Lee Child - Make Me

Reacher said, “I’m sure it varies.”

“You better hope I’m one who doesn’t. Because a reasonable interpretation of what Ms. Chang just told me is you committed four homicides today.”

“One of them twice,” Reacher said.

“Not funny.”

“Feel free to go home whenever you want. They’re your book rights, not mine. Someone else can pick over the story after it happens.”

“Is there a story?”

“There are only three parts we’re not sure about.”

“Which are?”

“The beginning, the middle, and the end.”

Westwood was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “I heard the name Merchenko before. Back when I was working on the Deep Web piece. Allegedly he offered a menu of services. He would guarantee invisibility for your web site, and he would handle problems if they arose. It was like a subscription thing. The Ukrainians were into on-line stuff early. I didn’t write about him in the paper because nothing was proved. Legal wouldn’t let me.”

“How many clients did Merchenko have?”

“People said ten, or thereabouts. Kind of boutique.”

“That guy wasn’t boutique. He wouldn’t know boutique if it ran up and bit him on his fat ankle. He had a strip club bigger than Dodger Stadium. It was pink and covered in balloons. He liked excess. He liked volume.”

“Ten is what I heard.”

“Then the volume must have come from revenue. Those ten clients must have been earning a fortune.”

“Possible,” Westwood said. “The Deep Web could be five hundred times bigger than the surface web. Very little of it makes money, I imagine, but very little of it needs to, in a universe that large. To earn a fortune overall, I mean.”

Chang said, “Has the government built a search engine capable of seeing the Deep Web?”

Westwood said, “No.”

“That was what McCann was calling about.”

“Then he was asking the wrong question. Or the right question the wrong way. I start to tune out when a caller talks about the government. Like a litmus test for common sense. I mean, who builds search engines? Software writers, that’s who. Coders. A tough project needs the best coders, and the best coders are rock stars now. They have agents and managers. They get paid a lot of money. The government can’t afford them. The alternative is kids. Rock stars still in their hungry years. But the government doesn’t hire them either. Too far outside its playbook. Those kids are weird.”

“What would have been the right question the right way?”

“He should have looked at Silicon Valley, not the government.”

“Has someone in Silicon Valley built a search engine capable of seeing the Deep Web?”

Westwood said, “No.”

“McCann felt there was a hint in your piece.”

“I asked what the motivation would be, for one of the big guys like Google. Which is not obvious. It would help law enforcement, but there’s no money to be made. By definition. If Deep Web people wanted advertising and promotion, they could come up to the surface web and grab it right now. The point is they actively don’t want it. They’re actively declining to become customers. And they always will. A better search engine will drive them deeper down. That’s all. It will turn into an arms race, with no money to be made, ever. Why would anyone do that?”

“McCann called you eighteen times. The hint must have been positive.”

“I said someone else would do it. He must have thought I meant the government. But I didn’t. The big guys like Google weren’t always big. Once they were two kids in a garage. Or a dorm room. Some of them set out to be billionaires from the get-go, but some of them didn’t. Some of them got just caught up in solving an interesting problem, which happened to be worth billions later. It’s a personality thing. It’s about the solving, not the problem. It’s a compulsion. Who knows where it will strike?”

“Are you saying some kid in a dorm room has built a search engine that can see the Deep Web?”

“Not exactly,” Westwood said. “Not a kid, not a dorm room, and not exactly built. Like I told you, it’s a compulsion. They can’t explain it. But sooner or later a problem speaks to them, and they have to solve it. They won’t be beat. But nine times out of ten there’s no commercial application, so they get a day job and it becomes a hobby. But they keep coming back to it every now and then. They keep tinkering. It will never be finished, because of time and money. But that’s not a problem, for a hobby. In fact that’s the point of a hobby.”

Chang asked, “Who?”

“He’s a start-up guy in Palo Alto. Already a veteran figure. Twenty-nine years old. Currently doing well with retail payment systems. But as an undergrad someone told him he couldn’t search the Deep Web, and that was all she wrote. It was like a red rag to a bull. Some weird intellectual spark. No money in it, he knew. Always a hobby. He admits it was mostly arrogance. Some geeks are like that. They need to be better than the other geek.”

“How far along is he now?”

“That’s an impossible question. How could he know? He can see some of it, clear as day. But is that all of it, or only a tiny part?”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t say more in your piece. This is a big part of the story, right? Progress has been made.”

“The guy wouldn’t let me. He was scared of retaliation from the Deep Web people. Some of those sites really don’t want to be found. He was the guy who told me about Merchenko. A hobby project makes him an easy target. He’s not a team. He’s just one guy. And he was right to be scared, according to you. I wasn’t sure at the time. It could have been drama. They’re in a world of their own.”

Reacher said, “We need to meet this guy.”

“Not easy.”

“Right now all we have is second-hand hearsay. But the consensus seems to be that Michael McCann used the Deep Web, and Michael McCann got off a train in a place called Mother’s Rest. We need to know if one thing led to the other. Did he get off the train because of the internet, or was he going to get off anyway?”

“You think Mother’s Rest is luring people in through the Deep Web?”

“We saw two people arrive by train. They spent a night in the motel and were driven away the next morning in a white Cadillac.”

Chang said, “They don’t even have cell service. They can’t be an internet powerhouse, surely.”

Westwood paused a beat, and then he said, “We should go somewhere more private.”

Twenty miles south of Mother’s Rest, the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair was pacing. Waiting for his phone to ring. Trying not to jump the gun. The last time he called ahead of schedule he had been made to feel small. Let us do what we’re good at, OK? Not that they had been. Not yet.

Couldn’t wait.

He picked up the phone.

He dialed.

He got no answer.

Westwood had called ahead with the reservations, not knowing, so he had gotten Reacher and Chang a room each. On realizing his mistake he was neither embarrassed nor worried about the overspend. He simply chose the room with the stronger wifi and called it an office. He pulled his metal computer out of his bag and set it up on a desk. Reacher and Chang sat on the bed.

Westwood said, “You mentioned Mother’s Rest before. Way back at the beginning. And you were right. A smart science editor would try to get a jump. So I did. It’s a grain-loading station and a trading post. There’s some technical stuff in the record. But a good reporter likes two sources. So I checked Google Earth, and sure enough, it’s right there on the satellite pictures. Right where it should be. And it looks exactly like a grain-loading station and a trading post. But it’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It’s like LA County had one crossroads and the rest of it was empty. It was fascinating. So I messed around a little. I zoomed out to check how far it was from anywhere else, just for the fun of it, and I happened to see a neighbor about twenty miles south. The only neighbor. Even more isolated. So naturally I zoomed in to take a look.”