“Does your wife know?” I ask, and the sudden blare of alarm from him gives me the answer. “You want to explain Downvote to her?”
He crumbles. “Look,” he says, “it was just a joke, it didn’t mean anything. Why are you taking this so seriously? Why are you picking on me?”
“Joke’s over. People are getting hurt,” I tell him.
Sara, who’s still staring at the login screen, interrupts.
“We don’t have time for this,” she says. “I’m sure he’s got it triggered to wipe the hard drive if we enter the wrong password. I’ve got a guy we can call, a hacker, he can probably be here in an hour or two with his kit—”
“Yeah, we could do that,” I say. “Or we could just ask.”
I turn back to Moffett. “What’s your password?”
“Eat me,” he snaps. But it flashes into his mind:
I stand up and search the kitchen counter for a pen and paper. Then I write down the string of characters and numbers for Sara.
She’s about to start typing, despite the skepticism on her face and in her thoughts. Then I stop her. “Hold up,” I say. I ask Moffett: “Any other booby traps? Anything else we need to enter to get into the machine?”
“Booby traps?” He snorts, pure contempt rolling off him. But inside:
“We’re good,” I tell Sara. She types the password.
Moffett grins. The screen goes blue for a second.
And then the laptop chimes and opens up for us. She smiles.
“That is actually very cool. You’re turning out to be a pretty handy guy, Mr. Smith.”
“More than just a pretty face,” I say.
Moffett, meanwhile, is awestruck. “How the fuck did you do that?” he wants to know.
“Magic,” I say as Sara plugs in the thumb drive and begins sucking down all the data. “Now. Let’s have a little talk. I want you to tell me everything you know about Godwin.”
There is a spike of pure terror from him. He goes paler than when I mentioned his wife. That was wound up in shame and embarrassment, but those are survivable. This goes down all the way to the brain stem, where fight-or-flight lives, the part that gets triggered when our brains decide we’re in real mortal danger.
Godwin scares Moffett out of any of his poses and personas. He’s no longer the suburban dad or the online troll or the secret hacker. He’s just a guy feeling very exposed and alone.
And so, of course, he clamps his mouth shut as tight as he can and shakes his head.
“He’s killed people?” I repeat, and Moffett’s eyes go wide again. “Who? What are you talking about?”
“What? How did you—?” Moffett is confused, because of course he’s not actually talking at all, but I’m able to see it in his memories as it pops up.
Moffett is one of five different sysadmins running Downvote. He’s been on the board for over a year, which makes him a veteran. He posted all the time, talked about his computer skills, suggested fixes and upgrades for the site on the message boards. Godwin recruited him by an encrypted email to start doing some of that work, then gradually gave him more responsibility, and more access.
But it came with a warning too. Not long after he gave Moffett the access codes to Downvote’s secure server, he sent an email with a video clip.
I can see it in Moffett’s mind clearly: a skinny kid in a black T-shirt, get-ting beaten by two big guys wearing biker gear. The clip had been edited to show only the highlights. They used chains, their fists, and boots. In the end, the kid was little more than a stain on the floor.
“That’s what happened to the last person who betrayed me,” Godwin typed in an instant message to Moffett. “Just keep that in mind.”
And he has. It is as vivid now as the day he first saw it. Moffett is pretty sure he’s a dead man because we’ve gotten in here and cracked his laptop.
“How does he get bikers to stomp people for him?” I ask, and Moffett is completely freaked out now. He’s got no idea how I can see what was in his head, so he jumps to a much more rational conclusion.
“You guys are feds, aren’t you?” he says. “I want witness protection. I want a new identity. And security! For me and my family!”
Sara looks at me. I shrug. Anything that will keep him talking—and thinking—is good.
“Why don’t you tell me what you have to offer,” I say, kneeling down to face him, “and then we’ll see what we can do?”
“He’s an actual criminal,” Moffett hisses. “I mean, I thought he was just in it for the fun and games, but he has a whole bunch of Dark Net sites out there. He moves drugs, money, fake IDs, all kinds of stuff. That’s how he gets the bikers. He pays them in meth.”
“And you’ve got proof of him doing this?” Sara asks, shifting effortlessly into cop mode. She’s enjoying this. She loves watching Law & Order marathons on cable.
Moffett laughs, almost hysterically.
“So you put together the site’s leaderboard. You keep track of the totals. You update it periodically. And you keep the site secure. Monitor the message boards, make sure nobody is making anything too public.”
He nods, but just barely.
“Does any of the money go through you?” Sara asks.
“No,” Moffett says. “It all goes through Bankster. Totally encrypted.”
“The PayPal of the black market,” I say to Sara. “So glad someone invented that.”
She makes a face at me.
“So does Godwin pay you for your work, at least?” she asks.
“No,” he says. He keeps his face blank. But I get a flash image from his mind of a priority mail envelope, delivered every other Tuesday. Packed with cash. Even better than Bankster.
