much.'

'Dad wasn't a nerd,' I said. 'That's why I didn't bother to look through the computer in the house.'

'Right. But he did use the Net.'

I shrugged. 'Email, occasionally. Plus he had a site for his business, though someone else maintained it. I used to go look at it once in a while.' It had seemed easier, somehow, than calling them on the phone. Since I'd dropped out of college, they'd never really known what I was doing. They certainly didn't know the reason I hadn't finished the course, or who I'd gone on to work for. My parents never gave the impression of being political people, but they'd been there in the 1960s, as the video I'd found made more than clear. You were there in the Summer of Stupid Pants, then you took certain attitudes on board. Finding their son was working for the CIA would not have gone down big. I'd hidden this from them, not realizing this meant I was hiding everything else. Of course that now seemed a little bizarre, given what they'd been withholding from me.

Bobby shook his head. 'He had Explorer and Navigator on his disk, and he obviously used both a great deal. Huge cache, and about a zillion bookmarks in each.'

'For what kind of thing?'

'You name it. Reference. Online stores. Sports.'

'No porn?'

He smiled. 'No.'

'Thank God for that.'

'I went through every single one. Even the ones that seemed like nothing, just in case he'd covered up by re-naming the bookmark to cover what the link actually led to.'

'You're sneaky,' I said. 'I always said so.'

'So was your father. He had renamed one, in fact, hidden in a folder of a hundred and sixty bookmarks for what I can only regard as the dullest facets of the realty business. It was called 'Recently sold Mizner/Intercoastal lots'. Mean anything to you?'

'Addison Mizner was an estate architect in the 1920s and '30s. Built a bunch of prestige property in Miami, Palm Beach. Italian villa-style. Very sought-after and outlandishly expensive.'

'You know some wacky stuff. Okay. But the link didn't lead to a site to do with land or houses. It led to a blank page. So I thought shit, dead end. Took me a few minutes to realize that actually the page was covered with a transparent graphic that had a hidden image map. When I worked that out I got through to another set of pages, with some pretty odd links.'

'Odd how?'

He shook his head. 'Just odd. Looked like the usual home pages, complete with excessive detail, bad punctuation and rancid colour use, but all the material seemed very anodyne. There was just something hinky about them, almost as if they were fakes.'

'Why would someone put up fake home pages?'

'Well,' he said, 'that's what I wondered. I followed most of the links down into dead ends and 404s. But the line kept on going, through pages of links — and on each page only one of the links seemed to lead more than a couple of pages away. Then I started hitting passwords. At first, easy Java stuff that I could hack myself, using a few goodies I found stashed on your disk. Incidentally, you need more RAM. Fucker crashed on me about five times. Then — hope you don't mind, there's a few long-distance calls on your room — I got some help from specialist friends. I had to get down to wedge tracing and UNIX backdoors and shit. Someone who really knew what they were doing had set up a lot of obfuscation.'

'But what's the point?' I said. 'Surely anyone could just bookmark the end site, whatever it is, and go straight there the next time. Why screw around setting up a paper trail when the whole point of the Web is nonlinear access?'

'My guess is that the destination address changes regularly,' Bobby said. 'Anyway, finally I got through to the end.'

'And what was there?'

'Nothing.'

I stared at him. 'Say again?'

'Nothing. There was nothing there.'

'Bobby,' I said, 'that's a shit story. It sucks. What do you mean, 'nothing'?'

He shoved the sheaf of papers toward me. The top sheet was blank apart from a short sentence centred in the middle of the page. It said: WE RISE.

'That's all there was,' he said. 'A couple of hours' worth of subterfuge to hide a page with no links and just two words. The other sheets are just printouts of the route I took to get there, along with some of the hacks required. Plus I got the IP address of the final page and did a trace on it.'

Most Web addresses are known by a format that, while often not exactly something that trips off the tongue, can at least be understood as words. In fact, the Internet's computers regard them as purely numerical addresses — 118.152.1.54, for example. By using this more basic form of address you can track the page down to a rough geographical location. 'So where was it?'

'Alaska,' he said.

'Whereabouts? Anchorage?'

He shook his head. 'That's it. Just Alaska. Then Paris. Then Germany. Then California.'

'What are you talking about?'

'It moved. Kept blipping all over the place, and I don't think it was ever really in any of those places

at all. It was ghosted. I'm not King Nerd, but I know what I'm doing and I've never seen anything quite like it. I've got a couple of friends looking into it, but either way, something weird is going down.'

'No shit.'

'Not just what's happening to you. This kind of thing is my job. I need to know how they're doing it. And who they are.' He took a long pull on his drink, and looked at me seriously. 'What about you? What are you going to do now? Aside from more drinking.'

'There's three sections on the tape. I can't do anything about the last one, about finding … the other child.' I'd been intending to say 'my twin,' but shied away at the last moment. 'I don't know what city it was, and it's over thirty years ago anyhow. He or she could be anywhere in the world. Or dead. The second section doesn't seem to lead anywhere. So I'm going to go looking for the place in the mountains.'

'Sound thinking,' he said. 'And I'm going to help you.'

'Bobby…'

He shook his head. 'Don't be an asshole, Ward. Your parents didn't die in any accident. You know that.'

I guess I did, and had done for a little while, though I hadn't really allowed the thought to settle, to say it to myself in words.

Bobby did it for me. 'They were murdered,' he said.

12

Nina sat in the yard with Zok Becker. The night was cool and she wished she'd accepted the tea she had been absently offered. Zandt had already spoken with the woman, and stood in her daughter's room, and was now inside with her husband. Neither Becker had seemed surprised to find two investigators on their doorstep, even this late in the evening. Their lives were already too far divorced from what they were prepared to accept as reality. The two women talked fitfully for a while, but soon lapsed into silence. Zok was watching her foot as it jogged up and down at the end of her crossed leg. That at least was the direction in which her eyes were directed. Nina doubted she was seeing anything at all, but rather floating in a void in which the movement of her foot was as meaningful an event as any other. She was glad of the silence, because she knew the only thing the woman would want to talk about. Was her daughter still alive? Did Nina think they would ever get her back? Or would there, in this house that Zoë had spent so much time getting just so, now always be a room whose emptiness and silence would darken until it was a black crystal at the centre of their lives? On the wall of this room was a poster for a band that none of the rest of them had ever heard except by accident. So what was the point of it now? Nina had no answer to this question or others like it, and when the woman appeared about to speak she looked up with dread. Instead she found that Zoë had started to cry, exhausted tears that seemed neither the beginning of anything nor its end. Nina didn't reach out for her. Some people would accept comfort from strangers, and some would not. Mrs Becker was one of the latter.