SAM BOURNE

The Righteous Men

For Sam, born into a family of love.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for The Righteous Men

Author's Note

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Friday, 9.10pm, Manhattan The night of the first killing was filled with song. St Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan trembled to the sound of Handel's Messiah, the grand choral masterpiece that never failed to rouse even the most slumbering audience. Its swell of voices surged at the roof of the cathedral. It was as if they wanted to break out, to reach the very heavens.

Inside, close to the front, sat a father and son, the older man's eyes closed, moved as always by this, his favourite piece of music. The son's gaze alternated between the performers – the singers dressed in black, the conductor wildly waving his shock of greying hair – and the man at his side. He liked looking at him, gauging his reactions; he liked being this close.

Tonight was a celebration. A month earlier Will Monroe Jr had landed the job he had dreamed of ever since he had come to America. Still only in his late twenties, he was now a reporter, on the fast track at The New York Times. Monroe Sr inhabited a different realm. He was a lawyer, one of the most accomplished of his generation, now serving as a federal judge on the second circuit of the US Court of Appeals. He liked to acknowledge achievement when he saw it and this young man at his side, whose boyhood he had all but missed, had reached a milestone. He found his son's hand and gave it a squeeze.

It was at that moment, no more than a forty-minute subway ride across town but a world away, that Howard Macrae heard the first steps behind him. He was not scared. Outsiders may have steered clear of this Brooklyn neighbourhood of Brownsville, notorious for its drug-riddled deprivation, but Macrae knew every street and alley.

He was part of the landscape. A pimp of some two decades' standing, he was wired into Brownsville. He had been a smart operator, too, ensuring that in the gang warfare that scarred the area, he always remained a neutral. Factions would clash and shift, but Howard stayed put, constant. No one had challenged the patch where his whores plied their trade for years.

So he was not too worried by the sound behind him. Still, he found it odd that the footsteps did not stop. He could tell they were close. Why would anybody be tailing him? He turned his head to peer over his left shoulder and gasped, immediately tripping over his feet. It was a gun unlike any he had ever seen – and it was aimed at him.

Inside the cathedral, the chorus were now one being, their lungs opening and closing like the bellows of a single, mighty organ. The music was insistent:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

Howard Macrae was now facing forward, attempting to break into an instinctive run. But he could feel a strange, piercing sensation in his right thigh. His leg seemed to be giving way, collapsing under his weight, refusing to obey his orders. I have to run! Yet his body would not respond. He seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if wading through water.

Now the mutiny had spread to his arms, which were first lethargic, then floppy. His brain raced with the urgency of the situation, but it too now seemed overwhelmed, as if submerged under a sudden burst of floodwater. He felt so tired.

He found himself lying on the ground clasping his right leg, aware that it and the rest of his limbs were surrendering to numbness. He looked up. He could see nothing but the steel glint of a blade.

* * *

In the cathedral, Will felt his pulse quicken. The Messiah was reaching its climax, the whole audience could sense it. A soprano voice hovered above them:

If God be for us, who can be against us? Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth?

Macrae could only watch as the knife hovered over his chest. He tried to see who was behind it, to make out a face, but he could not. The gleam of metal dazzled him; it seemed to have caught all the night's moonlight on its hard, polished surface. He knew he ought to be terrified: the voice inside his head told him he was. But it sounded oddly removed, like a commentator describing a faraway football game. Howard could see the knife coming closer towards him, but still it seemed to be happening to someone else.

Now the orchestra was in full force, Handel's music coursing through the church with enough force to waken the gods. The alto and tenor were as one, demanding to know: O Death, where is thy sting?

Will was not a classical buff like his father, but the majesty and power of the music was making the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention. Still staring straight ahead, he tried to imagine the expression his father would be wearing: he pictured him, rapt, and hoped that underneath that blissful exterior there might also lurk some pleasure at sharing this moment with his only son.

The blade descended, first across the chest. Macrae saw the red line it scored, as if the knife were little more than a scarlet marker pen. The skin seemed to bubble and blister: he did not understand why he felt no pain. Now the knife was moving down, slicing his stomach open like a bag of grain. The contents spilled out, a warm soft bulge of viscous innards. Howard was watching it all, until the moment the dagger was finally held aloft. Only then could he see the face of his murderer. His larynx managed to squeeze out a gasp of shock – and recognition. The blade found his heart and all was dark.

The mission had begun.

CHAPTER TWO

Friday, 9.46pm, Manhattan The chorus took their bows, the conductor bowing sweatily. But Will could only hear one noise: the sound of his father clapping. He marvelled at the decibels those two big hands could produce, colliding in a smack that sounded like wood against wood. It stirred a memory Will had almost lost. It was a school speech day back in England, the only time his father had been there. Will was ten years old and as he went up to collect the poetry prize he was sure that, even above the din of a thousand parents, he could hear the distinct handclap of his father. On that day he had been proud of this stranger's mighty oak hands, stronger than those of any man in the world, he was sure.

The noise had not diminished as his father, now in his early fifties, had entered middle age. He was as fit as ever, slim, his white hair cropped short. He did not jog or work out: weekend sailing trips off Sag Harbor had kept him in shape. Will, still applauding, turned to look at him, but his father's gaze did not shift. When Will saw the slight redness around his dad's nose he realized with shock that the older man's eyes were wet: the music had moved him, but he did not want his son to see his tears.

Will smiled to himself at that. A man with hands as strong as trees, welling up at the sound of an angels' choir. It was then he felt the vibrations. He reached down to his BlackBerry to see a message from the Metro desk: ‘Job for you. Brownsville, Brooklyn. Homicide.’

Will's stomach gave a little leap, that aerobic manoeuvre that combines excitement and nerves. He was on the ‘night cops’ beat on the Times Metro desk, the traditional blooding for fast-trackers like him. He might be destined to serve as a future Middle East correspondent or Beijing Bureau Chief, ran the paper's logic, but first he would have to learn the journalistic basics. That was Times thinking. ‘There'll be plenty of time to cover military coups. First you have to know how to cover a flower show,’ Glenn Harden, the Metro editor would say. ‘You need to learn people and you do that right here.’

As the chorus basked in their ovation, Will turned to his father with a shrug of apology, gesturing to the BlackBerry. It's work, he mouthed, gathering up his coat. This little role reversal gave him a sneaky pleasure. After years living in the glow cast by his father's stellar career, now it was Will's turn to heed the summons of work.

‘Take care,’ whispered the older man.

Outside Will hailed a cab. The driver was listening to the news on NPR. Will asked him to turn it up. Not that he was expecting any word on Brownsville. Will always did this – in cabs, even in shops or cafes. He was a news junkie; had been since he was a teenager.

He had missed the lead item and they were already onto the foreign news. A story from Britain. Will always perked up when he heard word from the country he still thought of as home. He may have been born in America, but his formative years, between the ages of eight and twenty-one, had been spent in England. Now, though, as he heard that Gavin Curtis, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in trouble, Will paid extra attention. Determined to prove to the Times that his talents stretched beyond the Metro desk, and to ensure the brass knew he had studied economics at Oxford, Will had pitched a story to the Week in Review section on only his second day at the paper. He had even sketched out a headline: Wanted: A banker for the world. The International Monetary Fund was looking for a new head and Curtis was said to be the frontrunner.

‘… the charges were first made by a British newspaper,’ the NPR voice was saying, ‘which claimed to have identified “irregularities” in Treasury accounts. A spokesman for Mr Curtis has today denied all suggestions of corruption.’ Will scribbled a note as a memory floated to the surface. He quickly pushed it back down.

There were more urgent matters at hand. Digging into his pocket he found his phone. Quick message to Beth, who had picked up his British fondness for texting. With a thumb that had become preternaturally quick, he punched in the numbers that became letters.

My first murder! Will be? home? late. Love? you.

Now he could see his destination. Red lights were turning noiselessly in the September dark. The lights were on the roofs of two NYPD cars whose noses almost touched in an arrowhead shape, as if to screen off part of the road. In front of them was a hastily installed cordon, consisting of yellow police tape. Will paid the fare, got out and looked around. Rundown tenements.

He approached the first line of tape until a policewoman strolled over to stop him. She looked bored. ‘No access, sir.’

Will fumbled in the breast pocket of his linen jacket. ‘Press?’ he asked with what he hoped was a winning smile as he flashed his newly minted press card.

Looking away, she gave an economical gesture with her right hand. Go through.

Will ducked under the tape, into a knot of maybe half a dozen people. Other reporters. I'm late, he thought, irritated. One was his age, tall with impossibly straight hair and an unnatural dusting of orange on his skin. Will was sure he recognized him but could not remember how. Then he saw the curly wire in his ear. Of course, Carl McGivering from NY1, New York's twenty-four-hour cable news station. The rest were older, the battered press tags around their necks revealing their affiliations: Post, Newsday, and a string of community papers.

‘Bit late, junior,’ said the craggiest of the bunch, apparently the dean of the crime corps. ‘What kept you?’ Ribbing from older hacks, Will had learned in his first job on the Bergen Record in New Jersey, was one of those things reporters like him just had to swallow.

‘Anyway, I wouldn't sweat it,’ Old Father Time from Newsday was saying. ‘Just your garden variety gangland killing. Knives are all the rage these days, it seems.’

‘Blades: the new guns. Could be a fashion piece,’ quipped the Post, to much laughter from the Veteran Reporters' Club whose monthly meeting Will felt he had just interrupted. He suspected this was a dig at him, suggesting he (and perhaps the Times itself) were too effete to give the macho business of murder its due.

‘Have you seen the corpse?’ Will asked, sure there was a term of the trade he was conspicuously failing to use. ‘Stiff’, perhaps.

‘Yeah, right through there,’ said the dean, nodding towards the squad cars as he brought a cup of Styrofoam coffee to his lips.

Will headed for the space between the police vehicles, a kind of man-made clearing in this urban forest. There were a couple of unexcited cops milling around, one with a clipboard, but no police photographer. Will must have missed that.

And there on the ground, under a blanket, lay the body. He stepped forward to get a better look, but one of the cops moved to block his path. ‘Authorized personnel only from here on in, sir. All questions to the DCPI over there.’

‘DCPI?’

‘Officer serving the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.’ As if speaking to a dim-witted child who had forgotten his most rudimentary times tables.

Will kicked himself for asking. He should have bluffed it out.

The DCPI was on the other side of the corpse, talking to the TV guy. Will had to walk round until he was only a foot or two from the dead body of Howard Macrae. He stared hard into the blanket, hoping to guess at the face that lay beneath. Maybe the blanket would reveal an outline, like those clay masks used by sculptors. He kept looking but the dull, dark shroud yielded nothing.

The DCPI was in mid-flow. ‘… our guess is that this was either score-settling by the SVS against the Wrecking Crew, or else an attempt by the Houston prostitution network to take over Macrae's patch.’

Only then did she seem to notice Will, her expression instantly changing to denote a lack of familiarity. The shutters had come down. Will got the message: the casual banter was for Carl McGivering only.

‘Could I just get the details?’

‘One African-American male, aged forty-three, approximately a hundred and eighty pounds, identified as Howard Macrae, found dead on Saratoga and St Marks Avenues at 8.27pm this evening. Police were alerted by a resident of the neighbourhood who dialled 911 after finding the body while walking to the 7-Eleven.’ She nodded to indicate the store: over there. ‘Cause of death appears to be severing of arteries, internal bleeding and heart failure due to vicious and repeated stabbing. The New York Police Department is treating this crime as homicide and will spare no resources in bringing the perpetrator to justice.’

The blah blah tone told Will this was a set formulation, one all DCPIs were required to repeat. No doubt it had been scripted by a team of outside consultants, who probably wrote a NYPD mission statement to go with it. Spare no resources.

‘Any questions?’

‘Yes. What was all that about prostitution?’

‘Are we on background now?’

Will nodded, agreeing that anything the DCPI said could be used, so long as Will did not attribute it to her.

‘The guy was a pimp. Well-known as such to us and to everyone who lives here. Ran a brothel, on Atlantic Avenue near Pleasant Place. Kind of like an old-fashioned whorehouse, girls, rooms – all under one roof.’

‘Right. What about the fact that he was found in the middle of the street? Isn't that a little strange, no attempt to hide the body?’

‘Gangland killing, that's how they work. Like a drive-by shooting. It's right out there in the open, in your face. No attempt to hide the body 'cause that's part of the point. To send a message. You want everyone to know, “We did this, we don't care who knows about it. And we'd do it to you.”’

Will scribbled as fast as he could, thanked the DCPI and reached for his cell phone. He told Metro what he had: they told him to come in, there was still time to make the final edition. They would only need a few paragraphs. Will was not surprised. He had read the Times long enough to know this was not exactly hold-the-front-page material.

He did not let on to the desk, to the DCPI or to any of the other reporters there that this was in fact the first murder he had ever covered. At the Bergen Record, homicides were rarer fare and not to be wasted on novices like him. It was a pity because there was one detail which had caught Will's eye but which he had put out of his mind almost immediately. The other hacks were too jaded to have noticed it at all, but Will saw it. The trouble was, he assumed it was routine.

He did not realize it at the time, but it was anything but.

CHAPTER THREE

Saturday, 12.30am, Manhattan At the office, he hammered the ‘send’ key on the keyboard, pushed back his chair and stretched. It was half-past midnight. He looked around: most of the desks were empty, only the night layout area was still fully staffed – cutting and slicing, rewriting and crafting the finished product which would spread itself open on Manhattan breakfast tables in just a few hours' time.

He strode around the office, pumped by a minor version of the post-filing high – that surge of adrenalin and relief once a story is done. He wandered, stealing a glance at the desks of his colleagues, bathed only in the flickering light of CNN, on mute.

The office was open plan, but a system of partitions organized the desks into pods, little clusters of four. As a newcomer, Will was in a far-off corner. His nearest window looked out onto a brick wall: the back of a Broadway theatre bearing a now-faded poster for one of the city's longest-running musicals. Alongside him in the pod was Terry Walton, the former Delhi bureau chief who had returned to New York under some kind of cloud; Will had not yet discovered the exact nature of his misdemeanour. His desk consisted of a series of meticulous piles surrounding a single yellow legal pad. On it was handwriting so dense and tiny, it was unintelligible to all but the closest inspection: Will suspected this was a kind of security mechanism, devised by Walton to prevent any snoopers taking a peek at his work. He was yet to discover why a man whose demotion to Metro meant he was hardly working on stories sensitive to national security would take such a precaution.

