A Conspiracy of Bones (Temperance Brennan #19)(48)

“And we girls have ours.” She laughed, a lilting chirp, like a kite lifting on a sudden breeze. “Tomorrow I’m preparing an Italian feast for him.”

Mama isn’t a good cook. When Harry and I were kids, she’d hit the stove now and then. Her sauce always tasted like bright red nothing, her salads like wilted green nothing. But we loved when she tried. It meant she was in a sunny place, as she called her good days. Or that her meds were properly balanced, and she was taking them.

“Good food, fine wine, a little postprandial mischief. He’ll be eating out of my hand.”

“Try not to kill him.”

“Sweet Lord in heaven. Do you think it’s too much—”

“I’m joking. He’ll be fine.”

More swirling ice. The sound of swallowing. Then, low and conspiratorial, “Has anything happened with your faceless man?”

“We have an ID.” Sudden thought. “Listen, Mama. I have an internet question.”

“Ma spécialité!” Too much enthusiasm. Or whiskey.

“I’ve tried to track an individual and come up blank. Zero on social media, no email address, nothing via the usual search engines. How would you go about finding a person with absolutely no footprint?”

“Do you know anything about him?”

“I have reason to believe he’s a conspiracy theorist.”

“Like your archenemy.”

“Sorry?” She’d lost me.

“The dreadful woman who did the interview with that huckster, Nick Body.”

“Right.” I’d managed to push Heavner to far background.

“Try the deep web.” When I said nothing. “You’ve heard of it, I assume?”

“Hasn’t everyone?” Not that I thought so at all.

“Many hear, few visit.”

I knew that the deep web was favored by privacy advocates and whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. That it was used to collect information hidden from common users. That Asia Barrow had been disgusted by it. Beyond that, I was clueless.

“Can you be more specific?” I asked.

“The deep web, deep net, invisible web, dark web—it goes by many names—contains World Wide Web content that’s hidden and can’t be accessed by commonly known search engines. It’s crawling with vermin like Body.”

“How extensive is it?”

“I’ve read estimates that as much as ninety-six percent of the content of the WWW is buried in the deep web. Claims that the deep web is five hundred times larger than the surface web.”

“You’re saying that only four percent of WWW content is visible and accessible via common search engines?”

“I’m not. Others are.”

“How does one get to it?”

“You need a specialized deep web browser, such as the Onion Router.”

“TOR.” There. I knew something.

“Yes. TOR works by redirecting internet traffic through a network of thousands of relays. TOR got its name from the term onion routing, which refers to layers of encryption, kind of like the layers of an onion. Isn’t that simply too droll?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“TOR encrypts a user’s original data together with the destination IP address and sends the request through a virtual circuit of successive, randomly selected TOR relays.”

When I said nothing.

“Picture the relay points as being along big loops. Each successive relay decodes a layer of coding in the original, which is then revealed only to the next relay in the circuit.”

“Scrambling and unscrambling so the user’s location and IP address remain anonymous.”

“There are other deep net browsers. 12P, Freenet. But I prefer TOR.”

“You’ve used it?” My almost octogenarian mother never ceases to surprise me.

“Of course.” Amused by my surprise.

“It’s more difficult to access the really deep, nasty stuff. That requires knowledge of the URL, usually a password.”

A voice called out in the background. Male.

“Hold on.” Followed by the same muffled hollowness I’d heard with Slidell. Then, “Showtime, sweet pea.”

“I thought your ambush was planned for tomorrow.”

“Dress rehearsal. Or should I say undress.” With a warm molasses undercurrent I refused to consider.

“Thanks, Mama.”

She was right. A few minutes at the keyboard scored the following facts.

The deep web holds 7,500 terabytes of content, compared to 19 terabytes for the surface web, and has more than 200,000 sites. The deep web contains 550 billion documents compared to 1 billion for the surface web, between 400 and 550 times more public information. Ninety-five percent of the deep web is publicly accessible, meaning no fees or subscriptions.

Googling the term TOR brought me to a site offering a free download. With some trepidation, I hit the purple tab. The browser was mine in seconds. I connected, tested my network settings, was cleared. The keywords conspiracy theory produced a screen listing links, some familiar, most not.

I spent hours swinging from one site to the next. The level of idiocy was astounding.

There was the usual hackneyed rubbish. A lone gunman didn’t kill JFK. Paul McCartney really died in 1966. The moon landing was an elaborate hoax, every photo shot in a studio on earth. The 1947 crash in Area 51 near Roswell, New Mexico, involved an alien-operated UFO.