried to shoot me, but it makes Stack feel better.
We then spend a few hours mapping out our strategy. It’s late, and we are still coming down from the shooting, but the clock is ticking now. Godwin has had months to get his plans together. We’re playing catch-up.
Stack has something, however. He’s so excited he barely registers Sara’s shock and exhaustion. In this moment, he’s too interested in what he’s found.
Not going to happen tonight. Stack has already been trying to pick up the digital bread crumbs of Downvote, and he’s practically bouncing in his chair, waiting to explain what he’s learned.
“All right, Downvote is a Dark Net site, right?” Stack begins, going slow for my benefit. “That means it’s as good as invisible. No way to trace its IP address to a location in the real world. But the website has to live someplace, right? The data has to be stored on a server somewhere. And the people who work on the site have to be able to access it. Like Godwin.”
“So how do we track that?” Sara asks. I’m glad she did. I don’t want to look like the only one who doesn’t know how the Internet works.
“Ordinarily, we can’t,” Stack says. “The home server could be anywhere in the world. It could be a box running off an AOL dial-up connection in Sri Lanka. Everything on the Dark Net runs through a host of proxy servers—the traffic bounces literally all over the Internet before it reaches your computer. Totally untraceable.”
“Except it’s not,” I say. This is not a guess. I can see Stack’s satisfaction glowing through him from across the room.
“Not for us,” he says. He smiles. He’s pleased with himself. This is what he loves. Figuring it out. Solving problems. Finding the answers. Vincent said this wasn’t possible, but it’s not exactly surprising to me that the billionaire software genius might know a few tricks that the FBI’s IT department doesn’t.
“I’ve been running a simple, brute-force attack on Downvote for days, looking for possible ways inside,” Stack says. “And I think I’ve got something. Downvote is getting popular, and Godwin can’t keep it running all by himself. He’s got help. And some of that help . . . well, they’re not as diligent as Godwin is about covering their tracks. He’s leaking data every time he accesses the site. I intercepted some packets between the site and a remote computer, and I was able to sniff out an IP address.”
Sara and I wait patiently for the translation.
“Houston,” Stack says. “One of the people who works on Downvote lives in Houston.”
*
A little over nine hours later, Sara and I are parked in a subdivision that was new ten years ago but is now starting to show some wear and tear. Paint chipping on some of the houses. A few of the lawns not so well groomed.
We chartered a private flight out of San Francisco on Sara’s corporate Amex, and were in Houston almost before the sun rose. Since then, Sara and I have been sitting in our rental car, staring at her laptop.
The streets are empty. Nobody home in the middle of the day.
Well, almost nobody. Sara watches the screen of her laptop intently. Stack wrote a program for us: it’s tracked the Downvote user down to a specific address, and alerts us as soon as he goes online. We see all his activity on our screen in real time.
So we’ve been watching Downvote pretty much nonstop the entire time we’ve been in the car, tracking the user when he gets on the site.
From Sara’s laptop, there’s a pinging noise, and a light appears on a map.
“That’s him,” she says. “He’s just logged in.”
She says “he,” even though all we’ve really got is a screen name: Redrum. His avatar on a dozen different boards is a pirate with a bloody knife clenched in his teeth. Technically, it could be anyone—man, woman, or other. It’s like the old joke: on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.
Except we know this is a guy, because we’ve been watching him the whole time we’ve been here, and he is nothing but a fountain of shit toward women. In the past two hours, he’s set up over a dozen new Twitter accounts and usernames to attack a female reporter for ESPN. So far, he’s sent her over a hundred messages—and pictures and texts and videos— almost all variations on the same theme: “Kill yourself.” “Jew bitch.” “You’d have made a good lampshade.” “Can’t wait until you get raped.” “Fuck you.” “Die you dyke.” “Nobody will cry at your funeral.”
And on like that.
The reporter’s crime? She wrote an article about his favorite baseball team that he didn’t like.
Sara has watched them all pile up, her mouth drawn into a thin, grim line. I promised I’d stay out of her head, but I still check on her mental state every now and then. Nothing specific, just taking a moment to gauge her internal temperature. She warned me about killing, but I am actually a little concerned about what she might do to this guy in person. We need him to survive long enough to get a lead on Godwin, after all.
