Interface: A Techno Thriller (15 page)

"But didn't you notice there was no MRI report? Or are you saying someone faked the results?"

Chatsworth blinked rapidly. "First thing tomorrow, I'll instigate a full investigation into it all. I know this is upsetting, but there really is no call for paranoia. Mistakes do happen."

Tom sucked in his lip. Perhaps this was plausible, but it felt wrong. "I know about CERUS."

Chatsworth went pale.
 

"I know they fund the clinic. If you don't want to talk to me, then I'm going to the police. One way or another I'm getting some answers."

Chatsworth's eyes flared and he shook his head. "I guess it's time you did know a few things." He walked over to his desk. "You should probably see this." He pulled out something and pointed it at Tom.

A hand gun.

Chatsworth shook his head. "I'm sorry." And he pulled the trigger.

Tom's heart leapt, but there was no bang, only a soft click and a stinging in his chest. Looking down, he saw a dart sticking out. Then everything blurred to black.

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Chatsworth moved to Tom's slumped form, checking his pulse. Then he hurried over to his computer and, hands shaking, connected a secure call, flagging it code-red. Marron responded almost immediately.
 

"Subject Zero is here," said Chatsworth.

"You said you'd discharged him."

"He claimed to be feeling unwell, but it was a ruse to get into the building," said the doctor. "He knows. Somehow he knows about CERUS. That we lied to him. He said he was going to the police. He said he had an MRI scan today. And it showed something metallic in his head."

Marron growled. "Where is Faraday now?"

"He's... sedated. I used the tranq gun."

There was another pause. A much longer one. "I'm sending someone over to tidy this up. They'll take Tom to a secure location. We'll work things out from there."

Chatsworth forced himself to breath more slowly. "I appreciate that."

"My resource will be with you in thirty minutes. Make arrangements for her to get in unnoticed."

FORTY-ONE

MARRON SAT IN HIS CONTROL room: the Faraday situation was one he would prefer to take care of personally, but the metrics on his screen were showing something wrong with his building and he was the only person who could investigate. He picked up one of his secure phones and called a familiar number.

"Yes?" answered a quiet voice.

Marron smiled. "Alex, I have a task for you. I need you at the clinic. Chatsworth is threatening to screw up the whole thing. He has Subject Zero with him, drugged. The doctor's finished his work with Subjects One to Four. And Zero didn't prove viable. We need to sanitise."

A pause. "I understand."

Marron frowned. "From your hesitation, do you disagree?"

"I thought Zero had other... relevance."

"Only to a point. There isn't time to manage him."

"Then I'll see it done. I should be there in twenty minutes."

"Update me when it's complete." Marron closed the call, turning back to his screen and the problem he was trying to unravel.

Two hours ago there had been a fault in the building network: an overload that had caused a local re-boot. That such a fault could arise was not unexpected, but
why
it had arisen should be immediately apparent: there should be some identifiable triggering event. And there was nothing that seemed to fit the bill. Could the fault have been generated deliberately to create a distraction, to mask something else? If so, Marron couldn't see what the 'something else' might be. All the security systems, all the firewalls, seemed to be intact. No data tunnel of any form had been opened from outside the building.

To be absolutely certain, he ran a check on the system-data files. No file had been altered. But several had been accessed at almost exactly the same moment as the network had briefly gone down. He brought up the details: the files had been accessed from
within
the building.

Marron straightened in his chair. There were few people with the expertise and capability to break CERUS' interior security systems. A brute-force hack would have taken several thousand years. Whoever had accessed the files had insider knowledge of the system.

So what had they been looking for? It was still a vast ocean of information, almost impossible to navigate without very specific knowledge. But, as he checked, he realised that it had been navigated. The perpetrator had made an unfettered beeline for Project Tantalus. How had they even known to look? And who could have done this? Whoever it was had looked over everything related to the project. Even Subject Zero. At least some details weren't in those files, but it was still a substantial breach. He needed to know who had done it. And he needed to find them.

The fault that had triggered the reboot had manifested itself without a specific point of incidence: the whole subnet had failed. At first he thought he'd have to run analysis on everyone, but no. It
had
to be a visitor or intruder. No employee would be brazen and stupid enough to attempt it. He set the system running a search of the CCTV footage from an hour before the incident, targeting visitors and scanning with facial recognition and pattern-matching software to identify suspicious behaviour. A dozen possible targets flagged. Most were known quantities: people who'd been doing business with CERUS for years. But two were new to his list. One was a man who was quickly identified as a representative of a local charity that CERUS wanted to align with. The other was a woman:
Daniella Lawrence
. He'd not heard the name before, although her face had a familiarity about it. He ran some broader searches and found several Daniella Lawrences of the same approximate age: a hairdresser, a teacher, a musician, and a medical doctor who worked in West Africa. This woman looked like none of them.
 

He isolated her activity in the CCTV footage. She sat, working on a laptop like it was an extension of her hands, occasionally glancing around. He zoomed in, the high resolution footage clarifying. There was something about her mannerisms, about those eyes, but he couldn't place it. Whoever she was, she knew what she was doing.

But so did he. He called up other CCTV footage and quickly viewed the same woman arriving. He saw the guard giving her the guide to the tower, the small souvenir booklet that every visitor was provided with. A memento of their visit. At least that was one of the guide's purposes. It also contained a paper-circuit tracking device that would activate once per hour for approximately a week and attempt to connect to a local network. If it could, it would send a message giving its GPS coordinates. Apart from those few seconds' of activity every hour, it was almost impossible to detect.
 

Marron smiled. If she still had the guide, he could find her.

