by Sam Bourne
'OK, gentlemen,' said a voice over a loud-speaker. 'If you can all take your places against the back wall.' Two of the men in the group seemed to know exactly what to do, casually walking to the back, then standing and staring straight ahead. It was then Will saw the markings on the wall, indicating height. This was a line-up, an identity parade.
On the other side of the one-way mirror Mrs Tina Perez of the Greenstreet Mansions apartment building stared at the men arrayed before her.
'I know it's been a long night, Mrs Perez,' Fitzwalter was saying. 'So you just take your time. When you're ready, I have two questions to ask.'
'I'm ready.'
'I want you to look really hard and tell me whether you've seen any of these men before and, if you have, where you've seen them. OK? Is that clear?'
'The answer's no. I haven't seen any of these men before.
The man I saw had eyes you couldn't forget.'
'You're absolutely certain, Mrs Perez?'
I'm certain. He had his hands around poor Mr Bitensky's neck and he looked up at me with those eyes. Those terrible eyes-'
'It's OK, Mrs Perez. Please don't distress yourself. Jeannie, you can take Mrs Perez home now. Thank you.'
'OK, show in Mrs Abdulla.'
Will was spared the encounter with his father he had feared.
Twenty minutes after the line-up, Fitzwalter had come into the cell.
'More good news and bad news. The bad news for me is that two witnesses say you were not the man they saw in Mr Bitensky's apartment. One of them did recognize you in the line-up. She places you at the apartment building standing outside at the time of the killing. So the good news for you is that I'm going to have to let you go. For now.'
There were forms to fill in, so that Will's things could be released. He pounced on his cell phone first, powering it up.
Instantly it began vibrating: a voice message. TO.
'Hi, guess what. As predicted, I am in police custody. They're questioning me about the murder of Mr Pugachov. It seems he was shot, at point-blank range. Can you believe this? In my apartment? That sweet, gentle man. And I can't bear to think it's all because…What? Oh God, I'm sorry. Sorry, Will, that's Joel Brookstein. Do you remember him? He was at Columbia. Anyway, he's agreed to be my lawyer. He's telling me to shut my mouth. Let me know where you are and what's happening. Not sure if they'll let me keep this phone on.' Her voice faded, as if she needed to talk over her shoulder. 'All right, I'm coming. One minute! Will, I'm going to have to go. Call me as soon as you can. We don't have much time.'
As he listened to her voice — which now seemed to oscillate between TO and Tova Chaya — he heard a double beep.
A text message. He pressed the buttons.
Paul, sort the letters of no Christian! (1,? 29) In the bombardment of the last few hours, Will had almost forgotten about the phantom texter. In his mind, he still associated these messages with Yosef Yitzhok, even though he knew, rationally, that was impossible. This latest text was definitive proof: someone else had been giving Will these coded clues all along. But who?
The meaning of this latest message seemed almost within reach. Forty-eight hours of communication with this man had given Will some sense of the workings of his mind. This must be how crossword addicts do it, Will thought: after a while, they insert themselves into the head of the crossword setter.
And this did indeed look like a crossword clue. Surely, the literal meaning was irrelevant. He knew how such clues worked, with instructions in one part relating to the rest. But who was Paul? And why did the solution include a word twenty-nine letters long?
He would start with the most obvious bit, following the instruction to 'sort the letters', to reorder, 'no Christian'. With the recklessness of a newly free man, he grabbed a pen from the desk clerk's table and scribbled on the back of the receipt she had just handed him.
On Ian Christ. That did not work. Con this rain. That was not much better.
And then he saw it, smiling his first smile in hours. How perfect that this message should arrive just as he was alone, without TO. The one area where he would have greater knowledge than her.
He picked up the phone to call his father. To tell him the good news that he had been released without charge and ask him to stop on his way, maybe at a hotel, and pick up the one thing that Will realized he would need: a bible.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Monday, 4.40am, Manhattan
For a minute, he thought about asking the desk sergeant.
Then he reconsidered. It would not look great, a dishevelled murder suspect, alternately ranting about the identity of the true killer — 'He has piercing blue eyes!' — and then demanding to read the bible. Fine if Will was guilty and pursuing a 'diminished responsibility' defence; not so great for a man who wanted to walk out of the seventh precinct having convinced the police he was both innocent and sane.
Instead he waited for his father pacing outside, desperate to get away. Finally William Monroe Sr, dressed in a battered sailing jacket, appeared. He looked exhausted, his eyes ringed in red. Will wondered if he had been crying.
'Thank God, William,' he said, hugging his son, his hand cupping the back of his head. 'I wondered what on earth you'd done.'
'Thanks for that vote of confidence, Dad,' said Will, pulling away. 'No time to talk. Do you have the thing I asked you to bring?'
His father nodded, a gesture of sad surrender, as if he was humouring a son who was babbling about the voices in his head or demanding a hundred bucks for another fix of crack. 'Here.'
Will pounced on the bible. 'OK, Dad. You know those text messages I've been getting? Well, here's the latest.' Will held up his cell phone.
Sort the letters of no Christian! (1, 7, 29) 'What could that mean?'
