Michael Morley - Spider

Ask Tariq whether he loved Islam more than America and the devout 35-year-old would dismiss your question as naive and ask you if you loved your child more than your wife or husband. His love for both Islam and America was equally passionate but subtly different and, because he didn't view them as mutually exclusive, when the chance came to join the New York bureau of one of the Middle East's largest and fastest growing news channels, he saw it as his dream job.

But lately, just lately, he'd started to worry about whether he'd made the right choice. As a staffer at Reuters he had been welcomed into any press gang in any hotel bar in the world. Similarly, his contacts book boasted some of the most important political, legal and social names in the country. But these days his calls went unanswered. His requests for access got turned down. And the press pack in the hotel bars always seemed to be turning in for the night whenever he arrived.

Right now Tariq el Daher was beginning to fear his dream job had turned into a dire nightmare. He looked at the first draft of the Prospects List his deputy had prepared for tomorrow and was disappointed at how thin it was. A couple of murders, both drive-by shootings in Queens, were only mildly interesting. A suicide by a Muslim woman who'd been secretly seeing a well-known professional gambler – that looked a bit spicier. But it was still thin.

He wanted coffee but his PA had disappeared from her desk again. The woman would have to go. She had been hired only for a month, from a temping agency, and was never at her desk when he needed her. Tariq couldn't be bothered making it himself so he tapped open the Inbox on his computer. Back in his Reuters days he used to fear firing up his machine. He'd easily have to clear more than a hundred e-mails a day. These days, he was lucky to find ten, and two would always be from his wife. Today was no different. He worked down the short list and killed junk mail offering him great deals on everything from stock market info to cut-price Viagra. The last message caught his eye.

It was marked simply 'Exclusive' and seemingly had been sent by a company called 'Insidexclusive'. He clicked it open. The mail was blank except for the web hyperlink www.Insidexclusive.com. And the instruction 'Enter the Password 898989'. He ran the cursor over it and pressed it. A box popped up saying 'Enter password before ten p.m.' Tariq glanced across at the office clock. There was plenty of time. He typed it in. The box disappeared and the screen started filling with the vertical colour bars that you sometimes see at the start of videotape. Then the bars disappeared and a black-and-grey mist filled the frame. Gradually, an image started to emerge, out-of-focus and blurred, as though the camera were moving rapidly sideways while simultaneously trying to focus. Eventually, he could make out something that looked like a newspaper, maybe a copy of USA Today, lying on the floor. Tariq got ready to kill the tape, dismissing it as another viral e-mail, sent by some trash advertiser pushing their useless products. Then he noticed that the camera lingered on the front of the newspaper. Tariq could even see the date. It was three days old, the second of July. He sat back and gave the video a chance; maybe this was USA Today trying out some weird cutting-edge marketing campaign. The camera slowly zoomed out and the paper seemed to disappear into blackness. Then the edge of a table came into shot. Tariq bolted forward in his seat. The newspaper shot suddenly made sense; it was there to show him that what he was watching was real and was current. The zoom stopped and the picture became razor sharp. Tariq could clearly make out the prostrate form of a naked young white woman chained to some kind of table.

'Sweet God alive!' he swore out loud.

The picture on his screen cut to an overhead shot.

He could see the young girl's battered face in horrifying close-up. She kept rocking her head from side to side with distressed monotony. Tariq had seen enough war-zone pictures, enough video evidence of tortured people to know what was real and what wasn't. He had no doubt about its authenticity. The girl was in an advanced state of trauma, and the rocking was a sure sign that she was close to breaking point.

Suddenly, the camera started to zoom in again. This time it headed towards the right side of the table.

On the floor, three white pieces of paper slowly became visible.

Tariq bent towards the monitor and squinted hard. He could see some big, blurred shapes or letters on each of them. The zoom stopped and the picture became sharp.

Tariq was shocked and confused. Three words blazed off the screen back at him: 'HA! HA! HA!'

FBI Field Office, New York Howie Baumguard finished his call with the Director of the FBI and speed-dialled Jack King's cell number. His eyes never left the news bulletin on the TV screen.

In Rome, Jack was already asleep. The third rude peel of ring tone woke him. 'Hello,' he said groggily.

'Jack, it's Howie, I'm real sorry to wake you, I guess you were sleeping -'

Jack flicked on a bedside light. 'Yeah, oddly enough you guessed right. Sleep is that freaky thing that oddballs like me do every night for as long as we possibly can.'

Howie gunned up the sound a little on the TV as he spoke. 'I'm sorry, buddy, I'm not dicking around, I had to call you. We've got a real shit storm blowing up.'

Jack dropped his smart-ass act. 'What's wrong? Are you okay?'

'I'm fine, no worries, but we've got a situation and it looks like it's related to our favourite sociopath, old BR-fucking-K himself.'

The mention of the Black River Killer was enough to get Jack to sit up. 'How do you mean? Go slowly with me, buddy; I'm not fully awake yet.'

'Well, this sure as hell is going to wake you up. You know Pan Arabia, the Arab channel set up in competition to Al Jazeera, the guys who do the special line in Bin Laden home videos?'

Jack rubbed sleep from his eyes. 'Yeah, I was part of one of the early validation teams that checked them out.'

'Well, they've got themselves one hell of a fucking exclusive this morning. They just friggin' well ran some video footage and a story about a woman being held hostage and being tortured to death.'

Jack struggled to catch it all. 'I don't get it, Howie; you're going to have to go slower, man. They've got pictures of an Arab woman hostage and you think it's somehow connected to BRK?'

'Fuck!' said Howie. 'I'm sorry. Let me start again. They're running an exclusive story on their English news channel, not their normal Arab output, video footage and a voiceover from their chief crime guy, Tariq el Daher. The report they've cobbled together shows a young white woman chained up in some kind of dark room. She looks in a hell of a fucking way. They're rerunning it now if you can find it on your TV over there.'

'I'll look when we're done,' said Jack, straining his eyes open. 'I'm still spaced-out at the moment.'

'Jack, you should see this girl, she looks really beat-up and distressed. Our friend Tariq showed a copy to some dumb-ass detective on Homicide down at the NYPD and got quotes enough to stand up a line that there's a nationwide hunt to find this kid before she gets croaked.'

'How do you know the footage is for real?' asked Jack, his brain in gear at last.

'I'm pretty sure it is,' said Howie. 'There's a copy of USA Today on the floor in the video and it's dated July the second, and here's the clincher, Jack, there were three other pieces of paper in the video, spelling out the words "HA! HA! HA!"'

Jack's head started to pound. 'Was it written the same way BRK did in his note here in Italy?'

'The very same way,' said Howie. 'All big capitals.'

'Holy fuck!' The worst of Jack's fears were coming true. The Italian connection was indeed a red herring, just as he'd told Orsetta he suspected. And, as he'd also guessed, BRK had been planning a new spree of America-based violence that was turning out to be unthinkably horrendous. 'Howie, do you really think this girl is being held right now by BRK somewhere in America? You reckon we've just been pissing in the wind over here in Italy?'