Darknet
Authors: John R. Little
By
John R. Little
JournalStone
San Francisco
Copyright © 2014 by John R. Little
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
ISBN:
978-1-940161-76-1
(sc)
ISBN:
978-1-940161-77-8
(ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number:
2014953321
Printed in the United States of America
JournalStone rev. date: November 21, 2014
Cover Art, Layout and Design: Cyrus Wraith Walker
Edited by: Aaron J. French
To my brother, Gary Little,
who has been a wonderful supporter of my writing and every other part of my life for as long as I remember.
Thanks, man.
I’ve always appreciated your help, more than you will ever know.
Thanks to both Dave Solow and Tod Clark for pointing out some of my errors, and to Gary Feierabend, who provided me with one of the best ideas that found its way into the plot.
“
Darknet
a killer! John R. Little takes no prisoners as he explores the genuine horrors of abuse, and what a woman will risk to protect herself and her child. Creepy and incredibly powerful.” – Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of
Code Zero
and
Fall of Night
"With
DarkNet,
John R. Little takes readers on a wild ride through the seediest parts of the human condition, from abusive spouses and the women who thrive on their abuse to murderers, thieves, and degenerates. The common bond between them all is DarkNet, the web's equivalent of the underworld, where anything is available.
DarkNet
moves at high speed from one crisis to the next, never giving the reader time to catch a breath." – JG Faherty, author of multiple award-nominated novels, including his latest,
The Burning Time.
"John R. Little's
Darknet
is a frighteningly believable trip down a very realistic rabbit hole. No one excels at taking ordinary men and women through the crucible of extraordinary experience like John R. Little, and his powers are on full display in this hard-hitting, tech-savvy tale of revenge and the search for inner strength and redemption. I loved this book!" – Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of
Dead City
and
Plague of the Undead
Several years ago, on October 1, 2013, the face of the Internet changed forever.
Indirectly, part of the change was inspired by a wonder-filled fantasy novel by William Goldman called
The Princess Bride,
which later became a Hollywood movie of the same name. In the story, the bad guy is a buccaneer called Dread Pirate Roberts. Roberts was feared around the globe, and as a result, whenever he announced he was going to attack a ship with his men, the sailors on the opposing ship always gave up immediately. They knew that any other choice was certain death, so Roberts ruled by reputation alone, never having to do a damned thing.
The story inspired a geeky physics major named Ross William Ulbricht to set up a storefront on DarkNet using the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. His store, Silk Road, turned into the biggest illegal shopping market yet seen on the dark side of the Internet. Ulbricht’s store eared more than $1.2 billion over a few short years.
He thought of himself as simply providing a service, connecting buyers and sellers, free to deal in whatever goods the free market was demanding. He had no qualms about selling illegal and dangerous merchandise, and since DarkNet was completely anonymous, there was little the authorities could do—although they knew exactly what was going on, there was no way to stop it.
But Ulbricht made mistakes, the biggest of which was to use his own name when posting on public websites. He was promoting Silk Road, and whenever he did that, a little ping clicked over at the FBI. Eventually, his electronic footprints led the police to a small branch of the San Francisco public library. Ulbricht was chatting online about Silk Road in the science fiction section of the library when a dozen armed FBI agents burst in and marched him up to the large glass windows. The feds had found Dread Pirate Roberts, and they shut down Silk Road that day.
In addition to being charged with running illegal drugs, he was charged with soliciting two contract murders on DarkNet. He hired the first killer for $80,000. The second time, he wanted to torture and kill one of his own employees, but when he negotiated the fee of $150,000, he was actually discussing the sordid business with an undercover FBI agent. The former employee was “tortured” on video and the full price of the hit was paid prior to Ulbricht’s arrest.
The dark side of the Internet was not pleased with one of its biggest businesses shot to hell. But, thousands of years ago, Aristotle may have said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” In business terms, if there’s a demand, there will be a market. The Silk Road may have been destroyed but that only gave rise to a hundred imitators, all of which were more cautious, having learned lessons from the careless pirate.
The golden age of DarkNet began, and there was never any looking back.
* * *
The following discussion between two people on a message board was captured shortly after 3:00 a.m. on an otherwise uninspiring and dull early June morning. Both parties were wide awake, and both lived in the same time zone.
One of the participants knew that the exchange would be logged on some anonymous server in the cloud, possibly ending up being stored in Texas, China, Singapore, or some other isolated part of the world. He didn’t care, because he was careful about what he said. He had to be, because understanding security (or lack of it) on the Internet was the basis of his business.
He was taking a tiny chance by talking over an unsecured line, but at least he’d initiated a private discussion, so anybody else checking the message board would see nothing. He knew nobody could monitor his own traffic because of the several layers of encryption he used, and it was unlikely anybody cared about his new partner.
The person he was chatting with was mostly clueless. He had targeted her for this conversation.
* * *
I know what you want.
Do you? What do you think I want?
I’ve been reading your posts. I see how unhappy you are. I see that you’re married to somebody you despise. I see that you want your freedom.
Lots of people want their freedom.
I can give it to you.
[At this point, the second person didn’t reply for almost five minutes, but neither was the chat session terminated.]
How?
This isn’t the place to talk about it. This is totally unsecured. Anybody could be listening or track this conversation later.
Really?
Really. You have no secrets on the Internet. None at all. If I cared, I could sniff out everything you type. Every single word, every one of your Facebook posts, tweets, message board posts, e-mails, and even random clicks. I can find it all. So could anybody else who wanted to and who has a bit of technical aptitude. Everything you type is sent over the ether and you think it’s safe, but it’s not. So don’t say anything else.
I want you to download some software. It’s called Tor. You’ll find it easy enough on Google. Go download it and play with it. Check out everything and get comfortable with it. This is a gateway into the deep Internet, the part that Google doesn’t want to show you. Then, go find a meeting place called Assassins Inc. Be there at 4:00 a.m. on June 20. I’ll find you then.
[Session Terminated]
Opening Gambit
July 2
7:00 p.m. The red light above the entrance to the broadcast booth flicked off.
“And we’re done!”
Cindy McKay smiled and removed her headphones. She’d been looking forward to the end of the show today. Not that she didn’t love her radio show, because she did, but it wasn’t often she had a chance to go out for an evening with her best friend.
On the other side of the glass partition, her producer, Ryan Hustings, gave her a thumbs-up and took off his own headphones. He would still be busy for another ten minutes wrapping up loose ends, but she was free to go when she wanted.
