Dark Web (DARC Ops Book 2) (9 page)

The hackers laughed politely, optimistically. Then they exchanged a quick greeting with Tansy before turning back to their screens. Even as hackers go, they weren’t exactly a sociable bunch, which was just fine with Tansy. He was far too tired for any more speeches.

“We keep everyone pretty busy here,” said Jackson, as if reading Tansy’s mind. “For their benefit. The sooner we can get this all sorted out, the better. Because then we can finally pack up and leave this fucking place.”

“Yeah. Leave and get some sunlight.”

“Some
what
?” Jackson said, chuckling.

“Just something that’s outside,” said Tansy, trying to read someone’s scribbled note on a dry-erase board. “So what’s the story so far?” He read down a short list of topics, all of them crossed out but one. “What do we know about that worm?”

“We found it in a federal database, The Bureau of Land Management, where they keep their tax information. Most likely sent from elements inside the Sagebrush Militia.” Jackson motioned for Tansy to follow him into a hallway. He spoke softly as they walked out of the room. “All we know is that it’s not theirs. They bought it from somewhere.”

“Anyone we know?”

“No. Doesn’t seem like it.”

They were now in a lounge room with TVs and plush furniture, an R&R space for the tired and overworked hacking team. Jackson was first to slide onto a sofa, kicking his feet up on a coffee table. Tansy followed suit, enjoying the feeling of sitting in something other than a car seat.

“If it’s someone we know,” said Jackson, “then they’ve intentionally created a weak worm. Which, I guess, is a possibility.”

“Why? They made it weak for
us
specifically?”

“It could be a message.”

“Was there anything imbedded? Any actual messages?”

“No,” said Jackson, inspecting some smudge on the sleeve of his golf shirt. “Nothing that obvious.”

“Okay. Well what if it’s
not
a message, and it’s just from a shitty architect?” asked Tansy. “We know they have
someone
over there in the militia. Someone who at least knows the rudiments.”

Jackson pursed his lips together, considering it. “Possible,” he finally said.

“Well, what’s
not
possible about it?”

“It’s not a shitty worm.”

“I thought you said it was,” said Tansy.

“I said it was
weak
. There’s a difference.”

“Not in my book.”

Jackson chuckled. “Your book,” he said mockingly. “It’s too black and white.”

“Black and white gets the job done, Jackson. How long have you guys been out here now?”

“Too black and white. Too simple. That’s the problem with you marines.”

“You wanna know what the problem with
you
is?”

Jackson smiled, waiting.

“You forgot to get me that fucking beer.” Tansy laughed. “Awful fucking host. How’s that for black and white?”

Jackson chuckled all the way to the fridge in the corner of the room. He grabbed two bottles and returned to the sofa, handing one to Tansy. “Listen,” he said, “this Sagebrush guy . . . he’s probably only good enough to find and hire other hackers, and to watch what they do. At least to make sure they’re actually doing something with his money. So we just gotta keep looking. Keep an eye out for who it is. That’s what we’re doing here.”

Tansy eased back in the sofa and took a swig of beer.

“What about you?” Jackson asked.

“What about me?”

“Have you been looking? How goes trying to track down some old friends?”

“I already told you,” said Tansy.

“Yeah. That was hours ago.”

“I’m still on it. Still waiting for some call-backs.”

Jackson started tapping his beer with his fingertips.

Tansy sighed. “Well, that’s the thing about tracking. It takes awhile.”

“Do you have any leads, though? Any suspicions?”

Tansy thought back to the conversations he’d had over the last week, the friends he’d reconnected with, the memories he’d reawakened. The time he had spent with The Collective had been one of the happiest and most productive periods of his life, and the relationships he’d made went deep, rivaling those he’d made in the marines, even.

“No,” he said. “Not for the people I’ve spoken with. They’d have no reason to lie to me about that.”

He occasionally worked for law enforcement, sure. But Tansy wasn’t a narc. He had enough respect in the community that it went unquestioned.

“How many people have you spoken with?” asked Jackson.

“Mostly everyone,” Tansy cleared his throat. Jackson was looking over his shoulder, looking around for someone. Or maybe to check if they were sufficiently alone. Tansy braced for some uncomfortable question to be lobbed his way like a grenade.

“Have you talked to Carly?”

Tansy tried to hide the impact, how her name hit him like a .60 caliber round. But he couldn’t stop the initial flinch at the sound of her name, no matter how much time had gone by or how “settled” he thought it had been.

“Or,” said Jackson, looking like he’d just sensed the tension he had created, “are you still not talking?”

Tansy could only give a rambling answer. “I can’t let that get in the way, whether or not it’s uncomfortable for us to talk. Or whatever it is. I was always cool with her, so I don’t know.”

It was Carly who had stopped communicating. Not Tansy. Out of nowhere, she’d pulled the plug on their relationship. On something that seemed to have just been getting started.

“Anyway,” said Tansy. “The last I heard was that she was retired.”

“Retired?” Jackson asked, a disbelieving expression distorting his face.

