Chapter 39 The Shortest Fucking Nowhere Man Mission Ever
The Shortest Fucking Nowhere Man Mission Ever
The videos on rotation on RedLite’s home page were stomach churning.
For the better part of the day, Evan had been set up in a café booth off the lobby of the high-rise housing the corp’s Century City headquarters.
With a laptop, the Aircrack-ng and bettercap software suite, and an external Wi-Fi card with a long-range antenna, he’d found the hidden SSID, cracked its encrypted credentials, and joined the RedLite network.
For such a big operation, their digital security was surprisingly middling.
It took only a few deauthentication requests before he cracked a four-way handshake and was watching their internal surveillance webcam feeds.
Joey could have handled it remotely in half the time, but he’d done it himself to ensure his digital-intrusion skills didn’t atrophy.
At least, that’s what he told himself. Though somewhere he knew it was less about staying in practice and more about maintaining distance from Joey.
He couldn’t believe he’d involved her in a mission this execrable.
Having her in the middle of this depravity, seventeen years young and prepossessing, loosened his emotional dial too much.
He could not afford that, not mid-mission, not sitting here spying on the building he planned to infiltrate in less than twenty-four hours.
The inner life of RedLite was generic to the point of parody.
The operation, rendered across two dozen live feeds, could have been anything—escrow service, insurance company, real estate agency.
Workers beetled about in their cubicles, typed robotically, or Keuriged coffee pods into mugs with logos matching those on Joey’s flash drives.
The workers looked to be about forty percent female, which surprised him initially and then did not.
The conference rooms were industrial-modern-by-way-of-IKEA in design, and there was a dearth of primary colors.
It was like watching a video game of an ant farm.
This morning in the Vault, Evan’s digital command center hidden behind a trick door in his penthouse, he’d done a deep dive on RedLite’s financials.
Or at least as deep a dive as could be done on a corporation stunningly expert at legal evasion.
Registered in the tax haven of Luxembourg, RedLite had literally dozens of phantom corporations that spawned dozens more.
Even if he successfully executed the takedown he’d planned with Joey, it would take resources and expertise well beyond his own to make sure the consortium stayed down for the count.
Beyond RedLite’s main website, they had hundreds of others, a massive interlinked ecosystem driving consumers from site to site, page to page.
They were a major mover, if not the major mover, of internet traffic, their sites drawing eight billion visits a month.
All of which made their not-more-than-adequate network security so puzzling.
On a resized window, another video listing flicked by:
She Can’t Breathe! 87k views.
The physical security inside RedLite’s three floors was relatively professional.
Metal detector at reception, RFID badges, access cards, departmental segregation.
Guest movement inside would be severely restricted and surveilled.
One security guard floated around reception.
He was built like a minotaur and looked peak dipshit-young.
Boys With Braces! 720k views.
Unsurprisingly there were no surveillance cams inside the office of the chief content officer, Anton DeGrado, whom Evan was to meet in twenty-four hours’ time.
DeGrado’s online presence was scarce, but he popped up here and there tagged on news-adjacent social-media posts.
He was early thirties posing as early twenties.
Boyish frame, hands stuffed in the pockets of a designer hoodie, expensively vivid sneakers.
In posed photos he went for a rakish stray-dog look, over-under with the eyes, forehead furled disarmingly, shoulders hoisted in a whatever shrug.
Evan despised him.
He despised this whole vaguely sanctioned business.
They Destroy Her! 1.1M views.
The screen grab attached to this one showed a pigtailed girl who only maybe was eighteen assaulted from all sides, wincing in pleasure-pain or just pain depending on which way you looked at it.
Evan’s heart rate had risen three to five beats per minute.
The RoamZone rang, jarring him out of his low simmer. The area code showed 818, the city listing Van Nuys, CA.
His thumb hesitated over the virtual green button, tapped.
“Do you need my help?”
Wet, shaky breathing. The back end of a good cry. That happened sometimes up front.
He waited.
Then: “H-hello?”
“Do you need my help?”
“I think so.”
