Hideout

by Jack Heath

  If I’m immune to any of this, it’s because I’ve always been too poor to advertise at. A low-interest demographic. That world of fast cars and big houses has always been so far out of reach that it’s not even worth thinking about.

  Kyle thinks I care about the car, and I do. If the Guards work out who I am, I’ll need a quick escape. Without the car, I’ll be stranded at the house in the woods as surely as Kyle was stranded in Ackerly.

  ‘Trust me,’ he says, ‘the prettier the car, the prettier the crash.’

  I put my hands against the trunk. Shoulder to shoulder, Kyle and I push it towards the edge.

  The car lurches, and there’s a crunch. Kyle and I step back, but it doesn’t fall. The front wheels have gone over the edge of the cliff, but now the undercarriage is on the dirt, taking the full weight of the front of the car.

  ‘Damn it,’ Kyle says. ‘Push harder.’

  We do. The lactic acid builds up in my muscles. The wheel is a great invention. On it, a three-thousand-pound car seems weightless. Off it, the thing won’t budge at all.

  ‘We’ll have to leave it here,’ I say. Maybe I can come back later and somehow pull it back.

  But Kyle is no quitter. ‘Can we lift it? Lever it over the edge?’

  We try. The back of the car is too heavy.

  ‘We’ll have to start the engine again,’ Kyle says. ‘Get some power from the back wheels. Drive it off.’

  I look at the driver’s seat. It’s right above the edge of the cliff. A hundred-foot drop onto stone and steel. Plenty of time to panic on the way down.

  Kyle isn’t about to volunteer. He smirks. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was your idea,’ I say.

  ‘I’m a visionary,’ he agrees. ‘Now over to you for the grunt work.’

  Grimacing, I ease closer to the driver’s-side door. The icy wind picks up, threatening to hurl me over the edge. I grab the side mirror for support. The car doesn’t feel as immovable now as it did ten seconds ago.

  Kyle hugs himself. ‘Hurry up, man.’

  I open the door. No way am I putting my ass on that seat. Instead, I lean in and twist the key in the ignition.

  The engine turns over. Kyle coughs as he gets a mouthful of exhaust.

  I look around for a rock I can put on the gas pedal. Everything is either too small to hold it down or too big to lift. I’ll have to use my hand.

  ‘You ready?’ I call out.

  ‘Ready.’

  I push my palm down on the gas. The engine roars. The rear wheels spin for a second, then catch. The underside of the sedan grinds along the dirt towards the edge of the cliff. I wrench my right arm out of the cabin just in time. The car overbalances and disappears over the edge.

  I crawl towards the cliff and peer over. The vehicle is still falling, the echoes of the idling engine bouncing off the other side of the gorge. Kyle joins me in time to see the impact.

  There’s a deafening crash. Parts of the car crumple inwards as others fly outwards. The hood is flattened like a cigarette packet under a boot as the car flips onto its roof, which caves in under the impact. Safety glass surrounds the impact zone in thousands of glittering cubes.

  The sedan settles on its side, barely recognisable as a car anymore. The last reverberations of the crash die away.

  ‘See?’ Kyle says. ‘Told you.’

  He wasn’t wrong. Even though that car was my way out, it was oddly satisfying to see it wrecked, and it wouldn’t have been as much fun if the car was a wreck already. The prettier the car, the prettier the crash.

  We wait another minute in case the car is going to explode or roll over one more time. Kyle is completely mesmerised. The spectacle, with just the two of us here to see it, creates a strange sense of kinship. I rest my hand on Kyle’s back.

  I get a vision of myself pushing him over the edge. One Guard down, five to go. It would be so easy.

  But how would I retrieve the body?

  Kyle looks uncomfortable, but doesn’t look confident enough to say so.

  I take my hand off him. ‘Sorry.’

  He gives a half-shrug, like unwanted contact is just part of life.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘It’s a long walk back.’

  CHAPTER 11

  First I’m a leafy wall, then I’m a dirty, gluttonous animal. Touch my back and you’ll bleed. What am I?

