Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗
Told to her this way, it made her angry all over again.
“You should see your face. I don’t blame you for being mad. I would be livid. Especially when she took the horse back. A couple of years down the line, when she saw just how much my condition changed my life—her life—she wasn’t so thankful anymore.”
He shifted in his chair, yawned. Laura wondered if the yawning helped him in some way. “If you want to put it in a charitable light, she was impulsive. Giving you the horse on an impulse and taking it back the same way. Your good deed had outlived its usefulness.” No self-pity, just a statement of fact. “But I’ve never forgotten, and now I’m in a position to help you. I know how important this is to you. It would be important to anyone, but considering what you’ve been through in your own life …" He let it hover, the vague reference to the home invasion.
Laura didn’t like this. He knew too much about her life.
“I want to apologize for my mother. It’s too bad Calliope is gone—I’d give her back to you if I could. Mother sold her foals. For all I know, one of them might be in town.”
“It doesn’t matter now."
He changed the subject. “Did Mikey tell you about my background?”
“Mikey?”
“Lieutenant Galaz.”
“He told me Dynever is an Internet security company.”
“We’ve worked with the FBI on cases just like this. One in New York, a pedophile ring. One of my people pretended he was a fourteen-year-old girl.”
He wiped his forehead. His complexion looked blotchy, and he was sweating. Laura looked around, but Freddy was still inside the house.
“These guys—they build their wholes lives around getting little girls. They marry women so they can get to their children. Go into occupations where they can be around them. It’s the fantasy. They can’t resist it—they don’t want to.”
“It’s sick,” she said. She knew that technically the guy she was after wasn’t sick. He was a sociopath—perfectly sane. But calling him “sick” relieved the pressure in her head, made her feel better.
“You’d be surprised at how many people—doctors, lawyers, beggermen, chiefs—think that doing a twelve-year-old girl is acceptable. The evidence is there, staring you in the face. On the ‘net.” He set his glass down on the table, spilling orange juice and champagne over his long, elegant fingers. He didn’t seem to notice. “The web has changed everything. People used to hide the way they felt, but now there are so many of them and they’re all connected, they have strength in numbers. Now they’re legitimate. They can rationalize it.
“So my question to you, Laura, is this: If more and more people believe something, might there not be some value to it?”
Before Laura could answer Jay called out, “You win, Freddy. I’m coming in." He backed his motorized wheelchair and deftly sped up the ramp and through the French doors into the house, leaving her to follow.
Freddy insisted that Laura wait in the living room while they “took care of some essentials.”
She waited, feeling uncomfortable. Wondering if he was being cleaned up because he had overheated, wondering if he had, indeed, pissed his pants. Wondering, too, if he thought that just because a majority of people thought something was right, there was an excuse for cruelty. Did he really think that, or was he just playing devil’s advocate?
Forty minutes later, Jay Ramsey reappeared, his hair combed nicely and his color better. “Let’s get down to it, babe,” he said.
Jay situated himself in front of the computer and connected to the Internet. Laura noticed that even with his limited hand motions, he was fast with his two index fingers; they seemed to fly over the keyboard like ten digits.
Laura watched as he pulled up a no-frills site, devoid of graphics.
Ramsey said, “Welcome to WiNX. This is the quintessential Internet relay chat program.”
Laura tried to remember what Buddy Holland had told her. “Does it have something to do with Instant Messaging?”
“That’s the currency. People talking to each other in real time. You’ve probably done something like it on Facebook or Yahoo.”
“Uh no.”
He twisted in his chair a little, smiled. “The principle is really simple. You put yourself out there and pretty soon someone wants to talk to you.”
He hit a couple of keys and brought up a screen that reminded Laura of her first experience with a computer, back in the covered wagon days. “That looks like DOS.”
“See? You know more than you think. WiNX is a DOS-based system. See these?” He keyed down through several lines of old-fashioned courier print and pointed with a thumb. “These are channels—rooms where people with like tastes can meet. There’re probably 20,000 channels on WiNX right now." He flinched again, moved in his seat. Looked at her. “Am I confusing you?”
She remembered how Buddy had thrown technical terms at her without telling her what they meant. Enjoying her discomfort. She hesitated to make a fool of herself, but couldn’t help asking, “Are they kind of like TV channels?”
He grinned lopsidedly. “That’s as good a description as any. Imagine a station with unlimited channels on everything you can imagine." He clicked on another page. “WiNX has been around forever. The thing you’ve got to know is that this is the real underground. There are no controls. Nobody’s watching you to see that you don’t go over the line. There’s nothing to stop you from doing anything you want to do. It’s a no-man’s land.”
Laura felt a kinetic snap in her spine. A no-man’s land. She got the feeling that she was on the brink of knowing something she’d rather not.
He scrolled down what seemed like miles of print. “Ah, here we are.” He clicked on something called Warezoutpost, and a list of titles came up, all after the word “warez”.
“Warez is ‘wares’,” Jay explained. “As in ‘let me show you my wares.’ See? Software for games. Movies, music. This is where the kids are at because they can download stuff for free.”
He showed her how to locate what he wanted, a movie called Ghost Recon. “This is what draws the kids. Free music, movies. I’m next in line if I want it.”
With a few clicks to the keyboard, he moved on.
“The kids are always the first to know. You can get anything you want off these boards. They cater to every taste. This one is general, but there are channels where kids talk to each other.” He pulled up another window. “Let’s see what we’ve got in the Girls’ Room.”
“The Girls’ Room?”
“I call it that. It’s used by lots preteen girls.”
He pointed out the list of names on the sidebar to the right. “Those are the people in the room now. What I’m going to do is …” He hit a key and then typed in a name, erased it, and typed in another. “Gotta have a nick.” He added helpfully, “Nickname.” He typed in “nick1amber/." This was accepted, and then he typed: “hi.”
It showed up like this:
Amber: hi
Laura heard a chime and a message box popped up. Jay pointed to the status bar and Laura saw the name Gitmo.
Gitmo: how old r u?
Amber: 2
Gitmo: pic?
“He wants a picture.”
Amber: ok were you fro?????????
Amber: from
Gitmo: CA u?
Laura heard a chime. Another person wanting to talk to Amber. Jay hit a key and another instant message box popped up.
Podunk89: a/s
“He’s asking her age and sex.”
Amber: alost 13
Jay nodded to the status bar at the top of the screen. Podunk’s name changed from red to black. He was gone. “Wrong age,” Jay said, going back to Gitmo.
Gitmo: where you been?
Amber: My mom calledm e
Gitmo: send me a pic
A flurry of chimes. Four new names lit up the board.
Amber: well see how old r you?
