“Very little, I’m embarrassed to admit,” I said. “It always sounded so ominous… the darknet. Like a horror movie.”
Brendan snorted kindly at my ignorance.
“Nothing so dramatic, sorry to say. It’s basically web content that only exists on darknets—overlay networks that use the net but require specific software or authorization to access. It’s all there, you just can’t see it unless you’ve got the configuration or decryption. There are a couple of networks that access it—Tor is a big one.”
“And it allows people to remain completely anonymous?” Peter asked.
“That’s the idea. The darknet encryption tech routes data through a gang of different intermediate servers, and that protects a user’s ID and location. It lets people communicate and transact without anyone knowing who they are, or being able to access their data. It’s reasonably ingenious, and such a complicated system makes it damn near impossible to reproduce the node path and decrypt the data. Sites aren’t able to track the IP of their users, and users can’t get the IP or location of the host, so you get complete confidentiality.”
“It seems like a perfect breeding ground for crime,” Peter said.
“Oh, it is. Crazy shit goes on—everything from the worst kinds of pornography to fraudulent Bitcoin transactions and illegal drug sales—even terrorist groups use it. But most of what’s on there is just people not wanting big brother to see everything they’re doing. Whistle-blowers, political groups, stuff like that. Lately it’s getting a lot more popular with people who just want to avoid ads and data mining.”
“Would there be a way to send this to the FBI or Interpol, like Peter said?” I asked.
“Oh, sure. They’re always monitoring what they can. Interpol has indexed thousands of darknet sites. If we push it to a place they’re looking with the authorization they need, it should land in their laps—theoretically.”
“So, theoretically, they’d have this file full of evidence, along with anything else we wanted to include, and would be able to decrypt it without seeing who sent it?” Peter asked.
“That’s the idea, yeah.”
“And then what?” I asked Peter.
“We bait the trap—and hope to God it works,” he replied.
“And Marianne?”
“She doesn’t need to know anything about it until we know it’s failed—or succeeded,” Peter said. “We can keep in touch through the IP address she left us and let her know if it worked—or if she needs to run.”
“She won’t run unless she knows I’m safe.”
“I know. So we’ll have a back-up plan—if they don’t show up, or something goes wrong, you tell the cops or Feds everything you know and see if they can’t help protect you.”
“I’d be turning Marianne in, too, wouldn’t I.”
“I don’t know what other choice we have. And honestly, at this point, I don’t think she’d mind.”
“She prob’ly even intended it,” Brendan drawled, lounging down in his chair as if his spine had melted into the leather.
“Why do you say that?” Peter asked quickly.
“Seems to me there are a few holes in your plot—no offense, man.”
“None taken. What holes, exactly?”
“How about, why did this Marianne tell you so much? Seems weird that she just spilled all her deepest, darkest secrets like that. You could put her in some serious trouble if you passed any of it along. Trust is nice, and all, but nobody’s going to incriminate themselves without a reason. So, what was the point of filling you in? Did she say?”
“No,” Peter answered thoughtfully. “No, she didn’t say.”
“Seems fishy. And why didn’t she just pull this stuff off the darknet herself? Anyone with half a brain and some knowledge of servers could do it, and I’m betting she knows plenty. These parents of hers probably use it in their little operations. So why not just download it and—what did she say she was going to do with it?”
“Show her parents enough to prove to them she had it, and make a bargain,” I said, since Peter seemed too abstracted to respond.
“Huh. Well, why couldn’t she have done that? She didn’t need you to do it, did she? Something else was stopping her.”
“She knew it wouldn’t work,” I said.
“Yeah, exactly. So you two come along and offer to do it for her when she says it’s not safe—am I getting warm?—fitting nicely into her new plan. You’ll pull the evidence—and use it to turn in her folks. My bet is the lady’s already long gone.”
“She set this up,” Peter agreed thoughtfully.
“Right,” Brendan said.
