The garage door opened. All three Turners hustled as best they could to drag the bags inside. Once the second one had been swallowed up in the black abyss, and the family with it, the garage door closed. The street was quiet again. And it stayed quiet. No lights came on inside the Turners’ house, either. Finally my tiptoes could no longer handle the strain.
I nearly collapsed. I was breathing heavily. What the hell was that?
Best to be rational. Detached. Granted, this was the second weird thing I’d seen go down in their driveway….Or was it? I tiptoed back to my laptop, determined to focus only on what I knew. The Turners had just moved in. Which took time. It was a gradual process, a work in progress. Maybe the sacks were full of long-awaited electrician’s tools or lead piping or barbells. What I knew to be truest of all: I’d wanted to dislike the Turners from the moment they arrived. I didn’t need Amir or my parents or Mrs. DLP to tell me that. These were the strangers who’d taken over my best friend’s home. My mind was predisposed to play tricks on me.
On the other hand, Kyle was a weirdo. (Terrible of me to think this way, but it was true.) He probably thought I was, too. From my perspective, it was weird that he and his dad had matching tattoos and matching first names. It was weird that they had talked about me using my last name. It was weird that Mr. Turner had so many “dirt cheap” phones, one of which they gave to my little sisters. Maybe it was a case of Loving Thy Neighbor. Amir would say that if he were here right now. Maybe my problem with this little late-night delivery was that it wasn’t so much weird as creepy. And yes, I fully realize this all happened while I was watching SVU, but still. There were real shayateen—evil spirits—out there.
Maybe I was paranoid. Fine. I’d be happy to prove myself paranoid—in a rational and detached way, now, on my own. There was nothing wrong with learning more about my neighbors. Nothing unethical. Plenty of information was out there for the taking. Once I found out what I needed to know, I’d be able to sleep.
I opened my laptop and dove in.
Within two minutes, I’d strategically narrowed my search. Kyle Turner and Katherine Turner were common names, obviously. But I knew my way around keywords and metadata (eye color, truck model, address, profession; the list goes on) enough to zero in on my neighbors—even on the clunky national, state, and municipal databases, which almost never get updated. Over and over, I came up empty. Apparently I was paranoid. The Turners had left almost no digital footprint. Well, nothing bad, anyway. No police records. No lawsuits or restraining orders. Not even a speeding ticket. Aside from Mr. Turner’s profile on the electric company’s website (full of rave reviews about his friendliness and skill), the biggest hits came from a 2012 article via Portland, Oregon. The Turners were living there at the time. Mrs. Turner had won a charity bake-off.
Now I felt creepy. They were model citizens.
So why was the voice in my head still whispering? Why was I so convinced that something was off with these people? I was probably insane. But to prove I was insane—if I wanted to be absolutely, 100 percent sure—I knew what I could do. I could break my promise to myself. I could hijack their router, just as I’d hijacked the Muhammad family’s router. It would be simple. Fast. Definitive. A peek at their search histories and personal data.
If wrong, I’d wipe all their information clean from my mind. I prayed I was wrong. But this one quick shady act would allow me to wear a white hat from here on out….
Or so I told myself.
My fingers had already moved to the keyboard, one step ahead of my ethics.
Unfortunately, Mr. Turner’s security appeared to be more sophisticated than Dr. Muhammad Muhammad’s. After three different kinds of attempts, I still couldn’t gain access. I’d been wearing the black hat for over twenty minutes now, much longer than I’d wanted. And I was grumpy, which wasn’t exactly optimal for getting into the hacking zone. I was losing focus. Getting sloppy. I was probably forgetting one simple crucial step….
Pulaski88 would know. I’d been fishing for an excuse to catch up with him anyway. I also knew better than to leave my own digital footprint by taking the same path more than twice—so I switched to a different overlay network, 12P, and logged on to his forum anonymously.
Me: It’s Jack’s cold sweat. Jack’s smirking revenge. Looking for Pulaski88.
No response.