We are pretty sure Redrum’s real name is Tom Moffett. Matches the name on the mortgage that we got from p
ublic records. He’s thirty-seven, self-employed, freelance software consultant. Used to be an IT guy at a mortgage broker right before it imploded, and he’s been working at home ever since.
“You ready?” Sara asks.
I nod. I think we’ve been careful enough. Nobody else is watching the house. Nobody is expecting us.
“Let’s go,” I say.
We drive around the corner and pull to a stop on the street right in front of the house. Not exactly subtle, but we figure that if he’s looking at the screen, he won’t be watching out the front window for anyone. And I need to be this close to scan the interior. We’re about at the limits of my range.
I get a focused presence in one room. A stream of letters, the fluid feeling of motion as someone types very, very quickly. A body a little heavier than it should be, left behind in the flow of his work on the machine.
That’s how he thinks of it. The machine. Like he’s handling a jackhammer or a cement mixer. I can just barely see what’s going through his head—a string of code, moving and switching lines, putting together a Web page—
His frustration is a tangible thing, piled up inside his guts. It feels like a sack of pennies, bright and shiny and seemingly endless, no matter how many of them he spends on all the stupid, lying, whining, cheating, whoring, fucking morons—
Sara places her hand, gently, on my arm. And I’m back.
“John? I asked if you got anything?”
I drag my mind away and answer her. It’s definitely Moffett in the house. “Yeah. He’s inside. Alone. Nobody else in his short-term memory. He’s not expecting a thing. Should be no problem.”
We walk right up to the front door. Like respectable visitors. Or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Nothing to worry about.
On the other hand, this is Texas, where people have been known to purchase antitank missiles for home defense, so a little caution is probably warranted.
Sara stands by the front door with her gun drawn and behind one leg. I cue up a particularly nasty sensation of a spinal fracture and prepare to shove it into Moffett’s mind.
We have to be quick. Stack warned us that Moffett probably has a fail-safe on his machine, ready to wipe the hard drive clean at the press of a button. “Coders usually aren’t stupid,” Stack said. “I mean, they can be, but not about coding. He knows he’s got incriminating stuff on that computer. He’ll have a self-destruct button.”
So here’s the dilemma. We can kick down the door, and risk him hitting the button and erasing everything we need. Or we can ring the doorbell, and risk him shutting everything down behind encryption it will take us a million years to unlock.
I look up, and see a webcam staring back down at us. I check inside Moffett’s head again. The same string of code.
“He’s still plugged into Downvote?” I ask quietly.
Sara checks her phone, like she’s looking at her email. Stack put the tracking app on there too. “Yes,” she says.
“That’s not what he’s working on,” I say. “He’s doing something else.”
“Sloppy,” she says. “He should log out.”
“Let’s ring the bell,” I decide. “He’ll leave it running.”
She considers it. Nods, and presses the button by the door.
I can feel his attention on us immediately. As I’ve said, my talent doesn’t work through electronics. But I can see Moffett, in my mind, looking at a window that’s just opened on his screen. The webcam. It’s wirelessly linked to his computer. Cheap DIY security. Fifty bucks at Home Depot.
I get a pulse of frustration.
Most important, he doesn’t shut down his computer. Or log out.
“He thinks we’re Realtors,” I mutter quietly, in case the camera is wired for sound.
He opens the door.
Tom Moffett. Shorter than he appears in his own mind. Hair retreating quickly to the back of his skull. Goatee. Eyes blinking rapidly in the sudden daylight.
“What?” he snaps.
Sara decides, right there, to improvise. “Hello, sir. We’re with Greater Texas Realty, and we were wondering if you might be interested in putting your home on the market.”
She gives him her best smile. Most men—hell, most women—would soften at least a little at that. She plans to ask to tour the house, to price it out for sale, and to get us inside that way.
Not a bad plan, really.
But Moffett is only looking for targets for his anger. And we’ve presented him with perfectly acceptable victims.
