by Ryan Schow
A ghost in the network.
The deep web was invented by the military for not only sending and receiving untraceable communications, but for intercepting hostile communications as well. Brayden reasoned that they must have doorways, and if they had doorways, they had backdoors. These backdoors, these access points below the dark net, they were in the deep web and so that’s where he was determined to live.
In his quest to slip into those doorways and hack the most impossible of networks, he forgot to eat or drink for several days. His father worked eighteen hour days back then and he was in between mothers. His father came home one night and found him passed out on his computer. Nearly dead. After being rushed to the hospital and rehydrated, his father made him set his alarm for every six hours. It was a reminder to eat. He even bought Brayden food and drinks he packed into a small refrigerator he bought and set up next to the computer. Now he could go for days. After Brayden cracked the FBI’s firewalls and spent a few months there, he hacked the CIA and the White House as well.
By then his father had taken a second bride and spent more time at home. He encouraged Brayden to get off the computer, spend more time outside. He even took him to his job sites where there were the kind of roughnecks whose biceps were bigger than Brayden’s thighs, whose shoulders were broad and hardened with physical labor.
“If you ever get tired of being skinny and pale, of wasting away on your computer day and night,” his father had said, “this is where you come to be a man. This is where you get your balls.”
“I’m not wasting away,” he’d said, feeling small and weak standing amongst his father’s crew of roughnecks.
“You’re a hundred and ten pounds. Girls like boys with strength, boys who work like men. Don’t you want to meet some girls some day?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Then you have to do something more than play your video games, or whatever it is you’re doing. I love your mother, but your step-mother is much better looking, a better wife to me. Me and you, we aren’t a good looking breed. If we’re not smart, rich and built like men, then we’ll never be anything of value. Living your life behind your computer, being reclusive and unable to hold much of a conversation in a social setting, looking anemic and frail, come on son, you’re just asking for a life of solitude and girls don’t like that.”
“Girls aren’t everything, dad.”
“They aren’t if you have the right one, but if you have the wrong one, then you can get everything in life right and your life will still feel wrong. It’s time to grow up. To stop wasting your time.”
That’s when he went back into the FBI’s network, left his digital footprints behind on a semi-decent hack he knew he’d get caught for. Yes, he wanted to get caught. No one like him had ever hacked the FBI before. No one so young. In his world, that mattered.
When the feds cuffed him and sat him on his father’s couch, as they were collecting his computer equipment and asking him questions he wouldn’t need his father’s attorney for, he said, “Did you get the message I left behind?”
The agents looked at each other, then Brayden, and then they shook their heads, no.
“The message was ‘SC&P.’ Meaning your network is Swiss cheese and your house if full of perverts.”
These were his negotiating tools. His way of getting a slap on the wrist as opposed to prison time. It worked. And after that, his father looked at him in a different light.
“Did you do this because I said computers didn’t matter? That only looks, money and girls did?”
“Yes.”
“So you let yourself get caught?”
“I did.”
“To prove your worth to me,” his father said, understanding.
“Do you see it now?”
“I see your talent. And though I don’t agree with you, or what you did, I suppose in a way, I understand.”
The truth was, no one really understood a hacker but a hacker. And these guys and gals he was now working with at the FBI—the Cyber Action Team—they understood like his father understood, like a person sitting outside the life understood.
Brayden glanced around his office of cubicles. A few of these guys sitting here with their ties and their slacks and their FBI lanyards, he thought of them as “the reaction police.”
They worked without hacker-level talent from nine to five with an hour for lunch and small talk about football, the wife and kids, the bane of the job or whatever.
He tried not to despise them. They were bright, for sure. And talented. But not talented enough. They didn’t stand a chance against him or whomever was slipping in all the holes this group left behind by mostly being amateurs. And the women? At least they were working.
Harder than the guys by the look of it.
5
The first thing Brayden did when he got to work was take a bunch of shit from everyone. They didn’t like the fact that he’d successfully blackmailed his way into their office, or that he’d bested them so mightily. He was a kid. Barely eighteen.
At first they gave him grief, then they ignored him.
Finally one of the women (the better looking of the two lipstick lesbians) slid her chair over and said, “Why are you really here?”
It had been a good week by then. Pretty soon he’d have to call his father and tell him he wasn’t finishing school this semester.
One thing at a time, he thought. Just answer the question.
“Think of it as community service,” he said, looking up at her. “Until I serve my time here, I won’t have legal access to a computer. So as much as chicks dig my fake credentials, this ain’t my dream job.”
Agent Sarah Young laughed, snorting softly out of her nose and smiling, but in a more cynical fashion. She smelled sweet and tangy, her perfume neither sexy nor offensive. It was really just notes of fragrance that barely had any real weight to them.
“So you took down our network and infected our computers while not having legal access to a computer, is that right? You used a computer to do something illegal so that you could get your rights to using a computer back through your legal channels?”
