Spiders in a Dark Web

by Emily Senecal

  I hated that we were wasting everyone’s time. Hated that we were driving ourselves closer to Marianne’s death, every mile bringing us nearer to the moment that the information would get uploaded and she’d show it to her parents. But it wasn’t like we had a better choice. Stopping now wouldn’t help. Marianne had to try. I understood that, even while I understood just how dangerous and futile the whole stupid plan was.

  I wondered how she would show it to them. Email them a screenshot? Text a photo? I couldn’t imagine. How did criminal conspirators communicate with their networks? Encrypted text apps? Marianne had said they weren’t in New York, now or often, which at least put some distance between them. Probably scamming some unfortunate victim on the other side of the world.

  It should have been a reassuring thought. It wasn’t.

  From everything Marianne had said, they were just as dangerous far away as they were nearby.

  I barely noticed that the city was gradually thinning out to a more sparsely-populated neighborhood, until we crossed what looked like a dry riverbed, covered with low trees, and began to weave through brown foothills. Straight ahead was one of the five mountain ranges, etched against a cloud-swept blue sky. Peter made a right turn onto a road that was paved, but had no sidewalks or streetlights or other signs of urban development. Only power lines crossing above and the driveways we passed showed that we were still in a city, otherwise we could have been dropped into the middle of nowhere.

  I paid attention now, interested by the scenery. The high desert has a beauty all its own. Scrubby trees and shrubs grew thickly along the road and around the properties, interspersed with tall cacti and low, crumbling ridges of rock. Unlike in so many parts of California, no grasses covered the hills, not even the scorched brown grass of summer. The soil was sand and rocks, out of which sprung, somewhat miraculously, every shade of green from dark forest to pale chartreuse. I caught glimpses of the houses we passed, each standing on its own property at least a few hundred feet, usually more, from its nearest neighbors. They were built in various styles, from Mediterranean to ranch, some much bigger and grander than others.

  Finally, after winding our way for several miles, we turned left onto a road that wasn’t paved, slowly churning up the brown dust, passing a gated property with flagstone driveway on the right. The road ended in a dirt driveway, which wound steeply up to a small house shaded and partially hidden by several stout, rounded pine trees. As we pulled up in front of a closed garage door, I could see that the house was made of concrete blocks with a flat roof and few windows. Peter parked the car and we got out. It was pleasantly cool here in the shade of the pines.

  He knocked on the front door, was about to knock again when it suddenly opened and Brendan waved us inside.

  “Good, you made it,” he said briefly, barely allowing Peter to pass before shutting and locking the door behind us.

  We found ourselves in a dim, empty hall, facing another doorway that provided the only source of light. Walking through into the room behind, I was vaguely surprised to find it spotlessly clean and comfortably furnished as a living room-study combined. An inviting leather couch stood to one side, facing a fireplace, flanked by armchairs and side tables. The other half was filled by a large U-shaped desk holding various pieces of computer equipment and monitors, the cords neatly tied and organized. Colorful artwork hung on the white walls, landscape paintings and posters. A large set of doors along the back wall opened to a private, walled patio. The view beyond this, ringed with dark trees, showed a glimpse of the mountains above.

  I don’t know what I’d expected; Brendan’s appearance, combined with the word hacker, had made me think of a dark, cramped underground bunker filled with shelves of canned food and unwashed dishes. I felt slightly ashamed of myself for making assumptions about how he’d live. Especially given my background, raised by software developers and trained in the same field, I should have known better.

  “Sit down anywhere,” Brendan said, waving a vague hand and moving purposefully over to the computer chair.

  “You had no problems, then,” Peter said, moving over to sit on the cushioned hearth and pulling me with him.

  Brendan snorted and continued to type.

  “As if,” he said. “You handed me basic account credentials, all I had to do was go where it pointed me and use them to decrypt the data, which got me to the exit node. It finished downloading last night.”

  “Did you look at it?” Peter asked casually.

  “Yep,” Brendan said. He spun slowly around toward us. I noticed he was wearing the same clothes as the day before. “You know what it is?”

  “Not… exactly,” Peter said.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, you two have gotten yourselves into some interesting shit, that’s all I can say. What are you planning to do with it, if I may be so bold?”

  Peter looked at me.

  “I’m… we’re not sure,” I said. “My—my friend is the person you’re sending it to. She has plans for it.”

  “We’ll be taking a copy, as well,” Peter said in his level way.

  “Oh, you will? That’s neat. And your friend has plans for it. I can only imagine how much I don’t want to hear what those plans are.”

  “Have you already uploaded it to her server?”

  “Not yet. If you still want me to, it won’t take long.”

  “You want to do this?” Peter asked me quietly. I met his eyes, and saw regretful understanding in his face.

  “We want you to,” I said out loud, trying not to sound like the voice of doom I felt myself to be. “What other choice do we have?” I added to Peter.

  “Well…” he pondered, considering me before looking at Brendan. “I have an idea—but I’d like to see the files first.”

  “Be my guest, man,” Brendan said, pushing back from the desk and standing up. He stretched his long body and made way for Peter, who had walked over to join him, to sit down. “It’s all there…” he pointed to something on one of the monitors, and Peter leaned forward to study it. Brendan disappeared through another doorway and I heard the sound of clinking glass.

