by Ian Andrew
Tien nodded, “Of course I can function. I’m not going to let them dictate my life.”
Kara put her hand on Tien’s shoulder, “And this time?”
“Same answer. Funnily enough, same outcome. Those responsible are dead and I’m not. I get to move on.”
Kara saw the hesitation in Tien’s eyes. “But?”
“But nothing really. I was lucky. Jacob stopped it before it became…” She struggled to find the right words.
Kara waited.
“Before it happened… really. I was lucky.”
“But?”
Tien looked away, “I knew Jacob was going to kill him and I knew he was our only chance to find Swift. I knew he wasn’t armed. I even yelled at Jacob to stop...” Tien looked back up, “But…”
Kara watched Tien’s tears begin to fall again.
“Oh Kara,” Tien sobbed and said no more.
Kara knelt and hugged her, “It’s okay Tien. It’s okay.”
After a few minutes, Tien steadied her breathing, sat back and wiped her eyes. “It isn’t Kara. It’s not okay. It was different when I lost my hand. It was the game. The rules were clear. The enemy died around us and I didn’t feel pleased. It was just the job. But this is different. I’m happy he’s dead. I shouldn’t be happy another human being is dead. That’s a most terrible sin. To wish that on him and be happy for it.”
Kara felt a rising frustration. She had never been religious. Even when she had been forced to attend some compulsory church service in school or in her early days in the Air Force, she had been a bored spectator. Intrigued more by the architecture of the buildings than the spiritual voodoo the robed-men up front were performing. She had no time for it, or them. Yet she knew Tien’s strong moral compass was kept true by her family’s faith. Every single Sunday, if Tien was in London, she would attend Mass with her parents and as many of her six siblings as were available. Knowing that still didn’t help Kara understand why Tien would feel guilty about Rik. She tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her emotion, “He was about to rape you Tien. Who knows what his friends were going to do. You’ve every right to be pleased. You ha-”
“No. I don’t. It’s not right.”
Kara stood up, “Maybe not.”
“You feel nothing bad about it, do you?” Tien asked, without criticism.
Kara shook her head, “Not a thing. He deserved it.”
Tien sniffed and sat straighter in the chair, “Well, I guess I said I can function, so we better get on with it. Eh?” She rotated the chair but Kara put her hand out and swung it back to face her.
“Tien, it’s okay to feel the way you feel. It’s what makes you, you. Don’t envy me my gaping lack of humanity.”
The smile returned to Tien’s eyes and she put her cheek down onto Kara’s hand, “Thanks. Now let’s see what these guys are up to.” She spun the chair back into place and powered up the television.
The image was of the room next door. Obviously centred on where the wooden frame had been fixed in place, it now showed the drain cover. The legs of Tubbs and Van and the right shoulder of Rik just edged into the frame. The blood, not yet hosed down as Chaz had intended, flowed steadily into the drain.
“Is that a live video feed?” Kara asked.
“Seems that way. I didn’t see any cameras mounted in there. It must be small, unobtrusive.”
Kara left the computer room and called from next door, “Direct me.”
It didn’t take many seconds for Tien to have Kara standing in the right position and looking up at the camera.
“It’s a pinhole mounted in the old ceiling coving. Weird they would have gone to that amount of trouble,” Kara said as she rejoined Tien.
“Not really, when you look here,” Tien raised a small remote and flicked the TV image from the room next door to the rooms she and Kara had been separately held in earlier. She flicked again and cycled through the upstairs bathroom, WC and bedrooms. “The whole house is wired up and you’d never know it.”
“That doesn’t bode well. What the hell have we stumbled into here.”
“We’ll know soon enough. See that?” Tien stood and took hold of a thin black cable trailing from the rear of the TV. She followed it until it entered the equipment rack in the corner.
“Uh-huh. What’s it attached to?”
“A Hard Disc Drive Recorder.” Tien followed a thinner cable back from the rack to the first of the computers under the desk. She retook her seat and flicked on the left most pair of monitors. The right screen showed an interface that was a virtual representation of a video-mixer desk. The left screen was a full format video playback display with digital counters running along the base. It showed a duplicate of what was on the bigger television screen.
“Oh dear Lord,” Tien said and reached for the appropriate mouse and keyboard.
“What is it?” Kara asked, peering forward to see what Tien had just seen.
“This is professional video editing software. I mean really professional. Top level stuff. I saw the same sort of thing at the PsyOps School once. They used it to produce cinema quality infomercials.”
“And?”
“And it’s been on record for the last forty-five minutes.” Tien used the mouse and scrolled back across the digital counter at the base of the screen. The image juddered and then a fast rewind of Kara momentarily standing in front of the camera in the adjoining room was followed by a fleeting series of images. Each one displayed for such a small amount of time that Kara’s eyes couldn’t process what she was looking at, but the overall effect was certain. Tien looked away from the screen but kept the mouse clicked.
“You can stop now,” Kara said. The still-image on screen showed Tubbs and Albert wheeling the wooden frame into place. “They meant to record it all.”
Tien glanced back at the screen, “Yeah.” Her voice was flat, toneless.
“But it recorded us killing them. Is this live streaming?”