“She set this up?” I echoed, apparently the only one who found the idea surprising.
“It makes sense. Why else tell us everything she did?”
“She couldn’t know we’d offer to get the evidence off the darknet,” I protested. “Would you have suggested that if you didn’t know Brendan?”
“No, but she could have gotten it to us some other way. She knew we’d want to use it somehow—to help her or to turn it over to the police. It turned out that we did know someone who could get it for her. This way was just an extra fail-safe.”
One more fail-safe.
It made sense, now that the idea had been shoved into my lap. Marianne had played us. She’d used our appearance in New York to her advantage, weaving us into her plan. Now that Brendan had pointed it out, it seemed so obvious. Without us, she had no chance of making a deal with her parents. The collateral she’d collected at such a high price, and I believed her story about that, would only be useful for one thing—to put her parents away. She could have sent it to Interpol herself, tried to set up a sting, but there was no guarantee it would work. Her parents already didn’t trust her, they were watching her every movement. What was her excuse for not turning them in herself—that they could do us harm from prison? Maybe that was true, but now that I thought it about it, it was ambiguously thin. More likely she’d already decided that we could do it for her.
She had her exit plan in place. That’s why, at long last, she was willing to share the dark side of her life with me. Show me the criminal schemes spun by the DiGregorios, or whoever they really were. Because after this, it wouldn’t matter anymore. One way or another, she’d be gone. She’d do everything she could to protect me, set up every safeguard possible, and then go. The final fail-safe would be handing myself and everything I knew over to law enforcement, so they could protect me if it came to that.
I could only hope, with all my heart, that it wouldn’t come to that.
Chapter 16
“So she knew we’d want to use the evidence,” I said, some minutes later. Peter and Brendan had already moved back over to the monitors and were animatedly discussing the best ways to bait the trap and send the files. I’d listened with half an ear, the rest of my mind still processing our theory about Marianne. It was only a theory at this point—and it directly contradicted what she’d told us she planned to do. But all the same, it was too plausible to ignore. My partners had already decided that this version was the correct one, and deep down I felt they were right.
“What was that?” Peter inquired, after a short pause. I got up and joined them, leaning up against one of the desks.
“She knew we couldn’t just send it off and sit on our hands,” I said. “When do you think she decided to bring us into it?”
“Before she agreed to meet us for drinks,” Peter said. “And after we showed up at her bolt-hole. We’d shown some tenacity in finding and interviewing Mike Sorenson, not to mention tracking down her address. I think she saw we could be allies.”
“Unwitting allies,” I amended, with mild bitterness. I couldn’t help but feel used.
“Somewhat unwitting, maybe. Though there’s no reason we couldn’t have figured it out—as we did.”
“Why couldn’t she just have asked us to take it to the police? Why all the—the maneuvering? It seems so pointless.”
&
nbsp; “Well, what if we didn’t want to? It was a lot to ask, and might not have done much good. At least we were warned, and maybe even protected to a degree. The worst thing that could happen was that we got the information to her and she was no worse off than before.”
There was no debating this, so I left it alone and drank the last of my second beer.
“I think I’ve got the sending part figured out,” Brendan volunteered, clicking rapidly through a number of windows. “I can send it through a posting server to a couple of agencies in D.C. Domestic and international. All we need to do is figure out what we’re going to tell them.”
“And how to bait the trap,” Peter said. “And where to set it.”
“Just a few small details, really,” Brendan said.
“Do you remember anywhere your aunt and uncle went when they were in the city?” Peter asked me.
I thought back. My memories of them were brief, vague and impersonal. When they infrequently came to town, they stayed at a hotel—did I ever hear which hotel? Or was that even true?—and either sent for Marianne in a taxi or drove by to pick her up without coming inside. It was sort of odd at the time, but with the serene self-centeredness of childhood I never questioned it. Only once did they get out of the car at our house, and once we met them in San Francisco, when I was about thirteen. It wasn’t far from Union Square, on Market…
“The Four Seasons,” I said suddenly. “We met them in the lobby once, to take Marianne home after she’d been staying with them. We happened to be in the city for the day—it was right after Christmas. I don’t know if they were actually guests there or not, but Marianne was waiting in the lobby and they were in the bar. My mom was kind of annoyed about it, I remember.”