Next was Dan Schwarz, whose desk seemed to be on the point of collapse. He was an investigative reporter; there was barely room for his chair, all floor space consumed by cardboard boxes. Papers were falling out of other papers; even the screen on Schwarz's computer was barely visible, bordered by a hundred Post-it notes stuck all around the edge.

Amy Woodstein's desk was neither anally neat like Walton's nor a public health disaster like Schwarz's. It was messy, as befitted the quarters of a woman who worked under her very own set of deadlines – always rushing back to relieve a nanny, let in a childminder or pick up from nursery. She had used the partition walls to pin up not yet more papers, like Schwarz, or elegant, if aged, postcards, like Walton, but pictures of her family. Her children had curly hair and wide, toothy smiles – and, as far as Will could see, were permanently covered in paint.

He went back to his own desk. He had not found the courage to personalize it yet; the pinboard partition still bore the corporate notices that were there when he arrived. He saw the light on his phone blinking. A message.

Hi babe. I know it's late but I'm not sleepy yet. I've got a fun idea so call me when you're done. It's nearly one. Call soon.

His spirits lifted instantly. He had banked on a tip-toed re-entry into the apartment, followed by a pre-bed bowl of Cheerios. What did Beth have in mind?

He called. ‘How come you're still awake?’

‘I dunno, my husband's first murder perhaps? Maybe it's just everything that's going on. Anyway, I can't sleep. Do you wanna meet for bagels?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yeah. At the Carnegie Deli.’

‘Now?’

‘I'll get a cab.’

Will liked the idea of the Carnegie Deli as much as, perhaps more than, the reality. The notion of a coffee shop that never slept, where old-time Broadway comedians and now-creaking chorus girls might meet for an after-show pastrami sandwich; the folks reading first editions of the morning papers, scanning the pages for notices of their latest hit or flop, their cups constantly refilled with steaming brown liquid – it was all so New York. He wanted the waitresses to look harried, he liked it when people butted in line – it all confirmed what he knew was a tourist's fantasy of the big city. He suspected he should be over this by now: he had, after all, lived in America for more than five years. But he could not pretend to be a native.

He got there first, bagging a table behind a noisy group of middle-aged couples. He caught snatches of conversation, enough to work out they were not Manhattanites, but in from Jersey. He guessed they had taken in a show, almost certainly a long-running musical, and were now completing their New York experience with a past-midnight snack.

Then he saw her. Will paused for a split second before waving, just to take a good look. They had met in his very last weeks at Columbia and he had fallen hard and fast. Her looks could still make his insides leap: the long dark hair framing pale skin and wide, green eyes. One look and you could not tear yourself away. Those eyes were like deep, cool pools – and he wanted to dive in.

He jumped up to meet her, instantly taking in her scent. It began in her hair, with an aroma of sunshine and dewberries that might once have come from a shampoo, but combined with her skin to produce a new perfume, one that was entirely her own. Its epicentre was the inch or two of skin just below her ear. He only had to nuzzle into that nook to be filled with her.

Now it was the mouth that drew him. Beth's lips were full and thick; he could feel their plumpness as he kissed them. Without warning, they parted, just enough to let her tongue brush against his lips, then meet his own. Quietly, so quietly no one but him could hear it, she let out a tiny moan, a sound of pleasure that roused him instantly. He hardened. She could feel it, prompting another moan, this time of surprise and approval.

‘You are pleased to see me.’ Now she was sitting opposite him, shrugging off her coat with a suggestive wriggle. She saw him looking. ‘You checking me out?’

‘You could say that.’

She grinned. ‘What are we going to eat? I thought cheesecake and hot chocolate, although maybe tea would be good…’

Will was still staring at his wife, watching the way her top stretched across her breasts. He was wondering if they should abandon the Carnegie and go straight back to their big warm bed.

‘What?’ she said, feigning indignation. ‘Concentrate!’

His pastrami sandwich, piled high and deluged with mustard, arrived just as he was telling her about the treatment he had got from the old-timers at the murder scene. ‘So Carl whatsisname—’

‘The TV guy?’

‘Yeah, he's giving the policewoman all this Raymond Chandler, veteran gumshoe stuff—’

‘Give me a break here, you know I got a lawyer friend downtown.’

‘Exactly. And I'm Mr Novice from the effete New York Times—’

‘Not so effete from what I saw a few minutes ago.’ She raised her eyebrows.

‘Can I get to the end?’

‘Sorry.’ She got back to her cheesecake, not picking at it like most of the women Will would see in New York, but downing it in big, hearty chunks.

‘Anyway, it was pretty obvious he was going to get the inside track and I wasn't. So I was thinking. Maybe I should start developing some serious police contacts.’

‘What, drinking with Lieutenant O'Rourke until you fall under the table? Somehow I don't see it. Besides, you're not going to be on this beat long. When Carl whateverhisnameis is still doing traffic snarl-ups in Staten Island, you're going to be covering the, I don't know, the White House or Paris or something really important.’

Will smiled. ‘Your faith in me is touching.’

‘I'm not kidding, Will. I know it looks like I am because I have a face full of cake. But I mean it. I believe in you.’ Will took her hand. ‘You know what song I heard today, at work? It's weird because you never hear songs like that on the radio, but it was so beautiful.’

‘What was it?’

‘It's a John Lennon song, I can't remember the title. But he's going through all the things that people believe in, and he says, “I don't believe in Jesus, I don't believe in Bible, I don't believe in Buddha”, and all these other things, you know, Hitler and Elvis and whatever, and then he says, “I don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in me, Yoko and me.” And it made me stop, right in the waiting area at the hospital. Because – you're going to think this is so sappy – but I think it was because that's what I believe in.’

‘In Yoko Ono?’

‘No, Will. Not Yoko Ono. I believe in us, in you and me. That's what I believe in.’

Will's instinct was to deflate moments like this. He was too English for such overt statements of feeling. He had so little experience of expressed love, he hardly knew what to do with it when it was handed to him. But now, in this moment, he resisted the urge to crack a joke or change the subject.

‘I love you quite a lot, you know.’

‘I know.’ They paused, listening to the sound of Beth scraping her cheesecake fork against the plate.

‘Did something happen at work today to get you—’

‘You know that kid I've been treating?’

‘Child X?’ Will was teasing. Beth stuck diligently to the rules on doctor-patient confidentiality and only rarely, and in the most coded terms, discussed her cases outside the hospital. He understood that, of course, respected it even. But it made it tricky to be as supportive of Beth as she was of him, to back her career with equal energy. When the office politics at the hospital had turned nasty, he had become familiar with all the key personalities, offering advice on which colleagues were to be cultivated as allies, which were to be avoided. In their first months together, he had imagined long evenings spent talking over tough cases, Beth seeking his advice on an enigmatic ‘client’ who refused to open up or a dream that refused to be interpreted. He saw himself massaging his wife's shoulders, modestly coming up with the breakthrough idea which finally persuaded a silent child to speak.

But Beth was not quite like that. For one thing, she seemed to need it less than Will. For him, an event had not happened until he had talked about it with Beth. She appeared able to motor on all by herself, drawing on her own tank.

‘Yes, OK. Child X. You know why I'm seeing him, don't you? He's accused of – actually, he's very definitely guilty of – a series of arson attacks. On his school. On his neighbour's house. He burned down an adventure playground.

‘I've been talking to him for months now and I don't think he's shown a hint of remorse. Not even a flicker. I've had to go right down to basics, trying to get him to recognize even the very idea of right and wrong. Then you know what he does today?’

Beth was looking away now, towards a table where two waiters were having their own late-shift supper. 'Remember Marie, the receptionist? She lost her husband last month; she's been distraught, we've all been talking about it. Somehow this kid – Child X – must have picked something up, because guess what he does today? He comes in with a flower and hands it to Marie. A gorgeous, long-stemmed pink rose. He can't have just pulled it off some bush; he must have bought it. Even if he did just take it, it doesn't matter. He hands Marie this rose and says, “This is for you, to remember your husband”.

‘Well, Marie is just overwhelmed. She takes the rose and croaks a thank you and then has to just run to the bathroom, to cry her eyes out. And everyone who sees this thing, the nurses, the staff, they're all just tearing up. I come out and find the whole team kind of, having this moment. And there, in the middle of it, is this little boy – and suddenly that's what he looks like, a little boy – who doesn't quite know what he's done. And that's what convinces me it's real. He doesn't look pleased with himself, like someone who calculated that “Hey, this will be a way to get some extra credit”. He just looks a little bewildered.

‘Until that moment, I had seen this boy as a hoodlum. I know, I know – I of all people am meant to get past “labels” and all that.’ She mimed the quote marks around ‘labels’, leaving no doubt that she was parodying the kind of people who made that gesture. ‘But, if I'm honest, I had seen him as a nasty little punk. I didn't like him at all. And then he does this little thing which is just so good. You know what I mean? Just a simple, good act.’

She fell quiet. Will did not want to say anything, just in case there was more. Eventually Beth broke the silence. ‘I don't know,’ she said, in an ‘anyway’ voice, as if to signal that the episode was over.

They talked some more, their conversation noodling between his day and hers. He leaned over several times to kiss her, on each occasion hoping for a repeat of the open-mouthed treat he'd had before. She was denying him. As she stretched forward, he could see the bottom of her back and just a hint of her underwear, visible in the gap between her skin and her jeans. He loved seeing Beth naked, but the sight of her in her underwear always drove him wild.

‘Check please!’ he said, eager to get her home. As they walked out, he slid his hand under her T-shirt, over the smooth skin of her back and headed south into her trousers. She was not stopping him. He did not know that he would replay that sensation in his hands and in his head a thousand times before the week was out.

CHAPTER FOUR

Brooklyn, Saturday, 8am

This is Weekend Edition. The headlines this morning. There could be help for homeowners after the Fed's quarter point rise in interest rates; the governor of Florida declares parts of the panhandle a disaster area thanks to Tropical Storm Alfred; and scandal, British style. First, this news …

It was eight am and Will was barely conscious. They had not fallen asleep till well past three. Eyes still shut, he now stretched an arm to where his wife should be. As he expected, no Beth. She was already off: one Saturday in four she held a weekend clinic and this was that Saturday. The woman's stamina astounded him. And, he knew, the children and their parents would have no idea the psychiatrist treating them was operating on a quarter cylinder. When she was with them, she was at full strength.

Will hauled himself out of bed and headed for the breakfast table. He did not want to eat; he wanted to see the paper. Beth had left a note – Well done, honey. Big day today, let's have a good night tonight – and also the Metro section folded open at the right page. B3. Could be worse, thought Will. ‘Brownsville slaying linked to prostitution’, ran the headline over less than a dozen paragraphs. And, in between, was his by-line. He had had to make a decision when he first got into journalism; in fact, he had made it back at Oxford, writing for Cherwell, the student paper. Should he be William Monroe Jr or plain Will Monroe? Pride told him he should be his own man, and that meant having his own name: Will Monroe.

He glanced at the front page of the Metro section and then the main paper to see who among his new colleagues – and therefore rivals – was prospering. He clocked the names and made for the shower.

An idea began to take shape in Will's head, one that grew and became more solid as he got dressed and headed out, past the young couples pushing three-wheeler strollers or taking their time over a café breakfast on Court Street. Cobble Hill was packed with people like him and Beth: twenty-and thirtysomething professionals, transforming what was once a down-at-heel Brooklyn neighbourhood into a little patch of yuppie heaven. As Will made for the Bergen Street subway station, he felt conscious that he was walking faster than everyone else. This was a working weekend for him, too.

Once at the office, he wasted no time and went straight to Harden, who was turning the pages of the New York Post with a speed that conveyed derision.

‘Glenn, how about “Anatomy of a Killing: the real life of a crime statistic”?’

‘I'm listening.’

‘You know, “Howard Macrae might seem like just another brief on the inside pages, another New York murder victim. But what was he like? What had his life been about? Why was he killed?”’

Harden stopped flicking through the Post and looked up. ‘Will, I'm a suburban guy in South Orange whose biggest worry is getting my two daughters to school in the morning.’ This was not hypothetical; this was true. ‘Why do I care about some dead pimp in Brownsville?’

‘You're right. He's just some name on a police list. But don't you think our readers want to know what really happens when someone gets murdered in this city?’

He could see Harden was undecided. He was short on reporters: it was the Jewish New Year, which meant the Times newsroom was badly depleted, even by weekend standards. The paper had a large Jewish staff and now most of them were off work to mark the religious holiday. But neither did he want to admit that he had become so tired, even murder no longer interested him.

‘Tell you what. Make a few calls, go down there. See what you get. If it makes something, we can talk about it.’

Will asked the cab driver to hang around. He needed to be mobile for the next few hours and that meant having a car on stand-by. If he was honest, it also made him feel safer to have the reassuring bulk of a car close at hand. On these streets, he did not want to be completely alone.

Within minutes he was wondering if it had been worth the trip. Officer Federico Penelas, the first policeman on the scene, was a reluctant interviewee, offering only one-word answers.

‘Was there a commotion when you got down here?’

‘Nah-uh.’

‘Who was here?’

‘Just one or two folks. The lady who made the call.’

‘Did you talk to her at all?’

‘Just took down the details of what she'd seen, when she'd seen it. Thanked her for calling the New York Police Department.’ The consultants' script again.

‘And is it your job to lay that blanket on the victim?’

For the first time, Penelas smiled. The expression was one of mockery rather than warmth. You know nothing. ‘That wasn't a police blanket. Police use zip-up body bags. That blanket was already on him when I got here.’

‘Who laid it out?’

‘Dunno. Reckon it was whoever found the dead guy. Mark of respect or something. Same way they closed the victim's eyes. People do that: they've seen it in the movies.’

Penelas refused to identify the woman who had discovered the corpse, but in a follow-up phone call the DCPI was more forthcoming – on background, of course. At last Will had a name: now he could get stuck in.

He had to walk through the projects to find her. A six-foot-two Upper East Side guy in chinos and blue linen jacket with an English accent, he felt ridiculous and intensely white as he moved through this poor, black neighbourhood. The buildings were not entirely derelict but they were in bad shape. Graffiti, stairwells that smelled of piss, and plenty of broken windows. He would have to buttonhole whoever was out of doors and hope they would talk.

