by Sam Bourne
Desperate sounded about right: desperate enough to send a car with no brakes onto the highway, where it could have killed God knows how many innocent people.
She said nothing, working through the permutations. It was Uri who spoke next: ‘Sounds like they think you’re ahead of them, Maggie.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Maggie?’
‘Let me ask you something, Uri. If it were you. If you had a blanket, if you had a karot-’
‘A karit-
‘You know what I mean. Where would-’
‘I was never quite at the karit level. But my father was, in his day. And you know what he used to say? Not just about this, about all intel things. Again and again, the same quote. From some Brit. “If you want to keep a secret, announce it on the floor of the House of Commons.”’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Hide it in plain sight. The one place no one thinks to look. If Churchill wanted to give the code for the D-Day landings, he’d do it in a speech to Parliament. What German would think to look there?’
‘You think Company men like Forb-, like the subject of my inquiry-’
‘Don’t worry, Maggie. I guessed already.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Don’t forget your question.’
‘I’m wondering whether someone who worked, you know, for the Company, would do the same thing: hiding in plain sight.’
‘The one thing I learned about intel was how similar these guys are. The spy books have that right: a spook from London and a spook from East Berlin have more in common with each other than either of them do with their own wives.’
‘Hide in plain sight. That’s good. Thanks, Uri. For everything.’
He was telling her she didn’t have to thank him, that her only job was to concentrate on getting well, but she wasn’t listening to his voice. She was listening intently instead to other sounds coming through the phone. She had heard a door closing, the bustle of another person in the room and then a change in the register of Uri’s voice. That confirmed it: a new girlfriend, turning her own key in the door to the apartment Maggie had once regarded as home.
Now, her own voice altered, she wound things up. ‘Listen, that’s great!’ she said, the tone false and perky, grating to her own ears. ‘I owe you one.’
‘Maggie, listen, if-’
‘Gotta go! We’ll talk soon.’ She decided to expel from her mind immediately the sound she had just heard, the sound of domesticity and intimacy between Uri and a woman who was not her.
Hide in plain sight. Concentrate on that.
She could see how that would work for Winston Churchill. He was famous, everything he did was in plain sight. But what did that mean for Vic Forbes/Robert Jackson? What counted as plain sight for a man who had spent most of his life hiding in the shadows?
She cracked open the new computer, waited for all the software to load up and then Googled the name Robert Jackson. She found an academic in Kansas and a councilman in Palo Alto, but no sign of the CIA agent. At least that meant no one else, including the legions of anonymous sleuths of the internet, was likely to have discovered his real identity – no one, that is, except the people who had driven her off the road and now had her notebook.
Next she tried Vic Forbes, bringing up reams of stories from the world’s press, including a long feature on Newsweek’s website: The short life and strange death of Vic Forbes – the anatomy of an attempt to shakedown the President.
She scanned the piece at a ferocious rate, impatient to see if the magazine had discovered that Forbes had also made a personal attempt to blackmail Stephen Baker. It had not: it was using ‘shakedown’ less than literally. Most of the article was speculation, wondering if Forbes had backers among Baker’s enemies, noting that in his Tuesday tour of the network studios Forbes had run into, and then had an apparently ‘intense and engaged’ conversation with Matt Nylind, impresario of the legendary Thursday Session, in which DC’s conservatives wargamed the week ahead. That was among a handful of interesting nuggets the piece had turned up but there was no hint of the material she had discovered. Most described him only as a New Orleans-based researcher.
She went back to the search pages, seeing a long string of video results. Clips of Forbes’s multiple TV interviews, alongside a couple of news reports on his death. She clicked on the first available interview, conducted the day he had been ‘unmasked’ as the source of MSNBC’s bombshell stories on Baker.
The sound was tinny on her machine and the video slow, but Maggie listened intently to every word.
‘Like I say, I have no hidden agenda. My only interest is transparency. The American people should know everything about the man who now rules them. They have that right.’
Was there some coded message Forbes was conveying, if only she was smart enough to hear it? Was she meant to note down the first letter of each sentence? Or perhaps the last? And of all the interviews he’d given, which was the crucial one?
A wave of aching tiredness fell over her. She slowly lay down on the bed, feeling the pain in her ribs afresh. It felt good, though, to rest her head on the pillow and close her eyes.
Hide in plain sight.
The whole point of a blanket, if she had understood Uri correctly, was that the information it contained could be retrieved easily – by others – after one’s death. If it were too deeply hidden, it would serve as no kind of deterrent. What had been buried would simply remain hidden.
Forbes had to be sure his information would break cover. And that meant there had to be some kind of timing mechanism, like a safety deposit box programmed to pop open a certain number of hours or days after his death.
Now her mind was running fast. Such a device would work only if it somehow knew its owner had died. How could that happen?
It could be a parcel, held with a lawyer, who would know to release it in the event of his client’s death. But that didn’t seem likely. Everything Forbes had done, he had done alone: would he have entrusted such a valuable secret, such a powerful secret, to a fellow human being?