I waited and waited, the cursor blinking in empty space. A minute passed, then two…
Pulaski88: Thought you were Jack’s colon.
Me: Ha ha. Good one. Need advice.
Pulaski88: Sorry. About to shut this baby down. Too much heat. Gotta go.
For a second, I wondered if he was joking. Or drunk. He sounded as if he were trying to imitate an old cop show from the 1970s. I typed “???” but as soon as I hit the return, the screen turned gray.
A message flashed:
Can’t open the page www.goldenrulehackers.onion because the server can’t find www.goldenrulehackers.onion.
No shit. Fine, so be it. Pulaski88 had disappeared into the black hole of the Dark Web. Par for the course. It wasn’t as if we were friends. He wasn’t “my boy.” I still felt hurt, though. This was the part of internet-only relationships Amir was much better at navigating. I knew from cyberstalking him that he could just let people come and go. Then again, many of his friends came from war zones. Their reasons for disappearing had nothing to do with anything illegal, other than to form a community….
So what now?
Time for Plan B: legal, but pricey. I’d go to BeenVerified, the nosy citizen’s public records aggregator of choice. I was already sneaking upstairs to the kitchen. There, I slipped into Mom’s purse and snagged her credit card. Was it worse than hacking? Yes. It was stealing from my mother. Nothing ethical about it. But I couldn’t let it go at this point. I wanted results and I wanted them now.
* * *
—
Back downstairs—twenty-six dollars and eighty-nine cents later—profiles of Kyle Turner Sr. and Katherine Turner emerged. Again, most of the data was benign. They had two mortgages, one in Virginia and another in Oregon. Boring. Too boring. I already knew they had zero social media presence. Even Grandma Thiede had signed up for a Facebook account. Their only subscriptions consisted of three magazines: Taste of Home, Canine Companion, and Occident Rise.
The last one didn’t even have a website. Print only. Okay, that was weird. Subjectively.
I vaguely remembered the term Occident from my Western Civ class, so I Googled it.
The countries of the West, especially America and Europe.
My pulse picked up a beat. I quickly found a PDF of the most recent issue.
There, in barely legible type, I found a link to a blog: occidentrisewife@wordpress. It belonged to “Debbie,” a nurse turned stay-at-home Army wife. Bare bones. No frills. I couldn’t decipher a lot of it (too many acronyms), but from what I could gather she’d started the blog to celebrate. A superior officer in her husband’s unit was recently discharged OTH. I looked that up, too.
Other Than Honorable.
I didn’t need to read any more.
The superior officer’s name was Kyle Turner. Only then did I realize that I had been sloppy. Not in my coding, but in my searching. I hadn’t noticed a glaring absence. There wasn’t a single record online of Mr. Turner’s having ever served in the United States military.
“AMIR?” I SHOUTED into the phone. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, are you okay?”
His voice was barely audible over the music pumping in the background. It would have been funny if I weren’t so frightened. Here I was, alone in my room in the middle of the night, and my boyfriend was…out. Having fun. I suppose I should be relieved that one of us was enjoying life? At least he’d answered my call.
“Not really,” I told him. “Where are you? I need—”
“Wait one s
econd!” he shouted. I could tell by the jostling in my ear he’d started running. The crowd noise faded. “Hey, you still there, Salma?” His voice got clearer. “Sorry,” he gasped, out of breath. “I’m at the Black Box with Mr. Epstein.”
“Oh.” The word stuck in my throat. My room suddenly felt very quiet and lonely. The computer screen had gone dark; the desk lamp was the only source of light. I wondered if Amir’s parents were aware he’d gone out. Probably. Mr. Epstein was a favorite and trusted teacher, after all, and Amir would never sneak around behind his parents’ backs anyway. My parents? They would have insisted on chaperoning—if they would agree to let me go in the first place, which they wouldn’t.
“But isn’t your show tomorrow evening?” I asked.
