Tropic of Death (13 page)

He stood there, hands on hips, his khaki shirt hanging out over the back of his jeans, the laces unravelling on his Nikes and a look of fierce anticipation on his face. He peeled off his shirt and slung it on the bed. Then he tossed aside the glasses, strapped on the helmet and pulled on the data-gloves encrusted with sensors.

As he eased back in his swivel chair, the tiny display screen inside the helmet lit up in his eyes, and the air pads in the gloves gave him the feel of his control deck. Now he was ready - wired into his personal flight simulator. It would take him on a trip into the alternative reality of computer graphics.

18
Rita got up from the bed, opened the mini-bar and helped herself to bottled water. She carried it out to the balcony and drank it, her sudden thirst the result of whisky and a touch of dehydration.

The moon hung, huge and flesh-coloured, over the Coral Sea. It cast a lurid glow among the dark outlines of the islands and threw the massive silhouette of the US aircraft carrier into sharp relief.

She thumped the balcony rail with her fist. What angered her most was the contempt with which she’d been treated. Even as a police officer, from the moment she’d been handcuffed until she’d driven out of the gates at the base, she had no protection under the law. And the security director, Maddox, trying to intimidate her, getting in her face, letting her know there was nothing she could do about it. What made him think he was entitled to behave that way? Who condoned such disregard for basic human rights?

Something was very wrong. Something had to be done about it. Rita took a deep breath and decided that the heavy-handed methods intended to frighten her off would do the very opposite.

It pointed to the oppressive use of force, a frontier lawlessness, that could not be tolerated in a modern democracy.

Yet she had to be careful. With that thought in mind she returned to the laptop and did a series of searches on Whitley, the base and the military reserve in tandem with any names that were relevant - Maddox, Willis Baxter, Steinberg, Rachel Macarthur.

There wasn’t much of interest to show for it, and nothing new.

Finally she did a search on Audrey Zillman, but the only hits she got were from the Cambridge era. There were academic and scientific pieces which Rita found technically obscure. But there was one news item and a photo accompanying it.

The article, from the previous decade, reported on the experiments Professor Zillman was conducting with computer-linked neural implants. The microchips interfaced directly with her brain cells. It was the very stuff that Byron had lectured eloquently about. Here, too, was the image of the twenty-nine-year-old woman who’d been his lover. And yes, she was striking, her face intense, her dark hair tied back, leaning against banks of electronics almost suggestively, the angle highlighting the imposing curves of her figure. She may have been ‘brilliant’ and ‘inspiring’, as Byron had found her, but Rita saw something else as well. This woman was scary.

19
It was like being on a space mission. But instead of flying towards the stars, Freddy was navigating through a 3-D cosmos of geometric patterns. He was seeing the architectures of the net from the inside

- websites, nodes - the way a computer sees them. He felt he had cybernetic vision.

His flight was the product of microtechnology. Tiny cathode-ray tubes projected images onto the display screen inside his helmet.

From there, a holographic mirror reflected three-dimensional views into his eyes. His eye motion was tracked by bouncing infra-red light from his irises into a miniature TV camera. The computer followed the movements of his head and hands via electrical signals induced in magnetic detectors in the helmet and gloves. And he steered his course by simulated touch on the computer-generated surface of a control panel.

Freddy marvelled at the cleverness of the technology - and immediately forgot it. He was too busy exploring, quite literally, new dimensions. Just as he’d been promised, the high-resolution VR graphics showed him databases as he’d never seen them before. His surroundings were spectacular. Surreal clusters of spheres, cubes, pyramids - glowing in fluorescent reds and ambers. Networks linked by pulsing filaments of emerald light.

The luminous structures floating in a vast blackness of space that belonged to a different universe. And Freddy was speeding through the void like an alien probe.

‘Wow, like doing maths on acid,’ he said to himself.

It took him a while to get the feel for his cyberflight. The simulated control panel responded sharply to the sensors in his gloves, and he was having to make rapid adjustments to his speed and direction. When he banked too quickly a hollow shock hit him below the ribcage, as though he’d just dropped off a roller-coaster. And when he pulled up too suddenly he felt the chilling vertigo of staring into an infinite chasm. Slowly he learnt how to handle the keypad and give himself a gentler ride.

Before using the code-breaker he decided to lay a false trail.

With a surge of acceleration, he flew directly at a sodium-glowing cube and burst through it in a blaze of light. He’d just gone through a node in Singapore. It made him laugh. He felt like a human comet. He performed a rapid switch-back and went through two more starbursts - Edinburgh and Toronto - before swooping in on the Australian constellations.

For his first breakin he decided on a relatively easy target, and homed in on the nearest shape, a dense concentration of data in the form of a silver hexagon. As he connected with it, his computer interfaced with the core data of a bank in Sydney. That’s when he powered in the code-breaker. Immediately he was decrypting and scanning the bank’s confidential files. Rows of figures were scrolling swiftly past his eyes. He punched into the fattest deposits and took lumps out of them with transfer orders, the credit dropping into half a dozen accounts he kept at different places online under a variety of coded identities. He skimmed off $100,000 - not bad for two minutes’ work - then clicked out.

As he lifted off from the hexagon, the geometric firmament unfolded around him again. He was flying with confidence now, calmer and richer, ready to crack a tougher target. He zoomed past the foreground clusters and headed for a towering spiral galaxy of phosphorescent white - the defence database. As he closed in for a cautious pass, the huge gleaming structure filled his field of vision.

To lock on at the wrong place would be extremely dangerous.

This was no commercial security bank computer, but a military system bristling with electronic sentinels. It wasn’t just the danger of being caught out and identified; he’d long been prepared for a squad of security police charging into his loft. But he was risking more than that if the rumours at the Diamond were right, rumours that Stonefish was convinced were based on fact. Stories of lethal feedback. Automatic defence programs built into the computer system. Surges of electricity that could grill you at your terminal, your fingers glued to a melted keyboard. And for those audacious enough to bust in using a VR helmet, the punishments could be more exotic. Stuff that left you brain-damaged or gasping in an induced epileptic fit. Or froze you in a cataleptic seizure till the military heavies smashed down your door. Or sent you into a hypnotic trance. You got up and put on your hat and walked out your front door, smiling to the neighbours, and strolled down to the nearest railway cutting and jumped in front of a train.

Freddy wasn’t sure how much was vivid imagination and how much was technically feasible, but he wasn’t going to bet his life on the difference. If the worst was true, he calculated he had a few seconds’ grace. At the first sign of anything coming up at him, he’d throw off the gloves and helmet, and race down to the loading bay. That’s where his dented second-hand Land Rover Discovery was waiting, with its tank full and its curtained rear serving as a makeshift mobile home. For an even quicker getaway, he could leap from the fire escape stairs to his Yamaha FJ-1200, which was always propped in position by the back door of the warehouse.

He was orbiting the vast helix of white light, drifting closer, drawn as if by a force of gravity, or fascination. This was the citadel he wanted to storm - the defence network that interlinked command centres, military intelligence posts, monitoring facilities and research bases, including Whitley Sands. Several months ago, a successful hack had provided Freddy with an opening set of codes that he’d managed to poach from the home work station of a level-six employee. But each time he was on the brink of getting in, he was shut out. His software couldn’t decode fast enough.

Now, using the defence department’s own equipment, he should have the edge. This time he should crash the gate.

He was floating - very close now - to the outstretched tip of a spiral arm. This was where he’d inject himself. Here, at a point remote from the core, his odds of getting in - and out again -

were better. For a moment he hovered, gazing at the intricate, crystalline surface, its phosphoric gleam dazzling his eyes. Then he took the plunge.

He locked on. Quickly he punched up the poached set of codes. They clicked in. He was posing as a research scientist with level-six clearance. Now came the tricky bit: getting inside. A set of coded commands had to be fired off. But if the code-breaker failed to crack the ciphers - game over. He hit it. There was a pause. Then with a whoosh he was through, the code-breaker gunning through the encrypted protocols, the firewall lifting, a rush of exhilaration surging through Freddy from his skull to his toes. The gate crashed open and he was inside - interfaced with the defence system.

