Authors: Malcolm Rose
The brief sound file came to a halt.
Angel said, “I’m not sure what that means, but there could be a hint of
why
he’s doing it. Some sort of grievance, perhaps. Something he thinks was unfair that hurt his
pride. That’s one of your jobs. Find out what’s behind his thinking. Then there’s
how
he’s doing it, who he is and – most important of all – stopping him
before he steps up a gear to threatening everyone and civilization itself.”
The pressure of responsibility made Jordan gulp. He wanted to protest that he was just a teenager, but he knew it was no good. In return for repairing his smashed body, Unit Red wanted something
from him. It wanted an agent who did not look like an agent. It wanted him to use his powers against terrorists and crooks who had evaded justice. His debt to Unit Red was too great to walk away or
to refuse a mission.
Jordan had become a spook. He’d never heard anyone in Unit Red refer to agents as spooks. Perhaps they reserved the term for their creepy neighbours in Highgate Cemetery.
He stood upright and said, “Just a couple of things. How did these voice clips turn up?”
“They were e-mailed from untraceable addresses to the police computer in Manchester.”
“Manchester?”
“No one knows why. Maybe there’s a reason, or he could’ve just stuck a pin in a map. What’s your second thought?”
“Why Ecuador then Edinburgh? Why pick on those two flights?”
Angel shrugged. “It could’ve been random, but I doubt it. I should think there’s a connection. That’s a good place to start.”
Kate Stelfox was not his handler’s real name. It was an invention, like Jordan Stryker, Angel and Raven. For confidentiality, Unit Red agents were only ever known by code
names.
Raven was one of the organization’s electronic whizz-kids, yet she defied the geeky stereotype. In her mid-twenties, she was glamorous, slim, heavily made-up and dressed as if she were on
her way to a nightclub. She filled the air with a perfume that Jordan’s olfactory system identified as oranges, blackcurrant, jasmine and cedar wood. It smelled expensive. On sizeable heels,
she stood in front of the wall-to-ceiling window that overlooked Highgate Cemetery’s stone crosses, headstones and monuments. To Jordan and Kate, sitting next to each other on the sofa, she
seemed to have an enchanted wood behind her as she briefed them.
“Have you heard of this? When a nuclear bomb goes off, you generate an electromagnetic pulse that overloads electrical systems for miles around.”
Jordan shook his head, but Kate said, “Yes, I think I knew that. Probably a documentary on the telly.”
“Lightning and high-energy particles from a solar storm can do it as well. They create a massive current that short circuits everything. An e-bomb has the same effect, but you don’t
have to fire a nuke or wait for the right weather. You can generate enough of a radio-frequency shock wave with pretty simple equipment. You could cobble it together for a few hundred quid using
off-the-shelf gear from an electrical shop or the internet.”
“Someone like me could do it?” Jordan asked.
“You’d need to download instructions from the net, but the components and know-how are out there, yes.”
“Scary,” he muttered.
“The powers-that-be are keeping quiet about it because they don’t want the bad guys to know how easy it is. You don’t want e-bombs in the wrong hands. But – with
Edinburgh and Quito – maybe it’s already happened.”
Kate asked, “How big are these things? Would they fit in a pocket, like a phone, or would you need a lorry to cart one around?”
“It’s between the two. About the size of a briefcase. You’d have to get it on the plane or put it on the ground within about a kilometre of the plane coming in to land or
taking off. Either way, the microwave flash would be powerful enough to bring the plane down.” Raven hesitated and added, “Angel asked me to put all the technical stuff on file so you
can access it. Riveting bedtime reading.”
“That’s an e-bomb,” Jordan said. “What about a hardware Trojan?”
“That’s easier to get your head around,” she answered. “We’ve got microchips everywhere these days. Faulty ones are somewhere between inconvenient and dangerous.
You could be booking a train journey when the internet packs up, or you could be in a plane when the engines cut out.” She paused to gather her jet-black hair and push it over her left
shoulder. “We’ve only got ourselves to blame. We rely far too much on technology. What happens is, you spike a chip with a hidden circuit that does nothing until you send a trigger
message. Then it blows the chip. Easily enough to screw up a plane’s flight and control systems.”
Jordan said, “What’s the trigger?”
“There are a few. The only one that makes sense for attacking planes is activating the Trojan with a radio signal.”
