Agent Appleton called the incident commander on duty at the forensics lab near Washington, D.C.

“Hello, this is Agent John Appleton working out of Milford.”

“Watch Commander Davis. Do you have evidence to check in?”

“I do. Is there any possibility we can get a rush on processing evidence from a mobile device?”

“Do you have the code?”

“I do not, but I’m working under a clock.”

“Is there any way you can get your suspect to unlock the phone?”

“I already tried that.”

“Then, unfortunately, there is little I can do. You can send it in, but it will be a first-come, first-served basis.”

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“Wait, I also have evidence on a laptop. Is there any way you can get evidence off that?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid we are in the same situation as the mobile phone. We are understaffed, and our caseload is high.”

Agent Appleton broke the connection and booted up the laptop. He quickly found a document related to burner phone bulk purchases. He also found a file with several links to Dark Web servers.

Several minutes later, Agent Appleton was able to secure a MORP connection to the Dark Web. He couldn’t understand what the links were by looking at the names of the links. They seemed like random gibberish. One feature he did notice was that each extension ended with “.un.”

Agent Appleton was just about to click on one of the links when he noticed a file called “ReadMe” on the desktop. He clicked on that file, and several links with descriptive text appeared. Then the screen went black.

As he checked the power connection to ensure that it was secure and connected to an outlet, he heard a distinctive beep which he recognized from when a system restarted.

“The computer probably just restarted after an update.”

A white progress bar appeared on the screen. He waited patiently for the bar to disappear.

It didn’t.

Approximately thirty minutes later, Agent Appleton returned to see: “No system or boot loader present.”