Midnight Empire (18 page)

Daniel watched Gray's face when the call was made on their fuel and Moore banked. Surely something about their approach to stopping Abu Ja'far had to change after this, if only for the sake of the city beneath? If it would, Gray gave no indication. At the back of the room he sat watching, another toothpick between his teeth.

The next morning Daniel sat on a stool in front of the LinkLock rack, supposedly considering how to code the automation scripts, thinking instead about the bazaar, the Paveway, the people in the fields, the car at the top of the street, what Ania was telling him, the fact that Gray and Wolfe seemed to want him on the outer.

He sat for twenty minutes, unable to work. It was too hard to concentrate. Eventually he went outside. Two pylons of cloud were hanging in the way off. The skies here really were something—lost for dimension, primitive, wildly fractal. You felt insignificant. Relieved of consequence.

Watching this horizon, he slowly became sure of what he would do: the thing that they wouldn't—the way to put a stop to it. If they weren't prepared, willing or able to do it, someone else had to. So much killing, but all that was required was the truth. And the truth was something that always surfaced, wasn't it? One way or another. He'd only be giving it speed.

He returned to the hut. Everything flowing through this point, the switches and systems, the entire scope of their enterprise. What did he think he'd be doing? Landing a punch for a little righteousness, a little justice?

It was beginning to make a lot of sense. The more he thought about it, the more the idea hardened. By the time he'd finished his lunch in the mess, it was a perfect diamond, a near-to-physical certainty, a sharp object of logic, inevitable and ready to cut.

Level two debugging. What he'd switched on when the initialisation failed; /var/log was sixty-one per cent full. He was fairly certain of what these files contained. He opened one. A long dump of information, time stamps, network addresses, packet IDs. Then something else—what he was looking for—page after page of unreadable binary stretching to the end of the file. A slab starting with a simple identifier: <89>PNG.

Images. He opened another file at random and used
grep
to knock out the picture. When he opened it, his skin flushed hot. He was looking down at the mazing streets of Peshawar.

The time stamps on the files: he knew that to save space the system deleted in a staggered fashion as it went, retaining the latest data then knocking off greater and greater intervals the longer you went back in time. He hoped that what he wanted would still be there. How long ago had it been?

The maroon Toyota Crown travelling on the highway.

A high landscape, fields and the shadows of clouds.

The soft glow of the city at night.

The Wahhabi safe house.

There. He found the day—the one on which they'd finally decided to provoke Protonic. One minute intervals. He'd need to be lucky. He was looking at Abu Ja'far and the fat man, December. He crept forward ten minutes, then another five. They were walking in the city. It was strange to look at, an experience of archive and foreknowledge. He found them at the commencement of the alley. How long had they taken to walk down it?

Knocking the next image from its file, he lifted his hands from the keyboard and stared. It was almost perfect. Dupont's arms were raised in apology. Abu Ja'far stood in startled arrest.

More than proof. Texture and impetus and a hundred other things. When John Wright saw this, he'd know to trust the deliverer. He'd know he wasn't dealing with some conspiracy theorist who'd plucked his email address from the ether.

He copied the image to a USB stick. He felt cold and calm doing so, his mind already made up. He put the stick in his pocket and thought for a moment. It wasn't exactly that he was covering his tracks but he thought it prudent, nonetheless, to switch off level two debugging. Then he thought it prudent to also delete the files and directories it had created. And after that, he thought it prudent to delete his history of commands.

Outdoors once more, he walked towards the mess. A jet fighter crossed the sky overhead, screaming through the afternoon. The mountains appeared especially red, heat spilling down the foothills, the subject of hazing.

He crossed the red line. A drone sat by itself out by the runway. He looked up and caught it facing him, the wingspan thin and grey, its aura one of conscious restfulness, of inexhaustible patience, it would follow you to the ends of the earth. Fluorescent tags hung from its weapon mounts: wind-flicked signifiers of he didn't know what but they were grim, they were like carnival ribbons.

