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 When it came back on, it loaded a black screen that looked outdated.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.”

“If it’s so secret, then why couldn’t we just have used my computer?” She glanced around. “Then we wouldn’t need to be sneaking around doing it here.”

“Because if it’s illegal you can buy it there. You can buy everything from young girls to uranium. You can hire a hit. You can buy and sell everything from counterfeit driver’s licenses and passports to security passes for nuclear sites.

“Anonymity makes it a thriving underworld of illegal activity. More and more it’s becoming a meeting place for hackers to join forces. It’s the originating source of sophisticated hacking attacks against everything from banks to military installations to infrastructure to insulin pumps.”

“And KDEX, the place where I work,” Kate said. “We’re under continual attack from hackers.”

Jack nodded as he glanced around. “The thing is, because there is so much illegal activity taking place on the darknet, the government and law enforcement agencies obviously want to know who is using it and why.

“All of this makes the activity on the darknet a national-security threat. Tor is considered a major tool of subversive, criminal, and terrorist activity, so the NSA has packet collection and inspection systems at every level of the regular internet. Simply using a normal search engine to look up information about the darknet, or using keywords in emails or texts, triggers tripwires at the NSA and they grab all of the data associated with you. They grab everything—mobile phone GPS tracking data, your cloud data, your travel, instant messages, emails, photos, the content of social media. All of it. Programs sift through that massive volume of material to come up with a threat analysis based on your patterns of activity.

“From that they generate a smaller list of suspicious activity for more focused investigation. Auditors review all of that material, including listening to recordings of all your phone calls, reviewing your text messages, and reading all your emails. If they find evidence of any kind of criminal activity they share it with other agencies—DEA, ATF, police departments.

“You don’t want to get caught up in that net.

“A lot of very bad players also want to know who is using the darknet. Beyond the ability to scam people out of their money—say, people wanting to buy illegal guns—imagine the blackmail potential.”

Kate lifted her hands in frustration. “So then it’s not so safe.”

“Well, the problem is, by using your own computer, they know who you are and they know that you’re going on the darknet, but they don’t know where you go or what you do there.”

Kate ran her fingers back into her hair. “This is so confusing. They know you’re going there, but yet they don’t?”

“I know that it’s a lot to take in all at once, but for a start I need to you understand the big picture.”

“I’m trying,” she muttered.

“Think of it this way. Imagine that there is a really big office building. That’s the darknet. In that building you could go to a room to conduct top-secret government business; or into a room to have a political discussion with dissidents about overthrowing the government of Iran; or a chat room on racist topics; or a room to launder money; or a room to buy child porn; or a room to buy drugs, or guns, or to hire an assassin.

“The government wants very much to know about those illegal activities going on in some of those rooms, but they can’t see where you went in that building and they don’t know who’s running the rooms. What their packet-collection software does do is to act kind of like an FBI stakeout sitting in a car across the street, watching the building with binoculars.”

“What good does that do?”

“It sends up a red flag. They knew you went in there. Is it a threat to national security? Knowing when you go onto the darknet—those FBI agents on stakeout watching you go into the building—becomes one element in the three-dimensional software that I mentioned before used to analyze everything electronic in your life.”

Kate took a quick look around. “So they would know that you’re logged in here, going onto the darknet right now?”

“Yes, but because of the kind of operating system and software I’m using, and the fact that I’m using that software on a machine in a store, not my own computer, it makes determining who we are extremely difficult. We’re adding layer upon layer to hide ourselves from their tracking systems. It would be unprecedented investigative work and gobs of resources just to determine that it’s Jack Raines standing here in this store going onto the darknet. And they still wouldn’t know what we’re doing.

“Not even recordings on the store’s cameras will tell them anything other than that two rather fuzzy figures were looking at computers on sale. When we leave, the computers will still be sitting here. As soon as I pull out this thumb drive, everything is gone off of it. If they followed us and came in here and went through this computer, there would be nothing on it to find. Some stores use desktop auditing software that captures screen images of what customers are doing, but we would have to be running the computer’s regular operating system. Because we booted into this thumb drive, using Tails, those tools aren’t running.”

“Jeez, Jack, you are one sneaky character.”

“That’s why I’m still alive. You need to understand that government agencies that would be tracking you would be doing so to try to protect national security, and while that’s all well and good and you’re not actually doing anything wrong, law enforcement agencies don’t know that and wouldn’t understand your ability. It might as well be voodoo. They wouldn’t want to believe you, so they wouldn’t try. They would think you were only making up excuses to hide something dangerous.”

“What is there for them not to believe?”

“Well, for instance that you and I killed two men last night in self-defense. Yes, we might be able to prove it, but how many years would that take? We would have to prove your ability, prove everything that’s happening, get everyone to believe that there is an entire hidden layer of super-predators hunting people like you. Do you think they would believe that? Why would they want to? There are plenty of officials and prosecutors who are only interested in a conviction. You could easily become an innocent person sent to prison for murder.”