“Sounds sexy when you say it like that,” he said, almost deadpan.
Her expression flattened. “It’s not.”
“That’s the first thing you need to know about hackers is we’re a nation unto ourselves. We don’t follow rules unless we want to, and we don’t care about what you think of us. We do what we want because we’re in the fast lane and everyone else is just sort of creeping along.”
“So you don’t follow the rule of law?”
“I do, mostly.”
“You realize you’re the type of people we go after,” she said, looking at him not as a human, but as something you scrape off your shoe. “That’s why we all hate you here.”
He hardened his eyes. “Do you know why I’m really here?”
“Yes, you pulled that stunt. And you know someone high up in the Bureau.”
“I’m here because the only way to prove my worth to my father, who is ridiculously wealthy and a titan in his industry, was to be a titan in my own industry.”
“You hacked the FBI and you let yourself get caught,” she said.
He smiled, impressed.
“I did.”
“Do you think you’re completely invisible? That in time we wouldn’t have found you on our own? With our own resources?”
It was a predictable question based on cop logic and ego.
“If I hadn’t shined a gigantic light on myself, then no, you would’ve never known I was there.”
“Times have changed and you’re not that good anymore.”
He decided to change the subject.
“What are you working on now?” he asked, thinking he might be able to turn this judgmental woman around.
“A puzzle,” she said, pulling her energy back.
“I’m good with puzzles.”
“Political ones?”
“What do you mea
n, political?” he asked.
“We’re tracking and monitoring an extremely organized, extremely large pedophile ring. They’re trafficking children inside the United States, selling them at online auctions on the dark net, engaging in some horrific activities. Things you could never even imagine. Things like human sacrifice, i.e. online murder rooms, Satanic ritual abuse. Tasty little things like that.”
He felt himself reeling in horror, which seemed to be the point.
Of all the things he’d ever heard about on the dark net, it was the online murder rooms he feared most. He stayed away from that stuff until one day he stumbled upon a chatroom discussing that very thing. People were bidding up the method of death.
The guy who won paid seventy-five thousand dollars for a Laotian girl to be killed with a chainsaw. She was nine. So yeah, he knew about the Red Rooms.
She tilted her head, studying him. A small grin found its way onto her face, and something passed through her eyes. A glimmer of light. “Oh, you thought we just went after the drugs and guns, and low level douchebags like you, didn’t you?”
He took a breath, then said, “Actually, I hadn’t thought too far beyond my own little world. I wasn’t there to make money, or extort anyone, or harm anyone.”
“That’s what makes you unqualified to work here. You don’t know the mindset.”
Wow, he thought. Then: “You don’t know me. You see a sliver of me and think it’s representative of the whole and that’s where you’re mistaken.”
“You’re a kid. Not even old enough to grab a drink after work. Your age alone tells me your life experience is not what it needs to be to truly understand the depravity that occurs in this world. It’s not just your world. This is a bottomless pit of criminal activity and human horrors. It’s a never ending sewer of digital-driven human filth. These clowns, sure they have your skillset, but what makes them worse is they have a criminal conviction a semi-decent kid like you can’t understand.”
“I’ve seen some pretty sick shit before.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you know all about Silk Road. Whoopti-freaking-doo. You build Trojan horses. Bypass firewalls. Run DDOS attacks and create ransom-ware used to hold our network hostage. Big deal. Do you understand what it takes to buy and sell kids online? Kids stolen from their homes, their families, their country? These are kids who will be terrorized and abused and eventually killed by perverts or devil worshipers. Do you know what it means to kill someone for pleasure, for a ritual? De you even know their language?”
He shook his head, even though he understood more about murder than she could have imagined from someone his age. How many times did he murder Dr. Heim before they buried him alive under Kaitlyn Whittaker’s casket? What Agent Young was right about was that he didn’t know the world of sex trafficking, the occult or ritual sacrifice, which is a huge problem these days, according to the FBI.
“Let me give you a sneak peek into my life,” she said, scooting her seat so close he could smell the minty flavor of her breath and see the pores on her cheeks. She was an average looking woman, but where there should’ve been feminine softness, there were only hard edges and intensity. “These people we’re tracking, they don’t deal in a kid here or a kid there. It’s not even dozens of kids we’re talking about. Not even hundreds. These trafficking networks, they sell thousands of kids a year. Tens of thousands some years.”
He swallowed hard, then said, “You said it was political?”
Her face broke into a sadistic grin that did nothing to hide the hatred she must feel for this lot of criminal.
“The end users we’re tracking are not scumbags or your circle of regular, everyday perverts. If that was it, we’d already be done with them. They’d already be in prison. Or killed.”
“So who are the end users?” he asked.
Agent Young’s nostrils flared as she drew a deep breath, looking like she was trying to decide what she was going to say, if anything. Then: “Hollywood, and D.C. That’s where we’re stopped up.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“You have no idea how the two cities are entwined, or how soulless they truly are.”
