Assassin's Web

by Richard T. Burke

  The assassin frowned. Had the man seen him emerge from the house? He showed no interest in his surroundings, so the chances were he hadn’t witnessed anything incriminating. The killer waited in his hiding place until the hiker disappeared from view.

  The man was lucky. He would never know how close he had come to joining the other two victims.

  Chapter 3

  It is often possible to trace a complex sequence of events back to a few seemingly insignificant triggers: in my case, the decision to set out on a walk at that particular moment, the flash of white catching my eye amidst the greenery and stooping to pick up the scrap of paper.

  It was the first Monday of the school summer holidays, and six weeks of glorious free time stretched out ahead of me. The build up to the end-of-year examinations had left me exhausted as I tried to cram the critical facts into the brains of my reluctant students. It would take a few late morning lie-ins followed by lazy days for me to recover my energy.

  When I drew back the curtains shortly after midday, the sun was already blazing high in a sky of cerulean blue. A storm was approaching across the Atlantic. The forecast was for rain to sweep in from the west later that afternoon, so I wanted to make the most of the opportunity while it lasted.

  I strolled into the kitchen and placed a slice of bread in the toaster. While I waited, I picked up a holiday brochure from the work surface and flipped through the pages. The pictures depicted photogenic people engaged in a variety of water sports against a background of golden, sandy beaches and impossibly blue seas. I had saved several thousand pounds and intended to blow it on a package that offered windsurfing lessons. The costs would be eye-watering during school vacation, so my intention was to book at the last minute to save some money.

  A metallic clack drew my attention back to the present and my empty stomach. After slathering the hot toast with butter, I wolfed it down and deposited the dirty plate on top of the pile of washing-up from the previous evening. Knowing my rushed meal wouldn’t keep me going for long, I stuffed a breakfast bar in my pocket and ambled into the hall where I dragged my walking boots out of the cupboard.

  Within a few minutes, I was strolling along the narrow pavement. The distant buzz of a lawnmower rose and fell in the gentle breeze, mingling with the crackle of a bonfire from a neighbour’s garden. A haze of smoke drifted over the hedge, permeating the air with the acrid scent of burning leaves. Despite the indirect signs of activity, the road was deserted.

  Within a quarter of a mile, the rows of houses and their tidy gardens gave way to open countryside. A sign on my left indicated the route of a footpath snaking up a slight incline through a gently swaying crop of wheat. I clambered over the wooden stile and followed the trail of cracked, bare earth cutting across the field like a scar. The heads of the plants encroached on the path and swished against my trouser legs as I strolled up the shallow slope.

  As I crested the rise, I paused for a moment. The dark line of the footpath meandered down the hillside through a patch of woodland towards a narrow country lane. Three huge mansions, each occupying a plot of several acres, lay on the far side. The locals referred to the road as Millionaire’s Row although its real name was Mill Lane. The last time one of these properties had come onto the market two years earlier, the asking price was over seven million pounds. What did people do for a living to afford that sort of money?

  I ruffled my shirt to provide some much-needed ventilation and ambled downhill towards the temporary respite of the trees. A metal gate set in the hedge signalled the route ahead. Beyond the barrier, the path continued into the mottled shade of the small copse. A high-pitched screech originated from somewhere overhead. I shielded my eyes from the harsh glare and gazed upwards, picking up the distinctive outline of a red kite as it wheeled over the treetops.

  I lifted the latch and passed from sunlight into shadow. Turning back, the bare earth of the trail I had followed described a wavy line through the undulating sea of wheat. The low drone of insects mingled with the rustling of leaves as the upper branches swayed in the light wind. I drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. The musty scent of damp soil and decaying vegetation filled my nostrils.

  The first pangs of hunger fluttered in my stomach. I remembered the breakfast bar and removed it from my pocket. In my eagerness to open the snack, I pulled too hard. Part of the wrapper split from the rest and slipped through my fingers, spiralling away towards a clump of brambles at the edge of the path. My instinctive reaction was to retrieve it.

  As my eyes tracked the trajectory, an incongruous patch of white caught my attention. I snatched up my own litter and shoved it back in my pocket. Under normal circumstances, I would draw the line at picking up somebody else’s rubbish. I’m not sure why I reached out for this scrap of paper. It might have been the neatly folded, rectangular shape. Perhaps it was the whiteness and the fact it had clearly not been there long.

  Whatever the reason, I closed my fingers around the edge and tugged it free of its prickly embrace. I hesitated before reading the contents. I remembered being taught from an early age it is wrong to read a letter without the owner’s consent. Maybe everything that followed is cosmic payback for ignoring that one important lesson.

  The faint outline of writing showed through the paper. Curiosity got the better of me and I opened the fold. Two lines of text ran across the page in a neat handwritten script.

  dfwetefg.onion/login

  user23956 / pw76TgRwe

  The words login and user provided the obvious clues. These were the details for accessing a website. The first part looked like a web address although it wasn’t in any format I recognised. The second line seemed to be a username and password. But what was the purpose of the site?