Besides, what had been the motif of his assault on President Baker? Technology. He had hacked into Katie Baker’s Facebook account, sending messages via a dumb terminal. He had even contrived to hack into MSNBC’s system, using a fake online identity.
What had the school principal said about young Jackson? He was what you would call nowadays a geek, fascinated by computers at a time when everyone else thought the limits of the virtual universe were marked by a game of Space Invaders.
Of course Forbes would have hidden his blanket online. And there the timing mechanism would be simple, even Maggie could see that. You’d just create some site that you made sure to visit every day or every week. If, for whatever reason, you didn’t log in, the site would know. A technical wiz like Forbes would surely have no problem programming a site to do something crazy after it had been left untouched for a specified amount of time, like emailing his blanket out to those who would know exactly what it meant and what to do with it – a list of addresses Forbes had keyed in before his death, as his posthumous insurance policy.
Maggie felt a surge of energy run through her. She was sure she was right. But one stubborn question remained.
Where the hell was it?
Muttering the words ‘hide in plain sight, hide in plain sight’ to herself, she typed in the most obvious place she could think of.
Vicforbes.com
Nothing. Nothing for.net or.org either. Same with victorforbes and robertjackson, robertandrewjackson, andrewjackson and bobjackson.
How the hell was she meant to crack this? It was just her and a laptop in this stinking bloody motel room. What was she meant to do?
And then it came. The one person who would know the answer.
42
Aberdeen, Washington, Saturday March 25, 16.41 PST
She looked at the clock. The eight-hour time difference meant it was already past midnight in Dublin. She hesitated.
; In the old days, she’d have happily called her sister Liz at three in the morning: she would either have just come in or been about to go out. But the arrival of her baby son Calum three years ago had put Liz’s clubbing days behind her. The drug she craved now – and which she would go to extraordinary lengths to score – was sleep. Calling her at this hour of the morning was what you’d call a high-risk operation.
She dialled the number from memory.
‘Liz? It’s Maggie.’
‘Uggh?’
Maggie whispered, as if she were right there at her sister’s bedside. ‘It’s me.’
‘Maggie? It’s the middle of the night.’
‘I know. I’m really sorry-’
‘It’s the middle of the fucking night, Maggie. Where are you? Has something happened?’
‘I’m in Washington. But not that Washington. It’s a long story.’
Maggie could hear a rustle, the sound, she guessed, of Liz sitting up in bed.
‘Are you drunk? You sound like you’ve got your head in a bucket.’ Book-it. The sheer strength of her sister’s accent made Maggie miss home immediately and intensely.
‘No, not drunk. I was in an accident.’
Instantly, Liz’s tone changed: suddenly she was a whirlwind of sisterly concern, offering help, insisting that she take the next plane, wanting to know what the doctors had said, marvelling at the fact – as Maggie had recounted it – that they had discharged her so quickly. It was simultaneously touching and stressful.
‘I don’t need anything, Liz, I promise. Nothing like that.’
‘Do you swear, Maggie? Because, seriously, I can get to wherever you are and be with you by tomorrow.’
‘Actually there are two things you can do for me.’
‘Say it.’
‘Don’t breathe a fookin’ word to our ma.’ She was hamming up the Irish to lessen the gravity of the request, the very act of which only confirmed the gravity of the request. ‘I mean it. She’ll only freak out and I don’t want her to know a thing. OK?’
‘OK. What’s the other thing?’
‘Liz!’
‘I promise.’
‘Good. The other thing is professional. I need your brainpower.’
Liz croaked out a laugh. ‘You mean you’re not calling for a recipe for courgette mash. It’s nice that someone remembers the real me.’
‘Too many coffee mornings?’
‘And playdates! There are only so many things you can say about pull-up nappies.’
‘Poor you.’
‘Though they are great. Pull-ups, I mean.’
‘Liz?’
‘Sorry. Go on.’
Maggie explained, tentatively and indirectly, what she was looking for.
‘What kind of man was he, Maggie? What did he do?’
‘He was retired. But he had been in intelligence. American intelligence.’
‘When?’
‘Eighties and nineties.’
There was a pause. Good: Liz was thinking. Then she heard her sister clear her throat, as if fully waking herself up, ready for action. ‘Now. Have we ever had the darkweb conversation?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘OK. When you look something up online, how do you do it?’
‘Google.’
‘And when you do that, you think you’re searching the whole internet, right?’
‘Right.’
‘That’s what everyone thinks. But they’re wrong. In fact, you’re searching, like, point nought three per cent of the total number of pages on the web.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You know that thing they always used to say at school, about humans only using ten per cent of our brains? Well, most of us are using just three hundredths of one per cent of the entire web.’
‘So where’s the rest?’
‘That’s what I’m talking about: the darkweb. Or the deep web. The places that are hidden. What most people see and use is the tip, but there’s this massive iceberg underneath.’
‘And what’s in it?’
‘A whole lot of it is junk, websites that have stopped working, addresses that have fallen into disuse, defunct internet companies. You gotta imagine it like this vast underwater landscape, full of old shipwrecks and derelict buildings that have fallen into the sea.’