  When we get back to the house, I let Kyle go on ahead so I can get a look at Fred’s pick-up. Thief’s instinct. I can’t walk past a vehicle without wondering how hard it would be to hotwire.

  I peer through the window at the dash. The letters RF are inscribed next to the ignition. That means there’s a radio frequency transmitter inside Fred’s key. Even if I took a hammer and screwdriver to the ignition to make it turn, the engine wouldn’t start unless the key was within three feet of the onboard computer.

  The garage door has small windows built in, slightly above head height. I stand on tiptoes. There’s a white van inside. I can’t tell what model from here. The garage door looks electric, therefore slow and noisy. At least if any of the Guards goes anywhere, I’ll hear them leaving—

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I turn around. Cedric is standing nearby, a bathrobe billowing around his bare legs. A big triangle of his skinny chest is exposed.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I ask, avoiding his question.

  ‘Yeah, well, today’s an inside day for me.’ Cedric sniffs. ‘For you too, in theory.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Yeah. Time for you to peek behind the curtain.’

  His robe flaps suggestively.

  ‘Come on,’ he says.

  Cedric leads me to what he calls his ‘studio’, but is clearly just his bedroom. Plenty of bookshelves, a few landscapes printed on frameless canvases. There’s a PC and a laptop on a desk. His window is locked with a padlock, just like mine. The room smells like air freshener and spiced cologne.

  I’ve been trying to figure out who the opium addict is ever since I saw those poppies in the greenhouse. Now I’m pretty sure it’s Cedric.

  ‘I’ve made a login for you.’ Cedric goes over to the laptop and points to one of the tabs at the top of the screen. He leaves the chair vacant for me. ‘Click up there.’

  On one of the bookshelves, a slim hardback volume has been placed face out, like he wants people to notice it—Deciduous, by Cedric Huxley.

  I point. ‘Is that your book?’

  Cedric tries to look wistful. ‘That was a long time ago.’

  I open it up. ‘“The Hedgehog”?’

  ‘Oh, of course you’d pick that one,’ he says. ‘The publisher said I would struggle to get reviewed if the book seemed too “niche”. I knew what they meant, so I tried to write the most over-the-top, British-sounding poem I could think of. You know, something that would appeal to white people.’

  He waits for me to read the poem, but it sounds like a trap. I don’t know whether I’m supposed to like it or not. So I put the book down and sit in front of the laptop. Click the tab. Type in the login details on the post-it note. An inbox appears on the screen.

  ‘Those are support tickets we’ve received, sorted by priority,’ Cedric says. ‘Keywords that already appear on the FAQ page are considered non-urgent, messages about downtime or police activity are urgent, questions from paying subscribers are non-urgent and so on.’

  ‘Shouldn’t the paying subscribers be urgent?’ I ask.

  ‘No. They’re already giving us money, and we’re not likely to lose them. The main purpose of support is to convince the free users to become paid users. Similarly, messages that pass certain spelling and grammar checks are prioritised, because that implies a level of education, which is correlated with income. You dig?’

  I raise an eyebrow. ‘Did you just ask me if I dig?’

  He looks embarrassed. ‘Sorry. That’s my hippie dad coming through. Don’t say things like that when you’re answering the tickets. Keep it profesh.’

  ‘Sure, I dig.�
�� I scroll through the messages. ‘Your dad still around?’

  ‘No. Bowel cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thank you. I dedicated my first book to him.’

  ‘Oh, you have other books?’

  ‘I’m working on a few ideas,’ he says defensively.

  Whoops. ‘Well, I’ll get started.’

  ‘You do that. Make sure you don’t respond to any messages about Emmanuel Goldstein.’

  ‘Who?’ I say without thinking.

  He looks taken aback. ‘Fred didn’t tell you?’

  Too risky to pretend I’ve just forgotten. Goldstein might not be forgettable. ‘No.’

