The righteous men

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Friday, 3.16pm, Brooklyn

Tom Fontaine had been Will's first friend in America, or rather the first friend he had made since coming to the country as an adult. They had met in the registration office at Columbia: Tom was just ahead of Will in the queue.

Will's initial feeling towards Tom was frustration. The line was moving slowly enough already, but he could see the lanky guy in the old-man's overcoat was going to take forever.

Everyone else had their forms ready, most of them neatly printed out. But the overcoat was still filling his in as he stood. With a fountain pen that had sprung a leak. Will turned to the girl behind him, raising his eyebrows as if to say, 'Can you believe this guy?' Eventually the two of them started talking out loud about how irritating it was to be stuck behind such a sap: they were emboldened by the permanent presence in the sap's ears of a pair of white headphones.

Finally, he had rummaged in his schoolboy satchel enough times to find a dog-eared driver's licence that had lost its laminate and a letter from the university. These somehow convinced the official that he was indeed called Tom Fontaine and that he was entitled to be a student at Columbia. In philosophy.

As he turned around, he gave Will a smile: 'Sorry, I know how irritating it is to be stuck behind the college sap.' Will blushed. He had obviously heard every word. (Will would later discover that the headphones in Tom's ears were not connected to a Walkman — or anything else. Tom just found it useful to have headphones on: that way, strangers rarely bothered him.) They met again three days later in a coffee shop, Tom hunched over a laptop computer, headphones on. Will tapped on his shoulder to apologize. They started talking and they had been friends ever since.

He was quite unlike anyone Will had ever known. Officially, Tom Fontaine was apolitical but Will considered him a genuine revolutionary. Yes, he was a computer geek — but he was also a man with a mission. He was part of an informal network of like-minded geniuses around the world determined to take on — maybe even take down — the software giants who dominated the computer world. Their beef against Microsoft and its ilk was that those corporations had broken the original, sacred principle of the internet: that it should be a tool for the open exchange of ideas and information. The key word was open. In the early days of the net, Tom would explain — patiently and in words of one syllable to Will who, like plenty of journalists, relied on computers but had not the first idea how they worked — everything was open, freely available to all. That extended to the software itself. It was 'open-source', meaning that its inner workings were there for all to see. Anybody could use and, crucially, adapt the software as they saw fit. Then Microsoft and friends came along and, motivated solely by commerce, brought down the steel shutters. Their stuff was now 'closed-source'. The long strings of code which made it tick were off-limits. Just as Coca-Cola built an empire on its secret recipe, so Microsoft made its products a mystery.

That hardly bothered Will, but for net idealists like Tom it was a form of desecration. They believed in the internet with a zeal that Will could only describe as religious (which was especially funny in Tom's case, given his militant atheism).

They were now determined to create alternative software search engines or word-processing programmes — that would be available to anyone who wanted them, free of charge. If someone spotted a fault, they could dive right in and correct it. After all, it belonged to all the people who used it.

It meant Tom earned a fraction of the money that could have been his, selling just enough of his computer brainpower to pay the rent. He did not care; the principles came first.

'Tom, it's Will. You home?'

He had answered on his mobile; he could be anywhere.

'Nope.'

'What's that music?' He could hear what sounded like the operatic voice of a woman.

This, my friend, is the Himmelfahrts-Oratorium by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Ascension Oratorio, Barbara Schlick, soprano-'

'What are you, at a concert?'

'Record store.'

The one near your apartment?'

'Yup.'

'Can I meet you at your place in twenty minutes?

Something very urgent has come up.' He regretted that straight away. On a cell phone.

'You OK. You sound, you know, panicky.'

'Can you be there? Twenty minutes?'

'K.'

Tom's place was odd, the embodiment of the man. There was almost nothing in the fridge but row after row of mineral water, testament to his rather peculiar aversion to drinks of any kind, hot or cold. No coffee, no juice, no beer. Just water.