“Swanky scene,” Brendan commented.
“Anywhere else?” Peter asked. I shook my head, feeling discouraged. “We don’t have any idea how to find their dummy business, or else that would be ideal. What we really need is someplace they’d feel confident in coming to, but couldn’t get away from easily.”
“Alcatraz?” I suggested wryly.
“Too remote,” Peter said, “but you’re on the right track.”
“I was kidding.”
He looked up and smiled.
“Sorry. I’ve been wishing I knew the city better. I’m sure we’ll think of something.”
“All you need to do is to set the bait,” Brendan said. “You don’t actually need a place for it. In fact, it’d be better not to have one.”
“Why is that?” Peter asked curiously.
“They’ll catch onto it—anywhere you pick will be too obvious.”
“So what do you suggest?”
Brendan unhurriedly spun his chair around in a circle.
“You mention this supposed meet—all nice and obscure, you don’t even really need to say where it is, right? Then you set the real trap in your hotel, say—somewhere they think they’ll be able to come at you unawares. Vulnerable. Before the fake meet is supposed to happen. If the Feds buy it, they’ll be watching the entrances, ready to nab our friends if or when they show up.”
“Use their suspicions against them,” Peter said slowly.
“Well, yeah. Otherwise they’ll smell a rat. I mean, they probably will anyway, but it might just get them where you need them to be. And, eventually, in custody.”
“How do we avoid getting arrested ourselves? Or do we avoid it?”
“Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? You’ll have to chance getting caught in the crossfire, so to speak—tell the authorities where to look for these DiGregorio people, and show yourselves to the DiGregorios so they think they’ve got you cornered and feel confident about making a move. Then turn yourselves in or get the hell out, whatever doesn’t get you killed.”
“That’s kind of brilliant,” I declared, thinking it over.
“It’s smarter than anything I had in mind,” Peter said without resentment. “I don’t like the idea of putting Lola in any danger—or myself, or anybody else—but I can see how these people are too devious to be caught easily. You’re right—the trick is to convince them that we’re trying to trap them somewhere else. They’ll only show up if they think they’ve outsmarted us. If they have the upper hand.” He sat in brooding silence, rubbed his eyes again. We waited, watching him. “Will it work, do you think?” he asked Brendan finally.
“I’ll be honest with you, man,” Brendan said, avoiding our eyes and turning back to the nearest screen. “I seriously doubt it.”
■ ■ ■
Suddenly everything seemed to be moving faster, now that we’d come up with the beginnings of a plan. Brendan, who must have had nothing better to do with his Friday than drink beers and advise us on how to catch a pair of lethal criminals, began to build the package we’d send to certain servers flagged by the FBI, the Justice Department and Interpol in Washington. As far as Marianne had said, Interpol was the only agency actively investigating her parents as most of their crimes were committed outside of the U.S., but it couldn’t hurt to throw a homegrown acronym or two in there.
Peter and I pulled chairs from the kitchen to sit closer to Brendan while he worked, discussing the best way to present our trap, along with all the incriminating files. In the end he suggested a text file, programmed to open automatically on download of the zipped package. I peered over his shoulder while he put this together, asking the occasional question and finding that none of it was more complicated than other programming I’d done. It was just a matter of using different tools and servers to do it.
To my surprise, Brendan was a good teacher; I’d forgotten that he taught for a living, that “hacker” wasn’t his profession. He answered my questions patiently and went out of his way to show me how to use Tor to access the darknet, which was straightforward enough. I’d forgotten a lot of what I learned in college, only working in database development for the last few years, but much of the language and intuitive processes started to come back to me as I watched Brendan work.