“You fucking people. How many fucking times do I have to fucking tell you? I am not fucking interested in fucking selling! Jesus Christ, are you too fucking dense to read the sign that says no fucking solicitors? Or did your husband not slap any sense into you this morning? I swear to fucking God, I have had it with this bullshit, you stupid fucking bitch—”
This is how he thinks it will go. We want to sell his house, so we’ll have to put up with his shit. Common courtesy will keep us from reacting with anything more than hurt feelings.
But this is not what is really happening.
I get a flash of all the abuse Sara has witnessed on the screen as it scrolls through her memories. And she pivots and decides,
She punches Moffett hard in the chest, simultaneously depriving him of air for his next sentence and shoving him back into the house.
He stumbles and falls flat on his ass. We’re inside the house in a second. I slam the door behind us.
He glares at us from the floor. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Sara shows him the gun. “Shut up,” she says. “Please.”
He goes from belligerent to terrified in a split second, barely any shifting of mental gears at all.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts. “Please, there’s no money in the house, just take whatever you want and go.”
In his mind, he’s absurdly grateful that his wife and their daughter aren’t home. He’s so frightened for them. It makes me soften toward him a little. Worst part of my talent: the ability to see everything from the other guy’s perspective.
I think of Kira. It erases any sympathy pretty quick.
“Where’s the computer?” Sara asks. Then she sees it. A big desktop model in what must serve as his office and a playroom at the same time.
I look at the toys scattered on the floor and realize he set it up like this so he can multitask. He can type up a dozen rape threats on his computer while his daughter plays a few feet away. Modern parenting.
We leave Moffett cowering on the floor and walk over to the computer. Sara looks at the screen and takes out a thumb drive. This is something else Stack prepared for us: it’s preloaded with a program that will hijack the hard drive and send a copy of everything to a remote server.
Only Sara frowns as she looks at the screen. “This isn’t Downvote,” she says.
I take a look too. This is the project he was working on—his actual job, designing a website.
Sara taps the mouse, moves a few windows, but there’s nothing active on the screen that has anything to do with Downvote.
She checks her phone again. “But he’s still logged in . . .”
I hear Moffett move behind me and pick up his thoughts at the same time. He heard Sara say “Downvote” and his mind lit up like a Christmas tree with an entirely different set of fears.
He’s scrambling over to a table in the breakfast nook, and I realize our mistake instantly. He doesn’t keep Downvote on his home computer. Of course he doesn’t.
Moffett is moving toward a laptop sitting on the table. That’s where he keeps
his really secret stuff: his hacking toolkits, his porn, and everything he’s got connected to Downvote.
He’d rather risk a bullet from Sara than have us find out what’s on there.
I’m sprinting across the room toward him, but he’s a step ahead. He slams the laptop shut just before I can snag it.
I shove him away from the table, and he hits the floor again. But now he’s a little less scared.
“Who the hell are you people?” he shouts at me. “If you’re cops, you need a warrant! I want a lawyer! This is still America!”
“Oh, shut up,” I tell him. I crack open the laptop again.
There’s a simple login screen. The name is filled in, but the password field is blank.
“Dammit,” I hiss. Sara has crossed the room behind me. She looks over my shoulder.
“Well, crap,” she says. “You couldn’t reach him?”
“Hey, you could have shot him in the leg. Then he wouldn’t have been so quick.”
“I thought you could paralyze him with your brain or something.”
“I try to avoid that when I can.”
Moffett’s confusion—and anger—is only growing. He seems to pick up on the fact that he’s not going to die in the next couple of minutes. So the belligerence is emerging from wherever it went to hide a few seconds ago.
“You’re not even cops, are you?” he snarls. “You’d better get the hell out of my house, or I’m calling 911—”
I turn to him and kneel down. “No,” I say. “You won’t.”
He’s a little quieter now that I’m within arm’s reach. But he’s still bubbling with rage. “Oh yeah? Why won’t I?”
“For one thing, she still has a gun. And for another, you don’t want anyone remotely related to law enforcement looking at what’s on that laptop, do you?”
He hesitates. I can see the bluff forming like fog rolling in.
“There’s nothing illegal on there,” he says. “I don’t care who sees it.”
“Really? You want to explain Downvote to the police? You ready for that?”
He thrusts out his chin, like he’s daring me to throw a punch. “Pretty sure that breaking and entering and assault with a deadly weapon is worse than anything I’ve got on there.”
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