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 TC 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.’
TC 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 TC. ‘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 TC’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 89.23.325.09?
‘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 TC 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.
The Church of the Reborn Jesus.
Monday, 5.13pm, Darfur, Sudan
The night of the thirty-fifth killing was almost silent. In this heat, and with so little food, people were too listless to make much noise. The call to prayer was the only loud sound to be heard all day; the rest was moans and whispers.
Mohammed Omar saw the heat-wave shimmering on the horizon and reckoned sunset would be only a few minutes away. That was the way it was in Darfur: the sun would sneak up without warning in the morning and disappear just as quickly at night. Maybe it was like that everywhere in Sudan, everywhere in Africa. Mohammed did not know: he had never travelled beyond this rocky desert.
It was time for his evening tour of the camp. He would check in first on Hawa, the thirteen-year-old girl who had, too young, become a kind of mother to her six sisters. They had fled to the camp two weeks ago, after the Janjaweed militiamen had torched their village. The little girls were too scared to talk, but Hawa told Mohammed what had happened. In the middle of the night, terrifying men had arrived on horseback, waving flaming torches. They had set everything alight. Hawa had scooped up her sisters and started running. Only once they got away did she realize that her parents had been left behind. They had both been killed.
Now, in the corner of a hut made of straw and sticks, she held her three-year-old sister in her arms. By the doorway, on the ground, stood a battered pot. Inside, a meagre ration of porridge.
Mohammed walked on, steeling himself for the next stop on the tour: the ‘clinic’, in reality another frail hut. Kosar, the nurse, was there and her face told him what he did not want to hear. ‘How many?’ he asked.
‘Three. And maybe one more tonight.’ They had been losing three children a day for weeks now. With no medicine and no food, he did not know how he could stop the dying.
He looked around. An empty corner of desert, sheltered by a few scrubby trees. He had not meant to start a refugee camp here. What did he know of such things? He was a tailor. He was not a doctor or an official, but he could see what was going on. There were columns of desperate people, often children, walking through the desert, searching for food and shelter. They spoke of village after village destroyed by the Janjaweed, the men who burnt and killed and raped while government aeroplanes circled overhead. Somebody had to do something – and, without ever really thinking it through, that somebody had been him.
He had started with a few tents, two of them stitched together on his old Singer machine. He collected a few axes and gave them to the men to get firewood. They struggled. One, Abdul, was desperate to help but the burns on his hands were so bad he could not hold an axe. Mohammed saw him, his hands so scorched he could not even wipe away his own tears.
Still, they chopped enough wood to start a fire and, once it burned, it worked as a beacon. More refugees came.
Now there were thousands of people here; there was no time to count them precisely. They pooled what meagre resources they had. These people were farmers; what little could be conjured from the earth, they somehow teased out. But there was not enough.
Mohammed knew what he needed: outside help. In the few hours of sleep he snatched each night, he would dream of a convoy of white vehicles arriving one bright morning, each one loaded with crates of grain and boxes of medicine. Even with just five vehicles – just one – he could save so many lives.
It was then he saw the headlights, shining through the dusk. Strong and yellow, they were coming his way, their light wobbling in the heat haze. Mohammed could not help himself. He began jumping up and down, waving his arms in a wild semaphore. ‘Here!’ he was shouting. ‘Here! We are here!’