  ‘Goldstein isn’t real,’ Cedric says. ‘We invented him as a kind of anti-mascot, and seeded rumours about him all over the web. We told conservatives that he’s a gay child molester who entered the country illegally. We told liberals that he’s a racist cop who shot an unarmed Black teenager and doesn’t pay his taxes. We told feminists he was a CEO who preyed on young, female employees, we told Jews he’s a Nazi, we told Nazis he’s a Jewish banker who secretly controls the media—you get the idea. Whatever makes people angry.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘Part of our escape plan.’ Cedric says this like I’m supposed to know what he means. ‘But now we get emails about him all the time. Our subscribers are always begging us to kidnap him, which we obviously can’t do. So just ignore those messages, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  I start opening the emails. Most of them are questions I have no idea how to answer:

  —When will the recording of Scammer’s death be mailed out?

  —How much does it cost to see the full library?

  —Can I see the criminal records of the inmates?

  A few other messages are simply fan mail:

  —Can’t believe that pedo is still squirming.

  —I want to see what happens to the KKK Queen!

  As unsettling as it is to find myself in a house full of killers, this is the more disturbing part. There are thousands of fans out there, all masked by anonymous usernames, Tor browsers and VPNs.

  ‘Who are these people?’ I wonder aloud.

  Cedric doesn’t look up from his computer. ‘We’ve identified most of them. It’s not hard, if you have a mailing address. We run an algorithm over the messages they send to guess their age and gender, and there’s usually only one person per household who fits. But there’s no typical customer. Some are poor people, some are millionaires. Grandads, moms, teenagers. Soldiers, civilians, dental receptionists. Americans, Chinese people, foreign diplomats. The popularity of our product crosses social, cultural and economic borders. Everyone loves seeing bad guys get hurt.’

  Eventually I find a useful message. It’s a question about billing details, and it features a link to the Guards’ actual site on the dark web.

  There are descriptions of all the prisoners, detailing their crimes. Their names aren’t used—they’re referred to only as the Nazi, the Pedo, the Rapist, the Scammer, the Abuser, the KKK Queen and the Terrorist.

  Again, seven names for six prisoners, one of whom is already dead. Maybe the site isn’t updated very often.

  There’s also a link to payment plans. When I click it, I finally understand how the Guards make money.

  The site has several types of customers. There are free users, who can download some but not all of the videos. There are ‘postals’, who receive flash drives in the mail with premium videos loaded on to them. The postals can also submit the names of people they’d like to see kidnapped, and vote for a prisoner to get killed every month. There are contributors, like Lux, who make their own violent videos and submit them in return for discounts. I wonder about Abbey, the young woman Lux abducted—what crime did she commit that meant so many people wanted to see her tortured?

  There are also gamblers, who pay bitcoin to enter a random lottery. The winners get to visit one of the prisoners and hurt them in person.

  Cedric is looking over my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about the lottery,’ he says. ‘It’s bullshit—we would never tell anyone where we are.’

  The movie sets make sense now. The Guards pretend the prisoners are in several different countries so they can sell lottery tickets in those countries. ‘Don’t the customers notice that no one ever wins?’

  ‘That’s why we wear the masks. The viewers are supposed to think it’s a different person each time.’

  I wonder how the Guards can trust each other, when so much of what they tell their subscribers isn’t true. ‘Mailing flash drives is an expensive way to deliver content.’

  ‘Nah.’ Cedric sits down next to me. ‘Netflix does the same thing, kind of.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure. They load their most popular shows on to hard drives and mail them to ISPs around the world. So you think you’re streaming the show from the other side of the country, but actually the data is coming from your own city. It’s cheaper and more reliable. We’ve just taken it one step further. Look, we have a few layers of protection from the FBI.’ Cedric swivels around in his chair and starts counting on his fingers. ‘One: using encrypted flash drives helps us conceal just how much traffic there is, and makes this place seem like a normal farmhouse, with hardly any data uploaded via satellite. Two: our customers are less likely to sell us out, because we know where they live. Three: crimes committed via mail are technically the purview of the US Postal Inspection Service, who have less power than the FBI. And four: the users think all our victims are in other countries, so even if one of them informed on us—’

  ‘Don’t the users notice that the prisoners all have American accents?’

  Cedric smirks. ‘You’d think, right? But no, it’s never come up. We do a bit of sound editing before we mail out the recordings, but that’s mostly just getting rid of noise from the other sets.’ He glances at a large plastic clock on the wall. ‘Come on, we have to get through these.’

  Now that I understand, the questions in the support tickets are easy to answer. I can mostly just copy/paste from the website and hit send.

  After doing this for a while, I realise that I’m running customer support for a dark web torture site. This could be the worst thing I’ve ever done, in a life not short of bad things. But it feels normal—boring, even. Read, copy, paste, click. Read, copy, paste, click. It doesn’t seem like a crime.

  I pause. ‘Are you worried about the guy out there?’

  ‘The underground guy?’

  I don’t know why Cedric would be refer to him that way. ‘The one sneaking around the house last night. The hiker.’

  ‘Oh. No,’ Cedric says. ‘Are you?’

  ‘A little.’ I gesture at the screen. ‘You have hundreds of customers. Thousands, even. They can’t all keep their mouths shut forever. And if the cops ever worked out what was on those flash drives, they wouldn’t need to decrypt it. They could plant microdots on them and track them here.’

  ‘Customers only receive flash drives, they don’t send them. The drives can’t be tracked back to us.’

  ‘The police wouldn’t do it that way,’ I say. ‘They’d start at the other end—put the dots on the flash drives as they roll off the assembly line. Then they’d order some videos from you guys. When a flash drive showed up with microdots on it, they’d be able to map out its whole journey, from the factory to them—via here.’

  To me, this seems unlikely. It would be a huge operation. But the idea is making Cedric nervous, which is what I want.

  ‘They couldn’t dispatch a whole squad to every point on the journey,’ I continue. ‘They’d send one or two guys in the middle of the night to check out anywhere the flash drive stopped for more than an hour. Don’t you think the hiker could have been one of those?’

  Cedric looks twitchy now. ‘No. Relax.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I gotta go to the bathroom. You’ll be okay here?’

  I nod. ‘Sure. I hope I haven’t worried you?’

>   He forces a laugh. ‘Of course not. Be right back.’

  Addicts like him—and me—follow a predictable pattern. They’re anxious, so they take drugs. While they’re high, their lives deteriorate. Whatever the initial problem was, it’s now too big to solve. This makes them even more anxious when the drugs wear off, so they take more. To push an addict off the wagon, just worry him about something.

  I wait a few seconds in case Cedric is coming back. Maybe he forgot to take his stash to the bathroom. No—his footsteps recede, and the bathroom door closes and doesn’t open again.

  I turn back to the computer and type Lux’s name into a search engine. Several news stories come up.

  TEACHING ASSISTANT SUSPECTED OF RAPE

  POLICE MANHUNT FOR TEXAS TEACHER

  CAPTIVE FOR MONTHS: ABBEY’S TERRIFYING ORDEAL

  I click on an article. It loads slowly, data trickling down from the satellite. Alongside the text there’s a picture of Lux, looking handsome, serious and nothing at all like me.

  I’m not on social media. I don’t have a website. But there is a single photo of me on the internet. A bomb was found under a car, and the FBI closed off the street. A journalist snapped a picture of me standing behind the police tape in the rain, wearing a second-hand leather jacket and muddy jeans, half-turned away from the camera.

  Most web browsers have a developer mode. You can go in and change the code so the site looks different. No one but you will be able to see it, but in this case, that’s all I need.

  I switch on developer mode and type the URL of the photo into the article about Lux. Cropping it with code is fiddly, but I manage. Soon the police tape is gone.

  Cedric’s footsteps are coming back. I leave the resulting franken-site on the screen, stand up and grab his book off the shelf just as he opens the door.

  His pupils are tiny. He looks so relaxed he might forget to breathe. Paramedics call that ‘respiratory depression’.

  ‘You okay?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah.’ I hold up the book, open to a random page. ‘I was just checking out your book.’