Scavenger Hunt Read online

  Solomon stumbled forward.

  The night deepened.

  Interlude

  1

  Thaddeus Sterling heard the doctors. That is to say, he heard a general buzz-buzz-buzz that something in his mind told him was words. But he didn’t register anything of it, other than the times.

  “… a month….”

  “… less….”

  “… maybe days….”

  Thaddeus nodded at the right times, his brain figuring out when the pauses were, when to nod, even as it retreated farther and farther into itself.

  Then the doctors were gone, and Thaddeus had no idea how long he had been sitting there. Had no idea how the phone had gotten into his hand, and no recollection of what he had been doing with it.

  Then it buzzed – again – and Thaddeus realized that was what had dragged his mind out of the fog, out of the darkness. The phone’s screen lit up, showing a text notification.

  Thaddeus looked at the texts. Realized that he had sent half of them without even knowing it. What did he know?

  “… a month….”

  “… less….”

  “… maybe days….”

  He looked at the texts, realizing now – fully and completely – what he had been doing when the doctors arrived.

  Thaddeus, “Tad to my friends,” Sterling was a very rich man. And very rich men rarely got that way, and certainly did not stay that way, without planning for the future. Without taking decisive action. Even as his conscious mind disappeared, the primal parts of his subconscious had taken over. Had done what had to be done.

  Thaddeus looked at the texts. The last one was incoming. Asking a question.

  Tad tapped out the response:

  TAD: It’s worse than I feared.

  Make it happen.

  The answer came quickly. Anonymously, as always, but that was to be expected.

  X: when?

  TAD: 24 hours.

  X: it’ll cost

  double 4 rush

  Tad tapped out one more sentence. Three little words. For a long time, his thumb hovered over the button that would send the message. It stayed there for a full minute as Thaddeus thought about what he was about to do. He was careful. That was another thing that kept him wealthy, kept his businesses stable, and had until now kept his life as close to perfection as any mortal could hope to enjoy.

  He came to a conclusion – the one he had always known he would reach, even as he pretended to consider for one last moment.

  His thumb touched the glass of the phone. The message sent.

  TAD: Just do it.

  2

  FBI REPORT FILE FA2017R2

  Appendix B

  Reproduction of YouTube comments on pertinent videos – see Appendix AA for list of videos, both active and since archived, Appendix AB for list of videos no longer available, and report sections 18 through 20 in re actions taken to recover videos that disappeared during hours following incident.

  See also Appendix AC list of known commenters as matched to YouTube designations, and Appendix AD for list of YouTube designations belonging to persons still unknown.

  For list of known homicides attributable to YouTube commenters, please see report for File FA 2018R2.

  *** NOTE: FILE FA 2018R2 HAS ADDITIONAL APPENDIX – FURTHER HOMICIDES CONTINUE, AND HAVE BEEN NOTED (WHERE KNOWN)***

  See also Appendix AD and files referred therein to list of Portobello Road videos, comments, and homicides. N.B.: Hard copies of the files must be relied upon, as all electronic files are subject to corruption by parties unknown. See Internal Report FA 2019R43.

  ---

  Comments to YouTube video designated A14

  ---

  3 COMMENTS - SORT BY

  Crying0nTheInsid3

  Anyone going to do this??? O.o?

  REPLY

  HansomeMuthah92

  Dunno. Maybe.

  REPLY

  MyL0ssHisGain!

  WHAT ARE YOU PUSSIES TALKING ABOUT? HELL YES. *I’M* GOING TO DO IT.

  We ALL should do it.

  I’m leaving now. Get off your shit train of doubt – you know why we’re all watching this – and get moving.

  REPLY

  THREE

  1

  Chong wasn’t his real name. That hadn’t been okay at first, but it turned out fine for him in the end.

  The kids at his school started calling him that when he was eight. Didn’t matter that he was third-generation American, or that his name was easy as any, and easier than most. They called him Chong because he looked Chinese, because they were assholes, and because – most of all – they could already tell he was smarter at the age of eight than any of them could hope to be at fifty.

  Chong was a genius. He realized that when he was two. Plinking out notes on a piano in his parents’ house was one of his earliest memories. He remembered the white and black keys, his tiny fingers moving slowly over them. Slowly – but still faster than any other child with arms too short to wipe his own butt should be able to do.

  He remembered staring at crotches. Not that he was a pervert or anything. But a two-year-old sitting on a piano bench would see mostly that level when adults hovered nearby. Lots of them did. Lots of them oohed and aahed and said words like “precious” and “prodigy” and “unbelievable.”

  A few asked his parents to let them have him. To let them take him away to places where he “would realize his full potential.”

  Dad was a banker. Mom had once been a painter of some note, before she retired to make babies and then found out she would only ever have one and spent the rest of her life pretending that one was enough – though Chong knew that was a lie.

  But both had caring hearts. The kind of hearts that doomed people. “He needs his mother,” Dad had said. “He needs to be around other kids his age,” Mom said.

