The Taken

eyes.

Hazel pulled the chair out for him, and Mackie sat, apologizing as he did, and Hazel asked him if he wanted a sedative.

“Oh no, Ma’am, that’d just make me sleepy.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

“What is it you were wanting to know, Ma’am?”

“That story the paper is running – did the chapters all come from the same email address?”

He’d popped the CD into Wingate’s drive and was waiting for it to show up on his desktop. “I had Rebecca turn the emails you wanted to see into rtfs to make things easier.”

“Meaning?”

“Just text files, Ma’am. They’ll open in any word processor.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard. He used the first two fingers of each hand to type and he seemed to be faster than Cartwright with all ten. The windows started opening on the screen, blooming and expanding until there were more than a dozen. “Thirteen in total, Ma’am.”

“Where are they coming from?”

“There’s his email address right there,” the kid said, putting his finger against the screen. The address read [email protected].

“Is it always the same? Like, is it coming from the same email address every time?”

“Yeah,” said Mackie.

“So that means it’s him writing to you guys.”

“Well, it’s his email address.”

“Is that a ‘yes’?” she said, getting impatient.

“It’s just that, you know, when you write an email, there’s an IP address attached to the ISP both sending and receiving the email -”

“English, Beaker!”

“I’m trying!” He hunched over the keyboard for a second, making an effort to become invisible. He spoke faster now. “IP: Internet Protocol. Every machine, you know, a computer or a device of any kind, that’s connected to a network – like the internet – has an IP address. It’s a unique identifier, it tells you where the device is located. Most of the time. ISP: Internet Service Provider. Simply said, your email originates at one IP address, that of your ISP, and arrives at another, the IP of your recipient’s ISP.”

“Fine. Where were these emails sent from?”

The kid started cycling through the text files. He ran his finger down a long string of gobbledegook that preceded the first bunch of the email messages. “Well, these all both originate and terminate at a Mayfair hub.” He quickly put his hands in the air to keep Hazel from yelling at him again. “A hub is the physical location where the ISP has its computers, and where all information is received, processed, and/or sent along. Eldwin’s provider is Ontcom, which has a hub in Mayfair, and ours is Caneast, which does too. So he sent these from his computer to the Ontcom servers, they sent them along to the Caneast servers, and we uploaded them to our hard drives from the Caneast servers.”

“So, broken telephone.”

“Sort of,” he said. “Except in the internet version, you can trace every step of the journey.”

“What about the rest of the emails? I want to know where chapters three, four, and five came from.”

He brought those up. She could see for herself that they still came from [email protected]. “These were sent from the internet, but still from his account.”

“Meaning.”

His shoulders slumped a little. “How come you don’t know this stuff? Ma’am.”

“You want me to slap your cranium?”

“You can send email from your desktop, you know, at home, off a program, or you can send it from the internet itself, from your ISP’s webmail program – it’s called a ‘shell’ and they all have one – which means you’re logging on to your account from some homepage – and this could be anywhere in the world – and you can send and receive mail from there.”

“Does the IP address change?”

“Yes,” he said. “Different servers.” He quickly added: “Servers are machines connected to the internet.”

“Can you find the location of these servers?”

“Yes,” he said, and he opened the browser on Wingate’s computer. He was copying and pasting strings of numbers onto a webpage. He clicked something and waited. Then he said, “Or no.”

“What do you mean no?”

“I mean these later chapters were sent from Colin Eldwin’s email address through the shell, but he was anonymized.”

“For Christ’s sake!”

Mackie turned in the chair, panicked anew. “Please, Ma’am, don’t slap my cranium. There’s all kinds of ways to be anonymous on the internet these days. You can send email, surf, chat, all anonymously. You can be untraceable. Anyone can do it.”

“So we can’t know it’s Eldwin physically sending the emails?”

“That’s right,” he said, and he sounded proud of her. “Someone could have his password and is using his account. That’s all they’d need. Then they could cloak, log on, and send email and no one would be the wiser unless they ran the IPs, like we just did.”

Hazel stared at the screen. The string of numbers Mackie had input was now superimposed over an image of planet Earth with a big yellow question mark beside them. “So what you’re saying is these last three chapters could have come from anywhere.”

“Well, they came from Ontcom’s shell, but the person who logged on to the shell could have been in Mozambique for all we know. This person used a site called Anonymice to cloak themselves. It says it here in the expanded headers.”

“What if we serve Anonymice with a warrant?”

“Good luck,” said Mackie. “These sites don’t keep any records at all. They don’t know who’s accessing their service. Theoretically, you could identify a user if you somehow got legal control of the site and you found him while he was online, because the Anonymice servers know, at some level, who’s logging on and generally where they are before they cloak them and send them forward into the internet. But once your guy’s logged out of the site, he’s a ghost.” She leaned over him and brought up the window with the video in it. She let him watch it. “Omigod. Is that blood, Ma’am?”

“What can you tell me about that url?”

He copied it from the address window and pasted it into trace search. “It’s the same thing. The path begins and ends on the internet.”

“Is there any way to link the url with the company that anonymized the emails? Is it the same company?”

He did some typing. “Yes. This is being processed through Anonymice as well.” He pointed to a string of numbers. “That’s their IP address.”

“Right now?” she asked. “The connection is live right now?”

“Yes.”

She patted him on the head, and he shrunk a little under her touch. “You can go.”

She went out the back of the pen toward her office. “Cartwright?” Melanie Cartwright appeared in the hallway. “Where’s my bacon sandwich?”

“Do you mean Mr. Pedersen?”

“Him, too.”

“I’m expecting him any minute,” she said.

Hazel went into her office. The missing link to Eldwin was some internet service that existed solely to allow people to work untraceably on the internet. But she knew what the average person didn’t: even a buried footprint still exists.

Something landed on her desk. The homey scent of peameal bacon wafted up from it. “I serve two masters,” said Andrew Pedersen.