Sam Bourne - The righteous men

Rabbi.Freilich@Moshiachlives.com.'

'OK, OK, that's what I'll try. Spell Mosh-, you know, for me again?'

'For the third time: M-0-S-H-I-A-C-H.'

Will glanced back out of the window. As much as Tom loved Beth, he could not stand TO. 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 TO were phosphorus and sulphur. They could not meet without sparking up.

In a novel form of coping strategy, Tom chose not to talk to TO 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 TO 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, TO 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.'

TO 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 TO 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.'

TO 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 TO. '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 TO'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 TO 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.