Chapter 3: God Bless the Internet

Chapter 3: God Bless the Internet

The horns of the Brandenburg Concerto #3 filled the room as Malcolm turned on his computer. He was in the office, as he thought of it, a special room where he went to contact the outside world and handle his financial affairs. The computer was American made, of course, since they make the best. As the monitor filled with color, he sipped the brandy and sighed contentedly. It had been a profitable and enjoyable day. The video had been sent electronically on its way to his client, he had enjoyed torturing Marie’s large, youthfully firm breasts, and topped everything off with a fine evening meal of steak. A quick check of his email and he would be retire for the night.

Malcolm had found the Internet very useful in his business. Phone calls are too traceable and not very private. The postal service suffered from similar problems, in addition to not being very fast. But the Internet! Ah, the speed of light communications that can be routed through a dozen different nodes and anonymous forwarders and made virtually untraceable. And encrypted easily and almost instantaneously into a meaningless hash of number and letters that would take the power of a major government agency to crack. It saved his having to meet clients face to face. Since some of his clients were powerful figures in the world of business, or crime, even infamous terrorists, it was preferable to remain anonymous.

It had taken only a few clicks on the keyboard and the video had rushed off on its way. It was encrypted with PGP, a robust encoding scheme, and would go through half a dozen intermediate servers before reaching its final destination. Which was not his client’s computer. Instead, it was a file storage website. That service gave him a coded file name. Only someone with that code would be able to download that file to his or her computer. There were several such file storage sites, mostly dealing with illegally copied movies and software being exchanged among hackers. He then sent an email, also encrypted, to his client; one that included that file code. His client could either pass the code along to Marie’s father for him to download, or download it himself and burn it to a DVD to be sent to the man.

That finished, he switched programs and checked his email. Three messages, the screen informed him. The first was a confirmation of receipt of the video he had made that afternoon. Good. The second was the number of a Swiss bank account that held his payment for the prior job, a goodly amount that he set about transferring to another numbered account. Later, he would again transfer it, this time to a bank in the Bahamas. He held his considerable wealth in banks all over the world.

The third message was a new client. As it displayed on the screen, it was gibberish, a screen filled with the weird characters native to computers but not humans. With the click of a mouse, he ordered the computer to decode it. A moment later there appeared the plain text transmission:

“Accept your terms. Target is Heather Claxon. Age 23. Information below. Secure as soon as possible. Level one treatment to begin immediately. If desired results not obtained, go to level two. Or more. Payment as agreed. M.”

He duplicated the information about where this Heather Claxon lived, description and habits, and then encoded them into another message. Logging onto an email service under an alias, he then sent the message off to his procurer in the United States. He knew that within a second the electronic message would be sitting in a provider’s email box and that before many hours had passed a man in Houston would have downloaded it to his computer and decoded the orders to procure this twenty-three years old female from the sunny state of California. For that service, when completed and the woman was in Malcolm’s hands, he would receive a large fee, which Malcolm would eventually take out of the money to be paid by a client known only as “M.” Which was only fair, since the capture and transporting of the targets was the most dangerous part of the whole operation.

A couple more clicks and the computer was shutting itself down. He pushed the mouse away and sighed contentedly. He enjoyed his work and made a great deal of money at it. Life was good.