“So you can’t stop them?”
“We’re trying to break the incoming channels. Stop the supply lines. But we have to go far enough down the chain to break it without exposing the political front. We think we can get past Hollywood, but it’s D.C. that we’re afraid might be the greater of the two evils.”
“And you can’t go outside the U.S. because that’s outside your jurisdiction?”
“It is unless we get a CIA liaison.”
“But they’re never available, right?” he said.
Now it was her turn to look impressed.
“They’re running out of excuses.”
“Wow,” he said, feeling humbled by the revelations.
“Yeah,” Agent Young said, the volume of her voice slipping a few octaves with a seriousness that sat on the edge of hostility. “The reason I brought this up is to tell you that if you treat this like some game you think you can play in our world, understand that me and most of the guys are waiting for you to screw up so we can bounce you right the fuck out of here, got it?”
He never blinked. Never tore his eyes from hers even though he was dying to. Instead he nodded slightly and said, “Yeah, I get it.”
6
For as feminine as Agent Young looked with her Nordstrom clothes, her tippy-toe perfume and her perfect makeup, the woman was all business. At least she had the stones to confront him. Tell him what was up. Everyone else was acting like he didn’t exist. But Brayden was no sackless-Sally. He wasn’t some bitch.
Four hours later he strolled over to her work station with a printout and laid it on her desk, tapping it twice with his forefinger. She looked at it and he watched her neck flush red. She looked up at him, righteous anger searing her features. Agent Young took that breath, the one you take before you’re about to really lay into someone, but Brayden didn’t give her the chance to speak.
“You’ve got your value, Agent Young, and I’ve got mine. This is mine.”
Her brown eyeballs shook with rage, a barely tempered loathing that looked hot and primed to explode.
“This is your whole life on a single sheet of paper. The part of it that matters anyway. This is your proverbial house of cards.”
He pointed to the bank account numbers and the balances, landing on the one overseas she thought no one knew about.
“What happens if all that money were erased? What if it were just gone?” he said, waving his hand like a magician for effect. “Say good-bye to your life. Say good-bye to stability, to that in-control feeling you cherish so much. You wouldn’t just feel robbed, Sarah, you’d feel violated.”
“Don’t call me Sarah,” she growled.
“A keystroke destroys you. It kicks your happy little existence on its ass. Your digital life doesn’t define you as much as it’s a hollow foundation. Once this goes away, the real world quickly descends into turmoil.”
“You creep,” she hissed, seething. Judging by the faint lines around her eyes and mouth, she looked to be around the same age as Aniela. Just not as sweet.
“This is a few hours of my time. Imagine if I had a day, a week, a month. I could comb through your social media accounts, your emails, your internet search patterns, all the little habits you don’t know you have. Then I could sift through the photos on your cell phones—the one you carry with you and that other one you don’t want anyone to know about.”
Her eyes flashed wide, then grew icy and narrow.
“Creating a psych profile on you wouldn’t be hard, Sarah, but the social you and the private you are two different people. They always are. So I could crawl your home computer and look at the rest of you. All those hidden files you’ve done a really good job burying. But they’re not hidden from someone like me.” Softening his tone, he said, “Just so you know, I didn’t look at them, but if I wanted to, I could spend all day ge
tting to know the real you.”
The discomfort in her eyes became tension in her body. She started to shift in her seat, like she wanted to jump up and cold-cock him. He edged closer into her personal space, blocking that possible trajectory, which at that point—if she rose up out of her chair—would be her standing dick to dollop, he was that close.
He put up his hands and said, “Here’s the real truth, Sarah. I don’t give a shit what you have going on in your personal life. The money stashed overseas. That cute little cabin in the middle of nowhere that’s still in your mother’s name even though she died years back. I don’t care. Just know that even though I’m young, and people like me are young, we’re efficient, ruthless and unmoved by all the little closed doors you try to throw in our faces. A closed door is an invitation. All we need is motivation and a target. You made yourself mine, but I’m not bitter. I’m not spiteful. And I have nothing so important to prove to you that I should rob you of everything you hold dear. Just know that I could. I can. Anytime I want.”
“How dare you threaten—”
“I like your girlfriend,” he interrupted. “She’s a bit too young and a bit too blonde, but other than that she’s pretty hot.”
“You little monkey fuck,” she uttered. Others were looking over at them. Agent Young’s face was blistering now, all puckered red and riled. And her body? It was bristling with so much explosive energy she shook somewhere between anxiousness and violent hostility.
“So I sat there and listened to you tell me what a worthless turd I was, and how you were looking to bounce my ass out of here at your first, glorious opportunity. But I’m here to tell you that poking me with your supposed might is you treading on extremely thin ice. I’m here to serve a purpose, to stop people like me from penetrating a firewall that’s both laughable and unsecure, and then I’m gone. A ghost. Not in your life or the Bureau’s life ever again.”
“That’s your deal then?” she said, trying to dial herself back.
