Kids’ cartoons are weird anymore. Why is there a squirrel with a diving helmet?
Or I could find out something about this Burt.
I head into the garage. I moved all the shit out of the way so I could pull the Impala inside this afternoon, and it’s a good thing. The rain has just started.
The room has a musty smell, and all the house junk is exposed, the guts of the heater and air conditioner and the water heater or whatever. In the corner I’ve set up my computer, some workbenches, and a safe.
I’m playing it cool with the gear—nothing illegal in my safe. I’m keeping that elsewhere in case I need it. Not like that’s my greatest worry or anything, I mean, if I get caught I’m going up the river no matter what I do.
At the computer, I get ready to go fishing. First I check the security of the connection—I don’t use Windows or Macintosh but a form of Linux that’s built from the ground up for security. Everything stored on my hard drive is encrypted; I’ll spare you the gory details, but it would take every computer on Earth running day and night using all the electricity in the world a thousand years to crack my files.
More importantly, I access the Internet through a proxy system called onion routing, over a secured private network. It’s not perfect but with a little extra caution I’m virtually undetectable as I do my research.
Unfortunately it’s slow as hell, and while it takes its sweet-ass time to load, I put on a pot of coffee and pace around the room. I should work out. I have all the equipment I need, it’s just a matter of setting it up, but I’m stiff as hell and I have to watch out for these damned stitches.
When the goddamn thing loads, I type in the dentist’s name.
Burt Simonson, DDS.
A frightening array of information becomes available to me almost immediately. Almost, because it takes five minutes to load.
Somewhere Burt should be feeling a goose walk across his grave. A contract killer is gathering a dossier on him.
I’m not going to kill him.
I just want to talk about how he treats his employees, and how he looks at little girls.
I have a…thing about people who hurt little girls.
After a few sips of coffee, the information loads, and it’s amazingly boring. He has a great credit score, married, two kids, lives near Rose but not in her neighborhood, owns a Buick SUV, a BMW sedan, and just bought that Benz I saw him driving this afternoon.
I wonder if his wife knows he’s fucking the barely legal receptionist at his office and trying to put the moves on the milf.
Stop thinking of her as a milf, Quentin.
This isn’t enough.I need more.
So I head to the information market.
What’s available for free on the Internet is scary. What can be dug up by an expert in systems and social engineering is fucking terrifying. I put out the call and start taking bids. Everything is paid for in cryptocurrency—secure and virtually untraceable. It’s going to take a while before I get enough bites, but it should be fairly easy and cheap. I’m not looking for details on a senator or something here. He’s just some guy.
It’s seven o’clock already. I pick Rose up at nine. First I take meticulous care to properly shut everything off, closing my connection and giving the computer enough time to encrypt and dump the 256-bit keys from the RAM. If someone busted into the house right now they’d have about six minutes to get the computer’s memory chips into liquid nitrogen and try to extract the keys the computer uses to solve an insanely complex equation, and access my data.
At ten minutes after seven I slip into the car and pull out in a light drizzle, the rain having subsided a bit. On my passenger’s seat is a sticky pad with some relevant info about my new best friend, Burt.
First off we’re going to check out his house.
It’s a short drive, but I’m not getting into his neighborhood just by rolling up to the gate. All of these places have a guard at the front entrance, it’s so fucking weird. What’s so important that they have to pay some guy to sit out front and eye fuck everybody driving in? Besides, it’s not like they’re securing anything. I haven’t been challenged once and even if I was all I’d have to do is park the car and walk right in.
That’s what I do now. I park off the road and walk through the trees. Problem is they just cut off where the neighborhood starts; they must have bulldozed everything when they started building the place. No cover.
Fortunately for me, Burt must have paid extra for a house on a cul-de-sac, backing up to the woods. Perfect. I circle around the whole way, watching for someone to spot me. They all have these huge backyards, but no one in them. There are barbecue grills and hot tubs, all sitting there lonely and empty.