  That was the beginning of Hell for Chong. A world that he wished every day would just end.

  It did, eventually. He got out of grade school early. That was partly because he was so smart his teachers were having trouble answering his questions; and partly because he had finally gotten sick of the teasing and made an example of the worst of them.

  Erin Westmoreland’s head hadn’t exactly exploded when Chong hit him in the back of the skull with the brick, but it had definitely shifted. Gone concave where it should have been convex, and the boy fell and twitched a bit and then was quiet.

  No one ever really thought Chong did it. Not really.

  That was what they said. But he knew otherwise. The teachers only looked at him indirectly, out of the corners of eyes that remained vigilant to him.

  The other kids looked at him even less, and spoke to him not at all.

  Only Mom and Dad actually said they believed that Chong had nothing to do with “that poor, poor boy.” And they did believe he was innocent, Chong knew. They couldn’t not believe it. They were good-hearted, both going to church regularly, both giving a full fifteen percent of their earnings to various charities.

  That was stupid, and the day he found out about it he called a meeting. He was only twelve at the time, so he was still a junior in college. Twelve, and what surprise his parents’ faces showed when he sat them down and explained the economic realities of their donations. He called up the spreadsheet he’d prepared and took them carefully through the reverse pyramid of earnings, showing how much they would likely lose in interest and investment returns over the course of the next twenty years should they continue their nonsense “charity work.”

  They looked at him with the same delight they always showed when he did something they felt validated their life choices. “Look how smart he is,” he could practically hear them thinking. “Look how well we did by him.”

  Out loud, his father said, “Of course I know all that, son. I’m a banker, after all.” His eyes softened even further than usual, going from cowlike to positively vapid. “But we’re fine. We have enough, and others have a bit as well. We have plen
ty to live on, and your mother and I have been careful. We won’t want, and we’ll be able to retire just fine.” He clapped a soft hand on Chong’s shoulder. “You don’t have to worry about us.”

  “You’re a good, good boy,” breathed his mother, her own expression the empty mirror of her husband’s.

  Chong almost screamed at them. Almost shouted what he was thinking, which was, “I’m not worried about you. Who gives a shit about you? It’s my money you’re spending!”

  But he didn’t. He just did as he always did when they said something blaringly stupid under the twin guises of kindness and/or wisdom. He smiled back just as vacantly as they were smiling at him, said, “Gee, I guess I didn’t think of it that way!” and then went back to quietly thinking about the best way to murder them.

  The answer came quickly after that, and a few days later his parents’ car went off the side of Latigo Canyon Road. They’d been on the way to the beach. Chong had demurred (“Gee, I’d love to, you know how much I love the beach with you guys, but, gee, I have so much homework!”) and not three hours later got the visit.

  It was just as he’d expected; as he’d imagined for years. A mournful cop. The priest from his parents’ congregation.

  There were a lot of words. “Poor boy,” and “Your parents were wonderful people” were the most oft-repeated. Chong just nodded, barely hearing them. He always had trouble pretending he was interested in other people – they were all so stupid – and now he had a wonderful excuse to not even try.

  Grief.

  His eyes filled with tears. He let out a ragged sob or two at random intervals.

  And tried not to let on that he was dancing cartwheels inside.

  The cartwheels stopped, though, when he discovered that his parents’ money was all left to him in trust. He couldn’t touch it before he was eighteen, and then would have access only to monthly payments until he was twenty-one.

  Nine years. Intolerable. Unthinkable.

  Chong petitioned for emancipation, and after the judge told him he’d represented himself with vigor and nerve and was by far the most accomplished pre-teen he’d ever met, shook his head and denied Chong’s motion and told him to come back in a few years.

  Intolerable. Unthinkable.

  The judge died. No one ever figured out why.

  Chong still didn’t have access to his money, though. That was why he started seriously studying computers. He was living with his grandmother, a senile old bag who didn’t even notice when he used her credit card to buy a laptop, or ask where he’d gotten it when she finally realized he was spending hours on the thing in his room.

  He learned quickly, as always, but this time found that he actually enjoyed what he was learning. Everything from the construction of the hardware to the coding of the software.

  By the time he was fourteen, he was confident he could hack into the bank that held his money and take what he wanted. Six months later he was confident he could do it and no one would even know.

  But of course he didn’t. Why bother? By that time, he was already rich.

  2

  Finding the deep web was easy. Unlike what most people thought, the deep web was just the unindexed stuff that was available on the internet. A lot of it was personal records, everything from dental visits to bank accounts. Some of it was just low-level data repositories by companies that wanted to keep a record of everything they’d ever done in their online presences. All mundane and boring.

  Some of it could be useful, and Chong accessed it quickly enough. Hacking into governmental databases and even those of most financial institutions was too big a risk – at least at first – but he could get into a lot of useful stuff without going that big.

