by Sam Bourne
Will briefed her on his early lines of inquiry. 'I reckon this must be from them, the Hassidim. They obviously got my number off the phone when they had my bag.'
'No, they wouldn't have done that. It breaks Shabbat. And they wouldn't send a text message for the same reason. Both violate the Sabbath.'
'What, and dunking an innocent man into freezing water is OK?'
Technically, yes. They didn't use any electricity, any fire.
They didn't write anything down, didn't use any machinery.'
'So what they did to me was all perfectly kosher.'
'Look, Will, don't give me a hard time. I don't make up these rules. All I'm saying is, they would only break the Sabbath if there was no alternative. So far they avoided that.'
'But what about pikuach nefesh, you know the saving a soul thing?'
'You're right. If they felt it was justified, they would do it.
OK, so it could be them. What does it mean?'
'Like I know. But I was wondering if perhaps foot means ending or conclusion. You know how you told me Rosh Hashana means literally "head of the year" so maybe foot is the end.' Will smiled hopefully, like a pupil expecting praise. TO did not smile.
'And runs?'
'You know, "it goes on". It runs on. Or "the end approaches".
Maybe Foot runs is a coded way of saying that the operation is nearing its end. And the B Gates thing is just a sign off.
You know, Bill Gates. Mickey Mouse.'
TO did not react. She just took the phone over to the couch, sat down and stared at it. 'Can you pass me the pad? And a pen.'
Will sat next to her, so he could see what she was doing. He felt awkward as soon as he had done it; his legs so near hers.
She was writing down a new message.
GPPU SVOT
'OK, so that doesn't work. Let's try it the other way.'
ENNS QTMR
'Nor does that,' she said, not disappointed so much as challenged.
'What are you doing?'
'It's kiddie code-breaking stuff. Each letter stands for the one after it — so that F is really G, O is really P — or, alternatively, the one before it — so that F is really E and O is really N. That way foot is either gppu or enns. Which means that neither of those is the code. Let's try another one.'
TO began to write, very fast, the alphabet across the page.
Then, underneath it, she did the same in reverse, so that Z, Y, X, appeared directly under A, B, C.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
'Now we can read off and see what we get.' Her finger scanned along the line, then she started scribbling.
ULLG IFMH
'Shit,' Will hissed. 'I am getting so tired of these fucking games. What the hell does this mean?'
'We're not thinking logically. Not many people send text messages by phone like this.'
'Brits do.'
'Yeah, but most Americans don't. And it would have been just as easy to communicate by email. But they didn't do that. Why not?'
'Because they know that we can trace their emails. They must know that I worked out where their last one came from.'
'Sure, but that might not be a bad thing from their point of view. They might want you to know it was a message from them. No, I reckon they chose a different method for a reason.
Can you pass me your phone?'
She grabbed it eagerly, instantly finding the messaging programme. She hit 'Create message' and began typing with her thumbs. Will had to huddle even closer to see what she was doing. He could smell her hair and had to fight the urge not to breathe deeply: in an instant, her scent had carried him back to those long hot afternoons together.
That in turn jogged another sense memory, the perfume of Beth. He liked it best when it was strongest: when she dressed up to go out for the evening. She might have got her outfit just right; he would want to rip it all off, to ravish her there and then. Later, at the party, he would spot her across the room and find himself looking at his watch: he wanted to get her back home. He was suddenly flooded with memories, of TO and of Beth, and they were arousing him. He felt confused.
TO was typing the word foot. Now her thumbs searched for the button; she pressed it twice, and a smile began to form around her lips. The display changed, showing the word foot, then font then don't, then enou, then emot, then donu and finally ennu before going back to foot. TO wrote down the word don't.
Next she keyed in runs, which showed up on the screen as sums, suns, puns, stop, rump, sump, pump, as well as stor, sunr and quor. She wrote one of those down, too.
'There,' she said, with the satisfaction of a bookish schoolgirl who had just completed her algebra homework in record time. The two-word nonsense of foot runs now appeared as a clear message of encouragement. don't stop.
It was not really a code at all, thought Will. Just a neat use of the 'predictive' language function on most cell phones: every time you tried to punch in a word, the phone offered possible alternatives using the same combination of buttons. You pressed 3,6,6,8 to mean foot, but you might have meant don't so the machine cleverly offered you that option. Whoever sent this message had found a novel use for the function.
The satisfaction of TO's handiwork was brief. True, they had decoded the message, but they hardly knew what it meant and they still had no idea who had sent it.
'So who the hell is Bill Gates?'
'Let's have a look,' said TO, picking up the phone again.
'Well, B could be C or A.' She keyed in the word gates. 'And that could be hates or haves or haver or hater.'
'So what would that mean?' said Will. 'A hater? A hater of what? Or is it B Haves as in "behaves"?'
'Or maybe it's the opposite of "a hater",' said TO, suddenly excited.
'The opposite?'
'The opposite of a hater. A friend.'
'But it doesn't say that. It's just gates or hates or haves or hates.'
'Or haver. Haver is the word for friend in Hebrew. B Gates is A Haver. This message says, "Don't stop, a friend."' She began circling, staring at the floor. 'Who would want to stiffen your resolve now? Who would think there was a chance you would give up?'
