The Killing League

15.

The Commissioner

The man strapped into the fishing chair of the seventy-two foot Hatteras sportfishing boat was known to the Internet hacking community as Millipede. He’d earned the nickname from his own spyware program, one of the first of its kind that had an amazing ability to grow millions of “legs” and scurry from one secure server to another, undetected.

The legend known as Millipede was tied to the fishing chair with thick cords, his eyes were wide, and the strip of duct tape across his mouth held firm against his screams.

The man who called himself The Commissioner looked at his captive. He was amused by Millipede (whose real name he knew to be Keith Goulet) because even though the man was in his forties, he dressed like a high school burnout; he had on dirty black pants and a stained Metallica t-shirt. He was barefoot.

They were just off the coast of California. The Commissioner turned from the bound hacker and poured buckets of blood and fish guts over the side of the boat into the sapphire blue of the ocean.

Already, he had seen at least one Great White shark cruise by.

“Carcharodon carcharias,” he said over his shoulder. “Very impressive, aren’t they?”

The hacker lunged against his restraints and screamed into the tape which turned his terror into a series of muffled gibberish.

The Commissioner ignored him and tossed the last of the bloody chum into the water. Something in the churning water thrashed and foam sprayed the side of the boat.

The Commissioner walked into the boat’s forward cabin and returned with a small medical kit. He opened it and took out a scalpel. The sunlight caught the knife’s laser sharp edge and flashed in the lenses of his mirrored aviator sunglasses.

He stood in front of his prey.

“When I was a kid I loved to fish,” he said. He smiled and his teeth were a brilliant white. “There was something so elegant about it. The art of the presentation. The idea of a human being, the most intelligent creature on the planet, trying to think like a fish. And outsmart it. So silly, yet so intriguing.”

He reached forward and with the scalpel sliced the man’s t-shirt down the middle, then pulled it off his body. The hacker’s eyes were wide and filled with tears that ran down his face, glistening when they hit the duct tape.

“Have you ever gone fishing before?” The Commissioner asked as he put the scalpel back in the medical kit. The hacker shook his head.

“Ah, well, this may not be the experience to use as criteria for your opinion of the sport.”

The Commissioner sighed. “Of course, you were sort of fishing when you snooped around the servers at CPAC, weren’t you?” CPAC stood for California Programming and Computing, a state-run facility used by select members of certain communities who needed the power of a supercomputer for various activities.

“Mmmmphhh, mmmpphhh!” the man urged behind the duct tape.

“You really didn’t get close,” The Commissioner said. “But you got close enough. And you know that expression ‘never bullshit a bullshitter?’ Same goes for hacking. Never hack a hacker. Especially one much more talented than you.”

The Commissioner walked back to the captain’s quarters and returned with a large treble hook, attached to a thick rope. He set the hook on the deck, next to the fishing chair.

He picked up the scalpel.

“This should be very interesting,” he said. He placed the scalpel’s point just above the man’s belly button, and pressed. Blood immediately ran from the wound and the hacker strained against his restraints, screaming into the duct tape.

The Commissioner reached inside the incision, and pulled out a small section of the man’s intestine.

“What’s so interesting to me is that the small intestine is about twenty feet long.” He reached down, picked up the treble hook, and impaled the section of small intestine on the barbed point of the hook. He pulled out more intestine, and wound it around the hook, stabbing the point of the hook through the intestine several times.

“So how much do you think we’ll have to feed out before we hook one of these big boys?”

The hacker had passed out, so the Commissioner retrieved a smelling salt from the medical kit and brought him back to consciousness.

Once the man’s eyes were open the Commissioner pulled the hook toward the stern of the boat.

“Fishing is so relaxing!” he said, and tossed the hook into the water. There was an immediate eruption of water and the intestine pulled from the hacker’s body with astonishing speed.

“We got one!” the Commissioner called out as intestine sped from the man’s body like an extension cord being reeled back in. The rope leapt from the deck and fed out with the intestine, hissing as it went over the boat’s transom.

The hacker looked down, saw the rope was tied around his waist and through his legs in a “Y” pattern.

The rope sizzled and the Commissioner used the scalpel to slash the cords holding the man to the chair. Immediately, the hacker was yanked from the chair, over the boat’s stern and into the water.

The Commissioner watched as the body became the centerpiece of a feeding frenzy. When the best of it was over he turned back to the deck and began hosing off the blood, whistling as he worked. He would be meticulous as always, eliminating any traces of the hacker. But he wasn’t worried. He had no ties at all to him, other than the security breach that no one else knew about. And never would.

No, he would take his time cleaning up and then he would return to the thing that mattered more to him than anything had ever mattered before.

The Killing League.