The righteous men

by Sam Bourne

  '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, imitating 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 voicemail. Hi, you 'we 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: