The Righteous Men (2006) (9 page)

Quietly, almost meekly, Will asked, ‘And so you went ahead with it?’

‘We did. I performed the operation myself. And I tell you, in my whole
career there was no operation that made me prouder. All of us felt it: the
anaesthetist, the nurses. There was an extraordinary atmosphere in theatre that
day; as if something truly remarkable was happening.’

‘And did all go smoothly?’

‘Yes it did, it did. The recipient took the organ just fine.’

‘Can I ask what kind of recipient we’re talking about?

Young, old, male, female?’

‘It was a young woman. I won’t say any more than that.’

‘And even though she was young, and he was old, it all worked out?’

‘Well, this was the strangest thing. We tested that kidney, obviously,
monitored it very closely. And you know what?

Baxter was in his fifties, but that organ worked like it was forty years
younger than he was. It was very strong, completely healthy. It was perfect.’

‘And it made all the difference for that young woman?’

‘It saved her life. The staff and I wanted to have some kind of
ceremony for him, after the operation, to thank him for what he’d done.
It won’t surprise you to hear that never happened. He discharged himself
before we’d even had a chance to say goodbye. He just clean disappeared.’

‘And was that the last you heard from him?’

‘No, I heard from him once more, just a few months ago.

He wanted to make arrangements for after his death—’

‘Really?’

‘Don’t get too excited, Mr Monroe. I don’t think he knew he
was about to die. But he wanted to be sure that everything, his entire body,
would be used.’ Huntley gave a rueful chuckle. ‘He even asked me
what would be the optimal way for him to die.’

‘Optimal?’

‘From our point of view. What would work best, if we wanted to get his
heart, say, to a recipient. I think he was worried, because he lived so far
away, that if he was killed in a road accident, for example, by the time he got
to a hospital, his heart would be useless. Of course, the one scenario he didn’t
count on was a brutal murder.’

‘Do you have any idea—’

‘I have no idea at all who could have wanted this man dead, no. I said
the same to Dr Russell just now. I can only think it was a completely random,
awful crime. Because no one who knew him would want to murder such a man. They couldn’t.’

She paused and Will chose to let the silence hang. One thing he had learned:
say nothing and your interviewee will often fill the void with the best quote
of the entire conversation.

Eventually Dr Huntley, with what Will thought was a crack in her voice,
spoke again. ‘We discussed this when it happened and we discussed it
again today and my colleagues and I agree. What this man did, what Pat Baxter
did for a person he had never met and would never meet — this was truly
the most righteous act we have ever known.’

H
e woke at six am, back now in
his Seattle hotel room. He had filed his story from Missoula and then made the
long journey cross-country. As he wrote the piece, he was powered by a single,
delicious thought:
Eat this, Walton
. What had that prick said?
‘Once
counts as an achievement, William; twice would be a miracle.’

Will prayed he had pulled it off. His greatest fear was that the desk might
find it too similar to the Macrae story, another good man among knaves. So he
had played up the militia angle, thrown in lots of Pacific Northwest colour and
hoped for the best. He even toyed with ditching the quote about Baxter’s
action being ‘righteous’, the very same word that woman had used
about Howard Macrae. It might look contrived. Still, it would be more contrived
to ignore it.

He reached for his BlackBerry, whose red light was winking hopefully: new
messages.

Harden, Glenn:
Nice job today, Monroe
. That was what he wanted to
hear. It meant he had avoided the spike; if only he could see Walton’s face.
The next email looked like spam; the sender’s name was not clear, just a
string of hieroglyphics.

Will was poised to delete it when the single word in the subject field made
him click it open. Beth. He had not even read all the words when he felt his
blood freeze.

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.

T
he nights were getting
cooler. Still, Sanjay Ramesh preferred to stay here in the air-conditioned
chill of the office than risk the suffocating heat of the city. He would wait
till the sun had fully set before heading for home.

That way he might avoid not only the clammy heat, but the ordeal of the
stoop. Every night it happened, his mother trading gossip and health complaints
with her friends as they sat outside until late. He found himself tongue-tied
in such company; in most company as it happened. Besides, September might be
cool by the standards of Chennai but it was still punishingly hot and sticky.
Inside this room, an aircraft hangar of an open-plan office, filled by row
after row of sound-muffling cubicles, the conditions were just right. For what
he needed to do, it was the perfect environment.

It was a call centre, one of thousands that had sprung up across India. Four
storeys packed with young Indians taking calls from America or Britain, from
people in Philadelphia anxious to pay their phone bill or travellers in
Macclesfield wanting to check the train times to Manchester. Few, if any, of
them ever realized their call was being routed to the other side of the world.

Sanjay liked his job well enough. For an eighteen-year-old living at home,
the money was good. And he could work odd shifts to fit in with his studies.
The big draw, though, was right here inside this little cubicle. He had
everything he needed: a chair, a desk and, most important of all, a computer with
a fast connection to the world.

Sanjay was young, but he was a veteran of the internet. He discovered it
when both he and it were in their infancy. There were only a few hundred
websites then, maybe a thousand. As he had grown, so had it. The worldwide web expanded
like a binary number sequence — 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 — apparently
doubling its size with each passing day, until it now girdled the globe many
times over. Sanjay had not matched that pace physically of course — if
anything he was a slight, skinny lad — but he felt his mind had kept up.

As the internet grew, he grew with it, constantly opening up whole new areas
of knowledge and curiosity. From his upstairs bedroom in India, he had
travelled to Brazil, mastered the disputed border politics of Nagorno-Karabakh,
laughed at Indonesian cartoons, gazed inside the world of the Scottish caravan
enthusiast, scanned the junior fencing league tables of Flanders and seen what
really motivated the tree-growers of Taipei. There was no corner of human
activity closed off to him. The internet had shown him everything.