  I contemplated returning the note to its hiding place. What if the owner realised he or she had dropped it and retraced their route, searching for it? I cast anxious glances both ways along the path, refolded the sheet and placed it in my back pocket.

  I continued my walk, trying to enjoy the scenery during the short bout of good weather before the rain set in, but the note was never far from my thoughts. As soon as I arrived home, I headed towards the study and my computer. There, I pressed the power button and waited for the machine to boot.

  After an interminable wait—not helped by an operating system update—the password box popped up, and I typed in my four-digit PIN. When the desktop eventually appeared, I grabbed the mouse and opened a browser window. I tapped out the characters in the address bar, frequently referring back to the handwritten note as I did so.

  My finger remained poised over the enter key. I hesitated for a second then pressed down. Almost immediately, the screen updated to display a message stating that the page was unavailable. Not ready to abandon my efforts at the first challenge, I typed the text into a search window: a single result. I clicked the link and waited ... and waited.

  Thirty seconds later, a Russian website opened. The site contained a series of hyperlinks, each starting with the first five letters I had typed followed by three more, ranging from AAA to ABD. I selected one at random. A new page popped up giving me the option to register the jumbled sequence as a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail email address.

  I returned to the search window and removed the slash and the login part of the string. This time, two results appeared, both linking to the same website I had just visited. As a last resort, I deleted the word onion and tried once again, only to receive the same list of hits. Whatever the letters signified, they didn’t relate to an active site on the Internet.

  Feeling slightly let down, I rocked back in my chair. There was someone I knew who might offer advice, but I was reluctant to phone him. The situation was complicated.

  For several minutes I debated with myself whether to make the call. In the end, I grabbed my mobile and scrolled down the list of contacts. The ringtone rang out six times. Just when I expected an automated message, there was a click.

  “Percy, this is a nice surprise.”


  My brother-in-law, Jamie Saunders, was the only person I knew who still used my schoolboy nickname. My real name is Alex Parrott. As a child, everybody at school, even the teachers, called me Percy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my sister Cathy, who is two years older than me, was known as Polly. She and Jamie met at University and married within a year of finishing their degrees.

  After fourteen years of marriage, they had separated a few months ago, which went some way to explaining my reluctance to contact my sister’s estranged husband. Cathy and their daughters, aged six and eight, left the family home and moved in with my mother.

  Jamie ran a web design business and knew everything there was to know about computers. Despite the breakdown in relations with my sister, we remained on good terms. If anybody could explain the meaning of the cryptic note, it was him.

  “Hi, Jamie. How are things?”

  “Oh, ticking along. I have no idea where Cathy is if that’s why you’re phoning.”

  “No, it’s not that. You two haven’t made up your differences, then?”

  There was a slight pause before he replied. “I think she’s set on a divorce. She told me I love my computers more than I love her. At least you can turn off a computer when you've had enough. The hardest part has been the impact on the girls.”

  I already knew the answer from talking to my sister, but I asked anyway. “Are you seeing much of them?”

  “I normally have them over on a Saturday night. They certainly know how to apply the emotional blackmail. They always turn on the waterworks when I return them to their mother’s on a Sunday afternoon, begging us to get back together. It takes everything I’ve got to not burst into tears myself. She’s the one who moved out though.”

  I had heard both sides of the story and knew neither half was blameless. Jamie might have spent more time with his work than his wife, but my sister had a stubborn streak the size of the Grand Canyon. Keen not to get embroiled in the rights and wrongs of the separation, I changed the subject.

  “How’s the business doing?”

  “Things are going well. I seem to spend half my day on the phone talking to prospective customers who tell me they’re about to become the next Google or Facebook then expect me to create their website for free. We’ve taken on a couple of new programmers recently, but we still haven’t got enough people to accept all the work that comes our way. It doesn't feel right turning clients away, but I don’t want to grow it too quickly. You can never be sure whether there’s another recession around the corner.”

  “I’m glad to hear it's a success.”

  There was a pause as we both considered how to bring the conversation back to the real reason for my call.

  Finally, Jamie accepted the challenge. “I’m assuming you didn’t just phone me for a social chat.”

  “Actually, I wanted to ask your advice about something computer related.”

  “Oh. Has your machine broken down?”

  I could detect the disappointment in his voice. He had commented on more than one occasion that, as a technical expert, friends and family expected him to provide free support.

  “No. I ... um ... came across what looks like a website address, but my browser doesn’t seem to recognise it.”

  Jamie’s tone brightened. “Are you sure you didn’t mistype it? Did you try Google?”

  “Yeah, but there were no useful hits. The bit after the full stop is one I haven’t seen before.”

  “What is it? You're aware triple X sites are to do with porn, I assume.”

  I ignored his poor attempt at humour. “It ends in onion, followed by a slash and then the word login.”

  He laughed. “Has your supply of wacky baccy run low? I have a contact who might be able to help. I didn’t know you were into that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “The dark web, of course.”

