Darknet (5 page)

Where were you?

Who were you with?

Why are they more important than your daughter?

Just what have you been up to, Tony?

She refused to cry. What was the point? Crying never helped her before.

What she really wanted to do was to tell somebody what he was really like. Nobody knew. She’d never even told Maria the complete truth, and if she couldn’t tell her, she couldn’t tell anyone. Even Avril never really saw things that Tony didn’t want her to.

She felt more alone than she’d ever felt before.

Soon, she heard Tony’s breathing change and recognized the sound of him sleeping.

Closing her eyes didn’t help. She didn’t feel the slightest bit tired. Part of her wondered how long she’d actually been asleep outside, but the math seemed too hard to work out. Her brain was only focused on how much she hated her life.

Finally, she gave up and crept out of bed. She walked to her office, clicked her laptop on, and found her way back to the deep web. DarkNet was calling to her.

It somehow seemed appropriate. The house was dark, with no lights on except the laptop screen. Dark, secretive, quiet.

“Where are you, my little secret . . .”

Cindy clicked her way easily through her Tor software into the secretive side of the wired world where nobody could see what she was doing, and anything was available.

Anything.

She’d thought about DarkNet a lot over the past couple of days. How could she not? It was right there, all the frontier-style things that anybody could do. She found The Silkier Road and entered . . .

The original Silk Road was one of the best known places on DarkNet. It was the world’s most explicit black market drug emporium. One of its spiritual children, Silkier Road, was even wilder. She stared and couldn’t believe she could just click on anything she wanted and buy it . . .

Cindy wasn’t a prude. When she was a teenager, she’d experimented with marijuana, mostly at parties, and she’d tried a bit of hash one time. She knew some people who had access to harder drugs, but they hadn’t interested her. In front of her was a long list of drugs that she could buy with just a few clicks.

Ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, LSD, and a hundred other drugs that she didn’t even recognize the names of. It was like browsing at amazon.com. She could add the drugs of her choice to her shopping cart, check out, and arrange delivery to her home. She clicked LSD out of curiosity and found it was 6.92 bitcoins for 50 tabs.

A bitcoin was the currency of the DarkNet. She could buy bitcoins legitimately, and then use them for whatever she liked, completely untraceable, like everything else in the dark web. One bitcoin was worth about $120 today, so the 50 tabs of LSD would cost her about $840, or a shade less than $17 each. She wondered how that would compare to walking down the back alleys of Seattle.

She tired of looking at drugs quickly enough and clicked over to a different site. This one sold services: if you wanted something stolen, you could hire this company to do the work. The service listed about 100 chain stores that they were happy to steal from and even offered you proof of theft (in the form of a photograph of your item) before you had to pay.

“Don’t really need anything stolen,” she whispered.

There was a creak somewhere in the house, and she froze, wondering if Tony had woken up and was coming to find her.

Not bloody likely
, she knew. He didn’t care enough about her to find her.

She wandered deeper into DarkNet.

Arms dealers willing to sell you any kind of gun you wanted, along with an ongoing supply of ammunition. AK-47s were a popular item.

Pornography of every stripe, every age, every kink. She didn’t bother going into those sites, since she didn’t expect there’d be much there she hadn’t seen somewhere else along the line.

Then there were the identity fraudsters. They would provide you with a new passport along with all the other government-issued ID you might need. All you needed to do was send in your photo and they’d take care of everything else for a mere 20 bitcoins. You could be a new person almost overnight with a history created out of thin air just for you.

Along the same lines, you could buy 100 valid Visa or MasterCard numbers. Each group cost only 20 bitcoins. They came with a guarantee that they were legitimate and that you could use each one for an average of three days before they were shut down.

There were lots of areas for doing things anonymously. Cindy could have rented a house or a car without anybody knowing her real name, opened a post office box or a bank account. There wasn’t much security a few bitcoins couldn’t buy. The same site could track the exact location of a lost cell phone.

Elsewhere she could find out what sporting events were fixed and bet on the winners.

She could scare the crap out of somebody by sending a SWAT team to their house in the middle of the night.

Cindy giggled at that one. It sounded more like an April Fool’s joke than a serious threat, but she knew if it’d happened to her it would be scary enough.

She hesitated and then clicked on Organ Associates.

It was a site dealing in harvesting human organs. The site was as professionally created as all the others, so there was no hint of bad grammar that might help identify where in the world this was located. The promises on the site just said they’d deliver any organ that was needed within 24 hours.

They also had a network of doctors who would implant the organs to a needy person.

She looked at the prices for hearts (5,000 bitcoins) and livers (4,000 bitcoins), and she just knew in her gut that the donors were simply murder victims. Organ Associates harvested organs by slaughtering innocent people, probably in China or Vietnam or some other place with few human rights.

How many innocent people have been killed because of this site?

What Cindy struggled with was knowing how easy she had become part of the network. She didn’t think to call the police, because she knew it was useless. They scrutinized these sites all day long and had no way to track them. That was the beauty of Tor; there was absolutely no way to track anything. Or anybody.

Nobody could find out what she was doing.

Cindy’s clicking had slowed down as her mind tried to absorb the evil that hid beneath her fingers.

She almost didn’t go any further, but she wanted to know. She’d skimmed the dark depths of DarkNet a couple of days ago but was so shocked she hadn’t really tried to absorb what she was reading. This time she wanted to understand.

Her happiness could be found here, she knew.

She tried to stop herself from going into the Child Emporium, but her fingers clicked the keys. She had to see it.

There, she found the site that had made her feel so badly earlier. She read the home page and bit her tongue. It was a service offering children for men to fuck. The children would be available only in Thailand, but the customer could request that the child be of any nationality he wished, including American. The ad cheerfully offered to find a blonde blue-eyed girl, “Guaranteed to be a virgin!”

The price? Only 50 bitcoins. Less than $6,000 to rape a teenaged runaway. Pre-teens could be found too, of course, for only an extra 20 bitcoins.

She thought of Avril, sleeping in her bed upstairs. Rather than scaring her, the ad re-enforced that she needed to obtain freedom for both of them. They needed to get away from the life they led before Tony
really
hurt them.

Cindy left the awful site and clicked out to an alleyway. In her mind, the DarkNet was a labyrinth of virtual stores, and she organized it like downtown Seattle, with some main streets and some side alleys. The more obscene the nature of the business, the narrower and darker the alley was.

Cindy found more than a dozen sites set up by hired assassins. One of them was the site mentioned in her online chat a week earlier: Assassins Inc.

For the right price, there were scores of men (she assumed they were all men) who would kill whoever you wanted.

Most of the sites were priced competitively, all offering their services for about $20,000. They didn’t bother using bitcoin amounts, but she knew that’s how they’d want to be paid. Half up front, half when the victim was dead.

Cindy noticed the time on her computer said it was after 4:00 a.m. She yawned and stretched and reluctantly closed out of Tor and shut off her computer.

Avril McKay wasn’t much of a sleeper and tonight was no different than any other night.

A Tuesday night in mid-summer, no school, not many friends who lived nearby, same old tension between her mom and dad. She woke and stared at the ceiling, not even thinking about what time it was. It never really made much of a difference. It was dark, so it wasn’t close to morning. Other than that, she didn’t care a whit what time it was.

As always, she lay awake and just listened to the sounds of the house. She heard the quiet hum of the air conditioner but nothing else.

“Good,” she whispered.

There’d been many times that she’d woken to all kinds of bad sounds coming from her parents’ bedroom. She hated those nights.

Avril never told any of her few friends that her dad was very mean. Nobody would believe her, ’cause he always looked cheerful and happy whenever anybody was around. It was only when she and Mom were alone with him that his face crunched up with anger, and that’s when she truly felt fear.

So far he hadn’t hit her, but sometimes he’d come very close. She could see it in his eyes, the cruel streak staring at her as if she were an evil witch that needed to be destroyed.

Mom always managed to stop him before anything happened, but Avril knew that she usually paid for that later. The bangs and whimpers coming from the master bedroom made her imagine all kinds of terrors. She never asked Mom about it. She never had the courage.

Mom would deny it anyhow.

Even at ten years old, Avril knew things no child should ever know. The biggest thing she knew was to keep it all a secret.

She hopped out of bed and pulled the curtains apart, letting moonlight stream into her room.

There was a two foot by two foot table sitting under the window, with a couple of Avril-sized chairs. She shuffled over to her closet and found her stuffed pink bunny, Juicy. Juicy was huge, almost three feet tall. Dad had won her at some type of game at a carnival when Avril was a baby. Juicy had been her constant friend ever since.

“You’re white,” she said as she settled the rabbit into one of the chairs. “’Cause you won last game.”

Sitting in the middle of the table was a chess set. She set up the white pieces in front of Juicy and placed the plastic black pieces in front of herself.

“What do you want to move?”

Avril stared at Juicy, waiting for her to answer.

“Pawn? Which one! I can’t just guess!”

She reached over and moved Juicy’s king’s pawn ahead two spots.

Avril wiped her eyes with her clenched fists, trying to wake herself up a bit.

She loved the quiet of the middle of the night. It was the best time to play chess and the perfect time to just sit and not fret about anything.

Chess had been her focus in life since she was six years old. She played it every minute she could, and the times she wasn’t playing, she was studying. She could play out dozens of the most famous games ever played from memory. Even though Bobby Fisher died long before she was born, she knew every move he’d made to defeat Boris Spassky to win the World Championship in 1972. She’d studied everyone from Paul Morphy to Garry Kasparov.

Her dad called her fucking nuts. He didn’t say that to her face, of course, but she heard him yell it to Mom one night when he was beating her up. Somehow her chess games made him mad, but she never understood why.

Now she tried to play at night or when he was at work.

“I’m moving my pawn to block you,” she said with delight. “You can’t just have free reign in the center of the board, you know.”

She moved her own king’s pawn up two spots.

Juicy apparently had been expecting that, because Avril followed her own move by immediately moving the bunny’s king’s knight to land two squares in front of her bishop.

Avril didn’t hesitate with her own move, moving her queen’s knight in the same fashion.

“I know what you’re doing,” she said. “The old Ruy Lopez opening.”

Juicy moved her bishop out past the space that had opened up with her first two moves.

“See! I told you!”

Avril stood and looked out the window. After hesitating, she grabbed Juicy and held her up so they could both stare out the window together.

“I know it’s silly to talk to a stuffed animal,” she whispered, “but sometimes it feels like you’re the only friend I’ve got. Only you know the truth.”

She hugged the rabbit tightly as she kept looking outside.