Including the images he had not wanted to see, the ones that had prompted
the project he had completed just twenty four hours earlier. He was a late
developer as a computer hacker, coming to it when he was fifteen: most started
before they were teenagers. He had played the usual tricks — hacking into
the NATO target list, coming within one click of shutting down the Pentagon
system — but each time he had held back from pressing the final button.
Causing mayhem held no appeal for him. It would only give people a lot of grief
and, his surfing of the web had taught him, there was plenty of that in the
world already.

Now he felt the urge to laugh, partly at his own genius, partly at the joke
he had played on those he had designated as his enemy. It had taken him months
to perfect, but it had worked.

He had devised a benign virus, one capable of spreading through the
computers of the world just as rapidly as any of the poisonous varieties
hatched by his fellow boy-geniuses, those whose malign purpose made them, in
the argot of the web, crackers rather than hackers.

At this moment, it was his method, rather than his objective, which
delighted him. Like most viruses, his was designed to spread via ordinary
desktop computers, those that were connected to the internet all the time.
While people in Hong Kong or Hanover were tapping away, emailing their friends or
doing their accounts, or even fast asleep, his little baby was inside their
machine, hard at work.

He had given it a target to look for and, just like everyone else, it used
Google to find it. Invisible to the user, below the screen, it got back its
results and used them to compile what Sanjay thought of as an enemies list.
These would be the sites to feel the virus’s wrath. All of them, like any
other site, would have some bug or glitch in their software: the challenge was
to find it. For that, hackers (and crackers) would devise a set of ‘exploits’,
designed to trigger the glitch. It might mean sending it a little nugget of
data the software was not expecting; even one rogue symbol, a semi-colon
perhaps, might do the trick. You never knew until you tried. Sanjay imagined it
like medieval warfare: you would fire hundreds of arrows at a castle, knowing
that only one might find the slit in the stone and get through. Each castle
would have a different gap in the armour, a different weakness. But if your list
of exploits was long enough, you would find it eventually.

And once you had, you could take down the site and the server that was
hosting it. It would be gone, just like that.

And these sites certainly deserved to disappear. But Sanjay had taken his
war against them a stage further. Most hackers stored their list of exploits on
a single server, usually salted away in the bandit country of the internet, a
place out of the reach of the regulators. Romania and Russia were favourites.

This method carried with it a fatal weakness, however: once the attacked
sites realized the source of the enemy fire, they could simply block access to
the server containing the exploits.

The raids would stop.

Sanjay had found a solution. His virus would get its arsenal of exploits
from a variety of sources and would even carry some of this payload itself.
Better still, he had programmed it to retrieve extra exploits every now and
then, to improve itself. He had created a magician constantly able to replenish
his bag of tricks. And creation was the right word, for Sanjay felt he had
conceived a living creature. In technical language, it was a ‘genetic
algorithm’ a piece of coding that was able to change. To evolve.

His virus would alter its list of exploits, even its method of distribution
— sometimes through email, sometimes through bulletin boards, sometimes
through bugs in web browsers as it spread throughout the infinite universe that
was the internet. In this way, the virus would reproduce itself, but its ‘children’
would not be identical either to the original virus or to each other. They
would mutate, by picking up new exploits and new methods of propagation from
sources all over the virtual world. Some of these sources would be servers in
the internet badlands of eastern Europe, some would be found by scanning
security bulletin boards — where people would discuss how to thwart the
very tricks Sanjay was deploying. Sanjay was proud of his creation, travelling across
the globe, imitating and bettering itself in a million different ways — thereby
making itself all but impossible to track down and eliminate. Even if he never
touched a computer again, they would continue without him. Still a teenager, he
felt like a proud father, or rather, a great-great-grandfather — the founder
of a vast dynasty. His progeny were everywhere.

And they were engaged in noble work. Scanning the results now, he could see
he had set the parameters sufficiently narrowly that only the target sites were
collapsing. Within a matter of hours, every one of the world’s websites
dedicated to child pornography would dissolve. Sanjay was laughing because he
could see that the final command he had programmed into the virus was also now
taking effect. Each of the sites that once displayed violent and pornographic images
of children was now replaced by a single picture: a 1950s, Norman
Rockwell-style drawing of a son on his mother’s knee. Below it ran a
simple, four-word message:
Read to your kids
.

Sanjay headed home, grinning at his joke — and his accomplishment. No
one needed to know what he had done; he knew and that was enough. The world
would be a better place.

Even at night Chennai was a noisy city, as raucous as it had been when it
was Madras. Perhaps that, and the fact that his mind was racing with his
success, is why he did not hear the footsteps behind him. Perhaps that is why
he saw and suspected nothing until he was walking down the side alley to his
own house, when he felt a handkerchief over his mouth and heard his own muffled
screams. There was a sharp pricking sensation on the side of his arm and then a
woozy slide downward into sleep.

When Mrs Ramesh found her only son dead on the ground, she screamed loud
enough to be heard three streets away. It gave her no comfort that her boy
— who had dreamt of one day doing something ‘for children’
and who had been murdered before he had a chance to do anything — had
been killed by some apparently painless injection. Police admitted they were
baffled by the murder; they had seen none like it before. There was no sign of
violence or, God forbid, abuse.

And there was the odd demeanour of the body. As if it had been handled with
care. ‘Laid to rest was how the policeman had put it. ‘It must mean
something, Mrs Ramesh,’ he had said. ‘Your son’s body was
draped in a purple blanket. And, as everyone knows, purple is the colour of
princes.’