Hideout Jack Heath (reading the story of the .TXT) 📖

‘Nah.’ Cedric sits down next to me. ‘Netflix does the same thing, kind of.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure. They load their most popular shows on to hard drives and mail them to ISPs around the world. So you think you’re streaming the show from the other side of the country, but actually the data is coming from your own city. It’s cheaper and more reliable. We’ve just taken it one step further. Look, we have a few layers of protection from the FBI.’ Cedric swivels around in his chair and starts counting on his fingers. ‘One: using encrypted flash drives helps us conceal just how much traffic there is, and makes this place seem like a normal farmhouse, with hardly any data uploaded via satellite. Two: our customers are less likely to sell us out, because we know where they live. Three: crimes committed via mail are technically the purview of the US Postal Inspection Service, who have less power than the FBI. And four: the users think all our victims are in other countries, so even if one of them informed on us—’

‘Don’t the users notice that the prisoners all have American accents?’

Cedric smirks. ‘You’d think, right? But no, it’s never come up. We do a bit of sound editing before we mail out the recordings, but that’s mostly just getting rid of noise from the other sets.’ He glances at a large plastic clock on the wall. ‘Come on, we have to get through these.’

Now that I understand, the questions in the support tickets are easy to answer. I can mostly just copy/paste from the website and hit send.

After doing this for a while, I realise that I’m running customer support for a dark web torture site. This could be the worst thing I’ve ever done, in a life not short of bad things. But it feels normal—boring, even. Read, copy, paste, click. Read, copy, paste, click. It doesn’t seem like a crime.

I pause. ‘Are you worried about the guy out there?’

‘The underground guy?’

I don’t know why Cedric would be refer to him that way. ‘The one sneaking around the house last night. The hiker.’

‘Oh. No,’ Cedric says. ‘Are you?’

‘A little.’ I gesture at the screen. ‘You have hundreds of customers. Thousands, even. They can’t all keep their mouths shut forever. And if the cops ever worked out what was on those flash drives, they wouldn’t need to decrypt it. They could plant microdots on them and track them here.’

‘Customers only receive flash drives, they don’t send them. The drives can’t be tracked back to us.’

‘The police wouldn’t do it that way,’ I say. ‘They’d start at the other end—put the dots on the flash drives as they roll off the assembly line. Then they’d order some videos from you guys. When a flash drive showed up with microdots on it, they’d be able to map out its whole journey, from the factory to them—via here.’

To me, this seems unlikely. It would be a huge operation. But the idea is making Cedric nervous, which is what I want.

‘They couldn’t dispatch a whole squad to every point on the journey,’ I continue. ‘They’d send one or two guys in the middle of the night to check out anywhere the flash drive stopped for more than an hour. Don’t you think the hiker could have been one of those?’

Cedric looks twitchy now. ‘No. Relax.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I gotta go to the bathroom. You’ll be okay here?’

I nod. ‘Sure. I hope I haven’t worried you?’

He forces a laugh. ‘Of course not. Be right back.’

Addicts like him—and me—follow a predictable pattern. They’re anxious, so they take drugs. While they’re high, their lives deteriorate. Whatever the initial problem was, it’s now too big to solve. This makes them even more anxious when the drugs wear off, so they take more. To push an addict off the wagon, just worry him about something.

I wait a few seconds in case Cedric is coming back. Maybe he forgot to take his stash to the bathroom. No—his footsteps recede, and the bathroom door closes and doesn’t open again.

I turn back to the computer and type Lux’s name into a search engine. Several news stories come up.

TEACHING ASSISTANT SUSPECTED OF RAPE

POLICE MANHUNT FOR TEXAS TEACHER

CAPTIVE FOR MONTHS: ABBEY’S TERRIFYING ORDEAL

I click on an article. It loads slowly, data trickling down from the satellite. Alongside the text there’s a picture of Lux, looking handsome, serious and nothing at all like me.

I’m not on social media. I don’t have a website. But there is a single photo of me on the internet. A bomb was found under a car, and the FBI closed off the street. A journalist snapped a picture of me standing behind the police tape in the rain, wearing a second-hand leather jacket and muddy jeans, half-turned away from the camera.

Most web browsers have a developer mode. You can go in and change the code so the site looks different. No one but you will be able to see it, but in this case, that’s all I need.

I switch on developer mode and type the URL of the photo into the article about Lux. Cropping it with code is fiddly, but I manage. Soon the police tape is gone.

Cedric’s footsteps are coming back. I leave the resulting franken-site on the screen, stand up and grab his book off the shelf just as he opens the door.

His pupils are tiny. He looks so relaxed he might forget to breathe. Paramedics call that ‘respiratory depression’.

‘You okay?’ he asks.

‘Yeah.’ I hold up the book, open to a random page. ‘I was just checking out your book.’

‘Ah.’ He beams. ‘I was so young. There was so much I didn’t …’ He trails off.

‘This one’s my favourite.’ I point to the page.

He peers at it. ‘Ah! “Mesopotamia”.