Nano (21 page)

69

Cloud Tower, Dubai

Chloe had stopped the Cage less than a metre away from the dead snake charmer. She broke the comms link with Steph and looked up at the door into 199. She was about to move forwards when she thought she saw the man's right hand twitch.

‘Oh my God!' she exclaimed. ‘He's . . .' She unbuckled her safety harness and depressed a pad on the control panel, releasing the door mechanism. She heard the lock click and the door start to swing open. Then the explosion hit.

The floor shook. The servos of the Cage automatically snapped into a higher gear, stabilising the machine in a fraction of a second. But Chloe was already out of the harness and was thrown forwards, her body slamming against the control console.

The boom of the explosion resonated around the bare concrete walls of the emergency stairs. Then came another sound, nearer, the snapping of steel girders, the sliding of shattered bricks and concrete. Chloe looked up as the ceiling crumbled and a torrent of debris crashed down. A metal bar landed squarely on the head of the snake charmer, crushing his skull. The Cage slipped to the left, throwing Chloe around inside. She slammed into the side of the Cage, her face crashing against the polycarbonate resin window. A sharp stab of pain shot through her left temple and she was thrown backwards, landing half-on and half-off her seat.

Jerking her head upwards, she saw a rectangular slab of ceiling fall through 3 metres of air and land on the opened door of the Cage, yanking it half off its hinges. The Cage wobbled. Chloe jolted around, trying to ignore the crashing pain in her head. She shot out a hand to grip a backup joystick close to the control panel, but her hand slipped as the machine rocked.

She fell forwards again, her side catching a sharp length of maxinium that had been twisted inward from the hinge as the Cage was struck. The shard ripped through Chloe's cybersuit, tearing the material above her right thigh and cutting into her flesh. She tried to twist away but was caught. Her left foot was trapped under the chair. The Cage started to topple. In desperation, she brought her arm around, grabbed her thigh and did a half-turn to her left. A second huge chunk of rubble smashed down onto the opened right side of the machine. Spears of metal and twisted plastic shot into the cabin.

70

‘Chloe? Chloe? Come in.' Steph was clambering over a pile of debris stretched across the floor. A large portion of the café ceiling had landed where Steph and Jessica had been treating the others a little earlier. The med-kit and the Hopjet were smashed to fragments. Jessica came up behind Steph. ‘Everyone okay?' She scanned their faces. They were all terrified but there were no new injuries.

‘What in the name of Allah was that?' Saeed gasped.

Steph ignored him. ‘Chloe? Come in please. This is Steph. Chloe. Answer, damn it!'

She looked up as Frank and Carmen approached. ‘What's happening?' Carmen asked, her cheeks streaked with tears. ‘I'm at my wit's end.'

Steph looked at her, keeping her face neutral, calm. ‘I'm not surprised,' she said and placed a gentle hand on the woman's shoulder. ‘That was obviously quite an explosion. But it wasn't on this floor.'

‘It could have been anywhere,' Saeed exclaimed. ‘Anywhere. We could all be crushed any second. Or the floor . . . the floor could collapse.' He was sliding into hysteria, his face wreathed in sweat and dirt. Steph noticed his bandaged arm was soaked through with blood.

‘Calm down,' Steph said, taking a couple of steps towards him. She went to lift Saeed's hand to inspect the bandage.

He misinterpreted the gesture. Eyes ablaze, sweat running into them, he took a swing at Steph. She reacted instantly, moving to one side as the blow missed her by a foot. But Saeed had lost all reason. He span around with surprising agility, flailing the air with his good arm. Again he missed Steph. She grabbed his wrist, spinning him on his heel and yanking his hand to a point high up between his shoulder blades. He squealed, spittle flying from his mouth, his face screwed up into a ball of fury.

‘Please,' Steph said with almost supernatural patience. ‘Please, Saeed. Try to calm down. We won't get out of here if we don't keep our heads.'

She glanced around at the confused and horrified bystanders. Saeed was still wriggling and writhing. Then he suddenly went completely limp and slumped to the floor, his head falling forwards as he sobbed into his palms.