He made an instant rule: stick to the women. He knew this was a cowardly impulse but, he assured himself, that was nothing to be ashamed of. He had once read some garlanded foreign correspondent saying the best war reporters were the cowards: the brave ones were reckless and ended up dead. This was not exactly the Middle East, but a kind of war – whether over drugs or gangs or race – raged on these streets all the same.

The first woman he spoke to was blank, so was the next. The third had heard the name but could not place where. She recommended someone else until one neighbour was calling out to another and eventually Will was facing the woman who had found Howard Macrae.

African-American and in her mid-fifties, her name was Rosa. Will guessed she was a churchgoer, one of those black women who stop communities like this one from going under. She agreed to walk with him to the scene of the crime.

‘Well, I had been at the store, picking up some bread and a soda, I think, when I noticed what I thought was a big lump on the sidewalk. I remember I was annoyed: I thought someone had dumped some furniture on the street again. But as I got closer, I realized this was not a sofa. Uh-uh. It was low down and kind of bumpy.’

‘You realized it was a body?’

‘Only when I was right up close. Until then, it just looked like, you know … a shape.’

‘It was dark.’

‘Yeah, pretty dark and pretty late. Anyway, when I was standing over it, I thought. That ain't a sofa, that ain't a chair. That's a body under that blanket.’

‘Sorry, I'm asking you to go back to what you saw right at the beginning. Before the blanket was laid on the corpse.’

‘That is what I'm describing. What I saw was a dark blanket with the shape of a dead man underneath.’

‘The blanket was already there? So you were not the first to find him.’ Damn.

‘No, I was the first to find him. I was the one who called the police. Nobody else did. It was the first they'd heard of it.’

‘But the body was already covered?’

‘That's right.’

‘The police seem to think it was you who laid down the blanket, Rosa.’

‘Well, they're wrong. Where would I get a blanket from in the middle of the night? Or do you think black folks carry blankets around with them just in case? I know things are pretty bad round here, but they're not that bad.’ None of this was said with bitterness.

‘Right.’ Will paused, uncertain where to go next. ‘So who did leave that blanket on him?’

‘I'm telling you the same thing I told that police officer. That's the way I found him. Nice blanket, too. Kind of soft. Maybe cashmere. Something classy, anyway.’

‘Sorry to go back to this, but is there any chance at all you were not the first there?’

‘I can't see how. I'm sure the police told you. When I lifted that blanket, I saw a body that was still warm. Wasn't even a body at that time. It was still a man. You know what I'm saying? He was still warm. Like it just happened. The blood was still coming out. Kind of burbling, like water leaking from a pipe. Terrible, just terrible. And you know the strangest thing? His eyes were closed, as if someone had shut them.’

‘Don't tell me that wasn't you.’

‘It wasn't me. Never said it was.’

‘Who do you think did that – closed his eyes, I mean?’

‘You'll probably think I'm crazy, what with the way they knifed that poor man to death, but it was kinda like … No, you'll think I'm crazy.’

‘Please go on. I don't I think you're crazy at all. Go on.’ Will was stooping now, an instinctive gesture. Being tall was usually a plus: he could intimidate. But right now he did not want to tower over this woman. He wanted to make her feel comfortable. He bent his shoulders lower, so that he could meet her eyes without forcing her to look up. ‘Go on.’

‘I know that man was murdered in a horrible way. But his body looked as if it had been somehow, you know, laid to rest.’

Will said nothing, just sucked the top of his pen.

‘You see, I told you. You think I'm crazy. Maybe I am!’

Will thanked the woman and carried on through the projects. He only had to walk a few blocks to get into real sleaze country. The boarded-up tenements he knew served as crack-houses; the shifty looks of young men palming off brown parcels to each other while looking the other way. These were the people to ask about Howard Macrae.

Will had ditched his jacket by now – a necessary move on this bright September day – but he was still encountering major resistance. His face was too white, his accent too different. Most assumed he was a plain-clothes cop, drugs squad probably. For those who spotted it, the car following a few blocks behind hardly helped. Most people started walking the moment they saw his notebook.

The first crack in the ice came the way it always does – from just one person.

Will found a man who had known Macrae. He seemed vaguely shifty but, above all, bored, with nothing better to do than to while away a few daytime hours talking to a reporter. He rambled on and on, detailing long gone and wholly irrelevant local disputes and controversies as if they would be of burning interest to The New York Times. ‘You want to put that in your paper, my friend!’ he would say over and over, with a bronchial, smoker's laugh. Heh-heh-heh. Humouring folks like this was, Will concluded, an occupational hazard.

‘So what about this Howard Macrae?’ said Will, when his new acquaintance finally took a breath during an analysis of the flawed stop light system on Fulton Street.

It turned out he did not know Macrae that well, but he knew others who did. He offered to hook Will up with them, introducing the reporter each time with the priceless character reference: ‘He's OK.’

Soon Will was forming a picture. Macrae was a certifiable, card-carrying low-life. No doubt about it. He ran a brothel; had done for years. The sleaze community seemed to have a high regard for him: apparently he was good at being a pimp. He ran a functioning whorehouse, kept it looking all right – even took the girls' clothes to the Laundromat. Will got inside, to see the rooms for himself. The best he could say for it was that it was not nearly as disgusting as he had imagined. It looked a bit like a clinic in a poor neighbourhood. There were no needles on the floor. He even noticed a water-cooler.

The whores told him the same story. ‘Sir, I can't tell you anymo' than what the lady already told you: he sold ass. Tha's what he did. He collected the money, gave some to us, and kept the rest for hisself.’

Howard seemed to have been a contented sort of pimp. The brothel was his domain and he was obviously a genial host. At night, Will discovered, he would put on loud music and dance.

It was late in the evening before Will found what he had been looking for all day: someone genuinely mourning the death of Howard Macrae. Will had contacted the undertakers, who were waiting for the body to be transferred to them from the police morgue. He got the cab to drive over to the funeral home, a rundown place that was depressing even by the standards of the rest of the neighbourhood. Will wondered how many of these ‘garden-variety gangland killings’ they had to clear up.

Only the receptionist seemed to be around, a young black woman with the longest, most outlandishly decorated nails Will had ever seen. They were the only spot of brightness in the entire place.

He asked if anyone had been in touch to organize a funeral for Howard Macrae. Any relatives? No, none. The girl on the desk had the impression Macrae had no family. Will tutted: he needed more personal detail, more colour, if this piece was to work out.

Will pushed harder. Had no one been in touch about Mr Macrae, no one at all? ‘Oh, now that you mention it,’ said Nail Girl. At last, thought Will. ‘There was one woman, called in around lunchtime. Asked when we were going to have the funeral. Wanted to pay her respects.’

She found a Post-it with the woman's details. Will dialled the number there and then. When a woman answered, he said he was calling from the funeral home: he wanted to talk about Howard Macrae. ‘Come right over,’ she said.

In the cab, Will instantly reached for his BlackBerry, tapping out a quick email to Beth. There was a rhythm to all this electronic communication: BlackBerry by day, when he knew his wife was near a computer terminal, text message by night when she was not.

Quick psychology lesson needed. Need to get interview with woman who knew the victim. Have led her to believe I work for funeral company. Will now have to reveal truth: how do I do that without getting her so angry she throws me out of her house? Need yr considered opinion asap, am just few mins away.

xx W

He waited; but there was no reply.

It was twilight when Will tapped on the screen door. A woman poked her head out of the upstairs window. Early forties, Will guessed; black, attractive. Her hair was straightened, with an auburn hue. ‘Coming right down.’

She introduced herself as Letitia. She did not want to give her last name.

‘Look, my name is Will Monroe and I apologize.’ He began babbling that this was his first big story, that he had only lied because he was desperate not to let his bosses down, when he noticed that she was neither doing nor saying anything. She was not throwing him out, just listening to him with a faintly puzzled expression. His voice petering out now, he gave her a pre-cooked line: ‘Look, Letitia. This may be the only way the truth about Howard Macrae will ever come out.’ But he could see it was not needed. On the contrary, Letitia seemed rather glad to have the chance to talk.

She gestured him away from the front door towards a living room cluttered with children's toys.

‘Were you related to Howard?’ he began.

‘No,’ Letitia smiled. ‘No, I only met that man once.’ That man. Here we go, thought Will. Now we're going to get the real dirt on this Macrae. ‘But once was enough.’

Will felt a surge of excitement. Maybe Letitia knows a secret about Macrae dark enough to explain his murder. I'm ahead of the police.

‘When was this?’

‘Nearly ten years ago. My husband – he'll be back soon – was in jail.’ She saw Will's face. ‘No! He hadn't done anything. He was innocent. But we couldn't pay the bail to get him out. He was in that prison cell night after night. I couldn't bear it. I grew desperate.’ She looked up at Will, her eyes hoping that he understood the rest. That she would not have to spell it out.

‘Everyone knows there's only two ways to make quick money round here. You sell drugs or …’

Now Will got it. ‘Or you sell … or you go see Howard.’

‘Right. I hated myself for even thinking about it. I grew up singing choir in the AME church, Mr Monroe.’

‘Will. I understand.’

‘I was raised right. But I had to get my husband out of that jail. So I went to … Howard's place.’

Without looking down, Will scribbled in his notebook. Eyes glittering.

‘I was going to sell the one thing I owned.’ Now she was tearing up. ‘I couldn't even go in, I was sort of hiding in the shadows, hesitating. Howard Macrae spotted me there. I think he had a broom in his hand, sweeping. He asked me what I wanted. Kind of, “Can I help you?” I told him what I wanted. I told him why I needed the money. I didn't want him to think, you know. And then this man, who I never met before, did the oddest thing.’

Will leaned forward.

‘Right there and then, he marched off to what I guessed was his own room in that … place. He unlocked it and, straight away, he starts stripping the bed.’

‘Stripping the bed?’

‘Uh-huh. I was scared at first, I didn't know what he was about to do to me. He put these blankets in a pile, and then he gets to work on his bedside table. Starts packing it up. Starts unplugging his CD player, takes off his watch. It all goes in this big pile. And then he begins moving all this stuff, shooing me out of the way. Now this bed is one of those really good ones, big with a deep, strong mattress, like a top-of-the-range bed. So it's heavy but he's dragging it and lugging it, till it's outside. And then he opens up his truck, a real beat-up old thing, and he loads up the bed – pillows and all – into the back. Then all the rest of it. I swear, I had no idea what in God's name the man was doing. Then he winds down the window and tells me to meet him just around the block, on the corner of Fulton Street. ‘See you there in five,’ he says.

‘Well, now I'm mystified. So I walk round the block, just like the man said. And I see his truck, parked outside a pawn shop. And there's Howard Macrae pointing at all the stuff, and men are coming out the shop and unloading it, and the boss is handing Macrae cash. And next thing I know, Macrae is giving the money to me.’

‘To you?’

‘Uh-huh. You got it. To me. It was the strangest thing. I wondered why he didn't just give me some cash, if that's what he wanted to do, but no, he insists on making this big sacrifice, like he's selling all his worldly goods or something. And I'll never forgot what he said to me as he did it. “Here's some money. Now go bail your husband – and don't become a whore.” And I listened to what the man said. I bailed my husband and I never did sell my body, not ever. Thanks to that man.’

There was a sound at the front door. Will looked around. He could hear several voices drifting through: three or four young children and a man.

‘Hiya honey.’

‘Will, this is my husband, Martin. And these are my girls, Davinia and Brandi and this is my boy – Howard.’ Letitia gave Will a firm stare, silencing him. ‘Martin, this man is from the newspaper. I'm just seeing him out.’

As they reached the front door, Will whispered. ‘Your husband doesn't know?’

‘No, and I don't plan on telling him now. No man should know such a thing about his wife.’

Will was about to say he believed the opposite, that most men would be honoured to know their wives were prepared to make such an extreme sacrifice, but he thought better of it.

‘And yet his son is called Howard.’

‘I told him it was because I always liked the name. But I know the real reason, and that's good enough. Howard is a name my boy can wear with pride. I'm telling you Mr Monroe: the man they killed last night may have sinned every day of his God-given life – but he was the most righteous man I have ever known.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Saturday, 9.50pm, Brooklyn That night in the kitchen where they did all their talking, Will followed traditional custom. Beth was cooking pasta, he was tagging along behind her, washing each pan and spoon as she finished with them. This was smart strategy, he reckoned: forward planning, prevent the washing-up mountain after dinner. Will was talking Beth through his day.

‘The guy's a scumbag pimp, but when he sees this woman in distress, he sells his most personal possessions to help her. A woman he doesn't even know. Isn't that incredible?’

Beth was stirring, saying nothing.

‘I'm not sure what Glenn will make of it, but this woman, Letitia, felt Macrae had saved her life. That he had saved her. That's something isn't it? I mean, that will make a piece.’

Beth seemed faraway. Will took that as a sign of success, as if his point had struck home, stunning his wife into contemplative silence.

‘Anyway, enough about that. How was your day?’

Beth looked up, her stirring hand stilled. She held him in a long, cold gaze.

‘Oh Christ, I just realized—’ Beth's note from this morning. Big day today. He had read it and forgotten it. Instantly.

Beth said nothing, just waited for him to explain himself.

‘I went straight to work and then I got stuck into this story. I must have had my phone on silent while I was interviewing that woman. Did you call?’

‘“I just realized.” How can you say that? You can't “just realize” this, Will. That's not how it works. Not this.’

She was speaking with that voice of iron calm which almost scared Will. It was reserved for when Beth was truly furious. He imagined she had acquired this kind of steel as part of her psychological training: never lose your cool. He admired it in the abstract, but could not bear to be on the receiving end.

‘I've been thinking about nothing else for weeks and you “just realized”. You completely forgot!’ Now the volume was rising. ‘You had all day—’

‘I was working—’

‘You're always working or thinking about work. You don't even remember what should be the most important thing in our lives, and I can't eat or sleep or shower or do anything without thinking about it.’ Her eyes were reddening.

‘Tell me what they said.’

‘You don't get off that easy, Will. If you wanted to know what they said, you should have come to the hospital with me. You should have been there with me.’

Each of those last four words were heavy as anchors. Of course he should. How could he have forgotten? It was true what she said: he had thought about nothing but this story from the moment he woke up.

