The Oracle Year(38)
Will watched as Cathy walked over to a little bar built into one side of the room. She took a large tumbler from a row of glasses on top of the bar. Ice, three cubes’ worth, out of the mini fridge. The rest was vodka.
Will stared. The woman took a container of cranberry juice and held it up.
“For color,” she said and splashed no more than a teaspoon’s worth into her glass.
A quick stir with a long, thin spoon, and she took a sip.
“Ah, yes, that’s just the thing,” she said, looking at Will. “You sure you don’t want anything?”
“That’s all right, thanks,” he answered.
Cathy walked across the room and sat in an armchair. She crossed her legs gracefully, adjusting her cream-colored linen pants. She took a coaster from a basket on the coffee table in front of the couch and set her drink on it.
Then, with everything properly arranged, she looked up at Will and raised a perfectly tweezed eyebrow.
“So?” she said.
“Is Becky coming?”
“She’ll be here shortly. She called just before you arrived. Traffic on the causeway in from Fort Myers.”
“Let’s wait for her, then. I’m sure she’ll want to hear this.”
Cathy sipped her drink.
The Florida Ladies. Two women he’d “met” online, down in the Dark Web, after being pointed in their direction by a keyboardist friend who had done significant spelunking down there in search of exotic pharmaceuticals.
It wasn’t difficult—you downloaded a piece of software, a web browser that both anonymized your own travels through the Internet and allowed you to connect to sites hidden from mainstream search engines. Tor was one, I2P was another, and new ones popped up all the time, promising better access to the net’s hidden corners and better security once you got there.
The site addresses weren’t standard URLs—they were just a hash of letters and numbers, almost like a code. If you didn’t know exactly where you needed to go, you’d never get there. Will’s keyboardist friend had given him a few links, to the boards where “security consultants” supposedly hung out—criminals, really. The sort of people who would dig into Amazon and Expedia and other huge e-commerce sites, harvesting them for credit card numbers they could resell in lots of a thousand each. Or they would search for security vulnerabilities in government and corporate sites, hoping to sell what they knew to the highest bidder, often the target itself. Or they would make themselves available for special projects—targeted assaults on sites or networks their clients wanted taken out of action.
Will had tried to strike up conversations with these people, but it hadn’t been easy. Most seemed to be based in Eastern Europe, and he had to deal with a significant language barrier compounded by a nonexistent trust factor.
Eventually, though, he’d found an operation run by an individual using the handle GrandDame, who spoke (typed) excellent English and seemed willing to meet him halfway.
Negotiations had ensued, with Will in the role of John Bianco, one of several supposed employees working under the Oracle, a mysterious man who could see the future. Even saying that much had almost ended things right there—GrandDame’s skepticism had almost palpably radiated from the computer screen, like standing in front of an oven with the door open—but getting the Ladies to believe in the Oracle had worked the same way it originally had with Hamza. Will gave them a prediction due to happen in the next few days and simply let it come true.
Disbelief, mental trauma, denial, eventual acceptance, and then much wheeling and dealing, until finally an arrangement—Cathy and her partner, Becky Shubman, the other Florida Lady, would devise a set of protocols that would allow the Oracle to accomplish four specific objectives. They were: release predictions to the world; add new predictions from time to time; receive e-mails; and make it all vanish without a trace at some point down the road, all with complete, impenetrable security that wouldn’t require day-to-day maintenance or upkeep by the Florida Ladies, the Oracle, or anyone else.
Three weeks later, they’d presented their results. The system they’d devised didn’t rely on hiding a server in some sort of data vault behind multiple layers of heavy-bit encryption, or setting up the Site in a privacy-friendly jurisdiction somewhere in the world, or any of the other standard methods of protecting information. All those could be hacked with enough time and effort—no good.
Instead, they had sent Will to an Internet café and told him to download a Tor browser. Through that, he had opened a onetime-use dummy account on a freemail service, which he had used to open a corresponding dummy Twitter account. That was used to post the first set of predictions to a pastebin-esque clone the Ladies had coded themselves—like an anonymous bulletin board that could be seen by anyone with an Internet connection, but only updated if you had the encryption key.
The key for this particular bin changed every ten seconds and could only be retrieved through the use of an algorithm built upon a key phrase Will had chosen himself—he’d picked the first line of the second verse of Hendrix’s “Little Wing.” Those sixteen words were used as the building block for the encryption key, which was about a hundred characters long and morphed and changed constantly, now so far removed from the original code phrase that it couldn’t be reverse engineered.
Ultimately, it had all worked as promised. The Oracle’s name remained the best-kept secret in the world.