Darknet (12 page)

“Let’s head home.”

“I’ve got my bike.”

“We’ll put it in the trunk. It’s okay.”

“Okay.”

As they walked back to the car, a sudden thought hit Cindy.

“You didn’t have any money. How did you get the ice cream cone?”

“Oh, Johnny bought it for me.”

“Who?”

“Johnny. He’s a nice man. He was watching me play today and then clapped when I won and bought me the ice cream.”

Cindy stopped and kneeled down so she was at the same height as Avril. She wanted to keep her voice calm.

“But who is he? You know you should never talk to strangers.”

“Oh, he’s not a stranger. He likes chess and watched my game. He’s really nice.”

“Is he still here?”

“No. He had to go. I think you know him, Mommy. He said you’d be coming for me soon.”

Cindy looked back at the chess tournament.

“You’re sure you don’t see him? What does he look like?”

Avril shrugged. “Just a man. He wore a red Mariners hat and I don’t think he has much hair.”

“What else?”

She shrugged again. “Just a guy.”

Cindy helped Avril get her bike the rest of the way to the car, looking back every few seconds, but she never saw anybody watching them.

The Starbucks was almost the same as every other one that Cindy had ever visited. It had the usual cast of baristas behind the counter, the mixture of baked goods, and the smell of strong coffee permeating everything. In other circumstances, she had always loved the aroma of the coffee shop, but today she barely noticed.

The man accompanying her was in his sixties. Dr. Rusty Moore wore a pair of old-fashioned brown horned-rim glasses and his sparse hair was slicked back with some type of cream. He reminded Cindy of her father in an uncomfortable way.

She didn’t much care for her dad, and she didn’t want those feelings spilling over to her business today.

The man seemed lost, staring at the bewildering choices of drinks.

“Would you like me to order for you?” she asked.

He just nodded and smiled, grateful for her taking control.

“Two grande dark roast, please.”

As the cashier rung in her order, the man pushed out a ten dollar bill to pay for it. She nodded her thanks and then waited an eternity for the coffees.

She couldn’t find a way to relax, knowing she was about to confess to a total stranger that she’d tried to hire a hit man to kill her husband.

The drinks arrived and they walked to the door. Out on Pike Street, they found Maria Delgado, who’d been waiting patiently. Maria hated coffee and had refused to even go inside with them.

“Devil drinks,” she muttered as they joined up and started walking toward the water. As they walked to Waterfront Park, they chatted about the warm weather, how the Mariners were doing, and what they all had planned for summer vacations.

Soon, though, Cindy couldn’t avoid things any longer. They found a bench to sit on, with the man in the middle of the two women.

“You didn’t invite me here just because of my good looks,” he joked. “I assume this has something to do with my appearance on your show a few weeks back?”

Cindy hesitated. This was her last chance to keep her terrible behavior to herself. She took a sip of her coffee and tried to keep the tears from forming in her eyes.

Maria added, “Cindy? It’s okay. We need his help.”

Cindy nodded.

“Dr. Moore, you told me about how there’s 500 times more information out there on the Internet than Google knows about. The DarkNet.”

He nodded. “I thought this meeting might be something to do with that. Sometimes I think I should keep my big mouth shut. But, that would be censorship of a kind, and I can’t abide with that. What happened?”

He smiled and reminded Cindy more of her grandfather now than her father, which was good. She’d always loved her grandfather.

She started talking, and once the first few words came out of her mouth, it was like a flood. She’d wanted help so badly but had no way to ask.

“I used that software you told me about, Tor, and I found so many things. It’s been awful and wonderful and terrible and I found somebody who would help me. I needed to believe somehow I could escape, could finally get away from my husband, Tony. I needed my daughter, Avril, and me to be away from him. But, the only way to really do that was to have somebody kill him, and I found this guy who would do it, but now he’s blackmailing me and has been threatening my little girl.”

Then the tears started streaming down her face, and she choked giant sobs as Maria hugged her.

The man didn’t move, just waited while Maria comforted her friend. It took several minutes for Cindy to calm down enough to face him.

“I don’t know what to do.”

He nodded and patted her hand.

“Let’s start with the basics. How do you know it’s a man?”

“What?”

“You said ‘he’ is blackmailing you. How do you know it’s a he?”

“He was at a chess tournament my daughter was at. He talked to her and bought her an ice cream.”

“And you’re sure that was him?”

“Of
course
it was fucking him! He e-mailed me about it.”

The man nodded.

“Tell me again, from the beginning. Everything. Your story was a bit confusing, and I need to know what you really have gotten yourself into.”

Cindy did. She talked about how she’d gotten connected to the Manipulator and their chats together, how he’d found out who she was by pattern recognition software, and how he was demanding the $250,000 now.

“It’s an unusual case,” he said. “When you first contacted him, he might have known you were in the U.S., but you could have been pretty much anywhere. How did he know you were in Seattle? That’s a big question, but let’s set that aside for a moment. He likely moved here, which wouldn’t make sense for the initial $25,000, so he planned all along to raise the stakes. It’d be worth his while to come here for a quarter of a million.”

Maria asked, “What can she do to stop him?”

The man shook his head. “I think it’s too late for that.”

“What?” Cindy whispered. “What do you mean?”

“What choice do you really have? You either pay him the money or you call the police. If you pay the money, he’ll just demand more after that. You can’t get rid of a rabid bulldog attached to your leg, unless you have a rifle. I doubt you want to go to the police, unfortunately.”

“What are you saying?”

“Evil people live and work on the dark side of the Internet. Some of them have done so many terrible things, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s where truly wicked people now do their business. The only suggestion I have is to pay him and hope he actually leaves you alone.”

