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.
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