Jimmy Bondage 3
Title: Jimmy Bondage
Fandom: The X Files and The Lone Gunmen (FOX, 1013 Productions, 2001)
Show-website: www.the-xfiles.com, www.thelonegunmen.com
Principals: Jimmy, Krycek, Byers
Rating: NC-17 (bondage, mild torture, some NC sex)
Part: 3
Wednesday evening
Byers wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting there, imagining Jimmy's fate at the hands of the men Krycek would deliver him to. Long enough for Langly to discover that their phone line had been cut from outside, like in an old thriller. Network connection too. (He was vaguely aware of Langly grumbling about having to put up with wireless network connection speeds in his own home.) Long enough for Frohike to finish splicing the cables.
"Byers!" Frohike said, startling him out of his mental horror show. "Did you see what Langly found?"
Byers peered at a screen of text Frohike was pointing to, without really seeing it.
"You okay, buddy?" Frohike asked.
"Fine."
"We'll get him out of this. Don't worry."
"It boards in less than an hour," Langly said. "We'd better head to the airport now and head them off."
Pulling himself together, Byers forced himself to read what was in front of him. It was a record taken from the airline reservation system, showing tickets issued today for two seats on a flight to Vladivostok. The passenger names were "Alvin Koatcek" and "Jimmy Hoffa."
"Let's go, Byers. If we take the time to erase their e-tickets, we'll never get there on time, and Krycek will have a hardcopy receipt with him and talk his way through it."
"Wait. 'Koatcek'? 'Jimmy Hoffa'?"
"You didn't expect it to be under their real names, did you?" Langly said impatiently. "He knew we'd find it in a second."
"Instead, you found it in ten seconds. There's only one flight a day to Vladivostok. The names jumped out at you, didn't they?"
"Well, yeah."
"Krycek knew we would check airline bookings. If he wanted to make it hard for us, he's clever enough to have booked the segment to Toronto separately from the connecting flights to Russia, and used two different sets of fake names. He wanted us to find this. In fact, he wanted us to know he wanted us to find it. Why else use such obvious aliases?" He was typing as he spoke.
"Why use aliases at all, then?"
"The FBI computers are set up to scan for Krycek's name, remember? Last we checked, anyway. Oh no!"
"What?" Langly and Frohike said, walking back over to stand behind him.
Buried among the usual arcane fare restrictions was a comments field meant to be used by travel agents or the airlines. But this one said: "66.54.11.104/jb/knap -- PSWD NEWSPAPER INITIALS"
They exchanged surprised glances. "You trace the routing," Byers told Langly. "I'll try DNS."
"It looks like the somewhere in Switzerland," Langly said after sending packets to it from a few locations.
"I can't find a domain name for it."
"What a surprise," Frohike put in. "I think we're its only customers."
"Did you find out anything else, Langly?"
"It's running a server on port 80. No other servers. Standard HTTP, no SSL."
"What type of server?"
"All-patchy."
"You know about the new security hole in Apache that was reported on the newsgroups a few weeks ago?"
"Yeah, I've already added it to my usual script that tries all the known vulnerabilities. Let's see. Nope, it looks pretty air tight."
"I don't think we'd find anything useful on this machine, anyway," Byers admitted. If Jimmy were here now, he thought, it would be at about this time that he snapped his fingers and said "I'll bet it's a web address. Only, it doesn't end in dot com." God, he missed the guy! He even missed his most bone-headed suggestions. They never bothered him as much as they did Langly. Jimmy tried so hard, and he was so enthusiastic about technology. He wasn't as annoying to Byers as people who were willfully ignorant. Even worse were the ones who decided that anything they didn't understand must be useless and boring, and that the people who did understand it were pitiful geeks just for possessing the knowledge.
There was little left to try but the same thing even Jimmy would have figured out by now. They used a commercial browser, through their usual proxy, and viewed the web page. It had some text, and a large image, which filled itself in top to bottom, a little slowly since they were still using a wireless connection.
Jimmy's face was one of the first things Byers saw as the picture filled in. He didn't look happy, but at least his eyes were open and he hadn't been beaten. He was lying on a bed. His shirt had been removed, and the words "KRYCEK'S HOSTAGE" were scrawled across his chest in black block letters. His arms were raised over his head. The picture stopped drawing just below his navel, leaving to Byers's imagination whether his captor had stripped him only to the waist. There was another picture below it, from a different angle, showing that his hands were handcuffed to the headboard.