And the bed was in the living room, a concession to his insomnia: when Tom woke up at three am, he wanted to be able to get straight back online and to work, falling down again when he next felt tired. Usually these quirks would spark some kind of lecture from Will, urging his friend to join the rest of the human race, or at least the Brooklyn branch of it, but not today.

Will strode right in and gestured to Tom to close the door.

'Do you have any weird gadgets attached to your computer, any microphones or cell phones or speakerphones or anything weird that might mean that what we're saying now could in some way that I don't understand get on to the internet?'

'Excuse me? What are you talking about?'

'You know what I mean. One of your techie things that I can't even find the words for; do you have anything that could be recording our conversation and saving it as some audio file that you won't even realize has happened till later?'

'Er, no.' Tom's voice and face were crinkled into the expression that says, Of course not, you psycho.

'Good, because what we are about to talk about is terrible and it is also one hundred per cent secret and cannot, underline cannot, be discussed with anyone — especially not the police.'

Tom could see his friend was in deadly earnest and also desperate. Permanently ashen-faced, Tom paled to a shade of light porcelain.

'Is this on?' Will said, gesturing at one of several computers on the work bench, picking the one that looked most like his own. It was a silly question. When were Tom's computers ever off? 'Is this a browser?' This much internet language Will could manage. Tom nodded; he looked scared.

Will did not ask if Tom's computers were secure: he knew there were none safer. Encryption was a Fontaine specialism.

Will typed in the address to access his web mail, then, when the page appeared, his name and password. His inbox.

He scrolled down and clicked open the first message.

DO NOT CALL THE POLICE. WE HAVE YOUR WIFE. INVOLVE THE POLICE AND YOU WILL LOSE HER. DO NOT CALL THE POLICE OR YOU WILL REGRET IT. FOREVER.

Tom, who was standing, reading over Will's shoulder, almost jumped back. He let out a low moan, as if he had been struck.

Only now did Will even think of it: Tom was crazy about Beth. Not romantically — he was no rival — but in an almost childlike way. Tom would often walk the few blocks over to their apartment to eat — a contrast with the sushi-in-a-box consumed in front of his screen that constituted the rest of his diet — and seemed to gain nourishment from Beth's attention.

She chided him like an older sister and he took it; he even let her buy him a stylish jacket that he wore, briefly, in place of the dead-man's coat that seemed glued to his back.

Will had not banked on this: Tom having feelings of his own about Beth's disappearance.

'Oh my God,' he was saying softly. Will said nothing, giving him a moment to absorb the shock. He decided to short-circuit the next stage by summarizing all the conclusions he, along with his father, had drawn so far. He showed Tom the second email, to establish the fact that the kidnappers seemed more interested in secrecy, and the non-involvement of the authorities, than in any ransom. The explanation was entirely mysterious, but there could be no question of telling the police.

'Tom, I need you to do whatever it takes to work out where these emails have come from. That's what the police would do, so that's what you have to do.'

Tom nodded, but his hands barely moved. He was still dazed.

'Tom, I know how much Beth means to you. And how much you mean to her. But what she needs from you right now is for you to be the laser-beam-focus computer genius.

OK?' Will was trying to smile, like a father cheering up a toddler son. 'You need to forget what this is about and imagine it's just another computer puzzle. But you have to crack it as fast as you can.'

Without another word, the two swapped places. Will paced up and down while Tom started clicking and clacking at the machine.

He offered one revelation straight away. The hieroglyphics that had appeared on Will's BlackBerry now looked completely different.

'Is that-'

'Hebrew,' said Tom. 'Not every machine has access to that alphabet. That's why it looked weird on yours. Using obscure alphabets is an old spammer trick.'

Now Will noticed something else. After the long string of Hebrew characters, he could see some English ones in brackets.

It was as if they had fallen off the screen on his own computer, but here they were visible, spelling out a regular email address: info@golem-net.net.

'Golem-net? Is that what their name is?'

'Apparently.'

'Isn't that some Lord of the Rings thing?'

'That's Gollum. Two l's.'

Suddenly the screen was black with just a few characters winking on the left. Had the system crashed?