Tien was clicking the mouse again and bringing up a series of smaller window displays. “No. Apart from the connection to the recorder, this PC has no other active connections. Not even Wi-Fi. It’s air-gapped.”
“That’s a bit strange in this day and age, surely?” Kara asked.
More windows were opening on screen as Tien said, “We used air-gapped systems in the military Kara. All the time.”
“But only for…” Kara stopped as she peered over Tien’s shoulder.
Tien made the last window full size and finished Kara’s observation, “Only for things that were highly classified. Things we didn’t want anyone to have access to. It’s the ultimate way to stop anyone hacking into your system. You just stay off the Net.”
“What is that?” Kara asked.
“It’s an archive store of edited video files.”
“But… there…” Kara stammered as her mind processed what she was looking at. “There are hundreds of them.”
“Two hundred and nine,” Tien said and double clicked on a random file, dating from January 2012.
The screen filled with an image from the room next door. Rik and Buddy were easily recognisable standing behind the wooden frame. They were talking softly, but audibly, in Dutch. Both turned towards what Kara knew was the door that led to the hallway. Rik smiled broadly and extended his right hand in a strange gesture that reminded Kara of an adult reaching out to a-
“Oh fuck no!”
ɸ
“Two hundred?” Sammi asked.
Kara nodded, “But they’re grouped by number sequences. They made a series of videos for each… well… each…” Kara couldn’t phrase the right word. She was angry, incensed beyond anything she had ever known, but most of all she was numb. Physically and mentally drained. Her head hurt, a weight in her stomach pulled so intensely that she felt like curling into the foetal position and her eyes were red and puffy.
Tien and she had quickly realised that the videos were grouped by their titles. Some groups had upwards of twenty video files, s
ome just one. Both women knew they had to conduct some rudimentary analysis just to determine what it was they had found. Even watching only enough to be able to confirm why the videos were grouped, the experience had been horrendous. They could take no more after opening a file from 2008. Kara had been physically sick in the toilet. Tien had wept and prayed. Then both had sat quietly, tears streaming down their cheeks, holding each other’s hand and waiting for the return of Chaz and Sammi.
“Victim?” Chaz offered as a closure to Kara’s sentence.
Tien nodded, “Yes. They’re grouped by victim. Based on the limited number we viewed, most are girls. But there are some boys. Ages were probably between maybe six or seven up to maybe fourteen or fifteen.”
“Oh,” Sammi said, dropping her gaze to the floor.
“How many groups of videos in total?” Chaz asked through clenched teeth. Kara could see his jaw was tight, the muscles in his neck tensed and his face flushed.
“Twenty-seven,” Tien answered.
“Twenty-seven kids,” he said, his voice wavering. “Over how many years?”
“Twelve.”
The room was quiet. Kara watched Chaz swallow hard, but that couldn’t prevent his tears. The four friends stood and hugged one another. Eventually Sammi straightened up, “We’ve got to hand this over to the cops. The parents have a right to know what happened. They’ll need to come in and dig this whole farm up.”
Kara leant against the desk, “We will do, but they won’t find anything.”
“Oh God, how do you know?” Sammi asked.
“There’s a video from 2008. Just one video in its own set and longer than those with multiple files. It showed the whole process. The abduction, they took her from a shopping centre, her time here, we reckon they held her for at least a month and then…” Kara stopped and tried to form words but just shook her head.
“It’s okay, you don- ” Chaz said.
“Yes we do Chaz,” Tien interrupted. “It explains what happened. There’s footage of them on the red boat. Rik and the fat man are on camera. That boat is a proper fishing rig. It has an industrial-sized gutting table with knives, bone saws and a chute where offcuts are hosed down before being dumped into the water… There’s going to be nothing to find.”
“Those poor kids.” Chaz’s whole body slumped.
Sammi squeezed his shoulder and put her arm around him, “We still have to hand it over to the police,” she said.
“And we will,” Kara agreed. “But I want to bring down the rest of whatever these bastards are into. I especially want to find Derek Swift. The Dutch Police won’t be bothered to go looking for him. The other small matter is if we hand this all over to the authorities at the minute, we’ll be spending a considerable amount of time in a Dutch prison. Despite Rik and the rest of them being paedophiles and killers, extrajudicial executions still aren’t authorised. We’ll all face murder charges.”
“So what’s the plan,” Chaz asked, his composure partially returning.
“Tien will need time to work through these systems and Jacob will have to stay out on the perimeter. Meanwhile you guys are going to play reservoir dogs.”
Chapter 15
The winter sun had struggled to cling onto the day and by early afternoon the interior of the house was dark. Tien swivelled away from the desk and faced Kara, who sat on a cushion against the far wall. The two were just visible in the light coming from the monitors.
“That’s the last one and I think I’ve finally figured it out. It’s sick, but I’ve got to admit, it’s ingenious.” Tien said, leaning forward and back to relieve the stiffness that had come from sitting in front of the computers for so long.
“Ingenious? Really? Doesn’t sound like I’m going to like this.”