He upped his pace to get out of its sight.

When it came time to leave for the day, he was annoyed to feel a little self-conscious. He put one foot in front of the other but it felt unnatural. Most irritating, he felt his pulse speeding up, this thing in his pocket, and he should have known how to manage that from sitting at the tables. Getting into the car he waited an extra few moments before starting it, moments to prove that he had no cause to rush, and to overcome the feeling of being watched.

There were the ways in which you saw things. There were the ways in which things were. Both were adrift. There was only the world's harrowing slipperiness, and small acts of defiance.

It was 4 a.m. when he got out of bed. Outside the tower, rare wisps of high cloud were catching blue light. He'd decided how to do this. First, he'd use onion routing, in which each node in a network learned the next destination by peeling a layer from the message. It wouldn't prevent interception, but it would certainly mask sender and receiver. There were many publicly available systems for doing this—Tor, Abbla.

Second, he would use some type of end-to-end encryption. It didn't have to be unbreakable. It was simply a poor idea to send this in plain text. He'd considered posting the message somewhere then providing Wright with the credentials. But this didn't seem to make as much sense as just firing a one-time single stream, an email, a slim transmission among the billions that would exist for a second at most, good luck to you if you managed to pick it off. He'd already found an open relay—the message would essentially count as spam, a one-way missive with no option of reply or provider to trace.

In the darkness his laptop's screen felt bright and immense. He wrote his message, laying out the facts as he knew them, Abu Ja'far's recruitment by the CIA, the dozen or more assassinations, his turning. He didn't use the word Protonic or give any detail he thought anyone would be able to audit. He made clear that the attached image was a verifier only. It had to be deleted immediately and he trusted the man to do it. (This was the one part of the plan that worried him, but Wright was a seasoned and professional journalist.)

Ania hadn't stirred. He looked at her solid form under the covers before taking his backpack from the corner of the room. Walking east, the streets slowly became empty. Cars passed him occasionally and then not at all. His many shadows stretched long under the streetlights. A dog decoded his presence, gave a low, impulsive bark. He walked for what he thought was a mile. The houses around him were dark and he triggered the occasional security light. When he felt ready, he took out his laptop. It saw three networks. Only two were encrypted.

He connected. He tested that he'd reached the internet, then quickly ran his script. The message went instantly. This was the medium and nothing on earth would bring it back.

On the laptop, he quickly deleted the script and the local copy of his message before putting it away. Then he looked up. Nothing stirred on the street. There was only the open mouth of a storm drain at its far end. He pulled hard on the straps of his backpack and began to walk. He felt a little satisfied about stepping up and doing something right, knowing there was every chance that he was saving lives, striking a blow against the absolutists, the fundamentalists, the killers who—when they got the news—would surely turn on the traitor in their midst.

11

T
he next evening they flew over a green zone in Afghanistan, above steep valleys and peaks of quickening dimension, snow in the far distance, and they followed rutted veins of goat track, the thinnest imaginable trails. They sat below cloud cover, a wall of grey. It was mesmerising, lofted breaking over valley and valley, it was soothing and it calmed them. They found no one out there, not even a shepherd.

It was Gray's hopeful theory that Abu Ja'far was up here or would be soon. You didn't finance or execute a bombing like that and then hang around, especially if you thought you'd just killed a dozen police. You went to ground, in this case the hills. You went to hills you were familiar with. Gray had been reading old Protonic transcripts and these were tracks he'd said he once used to get out of Afghanistan.

This was Gray, Daniel, Peach and O'Grady. In another ground station, Wolfe, Moore and Ellis were sticking with Raul in Peshawar.

Daniel sat quietly. The green scenes felt easy, almost comforting. Colours down there that were dark, full-bodied shades. He was beginning to like the idea of being secret: of hidden knowledge, its power. He was starting to enjoy the idea of quiet risk, of ulterior meaning; of appearing to be someone while being someone else.

