DARKMARKET

as they move from one life to the other. Mert had utterly failed to identify in his own mind when he was speaking the truth and when not.

Life would have been incomparably easier if Mert had been an unashamed fantasist who simply talked nonsense. Tracking down the hackers, members and cops associated with DarkMarket was among the most enervating experiences in my journalistic career. But nothing was quite so exasperating as the attempt to establish the veracity of Mert's story. Actually, that is not quite accurate: much of his tale turned out to be true and verifiable in essence, but embellished at times with such frills and twirls that it was transformed into something quite different. Bizarrely, when Mert told straight untruths, they often related to the most mundane matters that were the easiest to check. He told me boldly, for example, that he was born on 10th April 1982. In fact, he was born on the same day four years later.

In the following chapters I tell Mert's story largely as he told it to me. But there are two key moments when his narrative simply doesn't add up, where I am unable to confirm his claims; indeed, in the first instance, one of the main characters flatly denies Mert's version of events. When we arrive at those moments, I will alert the reader.

The ultimate test of Mert's credibility lay in his answer to the question that has vexed many aficionados of the cyber underground since the inception of DarkMarket. Who was Lord Cyric?