“How close would you have to get?” asked Jordan.
“I’m not sure,” Raven replied. “You’d probably need to be near enough to have a direct line of sight to the target.”
Kate was puzzled. “Wouldn’t the chip have to be sabotaged where it’s made?”
Raven nodded.
“But if someone makes a few Trojan chips,” Kate said, “how does he get them where he needs them – like into a plane he wants to bring down?”
Jordan wondered if he’d already figured out the answer. He leaped in before Raven could respond. “Aren’t almost all chips made by one company?”
“Yes,” Raven said. “Worldwide, eighty per cent are from the same source.”
“Well, if he worked there, he’d be pretty sure his chips would get into almost everything. Planes included. He’d just have to sneak a rogue circuit into the design.”
“I suppose so,” Raven replied, taken aback by Jordan’s quick reasoning. “The company would churn out millions of them without knowing a thing about it.”
Kate nodded. “It makes sense. That way, he’d have a few sleeping Trojans in most IT systems across the planet, waiting for him to wake them up and cause havoc. What’s this
company?”
“HiSpec. Short for HiSpec MicroSystems.”
“So,” Kate suggested, “Jordan could be looking for a HiSpec worker with a whopping gripe of some sort.”
“Something like that.”
“Could I have some of these dodgy chips in my head and arm?” Jordan asked.
Raven nodded again. “You, the Unit Red computer network, your car, almost anything.”
“Where’s the HiSpec factory?” he asked.
“Ah,” she said. “It’s a multi-national business, I’m afraid. You’re going to need a big net. They’ve got manufacturing units in China, the USA, Japan
and here – in Cambridge.”
Jordan didn’t ask her about the third possibility of cyber warfare. He knew someone else who could tell him all about hacking into important systems. Someone with practical experience.
Instead, Jordan changed the subject. “Have there been any other electrical blackouts – before Ecuador? Nothing huge or it would’ve been on the telly.”
Raven looked at him oddly for an instant. “How do you mean?”
“If I wanted to crash a plane by turning its engines off, I’d practise on something smaller first.”
“Got you.” Raven thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ll trawl through a few things and let you know. But...”
“But what?”
“Bringing down a plane isn’t hard. You just stop its engines and it’ll crash. It’d be much harder to crash, say, a boat. Stop its engine and it just floats till someone
fixes it. No one gets hurt. Just because a plane’s bigger doesn’t make it more difficult. Quite the opposite. To crash a boat or a car or something, you’d have to take control of
its steering. That’s much trickier.”
“Okay,” Jordan said. “Thanks.”
Leaving the room, heels clicking on the shiny granite floor, Raven smiled at Kate, but she merely nodded at Jordan. There was a fleeting hint of suspicion – maybe even dislike – in
her expression.
After the door closed, Kate gazed at Jordan and said, “How are you feeling about this?”
“Like I’m in Lower Stoke Boys, about to take on Manchester United.”
Kate’s quiet laugh was laced with nerves. “Make that both of us. But at least we’ve got people like Raven and Angel on our side.”
The curtains slid slowly across the massive window, as if possessed by an unseen presence, cutting out daylight and the view of the Highgate tombs. Opposite the window, the
giant screen unrolled itself. In seconds, the system was ready to show the CCTV footage of the ransom left in Kingston Upon Thames.
It wasn’t a thriller.
In split-screen mode, there were two views of a rubbish bin taken by fixed cameras at different positions. The bin containing a black sack of money was on a tree-lined riverside path called
Barge Walk. Highlights of the recording were a mum in a bright red cagoule pushing twins in a wide-load pram, an overweight jogger putting on a brave but probably unwise burst of speed, a spaniel
cocking its leg against the bin, and a young black woman walking past eating a sandwich with one hand and holding a mobile to her ear with the other. Then came the significant forty-three
seconds.
A slightly podgy white man entered the scene from the left. He was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and a beanie hat. He was probably trying to look younger than he actually was. He wasn’t
hurrying, wasn’t dawdling. He dropped a chocolate wrapper into the bin and hesitated. He looked around suspiciously and then put both hands into the bin as if he were about to lift out
something heavy. He paused again. Another second or two of indecision. He straightened up, scratched his cheek and glanced round once more. Finally making up his mind, he walked away
empty-handed.
