The Righteous Men (2006) (45 page)

To his great relief she called back. She had been released at nine that
morning. Police had just viewed the CCTV tapes from her building. The footage
from Saturday night included a sequence shot by the camera above the back
entrance: it showed Pugachov helping TC and an unnamed man into a large bin and
wheeling them out of sight. It then showed him re-entering the building a few
minutes later. Not only did it confirm the admittedly strange story she had
told detectives — it also showed that when TC had left Mr Pugachov, he
was alive and well.

There was something in the dead man’s trousers which helped, too. In
his right pocket was the spare key for TC’s apartment. He would surely
only have needed to use that if she was not in and the door had been locked. With
that second alibi, the police released TC. They even thanked her for her time
— doubtless, thought Will, with a scripted paragraph from the NYPD
customer care manual.

It was Will’s idea to meet at Tom’s, in what was a
straightforward calculation. Both his and TC’s apartments had been monitored;
here, they had at least a chance to meet undetected.

Besides, TC had a plan — just a hunch, she said — that required
major computing brainpower. Now she was standing over Tom’s shoulder as
he stabbed at the keyboard.

‘So you’re certain of the domain name?’ he was saying.

‘All I can tell you is what it says on the card I took. [email protected].’

‘OK, OK, that’s what I’ll try. Spell Mosh—, you
know, for me again?’

‘For the third time: M-O-S-H-I-A-C-H.’

Will glanced back out of the window. As much as Tom loved Beth, he could not
stand TC. At Columbia Will had always put it down to jealousy, the difficulties
of being a three. Now he reckoned it was more like organic combustion: Tom and TC
were phosphorus and sulphur. They could not meet without sparking up.

In a novel form of coping strategy, Tom chose not to talk to TC at all. He
talked to himself instead.

‘OK, so what we need to do is run a host domain name.’ He
punched those last three words into the ‘shell’, a kind of empty
window on the screen he had created. A few seconds later, a string of numbers
appeared. 192.0.2.233 All right, who is 192.0.2.233?’ He said the words
as he typed them.

Back came an answer. Among a whole lot of blurb about ‘registrants’
and ‘administrative contacts’ was the address of the Hassidim’s
headquarters in Crown Heights. The very building Will and TC had been in last
night.

‘Good, now let’s talk to Arin.’

‘Arin? Who the hell is Arin?’

‘ARIN is the American Registry for Internet Numbers, the organization
which allocates IP addresses — you know, the string of numbers we had
before.’

‘But I thought you already had that for this, you know, domain.’

‘I had one of the numbers. ARIN will give us all the numbers allocated
to this company or organization. We will have the number for every machine they
have. Once we have that, we can get to work.’

Soon the screen was filled with numbers, dozens of them. This, TC realized,
was the entire Hassidic computer network, expressed in numerical form.

‘All right, this is the range we’ll scan.’

‘What does that mean, “scan”?’

‘I thought you didn’t want me to get too technical. “Save the
geek stuff, Tom.” Remember?’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We wait.’

TC headed for the couch, laying herself flat out, using Tom’s overcoat
as a blanket, before falling into exhausted sleep. Tom was working away on a
different computer, hammering at the keys. Will alternated between staring out of
the window and at a photograph on the wall: a picture of himself, Tom and Beth,
wrapped up in thick winter gloves, scarves and coats in what looked like a ski
resort. In fact it was the centre of Manhattan, early on a Sunday morning after
a night-long blizzard. The smile on Beth’s face seemed to register
something more than laughter: there was, what was the word,
appreciation
,
for the fact that life, despite everything, could be wonderful.

An hour and a half later, the computer beeped; not the trill of a new email
but a simpler sound. Will turned around to find 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 89.23325.09?

‘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.

T
he 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!’

The truck slowed down until Mohammed could get a better view. This was not
an aid team, but just two men.

‘I come in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ,’ the first man
began in English, rapidly translated by the second.

‘Welcome, welcome,’ said Mohammed, grabbing his visitors with
both arms in gratitude. ‘Welcome, welcome.’

‘I have some food and drugs in the back. Do you have people to unload
it?’

A crowd had already assembled. After the interpreter had spoken, Mohammed
nominated two of the strongest teenagers, a boy and a girl, to take the boxes
off the truck. He then summoned a couple of men he could trust to stand guard:
the last thing he wanted was a food riot, as hunger and desperation sparked a
stampede.

‘Do you think we could talk?’ the visitor asked. Mohammed answered
with a gesture, ushering his guest towards an empty hut. The man followed,
carrying a slim, dark briefcase.

‘It’s taken me a long time to find you, sir. Am I right that you
are in charge? This is a camp you started?’

‘Yes,’ Mohammed said, unsure whether to look at the translator or
his boss.

‘And you have done this all by yourself? No one is paying you to do
this? You don’t work for any organization? You did this purely out of the
goodness of your own heart?’

‘Yes, but this is not important,’ Mohammed said through the
interpreter. ‘I am not important.’

At that, the visitor smiled and said, ‘Good.’

‘People are dying here,’ Mohammed continued. ‘What help can
you give them? Urgently!’

The visitor smiled again. ‘Oh, I can promise them the greatest help of
all. And it won’t be long to wait. Not long at all’

He then clicked the two side-locks of his briefcase and produced a syringe. ‘First,
I want to say what an honour it is for me to meet you. It is an honour to know
that the righteous truly live among us.’

‘Thank you, but I don’t understand.’

‘I’m afraid I need to give you this. It’s important that a
man such as yourself should feel no pain or suffering. No pain or suffering at
all.’

Suddenly the interpreter was gripping Mohammed’s arm, forcing him onto
the ground. Mohammed tried to escape, but he was too weak and this hand too
strong. Now, towering over him, was the visitor, holding the syringe up to the
light. He was speaking in English, lowering himself closer to Mohammed. As he
did so, the interpreter was whispering directly into his ear.