Dark Places

21. Demon Princes

I didn't know what to do. I wanted to call Talena and talk to her. At the same time I didn't want to talk to anyone, didn't want to ever have any contact with that repugnant animal called homo sapiens ever again. Move to Tibet and find a cave in the Himalaya and sit there forever. That was what I really wanted.
   I went out to get a very late breakfast. I got to the Pork Store half an hour before it closed. Best breakfast in the city but that day it might as well have been cardboard. I must have looked like hell, and I was muttering to myself, and the waitress gave me a wide berth and rushed to give me the check. I must have looked pretty weird and disturbing even for the Upper Haight, and that's saying something.
   The food helped me pull myself together. I went back to my apartment and turned the computer back on and went back to The Bull. Forcing myself to be analytical, investigative. To save every speck of data I could find on the site and then hunt through it to find out whatever I could.
   The bulletin board was only available to qualified users. I didn't try to register or add an entry. That left me with just the FAQ and the logs. I read through every single entry, starting in chronological order, making notes in a Notepad file as I went through.
   NumberOne was responsible for 13 entries. NumberTwo was responsible for 21, but hadn't made an entry in the last six months. NumberThree had done 10. NumberFour, Morgan, was responsible for seven. NumberFive had six entries, all Thai prostitutes.
   The total number of reported deaths was 57, although several entries, particularly from NumberTwo, were considered questionable and got few if any substance points. Fifty-seven murders. These five madmen had killed fifty-seven people over the last five years, and it looked like I was the first person to discover them.
   They had begun by killing locals. For the first couple of years they went to Third World countries and murdered poor helpless poverty-stricken natives. The majority of victims were still locals. But in the last couple of years they had moved to killing travelers in a big way. Partly for style points and partly because they were easier to corroborate. NumberTwo, in particular, lamented how difficult it was to get outside media to verify that you had murdered some street kid in Calcutta. But travelers were still a minority, a mere eighteen of the 57 victims were citizens of First World countries.
   I tried to extrapolate personalities from comments. NumberOne, presumably the original Bull, that Usenet "Taurus," was patronizing, full of himself, and used flowery words. NumberThree was much the same. NumberTwo didn't make comments very often, and when he did, used slang. NumberFour, Morgan, stuck to commenting on the difficulty of each entry. NumberFive appeared to be the odd one out, a sexual sadist who didn't have the command of the language that the others did, who often seemed a little defensive and didn't get along with the others. I got the sense they regretted that they had recruited him.
   Details of the appropriate recruitment technique were restricted to qualified users only. I wondered how it worked. Had any of these five ever met face-to-face? I doubted it. At least not until they were very confident in one another. Far too dangerous. So what was this technique? How did you safely bring a new member to The Bull?
   I guessed it worked the same day online child-porn rings worked. As repulsive as The Bull, but far more common if the newspapers were any guide. Your target market consists of the people hunting in the deepest, darkest, ickiest, most disturbing corners of the Net, the most loathsome hardcore porn sites, most unspeakable Usenet rape fantasies, the sick underworld of faked snuff films and elaborately documented torture fiction. They looked for users who contributed — anonymously, of course — to these sites. I guessed they wanted people who seemed homicidally fucked up but in a cold controlled way, although it looked like they had misjudged with NumberFive at least. Then they talked to them on an anonymous IRC chat line or a secure instant messaging connection, talked to them regularly until they thought they knew and understood the potential recruit, and if they passed muster, then they popped the question — invited the recruit to join The Bull.
   That IRC fragment I'd dug up, that must have been from one of those recruiting sessions, there must have been someone else online that NumberTwo and NumberThree were talking to. Maybe it was Morgan Jackson.
   I went back to the site and looked at it more carefully, doing a technical analysis. It was a Microsoft FrontPage/ASP-powered site; the .asp filenames and HTML source for the pages confirmed that. The media files were stored on the site, but the links to corroborating data were URLs to the newspaper or other sites in question.
   It was the work of a developer who knew a lot less than he thought he did. A semicompetent ASP programmer who thought that he understood how the Web worked and he had guaranteed security and anonymity on his site. Very wrong. First of all, he had neglected to warn his users to wipe the cookie files on client machines. Second, he was using an unencrypted login. Third, they had that simple "taurus" username/password combination for guests, where they should have an unintelligible mix of numbers and mixed-case letters.
   Fourth, and potentially most dangerous to them, were the links to corroborating data. Every time you click on a link in the Web, the site you go to may log not just the IP number of your machine, aka the client address, but the IP number of the site whose link you clicked on, aka the referring address. Which meant that there were web logs out there with entries that had The Bull's IP number as the referring address, one entry for each time that a user of The Bull had clicked on that link — and each of those entries also held the client address, the IP number of the machine utilized by The Bull's user at the time.
   In fact one of those web logs was the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree. My own account of Stanley Goebel's death had been used as corroborating evidence so Morgan could get his precious deadpool points. I couldn't remember if Lonely Planet logged the referring address or not. If they did, I could look them up, find out what computers the other users of The Bull had used to read that corroborating evidence.
   But the rule that The Bull should only be accessed from a public terminal was sound and alleviated a lot of their risk. If they had followed it. Rules are meant to be broken. Morgan had broken one of The Bull's rules, he had gotten fancy, he had had a conversation with me on The Thorn Tree. And he had begun his career by breaking another, by killing someone he knew socially. I wondered how he could have hated Laura so much. I wondered how anyone could have hated Laura.
   It occurred to me as I logged off that I had just left my traces on The Bull. Like Heisenberg said, the observer affects the observed. I had not gone through Anonymizer or SafeWeb or Zero-Knowledge; so I had left my own IP number in The Bull's web logs. And cable modems have fixed IP numbers. It was possible — difficult, unlikely, but possible — to determine my name and address once given that IP number. I might have just opened a path for The Bull to get to me.
