The Righteous Men (2006) (11 page)

But if that had been the purpose of his American journey, he had failed. He
knew little more now than he did when he first arrived, aged twenty-two. He
knew his father better, that was true. He respected him; he was a hugely
accomplished lawyer, now a judge, and seemed an essentially decent man. But as
to the big mystery, Will had gained no great insights. They had talked about
the divorce, of course, during a couple of moonlit evenings on the veranda of
his father’s summer house at Sag Harbor. But there had been no flash of
revelation.

‘Maybe that is the revelation,’ Beth had said one night when he
came back inside after one of these father-to-son chats. They were spending a
long Labor Day weekend with Will’s father and his ‘partner’,
Linda. Beth was lying on the bed, reading, waiting for Will to come back in.

‘What is?’

‘That there is no big mystery. That’s the revelation. They were
two people whose marriage didn’t work. It happens. It happens a lot. That’s
all there is.’

‘But what about all that stuff my mother says? And that grandma used
to say?’

‘Maybe they needed to have some grand explanation. Maybe it helped to
think that some other woman stole him—’

‘Not necessarily another woman,’ Will muttered. ‘“The
other great passion” was the phrase. Could have been anything.’

‘OK. My point is, I can see why a rejected wife and her very loving
mother would need to invent a larger explanation for the departure of a
husband. Otherwise it’s a rejection, isn’t it?’

She had not been his wife then, just the girlfriend he had met in his
closing weeks at Columbia. He was in journalism school; she was doing a medical
internship at the New York Presbyterian Hospital; they had met at a Memorial
Day weekend softball game in the park. (He had left the message on her
answering machine that same evening.) Those first few months were bathed in his
mind in a permanent golden glow. He knew the memory could play tricks like that,
but he was convinced the glow was a genuine, externally verifiable phenomenon.
They had met in May, when New York was in the midst of a glorious spring. The
days seemed to be lit by amber; each walk they took sparkled in the sun. It was
not just their lovestruck imaginations; they had photographs to prove it.

Will realized he was smiling. This daydream was the first time he had
thought of Beth, rather than Beth gone. Which was what he remembered now, with
the jolt of a man who wakes up to realize that, yes, his leg has been amputated
and, no, it was not all a horrible dream.

His father had come back into the room and was saying something about
contacting the internet company, but Will was not listening. He had had enough.
His father was not thinking straight: the moment they made any move like that, they
risked alerting the police. The internet service provider would surely take a
look at the kidnappers’ emails and feel obliged to notify the authorities.

‘Dad, I need some time to rest,’ he said, gently shepherding his
father to the door. ‘I need some time alone.’

‘Will, that’s all very well, but I’m not sure rest is a
luxury you can afford. You need to use every minute—’

Monroe Sr stopped. He could see his son was in no mood to negotiate; there
was a steel in Will’s eyes that was ordering his father to leave, no
matter how polite the words coming out of his mouth.

When the door was closed, Will sighed deeply, slumped into a chair and
stared at his feet. He allowed himself no more than thirty seconds like that,
before he breathed deeply, pulled his back up straight and girded himself for
his next move. Despite what he had just said, he was neither going to rest nor
be alone. He knew exactly what he had to do.

T
om 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: [email protected]

‘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.