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.’
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