True Faith and Allegiance

With a little more work, Jack could see how even clandestine employees of the government, most of whom had no online identities to speak of, were still vulnerable via family and friends letting information slip.

Gavin entered with his own cup of coffee, gave Ryan a nod, and then took his regular seat at the conference table.

As soon as he sat he said, “I’ve come bearing gifts.”

Jack didn’t even look his way. “You don’t eat donuts anymore, so I doubt that there’s anything you have that I’m interested—”

Jack stopped abruptly. He looked up now. “You talked to your friend at NSA. The guy with the back door to Reddit?”

Gavin corrected him. “I didn’t say he was a friend, and I didn’t say he had a back door. But I did get into the private message sent by the user you mentioned.”

Ryan snatched a pen off the table and scrambled to find a blank page in a notebook nearly filled with scrawl.

Gavin looked at his computer. “5Megachopper5’s message reads as follows: ‘I’ve been following your story, my friend, and I think I can help. If you truly want to do that which you claim, I will provide you with all the information you need to make it happen. I am prepared to prove myself to you, and I want nothing in return other than to see that justice is done for Stepan’s life.’”

Jack just said, “Wow.”

“He provides an address that can only be accessed by TOR for Rechkov to use to communicate if he is interested. It’s a dead link now. And then, the day he sent the PM, the guy we are after shut his Reddit identity down. I assume that means Rechkov did make contact with him.”

“So… we’re screwed,” Jack said. “Right back where we started.”

“Not at all,” replied Gavin. “I’ve been going through the contents of Rechkov’s hard drive, just like a dozen other forensics investigators, but unlike them, I am the only one who knows about the URL, and the date of the communication on Reddit. All this information was logged on his hard drive by the date. Remember, Rechkov was a fledgling computer scientist himself, so he has tens of thousands of pages of code saved as text files, all part of his studies, and it’s kept haphazardly all over his drive. But it occurred to me Rechkov might have tried to get some info on this person communicating with him, at least just to make sure it wasn’t the U.S. government trying to catch him in a sting. I found a few pages of code in a txt format saved on Evernote, a note-taking app, that he’d put there in the days after the Reddit communication, so I went through it, line by line, late last night.”

Gavin waited to be prompted by Jack.

“And?”

“And Rechkov left a clue as to who he was communicating with. In the code was the creator’s username, Polygeist999.”

Jack just said, “You lost me.”

“Rechkov determined this username was affiliated with the person who set up the dark website.”

“I thought 5Megachopper5 did that.”

“Nah, that’s a throwaway name he used on Reddit. Polygeist999 is another name he used.”

Jack scratched his head. “So… Rechkov figured out he was talking to someone online associated with another username. How?”

“Maybe something this guy sent him, or by hacking into a service this guy revealed he was a member of. No way to know, but it’s nice that that asshole Rechkov left us a clue.”

“How is that a clue?”

Gavin said, “I used link analysis on Polygeist999, to see if it, or a version close to it, shows up in other places online. It’s been used hundreds of times in different permutations. ‘Padding,’ it’s called. It could be 1Polygeist999, or Polygeist9991 or he might throw an ampersand in there or something else. Computer people often use variations, depending on what they are working on, and they are different enough that it takes high-level link analysis to figure out that all the different permutations are one and the same person. I went to my friend at the NSA, you know, the one who doesn’t exist, and had him run some reports for me. The Polygeist username first showed up in March of last year on an apartment service in Romania. After that it was everywhere, different types of computer and technical sites, coding, hacking, illegal downloads, et cetera.”

Jack said, “Romania?”

“Yes,” Gavin confirmed. “And the link analysis gives us other usernames that show up multiple times along with Polygeist. Dozens and dozens of uses of this name and others linked to it, all tied to e-mails, computer code, domain registrations, et cetera.”