Darknet

by John R. Little

  They also had a network of doctors who would implant the organs to a needy person.

  She looked at the prices for hearts (5,000 bitcoins) and livers (4,000 bitcoins), and she just knew in her gut that the donors were simply murder victims. Organ Associates harvested organs by slaughtering innocent people, probably in China or Vietnam or some other place with few human rights.

  How many innocent people have been killed because of this site?

  What Cindy struggled with was knowing how easy she had become part of the network. She didn’t think to call the police, because she knew it was useless. They scrutinized these sites all day long and had no way to track them. That was the beauty of Tor; there was absolutely no way to track anything. Or anybody.

  Nobody could find out what she was doing.

  Cindy’s clicking had slowed down as her mind tried to absorb the evil that hid beneath her fingers.

  She almost didn’t go any further, but she wanted to know. She’d skimmed the dark depths of DarkNet a couple of days ago but was so shocked she hadn’t really tried to absorb what she was reading. This time she wanted to understand.

  Her happiness could be found here, she knew.

  She tried to stop herself from going into the Child Emporium, but her fingers clicked the keys. She had to see it.

  There, she found the site that had made her feel so badly earlier. She read the home page and bit her tongue. It was a service offering children for men to fuck. The children would be available only in Thailand, but the customer could request that the child be of any nationality he wished, including American. The ad cheerfully offered to find a blonde blue-eyed girl, “Guaranteed to be a virgin!”

  The price? Only 50 bitcoins. Less than $6,000 to rape a teenaged runaway. Pre-teens could be found too, of course, for only an extra 20 bitcoins.

  She thought of Avril, sleeping in her bed upstairs. Rather than scaring her, the ad re-enforced that she needed to obtain freedom for both of them. They needed to get away from the life they led before Tony really hurt them.

  Cindy left the awful site and clicked out to an alleyway. In her mind, the DarkNet was a labyrinth of virtual stores, and she organized it like downtown Seattle, with some main streets and some side alleys. The more obscene the nature of the business, the narrower and darker the alley was.

  Cindy found more than a dozen sites set up by hired assassins. One of them was the site mentioned in her online chat a week earlier: Assassins Inc.

  For the right price, there were scores of men (she assumed they were all men) who would kill whoever you wanted.

  Most of the sites were priced competitively, all offering their services for about $20,000. They didn’t bother using bitcoin amounts, but she knew that’s how they’d want to be paid. Half up front, half when the victim was dead.

  Cindy noticed the time on her computer said it was after 4:00 a.m. She yawned and stretched and reluctantly closed out of Tor and shut off her computer.

  Chapter 4

  July 5

  Avril McKay wasn’t much of a sleeper and tonight was no different than any other night.

  A Tuesday night in mid-summer, no school, not many friends who lived nearby, same old tension between her mom and dad. She woke and stared at the ceiling, not even thinking about what time it was. It never really made much of a difference. It was dark, so it wasn’t close to morning. Other than that, she didn’t care a whit what time it was.

  As always, she lay awake and just listened to the sounds of the house. She heard the quiet hum of the air conditioner but nothing else.

  “Good,” she whispered.

  There’d been many times that she’d woken to all kinds of bad sounds coming from her parents’ bedroom. She hated those nights.

  Avril never told any of her few friends that her dad was very mean. Nobody would believe her, ’cause he always looked cheerful and happy whenever anybody was around. It was only when she and Mom were alone with him that his face crunched up with anger, and that’s when she truly felt fear.

  So far he hadn’t hit her, but sometimes he’d come very close. She could see it in his eyes, the cruel streak staring at her as if she were an evil witch that needed to be destroyed.

  Mom always managed to stop him before anything happened, but Avril knew that she usually paid for that later. The bangs and whimpers coming from the master bedroom made her imagine all kinds of terrors. She never asked Mom about it. She never had the courage.

  Mom would deny it anyhow.

  Even at ten years old, Avril knew things no child should ever know. The biggest thing she knew was to keep it all a secret.

  She hopped out of bed and pulled the curtains apart, letting moonlight stream into her room.

  There was a two foot by two foot table sitting under the window, with a couple of Avril-sized chairs. She shuffled over to her closet and found her stuffed pink bunny, Juicy. Juicy was huge, almost three feet tall. Dad had won her at some type of game at a carnival when Avril was a baby. Juicy had been her constant friend ever since.

  “You’re white,” she said as she settled the rabbit into one of the chairs. “’Cause you won last game.”

  Sitting in the middle of the table was a chess set. She set up the white pieces in front of Juicy and placed the plastic black pieces in front of herself.

  “What do you want to move?”

  Avril stared at Juicy, waiting for her to answer.

  “Pawn? Which one! I can’t just guess!”

  She reached over and moved Juicy’s king’s pawn ahead two spots.

  Avril wiped her eyes with her clenched fists, trying to wake herself up a bit.

  She loved the quiet of the middle of the night. It was the best time to play chess and the perfect time to just sit and not fret about anything.

