Nest

by Terry Goodkind

  “But why not?”

  “How could I care for anyone when I know that doing so would endanger her life?”

  “That’s right now,” Kate said. “Maybe things will change.”

  “I’m afraid not.” He reflected silently for a moment. “I know it probably sounds strange coming from a guy, but to tell you the truth, it’s pretty damn depressing sometimes, never to have had a woman say she loves me, and to know that I never will.”

  Kate thought that was about the most disheartening thing she had ever heard. It seemed to suck the meaning out of being alive, out of being human.

  “But you—”

  “You need to get some sleep, Kate. Tomorrow I’m taking you to a very scary place.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “This is the scary place you wanted to take me?” Kate asked, looking around the big parking lot. “An electronics store?”

  “The store itself isn’t the scary place. Think of it as a doorway.”

  “A doorway.” She shot him a skeptical look. “A doorway to what?”

  “To Onionland.”

  Kate shielded her eyes with a hand as she squinted over the top of the car at him in the bright sunlight.

  “Onionland? What’s Onionland?”

  “The place where bogeymen hide.”

  His tone was sobering enough that she knew that there was something very serious behind the vague response, and that she was finally about to get to those answers.

  Cars jockeyed for parking places or waited for people to pull out of spots in a lot busy with Saturday shoppers. People with jumping kids rolled out of the store with shopping carts loaded with new game systems, TVs, and computers.

  Kate wondered if it wouldn’t be better to come back on a weekday, when business was slower. But she also wanted answers about the dimension of the danger they were in. Considering what had happened the night before, waiting didn’t seem like the best option.

  She had thought that killing the man who had murdered John, AJ, and her family and had been hunting her, to say nothing of killing the man who had come out of nowhere, would mean that it was over and she was finally out of danger. Jack had discouraged that notion, saying he needed to show her. Considering her newfound ability, she was apprehensive that it could never really be over.

  So, she guessed she was going to this Onionland place to meet the bogeymen.

  Jack leaned closer as they walked toward the entrance. “Listen, Kate, this is going to be hard.”

  She looked over at him. “What do you mean?”

  “For one thing, this is an electronics store, so there are going to be lots of TVs on display in here. You’re going to see reports on the murders last night all over those TVs.”

  She looked away from the concern in his eyes and nodded. “I understand. I’ll be okay.”

  As horrified as she was by the death of AJ and her family, she knew that she couldn’t let herself become trapped in a yesterday that she couldn’t change, or she would be lost. She needed to focus instead on the problem at hand and what she might still be able to change.

  “Seeing the news about the murders isn’t going to be the worst of it,” Jack said.

  Kate took a deep breath. “What could be worse?”

  “I’m taking you to the underworld.”

  “The underworld.” She made a face at him. “Do you have to talk in riddles all the time?”

  “The riddles are about to end. To do that, I need to bring you face-to-face with things that most people will never see and wouldn’t accept if they did. You need to see the reality I’m dealing with, the reality I’m trying to protect you from, the reality you’re going to have to deal with if you want to live.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to live?”

  “You’d be surprised. Some people with your ability that I try to help simply can’t handle it and give up a level of control over their own fate.”

  Kate scanned the crowds funneling with them toward the store entrance. She wanted to live and was determined to face whatever she needed to.

  “I need you to keep in mind that we don’t want to attract attention to what we’re doing,” Jack said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we need to blend in. There are cameras everywhere, so if you lose your cool, it will be recorded. We need to look like nothing more than a couple out Saturday shopping. So stay as calm and collected as possible, no matter what you see. After last night I have faith that you can handle this.”

  “I understand,” Kate said as they went through the glass doors into the store.

  Despite how tense she felt, she consciously tried to act casual. She didn’t rush and she didn’t make herself obvious by looking around at everyone. She knew that they were there for a very different reason than every other ordinary person she saw.

  Mere days ago she had been a relatively ordinary woman living in the ordinary world—going to work, going to the grocery store, caring for her brother—but now she grasped that she was living in an unfamiliar world she didn’t yet understand. It was disorienting not knowing the rules of this strange new world she found herself in.

  Every face that turned her way seemed to momentarily elevate her heart rate. She scanned every pair of eyes that turned in her direction. They all looked so ordinary that it made her almost doubt her newly discovered vision. Almost.

  Inside the store, crowds churned through the maze of aisles made from shelves and tables in the vast, open warehouse space. Off to the far left she saw a wall of TVs. Jack was right: most of them were showing the news. Kate recognized AJ’s place, surrounded by yellow tape. Reporters stood outside the tape barrier speaking on camera, or interviewed neighbors by the looks of them. She was glad that she couldn’t hear what they were saying over the store music.

  While the murders of a police detective and her family were the lead story, it was only one of a number of murder reports. She saw a parade of bodies lying in the street or on sidewalks, all lit by strobing police lights. It had been a busy night for killers.

