‘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.
‘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 ‘Who is 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