“Smells good,” she allowed, then moved back. Thankfully because the smell of my soap was all over her and it was a little too intimate. “Where's your laptop? I can show you some stuff while we eat.”
“Drawer under the TV,” I said, scooping food onto plates.
I set the food on the coffee table, went back to get the cups of coffee, and when I got there, she had already gotten into my computer. And I mean... into it. As in... past the password protection.
“The fuck?”
“You're supposed to use words and numbers, you know. I mean... not that it would help, but still...”
I shook my head, handing her a fork and watching her put the laptop on her lap and balance a plate on the arm of the couch like it was something she had done a thousand times before.
“So what do you got?”
She reached into the box, pulling a USB out by random and slipping it into the drive. I watched as she punched in a passcode that seemed to have at least thirty digits, her fingers moving over the keys so fast there was no way I could even catch two of them put together.
The screen popped up. And there were folders upon folders, each locked individually. And even when she opened one, they were coded. She was careful. I appreciated that kind of attention to detail.
“Just have to... oh my god,” she groaned, her head going backward, her eyes closing. “This is nothing special?” she asked, chewing her food, rolling her eyes at me. “What the hell did you put in the potatoes?”
“Just onions and spices, doll,” I said, shrugging.
“If I live through this, I need to learn to cook.”
“We live through this, I'll teach you.”
Whoa.
What the fuck?
I'll teach her to cook?
What the hell was that?
I didn't teach anyone anything.
I certainly didn't let women hang around and chop onions with me.
Jesus Christ.
“I might take you up on that,” she said almost shyly as she turned her attention back to her computer, brought up some kind of box and typed rapidly until the page suddenly refreshed and the code was gone.
“Holy shit,” I said, dropping my plate back onto the coffee table and leaning closer. “Is that what I think it is?”
“I released a nasty little bug on his cell and computer a while back. But not before I did some digging around myself. This is a list of the dirt he has on all the organizations in the area. This is how he keeps them under his thumb.”
“How the fuck did you get into his system?”
At this, she snorted, shaking her head. “I sent him an email from an address that was one letter away from one of his usual contacts so he wouldn't be suspicious of it. And I sent him a link to a snuff film.”
“A snuff film?” I asked, my brows lowering.
“Yeah you know... like a porn where they kill a girl at the end. But it isn't porn. It's real.”
“Al, I know what a snuff film is, doll. I just didn't think they actually existed.”
“Oh, they exist,” she said with such authority that there was no question in my mind about the topic anymore. “Incidentally, I wasn't sending him to a real one. All he had to do was click the link and the bug was in his system. It actually sent him to a video about ending sexual assault.”
“So this is what you got from him?”
“This,” she agreed, throwing the lock back onto the files and ejecting the USB, “along with financial records and pictures.”
“Pictures?”
As soon as I pressed the point, she looked pale. She reached for her plate and set it on the coffee table only half eaten like she had lost her appetite.
“Yeah, pictures,” she said, digging around for the USB. When she found it, she held it up toward me, but she didn't plug it in.
“What are the pictures of, Alex?”
She swallowed hard. “Women.”
I was pretty sure I knew where that information was heading, but I needed confirmation. “Doll...”
She took a deep breath, looking down at the keyboard, typing into it.
“Pictures of women in varying forms of undress. Enduring varying forms of torture. Most prominently, women in the act of being raped.”
“Jesus fuckin' Christ.”
“Yeah.”
“What can we do with this kind of information?” I wondered allowed.
“I was thinking that while I was showering,” she admitted and an image of her naked flashed into my mind before I very deliberately pushed it away.
“Come to any conclusions?”
“I could put this out there.”
She said 'out there' in a way that implied it had a meaning. Just one I didn't understand. “Out where?”
“The dark net. Deep web. Whatever you want to call it.”
I'd heard of it. Anyone who did anything illegal in their lives probably had. It was a place for people like Alex. Hackers. People who did shit they wouldn't be able to do on normal browsers. And other small time crimes- endless pirated material. Porn. Government documents. But also, it was for other things. The bad shit. Gun running. Drug selling. Skin trading. Pedophilia. Fuck, even to get yourself black market organs.
“How would that help?”
At this, she shrugged. “It could incense the right people. You'd be surprised. There's a lot of people out there who actively try to shut down things like this. Operations other people are too scared to take on. In the grand scheme of things... I'm a nobody. My skills are pathetic compared to what some of these people can do. And some of them aren't just freaks behind a computer screen. They're people who... do shit. If I can ferret them out, get them interested, maybe they will take action into their own hands.”
I couldn't disagree with her. There had been a lot of hackers calling themselves hacktivists all over the news in the past few years. Taking down federal websites, turning the internet back on in Egypt when the government shut it down, releasing the names of KKK members, trolling organizations until they caved into whatever demands the hackers were making. They were powerful in ways I didn't understand but knew enough to respect.