Chapter 12: Broken Idols

I had work to do. I’d been so caught up in sleeplessness, office politics, and relational bliss for the past thirty hours that I’d not yet examined the results of my search for the cyberbully. Once Cali left my office to go to rehearsal, I settled in. Working at the office has advantages since I have a lot more computing power there.

I pulled the drapes and turned out the lights. I cranked up the music and started following my leads. It wasn’t quite as dark as the apartment, but the level of adrenaline I felt pumping through my veins as I plunged into Philanthropolis was enough to block out all distractions.

IP addresses are assigned to devices participating in a network, in this instance, the World Wide Web. Philanthropolis was hosted on multiple computers, with backup and mirroring on dozens more. Many of those computers functioned as virtual devices, meaning they answered to several different addresses, and pretended to be wholly different devices for each one. When I added in the problem that Philanthropolis was a composite of numerous organizations and domains that had been grouped together, I was dealing with a problem of incredible proportions. My automated searches, however, led me deeper into this morass than I thought possible.

The domain my searches all seemed to lead to was a massive structure in its own right. It housed such a reputable charitable organization that my first inclination was to ignore it and look elsewhere. I didn’t even want my search to lead me here. Not only is the Internet a great place to find things, it is a great place to hide things. The cyberbully I was after wanted to stay hidden.

Off the main portal I entered an antechamber that held a number of awards and certificates of appreciation. Each award and certificate could open a portal into the organization that issued it. That wasn’t where my spider was leading, though. In the back of the room was an unmarked passage and that is where I went.

The momentary disorientation of crossing from room to room was caused by the shift from domain to domain. This was leading me now through different countries as well. Being immersed in the U.S. Internet structure, it is sometimes easy for me to forget that there are over two hundred different domain suffixes, many specific to countries. Some countries found it profitable at the dawn of the Internet to sell domain names at prices significantly lower than the familiar U.S. domain names. Tonga—dot-TO—was a popular place for teens to get domains in the nineties because they charged only ten dollars to register. In the U.S. at that time, domains were $80 per year. I found that there was still a sizable market in country-specific domains available.

It’s common for a major company to buy the.com,.org, and.net domains for their businesses. International organizations often buy up the country specific domains in which they do business. But why would an organization that doesn’t have a business presence in a country own a domain in that country? There is no regulation regarding who can own a domain. If you want to contact the President, go to whitehouse.gov. If you go to whitehouse.net, you will find a parody owned by a couple of comedians. There are thousands of ways to hide on the Internet.

Buried in a backroom of an organization that didn’t exist in a politically turbulent African nation, I found the name of an owner. I’d been at it for two hours, but now that I had one, following the spiders to a dozen others went more quickly. I compiled search criteria for each of the names I found and sent the spiders out again. This time, I dove into the data.

The Internet is a real place to me, with real people, buildings, streets, and rooms. When I’m searching as I was now, it’s as if I am driving, walking, or running down those streets. A casual observer would see me mesmerized in front of my computer, tapping out commands on my keyboard as thousands of lines of code fly by. I learned a long time ago that I couldn’t comprehend what I saw as the lines scrolled across the screen. What I looked for were anomalies. If I saw string of numbers—for example: 1’, 3’, 7’, 10”, 15’, 22’, 47”—I would immediately recognize that the 10 and 47 were out of order. All the other numbers are in feet. The 10 and 47 are in inches and should be ordered first and fourth in the list. Many computer programs could not even put them in ascending order of the numbers that a human would recognize. It’s just how my brain works. Matching a single word, phrase, or string on the fly or spotting one that is out of order is less difficult for me than sitting down to study a segment of code in detail. I could see the difference as though driving down a street of bungalows and spotting the Taj Mahal.

In six hours, I had seventeen names—aliases for the same person. I sat back at my desk shaking. I hadn’t eaten, drunk, or gone to the bathroom. My neck, arms, and back were cramped and my head was throbbing. I pushed myself away from the computer in disgust and went to relieve myself. I washed my hands and then washed them again. I looked at myself in the mirror. Tears were running out of my eyes and I splashed water on my face to wash them away. I glanced into my office and just pulled the door closed and locked it. I couldn’t face looking at the screen again. I left the building, locked the door and wished I could burn it down rather than face what I’d left inside.

I’d walked two blocks before I grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket I wanted to call John Patterson and tell him someone was spoofing his identity. As if he’d pick up a call from a nobody gamer. But somehow I didn’t believe it was a spoof. I angrily punched in the speed-dial command for Jordan. It was his private phone, not the office, and he picked up on second ring.

“Dag! How’s the undercover adventure going? Put them straight yet?”

“It’s going okay, Jordan, but I need to talk to you about something else. I’ve got another client.” I quickly described my encounter with Daniel and his father, the bullying on the Internet forums and my searches through cyberspace. I skimmed through my adventures in Philanthropolis. Jordan knew I dealt with searches and results; he didn’t know what my mental imagery was.

“The net result is that I’ve found something that I can’t handle, Jordan. This is a job for the police.” I was still having trouble getting to the point. I didn’t want to believe what I’d found. I didn’t want any of it to be true. The work on credit card fraud, in fact my whole obsession with thieves, seemed insignificant and mundane.

“Dag, you know I have a lot of sympathy for victims of cyberbullying, but mostly we have to tell them to cancel their accounts and stay away from the Internet for a while. We’ve got a caseload that’s too big to handle as it is. The chance we could make charges stick on a case of bullying are remote. You’re better off trying to get the school to take disciplinary action.”

“Jordan.” I measured my words carefully. “We don’t have a cyberbully. We’ve got a predator. And he’s high up the food chain.”

I got to Andi’s house at half past four with the barbecue slated to start at five-thirty. I’d promised I would come to get the grill going. The police had been to my office and my computers—in fact, my whole office—had been impounded. The entire trace on my searches was subject to rules of evidence and they had to certify that I broke no laws in finding what I had. As far as I knew, I hadn’t even encountered a security measure that might be considered suspect. I don’t maintain data on my computers, and the police only had warrants for what was resident on the computer itself. Besides, Jordan was leading the investigation and I knew he would be circumspect, so I felt safe having the police in control of my office.

But I was totally drained. The discovery left me doubting basic humanity.

Four teenaged boys. God knew how many others had been near. But three had been lured away from their families and later found mutilated and dead. The fourth had never been found. The messages had come, first flaming them on the Internet, destroying their friendships, warning them away from certain parks, restaurants, bars, and—finally—one offering help. The boys had sought out the kind voice, and gone to meet with the friend. They’d never been seen again. It was never about sex or orientation. Like always, it was about power—about winning. To him, it was just a game.

I’d been looking forward to seeing Andi ever since I left her last night. In fact, even in the depths of the discoveries I’d made, I had flashes of her smile flit across my mind—tastes of her lips on my lips. Then I was standing at her door. I raised my hand to knock, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt so foul, just having discovered what I did.

The door opened before I’d had time to retreat. She stood there, smiling at me, welcoming me into her home and into her arms. We both had a moment’s hesitation before we lost ourselves in the embrace. I smothered myself in her hair, yearning to wipe away all the memories of the day past and start again from where I kissed her last night.

She seemed of like mind and when our embrace loosened, she raised her lips and sought mine.

We were still tentative. The newness of this relationship was still overwhelming and neither of us wanted to miss one bit of the way it developed. She stepped back away from me and looked me in the eye. She must have seen the fatigue and pain there. Her eyes fell.

“Are you okay?” she faltered. “Are we okay?” My God! She thought my fatigue and pain were because of her! I hastened to correct her.

“We are great. We are the best thing about my day. We are just beginning. I, on the other hand, just had a very bad day.”

“Oh dear. Poor baby. Did the bad guys get away?”

“Not yet.” She took my hand and I followed her into the living room where we sat down together on the sofa. She cuddled up next to me, an intimacy we hadn’t dared express before today.

“Tell me about it.” I couldn’t give her specifics because of police investigations. I told her of the boy and father who had come to me, about getting a clue about where to look for the cyberbully, and then about the revelation of the predator and involvement of the police. Like the boy’s father, Andi wanted to go directly to her computer and pull the plug out of the wall. She stroked my cheek and soothed me and in a moment we were kissing again. I didn’t think we’d break this time. I was breathless when our lips parted. She was scarcely breathing heavily when she pushed me lightly away.

“We have company coming,” she said softly.

“It’s a good thing,” I answered, breathing deeply.

“We need to get ready. Uh ... I bought a treat for you. There are ginger snaps on the kitchen counter.”

I confess; I’ve had a weakness for ginger snaps for years. When I was a little kid, my dad carried ginger snaps in his lunch. Three. It was really no problem for a big Swede like my dad to eat his lunch and polish it off with three ginger snaps and a big cup of black coffee. But every once in a while, Dad would bring one home in his lunch pail. He’d catch me up in his arms and say, “I went fishing today.”

“What did you catch?” I’d ask.

“A ginger fish.” I’d wrinkle up my nose. “I made it into a cookie. Want to try it?” I’d pretend to be doubtful, but nod. Out of the pail he would pull the one last ginger snap and offer it to me. My eyes would light up and I’d take a bite. If I was very lucky, Dad would pour the last spoonful of coffee out of his thermos and I’d sip it as if I, too, were working on the docks like my father. Ginger snaps have had a special place on my taste buds ever since.