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 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