Ahead of him stretched a city of infinite rectangles - rainbow-coloured. Pinnacles, plateaux and canyons receded to a precise horizon. Where to look? How to start? So much information.

Time to back his instincts. He keyed in two words: panopticon project. It was a gamble that worked. But it worked too well.

He accelerated across the cityscape at a dizzying velocity, colours blurring into a psychedelic spray. Shapes flickered across his eyeballs - ranges of tower blocks, mazes, chequered plains - a delirious stream of patterns that left him unable to see his control panel. He knew what was happening - a headlong rush towards the core at the Sands - and he could do nothing to stop it, his senses reeling, all balance gone. If a hunter-killer program was tracking him, he didn’t stand a chance. Something was shrilling in his ears. It might have been his own blood pressure rising out of control. Or was it his own voice screaming? And that’s when it hit him. The white-out.

How long he was unconscious he couldn’t tell. As Freddy emerged from the blankness his first sensation was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. His sight was blurred, stars fizzing around him.

As his vision cleared he saw that he was sitting in a white room.

It was quiet and sterile. A computer lab. In the distance he could see a woman. She was wearing a white lab coat. Her attention was absorbed by the screen in front of her. As he focused his gaze Freddy saw what was on the screen. It was his own face. He gasped and wanted to call out, but felt too numb. He tried to get up but was pinned to his seat by nausea.

As he sat there, dazed and horrified by his predicament, the woman slowly stood, turned and walked towards him. There was something menacing about her. She was grey-eyed with a strong, handsome face and dark brown hair pinned back severely from her forehead. She stopped right in front of him. His head felt heavy as he looked up at her. He was still having trouble focusing, but her anger was clear. When she spoke her voice seemed to cut into his brain.

‘I suppose I should congratulate you,’ she said with more than a little contempt. ‘You’ve managed to hack your way in where nobody else has.’

He took a slow, constricted breath and got out the words, ‘Where am I?’ But they sounded weak and muffled to his own ears.

‘Where you were aiming for.’

His head swayed around clumsily. ‘But this isn’t the core.’

‘All is not what it seems.’ She almost smiled. ‘And of course I caught you and tranquillised you before you could do any damage.’

He struggled to get up out of the chair.

‘Don’t do that,’ she snapped, and he sagged back immediately.

‘You’ll only hurt yourself.’

‘Who the hell are you?’ asked Freddy suspiciously.

‘You came looking for what controls the Panopticon Project

- well, that would be me. But you can call me Audrey.’ She gave him a dangerous smile. ‘I’m the system controller at Whitley Sands. You’ve got here courtesy of a new VR helmet, gloves and code-breaker I designed myself. Unfortunately I don’t control the manufacture, distribution or storage. But the man who supplied you was arrested five minutes ago. He’s on his way to military cells, a court martial and imprisonment.’

‘Stonefish?’

‘No, I’m not interested in cheap crooks - others will deal with him,’ said Audrey. ‘I’m talking about the ADF technical officer who stole the equipment and sold it on the black market. He’s finished.’

She let him think about it. The words gave him a sinking feeling.

‘What about me?’ he asked, looking around uneasily. ‘I suppose you’ve got a few goons waiting around for some head-kicking.’

‘Is that what you think?’ Audrey seemed pleased. ‘No. Your punishment will be limited and immediate.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you’re a cunning sod who’s done me a service by exposing security flaws. I may call on you again at a later date.’

‘Forget it.’

‘Tut-tut-tut,’ she said, moving closer, wagging a finger at him.

‘Get away from me, you bitch!’

‘Consider yourself lucky. I’m going to let you off lightly.’

At first he thought he was imagining it. But then he saw it was real - even though it couldn’t be real. Little blue veins of electricity were flickering from her fingertips.

‘What’s that?’ he blurted out.

‘Use your brain, Freddy. And you’d better get back from your computer decks.’

She raised her electric fingers to his face.

‘Shit!’ he shouted, then realised what was happening - he was still in virtual reality.