The dates on all of them would pass eventually. After that, he wouldn’t know anything more than anyone else. He’d be done.The Oracle wouldn’t—couldn’t—exist.
The road turned away from the beach and cut inland, running beneath a canopy of palm leaves that blocked out much of the sunlight,turning the road into a green cave.
Will scanned the mailboxes beside the driveways poking out from the jungle on either side of the road. Each had a cutesy namepainted on it—things like seabreezes or marlin’s rest.
About two miles into the island, Will finally found the address he was looking for. The mailbox for this house read just beachy.
A gravel driveway wound a little way back into the trees, leading to a pleasantly sized house, white with light blue trim,set up about twenty feet off the ground on a wooden stilt framework. A white Lexus—almost all the cars down here were white—satin a carport built into the space beneath the house.
Will parked, got out, and walked up the stairs to the front door of the house. He rang the bell. Through the cut glass panelson either side of the door, he could see a shape moving, resolving into a figure walking toward him.
He stepped back. He wiped his palms on the front of his jeans. He was sweating—he wished he had dressed for the weather alittle better, but had somehow stupidly not expected Florida to be so warm. Not at Christmas.
“John, John, John, John,” he muttered to himself.
The door opened.
A woman stood there. She was probably north of fifty, but she had either the resolve or the cash to take care of herself,because she just looked like an aged echo of a young woman—certainly older, but not old. Her hair was short and mostly white,but her face looked younger than the color, a Steve Martin sort of look. It was styled in a sort of upswung do that Will associatedwith suburban moms. Actually, that was her look: well-off mom.
“John Bianco,” the woman said.
“Hi, Cathy,” Will said. “How are you?”
“Surprised to see you,” Cathy answered. “It was my understanding that we had a deal. Safer for everyone if we kept all contactonline only.”
“You’ll be happy I came down.”
Cathy smiled.
“Well, of course, John. I already am.”
Cathy stepped aside and ushered him into her home.
The entrance hall opened into a spacious living room with enormous floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on a spectacularview of the beach and the Gulf of Mexico beyond. Ceiling fans set at least twenty feet off the floor spun lazily. The decorrelied heavily on wicker. It was all very tasteful and expensive-looking.
Cathy pointed at a couch set in the middle of the room, and Will sat.
“Something to drink?”
Will shook his head. He’d had drinks with Cathy Jenkins before, and he wanted to keep a clear head. He could get drunk later,back at the hotel, if he felt like it—which he absolutely would. He had celebrating to do.
“Well, I’m going to have something,” Cathy said. “It’s past noon, right?”
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 ofglasses 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 keyboardistfriend 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 Internetand allowed you to connect to sites hidden from mainstream search engines. Tor was one, I2P was another, and new ones poppedup 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 knowexactly where you needed to go, you’d never get there. Will’s keyboardist friend had given him a few links, to the boardswhere “security consultants” supposedly hung out—criminals, really. The sort of people who would dig into Amazon and Expediaand other huge e-commerce sites, harvesting them for credit card numbers they could resell in lots of a thousand each. Orthey would search for security vulnerabilities in government and corporate sites, hoping to sell what they knew to the highestbidder, often the target itself. Or they would make themselves available for special projects—targeted assaults on sites ornetworks 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
