Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

Braque laid the metal shard back on the table and blinked the grit from stinging eyes. Her interest was piqued, despite her fatigue.

Duran was watching her carefully. ‘Been up all night?’

She nodded.

‘Me too.’

She looked at him very directly. ‘So if you wanted to hire this guy to build a bomb for you, how would you contact him?’

Duran shrugged. ‘On the Dark Web, I suppose. But I’m no expert on that.’ He paused. Then, ‘One other thing.’ He led her across to another table and lifted a blackened object that was still clearly identifiable as a handgun. ‘We also recovered this from the vehicle. An illegal weapon, serial number erased. But it is a Makarov 9×18 millimetre pistol, widely used by Russian police, military and security forces.’ He turned it over to reveal areas which had been cleaned off and tested for prints. ‘We have no idea who owned it, but it has Georgy Vetrov’s fingerprints all over it.’

Marc Bouquand’s workspace simmered in permanent darkness, illuminated only by the screens lined up along his desk. He ushered Braque in from a brightly lit corridor and it took some seconds for her eyes to adapt to the change. The wall above the desk was lined with shelves groaning with electronic equipment that winked green and red lights in the dark, and spewed cables in snaking sheaths the thickness of her forearm to junction boxes fixed to the wall below his worktop.

Bouquand was on attachment to the Police Judiciaire from ANSSI, the Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information, the French network and information security agency. He wore jeans torn at the knees, a T-shirt with the logo A little radiation brightens my day , and looked about twelve years old. But he was, Braque noticed, older than he seemed, the beginnings of grey creeping in at the temples around his shock of self-consciously permed and probably dyed auburn air.

‘The Dark Web is not really dark at all, Lieutenant,’ he was saying. ‘It’s not even that secret.’ He pulled out a seat on castors for her, and slumped into his own state-of-the-art computer chair, swivelling to face her, and swinging one leg up over the other as he leaned back. ‘It’s just a collection of websites that are publicly visible, but hide the IP addresses of the servers that run them.’

‘Which means what?’ Braque was only barely competent when it came to actually using computers, and so this kind of thing was well beyond her.

‘That anyone can visit a Dark Web site, but would find it impossible to figure out where it was hosted, or by whom.’

He swivelled towards his desk to pull a keyboard towards him, and his fingers rattled quickly across the keys. A screenshot of a website called Silk Road filled one of his screens.

‘This, for example, is a dead site. It used to be one of the biggest Darknet markets for trading in illegal drugs, until the guy who founded it, Ross William Ulbricht, also known as Dread Pirate Roberts, got himself arrested and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It had a kind of weird morality, though, banning stuff like child pornography, assassinations, weapons, that sort of thing. So other sites, like Black Market Reloaded, sprang up to fill the gap.’ His fingers did more spidering across the keys to bring up a black page titled Killer Network in red, above a photograph of a man’s face with a gun held against his cheek. Services offered included killing a target in the USA or Canada for 10,000USD, or one in Europe for 12,000USD. The young man grinned. ‘Of course, who knows if it is genuine or not?’

Braque was shocked. ‘How can you just access sites like these?’

Bouquand shrugged as if it were a stupid question. ‘You could, too, Lieutenant. With the right browser. Most Dark Web sites use the anonymity software Tor. You can download it from your computer at home. Anyone can. Then you have free access to virtually any site on the Dark Web. Tor encrypts web traffic in layers and bounces it through randomly picked computers around the world. Each of those removes a single layer of encryption before passing the data on to its next jumping-off point on the network. In theory that stops anyone being able to match the origin of the traffic with its destination, even the people who control the computers in the encrypted chain. So you can conduct any kind of business you like in complete anonymity.’

Braque dragged her eyes away from the screen to focus on Bouquand. ‘You said in theory .’

He laughed. ‘Well, of course, theory and practice are two different things. The FBI have cracked quite a few of those Tor hidden services, which is why Monsieur Ulbricht is now languishing in jail. And much of what we’ve been doing recently at ANSSI is hacking into sites being used by terrorists to buy and sell weapons and trade information. But it’s not that easy.’

‘And suppose I wanted to hire a hitman, or someone to build me a bomb, how easy would that be?’

‘Well, there are people out there advertising their services. You could make contact easily enough, but they would be almost impossible to track down if you wanted to find them. In person, that is.’

‘And how would I pay?’

Bouquand turned back to his computer and pulled up a website called BitBear . ‘You’d go to a site like this and buy Bitcoins.’

Braque had heard of bitcoins, but had no idea what they were.

‘It’s a kind of virtual currency,’ Bouquand explained. ‘Again, anyone can buy them, and you can pay for services, from anyone who accepts them, in absolute secure anonymity. You really don’t need to be a computer guru to buy and sell services anonymously on the Dark Web.’

Braque thought about it for a moment, then asked, ‘What about the email we sent you?’

‘What about it?’

‘Are you able to say who sent it?’

Bouquand shook his head. ‘No. The address is a simple generic g-mail address. It could belong to anyone. The question to ask is where it was sent from.’

‘Well, where was it sent from?’

He turned back to his keyboard, and brought up a document filled with tiny text, on yet another screen. Most of it seemed to Braque entirely incomprehensible. ‘This is the raw source code of that email,’ he said. ‘But the IP address listed is not the address the email came from. The real address has been disguised, concealed by the sender. The email itself will have been rerouted many times over. A little like a Dark Web site. Bouncing around from server to server.’

Braque was disappointed. ‘Untraceable then?’

Bouquand pulled a coy little smile. ‘Well, not necessarily. No guarantees, but given a bit of time I might just be able to pin down a real location for you.’

Awareness came slowly. As if through a thick fog. The light seemed distant at first, then grew brighter, tinted red through the blood in her eyelids. Until they flickered open and sunlight falling through the window nearly blinded her. She screwed her eyes tight shut again and rolled on to her back, reaching across the bed to touch him as she always did first thing. But he wasn’t there, and the memory of events that sleep had stolen from consciousness returned like the pain of a raw, open wound.

She sat bolt upright, sleep banished in a moment, and wondered how she could have slept at all. She was on the bed, not in it. Had lain down sometime not long before dawn, still fully dressed, just to close her eyes. And sleep had taken her. To a place where Ruairidh still lived. In her dream they had been walking hand in hand together along the shore, wind tugging at their hair and their clothes, and he had been telling her about some new pattern, something unique, a blend of colours never seen before. And she wished with all her heart that she could simply have stayed there, in her dream, and never woken up.