He knew he needed to break out of this procedural stage of the conversation – why had he missed the appointment? – and move fast onto the substance: what had the doctors said? But how to make the shift? There was only one person he knew who would instantly understand how to pull off such a conversational manoeuvre, what psychological trick to play. That person was Beth.

‘Babe, I am completely in the wrong. I can't believe I missed that appointment. And I don't deserve to know what happened. But I really want to. We will talk about this whole other thing – me obsessing about work – I promise. But, right now, I think you should just tell me what happened.’

She was sitting now, still holding the wooden spoon. In a barely-audible whisper, as if the air had been sucked out of her, she finally spoke. ‘They didn't examine me; it was just a “chat”. And they said we should keep trying for another three months before they'll consider treatment.’ She sniffed deeply, reaching for a tissue. ‘They said we are both perfectly healthy, we should give it more time before “taking the next step”.’

‘That's good news, isn't it?’ said Will, half-aware that this was a tactical error – the premature move into cheer-up mode before the silent, listening phase was complete. Rationally, he knew that what Beth needed most was to talk, to get it all out. Not to have to argue, explain or defend anything. He knew that in his head, but his mouth had had different ideas, instantly wanting to make things better.

‘No, as it happens, I don't think it is good news, Will. I don't think it's good news at all. It just makes it more fucking mysterious. If my eggs are so perfect and your sperm is so fucking tip-top, why the hell CAN'T WE HAVE A BABY?’

She threw the wooden spoon at the wall, where it splattered tomato sauce into a Jackson Pollock pattern, turned and fled for the bedroom. Will chased her, but she slammed the door. He could hear her crying.

How could he have screwed up so badly? He had promised they would go to the clinic together, that he would take an hour or two out during the afternoon. Instead he had gone to work and clean forgot about everything else for the rest of the day. He had even sent a BlackBerry message – about work – to Beth at the time of the appointment. He knew what his psychologist wife thought. That he was throwing himself into his career to avoid dealing with the real issue: four years of marriage, two years of unprotected sex and one year of serious ‘trying’ – and still Beth was not pregnant. Will knew it looked like that, but she was wrong. This was not some new phase. He had always been ambitious. Even at college, he had worked hard: when he was not editing Cherwell he was trying to hawk tales of university life to Fleet Street. That was what he was like.

The phone rang.

‘Will?’

‘Oh, hi, Dad.’

‘I was just calling to see if you enjoyed the concert.’

‘Yes, of course. I loved it,’ Will said, running his fingers through his hair and facing the floor. How could he have been so stupid? ‘I should have called. Amazing choir.’

‘You sound subdued.’

‘No, just tired. It's been a long day. Remember that thing I was called out on after the concert, that killing? I had this idea to take what everyone thinks is a bog-standard murder and see what really happened. “Portrait of a crime statistic”, the life behind the death, that kind of thing.’

Beth's presence behind the slammed door of their bedroom was burning up the apartment. Surely he should be going over there, talking through the door, coaxing her back out. Or at least coaxing his way in.

‘That's good thinking. What did you find out?’ ‘That he was a low-life pimp sleazeball.’ ‘Well, I guess that's no great surprise. Not in that place. Still, I can't wait to read your IMF piece: much more you, I suspect. Listen, Will, Linda's gesturing. It's a dinner for Habitat – “you know who” is here – and we're expected to mingle. Speak soon.’

Even on his nights off, thought Will, his father and his ‘partner’ – a word Will could not bring himself to utter except in quotation marks – were doing something morally worthwhile. Habitat for Humanity was one of his father's favourite charities. ‘I like the idea of a cause that asks you to give your time and your labour, not just your money,’ Monroe Sr had said, more than once. ‘They ask you to open your heart, not just your pocketbook.’ Hanging in the judge's chambers was a photograph of himself and the former president – ‘you know who’ – each midway up a ladder, both clad in lumberjack shirts, the ex-president holding a hammer. They were taking part in one of Habitat's trademark events: building a house for the homeless in a single day. In Alabama or somewhere.

He wondered about all this great do-gooding fervour of his father's. In fact, he was suspicious of it. The most cynical reading was that it was merely a career move, designed to burnish William Monroe Sr's image as a man of fine character, eminently suited to a place on America's highest bench. More specifically, Will wondered if his father was trying to improve his chances with the evangelical Christian constituency that were such key players in the nomination of judges to the Supreme Court. Some of his father's rivals were committed, vocal Christians. A secular liberal like William Monroe Sr could not match that, but if he could smooth out some of his hard, godless edges, it could only help. That, at least, was his son's guess.

Will tiptoed over to the bedroom, creaking the door open just a crack. Beth was fast asleep. He closed the door; recovered what was left of the pasta and ate it from the saucepan. He felt as if a high wall had just appeared in their apartment – and he and his wife were on opposite sides of it.

He reached for the remote and jabbed on his default channel: CNN.

‘International news now, and more trouble in London for Britain's finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gavin Curtis, today under fire from the Church. The Bishop of Birmingham took to Britain's House of Lords to step up the pressure.’

Will sat up to take a close look. Curtis looked harried and much older than Will had remembered him. He had come to Oxford when Will was a student. Curtis was then in opposition, shadowing the environment department. He had come up to act as lead speaker in an Oxford Union debate: ‘This House believes the end of the world is nigh.’ Will was then the news editor on Cherwell – and he had given himself the plum assignment of interviewing the visiting politician.

He had not thought about it in years, but at the time Curtis had left quite a mark. He had taken Will seriously, treating him as a real journalist when Will could not have been much more than nineteen. The funny thing was Curtis had not seemed like a politician at all, more like a teacher. He had constantly peppered their conversation with references to books and films, wondering if Will had read some obscure Dutch theologian or seen a new and controversial Polish movie. Will had left their conversation feeling inadequate but also convinced Curtis was destined for oblivion: he seemed too intellectual for the blood sport of high politics. As his former interviewee had risen through the Cabinet, Will became embarrassed by his own lack of political foresight.

CNN was now showing a clip of a white-haired cleric in a grey suit with just a slice of purple showing underneath. The bishop's face, flushed with wrath, seemed to be trying to match the colour of his shirt. CNN identified him as the leader of the British equivalent of America's Church of the Reborn Jesus, a fiercely moral wing of Christian evangelism. ‘This is a sinful man!’ he was saying of the Chancellor, to the murmured rhubarb of agreement and disagreement in the chamber. ‘If it is true that he has been embezzling from the public purse, he must be cast out!’

Will turned it off and went to the computer. Beth would sleep till morning now. He thought about waking her up so they could talk some more. They had a rule: never go to bed on a fight. But she was so deeply asleep he would hardly score any points by disturbing her now. He had seen how she looked. She could wear a dozen different expressions in the course of the night: serene, brow furrowed, even ironic amusement. More than once, Will had been woken by the sound of his wife laughing in her sleep at some secret joke. But just now, even with her autumn-brown hair falling over most of her face, he spotted what he feared was a worry line in her forehead, as if she was concentrating hard. He imagined smoothing it away, with just a touch of his hand. Perhaps he should go back in and do just that. No, he thought. What if she woke up and their row reopened? Better to leave it be.

Might as well pull an all-nighter instead, write up the Macrae story and deliver it first thing. At least that would impress Harden. And it would be an excuse not to go into the bedroom.

At the keyboard, his mind kept wandering away from Letitia, Howard and the streets of Brownsville. He knew what Beth wanted and biology, or something, was standing in their way. He had been encouraged by the hospital's attitude: give it time. But Beth was not used to being a patient. She liked to sit in the other chair. And she wanted clarity: a diagnosis, a course of action.

Besides, he knew, getting pregnant was only part of the story. Beth had become irritated by his professional single-mindedness, his determination to make his mark. When they first met, she would say how much she liked his drive; she found it sexy. She admired his refusal to coast along, to trade on his father's prestige. He had made things difficult for himself – he could have gone back to America when he turned eighteen and used the family name to breeze into Yale – and she admired that. Now, though, she wanted the ambition to cool down. There were other priorities.

He finally crashed out just after four am. He dreamed he was on a boating lake, pushing a punt like some cheesy gondolier. Facing him, twirling a parasol, was a woman. It was probably Beth but he could not quite see. He tried squinting, determined to make out the face. But the sun was in his eyes.

CHAPTER SIX

Monday, 10.47am, Manhattan The good sinner: the story of a New York life – and death.

Will stared at it, not on B6 or B11 or even B3 but A1: the front page of The New York Times. He had stared at it on the subway into work, looked at it some more as he walked to the office and had spent most of the time at his desk pretending not to look at it.

He had arrived to a bombardment of congratulatory email, from colleagues sitting three feet away and old friends living in different continents, who had learned of his feat via the paper's online edition. He was receiving a plaudit by phone when he felt a surge move through his little desk-pod, a silent movement of energy like the magnetic force that passes through iron filings. It was Townsend McDougal, making a rare descent from Mount Olympus to walk among the troops. Suddenly backs were stiffened; rictus smiles adopted. Will noticed Amy Woodstein reflexively reaching round to the back of her head to plump up her hair. The veteran City Life columnist sought to tidy his desk with a single back-sweep of his arm, thereby despatching a couple of crumpled Marlboro packets into his pencil drawer.

The high command at The New York Times was still getting used to McDougal: appointed as executive editor only a few months earlier, he was an unlikely choice. His immediate predecessors had been drawn from that segment of New York society that had produced so many of the city's best known names and given it so much of its humour and language: liberal Jews. Previous New York Times editors looked and sounded like Woody Allen or Philip Roth.

Townsend McDougal was a rather different proposition. A New England aristocrat with Mayflower roots and Wasp manners, he wore a panama hat in summertime and tasselled loafers in winter. But that was not what had made Times veterans anxious when his appointment was announced. No, what made the editor and The New York Times an unlikely fit was the simple fact that Townsend McDougal was a born-again Christian.

He had not yet made Bible study classes compulsory, nor did he ask reporters to link hands in prayer before each night's print run. But it was a culture shock for a temple of secularism like The New York Times. Columnists and critics on the paper were used to a tone that was not quite mocking but certainly distant. Evangelical Christianity was something that existed out there, in flyover country – in the vast mid-west or the deep south between the coasts. None of them would ever say so explicitly, still less write it, but the undeclared assumption was that born-again faith was the preserve of the simple folk. ‘Trust in Jesus’ was for the women in polyester trousers watching Pat Robertson on the 700 Club, or for recovering alcoholics who needed to ‘turn around’ their lives and declare their salvation in a bumper sticker. It was not for Ivy League sophisticates like themselves.

Townsend McDougal unsettled every one of those presumptions. Now Times journalists had to check the default arithmetic that stated that secular equalled smart. From now on, religion would no longer be cast as a matter of poor taste, like big hair or TV dinners. It was to be treated with respect. The change, in articles from the fashion pages to the sports section, became apparent within weeks of McDougal's arrival. The new executive editor had not sent out a memo. He did not have to.

Now he was walking among the Metro staff, with his gaze aimed in only one direction.

‘Look, I better go,’ Will said into the phone in what he hoped was a low whisper. As Will replaced the receiver, McDougal began.

‘Welcome to the Holy of Holies, William. The front page of the greatest newspaper in the world.’ Will felt himself blush. It was not embarrassment at the compliment, nor even McDougal's klaxon of a voice, bellowing his praise all around the office in an accent that was so Brahmin as to be almost English, though that was embarrassing enough. It was the ‘William’ that did it. Will thought his father had reached an understanding with McDougal: that there was to be no public acknowledgement of the friendship between them. Will knew he would be resented as it was – the hotshot young journo on the fast track – without his colleagues assuming he was the beneficiary of that old-fashioned career-enhancing drug, nepotism.

Now it was out there; McDougal's decibels had seen to that. The internal emails would be flying: Guess who's on first-name terms with the boss? As it happened, Will had applied for this job the same way as everyone else: sending in a letter and turning up for an interview. But no one would believe that now. He could feel his neck becoming hot.

‘You've made a good start, William. Taking some unpromising raw material and turning it into something worthy of page one. I sometimes wish some of your more mature colleagues would show similar degrees of industry and verve.’

Will wondered if McDougal was deliberately setting out to make his life hell. Was this some kind of initiation rite practised by the Skull and Bones set at Yale, where he and his father had first become such pals? The editor might as well have painted a target on Will's back and handed crossbows to each of his colleagues.

‘Thank you.’

‘I shall be expecting more from you, William. And I shall be following this story with interest.’

With that, and a swish of his finely tailored grey suit, Townsend McDougal was gone. The collective posture of the reporters who had previously been sitting to attention now slumped. The City Life columnist opened up his top drawer, reached for his cigarettes and headed for the fire escape.

Will had an equally instant urge. Without thinking, he dialled Beth's number. After the second ring, he abandoned it. A call about a triumph at work would confirm everything she had said about him. No, he still had to do penance.

‘Now, William.’ It was Walton, his chair swivelled round to face the common space that linked them with Woodstein and Schwarz. He was looking upward, the lower half of his face covered with a supercilious smile. He looked like a malevolent schoolboy.

Despite being nearly fifty years old, there was something infantile about Terence Walton. He had the unnerving habit of playing hi-tech computer games while he worked, rattling the keys as he zapped various alien life forms to ‘proceed to the next level’. His fingers seemed to be in constant search of distraction; the moment he had finished one phone call, he would be onto the next. He was always fixing up extra-curricular activities, a radio appearance here, a well-paid lecture there. His work from Delhi had been highly praised and he was in fairly regular demand as an expert. His book, Terence Walton's India, was credited with introducing the American public to a country they barely knew.

Inside the building, Walton was held in slightly lower esteem. That much, Will had picked up. The seating arrangements alone confirmed it: a returned foreign correspondent placed alongside the Metro staff's newest recruit. It was hardly star treatment. Quite what Walton had done to deserve this slight Will did not yet know.

‘We were just discussing your front-page triumph. Good job. Of course, there will be doubters, sceptics, who wonder what greater light this tale shed, but I am not one of them. No, William, not me.’

‘Will. It's Will.’

‘The executive editor seems to think it's William. You might need to have a word with him. Anyway, my question is this: why, I wonder, should this little story be on the front page? What larger social phenomenon did it expose? I fear our new editor does not yet fully understand the sacred bottom left slot. It's not just for amusing or interesting vignettes. It should serve as a window onto a new world.’

