‘I don't...I'm not comfortable discussing this without a lawyer.’
Ella subtly shifted her weight, positioning her body to block the most direct path to the main door.
‘A lawyer?Why would you need a lawyer?’
‘I know my rights,’ Blackwood insisted.He stepped back from his table.Behind him was a fire door that looked solid as a rock.‘I don't have to say anything without counsel.’
‘Alright, Roger,’ she said.‘Let's dial it back a notch.I’m not here to accuse you of anything.I just want to understand what happened between you and Martina.I heard there was some…’
She was about to press further when Blackwood's eyes suddenly widened and a look of horrified realization dawned on his face.
Then, faster than she would have given him credit for, Blackwood lunged for the fire door behind his desk.
He slammed his hand down on what Ella quickly realized was a fire alarm, shouldered through the fire door and escaped out onto the school grounds.There and gone in a blink, with the fire door slamming shut behind him.
Adrenaline surged.Ella leaped to her feet, hauled ass over the desk and pushed through the same door as the alarm blared overhead.
Innocent men didn't run.And Ella Dark had never been one to let prey slip through her fingers.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
9AM.Ripley thought she was getting better with technology, but Ryland was fast proving her wrong.
His lair was a nest of circuit boards and servers, and while Ripley wasn’t a fan of the environment, all she needed was a translator.She was on mission, and that mission had a name.
LACHANCE666.
Her dark web ventures had given Ryland a lead, thin as it was, but Ryland could, in his own words, conjure miracles out of scraps before.On one monitor, lines of code scrolled past faster than the human eye could track.On another, a maze-like graph of interconnected nodes pulsed and shifted, each point representing a potential breadcrumb in the digital trail of their elusive poster, apparently.
Ripley couldn’t do much except watch and answer any questions Ryland had.She felt a little useless, but it was her that kickstarted this avenue of investigation.
‘Okay, so we’ve used a crawler to map out the site's structure and user interactions.The forum uses a modified version of the Tor network.It bounces connections through multiple relays to obscure users' locations.It’s clever, but not impenetrable.’
‘I… think I understand.’
‘Then I’ve deployed a series of packet sniffers and traffic analysis tools.We’re looking for patterns, anomalies, anything that might give us a clue who this user really is.’He flicked his monitor.‘Come on.Show me something.’
A notification pinged and drew Ryland’s attention to a secondary monitor.‘So this decryption algorithm has managed to crack a small portion of the forum's user database.It’s not much, just a fragment of metadata associated with recent logins, but it’s a start.
Ripley didn’t know where to stay quiet or encourage him, so she opted for a mixture of both.‘Sounds like good news.Even something minor is better than nothing.’
‘Now I’m going to isolate the data related to LACHANCE666’S account.I’m feeding it into another program, one I’ve made, which will attempt to correlate the login times with known exit nodes of the Tor network.’
For a moment, hope flared in Ripley’s chest.She wasn’t sure, but it looked to her untrained eye like there was a pattern emerging; a series of connections that seemed to originate from the same general area.But as quickly as it appeared, it vanished, probably swallowed up by the ever-shifting landscape of the dark web.
Outside, the precinct yawned to life with the first pot of cop coffee, but in here, time slipped sideways.Could've been minutes, could've been hours.All Ripley knew was after this, she didn’t want to use the dark web again.
‘Okay, another trace routine.This one’s designed to piggyback on the forum's internal protocols.It pretends to be routine server maintenance while it really hunts for IP addresses.’
A string of numbers appeared on his screen.
Ripley said, ‘Forgive my ignorance, but is that an IP address?’
‘Yes it is!’
Then, just as quickly, it vanished, replaced by an error message.[0x1D4C] UNAUTHORIZED INTRUSION DETECTED.
‘Damn it to hell!’Ryland slammed a fist on his table.‘I didn’t expect that.You know, whoever this LaChance guy, he’s pretty good.He knows his way around the dark web.’
