The Righteous Men (2006) Read online

  Now, as he would in court, he asked all the pertinent questions, pressing his son to tell him everything he could work out about the sender. Finally, he delivered his ruling.

  ‘It’s obviously an attempt at extortion. They must know about Beth’s parents. It’s a classic ransom demand.’

  Beth’s parents. He would have to tell them. How would he even utter the words? ‘I want to call the police,’ said Will.

  ‘They know how to handle these things.’

  ‘No, we mustn’t do anything too rash. My understanding is that kidnappers usually assume the victim’s family will go to the police: they factor it into their planning. There must be a reason why these people are so determined to avoid the police being involved.’

  ‘Of course they don’t want the police to be involved! They’re fucking kidnappers, Dad!’

  ‘Will, calm down.’

  ‘How can I calm down?’ Will could feel his voice about to break. His eyes were stinging. He did not dare try speaking again.

  ‘Oh, Will. Listen, we’re going to get through this, I promise.

  First, you need to get back here. Immediately. Go to the airport right away. I’ll meet you off the flight.’

  Those five hours in the air were the hardest of Will’s life. He stared out of the window, his leg oscillating in a nervous tic that used to strike him during exams. He refused all food and drink, until he noticed the cabin attendants were eyeing him suspiciously. He did not want them thinking he was poised to blow up the plane, so he sipped some water. And all the time he was imagining his beloved Beth. What were they doing to her? He began to picture her tied to a chair, while some sadist dangled a knife—

  It took all his strength to stop such thoughts before they had picked up speed. His guts were turning over. How could I not have been there? If only I had phoned earlier. Maybe she called the cell phone when I was asleep…

  Throughout he held the BlackBerry in the palm of his hand. He hated everything about this accursed machine. Even to glance at it brought those chilling words right back. He could see them now, hovering in the air in front of him:

  INVOLVE THE POLICE AND YOU WILL LOSE HER.

  He looked at the device, so small yet now containing so much poison. It was sleeping: no signal at this height. He kept watching the icon at the top right that would tell him when it was back within range. As the plane began its descent, he stole peeks at it. He did not want the flight attendants reminding him that they had asked that all ‘electronic devices be turned off until the aircraft has come to a complete stop’.

  At last he could see the sparkle of New York City in mid afternoon. She’s down there. The bridges, the highways, the flickering necklaces of light criss-crossing the whole vast metropolis. She’s there somewhere.

  He glanced down at the BlackBerry, moist with his own palm-sweat. The icon had changed; it was back in range. Now the red light was flashing. Will’s heart began to pound. He looked at the new messages flowing in, each one taking its place like passengers in a bus queue. Some round-robin cinema listing; an internal message from work about a lost notebook. There was a news-alert from the BBC website.

  Tributes have been pouring in for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gavin Curtis, found dead this evening, apparently from a drugs overdose. Police say he was found by a cleaner in his Westminster flat, with an excess of a sedative drug in his bloodstream. It’s believed that the police are not looking for anyone else in connection with Mr Curtis’s death …

  Will was staring out of the window, just imagining the media frenzy back in London. He had grown up there: he knew what the British press was like when its blood was up.

  They had been gunning for this guy for days and now they had got their scalp. Will could not remember the last time a politician had actually topped himself: when it came to taking responsibility, resignation was usually as far as they would go, and even that had become pretty rare. This Curtis must have been guilty as hell.

  And then one more message popped into the BlackBerry.

  the same hieroglyphic string that refused to reveal itself. Subject: Beth.

  Will clicked it open.

  WE DO NOT WANT MONEY.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Friday, 2.14pm, Brooklyn

  ‘It must be a bluff.’

  ‘Dad, you’ve said that three times. Tell me, what do you think we should do? Should we offer them money anyway? What should we fucking do?’

  ‘Will, I don’t blame you at all, but you must calm down. If we’re to get Beth back we need to think as clearly as we can.’

  That ‘if stopped Will short.

  They were in Will and Beth’s apartment. There was no sign of a break-in; everything was how he had last seen it. Except now a chill seemed to be coming off the walls and ceilings: the absence of Beth.

  ‘Let’s think through what we know. We know that their first priority is that the police not be involved: they said it in their very first message. We also know that they say it’s not about money. But if this is not about ransom, why else would they care so much about keeping the police out of it? They must be bluffing. Let’s think about your email address. Who has it?’

  ‘Everyone has it! It’s the same pattern for the whole Times staff. Anyone could work it out.’

  A phone rang; Will pounced on his, frantically pressing buttons, but the sound kept coming. Calmly, his father answered his own phone. Nothing to do with this, he mouthed silently, disappearing into another room for a hushed conversation.

  His father was proving no help. The aid he was offering was defiantly of the masculine variety, practical rather than emotional, and even that was not getting anywhere. Suddenly Will realized how much he missed his mother. Ever since he had been with Beth, that sentiment had become rarer and rarer: his wife was his confidante now. But, for a long while, that role had belonged to his mother.

  In England, they had been a team, united by what he suddenly thought of as their loneliness. In his mother’s version of the story, at least, she and Will had been abandoned by his father, leaving the two of them to fend for themselves.

  He knew there were alternative accounts, not that his father was in too much of a hurry to share his. The fate of his parents’ marriage was a long-running puzzle to Will Monroe.

  He was never completely sure what happened.

  One version said Monroe Sr had chosen his career over his family: over-work broke the young marriage. Another theory cited geography: wife was desperate to return to England, husband was determined to advance through the US legal system and refused to leave America. Will’s maternal grandmother, a silver-haired Hampshire lady with a severe expression that frightened the young boy the first time he saw her, and for years afterwards, once spoke darkly of ‘the other great passion’ in his father’s life. When he was old enough to inquire further, his grandmother shrugged it off.

  To this day, he did not know if that ‘great passion’ was another woman or the law.

  Will’s own memories offered little help; he was barely seven years old when his parents began to come apart. He remembered the atmosphere, the gloom that would descend after his father had stormed out, slamming the door. Or the shock of finding his mother, red-faced and hoarse after another fierce round of shouting. He once woke up from sleep to hear his father pleading, ‘I just want to do what’s right.’ Will had tiptoed out of bed to find a place where he could watch his parents unseen. He could not understand the words they were saying but he could feel their force. It was at that moment, hearing his British mother and American father at full volume, that the seven year old boy developed a theory: his mummy and daddy could not love each other because they had different voices.

  Once they were back in England, his mother gave few clues as to what had brought them there. Even raising the topic carried the risk of turning 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 remembere
d 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.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  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 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?’