Maggie, lying on the bed in the name of convalescence, made a silent grimace as she shifted position, sending a new ache through her ribs and across her shoulders. She didn’t want to break her sister’s flow. Liz had been the same as a teenager: she could turn positively lyrical when exalting whatever theme had become her passion.
‘But it’s not just old stuff, Mags. Sometimes it’s legitimate, maybe a database that’s blocked to search for copyright reasons, because it contains commercially sensitive information. And sometimes it’s vile. Like dirty address spaces that get taken over by crime syndicates. The Russians are big on that. They run spam or child porn from these disused sites. The darkweb is not a nice place.’
‘And is there-’
‘Right. I forgot. The other stuff you find – kind of lying on the seabed – are addresses that were set up right at the beginning, when the internet was just starting, and then abandoned. And you remember who started the internet, right?’
‘The US military.’
‘Yep.’
Maggie pulled the covers tight and hugged herself against a sudden chill. ‘And is there any way to probe all this stuff?’
‘I know how you can start.’
Maggie listened, taking detailed notes, as Liz gave her a step-by-step guide. She would follow the instructions and they would speak again in the morning, Dublin time. Liz estimated that she had four hours and forty-five minutes’ sleep left to her before Calum woke up. ‘Every one of those minutes is precious, Maggie. Don’t call me before six. ‘Night – and good luck.’
Maggie hauled herself upright and, with the sheet of paper at her side and the computer on her lap, followed Liz’s first instruction and Googled ‘Freenet’.
Two clicks later she was at a site that looked like any one of those places you occasionally had to visit to download or update computer software: grey and basic. Once she read the welcome paragraph, however, she got the first inkling that she was about to enter a different realm.
It declared that Freenet was free software allowing people to browse anonymously, to publish ‘freesites’ that would be accessible only via Freenet and, tellingly, Maggie thought, to ‘chat on forums, without fear of censorship’. Liz had warned her that for every free-thinking libertarian or Iranian dissident she might encounter here, there would be half a dozen users drawn to a place where those whose sexual tastes ran to the illegal could gather unimpeded.
She read on: Freenet is decentralized to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in ‘darkweb’ mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect.
Maggie followed the prompts, downloading and installing the Freenet software then answering the questions it asked her. ‘How much security do you need?’ There was a guide, ranging from ‘NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country’ to ‘MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned or worse.’
Maggie swallowed, then opted for maximum. Even though she was sitting in a motel bed, her back supported by three pillows, she felt as if, at that moment, she had plunged into a pool of deep, dark water, the depth of which could not be fathomed.
She came to an index, much starker and more basic than anything you’d find on the regular web. It listed freesites, those that would remain utterly hidden to anyone above the surface.
Before long she had found ‘Arson Around with Auntie’, a beginner’s guide aimed at animal rights activists, teaching them how to firebomb laboratories. Close behind, and no surprise, was the Anarchists’ Cookbook, the book spoken about in whispers even when Maggie was a student. More of a shock was ‘The Terrorist’s Handbook: A practical guide to explosi
ves and other things of interest to terrorists’.
Maggie rapidly concluded that the darkweb she had just entered was bound to be home to fifty-seven varieties of radical, but also to those charged with hunting them down. Both fringe militants and intelligence agents would jump at the chance to drop into the dodgiest websites without leaving any footprints. She felt as if she had stumbled into a labyrinth that was the natural habitat of both cat and mouse. Everything she knew about Vic Forbes told her he would have felt right at home.
She did a search for Vic Forbes and was rewarded with an instant result. She was taken to a URL that didn’t look like any she had seen before. She clicked on it, closing her eyes in a moment of superstitious prayer.
The page took a while to load up, the screen showing nothing more than blank whiteness as the ‘loading data’ message promised more. And then, three or four seconds later, it was there. Maggie recoiled, astonished by what she saw. Not that it was such an arresting image. Just the mere fact of what it represented. For there, in front of her, was confirmation that Vic Forbes had contemplated and prepared for his own death – by hiding his most precious secret in the deepest recesses of the internet’s underworld.
She looked again at the website address, so simple and so obvious. She had only to think of her own email which, when she was in the White House at least, ended.gov. All she had had to do was type in victorforbes.gov and there it was.
Doubtless, he had been one of those pioneers who had been in on the internet from the start, able to create a personal domain when next to nobody knew what such a thing was. Perhaps he had left it abandoned, lying on the virtual seabed as Liz had said. Maybe he had picked it up just recently, decades later, pressing it into service as his blanket. But here it was, Forbes’s own personal website. That it was his was unmistakable. The front page consisted of nothing more than a single, full-face photograph of him. Not the Vic Forbes who had been on television in the hours before his death, nor the young, moustached Robert Jackson in the foothills of his career and full of hope, his photo still there on the first page of his CIA dossier. This was Forbes seven or eight years ago, just turned forty: that was Maggie’s guess.