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 of charge. If someone spotted a fault, they could dive right in and correct it. After all, it belonged to all the people who used it.
It meant Tom earned a fraction of the money that could have been his, selling just enough of his computer brainpower to pay the rent. He did not care; the principles came first.
‘Tom, it’s Will. You home?’
He had answered on his mobile; he could be anywhere.
‘Nope.’
‘What’s that music?’ He could hear what sounded like the operatic voice of a woman.
‘This, my friend, is the Himmelfahrts-Oratorium by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Ascension Oratorio, Barbara Schlick, soprano—’
‘What are you, at a concert?’
‘Record store.’
‘The one near your apartment?’
‘Yup.’
‘Can I meet you at your place in twenty minutes? Something very urgent has come up.’ He regretted that straight away. On a cell phone.
‘You OK. You sound, you know, panicky.’
‘Can you be there? Twenty minutes?’
‘’K.’
Tom’s place was odd, the embodiment of the man. There was almost nothing in the fridge but row after row of mineral water, testament to his rather peculiar aversion to drinks of any kind, hot or cold. No coffee, no juice, no beer. Just water. And the bed was in the living room, a concession to his insomnia: when Tom woke up at three am, he wanted to be able to get straight back online and to work, falling down again when he next felt tired. Usually these quirks would spark some kind of lecture from Will, urging his friend to join the rest of the human race, or at least the Brooklyn branch of it, but not today.
Will strode right in and gestured to Tom to close the door.
‘Do you have any weird gadgets attached to your computer, any microphones or cell phones or speakerphones or anything weird that might mean that what we’re saying now could in some way that I don’t understand get on to the internet?’
‘Excuse me? What are you talking about?’
‘You know what I mean. One of your techie things that I can’t even find the words for; do you have anything that could be recording our conversation and saving it as some audio file that you won’t even realize has happened till later?’
‘Er, no.’ Tom’s voice and face were crinkled into the expression that says, Of course not, you psycho.
‘Good, because what we are about to talk about is terrible and it is also one hundred per cent secret and cannot, underline cannot, be discussed with anyone – especially not the police.’
Tom could see his friend was in deadly earnest and also desperate. Permanently ashen-faced, Tom paled to a shade of light porcelain.
‘Is this on?’ Will said, gesturing at one of several computers on the work bench, picking the one that looked most like his own. It was a silly question. When were Tom’s computers ever off? ‘Is this a browser?’ This much internet language Will could manage. Tom nodded; he looked scared.
Will did not ask if Tom’s computers were secure: he knew there were none safer. Encryption was a Fontaine specialism.
Will typed in the address to access his web mail, then, when the page appeared, his name and password. His inbox. He scrolled down and clicked open the first message.
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.
Tom, who was standing, reading over Will’s shoulder, almost jumped back. He let out a low moan, as if he had been struck. Only now did Will even think of it: Tom was crazy about Beth. Not romantically – he was no rival – but in an almost childlike way. Tom would often walk the few blocks over to their apartment to eat – a contrast with the sushi-in-a-box consumed in front of his screen that constituted the rest of his diet – and seemed to gain nourishment from Beth’s attention. She chided him like an older sister and he took it; he even let her buy him a stylish jacket that he wore, briefly, in place of the dead-man’s coat that seemed glued to his back.
Will had not banked on this: Tom having feelings of his own about Beth’s disappearance.
‘Oh my God,’ he was saying softly. Will said nothing, giving him a moment to absorb the shock. He decided to short-circuit the next stage by summarizing all the conclusions he, along with his father, had drawn so far. He showed Tom the second email, to establish the fact that the kidnappers seemed more interested in secrecy, and the non-involvement of the authorities, than in any ransom. The explanation was entirely mysterious, but there could be no question of telling the police.
‘Tom, I need you to do whatever it takes to work out where these emails have come from. That’s what the police would do, so that’s what you have to do.’
Tom nodded, but his hands barely moved. He was still dazed.
‘Tom, I know how much Beth means to you. And how much you mean to her. But what she needs from you right now is for you to be the laser-beam-focus computer genius. OK?’