‘I think it was doing that. It was correcting a stereotype about urban life in this city. This man seemed like a sleazeball but he was, you know, better than that.’

‘Yes, that's great. And well done! Tremendous job. But remember what they say about beginner's luck: very hard to pull off that trick twice. I doubt even you could find too many “tales of ordinary people”—’ he was putting on a cutesy, Pollyannaish voice ‘—that would interest The New York Times. At least not The New York Times I used to work for. Once counts as an achievement, William; twice would be a miracle.’

Will turned back to his computer, to his email inbox. Woodstein, Amy. In the subject field: Coffee?

Five minutes later Will was in the vast Times canteen, all but deserted at this morning hour. He paced up and down by the glass cases which housed Times merchandise: sweatshirts, baseball caps, toy models of the old Times delivery trucks. Amy materialized beside him, clutching a cup of herbal tea.

‘I just wanted to say sorry about all that just now. That's the downside of working here: lot of testosterone, if you know what I mean.’

‘It was fine—’

‘People are very competitive. And Terry Walton especially.’

‘I got that impression.’

‘Do you know the story with him?’

‘I know he used to be in Delhi and that he was forced to come back.’

‘They accused him of expenses fraud. They couldn't prove it, which is why he's still here. But there's certainly some trust issues.’

‘About money, you mean?’

‘Oh no, not just about money.’ She gave a bitter chuckle.

‘What else then?’

‘Well, look, you didn't hear this from me, OK? But my advice is to lock up your notebooks when Terry's around. And talk quietly when you're on the phone.’

‘I don't get it.’

‘Terry Walton steals stories. He's famous for it. When he was in the Middle East they called him The Thief of Baghdad.’

Will was smiling.

‘It's actually not that funny. There are journalists around the world who could talk all night about the crimes of Terence Walton. Will, I'm serious: lock away your notebooks, your documents, everything. He will read them.’

‘So that's why he writes like that.’

‘What?’

‘Walton has this very tiny handwriting, completely indecipherable. That's deliberate, isn't it? To make sure no one reads his notes.’

‘I'm just saying, be careful.’

When he arrived back in the newsroom he found Glenn Harden sticking a Post-it to his screen. ‘Come up and see me some time.’

‘Ah, here you are. I have a message from National. Go west young man.’

‘I'm sorry?’

‘To Seattle. Bates's wife is in labour and National need us to cover. Apparently they don't have any reporters of their own, so they've put out the begging bowl.’ Harden raised his voice. ‘I scraped the bottom of the barrel and offered them Walton, but he's come up with some lame-assed excuse and suggested you.’ Walton was on the phone, not listening. ‘Talk to Jennifer, she'll fix you a flight.’

‘Thank you,’ Will stammered, a smile beginning to break on his face. He knew this was a major break, a serious vote of confidence. Sure, it was only cover, only temporary. But Harden would not want Metro disgraced in the eyes of what he regarded as the Ivy League snobs over at National: he would want to show Metro's best face. Will gulped at the thought: that was him.

‘Oh and pack your galoshes.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tuesday, 10.21am, Washington State

And I have shown you, Jesus Christ is the light and the way. We have seen a miracle today …

Christian radio, along with country music, was the one staple you could always rely on: even the remotest backwater, where there were no other stations on the dial, would always be favoured with the word of the gospel, beamed through the air. The mountain passes of Washington State were no different.

He was getting closer to the flood scene, he could tell. The roads were becoming clogged and soon he began to see the flashing lights of emergency teams. Then, most reassuring of all, a fleet of white, liveried satellite trucks: local TV, confirmation that he had arrived at the site of the story.

He hooked up with a photographer who seemed to know what he was doing. For one thing, he had all the right equipment. Not just the regulation photographer jacket, with enough pockets to store the possessions of a nuclear family, but industrial-strength, thigh-high Wellington boots, waterproof trousers, polar ice-cap socks and gloves that looked as if they were custom-designed by NASA.

Will waded into the flood water after him, conscious of the chill creeping up his trouser leg. Before long they had hitched a ride on a police dinghy and were ferrying from submerged home to submerged home. He saw one woman winched to safety carrying the thing she valued most: her cat. Another man was standing, sobbing by his store front, watching a lifetime's investment wash away like leaves in a gutter.

A few hours of that and Will was back in the rental car, soaked and hunched over his keyboard. ‘The people of the Northwest are used to nature's temper – but her latest mood swing has them reeling,’ he began, before detailing the individual tales of woe. A couple of quotes from officialdom and a nice closing line about the fickleness of the climate, spoken by the man who had lost his stationery shop, and it was done.

Once back in the hotel room, he called Beth. She was already in bed. She talked about her day; he uncoiled the full story of his sodden journey into the flood lands. Both of them were too exhausted to restart the conversation they had never really finished.

He flicked on the local news: pictures of the Snohomish floods; Will picked out faces he recognized. His heart went out to the reporter doing the live-shot: that meant he was still there.

‘Next up, more on the murder of Pat Baxter. After these messages.’ Will turned back to his computer, only half listening to the words coming out of the TV.

The victim, fifty-five, found dead and alone in his cabin … police suspect a botched break-in … much damage, but nothing stolen … Baxter had been under surveillance for years … was briefly prime suspect in Unabomber case … no family, no relatives …

Will wheeled around. One word had leapt out. Will Googled ‘Unabomber’, getting an instant refresher course on a bizarre case which had foxed the FBI for two decades. Someone had sent mail bombs to corporate addresses on the East Coast, leaving behind a trail of obscure clues. Eventually, the culprit released a ‘manifesto’, a quasi-academic tract which seemed to be the work of a loner with a deep suspicion of technology. He also seemed to harbour a profound loathing of government. There was a piece on The Seattle Times website, just posted.

That sentiment put the Unabomber in tune with an entire 1990s movement, one in which the late Pat Baxter had been a reliable player. For this was the age of the gun-toting militias – Americans arming themselves against what they believed was an imminent onslaught by the US government. They eventually spread throughout America, but they began in the Pacific Northwest.

Will started working his way through The New York Times' online archive. He was struck by the first pieces that appeared: quite benign, depicting the militia men as ‘weekend soldiers’, overweight, overgrown schoolboys huffing and puffing their way through war games. But soon the tone changed.

The 1992 stand-off at Ruby Ridge, where a white supremacist lost his wife and child in a shootout with federal agents, like the siege at Waco, Texas a year later, revealed a world that most Americans – certainly those in media offices in New York – had never heard of. It saw Washington as the centre of a shadowy, new world order, embodied by the hated United Nations, which was determined to enslave free people everywhere. How else to explain the mysterious black helicopters spotted over rural America? What other meaning could there be to the numbers on the back of road signs; surely they were coded co-ordinates that would one day help the US army herd their fellow citizens into concentration camps?

The more Will read, the more fascinated he became. These civilian warriors believed the craziest theories – about freemasons, the Federal Reserve, coded messages printed on dollar bills, mysterious connections with European banks. Some of them were so sure the jackbooted bureaucrats of the federal government were out to get them that they had retreated into the hills, hiding in mountain cabins in remotest Idaho or wooded Montana. They had severed their links with the government in all its forms: they carried no drivers' licences, they refused to sign any official paper. Some moved, quite literally, off the grid – generating their own power, rather than living off the national electricity system.

And they were not playing games. On the second anniversary of the conflagration at Waco, the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City had shattered into dust, broken up by a mighty car bomb, killing 169 people. The culprits turned out to be not Islamist extremists but all-American boys whose heads had been filled with loathing of their own government.

The Seattle Times had an archive picture of Baxter at a rally in Montana in 1994. Except it looked more like a trade fair, down to the stands where exhibitors showed their wares. Baxter was pictured manning a stall that sold MREs – military-style, ‘meals ready to eat’. Apparently, he did a fairly brisk trade in dried foods, portable tents and the like: survivalist gear that would keep the freedom-loving American in food and shelter during the coming confrontation. In the remote world of the anti-government movement, Baxter was, if not a celebrity, then a fixture.

‘He was a great patriot and his death is a great blow to all those who love liberty,’ said Bob Hill, a self-styled commandant of the Montana militia.

Wednesday, 9am, Seattle Worryingly, the phone had not rung. When he finally awoke at nine – noon New York time – he saw that his cell phone was recording no missed calls at all. He reached for his BlackBerry; just some unimportant email. This was not right.

He reached for his laptop, pulling it down from the table and onto the bed, stretching its cable to breaking point. He checked the Times site: no sign of his story. He clicked down to the National section: links to stories out of Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, DC. He clicked and clicked. Here was something, datelined Seattle. But it was only an Associated Press wire story, written that morning. No sign of his own piece.

He phoned Beth. The hospital had to page her.

‘Hi babe, have you seen the paper today?’

‘Yes, I'm fine thank you. How kind of you to ask.’

‘Sorry, it's just – have you got it there?’

‘Hold on.’ A long pause. ‘OK, what am I looking for?’

‘Anything by me.’

‘I looked this morning. I couldn't see anything. I thought maybe you were going to do more work on it today.’

Will tutted silently: of course he wasn't going to work on it today. It was an on-the-day news story, about weather for Christ's sake: there was no more perishable commodity in journalism than a weather story.

‘You checked the National section inside? Each page?’

‘I did, Will. I'm sorry. Does this mean they didn't use it?’

That was exactly what it meant: his story had been spiked.

He braced himself for a call to the desk. If anyone but Jennifer, the news clerk, answered, he would hang up. He dialled.

‘National.’ Jennifer.

‘Hi, Jennifer, it's Will Monroe here, out in Seattle.’

‘Oh hi. Wanna speak to Susan?’

‘No! No. No need. You know that piece I filed yesterday, from the floods? Do you know what happened to it?’

Jennifer's voice suddenly dipped.

‘Kind of. I heard them talking about it. They said it was very nice and all, but that you hadn't talked about it with them first. If you had, they'd have told you they didn't need a story yesterday.’

‘But I did speak …’ Of course. He had only talked with Jennifer, told her his co-ordinates and his plans. He had assumed they wanted him to file. Had Harden not told him to pack his galoshes?

Now he realized: he was in Seattle just in case. He was keeping Bates's seat warm. All that soaking effort yesterday had been in vain. He felt embarrassed, like an over-eager intern. It was a stupid mistake.

‘Hold on, Susan wants a word.’

Three time zones away, Will readied himself for a roasting.

‘Hi, Will. Listen, I think the rule ought to be no filing unless we've talked about it first. OK? Maybe just find something that interests you, poke around a bit and see what it's worth. As for spot-news, keep your phone on and we'll call you if we need anything.’

Will ate a glum breakfast. He had screwed up and screwed up badly. By now Jennifer would have spread the word among the tiny circle of Times staffers in their twenties: they would be having a good laugh at his expense. The golden boy with a big-shot daddy had come down to earth.

There was only one solution. He would have to reel in a proper story. Somehow, from this far-off patch of snow, timber and potatoes, he would have to eke out a tale that would prove to New York that they had not made a mistake. He knew exactly where he would go.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wednesday, 3.13pm, Washington State The flight across Washington State had been brief, if bumpy, and the drive from Spokane gorgeous. The mountains were almost painfully beautiful, each cap dusted with a snow that looked like the purest powdered sugar. The trees were as straight as pencils, lines of them, so densely packed, the light almost seemed to strobe.

He was driving east, soon crossing the state line into Idaho – or at least the long, slender upper part of the state where the United States appears to be giving the finger to its northern neighbour, Canada. He drove past Coeur d'Alene, which sounded like a Swiss skiing village but which was most famous as the home of a racist movement known as the Aryan Nations. Will had seen the pictures in the cuttings: the men dressed in quasi-Nazi uniforms, the ‘whites only’ sign at the entrance. It would make a fascinating stop, but Will did not leave the road. He had somewhere to go.

His destination lay across the Idaho finger, in the western part of Montana. The roads were small, but Will did not get frustrated. He loved driving in America, the land of the endless road. He loved the billboards, promoting furniture stores thirty-five miles away; he loved the Dairy Queen rest-stops; the bumper stickers, advising him of the politics, religion and sexual preferences of his fellow drivers. Besides, he was planning his attack.

He had spoken already to Bob Hill, who was expecting him. Dutifully, Hill had conformed to the media caricature of a backwoods gun-nut. He asked to have Will's full name and social security number: ‘That way I can check you out. Make sure y'are who y'say y'are.’ Will tried to imagine what Hill's research would turn up on him. Brit? That would be OK. Americans usually liked Brits. Even if they hated limp-wristed, faggot Europeans, Brits were OK: they were kind of honorary Americans. Father a federal judge? That could be problematic; federal officials were despised. But judges were not always lumped in with the rest of the hated bureaucrats who represented ‘the government’. Some were even seen as the protectors of liberty, fending off the encroaching hand of the politicians. If Hill looked, though, he would find plenty in Judge Monroe's record that was bound to offend. Will hoped his host was not going to dig too deep.

What else? Parents divorced: that might rile the militia men. Mind you, this wasn't Alabama; the survivalists were not the same as the Christian right. There was some overlap, but they were not identical.

The daydream ended the moment he saw the signs. ‘Welcome to Noxon, Population: 230’. He looked down at the scribbled note perched on his lap: Hill's directions. He had to turn left at the gas station, down a road that would become a path. The SUV began rocking from side to side, over the ruts of mud, earning, or so Will liked to think, the extra charge he, and therefore the Times, had had to pay for it.

Soon he reached a gate. No sign. He was about to call Hill, as arranged, but he was halfway through dialling the number when a man became visible in his windshield. Early sixties, jeans, cowboy boots, old jacket; unsmiling. Will got out.

‘Bob Hill? Will Monroe.’

‘So you found us OK?’

Will went into a hymn of praise for Hill's directions, seeking to break the ice with some shameless flattery. His host grunted his approval as he trudged up a hard mud bank, heading in the direction of what seemed to be a thick patch of forest. As they got closer, Will began to make out a glow of light: a cabin, rather brilliantly camouflaged.

Hill looked to his waist, where a thick jailer's ring of keys was weighing down one of his belt loops. He let them in.

‘There's a chair there. Make yourself comfortable. I've got something to show you.’

Will used the few seconds he had to look around: a metal shield on the wall, bearing a vaguely military insignia. He squinted: MoM. Militia of Montana. There were a few framed photographs, including one of his host holding the head of a dead stag. On the metal shelves, a box of leaflets. Will peered inside: ‘The New World Order: Operation Takeover.’

‘Help yourself, take a copy.’ Will whisked around to find Bob Hill right behind him. Ex-marine, Vietnam; of course he would know how to creep up on a mere civilian like Will. ‘Wrote it myself. With the help of the late Mr Baxter.’

‘So he was … deeply involved?’

‘Like I told you on the phone, a fine patriot. Ready to do whatever it took to secure the liberty of this nation – even if his nation was too duped, its brains too addled by the propaganda of the Hollywood élite, to realize its liberty was under threat.’

‘Whatever it took?’

‘By whatever means necessary, Mr Monroe. You know who said that, don't you? Or was that before your time?’

‘It was before my time, but I do know. That was the slogan of the Black Panthers.’

‘Very good. And if that was good enough for them in their struggle against “white power” then it's good enough for us in our struggle to keep America free.’

‘You mean violence? Force?’

‘Mr Monroe, let's not get ahead of ourselves. You can ask me all the questions you like, I got plenty of time. But first, I have something to show you. See if this interests the great East Coast intellectuals of The New York Times.’

By now Hill was seated, behind a battered old metal desk, one that would not have looked out of place in the office section of an auto-repair shop. He handed Will, who was still standing, two sheets of paper, stapled together.

It took a few seconds for Will to work out what he was looking at. The notes on the autopsy performed on the body of Pat Baxter.

‘Missoula faxed it over this morning.’ Missoula, the nearest big town.

‘What does it say?’

‘Oh, don't let me spoil it for you. I think you should read it for yourself.’

Will felt a twinge of panic: this was the first autopsy report he had ever seen. It was almost impossible to decipher. Each heading was written in baffling medicalese; the handwriting beneath was just as inscrutable. Will found himself squinting through it.

Finally, a sentence he understood. ‘Severe internal haemorrhaging consistent with a gunshot wound; contusions of the skin and viscera. General remarks: needle mark on right thigh, suggestive of recent anaesthesia.’

‘He was shot,’ Will began, uncertain. ‘And he seems to have been anaesthetized before he was shot. Which does seem very odd, I grant you.’

‘Ah, but there's an explanation. Read on, Mr Monroe.’

Will's eyes scoured the document, looking for clues. Scribbled handwriting, sent through a fax, did not make it easy.

‘Second page,’ Hill offered. ‘General remarks.’

‘Damage to internal organs: liver, heart and kidney (single) severe. Other viscera, fragmented.’

‘What leaps out at you, Mr Monroe? I mean what word there friggin' jumps out and grabs you by the throat?’

Will wanted to say ‘viscera’, simply because the word was so undeniably powerful. But he knew that was not the answer Hill was looking for.

‘Single.’

‘My my, you Oxford boys are as bright as they say you are.’ Hill had not been kidding about his research. ‘That's right. Single. What do you think's going on here, Mr Monroe? What strange set of facts do we have here which Montana's finest have so far chosen to overlook? Well, I'll tell you.’

Will was relieved; the guessing game was making him sweat.

‘My friend, Pat Baxter, was anaesthetized before he was killed. And his body is found minus one kidney. Put two and two together and what do we get?’

Will muttered almost to himself, ‘Whoever did this removed his kidney.’

‘Not only that, but that's why they killed him. They wanted it to look like a robbery, a “break-in gone badly wrong” they're saying on the TV. But that's all a smokescreen. The only thing they wanted to steal was Pat Baxter's kidney.’

‘Why on earth would they want to do that?’

‘Oh, Mr Monroe. Don't make me do all the work here. Open your eyes! This is a federal government that has been doing experimentation with bio-chips!’ He could see that Will was not following. ‘Bar codes, implanted under the skin! So that they can monitor our movements. There's good evidence they're doing this with new-born babies now, right there in the maternity ward. An electronic tagging system, enabling the government to follow us from cradle to grave – quite literally.’

‘But why would they want Pat Baxter's kidney?’

‘The federal government moves in mysterious ways, Mr Monroe, its wonders to perform. Maybe they wanted to plant something inside Pat's body and the plan went wrong. Maybe the anaesthetic wore off and he began resisting. Or perhaps they put something inside his body years ago. And now they needed to get it back. Who knows? Maybe the feds just wanted to examine the DNA of a dissident, see if they could discover the gene that makes a real freedom-loving American and work to eradicate it.’

‘It does seem a little far-fetched.’

‘I grant you that. But we're talking about a military-industrial complex that has spent millions of dollars on mind-control techniques. You know, they had a secret Pentagon project to see if men could kill goats, simply by staring at 'em? I am not making this up. So it may be far-fetched. But I have come to learn that far-fetched and untrue are two very different things.’

Eventually Will steered Hill towards saner shores, seeking the biographical details of Baxter's life that he knew he would need. He got some, including a back story about the dead man's father: turned out Baxter Sr was a Second World War veteran who had lost both his hands. Unable to work, he had grown desperate; he could barely feed his family on his GI pension. Hill reckoned Baxter was a son who grew up resenting a government that could send a young man to kill and die for his country and then abandon him when he came home. When history repeated itself with Baxter's own generation in Vietnam, the bitterness was complete.

That would do nicely, serving as the easy-to-digest, psychological key needed for all good stories, in newspapers no less than at the movies. The piece was beginning to take shape.

He asked Hill to take him to Baxter's cabin. They used Will's car, its engine revving as it climbed further up the rutted path. Soon, Will could see colour – the yellow tape of a police cordon. ‘This is as far as we can go. It's a crime scene.’ Will reached into his pocket. As if reading his mind, Hill added, ‘Even your fancy New York press card won't get you in here. It's sealed.’

Will got out anyway, just to get a feel. It looked to him like a shed: a bare log cabin, the kind a well-off family might use to store firewood. The dimensions made it hard to believe a man had made this his home.

Will asked Hill to describe the interior as best he could. ‘That's easy,’ his guide said. ‘Almost nothing in there.’ A narrow, metal-frame bed; a chair; a stove; a shortwave radio.

‘Sounds like a cell.’

‘Think military accommodation; that'll get you closer to it. Pat Baxter lived like a soldier.’

‘Spartan, you mean?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Will asked who else he should talk to; any friends, any family. ‘The Militia of Montana was his only family,’ Hill shot back, a little too fast Will thought. ‘And even we hardly knew him. First time I ever saw that cabin was when the police had me round there. Wanted me to identify which clothes were his and which might have been left behind by the killers.’

‘Killers, plural?’

‘You don't think someone starts performing major surgery like that on their own, do you? They would have needed a team. Every surgeon needs a nurse.’

Will gave Bob Hill a ride back to his own cabin. He suspected that, though Hill's office might have been basic, his house was elsewhere – and not nearly so spare as Baxter's. The dead man was clearly an extreme kind of extremist.

They said their goodbyes, exchanged email addresses, and Will began the long drive on. Bob Hill was obviously a nut – DNA for dissidence indeed – but this business with the kidney was definitely strange. And why would Baxter's killers have given him an injection?

He pulled off Route 200 to fill up the car and his stomach. He found a diner and ordered a soda and a sandwich. A TV was on, tuned to Fox News.

‘… Dateline London now and more on the scandal threatening to topple the British government.’

There were pictures of a harried-looking Gavin Curtis emerging from a car to an explosion of flash bulbs and television lights.

‘According to one British newspaper today, Treasury records show clear discrepancies which can only have been authorized at the very top. While opposition politicians demand a full disclosure of accounts, Mr Curtis's spokesman says only that “there has been no wrongdoing” …’

Without thinking, Will was taking notes, not that he would ever need them: Curtis's chances of heading up the IMF were surely slim to nonexistent now. Watching the pictures of Curtis being shepherded past the baying press mob – a classic ‘goatfuck’ as the TV guys called them – Will's mind wandered onto trivial terrain. How come his car is so ordinary? This Gavin Curtis was meant to be the second most powerful man in Britain, yet he was driven around in what looked like a suburban sales rep's car. Did all British ministers live so modestly – or was this just a Gavin Curtis thing?

Will called the sheriff's office for Sanders County and was told that, for all the federal investigations and Unabomber inquiries, Baxter had no criminal record whatsoever. He had been under heavy surveillance, but it had yielded nothing: a couple of unexplained trips to Seattle, but no evidence of illegality. He had never been convicted of anything. Will flicked back through his notebook. He had scribbled down all he could of the autopsy report, including the name at the foot of the document. Dr Allan Russell, Medical Examiner, Forensic Science Division, State Crime Lab. Maybe this Dr Russell would be able to tell him what Mr Baxter's militia comrades had not. How had Pat Baxter died – and why?

CHAPTER NINE

Wednesday, 6.51pm, Missoula, Montana He had got there too late; the crime lab was shut for the day. No amount of cajoling could alter that fact; the staff had gone home. He would have to come back tomorrow. Which meant he would have to spend the night in Missoula.

He was briefly tempted by the C'mon Inn, if only because the joke was too good to resist. But Will realized, he could still tell people about it in New York: he did not actually have to stay there. So he played safe and checked into the Holiday Inn for a third night of room service, the remote control and a phone call with Beth.

‘You're making this too complicated,’ she said, audibly getting out of the bath.

‘But it is complicated. The guy has a kidney missing.’

‘You need to see a medical history. Maybe – what's his name again?’

‘Baxter.’

‘Maybe Baxter had a history of renal problems. Any reference to that or to dialysis or kidney trouble of any kind, and that will give you an explanation.’

Will was silent.

‘I'm ruining it, aren't I?’

‘Well, if we're talking news value, the choice between the death of an old man with a past history of renal failure and an attempted kidney-snatching is very close. But, yeah, you might be right: the kidney-snatching probably just edges it.’ Will was relieved they were back into banter mode. Several days now stood between them and the row; the wound seemed to be closing.

Thursday, 10.02am, Missoula, Montana The next morning, Will was ushered into Dr Russell's office. He saw it straight away, a certificate on the wall carrying an emblem Will recognized: an open book, inscribed with Latin words, topped off by two crowns.

‘Ah, you were at Oxford. Like me. When were you there?’

‘Several centuries before you, I suspect.’

‘That can't be true, Dr Russell.’

‘Call me Allan.’

At last, a lucky break. ‘You know, Allan, I'm not even sure I'll write about it for the paper, but this Pat Baxter business does intrigue me, I must confess,’ he began, as if settling down for an agreeable chat at high table. Will noticed his own English accent had become more pronounced.

‘Let me have a look here,’ Russell was saying, as he turned to his computer. ‘Ah yes, “Severe internal haemorrhaging consistent with a gunshot wound; contusions of the skin and viscera. General remarks: needle mark on right thigh, suggestive of recent anaesthesia”.’

‘Now, how are you defining “recent” there, Allan?’ Will hoped his tone was saying, Purely out of academic interest …

‘Probably contemporaneous.’

‘You see this, I have to say, is what intrigues me. Why would anyone anaesthetize someone before they kill them?’

‘Perhaps they were trying to reduce the victim's pain.’

‘Do murderers do that? It makes no sense. Unless—’

‘Unless the killer was a medical man. Trained to give a shot before any procedure. Force of habit perhaps.’

‘Or if he wanted to do something else before the murder. Perform some other operation.’

‘Like?’

‘Well, I understand that Baxter was found minus one kidney.’

Russell began to laugh, in a way Will struggled to find funny. ‘Oh, I see what you're driving at.’ Russell was grinning. ‘Tell me, Will. Have you ever seen a dead body?’

Instantly, Will remembered the corpse of Howard Macrae, under a blanket on that street in Brownsville. His first. ‘Yes. In my work it's hard to avoid.’

‘Well, then you won't mind seeing another one.’

It was not as cold as he expected. Will imagined a morgue to be a giant fridge, like those cold storage rooms at the back of large hotels. This was more like a hospital ward.

The orderlies were moving a gurney into a curtained-off zone which Will took to be the examination area. With not even a moment's warning, Russell pulled back the sheet.

Will felt his stomach tighten. The body was stiff and waxy, a yellowish green. The stench was rancid; seeming to come his way in waves. For a second or two he would think it had passed, or that at least he had got used to it, and then it would strike again – inciting Will to empty his guts out on the floor there and then.

‘It can take some getting used to. Apologies. Now take a look at this.’

Will moved closer. Russell was gesturing towards something in the stomach area, but Will was transfixed by Pat Baxter's face. The papers had run photos, but they were grainy – ‘grabs’ from TV footage mainly. Now he saw the weathered cheeks, chin, eyes and mouth of a man he would have identified as middle-aged, poor and white. He had a longish beard that, in a different context, might have looked elegant, even statesmanlike. (The face of Charles Darwin popped into Will's head). But the effect here was to give Pat Baxter the appearance of a homeless man, one of the winos found sleeping by trash cans in a park.

Russell was pulling back the sheet around Baxter's torso. Will could tell he was trying to conceal one thing, probably the bullet wounds, and reveal something else. ‘Look closely. Can you see it?’

Will leaned forward to see Russell's finger tracing a line on the dead white flesh. ‘That's a scar.’

‘In the area of the kidney?’

‘I would say so.’

‘And that can't be from that night, right? I mean, it takes ages to form a scar.’

Russell pulled back the sheet, stripped off his latex gloves and headed for a basin in the corner of the room. He began scrubbing, talking over his shoulder. He was enjoying this.

‘Well, of course, it's hard to be certain, what with the severe trauma to the skin and viscera.’

‘But what's your professional opinion?’

‘My opinion? That scar is, at the very least, a year old. Maybe two.’

Will felt his heart sink. ‘So it didn't happen that night? The killers didn't take out Baxter's kidney?’

‘I'm afraid not, no. You look disappointed, Will. I hope I haven't spoiled your story.’

But you have, arsehole, was Will's first thought. All this chasing for nothing. Then he remembered what Beth had said on the phone last night.

‘There is one last thing that might help. Do you think we could check Pat Baxter's medical records?’

Russell gave him a mini-lecture about patient-doctor confidentiality, but soon relented. Back in his office, he pulled up the file.

‘What are we looking for?’

‘The date Pat Baxter had his kidney removed.’