“He just wanted me to get a feel for the room before we play. You know, the acoustics. It’s really cool…I’ll tell you later.” He was speaking faster than usual. “What’s up? It’s late. Are you okay?”
“Not really, because I found out that Kyle Turner’s dad was discharged dishonorably from the Army, and that he’s managed to scrub this information from the internet.” My words also tumbled out in a breathless rush. “And believe me, that’s hard to pull off. Takes considerable skill and/or a whole lot of money.”
Amir was quiet. My mind flashed back to Mr. Fancy and that briefcase. “Amir?”
All I could hear was the muffled sound of drums and a fuzzy, indistinct bass line. “How did you find out?” he asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Salma, you need to be careful, please—”
“I’m always careful.”
“Listen, let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay? Mr. Turner could have been discharged for all kinds of reasons. Maybe he was a conscientious objector. Maybe he got a DUI.”
“He has no record of anything,” I protested.
“Maybe the power company wouldn’t hire him if he did!” Amir exclaimed. “Maybe that’s why he scrubbed it.”
I tried to think of a smart response. I heard a toilet flush. “Gross. Are you—?”
“No, that’s someone else.” He lowered his voice. “The bathroom is the quietest place here.”
I managed a tired laugh. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Go back and have fun.”
Amir sighed. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Salma. But right now, considering where I am, I have to say…it’s a very strange time in my life.”
Ugh. If Amir was referencing Fight Club right now, he was obviously trying to rein me in.
“Time for some new material there, Tyler Durden,” I muttered, but I was softening a bit. Maybe I was crazy. I was just about to ask him something else when the connection suddenly failed. I tried him again; the call went straight to VM.
Probably for the best. I’d ranted plenty for one night.
* * *
—
Debbie from OCCIDENT RISE had zero interest in being contacted, as she’d made that abundantly clear in her most recent blog post.
Dear friends: We are moving to an undisclosed location so I can be closer to the hospice. Rick’s condition has worsened. He remains a medical mystery. I can’t help but wonder if it is all related. Mr. Twelfth Star is capable of anything. This 7J business he was preaching was over the top. He had no business proselytizing to his unit. And even though he may be a seditious bastard, he isn’t stupid. Either way, I have neither time nor energy to keep track of him. I just can’t. The kids and Rick need me. I need me. Please respect our privacy. Don’t try to reach out. Uphold the Oath. It’s all that matters. We pray you take no part in what’s to come, for God and Country.
Army Strong,
Debbie
I felt sorry for her. And even though I had no idea what she was referring to, I empathized. Her life was unraveling at the seams; one more tug and it could fall apart. I was starting to imagine how that felt. I raised my hands and closed my eyes: Protect her, strengthen her, hear her prayers—Ameen. Then I clicked on the word “Oath,” highlighted in gold. It was hyperlinked to an external website, an official site of the U.S. military, featuring an American flag blowing in the header: The call of duty is a call to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I wondered how someone like her could get mixed up with someone like Mr. Turner. Yes, she was a patriot. Yes, her husband deserved thanks for his service. Still, there were hints—some subtle, some not—that Debbie also had some views in common with the Confederate flag promoters at the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Above all, the source: Occident Rising.
Occident is code for “the West.” Code, like the word heritage…another dog whistle, a noble euphemism for what motivated bigots like Barbie and the Bot.
I back-clicked to Debbie’s blog.
Several terms leapt out: undisclosed location, all related, 7J, seditious bastard, Twelfth Star, and most ominous of all, what’s to come.
I reached for a sticky pad and jotted down anything that seemed pertinent. I circled the word seditious and drew a line to Mr. Turner’s name. Of all the tenuous possible connections, it seemed to be the only one that might make sense, at least directly. An act of sedition—“incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government”—would certainly get someone an Other Than Honorable discharge from the U.S. military. Sedition might have even prompted his higher-ups to disavow him completely, which could mean they were the ones who’d scrubbed his service from the web.
So was “Mr. Twelfth Star” an alias of his? It had to be, right? He was Rick’s superior officer.
