Strong Darkness (28 page)

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“You ever hear of the Deep Web, Ranger?” Young Roger asked, inside Doc Whatley's office after they'd appropriated it for their meeting.

Whatley had been in the midst of putting a PowerPoint presentation together and had forgotten to turn off the pull-down screen on which it was projected. The result was to light both Caitlin's and Young Roger's faces in the spill off the gleaming white background.

“I believe it came up during one of my trips to Quantico, but not much stuck,” Caitlin told him. “Another version of the Internet, something like that, as I recall.”

“Kind of,” Young Roger said, tilting his head from side to side. “And that explains why you couldn't find that porn site when you plugged in the URL. You need a special browser called a Tor browser to access the Deep Web.”

He was only twenty-nine but looked even younger. Though a Ranger himself, the title was mostly honorary, provided in recognition of the technological expertise he brought to the table that had helped the Rangers solve a number of Internet-based crimes ranging from identity theft to credit card fraud to the busting of a major pedophile and kiddie porn ring. He worked out of all six Ranger Company offices on a rotating basis. Young Roger wore his hair too long and was never happier than when playing guitar for his band the Rats, whose independent record label had just released their first CD. Their alternative brand of music wasn't the kind she preferred, but Dylan told her it was pretty good.

“In a nutshell,” Young Roger continued, “the Deep Web was actually invented by our own government to create a clear and unobstructed path by which they could communicate secretly with their own people in the field without worrying about electronic eavesdropping. But it didn't take long before it became a haven for drug traffickers, financial looters, a whole lot of new-age criminals wielding an Internet currency called Bitcoin and—”

“Don't tell me, pornographers.”

“Kiddie porn included. The Deep Web provides a secure, untraceable means by which the freaks can conduct their business without fear of recrimination or reprisal. Ranger, we're talking about a second wholly independent Internet beneath, or alongside, the real Internet with its content never showing up on Google and its URL addresses bounced around so much as to be utterly untraceable.”

“So that link to the porn video I sent you…”

“… took me into the Deep Web. Actually, it took me nowhere at first, which made me figure the site had simply been taken down. Then I played around a little more and realized it was a matter of the location being disguised by the data being run through an intricate system of relays. Each time it switches, another layer of encryption gets stripped away until, by the time the site finally lands, only someone intricately familiar with negotiating the Deep Web can find it.”

“So you found the video, have I got that right?”

“Along with plenty more that could provide the link to others and, eventually, the originating point of the posting. Then we'll know exactly who was behind the software. I can tell you one thing for sure already: this wasn't the only porn video that followed the same general route, not by a long shot. Whoever posted it on the Deep Web has done it before and that's sure to help me nail them.”

“Any connection to those murdered Chinese girls, Roger?”

“I've only managed to track the relay route so far, but that's next on my list to follow up. I did look into this Li Zhen like you asked, though. His file's sealed on all relevant databases for national security reasons. Dead end.”

“I figured,” Caitlin told him, hardly surprised given Zhen's connection to Homeland Security. “Thanks for trying, anyway.”

“Hold on, Ranger. Since when do I let dead ends stop me?” Young Roger asked her. “Any traditional files on Zhen may be sealed but, like you figured, Interpol's were a whole different matter. Turns out they had plenty on your friend Li Zhen, thanks to his links to Chinese pornography. Apparently, he was a pioneer of expanding his horizons into the field of Internet porn years back.”

“So why didn't Interpol arrest him?”

“They could never make anything stick, especially the more serious Web-based material. But I did learn Zhen's wife died twenty-eight years ago. Interpol's file includes mention of two daughters too, one born in 1989 and the other in 1976; on July Fourth, if you can believe, the day of the Bicentennial. The older one committed suicide at the age of seventeen in 1993. But here's the strange thing. The younger one seems to have disappeared, fell off the face of the damn planet, right around the time Yuyuan got started. I believe her name was—”

“Kai,” Caitlin completed before he had a chance to.

*   *   *

Caitlin was so distracted by fitting the pieces of what Young Roger had told her into the puzzle she was assembling, that she almost got hit by a car walking across the parking lot on the University of Texas Health Science Center campus. She skirted another car screeching into reverse and climbed into her SUV, which she'd parked in a shady spot in the corner.

She'd just gotten the key into the ignition when movement flashed in the rearview mirror, and a hand grasped her shoulder from the backseat.

 

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“You want to order up some room service?” Cort Wesley asked the man tied to the chair. “Maybe check out the offerings on Pay-Per-View? Gotta figure out some way to pass the time if you're gonna keep giving me the silent treatment.”

Mareno looked down at his groin again. He held his eyes closed for a long moment, then opened them slowly with all trace of bravado, of resistance, missing now.

“You tell me what I want to know and our business is done, hoss. I pull that dry ice out of your undies and I'm gone from your life.”

“And I'm supposed to believe that?”

Cort Wesley couldn't help but smile. “Oh, I get it. You think I'm gonna punch your ticket because I'm scared you'll track me down otherwise.” He shook his head. “I'm not that easy to scare and if anyone comes after me as a result of this, it's you who'll pay the price.”

“What kind of accent is that? You sound like a cowboy.”

“Texas. And right now this cowboy is pissed off that your traveling whorehouse almost got my son killed.”

“Son?” the man asked, eyes flashing as if the pieces were finally falling together for him.

Cort Wesley dragged an armchair over from the corner and sat down angled close to his hostage. “So you wanna keep up the chitchat while your balls freeze, or you wanna get down to business?”

“You have no idea who you're messing with here, what we'll do to you.”

“Right now, it's just you.” Cort Wesley hesitated to let his point sink. “You starting to feel a bit of chill down there where the sun don't shine yet?”

The man looked down, his gaze telling Cort Wesley he was.

“Your balls are running out of time, hoss. So let's make this quick. Where'd the Chinese girl come from?”

“I don't know who you're talking about.”

“Goes by the name of Kai. Pretty enough to turn my son's head spinning. You remember my boy, don't you? He's the one someone involved with you beat to within an inch of his life. You wanna tell me what the girl had to do with that, where she fits into all this?”

Mareno swallowed hard, looked down below his waist again.

“Tick, tick, tick,” Cort Wesley said. “I figure you got maybe ten minutes before the pain kicks in, fifteen before you're gonna be a soprano. You don't impress me as a man cut out for this kind of shit. Just talk to me so you can go back to pushing your pencils, running your numbers, and fucking up a lot of innocent kids' lives.”

“Kai was sent to Providence,” the man said abruptly, his voice turning shrill. “But ten days ago she dropped off the map.”

“Ten days,” Cort Wesley repeated, recalling mention by Caitlin, of something else that had happened around that time, but he couldn't remember exactly what.

“We lost contact with her,” the man tied to the chair was saying. “She must have figured out how to disable her tracker.”

“Tracker?”

“GPS chip we install to keep tabs on the merchandise.”

“Where?”

“Underneath the skin on her forearm. We've been looking for her ever since.”

“She ended up back in Providence,” Cort Wesley told him. “But you know that already, since your men kicked the shit out of my kid.”

“Uh-uh, cowboy, not us. Whoever found Kai, whoever hurt your kid, must've dug up their leads some other way. We didn't even know there was a problem until we got a call that she hadn't shown up on set.”

“What set?”

“Another porn video.”

“Being shot where exactly?”

“What's the difference?”

Cort Wesley pulled his chair closer to Mareno again. “I walk out of here, hoss, you won't need one of your girls to give you a blow job anymore—you'll be able to do it all by yourself 'long as your freezer's working. Now answer my question: where was this video supposed to be shot?”

Mareno spoke through a smirk that had spread across his expression. “Your own backyard, cowboy: Texas.”

 

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Dylan waited in the lobby, on lookout like his father had told him. He'd bought a magazine at the newsstand, but wasn't really paying any attention to it, his mind upstairs with his father and the man whose tan colored his face orange.

He had found a chair with a view of most of the lobby and the street beyond the hotel entrance and watched the people come and go. Around him workmen toiled, continuing the updates on the lobby that included the fresh carpeting and new furniture in the section in which he was seated. He was digging the heels of his boots into the brushlike surface of the knap when a beautiful Chinese woman came through the door.

It looked like Kai, a lot like Kai, enough to set Dylan's heart fluttering the same way it had the first time he'd laid eyes on her. Just a trick of his imagination conspiring with his vision and the lobby's dull, atmospheric lighting, he decided.

The more the boy looked, though, the more the woman really did look like Kai. And then she was heading his way, Dylan's breath starting to bottleneck in his throat with the certainty that this was no trick of his imagination or vision at all.

“We need to go!” she said, voice hushed, as soon as she reached him. “Hurry!”

“Huh?” was all Dylan could manage, leaving him feeling lame and stupid.

“They're coming. I saw them on the street. There's no time.”

“Coming for…”

“You and your father. Hurry, please.”

Dylan felt himself rise. “I've got to warn him,” he said, the only words he could muster, prepaid cell phone in hand in the next instant, but Cort Wesley's phone went straight to voice mail.

“Now, please.”

Dylan's eyes fixed on the alcove housing the elevators. “Just stay here. I'll be right back.”

Kai grabbed him by the arm before he could move, holding him in place. Her grip was deceptively strong and she'd grasped his arm at the elbow, pressing in a way that he began to feel it go numb. Then her eyes bulged, Dylan catching four men in sports jackets worn over dress shirts without ties making their way through the lobby.

“Kiss me!” Kai said, in more of an order than a request.

“Huh?”

“Do it!”

And when he couldn't, she did it for him, leaning in and kissing him hard on the lips. Kai eased him into a slight spin that obscured both their faces from view, backing off only when the four men disappeared into the elevator alcove.

“I know people who will help us,” Kai said, her voice steady but hushed. “We must leave.”

Dylan couldn't take his gaze off the elevator bank. “I need to help my dad.”

“You need to come with me,” Kai told him.

And then Dylan saw the gun in her hand.

 

76

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Caitlin had her SIG out, already turning when she saw none other than Jones struggling to lean forward. The hand that had found her shoulder was trembling now, the rest of him a quivery mess with blood soaking through his shirt and jacket from clearly more than a single wound.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Only surprise,” he managed through dry lips, his voice cracking, “being it wasn't you who did it.”

“Who did?”

He slumped back in the SUV's backseat, everything about him looking smaller, all the intimidation and bravado that defined him leaking out with the blood. “I fucked up, Ranger, I fucked up bad.”

Caitlin gunned the engine. “I'm getting you to a hospital.…”

“No,” he wheezed louder, trying to reach out for her again, but failing. “No hospitals, unless you want to get me killed for sure.”

“While that's tempting, Jones, I know a doctor who owes the Rangers a favor for helping to keep him out of jail. Guy's name is de la Cruz. Rangers busted him a few years back,” Caitlin continued, already reversing fast and then jamming the SUV into gear, “for performing unsanctioned plastic surgery procedures. I saw pictures of some of the people who came in for facelifts and came out looking like they were wearing Halloween masks.”

Jones tried to smile and failed. “Is that the best you can do?”

“Don't worry, it's not like you need to have your nose fixed,” she said, going for her phone.

*   *   *

Caitlin ended the call and dropped her phone in the cup holder. “He's waiting for us,” she said, tearing down the road now for de la Cruz's house in East San Antonio. “What the hell happened, Jones?”