True Faith and Allegiance

While Vadim Rechkov got deeper and deeper into the threats and declarations of war against the USA, going so far as to reach out to others to find out how he could learn the name of the man or woman who fired the torpedo that killed his brother, Jack never saw anyone in the subsequent discussion offer to help in any way that seemed relevant to his own search. There were no promises of intelligence, no “friend of a friend” who could get him the info, no sly offers to send him some inside information or speak with him in private. Nothing that looked like someone with the information Rechkov would have needed to target Scott Hagen. While it was true some Reddit users helpfully suggested Rechkov “aim higher” and go for the commander of the ship, even naming Commander Hagen, nobody provided one iota of the specialized targeting information, or even intimated that they knew what specialized targeting information was.

Jack rested his neck by putting his head down on his arms on the conference table.

Gavin apparently saw this from across the table. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve got eighty-eight Reddit usernames to go through now, to search everything they’ve ever said online, and not one of them looks promising.”

Gavin said, “Actually, it’s worse than that.”

Ryan slowly lifted his head and looked at Biery with red-rimmed eyes. “What the hell does that mean?”

“You don’t even know eighty-eight is the right number. A Reddit user can also remove one of their posts at any time. For all you know, the guy we’re looking for reached out to Rechkov, or spurred him on somehow, and then removed his posts after the fact. Like when Rechkov got killed.”

Ryan just said, “Well, shit, Gavin. Are you telling me this was an exercise in futility all along?”

Now Gavin smiled. “No, it wasn’t. Because of this.” He spun his laptop around and pushed it halfway across the table to Jack, who still couldn’t tell what he was looking at.

“What’s this?”

“This is an archived version of each Reddit page, kept on a special third-party server. Completely open-source, free, and legal. These cached pages of the same subreddit will show us if anyone in the discussion removed their posting or postings after the fact.” Gavin added, “If I just talked a guy into killing someone, gave him the intel to do it… and then he freaking went ahead and tried it, you wouldn’t find me leaving a trace of it up on some public message board. I’d pull every bit of my side of it down. But even though you can remove your posts from the website, you can’t touch the archived pages.”

Jack smiled. “The Internet is forever.”

“Whether that’s good or bad depends on if you are the one hiding or the one seeking.”

Jack came back to life a little. “I just need to log all the usernames in the cached subreddit and see if there are any on the original version that are no longer around on the current version. Then look into those people and see if I can figure out why they deleted their post.”

“Exactly.”

“And I’m going to do just that.” Jack stood. “As soon as I get home, eat something, and take a shower. See you back here in the a.m.?”

Gavin said, “I’m going to sleep in my office, so… yep.”

Jack shook his head. “No way, Gav. I don’t even live two minutes from here. You can crash at my place. I’ve got a guest room I don’t think I’ve been in since I set up the bed in there.”

Gavin said, “Thanks, but no, thanks. I’ve got a buddy at NSA who’s working on the OPM hack. He’s got some special tools that might come in handy, so I’ve been helping him, in case we need him to help us. He’s going to call me in a bit.”

Jack had slipped his laptop in his backpack, and had already moved halfway out the door. “Okay. I’ll bring you breakfast in the morning. Something light.”

“But not too light,” Gavin said, already looking back down to his work.

* * *

Jack sat at his coffee table with his laptop open and several notebooks out in front of him. He had spent the last forty-five minutes writing down every username that corresponded with Vadim Rechkov in the cached version of the subreddit regarding the Baltic conflict. He then looked down at the database and saw there were eighty-nine names.

Jack rubbed his eyes and flipped back to the original list.

Eighty-eight names.

One user had removed his post or posts. It took just a couple minutes’ more work to find out the disappearing username was that of someone called 5Megachopper5. Quickly, Jack left his database lists and went back to the page that had the archived discussion on the Baltic conflict, so he could see exactly what this user had contributed to the original subreddit.

But to Jack’s frustration, 5Megachopper5 had posted only once. Under one of Rechkov’s long diatribes threatening death and destruction to the crew of the James Greer, this mystery user had posted the most simple of messages:

PM sent

“Private message sent,” Jack said aloud. It was a notice that 5Megachopper5 had sent a private message to TheSlavnyKid’s personal Reddit inbox.