  In fact, the smaller places were even better in a lot of ways. Wells Fargo might keep accounts of every single penny, NORAD might have entire teams of people monitoring for hacks. But the mom-and-pop gun range a few miles away?

  Easy.

  Chong carved his way into one of them, not even bothering to mask his tracks – because he left only the smallest of them. He was an ant on a cookie. Who would notice if he carried off a crumb or two?

  He grabbed a birthday, which was there in plain sight. A guy named Jerrod Hall. A nice anonymous name with a nice, boring record at the gun range. But the nice thing about gun ranges was that they required people to sign in and provide a bit of information that Chong wanted, like drivers license records and social security numbers.

  The last was encrypted, of course. All but the last four digits.

  Chong used the drivers license info, along with the last four numbers of the SSN, to contact Mr. Hall’s bank.

  The way he found which bank to call was easy, and surprisingly low-tech: along with the birthday and drivers license info, the range also had a listing for Hall’s next reservation, so Chong just waited outside the gun range until he saw Hall drive up and go in.

  Another nice thing about gun ranges and the shops that most had appended to them: few windows. There were cameras, but those were easy to spot, and easier to avoid.

  Chong went to Hall’s ride: a 1989 Ford pickup truck with no alarm. Chong popped the door open with a slimjim he’d made himself after watching a few YouTube videos.

  He got in and opened the glove box and flipped through the papers there. Lots of vehicle maintenance records. Oil changes, filters, and everything else a good, conscientious vehicle owner might use. Most of them had been paid for with a bank debit card.

  Chong called the bank. Pretended to be a harried Jerrod Hall, who had just had his bank card stolen and wanted to cancel it and lock his account. It was over and done in five minutes.

  No harm, no foul. Just a bit of inconvenience, to see if the information he had found would yield results. Most people thought of hacking as what they saw in movies and TV shows: some good-looking actor slamming away at the keys (Chong refused to call it typing, since most of their fingers never left the home keys and they looked more like epileptic baboons than people with computer skills), while saying things like, “into the mainframe” and “breaching their security” and “I’m in!”

  Hacking was more than that. There was computer work, sure, but it was also low-tech stuff like breaking into cars to see what bank a person used or finding their birthday since most people never bothered to use anything other than some variation of that to lock their phones or their computers.

  So Chong had just hacked Jerrod Hall. At the end of his time in the range he would find out that his account wasn’t working. He’d call the bank and sort it all out in an hour or two, and the bank might well look into it. Not much help there, since Chong made the call from a burner phone he paid for in cash and then, after the call, had broken into pieces and tossed those pieces in various trash cans throughout the city.

  Chong had hacked someone.

  It felt delicious.

  He did more and more, and soon his bank account had enough cash in it he had to change accounts to an out-of-country account. The Caymans were easy to work with, and more than happy to take his money into a secure account that they would not reveal without the force of an entire government leaning on them – and maybe not even then.

  A hundred grand. Two. Three. He never siphoned off more than a few hundred from any one person – never more than a crumb here and a crumb there – but the money built up quickly.

  It was exciting at first, but as with everything else, it became boring after a time. Chong started looking for something new. Something more.

  That was when he ventured into the dark web.

  The deep web was just the unindexed material on the internet. The dark web was just that: darker, more swollen with dangerous, exciting possibility.

  Getting into the dark web was even easier than jacking Jerrod Hall’s social and birthdate. Chong just downloaded a TOR browser, and he was in. Not that that allowed him access to what he was looking for. He was in the dark web the same way a newcomer might be in a city. He had stepped over the bord
er from the surface web to the dark web, but stood just inside the city limits. He wasn’t actually to Main Street, and couldn’t even see any buildings in the distance.

  But he got deeper in. A few dark web search engines came next. A bit more digging.

  And then Chong found Nirvana. He created Portobello Road.

  3

  One of his parents’ more annoying tendencies had been an appreciation of Disney movies. Not just the new ones, not just the animated classics, but old crap like Mary Poppins and Escape From Witch Mountain.

  One of their favorites had been Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which Chong came to dread almost as much as he dreaded having actual conversations with his mom and dad. In the Disney movie, David Tomlinson sang a song called “Portobello Road,” which he extolled as the place where you could find anything and everything in his trademark upper-crust English accent.

  It was nonsense, of course. The real Portobello Road did exist, but it was just a street market full of t-shirts and trinkets.

  So Chong created a Portobello Road that was the real deal. A place in the deepest part of the dark web where you could buy or sell anything. T-shirts? Check. Trinkets? Check.

  And a few other things, too. A night with a guaranteed virgin would cost only a few thousand dollars, if you knew where to look and were willing to fly to whatever country hosted the kidnapper who had taken her.

  If you knew how to get to the Portobello Road of the dark web, you could rent, lease, or buy anything from random Disney memorabilia that Chong’s parents would have loved, all the way up and through things like endangered animals, explosions, and even human beings.