Details of the appropriate recruitment technique were restricted to qualified users only. I wondered how it worked. Had any of these five ever met face-to-face? I doubted it. At least not until they were very confident in one another. Far too dangerous. So what was this technique? How did you safely bring a new member to The Bull?
I guessed it worked the same day online child-porn rings worked. As repulsive as The Bull, but far more common if the newspapers were any guide. Your target market consists of the people hunting in the deepest, darkest, ickiest, most disturbing corners of the Net, the most loathsome hardcore porn sites, most unspeakable Usenet rape fantasies, the sick underworld of faked snuff films and elaborately documented torture fiction. They looked for users who contributed — anonymously, of course — to these sites. I guessed they wanted people who seemed homicidally fucked up but in a cold controlled way, although it looked like they had misjudged with NumberFive at least. Then they talked to them on an anonymous IRC chat line or a secure instant messaging connection, talked to them regularly until they thought they knew and understood the potential recruit, and if they passed muster, then they popped the question — invited the recruit to join The Bull.
That IRC fragment I'd dug up, that must have been from one of those recruiting sessions, there must have been someone else online that NumberTwo and NumberThree were talking to. Maybe it was Morgan Jackson.
I went back to the site and looked at it more carefully, doing a technical analysis. It was a Microsoft FrontPage/ASP-powered site; the. asp filenames and HTML source for the pages confirmed that. The media files were stored on the site, but the links to corroborating data were URLs to the newspaper or other sites in question.
It was the work of a developer who knew a lot less than he thought he did. A semicompetent ASP programmer who thought that he understood how the Web worked and he had guaranteed security and anonymity on his site. Very wrong. First of all, he had neglected to warn his users to wipe the cookie files on client machines. Second, he was using an unencrypted login. Third, they had that simple "taurus" username/password combination for guests, where they should have an unintelligible mix of numbers and mixed-case letters.
Fourth, and potentially most dangerous to them, were the links to corroborating data. Every time you click on a link in the Web, the site you go to may log not just the IP number of your machine, aka the client address, but the IP number of the site whose link you clicked on, aka the referring address. Which meant that there were web logs out there with entries that had The Bull's IP number as the referring address, one entry for each time that a user of The Bull had clicked on that link — and each of those entries also held the client address, the IP number of the machine utilized by The Bull's user at the time.
In fact one of those web logs was the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree. My own account of Stanley Goebel's death had been used as corroborating evidence so Morgan could get his precious deadpool points. I couldn't remember if Lonely Planet logged the referring address or not. If they did, I could look them up, find out what computers the other users of The Bull had used to read that corroborating evidence.
But the rule that The Bull should only be accessed from a public terminal was sound and alleviated a lot of their risk. If they had followed it. Rules are meant to be broken. Morgan had broken one of The Bull's rules, he had gotten fancy, he had had a conversation with me on The Thorn Tree. And he had begun his career by breaking another, by killing someone he knew socially. I wondered how he could have hated Laura so much. I wondered how anyone could have hated Laura.
It occurred to me as I logged off that I had just left my traces on The Bull. Like Heisenberg said, the observer affects the observed. I had not gone through Anonymizer or SafeWeb or Zero-Knowledge; so I had left my own IP number in The Bull's web logs. And cable modems have fixed IP numbers. It was possible — difficult, unlikely, but possible — to determine my name and address once given that IP number. I might have just opened a path for The Bull to get to me.
For a moment I felt frightened. Then I realized that Morgan already knew my address. Last year when I moved in I had sent out a mass e-mail to all my friends and relatives and fellow Africa truckers. If he wanted to come get me, he knew where I lived. But I didn't think he was going to. I thought he was certain I was harmless.
I intended to show him he was dead wrong.
I went for a walk because my apartment seemed claustrophobic again. Maybe I shouldn't renew the lease after all. I was beginning to associate it with horrific discoveries. I walked all the way down Haight Street to Market and then I turned around and walked back again, chewing the facts I had discovered, trying to smooth them into a digestible mass.
Then I called Talena.
"Hello?" she answered.
"Hi. It's Paul."
"Oh. Hi." She waited expectantly. I think she thought I had called to apologize.
"Listen. There's something you should see."
"What's that?"
"Do you have two phone lines?"
"What? No."
"Okay. I'm going to give you an IP number, a login, and a password, and you should go there and read what you find."
"Paul," she said, "does this have anything to do with The Bull?"
"This has everything to do with The Bull."
"Paul, stop. I mean it. Get it out of your head. I'm not getting involved any more."
I almost started arguing furiously but I thought of a more cunning tactic. "Okay. I understand that. And to be honest you probably don't want to read this. It's the most disturbing thing I've ever seen. But I felt, you know, I should at least call you and try to tell you about it."
There was a silence. Then she sighed, long and loud, and said "Tell me."
"I will. But first of all, and this is the important thing, is you want to go through SafeWeb. SafeWeb-dot-com. Enter the IP number into the address field on its home page."
"Or the Men In Black will find me and kill me?" she asked sarcastically.
"It's a distant but distinct possibility."
"Uh-huh. All righty then. What's the number?"
I told her, and added the login and password.
"Taurus? The sign of the bull?… what is this?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," I said. "You'll have to look at it yourself. Call me back after you've had a look."
"I'll call you back," she said, and she sounded worried.
We said goodbyes and hung up. I thought about calling Agent Turner, she'd given us her card before we left, but decided to wait to talk to Talena. Maybe it was best not to talk to Agent Turner. If we were going to talk to anyone at this point, it should be the media. CNN and MSNBC and The New York Times and England's Guardian and France's Le Monde and all the big international papers. Let them break this story.
But what would that do? What would that really accomplish? Probably nothing. Which of those five would be put beyond harming anyone again? Probably none of them. It might scare them a little, might make them cool down for a few months. But the media had the collective memory of a gnat. Another year and stories about The Bull would be in the Whatever Happened To…? category.
The harsh truth was that nobody would do anything unless I did something.
I went back to my computer and went back to The Bull's site. I wanted to get all the data off it. I had all the text, but I wanted all the pictures, all the digital media, all the grotesque unwatchable stuff, as evidence. Thankfully cable modems are fast as hell. It only took half an hour to get the hundred or so files. I zipped them into a single file but they wouldn't fit in my Yahoo Briefcase, so I bought one year of a five-hundred meg XDrive. com partition on the spot and put it there. Pricey but I wanted offsite backup. This was critical evidence.