Tom saw Will's face. 'Don't worry about this. This is a "shell". It's just an easier way of issuing commands to the computer than GUI.'

Will looked baffled.

'Graphic User Interface.' Tom could see he was speaking a foreign language, yet he had the strong feeling Will wanted him to say something. He realized his friend was like a taxi passenger in an urgent hurry: ultimately it might make no difference, but it felt better to be moving than to be stuck in traffic, Psychologically, he knew Will was in the same state: he needed to feel they were making progress. A running commentary might help.

'I'm going to ask the computer who it was who just emailed us.'

'You can do that?'

'Yep. Look.'

Tom was typing the words 'Whois golem-net.net'. It always surprised Will when, amid all the codes and digits, a computer (or computer geek, which amounted to the same thing) used plain, conversational English, albeit with an eccentric spelling. Yet, it turned out, this was a bona fide computer instruction.

Whois golem-net.net Tom was waiting for the screen to fill up. There was nothing you could do in these moments, as the lights flickered and the egg-timer graphic ticked away. You could not hurry the computer. People always tried to. You saw them by ATM machines, their hands in position, like a crocodile's mouth poised over the dispenser, waiting to catch the cash as it came out, ensuring that not even the split second it would take to move across to collect it should be wasted. You saw it in offices, where people would drum pencils or play their thighs like bongos: 'Come on, come on,' urging the computer or printer to stop being so damned slow — forgetting, of course, that five, ten or fifteen years ago the task in question might have taken the best part of a working day.

'Ah. Well, that's interesting.'

There on the screen was the answer, clear and unambiguous.

No match for golem-net.net 'They made it up.'

'Now what?'

Tom went back to the email itself and selected an option Will did not know existed: 'View Full Header'. Suddenly several lines of what he would have dismissed as garble filled the screen.

'OK,' said Tom, 'what we have here is a kind of travelogue.

This shows you the email's internet journey. That line at the top is its final destination and that at the bottom is its point of origin. Each server en route has its own line.'

Will looked at the screen, each sentence beginning 'Received…'

'Hmm. These guys were in a hurry.'

'How do you know that?'

'Well, you could make up "received lines". But that takes time — and whoever sent this didn't have time. Or didn't know how to do it. These received lines are all genuine. OK, this is the thing we need. Here.' He was pointing to the bottom line, the point of origin. Received from info.net-spot.biz 'What's that?'

'Every computer in the world, so long as it's connected to the internet, has a name. That one there is the computer that sent you the email. All right. That means there's one more move I need to make.'

Will could see that Tom felt uncomfortable. This was not the way he liked to do things. Will remembered one of their earliest conversations, when Tom explained the difference between hackers and crackers, white hats and black hats. Will liked all the names; thought it might make a magazine piece.

His memory was sketchy. He remembered his surprise at discovering that hacker was a widely misused term. In the outside world, it was often applied to the teenage nerds who broke into other people's computers — other people being Cape Canaveral or NATO — and wrought mayhem. Among technofolk, hacker had a milder meaning: it referred to those who played on other people's virtual lawns for fun, not malice.

Those who were up to no good — spreading viruses, taking down the 911 emergency phone system — were known by aficionados as crackers. They were hackers for havoc.

The same distinction applied to white hats and black hats.

The former would snoop around where they were not wanted — inside the system of one of America's biggest banks for example — but their motives were benign. They might peek at customers' account numbers, even uncovering their PIN codes, but they would not take their money (even though they could). Instead they would email the head of security at the bank with a few examples of their plundered wares.

A typical white hat message, waiting in the inbox of the luckless official in charge, might read 'If I can see your data, then so can the bad guys. Fix it.' If the recipient was really unlucky, the email would be cc'd to the CEO.

Black hats would do the same but with darker purpose.

They would bust into a maximum security network not on the Everest principle — because it's there — but in order to cause some damage. Sometimes it was theft, but more often the motive was cyber-vandalism: the thrill of taking down a big target. The headline-grabbing viruses of the past — I Love You and Michelangelo — were considered artistic masterpieces in the black hat fraternity.