“I hacked into one of those job banks and found her resume. I guess she’s a marketer now? She builds websites for some little marketing outfit in Fort Collins.”

“That can’t be right,” said Jackson. “I obviously don’t know her as well as you, but I mean. . . . Come on.”

“I know.”

“It’s gotta be some kind of front,” said Jackson. That was always what he suspected first.

Tansy just nodded. “Maybe.”

“Is that even retiring, though? Going from hacking to web programming?”

Tansy nodded again. “Yes. Most definitely.”

“Hmm,” said Jackson. “Then I wonder what she’s doing in her spare time.”

T
hey took turns driving
, and crying, all the way to the Nevada border. The Dotties were booked to play a show at the border town of West Wendover, a tourist trap dotted with casinos. That night’s venue was a faux biker bar lined with slot machines and video poker. A stopover for vacationers headed for something better in Vegas or California, most of them in their fifties and half drunk by 2 p.m. Not exactly The Dotties’ usual crowd.

They dropped off whatever gear they could on stage with whatever energy they could muster. The substance-filled late night in the salt flats, coupled with the blow of getting punked out of their product, was the perfect motivation for them to abandon their shit-show of a tour. And it was pretty much the only topic they’d discussed on their otherwise silent departure of Utah.

Utah, where shitty bands go to die.

Now that they were all spiritually dead, it was time to think rationally. Heading any further into the desolation of Nevada seemed like a wasted enterprise without their product, their
real
meal ticket. Their next spate of shows in rural and depressed mining towns along the interstate was bound to bring in the worst numbers of the tour.

The younger and more financially stable version of Carly would have continued on regardless, persevering, playing for “the love of music.” But this newer, poorer, more broken iteration was ready to call it quits. She was ready to surrender, giving up her music dream in the parking lot of Sandy’s Bar & Slots.

“We don’t even have enough money to get home,” said Megan, snuffling in an attempt to not start sobbing again. The two of them sat out of the van’s rear door while Taylor paced around the parking lot on her phone. She’d been trying to wrangle up some funds, any kind of funds, for almost an hour.

“Maybe I could put it on my credit cards,” said Carly, despite not knowing for sure if she could actually do so. Before anything, she wanted to actually say it out loud, to test how it felt and sounded. “But I don’t know . . . I’m almost maxed out.” It sounded horrific.

“Goddamn it,” Megan muttered. “And the fucking cash, too.”

“We’re lucky they left us the instruments.”

Taylor, having finished her phone call, returned to the girls with a blank look on her face.

“Anything?” asked Megan.

“Nothing,” she said, leaning against the van with a sigh. “What about you?”

“The same,” said Megan.

“And you?”

Carly wanted to say no when Taylor asked if she could make any calls. She wanted to lie about her only remaining option, an opportunity to make a quick fifty thousand by doing what she did best. It would be so much easier to stay low-key and broke, to not “get back into it” by whoring herself out for the first time since her mistake with Bryce Johnson. Maybe she
would
just charge everything to her credit cards. She could always max everything out and then file bankruptcy. That would be playing it safe.

“I don’t know,” said Carly as she scrolled through the names in her phone’s contact list.

“Do you have any ideas at all?” asked Taylor.

Carly looked at her recent call log, scrolling as far back as the previous afternoon when she turned down that suspicious job offer—when she still thought she was employed. “Maybe,” she said.

“Hey,” called a raspy voice from the bar’s rear service door. It was the manager, an ex-biker-looking guy who’d recently been reformed via semi-casual business attire. “Did you girls come to play or what?”

They hadn’t. But they said yes, and went inside and took the stage, and played music while people gambled.

* * *

A
s the Dotties
mechanically ran through their songs, Carly’s mind drifted further and further away from the music. Away from Sandy’s Bar & Slots, and West Wendover, and the tour. Her mind seamlessly detached itself from her instrument, her fingers now working through the sheer robotics of muscle memory.

Away from the music she’d once loved playing, her thoughts brought her back to another activity that had similarly gone cold—hacking. Was it meant to stay cold forever? Maybe all she’d needed was a few minor catastrophes to help thaw the ice.

It seemed only natural that she’d come crawling back. Hacking had once defined her in a way that music or web programming never could. It had once been a definition that she was comfortable and completely satisfied with, embracing an online persona she’d worked so hard at creating. Cscape, as she was known to fellow hackers, a name that would pop up regularly at the inner sanctums of their dark web meeting places. It was how she met Tansy, a hacker and military whistleblower who, at the time, was rumored to still be on active duty. Who was also rumored to be communicating from one of Saddam Hussein’s secret bunkers. The claims were usually farfetched, like his ability to commandeer a fleet of drones if his unit required air support, or how he’d amassed full hard drives of blackmail-worthy communiqués so they could be used as protection against the crooked upper echelon of military brass.

His war against military corruption was what initially attracted Carly to him, his fight for the little people, who were often the Iraqis themselves. It was a fight that aligned with Carly’s own motivation for hacking and for enacting change—no matter the legality. They worked in this gray zone, the murky realm of gray-hat tactics, and often worked side by side. A hacking power couple, minus the romance. Their work was too important for that.