  Chess had been her focus in life since she was six years old. She played it every minute she could, and the times she wasn’t playing, she was studying. She could play out dozens of the most famous games ever played from memory. Even though Bobby Fisher died long before she was born, she knew every move he’d made to defeat Boris Spassky to win the World Championship in 1972. She’d studied everyone from Paul Morphy to Garry Kasparov.

  Her dad called her fucking nuts. He didn’t say that to her face, of course, but she heard him yell it to Mom one night when he was beating her up. Somehow her chess games made him mad, but she never understood why.

  Now she tried to play at night or when he was at work.

  “I’m moving my pawn to block you,” she said with delight. “You can’t just have free reign in the center of the board, you know.”

  She moved her own king’s pawn up two spots.

  Juicy apparently had been expecting that, because Avril followed her own move by immediately moving the bunny’s king’s knight to land two squares in front of her bishop.

  Avril didn’t hesitate with her own move, moving her queen’s knight in the same fashion.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she said. “The old Ruy Lopez opening.”

  Juicy moved her bishop out past the space that had opened up with her first two moves.

  “See! I told you!”

  Avril stood and looked out the window. After hesitating, she grabbed Juicy and held her up so they could both stare out the window together.

  “I know it’s silly to talk to a stuffed animal,” she whispered, “but sometimes it feels like you’re the only friend I’ve got. Only you know the truth.”

  She hugged the rabbit tightly as she kept looking outside.

  “One day we’ll live somewhere else, Juicy. We’ll run away, and we’ll be able to go someplace where nobody knows us and we can be happy. We just need to be a bit bigger.”

  Avril looked back at the chess game and frowned. She’d never really liked that opening. She moved the pieces back to their starting position and decided to read a book in bed about mid-game strategies instead. Juicy lay in bed beside her, keeping her company.

  She read for about a half h
our before falling asleep.

  Chapter 5

  July 6

  It’s the day, Cindy decided.

  DarkNet had been calling to her all day, vague rumblings rolling through her mind. Drugs, gun running, child pornography, livers available to purchase . . .

  Assassins for hire.

  There was still a part of her who refused to believe that what she was looking at was real. How was it possible to actually hire somebody to commit murder? How in God’s name could they actually advertise their services?

  But they did. She clicked back and forth between a couple of the sites.

  Why don’t the police shut these places down?

  By now she knew the answer. It was the magic of encryption. She’d done her fair share of Googling over the past couple of days and learned more about security and secrecy than she ever imagined she’d need to know.

  She wanted to be sure nobody could trace what she was doing, and now she was convinced. It was why killers hid in the deep web, accessible only by Tor, which took care of its users.

  Including me.

  She surfed over to Assassins Inc.

  * * *

  Got a problem you need taken care of? We’ll do it for you! No blood on your hands and no clue who ordered the hit.

  We are a full-service professional firm that specializes in total eradication of your problems. Just check out our references.

  * * *

  Of course the references were anonymous and there was no way to be sure they were real, but they sure sounded like it.

  There were more than a dozen testimonials listed on the website.

  It was another late night visit to DarkNet for Cindy. She’d come down to her office at 3:00 a.m., limping.

  The evening’s terror had started after she and Tony had watched the late news. Cindy was a news fanatic, wanting to keep up to date with the world because she needed a good understanding of current events to properly run her radio show. Her listeners expected she’d always know what they were talking about when they called, and she always did.

  Tonight the lead story was about a woman who’d been found dead the night before. Her husband was missing and so was their two-year-old son. The dead woman’s throat had been sliced open with a steak knife.

  “Bitch probably deserved it,” muttered Tony. They were sitting at opposite ends of the couch.

  Cindy knew better but couldn’t help herself. She turned to stare at him in disbelief. Her face must have shown the disgust she felt.

  An image popped into Cindy’s mind—her stabbing Tony repeatedly with one of her own steak knives. In her fantasy, blood spurted from his chest and neck as she slammed the blade into him over and over again.

  He glanced at her and glowered at her. “What’s your problem?”

  Tony had polished off three bottles of beer. He had never been good at holding his liquor and Cindy did her best to undo the damage.

  “Nothing. I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Don’t fuckin’ sound like it.”

  She shrugged, staring at the photo of the dead woman on the television. Nobody knew where the two-year-old was. Again, she thought of Tony, this time of him stealing Avril from her. It wasn’t impossible.

  “Don’t turn your back on me.”

  She forced a smile and looked at him. “Sorry, I just got distracted, I guess.”

  He could move fast when he wanted, and now was one of those times. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it, almost sitting on top of her.

  She knew he wanted her to cry out, but she’d been trying not to do that. Avril was getting older and noticing things more and more.

  “Please, don’t,” she whispered. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Now you’re telling me what I should do?”

  “No, I just . . . please, Tony. Let’s just have a drink and—”

  He pushed her back hard into the back of the couch.

  “Sometimes you make me sick,” he said.

