Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (popular romance novels TXT) 📗

heard the sound of approaching police sirens. The troopers were closing in, and once the drugs were discovered, the FBI would get involved.

John tried to run, but his legs and chest were throbbing with pain. His energy was low, and he could only manage a fast limp as he wove his way in and out of the stationary cars. The traffic on the other side of the interstate, beyond the crash barrier, was slowing down to rubberneck. John got into one of the cars on that side, one that a driver had temporarily abandoned. It was a large SUV with tinted windows to the rear passenger compartment and a sunblind across the back window. He lay down on the back seat so as not to be seen by other spirits and waited for the driver.

Around ten minutes passed. John could hear the sound of a helicopter approaching.

A guy dressed in a shirt, khakis, and loafers mumbled to himself as he got in. He started the car and joined the slow-moving traffic, which gradually sped up once the drivers of other vehicles had satisfied themselves with the view. John glanced out of the back window. The tailback of stationary traffic behind the crash site was getting longer and longer. A paramedic van raced along the shoulder, followed by three state police cars and a fire engine. He lay back down. The spirit would have no chance of knowing where he was hiding. He reveled in a moment of pride, knowing that he had done all that he could to expose El Gordito’s drug manufacturing.

Twenty-Five

George Cromwell was an IT specialist at the FBI. His primary focus was monitoring and taking down websites on the dark web, the part of the internet used by criminals to shroud illegal activities such as drug and weapon trades, prostitution, and even contract killings. Users of these sites tended to think the privacy technology was infallible and that they could fool the authorities indefinitely, but it wasn’t so easy to hide from Cromwell.

He had been instrumental in closing down the original Silk Road website, named after the famous historical and lucrative silk trading route between Europe, India, and China. The site even had an Amazon-style shopfront, but instead of books and soap powder you could buy bricks of heroin, Kalashnikov rifles, and other illegal goods. The website could only be accessed via a single, anonymous network known as The Onion Router, or TOR for short. It relayed communications through a number of separate servers around the globe to disguise the identity of its users. Trying to find a user on TOR would be like peeling layer after layer of anonymity from a virtual onion, hence the name. TOR had initially been developed by the US Navy Research Lab to hide military communications. It was then further developed with a number of commercial partners and made available to all, in the interests of protecting privacy and free speech. Since then, TOR had remained free and open-source to all, attracting not only legal but also illegal users.

But TOR was only half the story. Transactions on the Silk Road website were made in Bitcoin cyber currency using a ‘Bitcoin Tumbler,’ which mixed the bitcoin tokens used in transactions with other bitcoins to destroy any link between buyers and sellers. George was a gifted programmer and had been involved in the original TOR program team. He had broken into the network using his knowledge of backdoors in software and weak spots in code. This had enabled him to break into the Silk Road’s code and fool the system into thinking he was an administrator. It was in this way that he had gained access to one of the site’s secret servers and begin to plan its demise.

His target now was a server in Timisoara, Romania, one of many servers in Europe used by the Silk Road’s most popular successor, The Path to Paradise. He had once again deceived the website technology into thinking he was an administrator, despite the site having increased and complex security. Out of the many, many disturbing transactions on the website, one had stood out. It was a commissioning of the murder of an NYPD detective for a million dollars. Not just any detective, but a detective by the name of Daniel Lazlo whom Cromwell knew well. Lazlo, he knew, had dropped out of the FBI Training Academy at Quantico while going through a nasty divorce, but not before he and Cromwell had become firm friends.

The transaction targeting Lazlo had, he noticed, been concluded, subject to payment, between two users of the site. The buyer’s pseudonym was La Tarántula, ‘Tarantula’ in Spanish, and the seller, or commissioner of the hit, went by the name ‘Shadow Dragon.’ Cromwell didn’t need to check the FBI’s Most Wanted list to identify this ghostlike figure: the assassin known as ‘Shadow Dragon’ was top of every Most Wanted list, he already knew, including those of the FBI, CIA, and Interpol.

He had witnessed messages going back and forth for the last two days agreeing details of the transaction. Shadow Dragon was known to always demand one hundred percent payment up front and was one hundred percent efficient. The money was to be sent that day in Bitcoins, and George would track its route to the assassin’s account. As soon as the killer logged on to check the money was there, the FBI would have him. With his deep knowledge of every change to the constantly updating TOR network, Cromwell had even managed to break through the encryption of Shadow Dragon’s IP address. He had traced it to a residence in Honolulu, Hawaii.

An FBI SWAT team had arrived twenty hours ago in Hawaii under the command of Special Agent Arthur Chan. He and his team were holed up in a vacant property they had commandeered two streets away, watching the house rented by the assassin. Chan was now waiting for a signal from Cromwell––the signal to enter the house and catch a ghost.