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Renu Subramaniam's office was a terminal at the Java Bean Internet café. For much of the previous eighteen months Renu had been working on the Web against a background of grinding and screeching, as the modest Java Bean lay in the shadow of Wembley Stadium -- and the stadium was undergoing a monumental reconstruction, which, by the middle of 2006, was already overdue and over budget.

In most respects, the café was like thousands of others dotted around the world. Its surroundings were not salubrious. Nestled between the Bowling Nail Bar and a rather dingy-looking chartered accountant's office, it housed several decrepit, bulky screens and sticky keyboards that were attached to unreliable computers inscribed with faux brand names, marking them as cheap knockoffs from East Asia. Heaven only knows what activities have gone on behind the rickety wooden parti- tions dividing the grimy consoles.

Bent over the screens, adolescents played online games for hours, often with unparalleled levels of concentration; backpackers composed amusing emails brimming with their impressions of newly discovered lands; curious teenagers and frustrated middle-aged men surfed weird porn sites; idealistic youths planned political protests, imagining that by dropping into these anonymous venues they had dodged Big Brother, drug dealers arranged drop-off points and methods of laundering money, and cyber criminals logged on to see the value of the latest haul.

Apart from its location in the shadow of the inchoate Wembley Stadium, there was one other peculiarity about the Java Bean. Usually the computers in Internet cafés are equipped with only limited protec- tion from external attack. Viruses, trojans and other digital bacteria lie