The People vs. Alex Cross by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

leave.
    “I should not even be here,” FBI special agent Henna Batra said in a low voice. “I should be talking to Sampson or your wife.”
    “But you’re here,” I said as we climbed down the memorial steps. “Did you look at the website link I sent you?”
    Batra did not reply, just cocked her head in a way that said I was a fool to have even asked.
    Men and women far smarter than me will tell you that we are on the verge of the singularity, a moment in time beyond which all human brains will be able to access all possible information through the power of the Internet. As far as I was concerned, Batra was
already
at one with the Internet. Plugged in, she could reach across vast digital landscapes, unlock almost any door, and peek into some of the web’s dimmest hiding places.
    She was also one of the smartest people I’d ever known. Before Batra had even graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she had eight high-paying job offers with the search-engine-and-social-networking crowd. Instead of accepting any of them, she’d joined the FBI and its growing cybercrimes unit. I’d met her during the course of the investigation that led to the murder charges pending against me.
    That alone explained Batra’s reluctance to meet me in a public place. She was proud of being FBI, and she was a woman of great personal integrity who cared deeply about her reputation. But she’d come, which meant she thought it was worth the risk, which meant she had looked at Killingblondechicks4-fun.org.co.
    “C’mon, Batra,” I said. “Any luck unlocking those videos?”
    “Can a pickpocket pick?” Batra said, heading toward the Vietnam Memorial.
    “What did you find?”
    “Nothing,” she said. “The videos all end a second or two past the locking point. I suspect if a user has the correct passcode, the two extra seconds are revealed and a secret onion router message is sent to the webmaster. At that point, the webmaster would send back an onion router message with the complete encrypted film attached.”
    “Hold up,” I said. “Most of that went right over my head. Start with onion.”
    The cybercrimes specialist took a sip of her coffee and said an onion was a digital message or order that left a computer surrounded by layers and layers of encryption and code, almost like an onion. “When you send out an e-mail or look at a website,” she said, “you’re leaving digital tracks all over the so-called clear web. But when an onion message or order is sent, the surrounding codes direct it through dozens of routers on the deep, or unorganized, web. Each router peels away layers of encryption and metadata that would identify the original sender.
    “Onions guarantee anonymity,” Batra said. “We can’t look at them. The NSA can’t even look at them. Why? Because we won’t even know they exist. Done right, they leave virtually zero trace.”
    “You’re kidding,” I said, disappointed.
    “I’m not kidding,” Batra said, her face clouding as we entered the Vietnam Memorial. “This is serious black-net stuff you’ve gotten yourself into, Cross. Almost everything having to do with that website was done through onions, so I have no idea who built it or who maintains it.”
    “Can’t you hack it?”
    “What’s to hack?” Batra said. “The website is anonymously built and self-sustaining. I can shut down whatever the hosting URL is, but I’d imagine there are dozens of mirroring sites with the content on them already.”
    I thought about that. “You said
almost
everything having to do with the website was done through onion routers.”
    Batra arched an eyebrow and said, “You’re smarter than you look, Cross.”
    “One of my redeeming qualities. What was
not
done through an onion?”
    “Those posts on the hackers’ bulletin board.
Those
I could track. And I did.”
    “All of the posters?” I said, impressed.
    “Just the high-volume ones so far,” Batra said.
    “What do we know about