Here’s how it works on the board:
All information posted is public. There is no hacking happening on this site. There is no leaking of hacked information, either. That’s illegal and if you want to keep your anonymous operation going in plain sight like this and not be relegated back to the depths of the dark web, you keep it all legal.
So these anonymous posters, they wait for some nugget of information to be leaked—on purpose or by mistake—onto socials or in the news. Then they pick it apart. They find connections. And lots of times—not always, but lots of times—they even find the truth.
The diggers had made the connection between Sasha Cherlin and Sasha Aston, FBI agent, way, way back when the news of Nick Tate’s death was fresh. But this board didn’t exist when that happened. So all that info was put up on random websites, or forums, or on IRC. All of which are gone now.
This board had none of that intel. I regularly do searches of Sasha’s name just to make sure no one is getting too close. There was nothing. Not a single mention of the name Sasha alone, or with either surname attached.
So when Nick’s name came up a couple months ago he was a ghost from a forgotten past. The FBI Twitter page posted a pic of the house where Sasha killed him with the headline ‘FBI puts unused safehouses on the market for quick sale.’
The weirdos on the board watch all tweets from all government agencies looking for secret comms. It’s a level of paranoia that most don’t have the patience for, but I’ve done the comm-watch myself many times and it’s real. Agencies around the world all talk to each other by posting seemingly innocent pics and headlines on socials. Especially Twitter.
It took about thirty-five minutes for the first post to appear on the board.
And all it said was… Is it just me, or does this house look familiar?
I stayed calm and watched them make connections in real time. And they got a lot of it right. Not all of it—there’s always some dumbass who takes the conspiracy theory ten steps too far. But most of us recognize that asshole and just ignore him.
And then the inevitable happened. Just like Nick’s name, there it was. Sasha Cherlin. It took them about two hours to re-make that Aston/FBI connection. It took them another thirty minutes to find her address in Fort Collins. Five minutes later they had her picture up and a satellite view of her house.
Of course, they found her socials. Then someone started posting pics of her Facebook and Instagram accounts. It’s more suspicious to not have socials these days than it is dangerous to have them. So we all have socials. Even I have one. You gotta be present, man. The government don’t like when you disappear completely. It makes their almonds tingle when they find shit like that.
So suddenly, there she was. Sasha in the pick-up line outside Saint Joseph’s school. Sasha grocery-shopping. Her and Jax having drinks at the Fort Collins Theatre. Her socials are everything you would find on a suburban housewife’s Facebook page.
But my heart was racing as I watched them hour after hour picking apart Sasha Barlow’s past. They were seconds away from finding her adopted father, Ford Aston—and her original surname Cherlin—and linking the whole thing back to the FBI/Rook mess and I was just about to start making plans to go kill people when they suddenly gave up.
Except they didn’t just give up. A board volunteer appeared and started banning people and deleting posts. The diggers came back. VPN fixes a ban like magic and everyone knows how to use a VPN on that board. But the board volunteer stayed up the entire night to make sure the dig on Sasha died a slow, but very final, death.
The dig on Nick went on for several more weeks though. And this was the red flag for me.
It was such an obvious diversion tactic that it had to be on purpose. When you want to bury something on the board, you don’t usually have a board volunteer intervene, but it’s still easy enough to kill a dig. You just shit all over the facts you want to hide and then skillfully redirect the hunt onto someone or something else. Something far more interesting than the first dig. And sure, the urban legend about a little girl with a gun at the Santa Barbara massacre is enticing—alluring, even. But it’s like a ghost story. No one really believes it.
Nick Tate, on the other hand, that guy has a real past. And maybe he’s not as interesting as a tiny blonde assassin, but they can find shit on him. And once you find a clue, and then you find another, you’re invested.
The anonymous poster who had been seriously tracking Sasha was also the board volunteer using a different IP address to hide that fact. And he was also the one who then refocused the dig onto Nick Tate. His first attempt to kill the dig was to post normal pics of Sasha, trying to prove she’s just another Fort Collins housewife, but the diggers on the board that night weren’t falling for it. So the redirection was the logical next step. If that didn’t work the board would’ve been attacked. Maybe a DDOS attack to fuck things up just long enough that the serious diggers moved along and did something else. Or maybe something worse. Take down the entire server. Redirect the DNS.
But that wasn’t necessary. The Nick Tate bait worked like a charm.
And I knew one thing for sure after watching this all go down.
This anonymous poster covering for Sasha was one of us.
So I called James. I didn’t tell him anything about the board. Not a single mention of the dig. All I said was, “Got any news I need to know about?” We do this every once in a while. And if I have something, I let him know. And if he has something, he lets me know. James said no and that was that. He doesn’t bother with the boards, anyway. He gets his information with spies in the real. Not a virtual guy at all.
So who could it be? Who was this person protecting Sasha?
I went down the list. Was it Ford? He’s the next obvious answer, but I called him and nope. He had no news for me. It wasn’t Ford.
Was it Jax? He was FBI, after all. Those clowns monitor this kind of board twenty-four seven. But I asked him if he’d heard any chatter. And maybe he’s not allowed to break clearance, I get that, but he’s broken it with me like a thousand times. I don’t think he would lie. So it wasn’t Jax.
This was another problem in and of itself.
Because there was no fucking way in hell that the FBI didn’t see that dig on Sasha Cherlin the same way I did. It’s a public fucking forum. But they didn’t tell Jax about it. Because if they had, he would’ve come to me before I came to him.
That was another rabbit hole altogether. I had to stay focused on one thing at a time.
And that left just one other person who would have the skills, info, and motive to direct attention away from Sasha and onto Nick, and that was Nick Tate himself.
I was pretty sure of it too. I liked the idea that he might still be alive. That somehow, some way, he cheated death.
But now, I’m not so sure. I didn’t know about Adam Boucher or Donovan Couture, or some guy called McKay. It could’ve been them.
And now this Adam guy wants me to help unfuck a PSYOPS? On a dual personality? One of whom is a PSYOPS agent himself?
Fuck that.
My passive participation in this shit is now over.
“Anyway.” Sasha sighs. “I told him I would ask you, but I didn’t want his secret.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s a good idea if you ask me. No one wants to get pulled back into that shit, ya know?”