It bothered Byers that the Krycek and his cohorts hadn't even bothered to set up an encrypted site, when they obviously had enough know-how to assign themselves an unregistered certificate. The packets were traveling through ten hops around the world, in the clear, before they reached their proxy site! The image of his friend lying helpless in Krycek's power was wide open to view -- and not only to a whole alphabet soup of government agencies and at least three nosy corporations, but to hundreds of individual crackers who were potentially spying on network traffic. Many of them knew Byers, and some, such as Kimmy, had met Jimmy. Krycek might as well be marching him naked through the halls of a hacker's convention, labeled as his property. Byers felt humiliated on his friend's behalf.
He forced his eyes to the text above and below the picture. It gave no terms for Jimmy's release, but demanded a meeting. It gave detailed instructions. The meeting would be at a certain spot on a certain public beach. Byers was to come alone. He was to bring no recording devices or weapons, and wear nothing but swimming trunks. He was to lay out his towel a little distance from the nearest beach-goers, within sight but out of earshot of them.
"What do you think. A fake?" Frohike asked.
"Hard to tell at screen resolution," Langly said. "But Jimmy's a big man. It's hard to imagine a one-armed man wrestling him to the ground and tying him up."
"He could have hit him over the head when he turned his back," Byers said. He couldn't believe they were wasting time debating this. Yes, any of them could have faked the picture -- at least added the writing on his chest -- in ten minutes with one hand tied behind his back. Maybe Krycek could too. But if there was even the slightest chance Jimmy was in trouble...
"C'mon," Langly scoffed. "You think he carried him out the door, then stuffed him into a car one-handed without anyone stopping him?"
"More likely he pulled a gun on him," Byers said. If so, he was glad that Jimmy hadn't tried anything stupid. At least he was still alive, and there was still some hope.
"I suppose it's possible," Frohike said. "But there's no real proof."
"Anyone could have faked the writing in ten seconds," Langly said. With a few mouse clicks, he copied the image into a photo-retouching program and zoomed in. Byers watched as Langly painted in a black question mark after the word "HOSTAGE" and zoomed out.
Byers forced himself to inspect it technically. The sight of Langly writing on Jimmy's chest, even on a screen, was causing some very inappropriate stirrings, and not just emotional ones. He was ashamed to find his body reacting that way at a time like this. Jimmy must be feeling humiliated -- and if he had any sense, terrified. His throat dry, he said, "It does look pretty convincing. You got the perspective right on the first try. I suppose in theory the writing could be a fake."
"The picture itself would be harder to fake," Langly admitted. "It does look like it's probably Jimmy."
"It's Jimmy, all right," Byers said firmly. Was he the only observant one around here? He was absolutely sure of it; every detail matched his memory. But maybe Krycek had tricked Jimmy into take his shirt off on some pretext. But his stomach muscles did look like he was really lying down, and his pectorals and all the muscles in his arm were consistent with his arms being stretched over his head. The handcuffs could be a fake, but Byers was having trouble imagining how Krycek would have convinced him to get into that position. Maybe they were staying the night in a motel room, and Jimmy just happened to stretch? No, that was wishful thinking. Krycek really did have his friend at his mercy.
"We could run it through a 3d modeler and see if the lettering matches between the two pictures," Langly suggested.
"What good will that do?" Byers demanded. "Krycek could have used the same program to get the placement right. It's ten times easier than the reverse."
They argued for an hour. The plane left on schedule, and the ticket, at least, did turn out to be a decoy; the two passengers never boarded. After a late dinner that Byers had no appetite for, they spent a few fruitless hours trying to reconstruct what had happened. Frohike tried to recover the security camera recording, but someone had jammed its wireless signal to the video tape. Langly looked for clues on the net and came up with nothing. Byers himself looked for physical evidence inside HQ. He found an odd note in the "to shred" box that said "No point in looking backwards" in a handwriting that wasn't Jimmy's, and wasted some time trying to locate a sample of Alex Krycek's handwriting.
Finally, Frohike pointed out that it was 3am and they'd had a long day on the road, and that there was still no real evidence that Jimmy needed their help. Langly took the hint, but Byers stayed up for an hour after his partners were asleep, until he finally admitted that he was getting nowhere and would do better after a good night's sleep. What he got was a few hours of fitful tossing and turning, plagued by nightmares in which Jimmy was stretched out naked on a torture rack while Krycek did unspeakable things to him.