Ben finished the last line of code revision and saved his work. He stretched his back and rolled his shoulders before heading to the fridge for a beer. He would post the revisions to the test team well before the deadline but wanted to think things through before he did.

He was pleased with what he had done. An app with a big imbedded market always impressed  the backers. The fact that it was seen as a benefit to society only enhanced the appeal. But Ben had taken it a step further. He had identified a second market and a secret source of revenue that his public backers did not know about. It was this second revenue stream that would make him rich.

Ben's new app, CrimeLab, was simple in design. It pooled the computing power of idle smartphones to help solve problems. The concept isn't new. Apps like DreamLab already do this for cancer research. Ben's added value was to offer it to police departments for assistance with unsolved and unsolvable crimes. The pitch was irresistible; "Load your crime details to our server at the end of the day. When you come in the next morning, we will have crunched all the numbers and provide a report which could include new leads, collated facts, and possibly even busted alibis."

The beauty of it was he only had to sell the concept to a couple of police departments. With a few successes the public safety network got the word out to the entire country. Police departments then enlisted their local communities to load the app on their personal phones.  The more people to load the app, the more efficient it became.

The computing numbers are staggering. With only 100,000 installed users the data crunching power is already about 3000 times faster than any single computer could accomplish. With more users, this will grow astronomically.

His beer finished, Ben sat back down and posted his changes. The public safety system had insisted on stringent testing and security requirements. There were no less than three alpha test teams and three beta test teams, all independently involved with vetting the various functions and levels of the app. Even with those extra precautions, there were a half dozen police agencies already using the app right now in field tests. It was simply that good that they did not want to wait. That suited Ben just fine. The more activity, the easier it was to sell to his hidden clients.

He unlocked a bottom drawer of his desk and brought out a tablet computer. Using a sequence of IP addresses that he had memorized he hopped from one dark web site to the next until he reached a site which displayed as a completely dark page, edged in purple. No prompt showed but Ben typed in a long string of numbers anyways. The password was accepted and a single question mark appeared. Ben uploaded another string of numbers and shut down. After he had carefully locked the tablet back in the drawer he allowed himself another beer.

He didn't know who his five new customers were. It didn't matter to him if they were defense attorneys, bail bondsmen, or just sophisticated criminals. As long as they each paid him the one million dollar subscription fee each year, they would get access to every bit of info the cops had. Ben would just sit back on his private island retreat and watch the money roll in.