He looked at Gray and felt his urgency, the need to find their man. And there was a kind of pleasure in knowing that it didn't matter, whether they spotted him or not. Abu Ja'far's end was coming anyway, Daniel had made sure of it. It wasn't dissimilar to watching a movie with someone who didn't know how it was going to end. It was dissembling and enticing, examining the state of things with slight detachment, seeing from a higher perspective.

He imagined meeting John Wright in person—a clandestine encounter in a Paris café or at the back of a London bus, a man out of the shadow state and the journalist working to expose it.

Perhaps this, after all, was what he'd come here for. Was it not the place of people like him to do this? Duty, his job: Hannah was right, these weren't sufficient reasons for his having come here. Was it a crazy proposition that his task in this war was to slip quietly into the heart of the machine and spill a little of its blood?

In any case, watching the room, it was liberating to finally have done something, to be present in a situation doing something other than letting it roll over him—saying something other than yes.

In a peaceful state, he drove along the highway towards the city. He arrived at the Nexus having taken exit 21 of the I95, the closest. He'd gone there straight, taking no evasive turns or precautions, intending to collect Ania later from the MGM, and he parked downstairs and felt relief.

Upstairs, he dug his key from his pocket and put it in the lock. It didn't turn. He looked down and jiggled the key until it worked and then he walked inside and switched on the light.

The first thing he saw was a hole in the wall. Fist sized.

The second was the contents of the cutlery drawer, spilled all over the floor.

Third was the refrigerator, the door open and the motor buzzing.

He considered not going in further. He thought about calling the attendant for help and then he thought, no, he had to see what this was, what had been stolen.

The place was a mess. There wasn't much to throw but, if it was there, it had been: broken plates on the kitchen tiles, a crack in the thick glass of the big window, a dining chair overturned nearby. The contents of Ania's bags had been flung on the lounge-room carpet. His own things were everywhere. Poker magazines flopped like small, dead beings.

When he got to the bedroom, he was hoping against hope to find his computer smashed, the screen split or its keys ripped off. It would be on the floor, far side of the bed, where he always put it. It would be resting there, destroyed.

It wasn't there. He stepped forward quickly now. He knelt and lifted the sheets and looked under the bed and then around the floor. The drawers had been pulled out and he went to the cupboard: everything had plainly been riffled through but the computer wasn't there? He went to the lounge—maybe he'd left it here? He checked under the sofas, behind the cushions and the tray of the coffee table. He tried not to panic. He searched the bedroom again and for some reason the bathroom, the linen closet and the kitchen cupboards.

Eventually, he came to a halt by the window and sat. He sighed. This was a complication he didn't need but he wasn't too worried yet. If Ania's husband (and this was obviously his doing—the hole in the wall, the wanton damage) had the computer, so what? Yes, it was bad—there were a good number of things on it that should never go missing: the manuals for LinkLock's systems, his emails, some of the data from Creech flights. But the drive was encrypted, his password was unguess-able; these were protections you would only get through if you were expert and determined, and Ania's husband wasn't a hacking genius.

He turned to look at the crack in the window. There was a spoon next to him on the floor and he picked it up, tapping it against his palm, thinking about what he should do.

Then it hit him. A dark and physical apprehension, a sudden wash of fear and nerves that rose and kept rising, that was an almost animal response. No, there was nothing that should really trouble him on the computer. But the memory stick—what had he done with that? He thought hard. It was so elementary that he must have, he simply must have deleted the image—he'd recall doing so in a moment, the memory would come and rescue him. He remembered clearing the server. He remembered removing everything from the laptop. Had he done it to the USB or not? Could he really have forgotten to wipe it?

You leave home without your wallet. You lock your keys in the car. Could he really have done it, something so stupid, something so basic? He tried to think again that he hadn't. The memory would not emerge.

He looked out at the city, the moving lights and the headlamps of the cars. Dark sky. No sign of dawn.