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.
‘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.netspot-biz.com
‘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 techno-folk, 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