The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  He smiles so widely, she can see he’s missing a few molars. “Not bad,” he says, and then offers her a bowl of nuts, and when she refuses, he scoops a handful to pop in his mouth. For a time there is only the sound of his jaw crunching them down to swallow. “Why do you think I met with you?” There is a squeak and a grunt at the edges of his voice, as if there were other voices hiding inside it and waiting to get out.

  “So that you could be heard,” she says. “So you get the grand profile you deserve.”

  “I like flattery. I do. But let’s get this out of the way: the moment you came through that gate, you lost control of this story. I only agreed to this interview so that I could kill you.”

  She digs out a pen and her Moleskine notebook. “I see you have Laphroaig 18. You like Islay whisky? Have you ever tried Lagavulin?”

  “What?” He can’t seem to comprehend her calm. Then he glances at the minibar. “Oh, yes. The peatier, the better. I like the taste of smoke.”

  “You would.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I like the taste too,” she says. “Like a candied ashtray. Like a charcoaled sheepdog. Like a burned Band-Aid.”

  His eyes narrow, assessing her. He reaches for another handful of nuts. “You’ve got a devil’s way with words.”

  “You’re suspected for leading the hack that took down Merrill Lynch.”

  He says, between bites, “Is that a question?”

  “As well as the blackouts in Paris and New York, the braking system software malfunction with Ford, the mid-flight failures of a dozen Delta Airbuses, the nude photo leak that—”

  “You like Islay. Let’s have a drink. Would you like a drink?”

  “Oh, only if it’s not too much trouble. I’d love a taste.”

  He hoists himself from his chair and follows his belly to the bar, where he pours two fingers of Scotch. He sets a tumbler before her and raises his in a toast. “Death to the enemy,” he says.

  She unscrews her water bottle, adds a splash to her whisky.

  “What are you doing?” he says, fogging his glass with his breath.

  “Adding a little water. Especially with the cask-strength, it reduces the burn, opens up the flavors more. You want a drop?” She tries to make her voice as nonchalant as possible. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  He shrugs, fine, and she leans forward to plop a dollop of water in his glass.

  She tucks away the bottle and takes an appreciative sip of the whisky. “Boy, that’s great. Mmm. Thanks.” Then poises her pen over the notebook. “So what’s motivating you? What’s your purpose? What do you want? It’s obviously not about money.”

  He takes a long sniff of the whisky. “I want to listen to the world scream.” He tips back the tumbler for a sip. Runs his tongue across his lips. His eyes, closed a moment before, bug open. He drops the glass and it shatters on the floor. His face goes red. He gags. His hand goes to his throat and steam leaks from his open mouth. His tongue, when it bulges from his mouth, is blistered, swollen.

  She says, “How’s the holy water taste, you son of bitch?”

  He doesn’t answer except with a strangled cry. He fumbles for a desk drawer but never gets it open. Hemingway is already there, snapping his teeth around the man’s arm and shaking him from side to side until he slips from his chair and onto the floor. Here the dog finishes him.

  Lela finishes her whisky before standing and wiping her mouth. She goes to the desk and yanks open the drawer and removes from it a pistol that she then tucks into her belt. She locates two thumb drives and pockets them. Unplugs the blade servers and drops them on the floor and stomps on them until they shatter beneath her heel.

  She hears crows shrieking outside. Then the shout of gunfire. A single shot followed by the rattle of assault rifles. “Hannah?” she says. “Are we good?”

  Her phone immediately responds. “All good. I’ve disabled the alarm system, frozen their accounts, and uploaded all data into the cloud.”

  “I should be able to file the article by tonight.” She pulls Hemingway off the body and shushes his growls and tells him he’s a good boy. Then she holds out the phone to snap a photo of Wisam’s corpse. “I don’t want to get scooped, so let’s wait until then to contact the embassy.”

  “FYI,” Hannah says, “North Korea just test-fired another missile into the Pacific and the internal chatter at the Pentagon seems to confirm that Jong-un had everyone at Work Camp #22 executed. Should I confirm tomorrow’s flight to Seoul?”

  “Please.”

  A crow lands on the windowsill then. It cocks its head to regard her with a black eye. Its beak taps the glass—once, as if in salutation—before it flaps away.

  By the time she works her way outside, the sky is black and Juniper is waiting for her in the courtyard. He wears his preacher blacks. Two pistols hot in his hands. Gun smoke drifts like a fog taking form. Crows caw from the walls and garden.

  She walks up to him and tugs on his beard playfully. Both of them smile, and she remembers that moment, two years ago, when her hand plugged the thumb drive into the USB port and the blade servers hummed and their red lights blinked white and it became suddenly possible to believe that though winter was upon them, the ice and the cloud-clotted skies and the confused screaming winds and the seemingly endless dark would eventually give way to the determined sunlight and warmth and music of spring, a world swung back into balance.

  Juniper says, “You get everything you need for the story?”

  “Enough for a happy ending.”

  “Where to next?” he says.

  She readjusts the strap of her satchel and heads for the gate. “Follow me.”

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Helen Atsma—my longtime editor and fellow displaced Oregonian—for bringing me with her to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and for bullying yet another one of my manuscripts into shape. I’m excited to be part of the HMH stable, and I’m grateful to the team there for making me feel welcome and helping launch this digital nightmare into the world.

  Thanks to Katherine Fausset, a good pal, a great agent. Thanks to Holly Frederick at Curtis Brown, and Noah Rosen and Britton Rizzio at Writ Large, for muscling Hollywood on my behalf.

  Thanks to Tina Grazo, not only for building my website, but for serving as a tech adviser on this book. This is a supernatural story, but I tried to ground it in reality as best I could, and she helped tremendously. So did Geoff Sauer and Mike Edwards, who coached me on the mysteries of the Dark Net and cybersecurity. I also owe Steve Edwards—and his intentionally unacknowledged friend and wireless mole, T.A.—for helping me better understand cellular networks and their vulnerabilities.

  I read many articles when researching this novel, but I want to give special credit to Lev Grossman’s “The Secret Web: Where Drugs, Porn and Murder Live Online,” which appeared in the November 11, 2013, issue of Time. That’s when I became keenly interested in the subject of the Deep Web and spiraled down the research rabbit hole.

  Thanks to Thomas Maltman for biblical counsel. Thanks to Debra Gwartney for haunting and inspiring me with an image (a vampire cemetery in Sozopol) that became centrally important to this novel. Thanks to Paul Weitz and Stacie Toal for many gallons of bourbon and hours of companionship. Thanks to Peter Geye and Dean Bakopoulos for friendship and council.

  And of course thanks to Lisa Percy for her continued love, patience, and support.

  About the Author

  Benjamin Percy is the author of four novels—The Dark Net, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding—as well as two short story collections, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk, and a book of essays titled Thrill Me. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Esquire (where he is a contributing editor), GQ, Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Paris Review, and Tin House, among many others. His honors include an NEA fellowship, a Whiting Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. He writes the Green Arrow and Teen Titans series for DC C
omics. He was raised in Oregon but now lives in Minnesota with his wife and children.

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