Of course Tom's hat was as white as they came. He loved the internet, he wanted it to work. He had barely hacked, let alone cracked. He believed it was essential that the world grow to trust the web, that people felt secure on it — and that meant restraint on the part of those, like him, who knew where to find the gaps in the fence. But this was an exceptional situation. Beth's life was on the line.

Will began to pace. His legs felt weak, his stomach queasy.

He had eaten nothing since first sight of that email, now some seven hours ago. He wandered over to Tom's fridge: multiple Volvic and a box of sushi. Yesterday's. Will took it out, smelled it and decided it was still just about edible. He wolfed it, then felt guilty for having any appetite at all when his wife was missing. As he swallowed, Beth came back to him. The very idea of food seemed to trigger an association with his wife.

The evenings together making dinner; her unabashed appetite.

Whatever he imagined, warmth, hunger or satiation, he could only think of her.

He paced some more. He flicked through the computer periodicals and obscure literary journals that Tom had in a stack by the couch.

'Will, come here.'

Tom was staring at the screen. He had done a 'whois…' for netspot-biz.com and had got an answer.

'You don't seem happy,' said Will.

'Well, it's good news and bad news. The good news is I now know exactly where the email was sent from. The bad news is, it could be anybody who sent it.'

'I don't get it.'

'Our path ends in an internet cafe. People are in and out of those places all the time. How stupid can you get!' Tom slammed his fist on the desk. He seemed furious. 'I thought we were going to get a nice, neat home address. Dumb ass!'

Will realized Tom was addressing no one but himself.

'Where is this internet cafe?'

'Does it matter? New York is a pretty big fucking city, Will.

Millions of people could have passed through there.'

'Tom.' Sternly now. 'Can you find out where it is?'

Tom returned to the screen, while Will stared. Finally he spoke.

'There's the address. Trouble is, I'm not sure I believe it.'

'Where is it?' said Will.

Tom looked him straight in the face for the first time since Will had shown him the kidnappers' email. 'It's from Brooklyn.

Crown Heights, Brooklyn.'

'That's fairly near here. Why don't you believe it?'

'Look at the map.' Tom had done an instant MapQuest search, showing with a red star the exact location of the internet cafe. It was on Eastern Parkway. 'Do you realize where that is?'

'No. Come on, Tom. Stop fucking around. Tell me.'

'This message was sent from Crown Heights. That's only the biggest Hassidic community in America.'

The red star stared at them without blinking. It looked like the X on a treasure map, the kind that used to feature in Will's boyhood dreams. What lay under it? 'Despite the location, it's possible that it's not them who sent it.'

'Tom, the email was in Hebrew, for Christ's sake.'

'Yeah, but that could be a cover. The real name was golem.net.'

'Look it up.'

Tom keyed golem into Google and clicked on the first result.

It brought up a page from a website of Jewish legends for children. It told the story of the Great Rabbi Loew of Prague, who used a spell from kabbala, ancient Jewish mysticism, to mould a man from clay: a vast, lumbering giant they called the Golem. Will's eye raced to the end: the story climaxed in violence and destruction, with the Golem running amok. The Golem seemed to be a Hassidic precursor of Frankenstein's monster.

'All right,' said Tom finally. 'I admit it, it does seem to be them. But it makes no sense. Why on earth would these people take Beth?'

'We don't know it's "these people". It might be one psycho who just happens to be Hassidic.' Will grabbed his coat.

'Where are you going?'

'I'm going there.'

'Are you crazy?'

'I'll pretend I'm reporting. I'll start asking questions. See who's in charge.'

'You're out of your mind. Why don't you just tell the police you've traced the email? Let them handle it.'

'What, and guarantee these lunatics kill Beth? I'm going.'

'You can't just go charging in there, with your notebook and English accent. You might as well wear a fucking sign.'

I'll think of something.' Will did not say, though he thought it, that he was getting quite good at this kind of amateur detective work. His triumphs in Brownsville and Montana had left him pumped: in both cases he had found out a hidden truth. Now he would find his wife.