Russell paused, scanning the pages. Finally: ‘That's odd. There's no record of a kidney operation.’

Will perked up. He remembered Beth's briefing on the phone last night. ‘Anything there about a history of kidney problems, any disease, any references to renal failure, dialysis, anything?’

A longer pause now. And then, with a hint of puzzlement, ‘No.’

Will sensed he and the doctor now had something in common. They were equally baffled. ‘Does the history speak of any medical problems at all?’

‘Some trouble with his ankle, associated with war damage. Vietnam, apparently. Apart from that, nothing. I just assumed he was a renal patient who had to have his kidney out. This certainly appears to be a complete record. And yet there's nothing about a kidney. I've got to admit, this has me foxed.’

There was a light knock on the door. A woman, introduced by Russell as the media relations officer for the crime lab, opened it.

‘Sorry to interrupt, Dr Russell. It's just we're getting a ton of calls on the Baxter case. Apparently, an associate of the deceased called a talk radio station today saying that he believed Mr Baxter was a victim of some kind of organ-snatching plot?’

Bob Hill, thought Will. So much for his exclusive.

‘Sure, I'll be with you in a minute,’ Russell said, his brow tensing.

Will waited for the door to close to ask what Russell would tell the press. ‘Well, we can't give the most simple explanation, that Baxter had a history of kidney problems. Not now.’ It was Will's fault: he knew too much. ‘We'll think of something. I'll show you out.’

Will was pulling out of the driveway when he heard the pounding on his car window. It was Russell, still in his shirtsleeves and breathless.

‘I just got this call. She wants to talk to you.’ He passed his cell phone through the window.

‘Mr Monroe? My name is Genevieve Huntley. I'm a surgeon at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. I saw the reports about Mr Baxter on the news and Allan has just explained to me what you know. I think we need to talk.’

‘Sure,’ said Will, scrabbling to find his notebook.

‘I'm going to need some assurances from you, Mr Monroe. I trust The New York Times and I hope that trust will be repaid. What I am about to tell you I vowed never to repeat. I only tell it now because I fear the alternative is worse. We can't have people scaring themselves senseless about some organ-snatching ring.’

‘I understand.’

‘I'm not sure you do. I'm not sure any of us do. What I ask is that you treat what I tell you with honour, dignity and respect. For that is what it deserves, Mr Monroe. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes.’ Will could not imagine what he was about to hear.

‘OK. Mr Baxter's greatest request was anonymity. That was the one thing he asked of me in return for what he did.’

Will was silent.

‘Pat Baxter came to Swedish about two years ago. He had come a long way, we found out later. When he turned up, the nurses assumed he was an ER case: he looked like a bum off the streets. But he said he was in perfect health, he just needed to talk to a doctor in our transplant unit. He said that he wanted to give up one of his kidneys.

‘We immediately asked who he wanted to give the kidney to. Was there a sick child involved? Maybe a family member needed a transplant? “No,” he said. “I just want you to give my kidney to someone who needs it.” My colleagues immediately assumed that, frankly, there must be some mental health issues involved. Such nondirected operations are almost unheard of. Certainly the first one we had ever dealt with.

‘I sent Mr Baxter away. I told him this was something we couldn't consider. But he came back and I sent him away again. The third time we had a long talk. He told me that he wished he had been born rich. That way – I remember his words – that way, he said, he might have known the pleasure of giving away vast amounts of money. He said there were so many people who needed help. I remember, he asked me, “What does the word philanthropy mean? It means love of your fellow man. Well, why should only rich people be allowed to love their fellow man? I want to be a philanthropist, too.” He was determined to find another way to give – even if that meant giving away his own organs.

‘Eventually I concluded that he was sincere. I ran the tests and there was no medical objection. We even ran psychological tests and they confirmed he was of completely sound mind, totally able to make this decision.

‘There was only one condition, imposed by him. He swore us to complete secrecy, complete confidentiality. The recipient patient was not to know where his or her new kidney had come from. That was very important. He didn't want that person to feel they owed him. And not a word to the press. He insisted on that. No glory.’

Quietly, almost meekly, Will asked, ‘And so you went ahead with it?’

‘We did. I performed the operation myself. And I tell you, in my whole career there was no operation that made me prouder. All of us felt it: the anaesthetist, the nurses. There was an extraordinary atmosphere in theatre that day; as if something truly remarkable was happening.’

‘And did all go smoothly?’

‘Yes it did, it did. The recipient took the organ just fine.’

‘Can I ask what kind of recipient we're talking about? Young, old, male, female?’

‘It was a young woman. I won't say any more than that.’

‘And even though she was young, and he was old, it all worked out?’

‘Well, this was the strangest thing. We tested that kidney, obviously, monitored it very closely. And you know what? Baxter was in his fifties, but that organ worked like it was forty years younger than he was. It was very strong, completely healthy. It was perfect.’

‘And it made all the difference for that young woman?’

‘It saved her life. The staff and I wanted to have some kind of ceremony for him, after the operation, to thank him for what he'd done. It won't surprise you to hear that never happened. He discharged himself before we'd even had a chance to say goodbye. He just clean disappeared.’

‘And was that the last you heard from him?’

‘No, I heard from him once more, just a few months ago. He wanted to make arrangements for after his death—’

‘Really?’

‘Don't get too excited, Mr Monroe. I don't think he knew he was about to die. But he wanted to be sure that everything, his entire body, would be used.’ Huntley gave a rueful chuckle. ‘He even asked me what would be the optimal way for him to die.’

‘Optimal?’

‘From our point of view. What would work best, if we wanted to get his heart, say, to a recipient. I think he was worried, because he lived so far away, that if he was killed in a road accident, for example, by the time he got to a hospital, his heart would be useless. Of course, the one scenario he didn't count on was a brutal murder.’

‘Do you have any idea—’

‘I have no idea at all who could have wanted this man dead, no. I said the same to Dr Russell just now. I can only think it was a completely random, awful crime. Because no one who knew him would want to murder such a man. They couldn't.’

She paused and Will chose to let the silence hang. One thing he had learned: say nothing and your interviewee will often fill the void with the best quote of the entire conversation.

Eventually Dr Huntley, with what Will thought was a crack in her voice, spoke again. ‘We discussed this when it happened and we discussed it again today and my colleagues and I agree. What this man did, what Pat Baxter did for a person he had never met and would never meet – this was truly the most righteous act we have ever known.’

CHAPTER TEN

Friday, 6am, Seattle He woke at six am, back now in his Seattle hotel room. He had filed his story from Missoula and then made the long journey cross-country. As he wrote the piece, he was powered by a single, delicious thought: Eat this, Walton. What had that prick said? ‘Once counts as an achievement, William; twice would be a miracle.’

Will prayed he had pulled it off. His greatest fear was that the desk might find it too similar to the Macrae story, another good man among knaves. So he had played up the militia angle, thrown in lots of Pacific Northwest colour and hoped for the best. He even toyed with ditching the quote about Baxter's action being ‘righteous’, the very same word that woman had used about Howard Macrae. It might look contrived. Still, it would be more contrived to ignore it.

He reached for his BlackBerry, whose red light was winking hopefully: new messages.

Harden, Glenn: Nice job today, Monroe. That was what he wanted to hear. It meant he had avoided the spike; if only he could see Walton's face. The next email looked like spam; the sender's name was not clear, just a string of hieroglyphics. Will was poised to delete it when the single word in the subject field made him click it open. Beth. He had not even read all the words when he felt his blood freeze.

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.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Friday, 9.43pm, Chennai, India The nights were getting cooler. Still, Sanjay Ramesh preferred to stay here in the air-conditioned chill of the office than risk the suffocating heat of the city. He would wait till the sun had fully set before heading for home.

That way he might avoid not only the clammy heat, but the ordeal of the stoop. Every night it happened, his mother trading gossip and health complaints with her friends as they sat outside until late. He found himself tongue-tied in such company; in most company as it happened. Besides, September might be cool by the standards of Chennai but it was still punishingly hot and sticky. Inside this room, an aircraft hangar of an open-plan office, filled by row after row of sound-muffling cubicles, the conditions were just right. For what he needed to do, it was the perfect environment.

It was a call centre, one of thousands that had sprung up across India. Four storeys packed with young Indians taking calls from America or Britain, from people in Philadelphia anxious to pay their phone bill or travellers in Macclesfield wanting to check the train times to Manchester. Few, if any, of them ever realized their call was being routed to the other side of the world.

Sanjay liked his job well enough. For an eighteen-year-old living at home, the money was good. And he could work odd shifts to fit in with his studies. The big draw, though, was right here inside this little cubicle. He had everything he needed: a chair, a desk and, most important of all, a computer with a fast connection to the world.

Sanjay was young, but he was a veteran of the internet. He discovered it when both he and it were in their infancy. There were only a few hundred websites then, maybe a thousand. As he had grown, so had it. The worldwide web expanded like a binary number sequence − 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 – apparently doubling its size with each passing day, until it now girdled the globe many times over. Sanjay had not matched that pace physically of course – if anything he was a slight, skinny lad – but he felt his mind had kept up. As the internet grew, he grew with it, constantly opening up whole new areas of knowledge and curiosity. From his upstairs bedroom in India, he had travelled to Brazil, mastered the disputed border politics of Nagorno-Karabakh, laughed at Indonesian cartoons, gazed inside the world of the Scottish caravan enthusiast, scanned the junior fencing league tables of Flanders and seen what really motivated the tree-growers of Taipei. There was no corner of human activity closed off to him. The internet had shown him everything.

Including the images he had not wanted to see, the ones that had prompted the project he had completed just twenty-four hours earlier. He was a late developer as a computer hacker, coming to it when he was fifteen: most started before they were teenagers. He had played the usual tricks – hacking into the NATO target list, coming within one click of shutting down the Pentagon system – but each time he had held back from pressing the final button. Causing mayhem held no appeal for him. It would only give people a lot of grief and, his surfing of the web had taught him, there was plenty of that in the world already.

Now he felt the urge to laugh, partly at his own genius, partly at the joke he had played on those he had designated as his enemy. It had taken him months to perfect, but it had worked.

He had devised a benign virus, one capable of spreading through the computers of the world just as rapidly as any of the poisonous varieties hatched by his fellow boy-geniuses, those whose malign purpose made them, in the argot of the web, crackers rather than hackers.

At this moment, it was his method, rather than his objective, which delighted him. Like most viruses, his was designed to spread via ordinary desktop computers, those that were connected to the internet all the time. While people in Hong Kong or Hanover were tapping away, emailing their friends or doing their accounts, or even fast asleep, his little baby was inside their machine, hard at work.

He had given it a target to look for and, just like everyone else, it used Google to find it. Invisible to the user, below the screen, it got back its results and used them to compile what Sanjay thought of as an enemies list. These would be the sites to feel the virus's wrath. All of them, like any other site, would have some bug or glitch in their software: the challenge was to find it. For that, hackers (and crackers) would devise a set of ‘exploits’, designed to trigger the glitch. It might mean sending it a little nugget of data the software was not expecting; even one rogue symbol, a semi-colon perhaps, might do the trick. You never knew until you tried. Sanjay imagined it like medieval warfare: you would fire hundreds of arrows at a castle, knowing that only one might find the slit in the stone and get through. Each castle would have a different gap in the armour, a different weakness. But if your list of exploits was long enough, you would find it eventually. And once you had, you could take down the site and the server that was hosting it. It would be gone, just like that.

And these sites certainly deserved to disappear. But Sanjay had taken his war against them a stage further. Most hackers stored their list of exploits on a single server, usually salted away in the bandit country of the internet, a place out of the reach of the regulators. Romania and Russia were favourites. This method carried with it a fatal weakness, however: once the attacked sites realized the source of the enemy fire, they could simply block access to the server containing the exploits. The raids would stop.

Sanjay had found a solution. His virus would get its arsenal of exploits from a variety of sources and would even carry some of this payload itself. Better still, he had programmed it to retrieve extra exploits every now and then, to improve itself. He had created a magician constantly able to replenish his bag of tricks. And creation was the right word, for Sanjay felt he had conceived a living creature. In technical language, it was a ‘genetic algorithm’ a piece of coding that was able to change. To evolve.

His virus would alter its list of exploits, even its method of distribution – sometimes through email, sometimes through bulletin boards, sometimes through bugs in web browsers – as it spread throughout the infinite universe that was the internet. In this way, the virus would reproduce itself, but its ‘children’ would not be identical either to the original virus or to each other. They would mutate, by picking up new exploits and new methods of propagation from sources all over the virtual world. Some of these sources would be servers in the internet badlands of eastern Europe, some would be found by scanning security bulletin boards – where people would discuss how to thwart the very tricks Sanjay was deploying. Sanjay was proud of his creation, travelling across the globe, mutating and bettering itself in a million different ways – thereby making itself all but impossible to track down and eliminate. Even if he never touched a computer again, they would continue without him. Still a teenager, he felt like a proud father, or rather, a great-great-grandfather – the founder of a vast dynasty. His progeny were everywhere.

And they were engaged in noble work. Scanning the results now, he could see he had set the parameters sufficiently narrowly that only the target sites were collapsing. Within a matter of hours, every one of the world's websites dedicated to child pornography would dissolve. Sanjay was laughing because he could see that the final command he had programmed into the virus was also now taking effect. Each of the sites that once displayed violent and pornographic images of children was now replaced by a single picture: a 1950s, Norman Rockwell-style drawing of a son on his mother's knee. Below it ran a simple, four-word message: Read to your kids.

Sanjay headed home, grinning at his joke – and his accomplishment. No one needed to know what he had done; he knew and that was enough. The world would be a better place.

Even at night Chennai was a noisy city, as raucous as it had been when it was Madras. Perhaps that, and the fact that his mind was racing with his success, is why he did not hear the footsteps behind him. Perhaps that is why he saw and suspected nothing until he was walking down the side alley to his own house, when he felt a handkerchief over his mouth and heard his own muffled screams. There was a sharp pricking sensation on the side of his arm and then a woozy slide downward into sleep.