“Oh,” she said with sudden realization.

“Modern forensics are incredibly good. Your safety depends on making sure no one has any reason to look at you in the first place. Getting on the radar of any agency or police force would only result in your life becoming tangled in all kinds of complications. They can turn your life into a living hell.

“Cops are the good guys—just look at AJ. But even AJ was smart enough not to tell her department about what she was doing with John, or what she knew about you. She was protecting you. She had very sound reasons for doing that.”

“I think I’m starting to see what you mean.”

“Good, because if for some reason you get on the radar of law enforcement, or are connected to anything from last night or what we’re doing right now, while you’re being questioned, interviewed, hiring lawyers, trying to get yourself out on bond, and having everything in your life turned upside down and picked apart, the predators who don’t follow the rules will be hunting you from the shadows, waiting to catch you.

“In the darknet, digital information about everyone is a commodity. All law enforcement agencies have already been hacked and all of their data is for sale, here on the darknet, for these super-predators to buy.

“Your digital life is naked here, in the darknet.”

“That’s a pretty scary thought,” she said.

“It is,” he said. “But that’s today’s reality. It’s worse for you because you are not like ordinary people. Your safety depends on you staying as invisible as possible—including from the police—in order to stay invisible to those hunting you.

“I realize that you didn’t bring this on yourself, but that doesn’t matter. There is only living or dying. Those hunting you don’t follow civilized rules. To survive, you are going to have to avoid a lot of the rules you’ve lived by up until now. You need to learn how to stay alive. That’s all that matters.

“There are no rules for you from now on except not to harm innocent people and to stay alive yourself.”

Kate ran the fingers of both hands back into her hair. “My god, Jack, I don’t know how I can live like that.”

He put a reassuring hand on the back of her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Kate. This is what I meant about the people I find not wanting to believe me. They can’t accept the truth. They can’t deal with it.

“There are only so many people I can help, so I have to focus my efforts on those who are willing to face reality. It’s not easy, and it may not be right, or fair, but it’s the only way I know of that you are going to be able to stay alive.

“I needed you to understand how this darknet underworld functions so that you can use it as a tool to help you stay alive. The advantage is that the bad guys don’t know that I found their room in that building. They don’t know that we can watch them.”

“The hunters become the hunted?”

“That’s part of how you stay alive. You have to become the huntress.”

Kate regarded him for a moment with a sidelong look. “You mean I’m going to have to kill them before they can kill me.”

Jack shrugged. “You may have to. You need to know how this works so that you have an advantage.

“I’ll eventually give you a thumb drive like this one so that one day when I’m no longer around you can do this on your own to find out what they know. It won’t tell you everything, of course, because only some of them know about this site. By nature they tend to be loners, but it will still be a useful tool. Maybe it could even help you to find others like yourself so you can help each other.”

Kate suddenly felt a flush of panic at the thought of Jack not being there to help her in this alien world she found herself in. The thought made her feel vulnerable and alone in defending herself against things she couldn’t yet understand and or even imagine. How was she going to defend herself against these predators by herself? How was she going to be able to live her life and stay one step ahead of unseen killers who were out there hunting her?

But Kate couldn’t help thinking, too, about all those reviews saying Jack Raines was a fraud.

Was she getting caught up in what were elaborate delusions? Was this all just Jack’s crazy paranoia, him imagining conspiracies where there were none? Or even seeing things just because he wanted to be in a cloak-and-dagger world? Was the night before simply a series of weird, chance events that were only sucking her deeper into his grand illusions?

Some of it was obviously true, but was she being gullible to believe all the things he was saying?

A lot of the professionals who had posted reviews of his book had cautioned against falling for his phony “expertise,” saying that he didn’t really know what he was talking about. They said that he gave the real experts a bad name.

But on the other hand she desperately wanted to believe him, not because she wanted it all to be real, because she didn’t, but because she wanted Jack to be real. She had never met anyone like him, and she wanted more than anything for him to be everything he seemed to be, everything she wanted to believe a man could be.

Kate took another deep breath. “So what are we doing in Onionland? What’s hiding down in the basement? What is it, exactly, that you want me to know?”

“It was a lot of trouble to find this place,” Jack said.

Kate caught the look in his eyes. “Are you saying that you killed people for this information?”

He lowered his voice as he leaned down a little closer. “I’m trying to keep innocent people like you alive.”

She got the point.

“So what’s this place you found?” Kate finally asked, suddenly hesitant about what he was going to show her.

Jack typed in a web address. It was alphanumeric, rather than a name.

“Do you have a good memory?”

“Pretty good,” she said. “I’m good with facts and figures. It’s part of why I’m effective at my job.”

“Then memorize the address I just typed in.”

Finally, after a long delay as the request skipped from relay to relay all around the globe, a black page with white lettering came up.

It said Welcome to SCAVENGER HUNT.