  Shoppers roamed down row upon row of shelves lined with merchandise, from copy machines to cell phones to a wide variety of speakers and sound systems. There were aisles of supplies with everything from reams of paper to pens to hard drives. Banners hung down announcing sales. Computer boards and video cards were mounted on a display high up against the end wall. Below it were shelves with numbered bins corresponding to the parts on display, and one aisle was dedicated to empty computer cases for people who wanted to build their own systems with the parts.

  Jack led them on a meandering course, stopping momentarily to pretend to look at WiFi routers and portable hard drives so as to make them blend in with the rest of the shoppers, until they arrived at a long white counter dividing the computer portion of the store. On each side of the counter, sample computers were set up for shoppers to examine. Near the end of the far side were desktop computers and monitors. The side they were on had dozens of laptops, all open, most of them running.

  Jack looked at a few of them, checking the price, acting mildly interested as if he were just another shopper.

  A young man in a dark blue shirt and tie intercepted them as they moved along the counter. “Can I help you find anything in particular?”

  “Thanks,” Jack answered casually, “we’re just looking at laptops. Are these here last year’s model that I saw advertised on sale?”

  The man gestured to the ones in front of Jack. “You found them. These are all last year’s models. There are some great deals here if you’re not the kind of person who wants the latest and greatest. We still have most of them in stock.”

  Jack nodded thoughtfully as he gazed over the display, looking like he was in no hurry to find just the right bargain. “Okay, thanks. We’ll check them out.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, then. Just come find me if you need any help.”

  “Will do,” Jack said.

  It was obvious that the young man
was overwhelmed with a store full of customers and too little help, so, his duty done, he was glad to leave Jack and Kate to peruse the computers on their own.

  Kate had watched the salesman’s eyes. She remembered the story AJ had told her about the unassuming Edward Lester Herzog and the women customers he had murdered and cut into pieces. Herzog had worked in an electronics store, probably something like this one. John had identified him as the killer for AJ.

  This salesman probably looked something like Herzog had. It was easy to see why he wouldn’t have struck fear into the hearts of the women he had murdered. Not all killers looked scary.

  Jack worked his way down the counter toward the center of the long display and finally came to a stop before one of the open laptops. Customers checking out other computers were at least eight or ten stations away.

  “Stay on the lookout for anyone with the kind of eyes only you can see,” Jack said in a quiet voice without looking at her.

  “Like you needed to tell me that,” Kate said.

  Jack smiled as he played with the cursor on the laptop, moving it around, opening and closing a few windows.

  Still without looking over at her, he said, “There are cameras in this store. The computers are cabled down so they can’t be stolen. A lot of the stuff on the shelves is pretty expensive, so most of the cameras are aimed at the aisles and the shelves of things that can be shoplifted.

  “Don’t be obvious about it, but look up and you will see the cameras that are watching over these computers.”

  “I only see cameras on the other side at each end,” Kate said. “There are another two behind us, also at the ends.”

  Jack nodded, still playing with the computer, opening a browser window. “The store has a low margin. They can’t afford to waste money on expensive surveillance cameras, since all they really want to be able to do is see if someone takes something off a shelf and stuffs it in their shirt or down their pants. For that purpose, less expensive, low-resolution cameras are good enough.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “These computers are secured with cables so they can’t grow legs and walk away. That means it’s not as important to spend money on expensive cameras to watch over them.”

  “Okay,” she said, not really knowing what he was getting at.

  Kate noticed a paunchy man down the aisle a ways looking at her. He was wearing overly baggy jean shorts and flip-flops. She didn’t know if the man was looking at her because she was a woman, or because maybe he thought they looked suspicious for some reason. She was well aware of how men’s eyes lingered on her. She partially closed and then opened the lid of the computer beside Jack’s to make it look as if she were a customer checking out the merchandise.

  The ogling man looked away when a pregnant woman with a young girl arrived at his side. He took over the helm of their shopping cart as they wandered on down the aisle. He didn’t look at Kate again once his wife arrived. That alone solved the mystery.

  “Since there is only a camera at either end,” Jack finally went on, having also noticed the man, “that means that at their oblique angle they can’t see what’s on the screens of the computers in the center where we are. They won’t be able to see what I’m going to show you.”

  “That’s why you wanted to use an electronics store?”

  Jack nodded. “Unlike going into a computer lab at a university, we fit in here with other shoppers. Unlike a computer lab or an internet café, the cameras aren’t watching as closely and aren’t able to see what we’re doing or what’s on the computer screen. There is also considerably less supervision. Most important, we won’t require a credential to access the internet and every one of these machines auto-erases itself back to a clean demo mode on restart.”

  “I see what you mean,” Kate said. “So what do you want to show me?”

