He loaded several photos of Audrey into it, clicked Return, and up popped a website that calls itself 1919.”
“Like the year after World War I,” Smalls said.
“Yes, but that title only comes up when you get to the site. The actual name of the site is a series of letters and numbers, plus dot-com. A code that you’d have to know to find it, unless you found it like these kids did, going in sideways with the photo search. In other words, it was hidden, and they only found it by accident. When they clicked on the link, Audrey found a photo of herself walking out of her school and also spotted a couple of other photos of people she knew—a daughter of another senator and the son of a congressman.”
Lucas: “Huh. Why 1919?”
“There was some accompanying text,” Chase said. “Apparently ‘nineteen’ refers to the letter S, the nineteenth letter of the alphabet. In that case, 1919 would be . . .”
“SS,” Lucas said. “That’s not good. No offense, Porter.”
Henderson snorted and Porter Smalls said, mildly, “Fuck you.”
“To go on,” Chase said. “It appears to be a publication of a heretofore-unknown neo-Nazi group. What’s particularly disturbing is that they go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the origin of the photos and the text. Also, the Nazi Schutzstaffel, as you probably know, was both paramilitary and military.”
“I didn’t know that,” Lucas said. “History wasn’t my strong suit.”
“Yeah, your strong suit was a pair of hockey breezers,” Smalls said.
Chase ventured an eye roll. “Both military and paramilitary. Armed, in any case, and dedicated to violence, as are most of the articles on the site. Our analysts say we can’t do a word-match analysis on the articles, to find out who wrote them, because they were all cut-and-paste, taken from a variety of white supremacist websites. They were not written by any one person. Actually, and this can’t go any farther than here, one of the articles was written by one of our agents attempting to penetrate a white supremacist organization.”
Smalls said, “There you go. Taxpayer money well spent.”
“No direct threats?” Lucas asked.
“No, other than the fact that each photo has a cutline, identifying the kid and his or her parent and the school the kid goes to,” Chase said. “The lack of threats is almost as disturbing as the Nazi connection. We’ve kept this very quiet inside the Bureau, but one of my associates has argued, convincingly, I think, that whoever is doing this is running a kind of distributed-cell organization. Nobody issues or takes orders, so you can’t pin down a chain of command, but everybody is marching to the same drummer. It’s possible that not even the organizer would know who his followers are. All the readers would know is, ‘Here are some targets, if you want to do something about them.’ Then, if somebody attacks one of the kids, the organizer—who probably doesn’t even know the attacker—might begin with extortion of the other parents.”
Henderson: “They chum the water with these photos and when and if an attack occurs, it’s hard, if not impossible, to pin down the original responsibility. You might get the body, the shooter, but you don’t get the brain.”
“Have you checked the ISPs?” Lucas asked.
Chase was already shaking her head. “Of course. Nothing there. The internet service provider is in Sweden, one of the confidential sites. A month or so after the website was set up, the photos were all posted at once and came in from a Starbucks. There were some video cameras in the neighborhood, but not right at Starbucks. Our analysts have spent hours looking at the local videos, trying to spot somebody who might be our guy. No luck so far.”
“License tags?”
“Yes, there was one camera that did a good job on tags, but we came up dry on that, too. We did all the routine. We continue to think about it and do more work. Explore new possibilities. Some senators decided . . . perhaps we needed something a little more off the wall. Like you. Whoever did this is apparently internet savvy and security aware, so the regular routine, however intense it is, may not turn