CHAPTER TWELVE
He had other names, other identities. There were many layers to his personality, but the one he preferred, the name he liked the best, was Styx. The river of death.
He was in a game at the moment, making some changes to his avatar and exploring the landscape. It was easy for him—second nature, in fact. His fingers flew as he tweaked and fine-tuned. But as well as being in the game, he was keeping an eye out for things that were happening in the real world.
Styx was a gamer, a deep explorer, and a coder who had some serious skill as a hacker too. He had started off obsessed with creating the most difficult and dangerous games that challenged the intellect of the player. Games that led him down a twisted tunnel of logic.
But Styx soon realized that the games weren’t enough. They had never been enough. The chase, the excitement—he had only done it because he could. Because it was an outlet for something darker that lurked within him, something that seemed to be becoming more and more powerful.
The games had not turned him into who he was, that he knew. For a while, they had shielded him, given him an outlet. But it was no longer what he wanted, and he had acknowledged this truth. What ran in him was deeper, and it needed a more physical release.
In the end, he had made the decision to give in. To give in to what he had always known was inside him. He had given in to the darkness and to the twisted fantasies, to the desire to take things away and to take other people’s lives.
He started hunting.
He acknowledged the darkness in him. He accepted the urges, and he let them take him.
Because Styx knew exactly what he was. And he reveled in it. He was a killer, but an invisible one. And with his hacking ability, he had skills that would allow him to stay that way.
He imagined himself as the identity he’d built, the deep one, the one he rarely showed as he used other avatars to game and interact.
But the one he preferred was dark—a skull with empty eyes and long, bony fingers. He liked the extremism of it. It was the identity he used when he was hacking.
And Styx had thought ahead, far ahead. When he was hunting, he might get caught and arrested. He might get caught and killed. That was all legitimate risk. But he had managed the risk by thinking ahead, and one of the ways he’d done that was by tracking, and hacking, some of the players that he’d seen were interacting with his chosen targets.
He’d thought to himself that way, he could see if they were being investigated and it would provide him with an early warning alarm.
Now, he switched his screen to the real world. Through a combination of talent and luck, he was watching a sight that he thought was very enlightening.
He was watching a man, who was most definitely an FBI agent, leave the premises of Skullhead, who Styx knew from the gaming world.
Without a doubt, this tall investigator was FBI. The blue, bulky jacket advertised that fact loud and clear, but Styx would have known even without that. He had that kind of a face, that kind of demeanor. The type of man who was a fairly good hunter in the real world, Styx thought disparagingly. Although not possessed of the ability to survive in the virtual world.
But his partner, Styx was less sure of. For a start, frustratingly, he couldn’t see her face clearly, because of the angle that she was following him and also because of the large baseball cap, clearly FBI issue, that was pulled low over her head, covering her shoulder length dark hair and obscuring her face. She didn’t look like law enforcement. He had no idea who she was.
At night? A baseball cap? FBI didn’t wear those at night.
Was she undercover or what? It didn’t make sense. She was wearing black jeans and trendy boots, but an FBI jacket? He couldn’t place her, and she didn’t seem to fit into any pigeonhole in an organization that he knew was all about the pigeonholes.
He’d been monitoring the camera earlier and had experienced a moment of amusement as he saw the two girls, clearly whores, arrive. Skullhead was clearly more of a real-life player than Styx had ever given him credit for.
He’d kept watching, idly amused to see how this would play out and how long the girls would be there for. And also, keeping an eye to see if anyone else arrived.
He thought of Skullhead as one of his canaries, like the canary in the coalmine, an early warning system that he needed to be even more careful.
And sure enough, his canary had done what he needed him to do.
He’d watched both of the FBI agents arrive, and he’d seen them point at the camera, and then he’d seen the tall guy turn it around. And then, Styx had a view of the building’s brick wall for quite a while as he battled to get into the camera’s controls, which were more complicated to hack than just the viewfinder.
He’d done it, and he had turned the camera, and he’d been rewarded by the view of them leaving. They had clearly not found anything worthwhile in Skullhead’s apartment and what was important to Styx, is that by the time they left, they must have known the prostitutes were there. They were FBI after all. Though limited in many ways, he wasn’t going to make the mistake of underestimating their intelligence.
They hadn’t arrived at Skullhead’s apartment because of the girls.
He deduced that because they’d ignored the girls, or at any rate given him a free pass on them, Styx reasoned. Therefore, they were there for something else. Now Skullhead might be a drug user or have other illegal activities on the go, but what was interesting is that the FBI agents were leaving without him.
That logically meant they had simply been there to question him.
And that meant, Styx knew, that he needed to be extra careful. Their IT department must have identified the game where he got his victims from.