  “I’m sorry, Jamie. You’ll have to enlighten me.”

  “Dark websites all end in onion. You can’t access them with a normal browser. You need to use special software called Tor.”

  “How do you spell that?” I asked.

  “T. O. R. Just make sure you download it from the official site. It’s something like Tor project and it ends with an org. There are quite a few pages out there containing versions riddled with spyware, and that defeats the whole object of remaining anonymous.”

  “I’m sorry to be a bit dim, but can you start at the beginning?”

  Jamie sighed. “I’ll give you the concise version. There's plenty more on the normal Internet if you're interested. All web traffic passes through servers, the first of which is at your service provider—companies such as BT, Virgin or Sky. When the request from your computer reaches its target, that server responds by sending back responses in the form of a web page.

  “That’s fine unless your activities are somewhat ... nefarious, shall we say. If the site you are visiting is illegal, it’s easy for the authorities to listen in. The dark web circumvents all of that. I’m no expert on the inner workings, but the Tor software scrambles the packets of data and routes them via a random set of machines that forward the information to its destination, at which point it all gets put back together. The same happens in reverse to display the page on your computer.

  “In essence, whilst somebody can listen in to the raw data stream, they can’t decipher the contents or work out where it’s going. The Tor browser effectively encrypts and decrypts your connection, making it impossible to see what you’re accessing or uploading.”

  “Is everything on the dark web illegal?”

  “Not necessarily. There are several reasons to encrypt your web traffic, the most common of which these days is because you want to purchase an illicit substance, for example, drugs. Sites like Silk Road popped up to service the demand although the FBI shut them down years ago. They use crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin to pay for goods so payments can’t be traced easily either.

  “The other main application of the darknet is to exchange information. It’s a good solution, for example, if you live in a totalitarian state and don’t want the authorities listening in to your online activities. I read somewhere that Facebook runs a dark website for exactly that purpose. The criminal elements have less salubrious reasons for using it, such as the sharing of child porn.”

  I took a moment to think before I asked my next question. “So, nobody can listen in if I install the software you mentioned?”

  Jamie hesitated. “You should be okay. Obviously, you have to download it from a regular website before loading it on your machine. I’ve heard rumours that the government monitors downloads of the installer, but it’s not illegal to do so. If you were worried about that, you could always go to an Internet café rather than using your home connection. Do you mind me asking why the sudden interest?”

  I had already prepared an answer in case he asked this exact question. “I caught a lad in my class passing a note to one of his mates. It contained the address of a website. He wouldn’t tell me what it was about, so I thought I’d check it out for myself.”

  “Do you think this boy is into drugs or is it something worse?”

  “I’m not sure. I want to get the facts straight before I take it higher.”

  “Anyway, isn’t it the school holidays? The girls were pretty excited about having a few weeks off when I saw them last weekend. Cathy was complaining about having no time to herself for the rest of the summer.”

  “You’re right, but I thought I should get a better understanding of what I’m dealing with before the new term begins.”

  “Well, I’d be careful. As the name suggests, there’s some disturbing stuff out there. I hope for your sake it’s nothing too serious.”

  We chatted for a few more minutes, but my mind was on other things. If only I had heeded his advice.

  Chapter 4

  Twenty-five years ago:

  Tuesday, 7th February, 1995

  Each night, my mother chose a dif
ferent child’s room for the bedtime story. That evening, it was my turn. A large promotional poster for the film, Home Alone, dominated one wall, featuring the iconic photograph of a terrified Macaulay Culkin with his hands held to his face. I identified myself with the boy who had single-handedly bettered the two burglars trying to steal from his family’s house. The videotape had played the spider scene so many times that horizontal lines distorted the picture. A variety of model cars and aeroplanes lay scattered across the carpet despite my parents’ frequent requests for me to keep my bedroom tidy.

  “What would you like me to read tonight?” my mother asked, turning a blind eye to the mess.

  The question was redundant because my younger sister’s answer had been the same every night for the past few weeks.

  “Magic tree,” Elena yelled.

  My mother raised an eyebrow and peered over her glasses. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer Charles Dickens or Leo Tolstoy? Maybe a bit of Shakespeare?”

  My sister giggled. “No, I want the magic tree book.”

  “The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton it is then.”

  Elena clapped her hands and snuggled up to me. I put my arm around her. She squirmed for a few seconds until she had made herself comfortable.

  “Is everybody ready?” my mother asked.

  The bedtime story had become something of a ritual. In truth, at the age of nine, my literary interests were more advanced than the books that interested my six-year-old sister, but I still enjoyed hearing the stories, especially when my mother put on the funny voices as she read to us. Cathy considered herself too old to partake regularly, but occasionally she joined us too. Tonight, she stayed in her room, listening to music.

  “Hey, Cathy,” Elena shouted in her high-pitched voice. “The story’s starting.”

  We waited for a second or two, but there was no response.

  My mother shrugged and opened the page at the bookmark. “It doesn’t look like your big sister will be joining us. If we’re all settled, I’ll begin.”