When Mrs Ramesh found her only son dead on the ground, she screamed loud enough to be heard three streets away. It gave her no comfort that her boy – who had dreamt of one day doing something ‘for children’ and who had been murdered before he had a chance to do anything – had been killed by some apparently painless injection. Police admitted they were baffled by the murder; they had seen none like it before. There was no sign of violence or, God forbid, abuse. And there was the odd demeanour of the body. As if it had been handled with care. ‘Laid to rest,’ was how the policeman had put it. ‘It must mean something, Mrs Ramesh,’ he had said. ‘Your son's body was draped in a purple blanket. And, as everyone knows, purple is the colour of princes.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Friday, 6.10am, Seattle Will felt his face pale, the blood draining from it. His head seemed light, insubstantial. He read the message again, scouring it for some clue, some indication that it was a cruel hoax. He looked to see if he had been ‘bcc'd’, which would make this spam, sent out to millions. Maybe the Beth subject line was a coincidence. But there were no such signs. He looked for a ‘signature’ at the foot of the page. Nothing but junk. His palms were sweating as he turned on his cell phone. He scrolled down to B and pressed Beth, the first one to pop up.

Please answer. Please God let me hear her voice. The phone rang and rang, with one tone suddenly shorter than the rest: it was diverting to voice-mail. Hi, you've reached Beth … He crumpled as he heard her voice, surrendering as a memory floated into his head. The very first time he had asked her out, it had been via a message on her answering machine. ‘Unless it would be wildly inappropriate,’ he had begun, ‘I wondered whether you'd like to have dinner on Tuesday night.’ ‘Wildly inappropriate’ had been his way of checking that she was single.

‘Hello, this is Beth McCarthy and the answer is no,’ came the reply, also left via voicemail, ‘it would not be wildly inappropriate for us to have dinner on Tuesday. In fact, it would be lovely.’ Will had replayed that message a dozen times when he had first got it. Just as he replayed it now, in his head.

He stopped the call, his hands now quivering as they punched in the number of the hospital. ‘Hello, please page Beth Monroe. It's her husband. Please.’

Hold-music by Vivaldi; he was begging it to stop, praying for it to be broken by the sound of someone picking up and for that someone to be Beth. Please let me hear her voice. But the music played on. Eventually: ‘I'm sorry, sir, there seems to be no response to that page. Is there another doctor who can help?’

A sudden realization. She might have been gone for hours. Perhaps she had been snatched from their bedroom in the dead of night. They had spoken just before twelve her time. Maybe the kidnappers broke in at five? Or six? Or just now? He was a continent away, fast asleep when he should have been protecting his wife.

He looked at the email again, his heart shrinking as he saw those words. He tried to focus, to look at the top of the message, among those strange, garbled characters. There were some numbers, today's date and a timestamp which said 1.37pm, even though that was several hours away. That gave no clue.

Of course, he should call the police. But these people, these bastards, seemed so adamant – as if they really would not hesitate to kill Beth. Uttering the word, even if only as a thought in his own head, made him recoil. He regretted formulating the idea, as if expressing it made it real. He wished he could take it back.

In a moment of childish need, he realized he wanted his mother. He could call her – it would only be mid-afternoon in England now – and it would be such a comfort to hear her voice. But he knew he would not. She would panic; she might have an anxiety attack. She certainly could not be trusted not to phone the police, or at least talk to someone who would talk to someone who would. The simple truth was, she was too far away for him to manage and his mother was a person who needed managing. (He realized that word was a Beth-ism. It made sense that she was one of the very few people who knew how to handle Will's mother.)

He was slowly beginning to see that there was only one person he could ask, only one person who might know what to do. His hand shook as he reached for the hotel phone, something telling him this was not a call to be made on a cell.

‘The office of Judge William Monroe, please.’ A click. ‘Janine, it's Will. I need to speak to my father right away.’ Something in his voice cut through all social convention, conveying to his father's secretary that this was indeed an emergency. She dispensed with her usual small talk. She simply cleared out of the way, like a car making room for an ambulance. ‘I'll patch you through to his car now.’ A cell phone, thought Will, worriedly. He would have to let it pass: more important now just to get through.

It was a relief to hear his father pick up. The child in him felt glad, like a boy who persuades his dad to come kill a spider. Good, now an adult was going to take over. Doing his best to hold his voice steady, he told his father what had happened, reading the email out slowly, twice.

Monroe Sr's voice instantly dipped; he did not want to be overheard by his driver. Even in a whisper his voice had the deep authority that made him such a presence on the bench. Now, as he would in court, he asked all the pertinent questions, pressing his son to tell him everything he could work out about the sender. Finally, he delivered his ruling.

‘It's obviously an attempt at extortion. They must know about Beth's parents. It's a classic ransom demand.’

Beth's parents. He would have to tell them. How would he even utter the words? ‘I want to call the police,’ said Will. ‘They know how to handle these things.’

‘No, we mustn't do anything too rash. My understanding is that kidnappers usually assume the victim's family will go to the police: they factor it into their planning. There must be a reason why these people are so determined to avoid the police being involved.’

‘Of course they don't want the police to be involved! They're fucking kidnappers, Dad!’

‘Will, calm down.’

‘How can I calm down?’ Will could feel his voice about to break. His eyes were stinging. He did not dare try speaking again.

‘Oh, Will. Listen, we're going to get through this, I promise. First, you need to get back here. Immediately. Go to the airport right away. I'll meet you off the flight.’

Those five hours in the air were the hardest of Will's life. He stared out of the window, his leg oscillating in a nervous tic that used to strike him during exams. He refused all food and drink, until he noticed the cabin attendants were eyeing him suspiciously. He did not want them thinking he was poised to blow up the plane, so he sipped some water. And all the time he was imagining his beloved Beth. What were they doing to her? He began to picture her tied to a chair, while some sadist dangled a knife—

It took all his strength to stop such thoughts before they had picked up speed. His guts were turning over. How could I not have been there? If only I had phoned earlier. Maybe she called the cell phone when I was asleep …

Throughout he held the BlackBerry in the palm of his hand. He hated everything about this accursed machine. Even to glance at it brought those chilling words right back. He could see them now, hovering in the air in front of him:

INVOLVE THE POLICE AND YOU WILL LOSE HER.

He looked at the device, so small yet now containing so much poison. It was sleeping: no signal at this height. He kept watching the icon at the top right that would tell him when it was back within range. As the plane began its descent, he stole peeks at it. He did not want the flight attendants reminding him that they had asked that all ‘electronic devices be turned off until the aircraft has come to a complete stop’.

At last he could see the sparkle of New York City in mid-afternoon. She's down there. The bridges, the highways, the flickering necklaces of light criss-crossing the whole vast metropolis. She's there somewhere.

He glanced down at the BlackBerry, moist with his own palm-sweat. The icon had changed; it was back in range. Now the red light was flashing. Will's heart began to pound. He looked at the new messages flowing in, each one taking its place like passengers in a bus queue. Some round-robin cinema listing; an internal message from work about a lost notebook. There was a news-alert from the BBC website.

Tributes have been pouring in for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gavin Curtis, found dead this evening, apparently from a drugs overdose. Police say he was found by a cleaner in his Westminster flat, with an excess of a sedative drug in his bloodstream. It's believed that the police are not looking for anyone else in connection with Mr Curtis's death …

Will was staring out of the window, just imagining the media frenzy back in London. He had grown up there: he knew what the British press was like when its blood was up. They had been gunning for this guy for days and now they had got their scalp. Will could not remember the last time a politician had actually topped himself: when it came to taking responsibility, resignation was usually as far as they would go, and even that had become pretty rare. This Curtis must have been guilty as hell.

And then one more message popped into the BlackBerry: the same hieroglyphic string that refused to reveal itself. Subject: Beth.

Will clicked it open.

WE DO NOT WANT MONEY.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Friday, 2.14pm, Brooklyn ‘It must be a bluff.’

‘Dad, you've said that three times. Tell me, what do you think we should do? Should we offer them money anyway? What should we fucking do?’

‘Will, I don't blame you at all, but you must calm down. If we're to get Beth back we need to think as clearly as we can.’

That ‘if’ stopped Will short.

They were in Will and Beth's apartment. There was no sign of a break-in; everything was how he had last seen it. Except now a chill seemed to be coming off the walls and ceilings: the absence of Beth.

‘Let's think through what we know. We know that their first priority is that the police not be involved: they said it in their very first message. We also know that they say it's not about money. But if this is not about ransom, why else would they care so much about keeping the police out of it? They must be bluffing. Let's think about your email address. Who has it?’

‘Everyone has it! It's the same pattern for the whole Times staff. Anyone could work it out.’

A phone rang; Will pounced on his, frantically pressing buttons, but the sound kept coming. Calmly, his father answered his own phone. Nothing to do with this, he mouthed silently, disappearing into another room for a hushed conversation.

His father was proving no help. The aid he was offering was defiantly of the masculine variety, practical rather than emotional, and even that was not getting anywhere. Suddenly Will realized how much he missed his mother. Ever since he had been with Beth, that sentiment had become rarer and rarer: his wife was his confidante now. But, for a long while, that role had belonged to his mother.

In England, they had been a team, united by what he suddenly thought of as their loneliness. In his mother's version of the story, at least, she and Will had been abandoned by his father, leaving the two of them to fend for themselves. He knew there were alternative accounts, not that his father was in too much of a hurry to share his. The fate of his parents' marriage was a long-running puzzle to Will Monroe. He was never completely sure what happened.

One version said Monroe Sr had chosen his career over his family: over-work broke the young marriage. Another theory cited geography: wife was desperate to return to England, husband was determined to advance through the US legal system and refused to leave America. Will's maternal grandmother, a silver-haired Hampshire lady with a severe expression that frightened the young boy the first time he saw her, and for years afterwards, once spoke darkly of ‘the other great passion’ in his father's life. When he was old enough to inquire further, his grandmother shrugged it off. To this day, he did not know if that ‘great passion’ was another woman or the law.

Will's own memories offered little help; he was barely seven years old when his parents began to come apart. He remembered the atmosphere, the gloom that would descend after his father had stormed out, slamming the door. Or the shock of finding his mother, red-faced and hoarse after another fierce round of shouting. He once woke up from sleep to hear his father pleading, ‘I just want to do what's right.’ Will had tiptoed out of bed to find a place where he could watch his parents unseen. He could not understand the words they were saying but he could feel their force. It was at that moment, hearing his British mother and American father at full volume, that the seven year old boy developed a theory: his mummy and daddy could not love each other because they had different voices.

Once they were back in England, his mother gave few clues as to what had brought them there. Even raising the topic carried the risk of turning her into a bitter, ranting woman he hardly recognized and did not like. She would mutter about how her husband became ‘a different man, utterly different’. Will remembered one Christmas, his mother speaking in a way which frightened him; he could not have been much older than thirteen. The detail had faded now, but one word still leapt out. It was all ‘his’ fault, she kept saying; ‘he’ had changed everything. The intonation made clear that this ‘he’ was a third party, not his father, but Will could never figure out who it was. His mother was coming off like a paranoid, raving in the streets. Will was relieved when the storm passed and he was not brave enough to mention it again.

Friends, and his grandmother for that matter, were quick to analyse Will's return to the United States after Oxford as a response to all this. He was ‘choosing’ his father over his mother, said some. He was trying to reconcile the two, in the manner of many children of divorce, with himself as the bridge; that was another pet explanation. If he subscribed to any theory, which he did not, it would have been the journalistic one: that Will Monroe Jr went to America to get to the truth of the story that had shaped his early life.

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.

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 ‘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 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

‘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 path ends in an internet café. 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 café?’

‘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 café. 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.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Friday, 4.10pm, Crown Heights, Brooklyn His first reaction was confusion. He got off the subway at Sterling Street and walked straight into what looked to him like a black neighbourhood: Ebony, Vibe and Black Hair on sale at the newsstand, murals on every other wall, knots of young black men standing around in baggy combat clothes.

But once he crossed New York Avenue, he felt his pulse quicken with a reporter's sense that he was getting nearer to the story. Signs appeared in Hebrew. Some of the words were written in English characters, though their meaning was no less opaque. Chazak V'Ematz! promised one, enigmatically. Another word appeared several times, on bumper stickers, on fly posters, even on notices collared to lampposts, like flyers seeking lost cats. Will soon learned to recognize the word, though he had no idea how to pronounce it: Moshiach.

Next he passed a black man the size of a large refrigerator, with a little girl in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Will's confusion returned. He was now on Empire Boulevard, noticing Indian restaurants and vans decked out in the national flag of Trinidad and Tobago. Was he in the Hassidic neighbourhood or wasn't he?

He turned off, into residential streets. The houses were large brownstones or made of a firm, red brick, as if once, in a long-ago Brooklyn, they had been positively posh. Each had a few steps up to the front door, which sat alongside a porch. In other American homes, Will guessed, these porches might feature a swing chair, perhaps a few lanterns, certainly a pumpkin at Hallowe'en and very often, the Stars and Stripes. In Crown Heights they looked mainly unused, though even here Will spotted that word again – Moshiach – on window stickers, and once on a yellow flag with the image of a crown, which Will took to be some kind of local symbol.

Directly above each porch, one storey up, was a veranda, complete with wooden balustrade. Will thought of Beth, held behind one of these front doors: his legs suddenly tensed with the urge to run up the stairs of each house and knock down door after door, until he had found his wife.

Coming towards him was a group of teenage girls in long skirts, pushing strollers. Behind them were perhaps a dozen, maybe more, children. Will could not tell if these girls were older sisters or exceptionally young mothers. They looked like no women he had ever seen before, certainly not in New York. They seemed to be from a different era, the 1950s perhaps or the reign of Queen Victoria. No flesh was exposed, the sleeves of their white, prim blouses covered their arms; their skirts fell to their ankles. And their hair: the older women seemed to wear it in a preternaturally neat bob, one that barely moved in the wind.

Will did not look too hard; he did not want anyone to think he was staring. Besides, he no longer needed confirmation. This was Hassidic Crown Heights, all right. As he walked, he honed his cover story. He would say he was a writer for New York magazine doing a piece for its new ‘Slice of the Apple’ slot, in which outsiders wrote dispatches from different segments of New York's wonderfully diverse community, blah, blah. He would pose as the safari-suit explorer, sent to note down the curious ways of the natives.

And this was certainly an alien landscape. Will searched desperately for something that might give him a handle – an office perhaps, where he might discover who ran this place. Maybe he could explain what had happened and they would help him. He just needed a foothold, something in this strange place he at least understood.