Hurriedly, Will explained. 'No Christian is an anagram for Corinthians. The figure I refers to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians — and it must be Chapter 7, Verse 29. Which is why I wanted a bible. And here it is.'
What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short.
'He's getting desperate.'
'Will-'
'Hold on, Dad. I just want to prove something to you.
Now, I know how bizarre this will sound, but at the heart of this whole, fucked-up business seems to be a Jewish religious theory. It centres on men of exceptional goodness.'
He could see his father's face moving from pity to impatience.
'Will, what on earth are you talking about? The police brought you here on suspicion of murder tonight. Do you have any idea of the trouble you're in?'
'Oh yes, Dad, believe me. I know that I am in the deepest shit imaginable. Deeper than you think. But please hear me out on this. The Hassidim who are holding Beth say that someone — it may even be one of them for all I know — is killing good people. Extraordinarily good people. Not just here, but all over the world. What happened tonight is that I came this close to witnessing one of those killings. If the Hassidim's theory is right, the man who was murdered tonight will be a so-called righteous man. Which is why I wanted you to see this.'
He took his BlackBerry out of the police zip-loc bag, clicked on the internet browser and selected Google. Then he punched in the words 'Bitensky and Lower East Side'.
Google was searching, not fast on this handheld machine.
Finally, a page of search results. A biomedical website, something about a classical pianist. And then a link to Downtown Express, 'the weekly newspaper of lower Manhattan'. He clicked on it, waited an age for the page to load and then scrolled down. It was an archive item from a couple of years ago. He prayed for it to be something of substance, something which might prove to Monroe Sr that his son was not completely deranged.
Residents of the Greenstreet area endured a chilly start to the Passover season this week, when their apartment building was evacuated for a fire alert Tuesday.
It was after midnight when scores of residents filed together into the park, as fire crews examined the building be
fore declaring it was safe to re-enter.
While most folks were clothed only in pyjamas and robes, one group were fully dressed — since they had been taking part in the traditional seder that often continues until the early hours.
They were guests ofJudah Bitensky, one of the the last Jewish residents of a building that was once a hub for the East Broadway Jewish community. It appears that Mr Bitensky, janitor at one of the area's remaining synagogues, hosts an annual seder meal at his home — inviting all those who have no other home to go to.
'It's kind of a tradition,' said Irving Tannenbaum, 66 and a regular. 'Every year Judah opens his door to people like us.
Some of the crowd are elderly and live alone. Some are, you know, street people. It's quite a scene in there.'
Riwy Gold, 5I and homeless, added, 'It's the best meal I get all year. This is the one night I feel like I have family.'
Downtown Express counted twenty-six people heading back into Mr Bitensky's tiny apartment — including three in wheelchairs and two on crutches. Reluctant to give an interview to a reporter, Mr Bitensky was asked how he was able to feed so many, despite living on a meager income himself. 'Somehow I manage,' he said. I don't quite know how.'
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Monday, 2.25pm, Brooklyn
Will maintained his perch by the window, regularly peeling back the curtain to look out onto the street. He knew it was foolhardy. If anyone was following him, there could hardly be a better way to attract their attention. He flapped the material back and forth so often, he looked as if he were sending a coded message.
He had said goodbye to his father only minutes after they had met up. Monroe Sr had looked at him blankly when Will called up the Bitensky story on the BlackBerry, as if the whole business was just too deranged to take seriously. He had made a gesture with his face and hands — let's put all this nonsense aside — and asked Will to come back home with him.
There he would have a chance to shower, sleep and generally calm down. Linda would look after him. For his own part, he had an important case to prepare for that morning, but he would be back in the evening. Then father and son could put their heads together and work out how they were going to get Beth back. It was a tempting offer, but Will declined. He had wasted enough time already. With thanks he sent his father back to his car — and fired off a text message to TO.
To his great relief she called back. She had been released at nine that morning. Police had just viewed the CCTV tapes from her building. The footage from Saturday night included a sequence shot by the camera above the back entrance: it showed Pugachov helping TO and an unnamed man into a large bin and wheeling them out of sight. It then showed him re-entering the building a few minutes later. Not only did it confirm the admittedly strange story she had told detectives — it also showed that when TO had left Mr Pugachov, he was alive and well.
There was something in the dead man's trousers which helped, too. In his right pocket was the spare key for TO's apartment. He would surely only have needed to use that if she was not in and the door had been locked. With that second alibi, the police released TO. They even thanked her for her time — doubtless, thought Will, with a scripted paragraph from the NYPD customer care manual.
It was Will's idea to meet at Tom's, in what was a straightforward calculation. Both his and TO's apartments had been monitored; here, they had at least a chance to meet undetected.
Besides, TO had a plan — just a hunch, she said — that required major computing brainpower. Now she was standing over Tom's shoulder as he stabbed at the keyboard.
'So you're certain of the domain name?' he was saying.
'All I can tell you is what it says on the card I took.
[email protected].'
'OK, OK, that's what I'll try. Spell Mosh-, you know, for me again?'
'For the third time: M-0-S-H-I-A-C-H.'
