State of Emergency (7 page)

The man stepped down to meet them, the torch bobbing.
He switched it off. 'I'm so glad you've found me,' he said,
lifting his hand. It held a small metal box. He took another
step towards Josh and Pete and they finally saw the man's
face.

'Mark!'

'Game over,' Mark said. He pushed a button on the device
in his hand and the sensors woven into the back of their
cybersuits went off. The sound reverberated around the rock
walls.

'Great try, guys, but no cigar,' Mark said, handing them
each a water bottle. 'And the moral is – trust no one!'

The tall man in a grey suit and blue tie and wearing spectacles
with Armani turtle-shell frames was seated at the head of a
long, walnut table reading a report. His assistant – younger,
shorter and in a black suit and grey tie – tapped on the glass
door to the room and walked in. He strode the length of
the room to the head of the table. The taller man indicated
the assistant should sit.

'What is it?'

'This, sir. Just in from MI5.' The assistant slid a piece of
paper across the smooth walnut.

The taller man read silently, then leaned back in his chair
and removed his glasses. 'Sounds like horseshit to me,' he
said, fixing his assistant with hard, black eyes.

'The Brits appear to be taking it seriously, sir. They've
gone to orange.'

The taller man gave his assistant a sceptical look. 'And you
think they know something we don't? Something planned
on American soil?'

The younger man shrugged. 'There's more.'

The taller man's face was impassive. The assistant handed
him another sheet of paper and the boss put his glasses back
on. 'From the Bureau an hour ago,' the assistant said as his
superior read in silence.

A minute passed and the boss placed the paper on the
table. 'More speculation.'

'Perhaps, sir. But it comes from a field operative, Freddie
Neilson.'

'Neilson? Well, that settles it. It is horseshit!'

The assistant allowed himself a faint smile. Neilson was
famous in the FBI – and infamous among the conservatives
in the CIA. Perceived as a hero by some and a fool by others,
to say Freddie Neilson was no team player would have been
like saying Bill Gates was comfortably off. But he had more
scalps to his name than any other serving operative, and
that was just about the only reason he had kept drawing a
pay cheque from the Bureau.

'Apparently, Neilson was following his own leads, deep
under cover. Wouldn't say anything to anyone about it,
following his own agenda.'

'Yeah, that sounds about right. I've never understood why
our friends at the Bureau suffered the man.'

The assistant nodded. 'Looks like he was onto something
big, though, sir. He dropped out of sight three days ago –
simply vanished. Then yesterday he filed this report. He was
in southern California. Said he was close to the source. Asked
for backup to be prepped for his next call in.'

'Ha! And?'

'Freddie Neilson's body was found washed up on the
beach in Santa Barbara this morning.'

'Abort! Abort!'

'Okay, okay!' Stephanie brought her hand down hard on
the joystick and threw herself back in the chair. 'I will never,
ever get the hang of this thing!' she shouted into the helmet
mic, so loudly that Mark and Maiko in the control room
yanked off their headsets simultaneously.

'Okay, Steph. Take five.' It was Mark's deep voice coming
through her comms.

Stephanie emerged from the simulator seething. She had
been trying to land the Big Mac on a shelf of rock not
much bigger than the base of the vehicle, and every time
she had misjudged the altitude and slammed the VTOL
aircraft down so hard that the undercarriage buckled and
they plummeted 2000 feet into a digital ravine. 'I'm sorry,
Mark,' she hissed, stomping towards the control room. 'I
just –'

'Look – chill, okay?' Mark took her by the shoulders. 'I
died at least a dozen times before I got it right.'

Maiko was at the door to the control room as Stephanie
and Mark reached it.

'Your turn,' Mark said.

She was pulling on her comms headset when the central
computer, known affectionately as Sybil, interrupted. 'Mark,'
it intoned, in a soft female voice, 'perhaps you've forgotten
– the team are due to meet in Cyber Control at 15.00. Peter
and Josh are on their way. Tom is there already.'

