Midnight Empire (23 page)

White lettering on a red background and a time stamp that was right now. He keyed for a status update.

*** Interception alert ***

The message began to fill the screen. He didn't quite believe it, thought it must have been some form of malfunction.

*** Interception alert ***

He opened the log file. Here it was in more detail. A key mismatch, a quantum event, someone observing on the wire.

He turned to Gray. ‘I think somebody is trying to intercept the feed,' he said.

Gray looked at him. ‘What?'

‘Our signal. Someone is attempting to read the keys.' He pointed to the screen. Gray came across. The message arrived twice more.

Daniel showed him the log, still searching for an answer that might explain this as something other than what it appeared to be.

‘What is it?' Gray asked.

‘An alert. The keys are being transformed in transit—it's supposed to mean that they're being viewed.'

‘Are they?'

‘Well . . . I don't quite understand.'

‘You don't understand! Daniel, I need to know what's happening.'

Daniel sat up straighter in his chair and took a breath. Alright.

‘The keys are being viewed,' he announced.

‘Meaning?'

‘Someone is trying to crack the feed.'

‘Who?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Where?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘They can see what we're doing?'

‘No, but they're trying to. In this situation the system maintains security by using the last pair—the last set of keys that were successfully transmitted.'

‘How often?'

‘What?'

‘How often are new keys sent?'

‘Each half minute. I can step up the interval if you like.'

*** Interception alert ***

‘Just find them,' Gray said. ‘Just find me who the fuck it is.' Daniel looked up to see Ellis and O'Grady staring at him. He looked down at the console, at the log, the time stamps, the flags and the outputs, and for some reason he felt as guilty as hell, his neck felt red hot.

He ran a network trace. He switched on full debugging and dumped everything he could to file. Seventeen segments. Seventeen hops from here to the drone, and on one of them someone watching, not realising that by watching they were undoing the codes.

How were they up on it? How did they know where in the system to break in?

Daniel tried to think systematically. He typed so fast he made errors of his commands.

*** Interception alert ***

He'd never practised this. LinkLock had never told him what to do. They should have. There should have been a procedure drummed into him so that he didn't have to make something up in the heat of the breach itself.

‘Where are they?' Gray's voice was cutting.

‘I'm trying to find out.'

‘Please take your time.'

‘I'm
looking
.'

Latency. Bad packets. He looked at the network structure and the routes, the sockets, the listen queues. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. No dead or screaming clues.

He considered again whether an error might produce this. A bug in the key manager somewhere? A slip-up in the handling of the keys? If it was possible it was also unlikely.

He decided to increase the refresh interval. He sent new keys every two seconds—thought about sending them with every packet but was afraid he'd blow the connection to the drone.

*** Interception alert ***

*** Interception alert ***

He examined the logs again. Didn't want to stare in case his audience saw that he was out of ideas. He ran every diagnostic available and dumped to file. He drew a diagram of the links using an automated tool: the hut to the Creech network to Nellis, the web of backbone connections, the satellite, the drone—he couldn't see it. The keys went out and were changing mid flight but it didn't seem possible to know where.

He looked up at the screens, the hills, the green earth of the surface following into the horizon's heavy line.

He didn't want to be doing this.

He wanted it to go away.

It was infuriating and embarrassing. Wolfe's quiet breathing. Gray's eyes on the monitor. He needed the idea to come like lightning—how he could find the person who was responsible for this and destroy them.

The CIA men were reading his every command, as if they were sighting his line of fire.

Twenty-five miles and five minutes past the event and still the keys were being watched.

The new scripts! Could he have made some kind of mistake?

‘Can I drop the encryption?' Daniel asked. ‘I want to restart the system.'

‘Can you guarantee it comes back up?'

‘No.'

‘Then, no.'

Wolfe interrupted, ‘Don't tip them off. First rule: whoever they are, do not let them know that we know.'

*** Interception alert ***

‘Call it in.' Gray's voice broke Daniel's train of thought. ‘I want every man at your company on this and right now.'

Daniel rang a surprised Michael Sett. Sett called every engineer at LinkLock to a war room on the third floor at Northbourne Avenue. Daniel spent an age executing their commands, examining the routes and segments, trying to discover the source of the problem, the root cause.

‘Forensic,' Sett kept telling them. ‘I want a
forensic
trace.'

The requests piled up faster than Daniel could execute them. Into the telephone he read packet identifiers and latency numbers. They went to level four debugging. They wanted to perform a reset but Gray would not allow it. He was still instructing Ellis and O'Grady in the hunt for Abu Ja'far.

*** Interception alert ***

Then something very strange happened. The latency on the connection got longer in tens of milliseconds and then in full seconds, a gap quickly widening, the drone flying forward into time they couldn't see.

Daniel read the numbers out. From the room on Northbourne Avenue there was silence.

Twelve seconds.

Sixteen.

Soon, the drone was a full minute ahead of them. Daniel read the numbers; it seemed that something was dragging on the whole connection, a gravitational pull.

One minute, twelve seconds.

One minute, twenty-five and still increasing.

Daniel said to Ellis, ‘Maybe switch on the autopilot.'

The man turned from his controls and said, ‘What is going on?'

Sett told Daniel to tell Gray they had to remake the secure connection, even if it meant going raw. Daniel explained this to Gray, adding that if the latency kept rising this way they'd probably lose the drone.

‘Do it,' Gray said.

He brought down the encryption. He spoke the commands aloud so that LinkLock could follow what he was doing.

When it was done, they waited. But it didn't work. If anything, the latency rate increased.

‘Bring it back up,' Sett told him.

He executed the instruction but the system couldn't do it—couldn't get a secure key pair.