'The only people who even know about this are you, my father, Tom and the Hassidim themselves.'
'You're sure there's no one else. No one who's aware this is happening?'
With a stab, Will thought of Harden and the office: he would have to do something about that eventually.
'No. No one knows. And since neither you, nor Tom, nor my Dad need to contact me anonymously that leaves the Hassidim. I think we may have a bit of a split on our hands.'
'What do you mean?'
Will enjoyed the novelty of TO being a pace behind him for once. Politics never was her strongest suit.
'A split. A split in the ranks of the enemy. The only person who could have sent this would be somebody who heard the Rebbe, I mean the rabbi I spoke to yesterday, telling me to back off. They must want me to ignore that advice. They must disagree with what the rabbi's doing. This person doesn't want me to stop. And I think I can guess who it is.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Saturday, 8.10am, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
These days he came down to check only once a week. The Secret Chamber now seemed to run itself, needing only the lightest supervision. These visits of his were less practical than sentimental: it gave him pleasure to see his little invention working so well.
He had designed things before of course. Down at the docks, he had come up with a new roll-on, roll-off method for unloading the boats that came in from Latin America and went on to the US. He had not planned it this way, but his new system was said to have revolutionized the country's drugs trade. He had only been trying to improve the efficiency of import-export. But thanks to him, cocaine could come in from Colombia and be bound for Miami with the shortest possible turnaround. From there, and in a matter of hours, the parcels of white powder would spider out to A
merica's cities — Chicago, Detroit, New York. Haiti's drugs bosses boasted that if ten lines of coke were snorted into the nostrils of a US citizen at any given moment, it was certain that at least one had passed through Port-au-Prince.
In his social circle, that gave Jean-Claude Paul prestige.
Among the well-heeled dollar millionaires of Petionville, each in their armour-fenced, high-walled villas, no one fussed too much as to the ethical origins of one's wealth. That you could drive a Mercedes and send your wife to Paris to replenish her wardrobe and re-tint her highlights was enough. When the Americans invaded in 1994 they called the mansion dwellers of Petionville MREs — morally repugnant elites — and Jean-Claude was classed among them.
Maybe that was why his brain had come up with the Secret Chamber, as a way to make amends. He could not imagine where else the idea could have come from: it seemed to arrive in his head fully formed, nothing to do with him.
The chamber was, in fact, a single-storey building, painted white. It looked like a glorified hut, no more noticeable than a bus shelter. Crucially, there were entrances on all four sides which were open at all times.
The system was simple. At any moment, the rich could come in and leave money inside the chamber. And, also at any moment, the poor could come in and take what they needed.
The beauty of it was its anonymity. The doors operated on an automatic-locking system that ensured only one person could be inside the chamber at any one time. That way a giver and a receiver were guaranteed never to meet. The wealthy would not know who had benefited from their largesse; the deprived would not know who had helped them.
Port-au-Prince's well-off would not get the chance either to lord it over their beneficiaries or to judge them insufficiently needy. And the city's impoverished would be spared the sense of indebtedness that can make charity so humiliating.
The four doors were the finishing touch. It meant that there could never arise, not even informally, a givers' entrance or a receivers' entrance; it was too random for that. And so, if you saw someone walking in or out, you had no idea what kind of errand they were on.
There was only one more thing Jean-Claude had to do to make it work. He had to exploit a Haitian national trait, one that applied as much to the SUV-drivers of Petionville as the searingly poor of Cite Soleil: superstition.
He spoke to the healers and voodoo priests whose writ ran among the MREs, slipping a few dollars to those with a knack for spreading the word. Before long the wealthiest folk in Port-au-Prince came to believe that they would be cursed if they did not visit the Secret Chamber and do the right thing.
So Jean-Claude smiled as he stood inside the chamber now, looking at a bowl filled with US dollars as well as local currency and even the odd item of jewellery. Those outside assumed he was another visitor; his own role in setting up the chamber had remained unknown to all but the handful of holy men whose PR skills he had enlisted.
He was picking up a discarded food wrapper from the floor when the lights flickered and went off. With all four doors closed, the room was now in complete darkness. Jean-Claude silently cursed the electric company.
But it did not stay dark for long. Someone struck a match, just behind him. The power failure must have short-circuited the automatic locks, allowing this man to gain access.
I'm sorry, sir. Only one at a time, that's the rule.'
'I know the rule, Monsieur Paul.' The voice was unfamiliar; speaking French not Creole.
'Well, perhaps I'll leave and then you can do what you need to do.'
Tor that I need you here.'
'No, no. It's all private and confidential, my friend. That's why we call this the Secret Chamber. It's secret.'
The match had burned out now, shrouding the chamber once more in perfect black.
'Hello? Are you still here?'
There was no answer. Not a sound, in fact, until the gasp of Jean-Claude's own breath as he felt two strong hands on his neck. He wanted to protest, to ask what he had done wrong, to explain that this man could take all the money he needed — there were no restrictions, no maximum. But the air would not come. He was rasping, a sandy, dry exhalation that barely sounded human. His leg was trembling, his hand clinging onto the forearm of this man who was strangling him.