  I stayed where I was. I didn’t want to see. This felt a lot like sticking my head in the sand, however, and after a shamed minute I went to stand behind Peter and look over his shoulder. It wasn’t fair to put this burden on him. The least I could do was to share it.

  “Do you want to sit?”

  “No,” I said, resting my arms on his shoulders and scanning the document on the screen.

  It didn’t make much sense to me, this document or many of the others we saw. Out of more than thirty files in the open folder, there were at least twenty scanned PDFs in a language I didn’t recognize—not Spanish, so I guessed Portuguese, which made sense given that whatever it was had happened in Brazil. They looked legal, like contracts or laws—long outlines of articles and sub-articles, many of the pages with initials scrawled here and there.

  Eventually we came across something that wasn’t unintelligibly legal: a scanned page out of a notebook, which had words and numbers printed on it in a list, three words with three sets of numbers beside them. It looked to me like names and phone numbers. Two of the names were foreign—Espinheira, R and Perez, T, but the third was Anglo: Debrett, H + J.

  Now that we’d seen that name, Debrett, Peter pointed out that it was on nearly all of the legal documents, something I’d missed completely in the paragraphs of foreign text. Two people named Heidi and John Debrett, their names repeatedly listed along with the English words “Human Habitat Coalition,” had been involved in whatever this was. I had a strong suspicion who this “Heidi and John” might be.

  “You don’t happen to read Portuguese, do you?” Brendan asked from the doorway, holding three bottles of beer. He walked over and offered two of them to us. I straightened, stretching out the kink in my back, and accepted a bottle, as did Peter. It was barely ten in the morning, but then this was a vacation of sorts. The cold beer, som
e kind of local IPA, tasted good, settling into my stomach with a pleasant fizz.

  “No, do you?” Peter asked, after taking a sip.

  “No. I translated some of it. Looks like an investment scheme of some kind, to do with that habitat thing. Those three names were putting together a deal, but doesn’t look like it ended well. You didn’t get to the newspaper article, did you?”

  “Article?” Peter turned and quickly clicked through the file names, previewing as he went, finally stopping on one and opening it. This was a scanned article from a newspaper website, O Globo, printed from the online version rather than on newsprint. The headline had the word “homicídio” in it.

  “Roughly translated, it says a man was found dead in an apparent homicide. The police were investigating several leads. It’s dated two years ago.”

  Peter scanned down the text.

  “Raul Espinheira,” he read.

  “The dead dude. His partners were wanted for questioning—Tomas Perez and a couple of foreigners, names unknown.”

  “The Debretts,” I said, my throat suddenly dry.

  “Looks to me like you got yourselves a fat little conspiracy there,” Brendan commented, not seeming too disturbed by the idea. “Most of the rest of it’s more of the same—legal docs, and a couple of brochures for some kind of housing project in a depressed area—there, see? ‘Casas para os sem-teto,’ roughly ‘homes for the homeless,’ according to Google Translate. Looks like these guys were investors, or something.”

  This fit all too well with the kind of fraudulent schemes Marianne had described. The brochures, both colorful tri-folds with images of happy, nice-looking children with dark hair and large dark eyes and families standing joyfully in front of little bungalows, had been flattened and scanned, like everything else, but still came across as slick and glossy and quite convincing. They were both in Portuguese as well, but it was obvious that they advertised affordable housing projects.

  Brendon gave us a moment to absorb these before adding, “The only other scorcher is the passports.”

  At almost the exact moment he said this, Peter clicked the file and opened it. It was a color PDF of two scanned passports for Heidi Debrett and John Debrett, both ostensibly issued by Canada. The photos were of a late-middle-aged man and woman—the man clean-shaven with longish pepper-and-salt hair and glasses, the woman dark-haired with a stylish up-do. Neither had any distinguishing marks or features; they looking like average, well-to-do people in their sixties.

  The first two pages of the PDF were the passports. The second was a handwritten list of names—each appeared to be the name of a couple, a man and a woman. Wendy and Phillip DeVere. Jonathan and Sara Devlin. Paul and Lina Desano. Nan and Harry Dunn.

  “Aliases,” Brendan suggested.

  “Looks like it. Is this…?” Peter asked, scrolling back up to the passports and looking up at me.

  “Yeah. It’s them,” I confirmed. “They didn’t look like that the last time I saw them, but it was a while ago.”

  “You know these people?” Brendan asked, lounging against the desk behind me.

  “Not well,” I said shortly. “But yes, I’ve met them.”

  “Guessing those aren’t their real names.”

  “I doubt it—I knew them as Rosemary and Leonard DiGregorio.”

  My eyes briefly encountered Peter’s as Brendan said, “Ah.”

  I didn’t feel the need to mention that the woman was my step-aunt.

  ■ ■ ■

  “So what’s your idea?” I asked Peter, walking over to one of the armchairs and plopping into it, beer in hand. It was going down very fast and very smooth. Peter came to join me, sitting on the couch, while Brendan wandered around the room.

  “It’s probably a really bad idea,” Peter warned me.

  “Bad how?”

  “Dangerous… stupid… destined to fail.” He smiled ruefully, and I couldn’t help but smile back.

  “Let’s hear it,” Brendan said, taking the other armchair. “I love a good dangerous stupid idea.”

  “Can I tell him a little background?” Peter asked me, and I nodded. “Lola’s friend, Marianne, works for these people. They’re her biological parents, as a matter of fact, but we won’t hold that against her. From what she told us, they’re behind a lot of crime abroad—fraud, mostly, using the humanitarian angle as their cover, and some more violent crimes like murder. Marianne wants to get out, and managed to get her hands on these documents—some source or stash her parents missed when the scheme went south—which she plans to use as leverage. She’s going to show them she’s got this evidence and try to make a deal.”

  Peter drank a long sip from his beer before he continued. Brendan waited, fingers busy peeling bits of the label off his bottle, eyes skimming the room.

  “I’ve become convinced—I think Lola is, too—that it’s not going to work. Marianne’s going to tell her—employers—that she has this evidence, and they’re going to kill her the first chance they get.”

  I had to swallow hard to manage to get out a murmured “Yeah.” It was what I’d believed for almost an hour, but was still hard to hear it said out loud in such a matter-of-fact way.

  “We can’t stop Marianne from going forward with this, and we can’t help her once she does. So I was thinking… what if we take matters into our own hands? Send the evidence to Interpol—the FBI—the police—the whole goddamn lot of them—and give Marianne a chance to run, if that’s what she wants.”

  I looked at him in surprise.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “It would be the responsible thing to do, turning it over to the cops,” Brendan acknowledged.

  “I can’t help thinking there’s no other way to stop them—our best bet is to get them into custody. Marianne has a fighting chance that way—so does everyone involved,” Peter explained, with slight emphasis on the “everyone.” Meaning me. If they wanted to retaliate against their daughter, there’d be no better way than to track me down and take me out.

  “Yeah, but these are slick customers, man,” Brendan protested mildly. “I’m sure they’ve ditched these names and buried themselves behind new ones. Interpol’s probably been looking for them for years.”

  “Well… That’s the other part of my idea,” Peter confessed. “We set up a trap for them, with Marianne—and the evidence—as bait.”

  We stared at him.

  “Definitely stupid, and probably destined to fail,” was Brendan’s opinion, after a moment of consideration.

  “How?” I wondered. My brain didn’t seem to be processing things clearly. Maybe it was the beer, which I’d finished. I did feel slightly fuzzy, which wasn’t unpleasant. I just couldn’t seem to connect all the conversational dots without extra help drawing the lines. “How would we set a trap? Why would they fall for it?”

  Peter finished his beer before answering, and as I watched him set down the bottle on the nearest table, I realized that this must be really hard for him. He wasn’t even involved in this mess, and here he was trying his damnedest to think of a way out of it. He didn’t want to scare me more than I already was, he didn’t want to involve Brendan any more than he already had, but at this point he had to push forward anyway. I reached out and took his fingers, squeezing reassuringly, and he squeezed back.

  “We use what we already know—what Marianne told us about them. She said that they’re monitoring your accounts—credit card, email, social media, whatever they’ve been able to hack into. We know they can trace your credit card because they found us in New York. So, we use that to our advantage. We book plane tickets and hotels, fire off emails and log into anything and everything, sending them to a certain place and time that we’ll supposedly be meeting up with Marianne to get the evidence from her—or a contact of hers.”

  “Waving a red flag in front of the bull,” Brendan said, getting up and walking into the kitchen.

  “Would they buy it?” I wondered.

  “They might,” Peter s
aid. “They don’t know you know anything concrete—and even if it occurred to them to be wary it might be too tempting not to come check it out. I don’t know that they could afford to ignore it, even if they didn’t buy it.”

  “But… where would we go? Back to New York?”

  “Maybe… It’s possible you could have left town and come back again in a few days. But I think it makes more sense to do it somewhere else. Somewhere that might seem safer to you, since it’s not far from where you grew up. Remember she said that her parents had a West Coast base in San Francisco? I don’t know anything about them, but I bet they’d be more inclined to show if they felt they were on familiar turf. Otherwise I’d suggest we do it here.”

  He’d really thought this through. I still couldn’t grasp the whole plan, so waited for him to explain further.

  “You think they’d come themselves?” Brendan called from the kitchen.

  Peter rubbed his eyes and dropped his hands to his lap.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I just don’t think there’s anyone else they’d trust to send. Marianne said they only really trust each other, right? Worst case, only one of them shows up—but that’s better than nothing.”

  “How’d you plan on letting our friends in law enforcement know about this little sting?” Brendan asked, returning with another round.

  “I was going to ask you about that…”

  “Oh, swell.”

  “Would there be a way to get it to them through the darknet?”

  Brendan, after handing us each a bottle, took a thoughtful swig.

  “That’s a thought,” he said. “Especially if you don’t want them to know who sent it, which is what I’d recommend.”

  “I’d like to keep our options open. I don’t know much about how it works, though. Do you, Lola?”