  Jack looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Do you remember when you were little, and you were afraid to go down in the basement because you thought there might be monsters hiding down there?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  Jack had his left hand near the side of a computer. He turned it up a little to let her see the thumb drive resting in his palm.

  “This is the key to the basement door. I’m going to take you down there so you can see where the bogeymen live.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  Jack covered the thumb drive from view with his hand as he plugged it into the USB port on the side of the laptop.

  “The internet that people know,” he said, “the internet they use a search engine to navigate, the websites, social media, the places they go to buy shoes, to listen to music, to watch videos, to pay bills, to do their banking, is only a very small portion of the web. There is probably a hundred times as much material that can’t typically be accessed because it’s blocked from search engines. That hidden part of the web contains databases, archives, medical records, scientific reports, government resources, and password-protected company websites that use nonstandard protocols and ports. That’s the deep web.”

  “That’s where the bogeymen live?”

  “No. Where we’re going is the vast layer beneath that. It’s even more obscure. It’s called the darknet.” Jack casually glanced both ways. “Stand closer to me to block the screen so if anyone walks by they can’t really see it.”

  Kate moved shoulder-to-shoulder with him, watching as he restarted the computer. When it came back on, it loaded a black screen that looked outdated.

  “Why are you restarting from your thumb drive?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to use this computer’s operating system for where we need to go. To prevent kids from installing remote administration tools on these computers, this store might be using monitoring software that could follow a glowing trail of bread crumbs from what we’re doing.

  “We need to stay anonymous,” Jack said. “So instead of using this computer’s operating system, I’m running it on an operating system called Tails.”

  She was momentarily tempted to think he was joking, as if he didn’t want to be tailed, but she remembered all the strange acronyms Brian in the computer department at KDEX used.

  “What’s Tails? I never heard of it.”

  “Not important, but if you really want to know, it stands for The Amnesic Incognito Live System.”

  “Seriously? Amnesic? You mean it forgets where it’s been?”

  Jack flashed her a quick smile. “And incognito; concealed identity. Plug in the USB, restart, and the computer is being run from the Tails operating system rather than the system installed on the computer. Tails doesn’t store data locally. Once I pull out the thumb drive there is nothing left behind to find.

  “To get into the darknet you need to run Tor, which I also have on this thumb drive. Tor stands for The Onion Router,” he said before she could ask as he opened the browser. “Unlike the places you’re used to going that end in dot com, most of the addresses in the darknet end in dot onion. You need to use the Tor browser to access those addresses. Hence the reason the darknet is sometimes called Onionland.”

  Kate pressed her fingers to her forehead. “I’m getting a headache from this stuff.”

  “I’m not trying to give you a headache, but it’s important for your longevity that you begin to understand how some of these super-predators operate in order to help you understand the extent of the nesting phenomenon.”

  “Nesting phenomenon?”

  “Yes,” he said without explaining. “Some of the most dangerous people hunting you want anonymity, too, so they are hiding in the darknet. If you want to stay alive, you need to know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.”

  Kate gestured at the screen. “You mean they do all this?”

  “The smart ones do. And it’s the smart ones who are the most dangerous.”

  “So bad guys developed the darknet as a way to hide?”

  “Actually, it was developed by the US Navy
, primarily for ultra-secure communications.”

  “So it’s more secure than the regular internet?”

  “As far as anonymity, yes. Instead of data going directly through known, traceable points, the darknet uses layers of relays, like the layers of an onion. Each node only knows the identity of the next relay—not the point of origin or the destination—and those handoffs among relays are in constant flux as they’re bounced all around the globe.

  “In addition, each hop is encrypted. No one can track you down, no one can find out who you are, no one knows where you’ve been, and no one knows what you are doing. You are anonymous and what you do on the darknet is unknown, unless you disclose any of that information either deliberately or unintentionally.

  “The darknet was eventually released into the public domain to enable people in countries with repressive regimes to communicate and remain anonymous. Were those governments to discover who these dissidents were, they would be thrown in prison or executed.”

  “Well, that all sounds like a pretty good thing, then.”

  Jack cast her a look. “That side of it is, but when no one can be identified or traced, it also becomes a perfectly secure place to conduct illegal activity.

  “In the darknet criminals are anonymous. Law enforcement doesn’t know who they are or what they’re doing. Search engines work by using spiders—algorithms that crawl through web servers and follow every link down every possible avenue of the web. The structure of the darknet makes that impossible, so there are no search engines down here. Tor simply gives you a connection into this underworld—a stairway down into the darkness.”

  “Then how do you find anything?”

  “It’s not easy. Webpages there are alphanumeric, so you can’t look for sites based on their names. In a lot of cases you need to know the specific address of where you want to go. There are also a few popular directories and star reviews of sites that sell illegal items, like drugs. They provide links with headings like ‘Good source for drugs here’ and ‘A-plus forged documents.’ They read like a terrorist’s private phone book.”