“Where did you get this number?”
“I, uh, I’m a high-school volunteer in Querida Alonso’s third-grade classroom?” That odd uptalk pattern iGen used, where every sentence ended as a question. “And her mom? Neva? She said you helped when Querida was taken?”
Evan had indeed.
He checked his Vertex fob watch. It was a touch past three o’clock. School had just gotten out.
“She saw I was … I guess I was crying? After the school play? And she asked what was wrong?”
“What is wrong?”
She Gets What She Wants! 3.1M views.
“I, um…” A hushed voice. “It’s too embarrassing to say.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I can wait.”
She took him up on the offer.
In the ensuing silence, he checked the phone to make sure the connection hadn’t dropped. After another spell, he checked again.
Finally, she pushed out the words: “There’s a guy? Like, a few years older? And we hung out a little. And I sent him, like, a … like a picture? And now, um…”
Evan waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
“He says I have to do … more? Or he’s gonna send the picture of me to everyone I know. Like, to my whole school? And I found out … He’s actually done it. Before, I mean. To girls? And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know…”
Quiet, desperate cries.
It Won’t Fit! 223k views.
“And he keeps calling me. And calling me. And telling me what he’s gonna do and I’m not sleeping, not anymore, and I just…” The next words came out hoarse, almost without sound: “I just wanna die.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kenzie.”
“Kenzie. It’s gonna be okay now. What’s his name?”
“Tyler. Tyler Russell.”
“I will handle Tyler Russell. Where’s he live?”
“I don’t know. I only saw him at the mall.”
“You just need to—”
A spirited ringtone erupted over the line. “God!” The sound of her phone clattering to the floor. Shuffling noises. Then Kenzie came back on, voice thin with panic: “It’s him. He’s FaceTiming, like, right now!”
“Hold on,” Evan said, swiping his screen to find the right app. “I’m gonna text you a remote-access link to your phone. So I can watch the call and he won’t know I’m there.”
“But I have to answer! I have to answer or else—”
“It’s coming right now, Kenzie.”
He generated the link, pinged it over.
“I missed it! Oh my God, I missed the call.” She was sobbing. “He told me I couldn’t. He told me if I did—”
“Kenzie, he’ll call back. Do you see the link?”
“Yes.”
“If you agree to let me into your phone, I can track him down.”
Another shriek. “He’s calling! He’s calling back right now!”
“It’s okay. Just click the link.”
“Okay! Shit, okay.”
Her screen came up, filling the RoamZone’s visual field. Evan pressed to record the feed. “Answer.”
“What do I tell him?”
His eyes swept the laptop screen—
Stepdad Surprises Her! 559 views.
—and he felt a sharp edge of hostility slice through his operational calm.
“Tell him you’ll get him pictures tonight. When you’re alone.”
“Okay. Shit, shit, shit.” Kenzie’s face was there in the corner, half in shadow, her selfie view.
A sweet-looking kid, should be babysitting or lying in a heap of friends watching a movie.
Automatically, she peered into the camera and fixed her hair, sweeping her bangs to one side.
Her instinct to look good, to please, even under these circumstances, was hard to watch.
She wiped her nose and answered, her face a flushed mess.
“Kenzie, Kenzie, Kenzie.” Tyler Russell was walking outdoors, phone jostling along at his side, angled up to capture his face and a swath of blue sky.
He barely bothered to look down at her. As the lens careened around, Evan caught glimpses of him between strobes of sun glare.
High-school junior or senior, shock of blond hair, strong jaw, sports tank top putting gym-enhanced biceps on display.
“I told you what’ud happen if you didn’t pick up when I called. ”
“I’m sorry. When you called? I was in the bathroom. I’m sorry, okay?”
“Now we all know girls take their phones into the bathroom, don’t we, Kenzie?” Tyler looked down now, shadowed eyes peering out beneath a baseball cap, nasty little grin dimpling both cheeks.
“I forgot it. On the couch.”