I give him a hard look. He shrinks down farther.
“Well. A little. It’s mostly a volunteer effort.”
This is what’s really baffling to me. And though we don’t actually need to know, I ask him the question anyway: “Why?”
That stops him cold. He blinks. “Why what?”
“Why make this site? Why Downvote? Why invest all the time and money and effort?”
“Because otherwise they would just get away with it,” he says, like he’s talking to a four-year-old.
“Get away with what?”
Again, he looks at me like I’m from another planet. But now there’s an added layer of contempt.
“Everything,” he says.
*
In the end, we leave Moffett in his living room as soon as we’ve finished copying his hard drive. There’s nothing more we need from him, and there’s nothing I can do that will scare him more than Godwin does. We let him go on thinking we’re feds. It’s easier that way.
Back at the hotel room, I watch as Sara uploads the whole of Moffett’s hard drive to Stack on his boat. Stack’s cadaverous face stares back at both of us from the screen of Sara’s laptop over a video link.
I can hear him tapping a few keys over the laptop’s speakers, and then he breaks into a grin.
“Yes. We’ve got the login to his servers,” Stack says.
“Which means what?” I ask. I am getting a little bored with all the tech stuff. I know it’s necessary, but I’m anxious to get moving again.
On-screen, Stack’s grin grows wider. “It means we can access the server, and we can intercept the signals as they’re coming in. We k
now where it is.”
“We’ve got the actual, physical address for Godwin?”
On-screen, Stack’s grin vanishes. Sara looks at me, a kind of pity on her face and in her mind. “Not quite,” she says.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. “Then what do we have?”
“We know where Downvote is located. We’ve found the server where Godwin keeps the site. Godwin can still access it from literally anywhere in the world. We need to intercept the traffic from him the next time he logs into Downvote. Which means you need to get physical access to the server itself if we’re going to find him.”
“So where are we going?”
“Reykjavík,” Stack says.
“Iceland?”
“Do you know another one?” Sara asks, sort of amused.
“I’ll keep working it from this end,” Stack says. “Maybe I can find something else in the hard drive. You two, travel safe.”
His screen closes.
Another digital bread crumb on the trail. One more lead to follow. No wonder Godwin sounded so confident. He’s at the end of a million-mile maze. I turn to go to my room and start packing.
Sara doesn’t pay attention as I leave. She’s already clicking over to Amazon, talking to herself. “I wonder if we can get same-day delivery here,” she says. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to buy winter clothes in Texas in May . . .”
*
As soon as I’m away from Sara, I take out my phone and dial a number. The encryption delays the connection slightly.
A voice that sounds like the owner is ten minutes late for his throat cancer diagnosis answers: “Jimmy’s 44 Club.”
“Hey. You guys still have Monkey Knife Fight on tap?”
A pause. “Nah, not this week. We got Chupacabras and Regal Select.”
“Let me give you my number, you call me when you get it back.”
“Yeah, sure.”
The bartender takes my number and hangs up. I get just inside the door of my room when my phone rings again.
It’s Cantrell.
“That was fast,” I say. “I thought maybe I’d have a chance to order room service. Get down to the pool.”
“You don’t want to swim in a hotel pool,” Cantrell says, his voice full of its usual shitkicker twang. “You know how many kids pee in those things?”
“Still, I didn’t think I was on your priority list.”
Cantrell chuckles. I can practically see him put his feet up on his desk and grin. “John, I have learned that it is best not to leave you unattended for any great length of time.”
Cantrell was my recruiter, my handler, and my mentor when I was using my talent for God and country. He taught me about spycraft, how to drink good Scotch, and sent me all over the planet to crack open the minds of terrorists and pluck out their secrets. He was the head of the CIA’s top-secret psychic soldier program—they called us Cantrell’s special-ed kids behind our backs, which is kind of stupid, because we could read minds, after all—and for several years, I was the most reliable weapon in his arsenal.
If I’ve had enough to drink, I would probably tell you he’s the closest thing to a father I’ve ever had.
And of course, he betrayed me and lied to me, which led to my leaving the Agency and going private.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t still use each other.
Like right now I need hard data that can’t be found on the Internet. Cantrell still lives in the world where information exists as rumor and innuendo and hearsay. These are the kinds of stories that are rarely ever put down on paper, let alone typed into a computer database.
If anyone knows anything about Godwin, it’s Cantrell. Or he’ll be able to find out.
I give him the bare minimum at first. “I’m investigating something and a name has come up. A hacker who’s branched out and become a genuine crime boss. I’ve heard about contract hits with bikers, meth sales, drugs, money laundering . . . You know. The usual delights.”
“This investigation of yours have anything to do with that shooting at the wedding?”
“You keeping track of me?”
“Always,” he says. “But in this case, I got flagged when some federal agent pulled your file. Named you as witness and person of interest at the scene.” Cantrell is a private contractor now too, but he still maintains links with the Agency. And anything to do with the old program usually gets sent to him.