But there were feelings. And looking back now, had it been a mistake to deny them? If nothing else, it would have put a lid on the fiasco with Bruce Johnson.

For activists like Cscape and Tansy, the end had always justified the means. Near the end of Cscape’s career, this meant branching away from military causes, and instead aiming for something even dirtier—politics. Although she held a firm hatred of it even now, politics had seemed like the best way for her to damage “the system,” hacking for politicians—at least the ones she thought were not complete and utter slime.

Bryce Johnson had once filled that bill, a staunch supporter of human rights and of a free and equal internet as a human right. It put some distance between her and Tansy’s already-distant relationship, Carly becoming more and more focused on Bryce, and then on his secret email server, then on its need for cover-up, which was when Carly had scrambled back to Tansy for help. There too, the end justified the means: her needing his help.

Some years later, she’d written a song about it for The Dotties. More than anything, it was a song about painful choices. In this case, it was the choice to cut contact with Tansy in order to put distance between him and the investigation. To save him. But now that a fresh investigation had been once again set in motion, she could feel the distance closing.

* * *

“
W
e’ll send
you a packet tonight,” said the voice on her phone. “After we make sure that you can receive it safely.”

“I’m not an idiot,” said Carly.

“Of course not. We’re talking to you, aren’t we?”

“They” were indeed talking to her. A conversation between The Dotties’ two music sets, Carly walking back and forth in a small parking lot behind the bar. Against her better judgment, she had called the friend she’d said no to only twenty-four hours before, asking to be put in touch with whomever had requested her services. She tried not to sound desperate, just curious. She was just interested in how high she could talk up the price. That’s all.

“We can pay in installments. Darkcoin.”

“Bitcoin’s fine,” she said, already thinking of how to monetize the cryptocurrency, how it could be used as soon as possible to pay for the food and lodging required for The Dotties to reach California. The plan from there was to meet an old friend who lived in The Emerald Triangle, to invest in another round of honey oil, and to this time play it safe in driving it back to Nevada. No more stupid rock-star bullshit. No more K9s on the salt flats.

“The first installment needs to be immediate,” said Carly. “If that’s okay with you.”

“Of course it is. We’re just glad to hear from you,” said a voice that was almost unisex in its timbre. Not quite deep enough for a man’s voice, but a male nonetheless. Maybe a teenager, or young male. Carly imagined the boy on the other line, talking through a Bluetooth while playing a first-person shooter video game. Energy drinks and pizza rolls. And somehow having access to fifty thousand dollars in bitcoin.

She stopped there.

“I don’t want any personal info in the packet,” she said. “Take it out if it’s there.”

“What? What kind of personal info?”

“Anything,” Carly said. “The less I know, the better.” It was a lesson from the past, one she’d learned the hard way.

“People usually send you their personal info in packets?” He really did sound like a little punk. “Like, their names and social security numbers or something?” He waited a few seconds and then said, “Anyway. . . .”

“And I mean it about the payment,” she said. “I’m starting tonight, so I’ll expect to see something.”

“You’ll see something.”

“Also, I need to know who else you’ve got working on this.”

“No, you don’t,” he snickered. “It’s not a collaborative effort. Just take care of the goals that we spell out in the packet, and you’ll see your bitcoin. Tonight.”

* * *

S
he got
to work immediately following their gig, stretched out on a bed with a laptop in a cheap motel, poaching Wi-Fi from a neighboring casino, drinking an extra-large coffee and wondering how the fuck she ended up having to hack from a two-star Hi-Way Motor Court in West Wendover. It was a far cry from the trendiness of Denver’s Silicon Mountain, the glitzy and ever-expanding tech district that Carly had once called home.

“Are you doing it right now?” asked Megan.

“Do you want us to leave?” Taylor asked.

The questions came out awkwardly, like they didn’t know how or what to ask, like they were unsure if they could just sit around while Carly worked.

“Why?” asked Carly. “It’s not like I’m a webcam model. I don’t have to take my tits out or anything.”

Taylor laughed as she flung her sneakers off her feet and off the bed, tossing them toward the door. “You sure? I heard there’s good money in that. It’s like the newer tech version of being a phone-sex operator.”

“Well, then why don’t you sign up for it? I’ve got an extra laptop.”

“No, that’s okay,” said Taylor. “I’d rather you teach me how to make websites.”

Making websites. . . . That was what they thought she was doing, programming some code for some innocuous company in Delaware. DeBlasio Solutions. They were in an extreme rush. A salvage job for a new site implementation that had gone off the rails.

The more specific the lie, the better.

It wasn’t like her friends didn’t know about Carly’s hacking past. She just preferred they assumed it was still there, in the past. Nice and safe. It was her new policy, since the loss of Tansy, to not drag anyone down with her activities.

“It’s pretty boring,” said Carly. “Hacking websites—I mean
building
websites.”