Will glanced back out of the window. As much as Tom loved Beth, he could not stand TO. At Columbia Will had always put it down to jealousy, the difficulties of being a three.
Now he reckoned it was more like organic combustion: Tom and TO were phosphorus and sulphur. They could not meet without sparking up.
In a novel form of coping strategy, Tom chose not to talk to TO at all. He talked to himself instead.
'OK, so what we need to do is run a host domain name.'
He punched those last three words into the 'shell', a kind of empty window on the screen he had created. A few seconds later, a string of numbers appeared. 192.0.2.233 'All right, who is 192.0.2.233?' He said the words as he typed them.
Back came an answer. Among a whole lot of blurb about 'registrants' and 'administrative contacts' was the address of the Hassidim's headquarters in Crown Heights. The very building Will and TO had been in last night.
'Good, now let's talk to Arin.'
'Arin? Who the hell is Arin?'
'ARIN is the American Registry for Internet Numbers, the organization which allocates IP addresses — you know, the string of numbers we had before.'
'But I thought you already had that for this, you know, domain.'
'I had one of the numbers. ARIN will give us all the numbers allocated to this company or organization. We will have the number for every machine they have. Once we have that, we can get to work.'
Soon the screen was filled with numbers, dozens of them.
This, TO realized, was the entire Hassidic computer network, expressed in numerical form.
'All right, this is the range we'll scan.'
'What does that mean, "scan"?'
'I thought you didn't want me to get too technical. "Save the geek stuff, Tom." Remember?'
'So what do we do now?'
'We wait.'
TO headed for the couch, laying herself flat out, using Tom's overcoat as a blanket, before falling into exhausted sleep. Tom was working away on a different computer, hammering at the keys. Will alternated between staring out of the window and at a photograph on the wall: a picture of himself, Tom and Beth, wrapped up in thick winter gloves, scarves and coats in what looked like a ski resort. In fact it was the centre of Manhattan, early on a Sunday morning after a night-long blizzard. The smile on Beth's face seemed to register something more than laughter: there was, what was the word, appreciation, for the fact that life, despite everything, could be wonderful.
An hour and a half later, the computer beeped; not the trill of a new email but a simpler sound. Will turned around to find Tom jumping back to the machine he had left running.
'We're in.'
Now all three were gathered round, staring at a screen that only made sense to one of them.
'What's this, Tom?' It was Will, deciding to get the question in first — and phrase it politely — before TO had a chance to bark.
'These are the system logs for the machine we've just hacked into. This way we should be able to tell who's been in and out.'
TO was biting her nails, willing everything to happen faster.
Will was scanning not the screen but Tom's face, looking for any sign of progress. He did not like what he saw: Tom seemed puzzled. His lips were pursed; when he was on the brink of a breakthrough, they would part, in readiness for a smile.
'Nothing there. Damn.'
'Look again,' said TO. 'You might have missed something.
Look again.'
But Tom did not need to be told. He inched closer to the screen, now slowly going through each line that appeared in front of him.
'Hold on,' he said. 'This might be nothing.'
'What? What?'
'See, that line in the log. There. Time service crashed. 1.58 this morning. It might be nothing. Programmes often crash and restart automatically. No big deal.'
'But?'
'It could indicate something else.'
'Yes?'
Tom was not doing well under TO's interrogation. Will stepped in. 'Sorry, Tom. For a know-nothing like me: what's a time service?'
'It's just a bit
of the networking set-up that some people forget about. They don't turn it off so it just sits there, keeping track of the time of day.'
'So?'
'The important thing is, people forget it's there. So they don't give it the tender loving care they give to the rest of the system.
Old security holes that may have been closed elsewhere in the system sometimes get left in the time service bit.'
'You mean, it's like a hole in the garden fence, round the back where no one notices?'
'Exactly. What I'm wondering is whether this time service crashed through, you know, natural causes — or whether somebody bust right through it. If you know what you're doing, you can send in a buffer overflow, a huge bunch of data in a specific sequence, which totally screws up the time service. If you really know what you're doing, you can not only make it crash but kind of bend it to your will.'
'How do you mean?' asked Will.
'You can make it run your commands, which effectively gives you access to the server.'
Is that what happened here?'
'I don't know. I need to see the time service's own access log. That's what I'm waiting for now… whoa, hold on. This is good. See that, right there?'
He was pointing at a string of numbers by the time, 1:58am.
'Hello, stranger.'
It was a new IP address, a string of numbers different from all the others allocated to the Hassidim and their network.
This was the signature of an outsider.
'Can you see who it is?'
That's what I'm asking right now.' He typed: whois 89.23325.09?
'And here is our answer.'
Tom was pointing at the line on the screen. It took Will a second to focus on the words. But there they were, words which changed everything. Neither he nor TO could make a sound. The three of them stood in silence, looking at the address in front of them.
The organization which had hacked into the Hassidim's computer — reading everything they were reading, looking over their virtual shoulder to see every one of their calculations, including those that revealed the exact locations of the righteous men — was based in Richmond, Virginia and there, on the screen, was its full name.