Jon Evans - Dark Places

"Nothing," I said hastily. I had thought to myself: well, she's talking about sexual urges at last, Paul, that's a heck of a start. "No, he wasn't like that. He seems stable enough. Actually he seems more stable than just about anyone else I know. It's just that he's a total sociopath. It's all just a game to him. On the truck we called him the Great White Hunter."

"The world is full of sociopaths," Talena said. "Half the really successful businessmen you'll meet are textbook cases. Most of them don't go around killing people."

"Maybe because they don't realize how easy it is," I said.

"Yeah. That's what's scary. You see what he does and you wonder why there aren't hundreds of people doing it. They would, you know. In the West people think that anyone who goes around killing people for fun, they have to be sick, deranged, brain chemistry problems. It's nice that they can think that. But it's not true. It happened all the time in Bosnia. Normal people, middle class, stable homes, good jobs, turned into monsters. Sometimes overnight. One of them was someone I knew. Not close, but still. He always said it was for his people, for his country, but really, I think he was just like Morgan. Just because he could. Just to show he had the power. And it's not just Bosnia. You know that. Rwanda. Cambodia. Same thing."

"Huh," I said.

We looked at each other.

"That's awful too," I said. "But I don't think it's really Morgan's trip, not exactly. I don't know, I'm just guessing, but I think I knew him pretty well. I don't think it's all about power, for him. It's the thrill of the hunt. Murder as some kind of extreme sport. I guess it's crazy, but so is BASE jumping, you know?"

"It's not really all that different," she said. "Different excuse for the same…" A thought hit her and she looked at me, alert. "What did you mean 'maybe'?"

"Eh?" I said, avoiding her suddenly icy blue gaze.

"When I said he's going to do on doing what he does until he fucks up, you didn't say 'yes', you said 'maybe'. Why is that?"

I shrugged.

"Paul. Don't go clamming up on me now."

"I don't know," I lied, "I just said it."

"Oh, no." She slammed her coffee down so hard that although it was half-empty some of it splashed out of her hand. It must have scalded but she didn't react. "Oh, you totally stupid asshole. Don't tell me you still have some kind of plan. Don't tell me you're still not going to leave well the fuck enough alone."

"I don't have any kind of concrete plan," I said. "But if the opportunity presents itself, I'm going to do something about Morgan Jackson."

"Like what? Become Victim Number Three? That'll sure show him. You were five seconds away just a couple days ago, in case you've forgotten already. Do you have some kind of fucking death wish?"

"Relax," I said. "It's a moot point. I said if the opportunity presents itself. Doesn't seem likely that it will anytime soon." I was prevaricating a little but didn't want to provoke her any further.

"I see," she said.

Clearly she could tell I was not telling her the whole truth. We sipped coffee at each other again. This time the air was hostile.

"Well," she said, standing up. "I'm going home. Give me a call if you ever get that much-needed lobotomy."

I went home too, after a period of kicking myself and imagining the countless different ways I could have handled that conversation better. I decided to kill time by getting my old computer hooked up. I went down to the copy center, bought some floppy disks, downloaded the cable modem drivers onto them, came home, installed the drivers, played around with the configuration until it finally started working. I was back on the Net. This computer was a little slow but not too bad. I considered replacing Windows 95 with Linux but decided to delay awhile.

First I went back to the Thorn Tree. There was, as I had half-expected, one final message tacked on to the conversation I had started.

BC088269 11/17 04:07

Consider that your final final warning.

Live long and prosper, Paul. And don't ever fuck with me again.

"Fuck you," I muttered under my breath. An easy thing to say from the safety of my Cole Valley apartment.

I went to my Yahoo Briefcase account and downloaded the zip files with the cookies from that machine in Tetebatu. I examined the list of files: aol. com canoe. ca excite. com footballunlimited. co. uk hotmail. com lonelyplanet. com lycos. com microsoft. com msn. com netscape. com nytimes. com rocketmail. com roughguides. com times. co. uk yahoo. com

216.168.224.70

The filenames indicated the site that the cookie referred to. Most of the sites were pretty well known and pretty much what you'd expect on a backpacker machine. But that last one, 216.168.224.70, was an IP number instead of a DNS name. That was unusual. I examined the cookie: server=Microsoft Active Server Pages Version 3.0 session=HX8338947MUT7G-KXFWJ38

Nothing useful there. Sites that run on Microsoft ASP are automatically configured to leave cookies so that they can track user access over a period of time. It didn't tell me anything about what was on that site. But that was easy enough to find out. I typed http://216.168.224.70/ into my browser address window.

A popup window appeared asking for my username and password. The browser contents did not change. No welcome page, no nothing. Whatever this site was, its owner didn't want anyone looking at anything unless they had a name and password. Pretty unusual in a medium where page-views were the measure of success. Pretty unusual for a vanity site too. Pretty unusual full stop.

I tried a whois: whois: 216.168.224.70

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:

Merkin Muffley

P.O. Box 19146

Cayman Islands mm9139@hotmail. com

Well, that gave me a contact name, but… "Merkin Muffley"? I didn't think so. That was the president's name from Dr. Strangelove. Somebody had pulled a fast one on CaymanDomain and Network Solutions.

So what we had here was a site with a moderately paranoid level of security registered under a false name and presumably hosted in the Cayman Islands. Could have been a lot of things. An offshore bank, say, or one of those buy-a-second-passport offers you see in the back pages of the Economist, or some kind of connection to money launderers or drug runners or God only knows what sort of illicit activity.

But probably not. First of all because it's unlikely anyone would have connected to one of those from a hovel in Tetebatu. But second of all because it really wasn't that secure. That popup login window wasn't encrypted; anyone with a packet sniffer on the network could read what the user typed in. Anyone with serious resources would have done a far better job. It looked more like a site thrown together by some amateur who wanted to make it as secure as possible without actually understanding the myriad problems of security.

It was still going to be problematic. I wasn't really a hacker. I was probably enough of a programmer to become one in the space of a few days, I could go out and get some Cult of the Dead Cow software or hacker scripts, but realistically, it wasn't my forte, and hacking isn't near as easy as newspapers and movies make it seem.

For fun I typed "thebull" into both the login and password fields and clicked on OK. "Invalid login" said the computer. So I tried "taurus" instead of "thebull", thinking of that five-year-old Usenet conversation I had dug up.

And the browser filled with data. Not very much data. The simplest arrangement imaginable, black text on a white background. There were only thirteen words, but they were enough to set my heart racing.

The Bull

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