Lee Child - Make Me

“Search where?”

“Chat rooms, mostly. Maybe commercial web sites.”

“I don’t want to become a public resource.”

“I’m happy not to pay you.”

“Then I would be doing it for friendship, which makes the obligation worse.”

Reacher said, “Can you do it? If you wanted to?”

The guy said, “I’ve been doing it since it was called the undernet. And the invisible web. It got harder, but I got better.”

“The destination might be hard to crack.”

“Cracking is easy. It’s finding that’s hard.”

“So what would get you to give us an hour of your time? Apart from getting paid?”

“Do you have a motive, apart from getting paid? Does anyone, really?”

“As a matter of fact I’m not getting paid.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because some guy thinks he’s pretty damn smart.”

“But you’re smarter? And you have to prove it?”

“I don’t have to prove it. I want to prove it. Now and then. Out of respect. For the people who really are smart. Standards should mean something.”

“You’re trying to steer me to the same conclusion. A battle of egos. Me against them, as coders. Good try. You know me well, even though we’ve only just met. But I’ve gone beyond. I’m happy there. I’m better than them. I know that. I’m secure in that knowledge. I no longer feel the desire to show it. Not even now and then. Not even out of respect. Not that I don’t respect the way you feel. The old me would have agreed with you.”

“What would the new me agree with?”

“Tell me about the missing individual. Is he interesting?”

“Thirty-five-year-old male, crippled by what the doctors call anhedonia, and his aunt calls his happiness meter stuck on zero. Otherwise normal IQ. Functional some of the time.”

“Lived alone?”

Reacher nodded. “In sheltered housing.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“Sudden new friend prior to disappearance?”

“Yes.”

The guy said, “Thirty-two seconds.”

“For what?”

“I’ll find him in the Deep Web inside thirty-two seconds. I know where to look.”

“When can you do it?”

“Tell me about the aunt.”

“She married up. A doctor. She has a beautiful daughter. But she still loves her nephew. And seems to understand him.”

“I like her image of the happiness meter.”

“We agreed mine is four to nine.”

“I’ve gone beyond. I hit ten now. All the time.”

“That’s the molly talking.”

“The what?”

“I read it in the paper.”

“I haven’t taken molly for two years.”

“Something else now?”

“Everything else now. Got some stress.”

“Just remember, speed kills. That’s what they told us, back in the day.”

“I won’t go public. You understand what that means?”

Reacher nodded. “There won’t be a trial.”

“Was it you with Merchenko?”

“Admit nothing, even on your deathbed. You might suddenly get better.”

“One night only,” the guy said. “No coming back to check on things. I need space of my own.”

“When can you do it?”

“Now, if you like.”

“Where?”

“At my house. You’re all invited.”

The guy from Palo Alto had a thing on his phone that summoned cars to the curb within minutes. Riding four to a car was deemed unseemly, so he pressed twice and got two. He rode with Westwood, to catch up on old times, and Reacher and Chang followed, in a Town Car all their own. The guy’s house was a 1950s box remodeled in the 1970s to look like the 1930s. Reacher figured it had a triple layer of ironic authenticity all its own, and was therefore worth more than all the money he had made in his life.

Inside it was clean and all silver and black. Reacher had been expecting a tangled riot of computer gear, like they had seen in McCann’s apartment in Chicago, but in the den there was nothing but a small glass table and a lone no-brand desktop. There was a tower unit, and a screen, and a keyboard, and a trackball, none of which matched. There were only five wires, all cut to the right length, none tangled, all neatly placed.

The guy said, “I built it myself. There are various technical hurdles and some serious data incompatibilities to overcome. It’s like visiting a foreign country. You have to learn their language. And their customs, more importantly. I wrote some browser software. Based on Tor, which is what they all use. Which was written by the United States Naval Research Laboratory, ironically. To provide a safe haven for political dissidents and whistleblowers, all around the world. Which is the law of unintended consequences, right there, biting the world in the ass. Tor stands for The Onion Router. Because that’s what we’re dealing with here. Layers upon layers upon layers, like the layers of an onion, in the Deep Web itself, and inside all of its separate sites.”

He sat down and fired up his machine. There was no fancy stuff on the screen. No pictures of outer space, no icons. Just short lines of green writing on a black field. All business, like an airline check-in desk, or a car rental counter.

The guy said, “What’s the missing individual’s name?”

Chang said, “Michael McCann.”

“Social Security Number?”

“Don’t know.”

“Home address?”

“Don’t know.”

“Not good,” the guy said. “There are preliminary steps to be taken. I need what I call his internet fingerprint. It’s an algorithm I wrote. Some of this, some of that. The precise minimum required to be definitive. Elegant, really. We can start with something as simple as his cable bill. But there are other ways. Do we know his next of kin?”

“That would be his father, Peter McCann. His mother is long dead.”

“Do we have an address for Peter McCann?”

Chang told him. The undistinguished brownstone, on the undistinguished street. Lincoln Park, Chicago. Apartment 32. The guy typed a command and what looked like a portal appeared, into the Social Security Administration’s mainframe. The real government deal. Reacher glanced at Chang, and she nodded, as if to say it’s OK, I have one too . The guy entered Peter McCann’s data and found his Social Security Number instantly, which instantly led to Michael’s, because they were nominated for each other’s survivor benefits. Next of kin. Michael’s Social Security Number led to his address, which was also in Lincoln Park, Chicago.

Then the guy came out of Social Security, and went into some other complex database. He entered Michael McCann’s Social Security Number, and his address, and the screen re-drew into a long list of alphanumeric codes. The internet fingerprint. Michael McCann, and no one else.

The guy typed a new command, and the screen came up with a title page, crudely formatted out of plain green writing on a black background, but with tabs and spaces and centering, so that it looked vaguely like a commercial product. Or a prototype. Which it was, Reacher supposed. In a way. Potentially. It looked inviting enough. Like bright emeralds on velvet. The most prominent word on the page was Bathyscaphe .

“Get it?” the guy said.

“A submarine,” Chang said. “Capable of going all the way to the ocean bed.”

“Originally I called it Nemo. After the guy in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea . He commands a submarine named Nautilus. I liked him because nemo is Latin for nobody. Which seemed appropriate. But then they made a movie about a fish. Which ruined it.”

He typed another command, and a search box came up.

He said, “OK, start your engines. Thirty-two seconds is the wager.”