'Thanks, Sybil,' Mark said. 'I had forgotten.'

They reached Cyber Control a few seconds after Pete and
Josh. The two men looked freshly scrubbed in new jumpsuits
– the standard uniform for everyone at Base One. Made from
polycarbon fibres, each suit weighed only a few ounces but
was as strong as silk, with a similar texture. The two of them
had just completed Survival Training Course 6M, one of the
toughest – and messiest.

Tom gave Josh and Peter high fives as they came in. 'Good
day at the office, guys?' he enquired.

'Can't complain, Tom. It must have been hell slaving over
a hot keyboard all day,' Josh replied.

'Right, everyone,' Mark said. 'It's just the weekly check.
How're we all feeling?'

'Apart from crashing six times today, just fine,' Stephanie
replied.

Josh looked at her in amazement. 'You
still
haven't landed
the Big Mac?'

'No, I haven't, smartass. I'm sorry to disappoint you.'
Stephanie caught herself and took a deep breath. 'Oh, look,
I'm . . . Not a good day.'

He had his hands up. 'Hey, I'm sorry.'

'Actually, there is something I want to pass on.' It was
Tom Erickson. He was at a computer terminal. A holographic
image floated in space in front of his eyes. At the apex of
red and green converging lines was a paragraph of text.
'Sybil,' he said. 'Project the global map onto the big screen,
please.'

Tom spun his chair round and the others turned as the
wall behind them lit up.

'I don't want to panic anyone, but we've been picking up
some strange intelligence traffic.'

'What does that mean, exactly?' Josh asked.

'Well, as you know, Sybil monitors all transmissions
on the planet. Then, just like a search engine on the net,
she sorts the stuff according to a set of pre-programmed
criteria. The most useful sources are secret-service and
military transmissions.' The screen lit up in clusters around
Washington, London, Moscow and Beijing. 'During the
past couple of days there's been increased activity from
the US and European intelligence agencies. A lot of crosstalk.
Sybil's picked up no fewer than 1800 communications
between the CIA and MI5 since Tuesday. They obviously
suspect something is about to go down.'

'Any idea what?' Pete asked.

'None at all. Either the spooks know and there's a complete
security lockdown, or they've had a tip-off but nothing
specific.'

'Okay,' Mark said. 'Keep monitoring it, Tom. The first hint
of anything clearer, let me know.'

He was about to add something more when a technician
came in. 'Sir?'

Mark approached the technician, who whispered in his
ear. Mark looked grave. Turning to Maiko, he said. 'Mai, can
I have a private word?'

They stepped into the empty corridor. Through a large
window they could see palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze.

'What's up?' Maiko asked.

'It's a private matter, Mai. It's your mother. She's had a
stroke.'

She stared at Mark, her expression blank with shock. Then
she suddenly seemed to jolt into awareness. 'I have to go,'
she exclaimed, looking around as if she was trying to find
the exit there and then.

Mark fixed her with his eyes.

'You do understand, don't you?' Mai said.

Mark ran a hand over his forehead. 'Yes . . . yes, of course,
Mai,' he said heavily. 'Leave it with me.'

At 2.54 pm Josh was woken from a deep sleep by the buzzer
beside his bed. Only six hours earlier he had completed a
48-hour sleep-deprivation exercise.

'It's Mark,' came the voice at the end of the line. 'You'd
better get to Cyber Control, fast.'

When Josh arrived, looking bleary-eyed, he found Mark
already there. Pete entered a few moments later, then
Stephanie, who had been down in the hangar getting
instruction in how to use the Mole.

'What's happened?' Josh asked, as they gathered near
Tom's computer module.

'About 30 minutes ago the CIA comms network went into
overdrive,' Tom replied. 'Both the US and UK governments
have gone to their highest alert levels. Neither have made
it public yet.'

'Anything specific?'

