Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:33:11 -0700
From: applesandpears@hushmail.com
Subject: A Little Revolution Part 10

Thanks for your patience while I took a nice long summer vacation! I hope
you didn't lose interest in the story, because it's going to get even
better and more complex. I love my readers, and to communicate with me, let
me know what you like, what you want to see, and make any other comments or
requests, to Adrian at:

applesandpears@hushmail.com

Editor's Note: Naturally, this is all fiction, don't take it seriously,
don't fuck your kids, etc., or anyone else`s. We don't live in this
world. If you have a hard time telling fantasy from reality, seek
professional help.


"Seven years ago I was working in the Los Angeles field office of the
F.B.I."

Jackson glanced around at the team who looked up at him, their expressions
revealing various shades of curiosity. Some of them probably knew the
story, but he would start at the beginning nonetheless.

"I had spent three years as an undercover officer of the L.A.P.D.,
infiltrating the network of Armenian mob boss Harman Harkerian. I was
twenty-two when I went under, and after the Glendale Hyatt shootout, I was
burnt out. I had killed Harkerian, but within a year a whole new order had
risen in the Armenian mob.  I despaired that that particular cancer would
ever be rooted out. But then the F.B.I took down Harkarian's nephew on
money laundering charges without firing a shot. I knew that to really go
after the bad guys, it wasn't guns that would bring them down. It was a
keyboard."

The massive Italian, Stefano, stifled a yawn. He looked uncomfortable on
the little plastic chair. Their newly assigned office was a closed primary
school in Paris's unfashionable 19th arrondissement, an ugly brick building
from the 1960s that had been unused for several years. A number of the
rooms were still stuffed with little desks and chalky blackboards. It was
some French bureaucrat's idea of irony, placing a special unit dedicated to
bringing down a pedophile in an abandoned school.

"The F.B.I. knew my work, and they took me on. They sent me back to school
for a masters at Cal Tech. I'd been a bit of a programming geek as a
teenager, so I took to it, and a year later I was working out of the field
office in Westwood, tracing mob money across the supposedly secure networks
of the internet. That was when the case landed in my lap."

Thom, the wiry, balding blond German from Dresden who was in charge of
their online investigation, piped up with a question.

"One second. A masters at Cal Tech? Who was your advisor?"

"Goldstein".

Thom gave him a knowing smile. God, I hate geeks, Jackson thought. Smug
little jerks. Everyone in the hacker community knew about Goldstein.

"It landed on my desk because of the internet aspect and the money
laundering aspect. Otherwise, it was not my kind of case. It had started as
a straight-up child molestation prosecution. A wealthy investment banker
from Newport Beach had been caught diddling the neighbor boy. Nothing
unusual about it. The case had broke when the boy's mother set up a net
nanny program on his computer that captured the pedo sending her son porn
files. Kiddy porn files of men and boys. It was an open and shut case, the
perp had broken down and confessed. But then he had told an interesting
story, one that brought the F.B.I. into the mix. Turns out our bigshot
banker was broke. He was broke because he has been taken in a most unusual
blackmail. A couple of years before his arrest he had gotten into
downloading kiddy porn files off of internet newsgroups. He had been a
particular fan of files produced by a certain sicko who called himself
"Hermes". Hermes produced real slick sick shit, a mix of boys and girls in
all sorts of combinations. Our perp preferred the boy vids and collected a
couple of dozen. Hermes always posted with a contact e-mail, but our guy
was too cautious to use it. He had taken all kinds of precautions,
including ISP masking and a dead drop e-mail. He thought he was perfectly
anonymous. Nevertheless, one day an e-mail landed in his supposedly
anonymous box. It was a webpage link, a log-in code, and it was signed
"Hermes". He deliberated for a while but eventually he gave in. What he
found blew his mind.

The web page was a hub of links to all kinds of high-end, well produced
porn. There were free vids for download, other vids that required payment,
and an offer of live webcams for pay. Payment was by an e-cash broker in
Asia. He started watching the vids, first the free stuff and then the
paid. Eventually he signed up for his first live web show, and had a boy in
Russia wanking off for him, following every prompt he typed into the chat
window. He loved it, and started visiting more frequently.

That's when another e-mail came from "Hermes". This one contained a hotel
room number in L.A., a time, and the picture of a boy, the kind of boy this
perp liked, the kind that anyone tracking his consumption would know he
liked. He wondered about how they had figured out his preference and his
location, but still, he couldn't resist. The hook took. At the appointed
hour, he found himself in front of the hotel room door, sure that he was
about to be jumped and robbed. But the boy was the only one there, and he
was willing to give the perp exactly what he wanted. He thought he'd found
nirvana, and had given the boy the 500 bucks he had asked for happily.

The next day he received another e-mail. It contained a link to a video
from a hidden camera, starring him and the boy from the night before. It
also contained information on a Cayman bank account, and instructions to
deposit 25 grand. Plus it contained his savings account balance, his
business e-mail, address and phone numbers, his business partner's contact
information, his mother's home address, and other personal information that
had obviously been gleaned off the net.

He deposited the money.

A month later, another e-mail. Another hotel room, another boy. This time
the deposit was 30 grand. This went on for a year, until he was down to his
last 19 grand in savings. One more e-mail, one more boy. And finally, one
last deposit. For the exact amount he had in his savings. Then, nothing."

