"Don't tell me." Gabriel grinned. "Some digital babe in the kingdom of Dreadshine." He was referring to one of Isidore's regular haunts on the Internet: a multi-user domain of the more surreal kind. Here, in a cyberworld entirely built up of words, Isidore regularly turned himself into a medieval knight slaying gremlins and demons with ruthless gusto. Isidore and a host of other Dread-shine residents-all equally dazzled by the products of their own imagination-had a grand old time amazing one another with their cleverness and virtual feats of daring. But never any face-to-face contact. Romance and adventure via keyboard. It was all a little sad.
Gabriel gave Isidore an abbreviated salute. "So have fun."
"Always." Isidore grinned wolfishly.
As Gabriel walked down the stairs, the music started up again. Belinda Carlisle, this time. Good grief.
Contrary to what Isidore thought, Gabriel did not have a date tonight. He was looking forward to a glass of twenty-year-old Scotch, some spicy stir-fry and a long soak in his cedar-paneled and very expensive bathtub.
As he walked into the loft, the light was blinking on his answering machine but he ignored it. After hanging the bike on the wall, he walked across the huge room with its beautiful jarrah wood floor and pulled open the sliding door that gave access to a narrow balcony. His apartment was the biggest in this converted warehouse, and the balcony ran the entire length of the loft space. It was close to Tower Bridge, and the view onto the Thames never failed to make Gabriel feel deeply content.
He loved the river. He loved it in winter with the fog hanging still and white, shrouding the gold-tipped bridge with its high walkway so that it looked like a ghost. He loved it in summer, when the river became a lazy brown snake and the smell of wet earth hovered in the air.
The loft apartment with its radiant views was not merely a pleasant place to live. It was much, much more. It represented to him everything he had hungered for as a child. The Bristol neighborhood in which he grew up had been dreary and joyless. His father had been a long-distance trucker, while his mother added to the family income by making beds and cleaning bathrooms in a hotel. The family wasn't poverty-stricken, but their lives had very little grace. Seared into his memory was the house in which he had spent the first seventeen years of his life: the paper-thin walls, the cramped rooms and low ceilings. The television forever tuned to some or other Australian soap; the house smelling of macaroni and cheese and his brothers' dirty woolen socks. His mother's panty hose and bras dripping from the shower railing. The dreadful feeling of claustrophobia, of never having enough air to breathe.
His parents barely tolerated each other, their relationship worn thin through the repetitive strain of their daily routines. Some of his earliest memories were of the toneless bickering they kept up with mindless, dogged intensity, a despairing white noise. They were not cruel parents-no abuse or intentional neglect-but they did not seem to like their offspring very much and had very little interest or energy to invest in them.
By the age of twelve, he was running with a group of boys whose behavior hovered perilously between obnoxiousness and outright hooliganism. He might have found himself in serious trouble if it hadn't been for a teacher who had managed to find him a scholarship to a school where the emphasis was on hard work and high standards. The school ironed out his accent and gave him an excellent academic grounding, and he'd been offered a place at Oxford. Then, six months shy of graduation, he dropped out. His friends were aghast, but he never sought to explain his reasons to anyone. He simply packed up and left for London. And became a thief.
He had no illusions about his chosen field of endeavor. He had turned an aptitude for computers into a lucrative but criminal enterprise. Isidore, he knew, subscribed to the romanticized version of what it is to be a hacker, seeing himself as a caped crusader in cyberspace where corporations were fat-cat exploiters of the little man and fair game.
Much as Gabriel loved Isidore, he had no patience with this kind of bumper-sticker libertarianism. Theft was theft: whether in cyberspace or in the real world. Just because the medium was different didn't mean the principle was. If you download a piece of copyrighted music from the Internet without paying, you have just walked into Tower Records and pocketed a CD on the sly. If you hack into the research data of a company and peddle it to the competition, you're affecting the research and development budget of that company, stealing from them years and years of effort and monetary commitment. And although the bigger corporations might be able to survive the loss of trade secrets, smaller companies could be devastated.
So he never fooled himself. For ten years now he had been making a living-and a very good one at that-illegally leeching off the creative endeavors of others.
He stretched his arms wide-he had a knot in his back from the hours of cycling-and placed his hands on the railing of the balcony. As he stood there, suspended between sky and water, he experienced a profound sense of well-being. Dusk was his favorite time of day. He loved the feeling of the city letting go, kicking back. The glitter of lights on the other side of the river. The softer glow of the streetlamps reflected in the dark water slapping gently against the muddy bank.
It was as he turned away from the water, walking back into the apartment, that he spotted it again: the flickering light on his answering machine. For a moment he debated with himself whether to leave it until the next day-it was Friday evening after all-but then he walked over and pushed the play button.
The voice on the tape was unfamiliar. It was a male voice; rather thin, the words uttered with measured precision. The message was innocuous: a request for a breakfast meeting the following Monday to discuss a business proposition "that could be to our mutual benefit." The caller did not give his last name, identifying himself merely as William and specifying that he would be sitting in the booth farthest from the entrance.
The caller's reticence at identifying himself was not unusual. Prospective clients usually acted coy, at least initially, and it was quite understandable considering the kind of services they were hoping to procure. So the message seemed perfectly normal. Nothing out of the ordinary here, certainly nothing that could have set off an alarm bell inside his mind.
But months afterward he would think back on this moment when he had stood inside his beautiful apartment, his finger still on the button of the machine, the light fading outside the window, the sound of voices and laughter drifting upward along with the smells from the kebab house on the corner. He would look back on that moment as though it were frozen in time and search for some sign that might have indicated that his life was about to change completely. On that warm summer evening, when he had felt in absolute control of his destiny, was there not something that had served as a warning? Surely he should have sensed something. Surely there must have been an omen.
He lifted his finger from the button, unconcerned, merely making a mental note to himself to rise earlier than usual on Monday in order to get to Piccadilly in time for the meeting with his new, and as yet unknown, client.
But as he walked toward the kitchen, whistling tunelessly under his breath, a cool wind suddenly lifted one of the silk hangings on the wall. And in the wine red sky a fat moon was rising slowly.
Entry Date: 20 May
Follow the path that does not wander.
M is building a new door. The key will be large-as long as a woman's arm-and fashioned from silver. She is wording with such feverish haste, I am getting concerned. But it is true that the door is looking splendid.