David Duffy - In for a Ruble

The table was littered with a pizza box, beer and soda cans, and a full ashtray. Stale smoke hung in the air. I pushed the butts around with the tip of my screwdriver. Tobacco and marijuana.

The computer was asleep. I hit a key and it came to life. A Web browser contained the home page of WildeTimePlayers.com. Oscar Wilde himself stared out from the screen with long hair and Victorian frock coat, his arms outstretched, holding a collage of photographs showing bodies, no faces, in various stages of undress. None were outright naked, none were overtly pornographic. None looked to be over eighteen either.

A menu bar gave me multiple options—SIGN IN, REGISTER, PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE, MEET THE PLAYERS, PAST PRODUCTIONS, MY ACCOUNT. Just like Amazon or Netflix. I clicked on MEET THE PLAYERS and a dialogue window popped up—PLEASE SIGN IN. I clicked on SIGN IN and was asked for a user name and password. I clicked on REGISTER and was asked to designate a user name and password and pay a fee of five hundred dollars. To do that I had to establish an account at ConnectPay.

I tried the HISTORY bar. Someone had been working the pages. The clock in the corner said 8:06 A.M. I called the office on my cell phone, hoping Foos was true to his word. Six rings before he answered. His voice was grumpy.

“This better be good.”

“It’s not. Bad, getting worse. I need a keyboarding bug—pronto. I’m sending you an e-mail.”

“That it?”

“We need to check out a Web site. We’re going to want zombies and a straw man.”

“That bad?”

“Worse, like I say.”

“Give me a minute to hook up a zombie. I’ll send the e-mail back through that.”

I opened the e-mail program and sent a blank message to pigpensboss@pigpensplace.com. A minute later, I got a reply. I clicked on the attachment, which launched itself, installed itself and disappeared. A second later my e-mail and the reply self-evaporated as well.

“Done,” I said. “Straw man?”

“How much we need?”

“Five hundred to open. Don’t know after that. Figure a couple grand.”

“Hold on. I’m sending you a parallel screen app. Click on the attachment and you’ll see what I’m doing.”

“Great. Get rid of it when we’re finished.”

“Why is it you constantly assume you’re dealing with Homer Simpson?”

I ignored the rebuff—not undeserved—and clicked on his e-mail.

The financial history of one Malcolm Carver appeared on the screen. He had checking and savings accounts at Citibank with balances of $2,315 and $3,356, respectively. He also had a Citi Visa debit card and an American Express gold card. His address was in Bethpage, New York.

“He’ll do,” I said.

“I’ve got zombies lined up in Hungary, Italy, and Indonesia. That enough?”

“Should be sufficient. Address is WildeTimePlayers.com. Wilde with an ‘e’, as in Oscar.”

The zombies were an extra precaution. I doubted the Crestview cops had the technology to monitor online activity, but Victoria and the FBI could be monitoring ConnectPay. I don’t know much about the laws governing child pornography, but I assumed we were about to break a few.

Foos typed in the address. The home page of WildeTimePlayers appeared on the parallel screen I was watching.

“I see,” he said.

“It’ll get worse. Malcolm has to register. That triggers the five bills.”

He did as instructed, creating a username, MalMalware@yahoo.com, and opening an account for Malcolm Carver at ConnectPay tied to his Citi debit card. By this afternoon, his account would be five hundred dollars lighter.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Try MEET THE PLAYERS.”

A new screen appeared with photos of Andras Leitz, Irina Lishina, and three others, dressed—or more accurately, mostly undressed—in the vintage costumes I’d seen down the hall. There was no attempt to hide the essentials here. Andras wore pantaloons dropped around his knees and a codpiece pulled up to his stomach, exposing his genitals. His penis was partly erect. Irina’s breasts showed clearly through a sheer camisole, the hem well above her shaved crotch. The other kids were similarly exposed. Below each was a name—Salomé, Dorian, Algernon, Basil, and Sybil.

I could almost see Foos shaking his gray-black mane. “Shit, that’s Andras.”

“Afraid so.”

“You know the others?”

“The girl in the see-through is the Russian. I’m guessing the others are kids at Gibbet School.”

He grunted. “The names are all Oscar Wilde characters, right? Not that it matters.”

“They’re not Dostoevsky.”

“You want to see more?”

“No. But we need to know how bad this is.”

“We do?”

“I do. Sorry you’re along for the ride.”

He grunted again.

“Click on one of the other kids. Keep it as anonymous as possible.”

“Oh, that makes it much better.”

Fifteen minutes later we had a complete picture of the Web site and the WildeTimePlayers’ operation—or as complete as we wanted to get. The Players offered an à la carte menu of content, charging different rates for photos, videos, and “private auditions.” The photos and videos, which set Malcolm Carver back another three hundred dollars for a quick and perfunctory survey, came in solo, duo—boy-girl, boy-boy, girl-girl—and three-way packages. Not much, as in nothing, was left to the imagination. No private auditions available at the moment—they were strictly live and priced accordingly.

Foos said, “I need coffee. Back in a few.”

I got up from the computer and checked the window. Still snowing, no action in the parking lot. Growing up in the Gulag, I saw more than my share of depravity. Starvation. Murder. Exploitation. Rape. The worst was babies turning on their mothers, pounding their chest with fists too tiny to hurt, because the mothers were too emaciated to feed them. Forty years later, they still haunt the occasional nightmare. As a spy, I was taught to prey on human weakness—psychological, emotional, sexual, professional, financial. I don’t harbor many illusions, the world is an ugly place, and I can’t say I felt any particular shock or outrage at what we’d seen. But in a place I didn’t want to be, couldn’t wait to get out of, in the middle of a northeast blizzard, I tried to fight off a profound depression. It wasn’t just the sleaze. Porn by definition involves exploitation. These kids, who had everything, were exploiting themselves, or each other, or both. They wrapped their brand with an ersatz Victorian theatrical veneer and convinced themselves that somehow this made it all okay—a good or productive or funny way to spend their time. For what? The money? That explanation still didn’t work, and I couldn’t see one that did. I’d dealt with lots of twisted people with fucked-up motives, but it was beyond my ability to imagine where and how these kids had gone so far off the rails. I don’t know how much depravity Foos encountered as a California-raised child genius, but he’s one levelheaded dude, as they say these days. Even across the ether, I could feel the Web site sucking his energy.

I returned to the computer.

“You back?”

“Yeah.”

He said, “You think Leitz has any idea?”

“Nope.”

“You gonna tell him?”

“That’s one of many questions I can’t deal with right now. I gotta get out of here.”

“I’ll clean up the electronic trail.”

“Check something first—recent activity on these servers, between seven and eight this morning.”

“Hang on.”

The screen in front of me filled with lines of computer code, which scrolled, flashed, disappeared, flashed and scrolled again.

Foos said, “Somebody spent the better part of an hour looking for outgoing activity. They found it and copied it.”