Burned

Something has been bugging him all day. All good crime reporters have sources. Henning has a great one. Or he used to. This source came into Henning’s life when he was surfing for child porn for a story one evening. He wanted to discover how easy it was to find child porn on the Internet, how many clicks it would take, and he soon reached a flagged page. Fortunately, the police already knew about it. But because Henning had visited it, they knew about him, too. He had been aware that this might happen, but that was also a part of his story. Establish how well informed the police were, how far he could go before he was stopped. He couldn’t quite recall how he got the idea, but he thought it had come to him after learning he was going to be a dad. Perhaps it had been an attempt to meet trouble halfway?

After visiting several different child porn sites, he was befriended on-line by a woman calling herself Chicketita. She promised to give him some child porn DVDs if he met her in Vaterlands Park at 11 p.m. that night. He never went.

The day after, he was brought in for questioning, his laptop was seized and sent to Forensics to check if he had surfed for child porn before. Which he obviously hadn’t. He was quickly released, once he had explained his actions to officers from the Sexual Crimes Unit. Chicketita, who turned out to be a female police officer called Elisa, was sympathetic. He was given permission to carry on with his project. She was in favour of the press highlighting the issue.

Some days later, he was contacted by 6tiermes7. At first, he thought it was another police officer hunting paedophiles, but he eventually decided that it couldn’t be. 6tiermes7 had a completely different agenda.

He didn’t know if 6tiermes7 knew about his child porn story, but he suspected that he or she had followed his work for a while or, at least, checked him out to know that he was sound. At that time, he often worked undercover; he had exposed several scandals, which led to the police starting new investigations or solving cold cases. He got results. 6tiermes7 was willing to help him on the non-negotiable premise that he never revealed his source.

Via an e-mail account, which couldn’t be traced to 6tiermes7 ’s real name, Henning was sent a file containing a program called FireCracker 2.0 which he was told to install. Henning later searched the Internet for the program, but never found anything which suggested it might be for sale anywhere. He assumed that 6tiermes7 had written it, but he never asked. The program, once opened, connected to a server so they could chat safely. Or, in relative safety.

They used an encryption algorithm that made any keystrokes they sent to each other incomprehensible to outsiders — unless they had the key. This security feature obviously depended on their keystrokes not being recorded before they were encrypted. After all, it is possible to monitor a keyboard. 6tiermes7 could be risking his/her own life, but Henning had no wish to question the morals and ethical dilemmas faced by his source.

6tiermes7 soon turned out to be the best source he had ever had. Everything in journalism is about contacts. Having a reliable source, who brings the stories to you, not the other way round, someone who will regularly feed you information that helps you in interviews, insider knowledge that may not be useful at the time, but which turns out to be worth knowing, nonetheless. As leverage, for example. Or new developments in an investigation, what the police have discovered, which leads they are pursuing, names of people brought in for questioning — that kind of information.

6tiermes7 gave him all of that. He or she was Deep Throat, the deepest of them all. In the three years before That Which He Doesn’t Think About, Henning had published several stories as a result of his partnership with 6tiermes7. 6tiermes7 helped him, he in turn helped the police by breaking stories that threw fresh light on their investigations, new and old, and together they got results. Quid pro quo, as Hannibal Lecter would have put it.

But 6tiermes7 has never told him why or how. And Henning has never tried to uncover the identity of 6tiermes7. Nor has he any plans to do so. Some things are best left alone.

Before he went back to work, he hadn’t thought about 6tiermes7 for almost two years. He has no idea whether 6tiermes7 is still available to him as a source, if he or she has started working with other people, or if 6tiermes7 has simply vanished from cyberspace.

But he is about to find out.

Chapter 18

The steam rises and condenses under the roof. A high pressure hose is systematically swept across a dark red Audi A8 with shiny 19-inch chrome rims. Encrusted bird pooh, grit, gravel and pebbles are quickly washed off the paintwork. The car is drenched in seconds.