“I really got to know Will when we worked closely for a time in Africa. It was initially a follow-up to the land mines interest that Princess Diana generated. We decided to travel on for a month together and ended up in Maputo, at the Polana Hotel, in post-civil-war Mozambique—the classic colonial setting in the midst of abject poverty. Children playing and laughing on dirt streets with only a Coke can for a toy. It got to Will. On the second day we witnessed a bomb blast which took out a bus—all the passengers were small children and their mothers—all that destruction the result of some obscure agenda. Neither of us could comprehend it—the lengths others will go to, to assert their will, their vision of the world. A five-year-old girl bled to death in my arms, and Will couldn’t click the frame. He knew the world should see it—but said it would feel like rape.

“More recently we didn’t have to travel to the Third World for horror. We were together in Washington, openmouthed at the devastation, the plume of smoke that smoldered over the Pentagon for days; that terrible stench of burning, the air thick with fatty ash. A climate of fear followed, understandably, allowing extreme religious elements of all persuasions to use the situation for their own purposes. The taking-down of Saddam, suicide bombers and religious fanatics of every type, everyone has their own take on it…” Simon was afraid he wouldn’t be coherent enough to make his friends comprehend the danger that he now believed they could be in.

“Alex, what started Will on this epic quest after your mother’s death was, I think, a need to explore something complex in himself—his restlessness, his inability to settle or, more particularly, to acquiesce to injustices everywhere. What he ran into could have cost him his life. Talking to Calvin, I’m not convinced the plummet into the river was accidental.”

“I’d always thought that; and these new details make me certain there was something sinister involved—just as you feel. But let’s not make accusations we can’t prove yet. And please don’t—in fact, none of us must—mention this idea to my father. It’s hard enough for me to digest—and death is part of my everyday landscape. And,” Alex added after a moment’s consideration, “I think it might be better not to tell him about my reasons for following Lucy to France—at this point. I’ll talk to him when I think the time is appropriate—but he’s been through too much in the last year or so, and I frankly don’t want to worry him more than I have to. But, Simon,” he continued after a long breath, “what I don’t understand is, what on God’s earth do they want? And, come to that, who are ‘they’?”