  She tried to plead with her eyes, but he didn’t notice. Or he didn’t care. She wasn’t sure which sometimes. He punched her hard in the stomach and knocked the wind out of her. She bent over and tried to breathe, but she couldn’t get any air. A part of her began to panic, thinking she was going to suffocate. She found herself on the floor, her head banged and sore, but that didn’t matter. The pain in her stomach didn’t matter, either, as she gasped for air.

  Soon, she could feel that she was breathing again. She wasn’t going to suffocate.

  Ohmygod, please help me.

  Cindy took a few more minutes to get her breathing back to normal. She was still on the floor and could see Tony’s legs. He was standing in front of her.

  It’s not over, she knew. She closed her eyes and tried to be somewhere else. There was a beach that she’d been to when she was a teenager. It was the only time her parents had ever taken her on a holiday and the trip down the Oregon coast was magical. She’d loved the shoreline and the forests, and her dad even let her tune the car radio to whatever rock station was clearest as they drove. Wilson Phillips, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, and Paula Abdul drove down the coast with them.

  Cindy thought of that wonderful summer as Tony beat the shit out of her.

  Through the pain, she remembered the waves, the beautiful huge waves that she could body surf on. Oregon was magical that summer, and she decided she wanted to take Avril back there one day, so she could experience some of the same magic.

  Her back was bleeding, she knew, and he was cracking a leather belt on her legs. She thought only of the sand and surf and the trees and camping and hiking trails and all the other things Oregon gave her that summer. In her mind she was swimming in the ocean when she passed out from the pain.

  * * *

  Cindy stared again at the testimonials. Of the dozen she skimmed, several were from women who had hired Assassins Inc. to murder their husbands, and according to the grateful comments, they escaped from the pain and sorrow of their awful lives.

  Before she even knew what she was doing, she clicked the button labeled, “Need Help?”

  A pop-up screen appeared. It looked like an old-fashioned DOS prompt that she’d seen when she was a kid on the then-old Compaq computer her parents had.

  “Chat time,” she said.

  Part of her wanted to click the close button. She could feel her heart beating, and she subconsciously pushed her chair back and stood up.

  The cursor blinked on and off in the corner of the blue window.

  Pain scorched through her legs, and she sat back down. She hardened her resolve. What could it hurt to just chat?

  At the top of the screen, there was a flashing line of text. “Please wait a moment and somebody will be with you shortly.”

  At least they’re polite, she thought.

  She stood again, this time more slowly, and walked out to the kitchen to get herself a beer. She needed something to calm her nerves. She took the opportunity to listen to the rest of the house. Nothing. If she’d heard either Tony or Avril, she would have hurried back to her computer and closed the screen. Fate would have solved her dilemma.

  But there was no noise. She took a long drink and walked back to the computer, where a message was waiting for her.

  “I can help you.”

  * * *

  Cindy stared at the message, and for some reason she struggled to understand, she started to cry.

  “How did I get here?” she asked the silence. There was no answer except the thundering truth of her own inability to act.

  When she married Tony, she thought she’d hit the lucky ticket on the train of life. He was strong, handsome, funny, and everybody liked him. He could make anybody laugh and there was simply nothing not to like.

  On top of that, he’d written Summer Drive, one of the most popular songs of the decade. For months, when she was a nothing DJ in a peewee radio station, he’d phone her and talk about his song, but he’d also talk about the future he planned for himself and
his band. He never sounded arrogant—just realistic. Cindy liked that he was forward-thinking and planned for his future. She believed the funny, self-deprecating song was the first in a long unbroken chain of hits yet to come, and she loved being part of the ground floor.

  She believed him. Everything. And she loved the idea that she could be part of the dream along with him. When he proposed to her, she jumped into his arms and never wanted him to let go of her.

  Cindy often asked herself how she could have been so wrong, but she knew that Tony only let people see what he wanted them to see. Even to this day, nobody knew the side of him that she lived with, and nobody would believe her if she told them. There was no way he could be the monster she would describe.

  For the first two years, she didn’t leave because of a jumbled combination of bad emotions. She felt the beatings must be her fault, that she deserved them and needed to meet his needs better (somehow). Other times, she thought he was just going through a phase and she’d soon have the man back that she wanted, and in the darkest of times, she thought maybe this was just the way marriage worked and nobody talked about it.

  The truth was, she was afraid. If she left, he’d hunt her down. She knew that as much as she knew anything at all. He’d never let her leave him. It wasn’t in his nature to lose, ever. If she left . . . he’d kill her. Plain and simple.

  Then she was pregnant, and she grew up very fast.

  Tony never beat her when she was expecting, although he came close a few times. Avril was her protection, and sometimes she daydreamed that the baby might change him.

  A month after she was born, Tony broke two of Cindy’s ribs. It was as if the pent up need to hurt her had been brooding inside him and growing bigger with every missed opportunity.

  Once Avril was safely out of the way, Cindy was fair game again. She knew she was a helpless victim, but that didn’t allow her a way out.