FORTY-TWO

THE BARN WAS ONE OF a number of old outbuildings on the farm, located a few miles from Windsor, an hour west of London. Lentz had, years previously, struck a deal with the farmer to use the wooden structure for long-term storage of some old machinery. It wasn't an accurate description of what she did with the place, but the farmer had never seemed all that interested in the details of her activities.

She always checked on the barn when she returned to the UK, to make sure it was equipped and ready for her; today that care was going to pay dividends. She navigated the unmade road in the dim headlights of her twenty-year-old transit van: a vehicle that had once been white but was now several shades of dirty grey. Parking in the lane, she pulled out her phone and accessed a hidden wireless network. The barn's security system told her the site had not been disturbed.

Removing a heavy key from her pocket, she undid the oversized padlock and let herself in, strip lights flickering on and illuminating the space. It was full of old tractors and other farm machinery, very little of it ever likely to work again. Lentz pushed aside a deceptively light tractor wheel, revealing a trapdoor, and descended into a space full of equipment that was not so out of date and considerably more functional. She pulled dust sheets away to reveal a number of computer servers and three large computer displays. Every inch of wall space was decked with racking, all loaded with electronic components and mechanical parts, except for a single shelf on which stood a line of faded photos of two little girls and a child's remote-controlled car, decades old.

Lentz set her laptop on an empty desk and began scrolling through what she had managed to download from CERUS Tower. Unfortunately it was very little. She did not have enough to perform any useful analysis. She knew they were combining Tantalus with nanotechnology, but none of the specifics.

But she could guess a lot. It made her giddy and sick at the same time. The scientist in her almost couldn't contain herself: the humanitarian she had become wanted to scream.

Should she just go to the police? Last time that strategy had got her 'killed' – at least as far as CERUS was concerned. And to give her story any credibility she would have to reveal who she was, which was a can of worms she did not want opened. At this point, it was her one real advantage over CERUS.
 

So what should she do? She could try to re-enter CERUS Tower, but she doubted that would work. She was lucky she had got away undetected this time.

She opened her bag and removed the CERUS Tower guide, flicking through its pages. It was supposed to be a guide to the building, to the company, but it told her nothing she needed to know, just what they wanted her to know. As if it were more for their benefit than hers. She threw the guide aside and adjusted her wig, which still itched.
 

She needed to think laterally. Where else might CERUS data be stored? They were undoubtedly doing work at sites other than the Tower. Working at the old Eastwell site had taught her that Bern always planned carefully with special locations completely ring-fenced from the main operation. Nothing in the data she had downloaded indicated where the latest might be.

Sighing, she turned to her folders of publicly available data on CERUS Tower. The plans and specifications, down to power and sewer supply, were available for inspection at the local council offices; Lentz had made a nuisance of herself over the years, challenging the design plans at various stages. She hadn't been able to stop the Tower being built, but she'd made Bern's life difficult. And she'd archived a wealth of information about every aspect of the design of the building. Just nothing that would help her now.

So where else could she look?

And then it hit her.

Armstrong.

He had clearly been acting against CERUS. He must have acquired data and hidden it somewhere. Had they recovered it? Or was that why they'd blown up his house? Was it still somewhere among the ruins?

She palmed the van keys. It was worth a look.
 

FORTY-THREE

TOM WOKE WITH A GASP, sucking in a deep breath of air. It felt like he had been thrown into a tub of ice water, yet he was completely dry. Breathing hard, he looked around. He was still in the office at the clinic, but he was tied to the chair. He started to test his bonds, then something made him look up.

And he froze.

Chatsworth sat opposite. And he was dead. At least that was Tom's presumption, based on the grey of his skin and terrible bulging eyes.
 

The door opened and a woman walked in. Not in a black dress this time, as she had been at the launch of CERUS Tower, but Tom recognised her in an instant.
 

She looked at him with mild surprise. "You aren't supposed to be awake yet. This is awkward."

Tom was so angry, had so many questions, that they jammed in his throat. He coughed and managed to spit out, "You killed him. Why?"

"He had become a liability." She placed an electronic device with a keypad and display on Chatsworth's desk. "Don't go anywhere," she said, and walked from the room.

Tom assessed his options. He was tied up and still groggy, although his head was clearing fast. Perhaps he could negotiate a way out of this? But then he shook his head. She had basically admitted to murder in front of him. She wouldn't let him leave.

The woman returned, dragging a large metal cylinder.

"What is that?" he asked.

She placed it next to the desk then clipped the device to it. "It's an oxygen tank. I need an accelerant because there's no mains gas supply to this room." She tapped some numbers into the device and the digits 15:00 appeared.

"Three o'clock tomorrow afternoon?" he asked hopefully.

She turned to him. "Fifteen minutes. Sorry, Tom. I'm under instructions to clean up this mess."

"So you're just going to leave me here? To watch that countdown?"

She seemed to consider that, then reached into a pocket and withdrew a familiar item.

"This is the tranquilliser gun that the doctor used on you." She raised it and aimed. "I was told you were special: that we're alike. But I didn't see it at the party and I don't see it now."

And she fired.

The same click, the same sting, then he was fading, fading...

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Tom woke with a start, still sitting in the chair. In front of him the red glow of the timer glared.

3:01... 3:00... 2:59...

In shock he sat up and immediately realised he was untied. For a moment he wondered why, then realised he had, again, woken up much faster than expected. She hadn't wanted to leave evidence of him being tied up, so that this looked like another 'accident'. Could that be enough to save him?

2:43... 2:42... 2:41...

He lurched over to the timer and looked at it closely. He couldn't quite say why but it
felt
complicated. There were several buttons of different colours, but no markings.
 

2:19... 2:18... 2:17...

Should he try to disarm it? Might he just set it off? Something in his head was telling him to have a go: that he could do this. He looked across at Chatsworth. If he did not act fast, he would be joining the doctor.