   For a moment I felt frightened. Then I realized that Morgan already knew my address. Last year when I moved in I had sent out a mass e-mail to all my friends and relatives and fellow Africa truckers. If he wanted to come get me, he knew where I lived. But I didn't think he was going to. I thought he was certain I was harmless.
   I intended to show him he was dead wrong.
   I went for a walk because my apartment seemed claustrophobic again. Maybe I shouldn't renew the lease after all. I was beginning to associate it with horrific discoveries. I walked all the way down Haight Street to Market and then I turned around and walked back again, chewing the facts I had discovered, trying to smooth them into a digestible mass.
   Then I called Talena.
   "Hello?" she answered.
   "Hi. It's Paul."
   "Oh. Hi." She waited expectantly. I think she thought I had called to apologize.
   "Listen. There's something you should see."
   "What's that?"
   "Do you have two phone lines?"
   "What? No."
   "Okay. I'm going to give you an IP number, a login, and a password, and you should go there and read what you find."
   "Paul," she said, "does this have anything to do with The Bull?"
   "This has everything to do with The Bull."
   "Paul, stop. I mean it. Get it out of your head. I'm not getting involved any more."
   I almost started arguing furiously but I thought of a more cunning tactic. "Okay. I understand that. And to be honest you probably don't want to read this. It's the most disturbing thing I've ever seen. But I felt, you know, I should at least call you and try to tell you about it."
   There was a silence. Then she sighed, long and loud, and said "Tell me."
   "I will. But first of all, and this is the important thing, is you want to go through SafeWeb. SafeWeb-dot-com. Enter the IP number into the address field on its home page."
   "Or the Men In Black will find me and kill me?" she asked sarcastically.
   "It's a distant but distinct possibility."
   "Uh-huh. All righty then. What's the number?"
   I told her, and added the login and password.
   "Taurus? The sign of the bull?… what is this?"
   "You wouldn't believe me if I told you," I said. "You'll have to look at it yourself. Call me back after you've had a look."
   "I'll call you back," she said, and she sounded worried.
   We said goodbyes and hung up. I thought about calling Agent Turner, she'd given us her card before we left, but decided to wait to talk to Talena. Maybe it was best not to talk to Agent Turner. If we were going to talk to anyone at this point, it should be the media. CNN and MSNBC and The New York Times and England's Guardian and France's Le Monde and all the big international papers. Let them break this story.
   But what would that do? What would that really accomplish? Probably nothing. Which of those five would be put beyond harming anyone again? Probably none of them. It might scare them a little, might make them cool down for a few months. But the media had the collective memory of a gnat. Another year and stories about The Bull would be in the Whatever Happened To… ? category.
   The harsh truth was that nobody would do anything unless I did something.
   I went back to my computer and went back to The Bull's site. I wanted to get all the data off it. I had all the text, but I wanted all the pictures, all the digital media, all the grotesque unwatchable stuff, as evidence. Thankfully cable modems are fast as hell. It only took half an hour to get the hundred or so files. I zipped them into a single file but they wouldn't fit in my Yahoo Briefcase, so I bought one year of a five-hundred meg XDrive.com partition on the spot and put it there. Pricey but I wanted offsite backup. This was critical evidence.
   I thought about registering The Bull's site with Yahoo or Google, flooding them with traffic from every headcase who searched for words like "evisceration" on the Net, but while this would be a petty form of justice it would probably just make them move to a fallback location and alert them that their cover had been at least partially blown.
   I was composing my dead-man-switch letter to the world's media organizations when Talena called me back.
   "Paul?" She was almost whispering.
   "Yeah."
   "This is some sick shit."
   "Yeah."
   "What are you going to do?"
   "What makes you think I'm going to do anything?" I asked, trying for an innocent tone.
   "Paul."
   "Okay," I said. And I told her my plan.
   She didn't seem impressed. But I was past caring. While writing my To Whom It May Concern letter, documenting down all the facts of the situation in cold impersonal prose, I had felt that cold fury well up inside me again. Twice as intense as before. It made me feel strong, and I didn't think it was going to go away this time. I promised myself it wouldn't. I promised myself there would be no repeat of that moment I had whimpered and cringed before Morgan Jackson.
   I wrote the letter as simply and clearly as possible, the way I'd written my Thorn Tree post, but this time I left nothing out. I included a pointer to the complete contents of The Bull's site on my XDrive account, and the login and password required to access those contents. I cc'd the major newspapers in as many First World countries as I could find, and added Agent Turner's contact details. No doubt she would thank me for that.
   Then I configured my Yahoo Calendar account to send that e-mail one month from today, and again two months from today. That way if even if my plan went utterly wrong, in the worst way, and even if Talena walked in front of a bus, everything I had found out would still get out. I was being unnecessarily paranoid, I knew. After all the first step in my plan was to tell every detail to several more people. But I didn't want to take any chances that might benefit those five fuckers who played at the game they called The Bull.
   Five serial killers, awarding one another style plaudits over the Internet. It was like hotornot.com for murderers. I mentally christened them The Demon Princes, after a surprisingly memorable sci-fi series I had once read about a man who hunts down the five arch-criminals who killed his parents. I wasn't going to be as obsessive and ruthless as Kirth Gersen, the protagonist of those books, who had lived for nothing else except hunting down and killing each of the five in turn. Not quite as obsessive. I was only after one of them.
   By now it was a blood oath. One way or another Morgan Jackson was going down. And now I thought I knew the way. I had a plan. It felt like a good plan. It felt right. It felt appropriate that this ended where it began.
   Africa.