She laid it out for me, using a digital map responding to her voice commands. "Show eldorado." Several hundred locations lit up in a global view.

"Eldorado began back in 1993 as an e-mail server for a small power and light company in eastern Kentucky. A volunteer in the land lines division got permission to run an anonymous remailer on the server. The remailer was an in-between; it received mail and message board communications and stripped off their source IDs before forwarding them to their destination. The company was bought and sold over the years, and the server has been continuously upgraded. But it wasn't until 1998 that eldorado went global. It hasn't changed hands since then; and it's clear that the company's business isn't just electricity any more."

Porky's map responded to her voice commands.

Most remailers are pretty easy to trace. This was the most complex one Aporkalypse had ever encountered. She explained how a message going in would be bounced from one node to another millions of times before being spit out and finally delivered to its addressee. After a trip like that, an e-mail was completely untraceable. And as Porky saw it, such a system could clean more than e-mail. She surmised it was a money laundry - stripping electronic financial transactions of their source IDs.

So the Bernley anon e-mail was untracable. But Aporkalypse had found greater success tracing ownership of the eldorado network. It was owned by Global Image, a Miami company, and it's board members were expatriates, living in Indonesia. On record, the whole corporate structure appeared as a shipping company. But Porky had learned more about the Indonesian underground. Global Image was most likely a content pirate, stealing and reselling satellite transmissions, probably television programming.

And the company CEO was rumored to be a heavy in Indonesian mob circles. His name was John Joseph, also known as "The Wren."