“The police identified him as David Venables,” Kate remarked. “A local government worker.”
Jordan nodded. He had logged in to the Unit Red network and the police report was being fed directly through his optic nerve into his online brain. “They cleared him of any
involvement,” Jordan added. “He was going along Barge Walk, saw the black sack, decided to take a closer look and then changed his mind. ‘It could have been a bomb or
something,’ he said when they questioned him. That’s all. No interest in electronics, nothing beyond normal use of a computer, no connection to Ecuador or Edinburgh. End of the
line.”
“Yes,” Kate replied. After a moment’s thought, she added, “Or guilty but very crafty indeed.”
“Not that crafty or he wouldn’t have got caught on camera. And if he’s Short Circuit,” Jordan said, using the police’s code name, “why didn’t he take
the money?”
“That wasn’t the point, judging by the message he sent afterwards,” Kate replied. “He just wanted to check he’d panicked the authorities enough to make them cough
up and put millions in the bin.”
Jordan sighed. “Okay. He’s on a power trip. But if Short Circuit’s that good, he must’ve known the police would put cameras in the bushes. They’d keep an eye on
their cash. So, he wouldn’t show up.”
Kate shrugged. “Good point, but somehow he knew they’d delivered the ransom.” She pressed the switch on the table and the curtains began to open. “By the way,” she
added, “I’ve got a present for you.”
“Oh?”
“Angel asked me to hand it over.” From behind the sofa, she produced a cardboard container, slightly bigger than a shoebox.
Inside he found a pair of shoes and a pair of gloves.
“The latest development,” Kate told him. “You can’t see this – not even with your eyes – but the gloves and the soles of the shoes have got tiny carbon
nanotubes on them. Like the hairs on spiders’ feet. Microscopic Velcro.”
“So?”
“You know how Velcro sticks well, but you can ease it apart at the right angle? That means you can put the shoes and gloves on and walk up walls and across ceilings.”
“Really?”
“Even surfaces that look smooth are rough under a microscope. Rough enough for flies and spiders to grip with the hairs on their feet. Rough enough for those as well,” she said,
pointing at his new shoes and gloves. “Awesome.”
“How do I know they’ll take my weight?”
“We’re putting you on a diet,” she replied with a grin. “No. You’ll be fine. A square metre of it holds a car up.”
“Spider-Man, eh?”
“Angel said you should also know your arm’s got a GPS chip in it – like a SatNav but much more precise. It’s called an inertial navigation system.”
“So Unit Red can spy on me?”
“It’s for your own safety. We’ll know where to find you if there’s a problem. On top of that, you can log on with a brain implant if you get lost and it’ll tell you
exactly where you are. You shouldn’t get lost, though, because it’ll guide you wherever you want to go.”
Jordan asked, “Do you listen in to what I say as well?”
Kate shook her head. “No microphones. Angel thought you wouldn’t appreciate it.”
“He’s right.”
“Back to the case,” Kate said. “Where are you going to kick off?”
Jordan stopped himself from saying, “At home.” After all, the Unit Red house in Highgate Cemetery was his home now. Instead, he answered, “Lower Stoke.”
It seemed a lifetime away. In a sense, it was. A little more than a year earlier, Jordan Stryker had been ordinary Ben Smith, living in a small Medway town that had not yet
been wrecked by the Thames Estuary explosion. Ben Smith had not yet been killed by the same blast. He’d got into about as much trouble as anyone else in school, he hadn’t been top or
bottom of his class, he’d been the brightest young tennis talent in the area, he’d played drums in a group and he’d had a best friend called Amy Goss. Among the older boys Ben
knew was Merrick Breeze.
Made unrecognizable by surgery and the passage of time, Jordan walked anonymously down All Hallows Road until he came to the familiar sports centre. He didn’t go inside, though. He walked
straight past. On the other side, there was a wooden shed. It was large and sturdy, but still a shed. Since the Thames explosion, it had housed the local community radio station.
Before the blast, the outfit had been pirate broadcasters. Harassed by the police, the Medway Pirates had been forced to uproot themselves and move in secret from place to place. They had never
been busted because Merrick Breeze had hacked into the local police computer and he’d always alerted them when a raid was about to happen. At once, volunteers had shifted the illegal gear to
the next hideout. The police had found themselves scratching their heads in an empty room each time.