“I don’t have that much money!”

The man nodded. “I was afraid you’d say that. In that case, I suggest you run. Take your little girl and hide somewhere that he can never find you. South America or Japan or Austria. Just go and don’t tell a soul where you’re going.”

Cindy stared at him and once again tears started to drop from her eyes.

* * *

Assassins Inc.

The Manipulator loved the name of his company. It sounded so professional . . . in more than one sense. He was logged into his website and loved the way his logo hung at the top of the page: a knife dripping blood. Not that he’d ever actually used a knife. His weapon of choice was a Colt 911A1 .45 caliber semi-automatic handgun. He’d had years of practice and now he never missed his target. He liked the power but the relative silence.

The knife on the computer, though, was more visceral. It looked savage and personal—perfect to get the attention of potential clients.

His chat room was open, but he was ignoring it. He knew that Cindy McKay was there, not typing anything, but rather trying to find if there was any way to locate their previous correspondences.

He chuckled and minimized the screen, opening up a new screen that showed the view from Cindy’s webcam, which was squarely placed in the center top of her laptop.

“You’re so fucking stupid,” he said to her image. He chugged a bottle of beer and watched the screen. Cindy was there with her friend, Maria.

It wasn’t long after they’d first connected that he’d started spying in her home. She was naïve enough to let him infect her computer, and that was enough to give him control of both her webcam and the audio controls. She hadn’t noticed that although she’d always kept the microphone volume on mute, it was now on the fourth setting. She was so stressed these days, she wouldn’t notice things like that.

He listened in for a moment.

“I wish I’d taken screen shots,” Cindy said. She pushed out a long breath of frustration and used both her hands to slide her hair back.

“Would it matter? You can’t really go to the police or anything. Right?”

“Maybe I could find some way to identify him, though. Some slip-up he might have made.”

The Manipulator laughed. “Good luck with that.”

He glanced over Cindy’s shoulder, his mouth pursed in dissatisfaction. She shouldn’t have dragged anybody else into this, and he was trying to decide whether to let her know that he knew.

Not that it made any difference in the long run. He took another sip of his beer and closed his browser. The basement was calling to him.

It had taken him a long time to even notice the basement existed. He’d anticipated creating his work room at one end of the barn. That would have been fine, because he was a million miles from civilization, but a cellar was better.

The old farmer who owned the place must have been one of those loonies who feared nuclear destruction during the middle of the last century. The cellar had a trap door that raised up from the floor. If you didn’t know what it was, it just looked like a section of the barn floor. Over the years, though, the metal supports underneath the wooden covering had stayed strong while the rest of the floor sagged just about everywhere. The solid section had gotten his attention and he laughed when he found it had a handle to pull it up.

“Perfect,” he’d said, even before going down.

There was a set of creaky stairs that led him to the basement. He half-expected to find a thousand cans of tuna and lima beans, but the place was empty. It was just a vacant shell buried below ground.

The lights still worked. There were no rats or other critters, and the Manipulator had brought in all the equipment he needed over the past couple of weeks. Chains, a small cot, a jug to hold water, some scalpels, and rags to clean up when he would need it.

And of course, a beautiful video camera that was already linked up to stream to his website.

He was all ready for Avril to visit.

1989 was the year of Ken Griffey, Jr. The rookie centerfielder seemed to turn the entire population of Seattle into baseball fans overnight. Even people who’d never bothered to watch a single game suddenly needed to know whatever Junior had done the night before.

Griffey played in 127 games that year, hit an unremarkable .264 and collected 16 home runs. It wasn’t the record that was the show; it was The Kid himself. He was 19 and oozed charisma.

Junior would go on to set a team record 56 four-baggers twice, and as far as most sports fans in the Pacific Northwest were concerned, Ken Griffey, Jr.
was
baseball.

Also in 1989, Tony McKay was 13 years old. He was lost in the imagination that swirled around Junior as much as anybody and for that one beautiful hot summer, Tony suddenly knew his future. He was going to be a famous baseball player, just like his hero.

Tony watched every Mariners game that year, watched how Griffey took his stance, how much he choked the bat, the wonderfully graceful swing . . . every aspect of Griffey’s game imprinted itself onto Tony’s brain. He knew he was going to follow in the footsteps of The Kid.

His mind knew what to do. He knew how to watch the clues from the pitcher to know whether to expect a fastball or a curve, how to spot the seams as the ball raced toward him, when exactly to commit, and when to back off.

Yes, his mind knew all the tricks. It was his body that failed him.

He played right field on a peewee team, along with all the other leftovers that couldn’t make a serious league. At first he shrugged it off.

“They’ll regret not having me,” he told himself.

After three weeks of striking out more often than connecting with the ball, let alone getting on base, he found himself riding the pine. Joey Calone, the weird Italian kid from down the street, took his place in right field.

Tony wanted him dead. He glared at Joey and imagined tripping him as he hopped out of the dugout, his head smashing on the concrete steps.

Sometimes, if the game was no longer in question, the coach would let Tony play the last couple of innings. He continued his streak of strikeouts, getting more frustrated with each at bat.

On the last game of the season, Tony’s team was losing 8-0 in the seventh. The coach was a fat old man whose stomach sometimes peeked out from below the shirt of his uniform. He muttered about the season finally being over and thumbed at Tony to hit the field for the eighth.

Tony jogged over to his position in right field and didn’t have to move a muscle the entire inning. The first guy walked, the second popped out to third, and the last batter grounded into a rare double-play. Tony frowned and headed back to the dugout.

“Hey, kid, you’re up.”

Tony hadn’t been paying attention to the batting order and blinked in surprise. He hadn’t batted for two weeks.