“Well, the last system was hooked onto ZeroNet. It used a different chat app from the others but basically, it and the rest of them were the same. All their communications are routed over darknets and they’ve used five systems, each with a slightly different protocol.”
“So this is the darkweb they’ve hooked into?” Kara asked, not knowing much about the hidden Internet other than it existed.
“Yep. They’ve used TOR, I2P, FAI, FreeNet and ZeroNet.”
Kara held her hand up, “Woah. You know you lost me at the first one. I get they had multiple communication paths but all I need to know is, can we trace who they were talking to? Can we get a lead on Swift?”
“No. That’s the ingenious part. Each one of these computers is hooked into a chat room but you can only access it on video. That’s what these are for,” Tien said, pointing to micro cameras mounted on top of five of the screens. “As best I can establish, they made and edited the videos on the editing PC. Then they uploaded them separately onto file servers buried in the darkweb. That provided the isolation and anonymity.”
“So these videos are online? Shared with anyone who knows where to look?”
“Not quite. The added layer of security is opposite to what you’d think.”
“How’d you mean?”
“To access the files you need to go through a protocol,” Kara frowned. Tien switched tack, “Okay, imagine that the files are in an office, but to get into the office you need to pass through a security check.”
“Okay.”
“Well, that’s what’s taken me so long. We’d think these individuals can’t afford their names and faces to be known. Every nation on earth would arrest them for what are on these videos. So you’d expect the security procedures to be hi-tech encryption based.”
“Yeah. Is that the problem, you can’t break it?”
“No. That’s just it. There are no encryption methods. Not that I can find and I’ve looked for,” Tien checked her watch, “a good three hours now.”
“So the security check is that you can just waltz in?” Kara asked, rubbing her eyes and suddenly feeling very tired.
“No. I think the security check is these cameras. They have to make a video call. The person in this room has to recognise the person on the other end. It’s the only explanation that I’m left with and it ties in with the only documentation I can find. Come here and take a look,” she said and swivelled back to the monitors. Kara rose and came to look over her shoulder.
“There’s a plain text file on each system,” Tien said as she opened up a document on screen. “All different content but the same type of information. A list of names and a list of two numbers against each name. See anything familiar?”
Kara leaned in, “They’re all first names only and the numbers are i- Oh!” Kara stopped and leaned closer. “The numbers are like the ones Amberley used in his text message. Five figures and then a three figure pin.”
“Yep,” Tien agreed. “I also think the first two digits of the first number are country codes.”
“Like phone codes you mean?”
“Yeah. Amberley and Swift’s were both forty-four and I can’t find any on here or the other systems that don’t start with a number that isn’t a country code.”
“So that means we can find them?”
“No. Well, probably not. It tells us where they were when they first got given the number. I doubt Swift is still in the UK but he was still referred to by Amberley with a forty-four number.”
“Okay, so you have names and numbers. What’s that got to do with the videos?” Kara asked, going back to sit on the cushion.
“I think they get identified within the system and then after that it’s a human check. Someone in this room has to recognise the person joining the chat room, otherwise they don’t get any further. Like I said, it’s ingenious. You have a group of people all corrupt, all as guilty as each other, who only allow those they recognise in.”
“Like Mutually Assured Destruction?”
“Yeah. It’s MAD for sure,” Tien agreed, “but more than that. If you do get in and were being coerced by law enforcement, they’d see it in your face. There is nothing better than another human looking at you to figure ou
t if you’re distressed.”
“So we have a whole ton of paedophiles and perverts congregating in a chat room and no way to get into that chat room to see who is in there, without being a recognised face?”
“Yep and being darkweb means absolute anonymity for the computers they use, so you can’t get them that way. You have to be on the inside. The idea that law enforcement could pose as someone and infiltrate the system is unlikely. I can’t find proof, because by its design there are no traces, but I would imagine you have to take part in some form of initiation before they’d let you into the inner circle. Apart from no court upholding any case once an illegal act is performed by an undercover officer, I doubt any operative would put themselves through that. So the most you would take down is the single cell you were trying to gain access through.”
“But if you did get in, you’d bring down a global network,” Kara said, her mind already processing options.
Tien halted her before she had made much headway, “Not really. That’s where the separate systems come in. This one,” she said pointing to the right most set of monitors, only seems to connect to people with German and Moldovan codes. That one,” she indicated the next system over, “connects to the UK, Ireland and strangely enough, Azerbaijan and Cameroon.”
“So it’s not just MAD they’re emulating, but a terrorist cell network?” Kara asked.
Tien nodded. “If you did get into one cell, you’d only be able to remove that particular subset.”
“Unless you were in this room,” Kara said. “Then you’d bring it all down?”
“You’d bring more down, but I doubt all. This must have been setup like a series of distributed hubs. I’d imagine, no, scrub that, I’m certain that there will be two or three or ten other central hubs like this. It’s maximum security with limited risk if compromised.”
“Yeah but that’s all guesswork, surely?”
“I suppose, but I do know there’s even more isolation and compartments. I can’t find all the country codes. I mean, I’ll have to properly go through them, but it was easy to spot that there are definitely no codes for France or the USA. I doubt very much they are paedophile-free nations and anyway, like I said, I’m certain.”