'I'm trying. Sybil's analysing the comms. Everything's
encoded, of course. I've got the system to pick keywords
from the intelligence traffic. Here we go.' The holographic
image shifted in front of Tom's eyes and he slid his fingers
over the metal surface where the keypad was visible as a
light projection on the desk. 'Here're the top three.'

Three lines of numbers appeared from the confusion of
text.

'It's an RSA code,' Josh said, suddenly wide awake. He
felt energised by the fact that he could at last employ his
knowledge of cryptography.

'Which is?' Pete asked.

'It's like the system used for credit cards,' Tom interjected.
'It depends on the level of encryption, but most of them are
considered completely unbreakable.'

'Well, yeah, that's true for commercial transactions,' Josh
added. 'The PIN number you use, or your bank password,
is almost impossible to crack. But if you look at these
rows of numbers, you can see they break up into smaller
segments.'

'Tom,' Mark said, 'can you put them on the big screen,
please?'

A few seconds later, numbers a foot high appeared on the
wall.

'It's been estimated that to crack the very best of these
codes it would take all the computers in the world – even
working together – something like 12 million times the age
of the universe,' Josh commented. 'But this doesn't look like
a particularly complex one.'

'And we have one shit-hot advantage,' Tom added, patting
the desk in front of him affectionately. 'The only quantum
computer in the world.'

'Okay, Sybil,' Josh said. 'I think the spooks have used a
third-level factorising equation to get these numbers. Which
means we have to reverse the process. Let's take the first
number cluster – 657609873. What do you make of it?'

All eyes were on the big screen. Then Sybil's synthetic
voice cut through the quiet. 'Best fit is REHKTHY.'

No one spoke for a moment, then Tom laughed. 'Fantastic
– that's C-3PO's mom, right?'

Josh sat down and ran his hands through his hair. He had
dark rings under his eyes. He leaned forward, elbows on his
knees, and peered at the screen. Then he stood up suddenly.
The others looked on in silence.

'Sybil,' he said after a long pause. 'Good try. Let's look at
the second number cluster – 6858876568.'

Another few moments of silence. Tom twirled a pen across
the fingers of his left hand.

'Closest correlation is HYJJHHHKIO.'

Tom dropped the pen onto the console attached to his
wheelchair.

'Okay,' Josh sighed. 'Sybil, the third numeric cluster –
7876345256.'

The silence was oppressive, then the computer voice rang
out. 'SELL ONE GAS.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake!' Pete exclaimed.

'It's alright. It's an anagram,' Josh said. 'LOS ANGELES.'

Mark shot a glance at the cryptographer and nodded. 'So
the spooks must know something big is about to go down
in LA.'

'Yeah, but they obviously have no idea what it is, or
clues to that information would have been imbedded in the
encoded traffic we've picked up between the agencies. You
haven't isolated any other keywords have you, Tom?'

'No.'

'Which means,' Josh continued, '
we
have absolutely no
idea what's about to go down either.'

Senator Kyle Foreman stretched his long legs as best he could
in the back of the Mercedes and watched the buildings flash
by along Pico Boulevard. The morning sun was bright in a
perfect blue sky.
I could get used to this place
, he thought to
himself. Flying out of JFK only four hours earlier, he had
left behind grey skies and rain. Sometimes he could barely
believe LA and New York were part of the same nation.
Whenever he flew into LAX, the City of Angels always felt
like a foreign land to him, every bit as exotic as its name.

The car slipped into a short tunnel and he caught his
reflection in the window – high cheekbones and square
jaw, salt-and-pepper hair slicked back, large hazel eyes
that spoke of his Italian ancestry. He looked weary. He had
been working hard and it was showing. His skin was a little
saggy around the eyes and there were new wrinkles at the
corners of his mouth. He glanced down at the briefcase on
his knees and tried to focus on the job ahead, but his mind
kept wandering and it always returned to the same thing,
Sandy. He hated leaving her right now. The timing could
not have been worse. Only the night before, he had rushed
her to Mount Sinai Hospital. It was a false alarm, but her
due date was only two days away. The baby could arrive at
any time.