I entered 12th star into SurfWax, a hacker’s search engine. My stomach squeezed as the screen spat back the results. Maybe I should have been more surprised. But the sickening picture had already begun to form. A dark chasm of online hatred opened up before me, and down I tumbled.
As a Muslim living in Virginia, as the oldest sister of three, I’d kept an eye out for hate groups. So I’d been here before, seen how the rabbit hole veers off in a million directions—a grotesquely diverse underworld whose only unifying principle is a hatred of diversity. There are religious fundamentalists, Western triumphalist renegades, gun aficionados, hardcore KKK, softcore robe-free Klan “realists”…and the just-plain-freakish, like the manosphere of Nordic-style pagans. Oh, and the Doomers. I bugged out a little on them, especially their stockpiling recommendations. What if the proverbial shit did hit the fan, and World War III decimated civilization? The Bakkioui family would be screwed. We had nothing from their DIY prep lists in our basement: no gold bars, or spirulina, or gas masks, or camping gear, or high-powered weapons. We might as well prepare our white flag of surrender now. White would certainly go over better than any other color….
Focus. Focus.
I resisted the urge to slap my own face, even though I needed to. My EDS-related caffeine-like midnight boost had already receded. My body was exhausted.
But my mind—
I couldn’t let go of the fact that I still needed to figure out elements of Debbie’s last post, those key words that told me what I wanted to know about the Turners but still meant nothing to me. What was this Twelver stuff? And 7J? I was puzzled.
And intrigued. Obsessed. I couldn’t let it go. No way was I falling asleep.
* * *
—
Nearing one o’clock, I stumbled into a chatroom called “Domain of the Twelve Generals.”
The page was encrypted in a way I’d never encountered before. Once again I cursed Pulaski88. Couldn’t he have waited one more night to “shut this baby down”? He would have known a backdoor. But now I was at a dead end. It mocked me; the box in the middle was a royal F-you. Username and password? Go ahead and try, it seemed to snicker. Bound to be a futile endeavor. Types like this are too clever and obsessive. They change passwords with OCD frequen
cy. But they’re also arrogant. And frustration aside, that was something I could usually bank on. I grabbed my pen and studied the page with a naked eye, hoping to discern a pattern.
A few sequences grabbed my attention. I jotted them down:
G 1:28, I 2:2, 48764, 1493
I froze on the last one, tracing the sequence with my ballpoint pen. I felt sick. 1493: the number Mr. Turner and Kyle had etched into their forearms. I kept scrolling. Several visitors had left messages in the open comment section. Some were annoyed, complaining that they lacked access. Others bemoaned that their passwords were no longer valid. At the bottom, I stumbled on the lone conversation thread, where: bingo. The number-letter combo 7J immediately jumped out.
FallenSheClimber * 9 days ago
7J Survivors: Get out while you can. Inside 43ers, heed my warning: The 12 Apostles are false, the doctrines warped. GET OUT.
PatriotAmerican * 8 days ago
Fuck you, snowflake.
Evola14 * 5 days ago
Stop distracting us from the real enemies: weak whites, Muslims, BLM
Odin’sAXE * 3 days go
Jump off a cliff, bitch.
FallenSheClimber * 3 days ago
I’m a masterless, fearless, Christian Ronin and I won’t take orders. You’re a Nazi.
Odin’sAXE * 3 days ago
As much as I need to be. And proud of it. Sieg Heil!
The thread continued like that, on and on…ad nauseam to ad nazium.
I sipped my water and rubbed my eyes. FallenSheClimber’s last post was only five minute ago. I glanced at the clock on my menu bar: 1:13 a.m. Not that late. Maybe she was still online.
I left a comment for her: On your side, Christian Ronin, with a plea to DM me on one of my anonymous Twitter accounts. Urgent and want to talk. I switched screens and waited. A minute later, I got a new follower: @fallensheclimber. I followed her. Ten seconds after that, the DM appeared.
No True Believers Page 15
