Make Me

He pasted a whole lot of stuff into the search box. Not Michael McCann’s name, but some of the long alphanumeric codes from the previous database. The fingerprint. Better than a name, presumably.

The guy clicked the go tab, and a clock started running in Reacher’s head.

Five seconds.

The guy said, “One day it will be much faster. The raw search is good, but the page search is piped out to the find-and-replace function from an old word processor.”

Twelve seconds.

The guy said, “But please don’t get the wrong impression. In absolute terms it’s fast enough. But the Deep Web is very big. That’s the issue. And I don’t have Google’s advantages. No one is clamoring for my attention. They want the opposite. But I’m down there. Right now. I’m among them. They can’t see me, but I can see them.”

Twenty-five seconds.

The guy said nothing.

Then the search stopped.

The screen changed to a list of links.

“We found him,” the guy said. “Twenty-six seconds. Well below the promised thirty-two.”

“Pretty good,” Reacher said.

“I gambled. I narrowed the field. I knew where I might find him.”

“Which was where?”

“I hope Mr. Westwood explained about me. The rabbit holes we go down are sometimes chosen for us. Not necessarily on merit.”

Reacher said, “The solving, not the problem.”

“Searching the Deep Web is technically elegant, but being in it can be unpleasant. It has a bit of everything, but ultimately it’s a three-legged stool. A third of it is a vast criminal marketplace, where everything is for sale, from your credit card number to murder. There are auction sites where hit men compete for jobs. Lowest bid wins. There are sites where you can specify how your wife should die, and there are contractors who will give you a custom quote.”

Chang asked, “Where did you find Michael McCann?”

The guy said, “The second leg of the Deep Web stool is pornography of the nastiest sort. Stomach-turning, even for me, and I’m not exactly a mainstream person.”

“Is that what he was into?”

“No, I found him in the third leg.”

“Which is what?”

“It was an easy guess. Because of the anhedonia. Because of the happiness meter stuck on zero. The third leg of the Deep Web is suicide.”

The guy from Palo Alto said, “I browse those boards from time to time. As an anthropologist, I hope, not a voyeur. Not a spectator at the zoo. I imagine Michael McCann was on the low end of typical. Born depressed, and if his mother is long dead, she died when he was young. Not a good combination. I’m sure he wanted it all to end. Every day. We can’t imagine how sure and certain these people are. These are not temporary ups and downs. These people hate their lives, deeply and sincerely, and they want them to stop. They want to catch the bus. That’s the phrase they use. They want to catch the bus out of town. But it’s a big step. Some of the boards are about support. Which is why I asked about the sudden new friend. They call them suicide partners. They do it together. They hold hands and jump, so to speak. The boards hook them up. There’s a lot of discussion about compatibility. Is Michael’s partner missing too?”

Chang said, “We don’t know. We don’t even know if it was a man or a woman. Near Tulsa, Oklahoma, we think.”

Westwood said, “What do they talk about on the other boards?”

“They talk about how. Endlessly. That’s their big question. There’s plenty of data out there. They discuss it like scripture. Best of all is a shotgun to the head. Instantaneous, as far as we know, and ninety-nine percent effective. A handgun in the mouth is ninety-seven percent. Shotgun to the chest, ninety-six, and a handgun to the chest about eighty-nine. Which is about the same as hanging yourself. Setting yourself on fire scores about seventy-six. Setting fire to your house is about seventy-three. No one really wants to go lower than that. Meanwhile jumping in front of a train is back up there at ninety-six, and jumping off the roof is at ninety-three, and driving into a bridge support is about seventy-eight. But make sure you wear your seatbelt. You can get thrown clear. Unrestrained drivers score about seventy straight. You have to be there, when the engine comes in through the dashboard. And last but not least, ever popular, right back at the top, second only to the shotgun, is cyanide. Better than ninety-seven percent effective, in about two minutes. But it’s two minutes of hideous agony. And that’s the problem right there. All the best ways are violent. Some folks can’t handle that. Men as well as women. And some don’t have the circumstances. If you live in the city, you don’t have your uncle’s old varmint gun in the back of the barn. If you can’t drag yourself to the bathroom, how can you drag yourself to the railroad track?”

“So what do they do?”