Peter wasn’t half as interested as I was, not even pretending to listen. He’d pulled over a blank piece of paper and was writing intently on one of the desks opposite. Once Brendan had finished setting up the text file programming, he turned to Peter and said, “So, what are we putting in this love note?”
Frowning in concentration, Peter read out what he’d been writing. I should have guessed that was what he was working on.
“‘Enclosed evidence regarding suspects of international fraud, extortion, murder, wanted for questioning by Interpol. Alias Heidi Debrett, John Debrett (aka Wendy DeVere, Phillip DeVere. Sara Devlin, Jonathan Devlin. Lina Desano, Paul Desano. Nan Dunn, Harry Dunn. Rosemary DiGregorio, Leonard DiGregorio). Suspects may be at this location at this time’—we’ll need to figure out where and what date—‘possibly under new alias. Best wishes from a concerned citizen.’”
Brendan chortled, nearly choking in his mirth.
“Oh, man!” he guffawed. “‘A concerned citizen…’ Priceless!”
“Too much?” Peter asked, grinning.
“It’s good,” I assured him, wishing I could find any of this as funny as they seemed to. “I don’t see what else we can say.”
“What day are you going to do this?” Brendan asked, still shaking with laughter.
“I don’t know. Soon. How quickly could they take action?”
“As fast as their analysts can get through it. I’d say no more than a day or two. They’ll have to run it through their security software a few times, once it’s deemed safe it’ll get pushed through for processing. My guess is Interpol will be the first dogs in the water, if any of those names show up in their system. After that the Feds.”
“So possibly as early as tomorrow or Sunday, if we send it today. If we send it tomorrow, maybe Monday at the latest.”
“Sounds about right.”
“The timing will be the tricky part. We can’t risk moving too fast on either side—having the DiGregorios show up before the police a
re in place.”
“We’ll just have to push them to come soon—make it a tight window between the pretend-trap and the real one,” I said, finally feeling like I had a grasp on what we were going to do. “We can reserve a hotel room there under my name, and keep walking through the lobby or hanging out in the bar—places where the agents or whoever can keep watch.”
“Makes sense,” Brendan approved. “Which hotel?”
“The Four Seasons,” I said without thinking. “Go big or go home.”
“Great choice. The management won’t like it, but let the authorities deal with that. They’re good at cleaning up awkward messes.”
Peter looked more concerned than impressed by my plan.
“I know this was my idea, but I hate the idea of you being such… such visible bait,” he said, his voice strained. “We’ll be sitting ducks for some very dangerous people.”
“In public—surrounded by cops,” I reminded him.
“There’s no guarantee of that. We can’t force the authorities to set up a sting—anything might prevent them from taking action.”
“In which case a couple of baddies know you’re holding the goods on them,” Brendan added helpfully. “But hey, that was always the risk, right? Dangerous and stupid plans have that disadvantage.”
“Right,” Peter agreed reluctantly.
The nerves in my stomach—previously steadied by the beer—gave an anxious lurch. There was no getting around it. If our plan to have them caught failed, we’d have walked ourselves directly into the DiGregorios’ line of sight. We could always throw ourselves onto the mercy of the FBI or the police, but as Peter said, there were no guarantees.
“Then we just have to hope it works,” I said, and hoped I didn’t sound as terrified as I felt.
■ ■ ■
Brendan completed the “love note,” as he kept calling it, including the name of the hotel and the date range of now through Monday. We had to push everyone to act. It was soon—too soon, ominously soon, but we had no reason to wait and every reason to get it over with quickly. Peter had already missed almost a week of work. If our plan succeeded, and we weren’t in jail, he might even be able to return to the bar on Tuesday. Delia had kept in touch via text and told him everything was fine, but he didn’t feel good about not being there, for her or the business. On top of that, time might be ticking away until Hal’s indictment came through, setting more problems in motion.
Spiders in a Dark Web Page 21