Steph didn't allow them time to think. ‘Frank and Mohammed?'

She nodded silently towards Saeed Khalid's crumpled form. They understood straight away and leaned in to help the man to his feet. He seemed to have given up and simply went along with it.

Steph turned to the others. ‘We need to get to the emergency stairs back over there.' She pointed to the southeast corner.

‘But the way up and down is blocked,' one of the women in Charlotte Emmington's group said, her voice shaky.

‘They were but hopefully my colleague has cleared a route up to the roof. She's waiting for us.' Steph turned to her comms once more. ‘Chloe?'

Nothing.

‘Right, let's go.' Steph span on her heel.

Outside the café, the place looked much the same. There was no sign of further damage. They made it along the side of the building without incident and in the space of 90 seconds they had reached the door to the emergency stairs. It had shattered and behind it the stairwell was steeped in rubble. Stephanie could just see the edge of the Cage buried under tonnes of rock.

71

72 metres beneath the English Channel

Pete and Mai led the way back through the carriage and out into the red glow of the tunnel. Mary stepped down onto the rumpled tracks and stood looking around in disbelief. Her shock was clear even through the visor of the biohazard suit. Pete and Mai could hear the woman breathing heavily into a small comms device built into the suit.

‘My God!' she said quietly. She sounded on the verge of tears. ‘How . . . how could anyone do such a thing?'

Pete and Mai stood, silent. Mary turned to them and shook her head slowly.

They walked off along a narrow pathway beside the tracks. Mary was comforting Billy as best she could through the layers of plastic and, remarkably, he seemed to have calmed down. It wasn't far to the hatchway into the Maintenance Hub. Mai was first to reach it. Stopping to let the others catch up, she pulled her container of Bioweb from her utility belt and ran her fingers over the controls on the side.

‘You're constructing another anteroom?' Mary asked as she and Billy arrived at the hatch.

‘I'm pretty sure there'll be a positive pressure gradient that'll push air out from the Hub,' Mai replied.

‘But you can never be too careful?'

‘Precisely.' She aimed the Bioweb at the hatch and went through the same process Pete had executed in the train. Within a couple of minutes she had the chamber in place – three walls and a ceiling.

Pete checked it with his all-purpose wrist computer. ‘Integrity is fine, Mai. We'll have to take this one-at-a-time. You go into the chamber, open the hatch, get through to the corridor beyond and then close the hatch before Mary and Billy go in. You got that, Mary?'

Mai stepped up to the front wall of the antechamber. Running a finger along an invisible seam, she pushed into the membrane formed by the Bioweb.

‘I'm in,' she said, resealing the door. She strode over to the hatch, opened it and clambered through.

Mary and Billy went in next. Mary's lab experience was invaluable. She knew what she was doing, which saved Pete a lot of time and energy trying to guide her through the procedure. She slipped into the hatchway and closed it from the other side, leaving Pete to follow her through.

Once Mary and Billy were inside the Hub, Pete entered the anteroom and stood for a moment looking around. The red glow from the fire at the end of the tunnel was refracted by the material of the Bioweb. He felt isolated, cocooned. In here, it was almost womb-like. He reached for the handle of the hatchway, twisted it and pulled it outwards towards him. Clambering through, he sensed an odd stillness in the corridor. He locked the hatch from the inside, turned and felt the jab of a gun barrel in his ribs.

72

Base One, Tintara

‘So let's get this straight,' Mark said, his face filling Tom's holoscreen. Tom pulled himself up a little on his bed. ‘The Four Horsemen are back and they are behind the three attacks.'

‘Yes, three
coordinated
attacks, Mark.'

‘And their objective is to deliberately destabilise the companies behind each of the targets so they can make a financial killing.'

‘Precisely. It's been done before.'

‘When?'

‘9/11. Bin Laden applied the same technique: "Put Options". A few weeks before the disaster, Al-Qaeda invested tens of millions in companies it knew would be the worst hit by the attack. As a result, they netted hundreds of millions – that has funded their cause ever since.'