“It’s related,” I admit.
“Got a name for me?”
“Godwin is his online alias.”
“Oh, that narrows it down.”
But I hear something in his tone. If I had not spent years with him, I wouldn’t have picked up on it. “You’ve heard of him,” I say.
“Well, yeah, bits and pieces,” Cantrell says. And he tells me what he knows.
Godwin is currently a nagging, recurring presence at the edge of several international drug enforcement investigations. “Organized crime needs good computer programmers just as much as legitimate businesses these days,” Cantrell says. “Probably even more.”
But Godwin is never the main target, Cantrell tells me, because he’s smart enough not to become too big, or too public.
“He’s not an idiot like that Silk Road dipshit, putting his name out everywhere and embarrassing the federal government by giving interviews,” Cantrell says. “He’s found his sweet spot, and he sticks with it.”
Godwin is known as a service provider. He sits in the middle, like a fat spider in a web, and does the logistical work for the criminals above and below him.
There’s no record of him before he started out with the Eastern European mobs, mostly Romanian, ripping millions of credit-card numbers from horny guys visiting cam girl sites. Then he branched out into online drug sales, using the mobs as suppliers to U.S. customers. He’s contracted biker gangs for collections and enforcement, like Moffett says, hiring them over encrypted email and message boards, and paying them with regular bags of meth and cash FedEx’d to anonymous PO boxes all over America.
“So where can I find him?”
“That I can’t help you with,” Cantrell says. “I can reach out to my contacts at the DEA if it’s important, but I’m pretty sure they don’t know dick either. That’s the thing about this Internet you kids love so much. Guy could be anywhere. Could be in Hawaii getting a tan on the beach, or he could be next door to you in your hotel.”
“That’s what I hear. Well, if you can think of anything—”
“I’ll be sure to be in touch,” Cantrell says. There’s a pause and I can hear him chewing on one of those cigars he keeps in his desk. “Still. Kind of surprising he’d send somebody to shoot up a TV wedding. Seems stupid and direct for him. Can’t imagine he’d want to actually put his fingerprints on something that public and noisy.”
I can’t help feeling proud at knowing something Cantrell doesn’t. “Yeah, well, he doesn’t exactly have his finger on the trigger,” I say. “It’s more like he’s working a remote control. He’s using social media to push people into position. On-demand mayhem via the Internet. Like Pokémon Go, but with bloodshed.”
“Bullshit,” Cantrell says flatly. “How’s that even supposed to work?”
I explain a little bit about social contagion, and the software that Stack designed, when I realize Cantrell has been way too quiet. Instead of interrupting me with dirty jokes or insults, he’s listening intently.
And too late, I shut up.
“Interesting,” Cantrell says into the sudden silence. “Software that pushes people around. Turns crowds into weapons. What a neat little toy he’s got there.”
I am kicking myself mentally. Of course Cantrell would see a use in this.
“He’s not going to have any more fun with it,” I say. “Not after I find him.”
“Oh, I’ve got faith in you, John,” Cantrell says. “I’m sure you will track him down. In fact, you should stay in touch on this one. I think maybe I can help you out with
it. In a big way.”
“I can handle it on my own, thanks.”
“John, come on now. Never be too proud to ask for help from a friend.”
“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” I tell him, and hang up as fast as I can after that.
Stupid. It’s hard to get out of old patterns. I still want to impress the teacher, and I end up giving Cantrell valuable intel.
I know he’s probably already thinking about how much the Agency would pay for something like Godwin’s software. Millions, without blinking an eye. I know because they spent far more than that on the projects that trained me. The idea of controlling people, steering them in what-ever direction they need, has been an obsession of the CIA since the MK-ULTRA experiments back in the fifties. At its heart, that’s what the Agency is for: making sure people behave in exactly the way they’re supposed to.
And I don’t have to imagine what they would do with that kind of power. I’ve caught the live act. I’m not a fan.
///15
You’ve Got the Wrong Guy
We start to run into problems the very next day.
First, we arrive at the airport and discover the charter to Iceland that Sara has arranged has been canceled. I know, I know, cry me a river, I don’t get to put my ass down in the leather seat of a private jet. But it bugs me, and not just because it throws off our schedule. We’ve got to get to Reykjavík fast, before Godwin can send anyone to wipe his remote servers. I know we cannot depend on Moffett to stay quiet, no matter how much we scared him. Every hour counts right now.
But what really bothers me is that the operator in the private terminal tells us that we were the ones who canceled the reservation.
“Impossible,” Sara tells him for the fourth time. “I never talked to anyone from your firm.”
The man at the counter gives us a polite, concierge-level smile, but doesn’t budge. “I can only tell you what I see here on my screen. Your charter was released after a phone call from a Miss Sara Fitch—”
“That’s me. But I never—”
“—and so we allowed another party to use the plane. They left early this morning.”
Hunt You Down Page 15