Tyler’s lens swung around some more, showing a small backyard with wooden fencing, a trampoline, a chicken coop, and an aluminum-framed aboveground pool centered on a square of grass.
In front of him, a golden retriever wriggled and barked.
“I still don’t have those pictures I asked for, Kenzie.
I really want them. I really like you. I feel like you’re stalling me. ”
“I can’t just take them wherever.”
Tyler leaned down, his phone leaning with him as he picked up a tennis ball. He threw it into a stand of bushes in the corner of the yard, and the dog shot off, tail wagging. A voice shouted in the background, “Tyler Joseph, you’re gonna get Cooper covered in burs again!”
“Mom! Shut up! I’m on a call!” Tyler focused again on the FaceTime, adolescent outburst forgotten, that tight little grin resuming. “You got a bathroom, Kenzie. That’s privacy.”
“I just haven’t been … able to…” She was hyperventilating, jerking in tiny breaths.
Is She Sleeping? 994k views.
Heat had crept across the back of Evan’s neck. His grip had tightened on the RoamZone. Easing the laptop lid shut, he gathered his things into a rucksack.
The conversation continued: “So now I think I’ll have to ask for something more.
Something … better.” Tyler struck a theatrical pose, gripping his chin in his palm, one finger elongated to tap his cheek pensively.
“Maybe I don’t want pictures anymore.” A sadistic pause. “Maybe I need you to send me vids.”
“Videos?”
Across decades of operations, Evan had seen countless faces of cruelty. But casual brutality seemed to be growing more widespread every day, quickening algorithmically.
“Just for me,” Tyler said. “Me and you. Or?” He paused by a rusty tricycle in the weeds, his dog returning the ball and waiting pantingly. “I have your school’s official Insta all teed up. I friended it yesterday. So I could just start posting your JPEG in the comments…”
Evan was outside now, walking briskly. His truck waited at a well-fed meter up the block.
“Please don’t? Just—please, please, please? I’ll do it, okay? I’ll do it tonight. I promise.”
“But Kenzie, I haven’t even told you what I want yet.”
What He Wanted! Evan thought. Tyler Russell’s personalized caption, waiting to gather views.
As Tyler explained his desires in elaborate terms, Evan slid into his driver’s seat, reopened the laptop, emailed himself a chunk of the current footage, rewound to when Tyler had leaned down to pick up the tennis ball.
At one point, the front panel of his baseball cap caught the light and Evan froze the screen.
The logo was a bulldog head, baseball bats crossed behind it like swords on a family crest. Evan dragged it into image search and Google spat out Burbank High School baseball team.
In the DMV databases, Tyler Joseph Russell, Burbank CA yielded precisely two profiles, the first featuring a bearded guy with a Class B commercial driver’s license.
The second had the right face and an address on North Lincoln.
“I don’t know…” Kenzie’s words sputtered off.
“You don’t know what?”
Her face twitched. With the pressure at full blast, she’d forgotten to play along. “If I can do that.”
“Which?”
A horrified whisper: “Any of it.”
“You can do it for me. Just for me and you. Tell you what, Kenzie. I’ll give you until midnight.”
The FaceTime call disconnected.
Evan called Kenzie back.
She snatched up the phone on a half ring, answering in a near shriek: “What?”
“It’s me.”
“I can’t. I can’t do any of that. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” She’d moved into a fall of light now, and Evan could make out her palatial bedroom, a fireplace in the background.
“You won’t have to.”
His voice was utterly emotionless. The Fourth Commandment.
He couldn’t let anything personal bubble to the surface.
Not Joey at the club with drunken men spinning around her.
Not Osman, Manny Llorente, Goat-Skull Tattoo, or Anton DeGrado with his screaming video captions and millions of views.
Something had been building inside him since the moment Anca had collapsed in his arms in her hallway and he’d had nowhere to direct it.
A wobble: “Wh-why not?”
“Because I am heading to Tyler Russell right now,” Evan said.
He hung up, punched the address into nav, selected a twenty-three-minute route, and started off.
This was going to be the shortest fucking Nowhere Man mission ever.