He cursed his schedule. He had utter belief in his cause,
but sometimes . . . Then reason prevailed. This gig had been
booked more than eight months earlier. How could he have
known?

Tonight's speech was to be the most important he had
made, the culmination of two years of campaigning and
dedication. He had been captivated by environmentalism
three years earlier. Looking for a new direction in his career,
he had found an immediate simpatico with what he quickly
realised was the cause of the era. Environmentalism, as he
often now said, was beyond politics.

Kyle Foreman's critics – and there were many, from all
parts of the political spectrum – claimed that all he ever did
was preach to the converted. He knew this was untrue and
that in just two years his organisation, OneEarth, had grown
from being a group of likeminded enthusiasts to a global
campaign with over a million paid-up members. But even
he had to admit that tonight's event was partly a show for
the troops.

He was not doing all this purely for political impact, nor
simply to enhance his profile. He sincerely believed in the
cause, and he was a man who threw himself heart and soul
into anything he felt passionate about. Now, at the age of
43, Foreman was at the top of his game, one of the most
popular and successful members of the Senate, a man tipped
to go all the way.

His had been a remarkable ascendency. Born into a poor
family and brought up by his widowed mother in Ford
Heights, Chicago, he had been forced by necessity to fight
for absolutely everything he had achieved. Graduating from
Yale
summa cum laude
, he became obsessed with succeeding
as a politician because he believed politics was where the
real action was. It was the arena in which he could do most
to bring positive change to the world. He soon learned he
possessed natural charisma and could communicate easily
with people from all walks of life. Coupled with his massive,
restless energy, these qualities set him on the road to great
things long before the media made him famous.

Through the window, he could now see the California
Conference Center, the massive complex of arenas and
exhibition halls where, in less than eight hours, he would
walk onto a stage to greet a thousand key supporters. He
couldn't help but feel proud and excited, but at the same
time he had a growing sense that his real place now was 2500
miles east – with Sandy in their upper eastside apartment.

The lead car pulled into the underground garage,
Foreman's followed and the rear car came up to the bumper.
Four CIA security agents surrounded the senator as he passed
through a glass vestibule into an brightly lit reception area. A
delegation of half a dozen officials from the Center met him.
A member of his staff made the necessary introductions. It
took another half an hour of glad-handing and backslapping
before he reached his private suite on the top floor of the
Hilton annex, which adjoined the CCC. Foreman threw his
jacket onto the bed, loosened his tie and dismissed the two
CIA agents who acted as his personal bodyguards.

Sitting up against the headboard of the bed, he dialled
home. It would be lunchtime there now. There was a pause
as the connection was made, then the comforting ring.
Sandy didn't pick up. The senator felt an immediate ripple
of anxiety. After a few more rings he put the phone down
and redialled. It rang and rang. He stabbed at the disconnect
button and called Sandy's cell phone. It could only mean
one thing, he told himself, and let out a heavy sigh. 'I just
knew this would happen.'

The cell rang five times before Sandy's message service
kicked in. Foreman winced. Disconnecting, he threw down
the phone, jumped off the bed and marched to the bathroom.
He ran a bowl of cold water and threw two handfuls
over his face, enjoying the shock of it.

The phone rang. He rushed back into the bedroom and
snatched at the phone.

'Honey?' a voice said.

'Whoa – you had me worried there, Sand.'

'I was just seeing Marianne to her cab.'

'Of course, I forgot, your sister . . .' He was making a
gargantuan effort to sound calm.

'So, no problem, okay?' Sandy added. 'Now, look. You
get yourself nice and relaxed before your speech. And stop
worrying!'

'Okay, boss,' he laughed.

'And, honey? Good luck.'