His log-in no longer worked. No more e-mails came. He had been tapped out.

He grew desperate. He was hooked on what they had given him. So he went to
find his own, shat where he ate, and we found him. Normally, a blackmail
con on a pedophile would have been really far down the Bureau's list of
priorities, but since this asshole was claiming that child prostitution was
being run by the same outfit, they tasked me the case. I traced the website
address to a server stack in an office building in Cracow. No one in the
building management remembered who installed the stack or who it was
supposed to belong to. It was just there, riding off their fiber, humming
away, burning their electricity. When the Polish police duped the server
and sent it to me, is was pristine, totally wiped clean, either by software
working remotely, or by the local cops who didn't know what they were doing
or didn't want the F.B.I. reading those drives. Either way, the trail went
cold, the perp was given thirty years and offed himself with a shotgun the
night before he was to report to prison, and I moved on, figuring that the
perp had made up the whole real live boy angle to upsell us on his info. We
only had proof of the money transfers after all. He was trying to bargain
his sentence down with this story, so some of the details were always
suspect.

"So you let it drop?" Karina, the detective from Barcelona, questioned him
in a neutral tone. She was a dark-eyed Spanish woman, almost a touch of
gypsy in her looks. Jackson had been eying her since the team had met for
the first time the night before in an old bistro near the Oberkampf.

"Yeah, I let it drop. Dude was dead, the website search was a dead end as
well. I forgot about it and moved on, spending almost a year bringing down
a corrupt Korean real estate scammer. I had pretty much forgotten about the
case, until as I was walking out of my office one night my phone rang. It
was an agent in the field office down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Turns out
we had a guy from our office who had transferred down there. This agent got
involved in a case that reminded him of my old investigation. Turns out
they had arrested an evangelical minister, a real big fish down there, one
of those guys with a mega-church in the suburbs that had its own exit on
the highway. This dude had a thing for little black girls, and was diddling
his housekeeper's daughter. Poor thing finally confessed it to her mom, who
promptly shot the pastor with his own 45. She didn't kill him though, so
when it came time to cut a deal, he trotted out the same story, pretty
much. Online porn leading to an anonymous e-mail, leading to a willing
young girl in a New Orleans hotel, leading to extortion. It had continued
for almost two years, and the good reverend had drained over a million
bucks from his church's coffers. The only difference was he was still
paying. But someone must have been reading the newspapers down there,
because after the arrest there had been no more e-mails.

Given the strange similarities in the case, I asked the bureau to set up a
special task force. They approved it, a task force of one. At least that
was how it started. I traced back the internet address again, this time to
a server in an office park in Bangalore that was supposed to be running a
call center's switching software. It had been hacked and turned into a
slave. It was another dead end. Now I was getting pissed."

"What did you do about it" asked Jean-Paul, the tough and swarthy Corsican
cop from Lyon who was the team's main liaison with the Gendarmerie.

"I built a profile, based on the two cases, and sent it out to Bureau field
offices and our law enforcement partners. All wealthy pedophiles were to be
questioned. I didn't have any hope, it was a shot in the dark. But the
confessions started coming in. It was like..." Jackson hesitated, at a loss
for words. "It was like they wanted to confess that they had been taken. As
if it made up for their crimes. All told, within a year, I had nine similar
cases, all involving the same m.o."

"Nine cases. Were they all in different cities?" Karina was pondering the
implications.

"Four were in California. The L.A. case, two in the Bay, using different
hotels and website addresses and bank accounts, one in San Diego. Then one
in Seattle, one is Chicago, two in Miami, again with different hotels,
websites, and banks, and one in New York City. Eventually, by the end of
the investigation, I had twenty-one cases in fourteen different
cities. Sometimes the e-mailer was Hermes. Sometimes it was several other
names of popular kid porn producers on the nets."

"You are telling me this ring had child prostitutes in fourteen different
American cities?" Karina was asking herself the same questions he had
asked.

"Yes. And we compared physical descriptions. They were all different
kids. Sometimes, the same perp would have the same kid over a matter of
months, but the longest case we had, an internet millionaire in San
Francisco, he had been paying for over four years. He estimated that he had
had sexual encounters with nineteen different kids during that time, and
deposited over ten million into his assigned account."

The Italian let out a loud, low wolf whistle. Karina shook her head at the
implications of the scale of the operation.

"I built profiles of all the kids described in the cases. We also had
video, tons of it, from the blackmail clips that had been sent out. We saw
kids who got used in different cities. We collected descriptions from the
live sex shows on the websites, as well as the video downloads, of all the
adults and children both. In one case, we even got DNA from a girl, when
one of the perps kept a pair of her panties after an encounter. But it
turned up nothing in the database. Neither did our facial recognition
software, or our photo circulations. I started to have the feeling that the
ring we were chasing might have even had access to the same databases we
did. We did an exhaustive security review and could find no inappropriately
deleted files, but then again, the ring didn't need to delete files. They
just needed to make sure that none of their kids were in any of our
databases."

"You're telling me that you think this ring hacked the law enforcement
databases in the U.S.?" Thom could hardly contain his snort of disdain.

"Yes. More on that later. But first, we finally had a break in the case. We
finally found one of the kids."