Spider

52

Pan Arabia News Channel, New York Crime editor Tariq el Daher was beginning to wonder whether he had made the biggest mistake of what he had once been told was a highly promising career. Just over a year had passed since he'd left his job at Reuters and joined the controversial Dubai-based station Pan Arabia to beef up their newly launched English language network.

At first, major technical problems had seriously delayed the station's long-awaited debut transmission and hugely undermined their credibility as a news outfit. But those difficulties had faded into insignificance compared with the vitriolic criticism unleashed upon them by competing Western media groups once they did get on air. Sitting in his New York office, scanning the digital airways to check the content of competing channels, Tariq consoled himself by recalling that neither he nor his bosses had been under any illusion that they were in for an easy ride.

As a Muslim, he didn't just understand the facts and figures of minority life – he lived them. Of New York's twenty million people, fewer than two per cent followed the doctrines of Islam and fewer than two per cent were Buddhists, Hindus or Sikhs. But behind those figures were the earthquake tremors of a massive change that wasn't yet visible. While New York is home to a quarter of all America's Jews, it has also quietly become the chosen land for a quarter of all America's Muslims.

Ask Tariq whether he loved Islam more than America and the devout 35-year-old would dismiss your question as naive and ask you if you loved your child more than your wife or husband. His love for both Islam and America was equally passionate but subtly different and, because he didn't view them as mutually exclusive, when the chance came to join the New York bureau of one of the Middle East's largest and fastest growing news channels, he saw it as his dream job.

But lately, just lately, he'd started to worry about whether he'd made the right choice. As a staffer at Reuters he had been welcomed into any press gang in any hotel bar in the world. Similarly, his contacts book boasted some of the most important political, legal and social names in the country. But these days his calls went unanswered. His requests for access got turned down. And the press pack in the hotel bars always seemed to be turning in for the night whenever he arrived.

Right now Tariq el Daher was beginning to fear his dream job had turned into a dire nightmare. He looked at the first draft of the Prospects List his deputy had prepared for tomorrow and was disappointed at how thin it was. A couple of murders, both drive-by shootings in Queens, were only mildly interesting. A suicide by a Muslim woman who'd been secretly seeing a well-known professional gambler – that looked a bit spicier. But it was still thin.

He wanted coffee but his PA had disappeared from her desk again. The woman would have to go. She had been hired only for a month, from a temping agency, and was never at her desk when he needed her. Tariq couldn't be bothered making it himself so he tapped open the Inbox on his computer. Back in his Reuters days he used to fear firing up his machine. He'd easily have to clear more than a hundred e-mails a day. These days, he was lucky to find ten, and two would always be from his wife. Today was no different. He worked down the short list and killed junk mail offering him great deals on everything from stock market info to cut-price Viagra. The last message caught his eye.

It was marked simply 'Exclusive' and seemingly had been sent by a company called 'Insidexclusive'. He clicked it open. The mail was blank except for the web hyperlink www.Insidexclusive.com. And the instruction 'Enter the Password 898989'. He ran the cursor over it and pressed it. A box popped up saying 'Enter password before ten p.m.' Tariq glanced across at the office clock. There was plenty of time. He typed it in. The box disappeared and the screen started filling with the vertical colour bars that you sometimes see at the start of videotape. Then the bars disappeared and a black-and-grey mist filled the frame. Gradually, an image started to emerge, out-of-focus and blurred, as though the camera were moving rapidly sideways while simultaneously trying to focus. Eventually, he could make out something that looked like a newspaper, maybe a copy of USA Today, lying on the floor. Tariq got ready to kill the tape, dismissing it as another viral e-mail, sent by some trash advertiser pushing their useless products. Then he noticed that the camera lingered on the front of the newspaper. Tariq could even see the date. It was three days old, the second of July. He sat back and gave the video a chance; maybe this was USA Today trying out some weird cutting-edge marketing campaign. The camera slowly zoomed out and the paper seemed to disappear into blackness. Then the edge of a table came into shot. Tariq bolted forward in his seat. The newspaper shot suddenly made sense; it was there to show him that what he was watching was real and was current. The zoom stopped and the picture became razor sharp. Tariq could clearly make out the prostrate form of a naked young white woman chained to some kind of table.

'Sweet God alive!' he swore out loud.

The picture on his screen cut to an overhead shot.

He could see the young girl's battered face in horrifying close-up. She kept rocking her head from side to side with distressed monotony. Tariq had seen enough war-zone pictures, enough video evidence of tortured people to know what was real and what wasn't. He had no doubt about its authenticity. The girl was in an advanced state of trauma, and the rocking was a sure sign that she was close to breaking point.

Suddenly, the camera started to zoom in again. This time it headed towards the right side of the table.

On the floor, three white pieces of paper slowly became visible.

Tariq bent towards the monitor and squinted hard. He could see some big, blurred shapes or letters on each of them. The zoom stopped and the picture became sharp.

Tariq was shocked and confused. Three words blazed off the screen back at him: 'HA! HA! HA!'