‘All right,' Mark sighed. ‘It's all pretty academic. The main issue is this hacker, "Light Touch".'

‘Agreed.'

‘But you can't get through his defences?'

‘Not fully. Not yet anyway.'

‘We don't have much time, Tom. These three concurrent attacks will send the markets into freefall. The Four Horsemen will gain but almost everyone else on the planet will suffer, whether they're investors or not.'

‘But whatever we do, the markets will already be damaged.'

‘True, but if we can shut him down, we can minimise the effect . . . restore confidence,' Mark said, exhaling heavily. It was clear to Tom he was exhausted. ‘The Tower will go in . . . 37 minutes. To stop a cascade effect with the Euro- tunnel and ITAM we need Light Touch neutralised within an hour.'

‘In that case, there's no chance of Syb and me breaking through in time.'

‘So what now?'

There was a long pause down the line. Tom looked away from the screen for a moment. Turning back to Mark, he said: ‘There's one possibility but it's never been tried before. I have no idea –'

‘What is it?'

‘Experimental, risky . . .'

‘Sure, Tom. What's the idea?'

73

Geneva, Switzerland

Michael Devlin had known Tom Erickson since the E-Force cyberguru was a boy of 14. They had never met but had corresponded for years via a geek's chatroom filled with people obsessed with the art of hacking. The cyber-acquaintances in the group had created their own internet protection software so that no authority or nosy individual could decode their chats, allowing them to develop their skills anonymously.

Michael Devlin had always been a pretty good hacker but that wasn't actually where his greatest talents lay. He was over twice Tom's age and very experienced. He had worked at Microsoft for years before being shown the door and threatened with prosecution because he had committed the cardinal sin. Breaking into the company's defence systems, he had messed with the boss, disabling Bill Gates's home security network as a prank. To do this he had eschewed conventional hacking and relied on what he knew best: nano-engineering.

Michael Devlin was a nanoscience genius, perhaps the most talented engineer of his kind in the world. And he worked only for himself. Brought up in a liberal, free- thinking household in San Francisco, he had never trusted a single politician, nor any authority figure or major organisation. He had been offered huge retainers by the armed forces of several wealthy countries, all the major intelligence services and many of the world's largest, richest multinationals. He had turned them all down. With the money he earned at Microsoft, he built his own laboratory in a lakeside cabin in the woods near Versoix, a short drive from Geneva. There, he set about single-handedly pushing the limits of nanotechnology decades into the future.

When Tom was recruited into E-Force over a year ago, one of the first people he had contacted was Michael Devlin and with Mark's support they worked out exactly how Michael could help them. He had no desire to come to Tintara. He valued his privacy and was no team player. Instead, he received funding from the financial backers of E-Force and in return he could be called upon to help out whenever he was needed. At the same time, he liaised with the scientists on Tintara via Skype and helped with the development of the many nanodevices at the heart of E-Force's impressive array of equipment.

‘So you can definitely help?' Tom was saying, his face large on the screen of Michael's laptop.

‘Of course I can. We have the technology!' Devlin laughed, putting on a science-fiction narrator's voice. ‘The difficult bit will be getting the critter inside.'

‘Well, that's our department. I have schematics of the building. You just need to get it as close as possible to the entry point. I'm sending over the diagrams now.'

As he spoke, a set of images showing the interior layout of ITAM's Geneva headquarters appeared on Michael Devlin's computer along with schematics of utilities coming into the building. Each of these – electricity, gas, sewage and comms cables – was designated a different colour.

‘Cool,' Michael responded. ‘Now I think the only way we can do this is for me to send you the operating codes. Then you'll have complete control of the device. There's no point you using me as an intermediary once we're there, it'll just slow everything down.'

‘Agreed,' Tom replied. ‘Here they come,' he added, seeing the data appearing on his holoscreen and fed directly to Sybil's network.

‘You and Syb should have no trouble controlling everything.'

‘All right, thanks, Michael. Don't wanna hassle, man, but we have to get this done super-double-fast, yeah?'

‘Got it, buddy,' the nano expert replied. ‘Michael Devlin is leaving the building.'