But it was no good; darkness came upon darkness. He slumped to the floor. The stranger lit a new match, crouched down and closed the dead man's eyes. He murmured a short prayer, then straightened himself up and shook the dust off his clothes. He headed for the door he had used to come in, taking care to reconnect the circuit he had broken a few minutes earlier. And then he stepped out into the night, anonymous and unseen, just as Jean-Claude Paul had intended.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Saturday, 8.49am, Manhattan
When they talked in the night TO had not been that interested in Yosef Yitzhok. She was focused on the rabbi and on everything that happened inside the classroom and later at the mikve. Now, though, she trained the full beam of her intellect on the encounter that had concluded Will's brief and unhappy stay at Crown Heights.
'You're wrong about one thing,' she told Will rapidly. It doesn't make sense for Yosef Yitzhok to have brought in the paper just to make the point that you work for The New York Times, and therefore they've got to be careful. They already knew you worked for the Times. They sent that very first email to your Times address. That much they had worked out. So as soon as they realized you were not Tom Mitchell but were Will Monroe, they knew exactly who they were dealing with. Beth's husband. A reporter for the Times.'
'So why did they have a copy of my story laid out? Why had Yosef thingy brought it in?'
'You don't know he brought it in. Might have been in there throughout.'
'No, I definitely-' Will stopped himself. After the Rebbe fiasco, there was nothing he knew for definite. He thought he had heard the arrival of a new person in the room, the rustling of paper and a row — but he had not seen that. He might have just got it wrong.
'So what did Yosef Yitzhok — we'll call him YY, it'll save time. What did YY say to you outside?'
'He apologized for what had happened inside. At the time I thought that was bullshit and I ignored it. But maybe that was his way of telling me he disagreed with what was happening. Maybe he's a dissenter! Perhaps he can help. You know, from the inside.'
'Will, I know you're stressed out but we really have to keep it cool and calm. This is not the movies. Just tell me what he actually said.'
'OK, so there's the apology. And then there's this stuff about my work. 'If you want to know what's going on, look to your work.'
'Hmm.' TO began pacing, stopping by a painting she had done of the Chrysler Building apparently melting in the twilight rain. 'So he's seen your story in the paper; he knows what you do. It's possible he didn't know that until that moment.'
'I thought you said they knew the moment they emailed me.'
'That's true. They knew. The rabbi and whichever one of his techie helpers sent you the email knew. But this guy might not be inner circle. It may have been news to him.'
'So it's possible that he was steaming in there, warning them that I was a reporter and could make trouble.'
'It's possible. But something about it doesn't feel right. If he's in the room, he must be trusted enough to know what's going on. It must be something else. But OK, let's say you're right. He doesn't like what's happening and so he breaks Shabbat to tell you urgently that you must not give up. Why would he do it in code? You know, foot runs?'
'Just in case someone read it over his shoulder. Or saw it in his "Sent messages".'
'All right. I'll buy that. And I suppose the thing he said to you last night — "look to your work" — is related. Perhaps he's telling you to do what you do in your work: to keep looking, keep asking questions.'
'I reckon that's it. Don't stop, keep probing.'
'Good. So that's what it is. OK.' Will could see she was only partly persuaded. 'What do you want to do now? Are you
going to reply?'
Will had not even thought of that, but she was right. He should just hit Reply, send a message of his own and see what happened. Who are you? That might scare YY off. What do you want me to do? He needed to get this right. 'What do you think?'
'I think I need some coffee.' She flicked on the machine and, clearly out of habit, flicked on the radio at the same time. It was big, old-fashioned and splattered with paint; a builder's radio. Except hers was not programmed to KROC or Kiss FM, but WNYC, New York's public radio channel.
Will fell back into the sofa, willing himself to have a brainwave.
He had to think of something that would end this ordeal. Beth had now spent a night as a captive. God only knew where she was and in what conditions. He had seen how hard these men could be, nearly freezing him into unconsciousness.
What pain were they inflicting on Beth? What strange rules would allow them to hurt a woman who, they admitted, had done nothing wrong. He imagined how frightened she was. Think, he urged himself. Think! But he just stared at the cell phone, bearing its message of bland, coded encouragement — Don't stop — and at the BlackBerry which had, so far, brought only bad news. One in each hand, they yielded nothing.
The radio was burbling with a signature tune, announcing the top of a new hour. Will looked at his watch: 9am.
'Good morning, this is Weekend Edition. The President promises a new initiative in the Middle East. The Southern Baptist conference gets underway with a promise to make war on what it calls "Hollywood sleaze". And in London, more revelations on the scandal of the year Will spaced out for most of it, but he caught the latest on Gavin Curtis. It turned out that the red-faced cleric Will had seen on TV the other night was right: Curtis had been siphoning off colossal amounts of public money. Not just millions, which would have made him fantastically rich, but hundreds of millions at a time. Apparently the money had been diverted into a numbered account in Zurich. The humble Chancellor Curtis, riding around the British capital in a modest sedan car, had made himself one of the richest men in the world.