The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 18

There’s a lot of crap talked about the darknet.

Encrypted data, hard (but not, please note, not impossible) to trace. It lurks beneath the internet, that public stewing ground of tracked data and tweets, like the submarine beneath the cruise ship. There, political dissidents post videos of their kin being slaughtered by the powers that be; here, the factory workers in Yunan driven to despair, their final moments shown as they throw themselves from the highest windows. Their deaths are filmed on a smartphone and smuggled through the Great Firewall of China; the man who died that day made your computer, and it was cheap — will you, knowing his suffering, buy elsewhere? (But it was cheap! So wonderfully cheap!) Governments use the darknet to negotiate and communicate away from prying eyes. The US Navy invented it, and through it treaties are salvaged, truths revealed.

Anonymous don their Guy Fawkes mask and take down government servers and giant corporations, fight for petty feuds and noble causes. Today a DDOS attack against the Russian government in retaliation for the death of a journalist who spoke out over Ukraine. Tomorrow a police server is wiped in Scotland Yard, erasing records of one of their kind and, incidentally, securing the freedom of two aggravated assaulters, three burglars and a rapist.

Causes are sometimes blind, they say. Sometimes people are hurt in the fight for freedom.

Free to look at child pornography.

**My website has over 40,000 positive reviews and over 3,000 images!!**

Or perhaps:

Heroin, uncut, 2kg slab direct from Afghanistan. This is the highest quality, carefully packaged and delivered. Please place your offers with the subject line, “Auction bid”.

There is no act too degrading, no violence which cannot be indulged on the darknet. Pay in USD, euros, bitcoins or yen, someone, somewhere, will make your dreams come true.

On the day I was to exchange $2.2 million worth of diamonds with an anonymous user by the name of mugurski71 in a café in Oman, I took a gamble on Byron14, and sent a decoy in my place.

Her name was Tola, and she had been trafficked from Thailand four years ago into domestic service. Her passport was taken by the agency who’d arranged her transit, her salary was held back for “security requirements” and after three weeks in the house where she was labouring, the fifty-four-year-old father-of-nine attempted to rape her. She bit his ear hard enough for him to need stitches, and she was arrested. Once he was out of hospital, the man didn’t press charges, but the agency which had trafficked Tola gave him compensation for his trouble and had Tola in a brothel in the desert before the cheque had cleared.

“I’m nice,” she said, when I phoned. “I have good French.”

I told her to meet me in the souk, and left a mobile phone on the table in the café where the transfer was to take place.

Through the mobile phone’s camera, I watched her face bob in and out of focus. She didn’t pick up the phone, didn’t examine it, expressed no curiosity about anything. Just sat and waited, her features stuck in tiny motion, like a piece of degraded film on a loop.

From my phone a few shops away, I sent her location to mugurski71 and waited.

They arrived in seventeen minutes, and the moment they did it was obviously a trap. The man who went into the café was respectable enough: a cream linen suit, sunglasses, hair receding from his high forehead and a silk handkerchief folded in his jacket pocket. The seven armed men who positioned themselves around the little shop and nearby pathways didn’t even bother to hide their weapons; one, an idiot who deserved to lose both his testicles in the inevitable slipped-trigger, had a gun lodged in his trouser belt.

All this I saw as I walked between them, examining the sights of the market like a good tourist. In my ear I could hear a conversation unfolding in the café that I was happy not to be a part of.

Where are the goods?

Good. Good good.

Where are they?

You know place near here? I know place near here.

Do you understand what I’m talking about?

Good good. Yes, of course, very good.

Tola leaning across the table, one hand reaching out to caress the buyer’s thigh. A slap; he pushed it away, she recoiled, animal hurt now on her features.

I dialled the mobile phone in the café.

mugurski71 answered.

“Yes?”

“Too many guns in the room,” I said. “Diamonds say bye-bye!”

He tried to speak, but I hung up, pulled out my battery and SIM card, and threw them in the rubbish on my way out.

I left Oman that night, stealing a ticket from a passenger on a cruise liner heading for the Red Sea. I couldn’t use the passenger’s cabin; she had shouted her way back on board, and a search was quickly underway for the stowaway. But I could sit by the bar, ordering a series of desultorily alcohol-free concoctions and waiting for security to give up, declare “Maybe you lost it, ma’am,” before we pulled out of port. I could bring no luggage that would attract attention, so walked round with my stolen goods, and stayed awake until 3 a.m., when I finally managed to snooze during a screening of a bad romantic comedy in the ship’s all-night cinema lounge.

By day I slumbered on a balcony overlooking the sea, as the engines roared above and grumbled below. I bought a bikini from the over-priced on-board shop, changed in the toilets, swam in the cruiser’s outdoor pool, washed myself in the fountains that spurted up either side of the deck, dried in the sun, met a preacher and his wife, a retired commander of the RAF, a former tap-dance teacher and her four abhorrent children, a man who reported himself to be in “commodities” and who I suspected of being an arms dealer, and a group of student actors who every day put on the “happy matinee show for the kiddies!” (The Big Friendly Giant) and then in the evening, on the same stage, performed the “grown-up show for culture” (Richard III).

“I play King Richard,” whispered one conspiratorially. “It’s a big part, I mean, a big deal, and like, an amazing role, just so amazing, but between you and me, I’m happier being a talking broccoli in the matinee.”

“I didn’t realise there were any talking broccoli in The Big Friendly Giant.”

“Me neither! But the director’s inspired like that.”

A couple in the first-class dining room, I didn’t think I’d seen such beauty before. His radiance, rather than obscuring hers, seemed to set it off, and the whole room turned to look at their entrance. Waiters scurried to fulfil their wishes — which was for a bland vegetarian option and an obscure protein drink — and all the while she rested her chin on the back of her hand and laughed at his jokes with the high sound of silver tapping on a crystal glass, and didn’t look at his face, but scanned the room, like an animal wary of predators in the grass.

I approached them out of curiosity, told them I was a producer with the BBC, and forgive me intruding, but had I seen them on the TV?

“Not yet,” replied the man with a dazzling smile.

“Oh a producer, how wonderful!” exclaimed the woman, and a few short sentences later and a couple of references to my friend the director general and how exciting it was to meet new talent, I was at their table.

“I’d just love to be on the TV,” she exclaimed. “Not for the fame, you understand, but just because I think there’s so many important things I could say.”

Her partner joined in when I mentioned Top Gear, wondered if I’d met the boys, driven the cars.

“They’re darlings, such darlings — that chemistry you see on screen, it’s real, all of it, it’s just so real,” I lied. “Are you interested in cars…?”

Why yes, yes he was, he’d just bought his first Jaguar…

“He wanted a Ferrari,” exclaimed the missus, “but I won’t let him do anything so silly.”

I listened to them a while, dropping in occasional total lies and abject flatteries, until at last the woman leant over and said, “Have you got Perfection?”

“Why yes, of course. Though I haven’t used it for a while.”

“Changed. Our. Lives,” she intoned.

“Changed our lives,” he concurred.

“This trip — elite access, VIP upgrade to first class. It said ‘you need a break’ and you know, it was right, I mean, of course it was, it had GPS on me, knew I spent far too much time at work…”

“Far too much…” sang along the mister.

“…‘The perfect holiday for the perfect you,’ it said and, well, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it just?”

“You don’t feel like you’ve just been sold a package?” I enquired.

“Of course we’ve been sold a package,” he replied, bristling at the notion that any thought might occur in this world which had not first occurred to him. “All these cruise companies and holiday companies, they all have tie-ins with Perfection, of course they do. But then, it is the perfect holiday…”

“… the perfect holiday!”

“… isn’t it?”

I smiled, and looked at this couple again, and imagined the hours they’d spent in dentists’ chairs, the wash of the general anaesthetic before plastic surgery, the days lost to shopping trips, the friends abandoned for lack of social graces.

“The perfect holiday, for the perfect couple,” I murmured, and stole their room key, and while they were finishing their dinner I used their shower, stole his watch, their currency and her make-up bag.