“I wasn’t sure about you at first, intern, but you’re pretty okay.”
“Thanks. That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t get used to it,” she says. “I have a policy of giving out no more than one compliment per decade.”
“Oh, here’s one last nugget. The guy who built the building. Samuel Fromm. He was a known associate of Aleister Crowley.”
Night has fallen. Lela goes to the bedroom window and pulls aside the shade and stares out into the dark nothing of the backyard. “Why do I know that name?”
“The wickedest man in the world? Occultist? Practitioner of black magick? Come on, Lela. You really need to spend more time on Wikipedia.”
The bedroom door shudders in its frame and she opens it, and Hemingway pushes inside and nudges her with his cold wet nose and whines.
“All signs point to creepy. What about Undertown?”
“They seemed legit at first.”
“At first?” she says.
“Yeah, at first. They’re like a junior version of MongoDB. Obviously you don’t know what that is. They’re one of the biggest names in Internet databases. Storage centers for all web content and the junk people send and receive online. Undertown is a start-up competitor. They’re also in the business of tracking and ad serving.”
“But?”
“But I found a few sketchy news items recently. Out of Europe and on Al Jazeera. Database sharing of personal information. Undertown was housing data for some hospitals and insurance companies, and then allowing others to access the information for a fee. I didn’t have time to translate most of what I found, but it looks like they’ve got a lot of real estate on the Dark Net.”
“What’s the Dark Net?”
He tells her about the Deep Net, which is hundreds of times the size of the surface Internet, all the information that is unlisted, unsearchable, much of it legit, academic and government and military databases. The Dark Net is like the basement of the Deep Net. Mail-order drugs, weapons trafficking, human smuggling, terrorist communications, spy communications, insider trading, intellectual property theft, death porn, and kiddie porn. “Anything nasty or forbidden. Anything people don’t want other people knowing about. It’s the red-light district, it’s the torture chamber, it’s digital hell.”
Hemingway sniffs her butt and worms between her legs, and she shoos him away. “Do you need some sort of secret invitation or something? How do you get on to this thing?”
“It’s easy actually. You just—”
“You mean, you’ve been there? I thought you said it was only for underworld weirdos.”
“You have to wonder about somebody’s motives for being there, but there’s a contingent of normals too. Lots of journalists actually. Anyone looking for dirt but especially overseas correspondents. Bloggers too. People who worry about censorship. People who worry that if their location or identity gets leaked, they might end up killed or tortured or imprisoned. And then there are the nerds. Bitcoin traders and gamers and such. That’s why I go on there. For the free songs and movies.”
“Free as in you steal them?”
His voice cracks when he says, “I’m a poor college student working as an unpaid intern. I get a hall pass.”
“Go on.”
He explains that normally, when you’re accessing a website, you’re trafficked through multiple routers to get to a server. But the path is traceable. On the Dark Net, those routers would be masked and the URLs wouldn’t even be traceroute-able. “You’re no one.” The standard browser and network is available through TOR, and the websites are seemingly random strings of symbols capped by .onion. “Like kyxt5ww37e9ryb.onion or 7zh42mtc4n2n2.onion. It’s not like shopping on Amazon or browsing Huffington Post. Most of the websites look garage-made. Message boards and indexes, junk heaps of posts, links, files. Stolen PayPal accounts for sale, fake IDs for sale, movies for sale, people for sale. It’s hard to say how many people are down there. Some say four hundred thousand, some say a million. You’re off the grid—in an unfiltered, unmoderated, many-layered netherworld—and because of this you’re nearly impossible to police. It’s a maze of anonymity. And probably the majority of stuff going on down there is put-you-in-prison-for-a-long-time illegal.”
Hemingway whines again, this time swiveling his head toward the hallway.
“Hold on a sec,” she says.
But Josh doesn’t seem to hear her. “You might want to be careful if you’re looking for dirt on these guys. This could be some serious—”
She pulls the phone away from her ear, and his voice trails off to a garble. She hears something then. Not in the kitchen, where her sister putters around, but from deep in the house, what could be a footstep thudding or a cupboard door closing or a book toppling over on a shelf.
She rests the phone against her breast. Hemingway now creeps toward the hallway, his tail tucked and his body arrow-straight. The dog’s hackles rise and a guttural rumble issues from his chest.
Chapter 15
LELA DOES NOT SILENCE Hemingway, and does not call out for her sister, but tiptoes down the hall. At the threshold of Hannah’s bedroom, she pauses, not wanting to step inside and flip on the light, not wanting to look. If she doesn’t look, she can go on pretending that this night will be different from the last. She can remember all those other occasions when she investigated a noise and it turned out to be nothing.
She nudges the light switch. And sees the man, black-bearded and block-bodied, from the construction site. And from the woods behind Benedikt’s, according to her sister’s story. He is hunched over, with one leg planted on the floor and one arm steadying the tableside lamp he must have knocked into—while the other half of his body remains outside, lost to darkness.
Once he sees her, he pulls himself fully into the bedroom and stands upright. He is the same height as she, but far broader, with a short muscular neck that upswells from his shoulders. His beard grows too far up his cheeks, the black hairs like so many bristling fly legs.
For a finger snap, she knows nothing, just the vacancy of panic. Then Hemingway’s growl rolls into a snarl that crashes apart into spittle-flecked barking. Beside the dog, she feels a little stronger. Her hand goes to the first thing within reach. A book. Through the Looking-Glass, the Braille edition. She hurls it. It opens up midair with a flutter before the man knocks it aside. She grabs another book, then another, pitching them overhand—and the man slashes his arms in defense. When there are no more books, she throws knickknacks, a glass bauble, a yellow agate, a clock that splits his eyebrow. He curses her in a rough-edged language she does not recognize and then stomps around the canopy bed and crosses the ten feet of space that separates them.