Now the drone was three minutes into the future. Ellis asked for an order and Gray said, ‘What is protocol?' Ellis said he'd set a dump point, a place at the end of their fuel reserve where the drone would crash into the earth.

Daniel tried to repair the connection. The engineers in Canberra shouted suggestions over the phone but nothing worked; the time between station and drone only grew, a warp that became more and more elastic and which nobody understood.

It had to be something foreign, Daniel thought. There weren't any new segments on the link and therefore it had to be a compromised node. He said this over the phone. What could possibly be compromised? Sett wanted to know.

Five minutes. Then six and a half. It wasn't strictly an exponential gain but bad enough. The engineers barked further commands and Gray spat did he need to get someone else in here before their MQ-9 crashed.

Daniel's fingers were sweaty on the keyboard. He desperately wanted to figure this out. He thought, How would you go about it, what would you need to get up on the link?

*** Interception alert ***

Where would you need to be? He didn't see how you could do this on the air between satellite and drone. You'd have to have access somewhere on this side of the connection. And you'd also need to know—what? The structure of the circuit. Where to stand to intercept the link. That meant knowing how the link was constructed.

O'Grady began talking to Bagram. He wanted an intercept on a lost asset and he gave the drone's heading and identifier.

‘Is this shoot down?' said the voice.

‘Potential.'

Eight full minutes. Daniel was surprised there could be that much elasticity in the link. He asked the room in Northbourne Avenue for advice and was told to wait.

‘Phantom has visual,' said the voice in Bagram.

The latency became jerky, and finally they lost it. The images froze on the screen and their commands went unanswered.

‘Drop the link,' said Gray. ‘Terminate it and reconnect.'

That was O'Grady's job, not Daniel's. He watched the man kill the connection. Everything went dark. On the phone Sett asked Daniel what was happening, but he didn't want to break the silence to reply.

The connection did not re-establish. For a long time, they listened to O'Grady's keystrokes and watched the screens.

Gray's breathing became heavy. ‘Technically, can I even give the order?' he hissed.

Ellis spoke to Bagram. He said this was a shoot-down request.

‘Authenticate bravo x-ray. Parties please acknowledge with initials.'

‘Tango Juliet.'

‘Mike Kilo. Bagram?'

‘You have asked for shoot down. Phantom will engage.'

It took only thirty seconds. The voice told them the target had been destroyed. Ellis and O'Grady swivelled in their chairs, faced the room. Gray stood facing the empty monitors, his fingers on the sunglasses in his breast pocket.

‘We launch again tomorrow,' he said. ‘By then, I want to know what on God's earth this was.'

Daniel sat alone in the control station with the Northbourne Avenue war room on the phone. He'd been reading aloud messages and outputs for the better part of three hours and he felt wasted, worse than tired.

The engineers were trying to figure it out. Their conclusion so far was that the interceptor must have had knowledge of how the link was built: the ability to watch it being established, or in the very least access to a trace.

Sett was anxious about the fallout. He wanted Daniel to reiterate to Gray the fact that, without LinkLock, there would have been no knowledge of the interception at all. In fact, in the wash-up, it would probably turn out that the system had done its job perfectly.

They worked until Daniel dozed off. He woke numbly to hear Palmer repeating his name.

‘Go and rest,' Palmer told him. ‘Call us again in four hours.'

He walked to the dorms and found a bed.

His dream was of streets, a desert city; at first he thought it was Indian Springs but he was soon walking by mud-brick houses and even mud skyscrapers and everything felt ancient.

When he woke there was still an hour left to sleep. He shut his eyes and wanted to drift but now something was keeping him ever so slightly awake.

Whatever happens, remember that it is my fault
.

They had been her words, hadn't they?

For a moment he tried to slip again into the desert city but the thought of her held him out.

A trace. To understand the circuit. There had been several on his laptop. Even better: the manuals for the system itself.

The face that came to him was Austen's. ‘Has anyone tried to get close to you, Daniel? Has anyone inexplicably tried to befriend you?'

Are you taking a woman in or are you not?

He suddenly felt cold. He lay still but the thought grew heavier. Surely it wasn't possible?

He'd met Ania when? It had been after the mugging. He must have already been at Creech for weeks, possibly longer; more than enough time for someone to know who he was. He knew that these things happened in the world. There were people whose job it was to orchestrate such plots. But no, it simply couldn't be the case. Weren't he and Ania genuine? Didn't he feel that?

You know, it isn't so easy for me. This.

He stared up at the faintly lit ceiling. The more he thought about them, together, the less he was sure.

Then he wondered: Did their being genuine even matter?

There was nothing to stop them from being real while Ania was also otherwise employed. That day at New York New York—the saddest place in the city, alright, but it couldn't have been that she was crying about. Was it too much to think that she was already regretting it, what she was doing to him?

An agent. He said the word and it frightened him. He tried to remember when exactly he and Ania had first shared a table—had she been sitting at one he'd joined, or had she sat down at one with him?

He thought hard. He thought with his mind and with his gut.

The idea of her playing him began to feel more than possible. It began to have the tenor of truth.

The husband. A convenient story, a way to get Ania deeper in?

The break-in. A way to get their hands on his computer while leaving the agent in place?

And only once she'd had to leave, their connection to him ended, had they chosen to attack.

Isn't it part of the game we have chosen to play?

A woman like Ania approaches someone like him. Objectively it really didn't seem likely, did it? It felt . . . enacted. Improbable. Arranged. Things like that never happened, especially not to him; beautiful foreign women wanting to share their lives, to share themselves, with complete strangers in casino bars.

Was she invented? A lie? He could suddenly believe it. The crying for help. The Inderal. How could it have taken him so long to realise? She was the bug of some foreign country against America that was now crashing about their network, trying to learn what the empire was up to, trying to get at its secret toys.