The Edge of Madness

by Michael Dobbs

  The Edge of Madness

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2008

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Michael Dobbs, 2008

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Michael Dobbs to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  222 Gray’s Inn Road

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  www.simonsays.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-84737-560-5

  ISBN-10: 1-84737-560-X

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  To Helen and Katrina.

  Beautiful nieces.

  War is the continuation of politics by other means.

  Chaos is the continuation of war, by even better means.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Arnie Edwards was no common or garden adulterer. He’d recently celebrated his silver wedding anniversary and was no longer in the prime of his manhood, but that left him with a sense of sexual urgency which screamed out for satisfaction. So much to do, so little time to do it, and Washington, DC was a town overflowing with opportunity. For a while, Arnie tried to take advantage of them all, wandering away from the kennel every chance he got. Bit of a selfish dog, was Arnie, and the excuses he made to himself were as prolific as they were predictable. His wife had other interests, was neglecting him, he couldn’t remember the last time they’d spent an evening raking the embers. What did he expect when his wife was the President of the United States?

  Screwing around by the First Laddie, as Arnie liked to refer to himself, required certain precautions. He couldn’t bring the business home to the White House, he was unlikely to get away with booking a room at the Four Seasons under some assumed name, and there were always those wretched guys from the Secret Service hanging around. So when Arnie bumped into a clinically enhanced oil lobbyist from Texas named Gretchen who had her own apartment in the rabbit warren of the Watergate complex, the arrangement seemed ideal. He could pop round to her burrow almost any time. And he did.

  Trouble was, her burrow quickly came to seem like home for Arnie in a way the White House could never be, and soon he began leaving his razor and toothbrush behind. He knew he was taking a risk, with his reputation, his marriage, even his complimentary tickets to the Redskins’ games. Wouldn’t do much for the institution of the presidency, either, but when you’re lying between the thighs of a woman from Texas who’s licking out your inner ear, you’re no longer thinking with the right part of your anatomy. Responsibility? Nothing more than a strange word from a crossword puzzle. Six across, thirteen letters–or was it fourteen? By this time he couldn’t even count, let alone reason.

  The affair soon got to the point that Arnie was determined to continue with it, regardless. He came to that conclusion one evening after he had rolled over onto distressed sheets and felt as though he were twenty-three all over again. He could take it, no matter what the consequences.

  Unfortunately for Arnie and many other people, he had no way of knowing that one of those consequences was going to help kick-start a global war.

  There were to be no guns in this war, no missiles, no vapour trails stretching like accusing fingers across the skies, none of the obliterating explosions and sudden bursts of darkness you would expect. Not even a scream. There was nothing, save for the tentative striking of keys on a cheap keyboard. Yet make no mistake; this was warfare, it would bring the world to the edge of damnation. And the brilliance of the whole thing was that no one would realize it was happening.

  Yet, like all weapons, the system required testing, and the first place they decided to test it was against the Russian nuclear plant at Sosnovy Bor. She was of the same era as Chernobyl, and her four RBMK-1000 reactors were almost identical in design. The grimy cooling towers of the Leningradskaya Atomnaya Electrostantsiya squatted on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, scowling in the direction of the ancient Russian capital of St Petersburg that lay only fifty miles to the east.

  She was an old lady, so far as nuclear plants went, and like many old women she creaked and complained. Thirty years earlier there had been rumours of a partial meltdown of one of the cores, but in true Sovetskii-style that couldn’t conceive of failure, let alone own up to it, the incident was swept aside. Much of the basic plant was all nuts and old bolts that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in one of Sergei Eisenstein’s black-and-white masterpieces, but after Chernobyl had blown the top off its reactor, the international community had poured millions of dollars into Soviet nuclear plants to ensure there would be no repeat, and Sosnovy Bor had received its fair share. They’d used the funds to upgrade the computers to take away the guesswork, double-banking all the vital equipment and fitting the latest cut-outs and fail-safes.

  There was always the problem of the safety culture, of course, getting sodden-brained workmen to take responsibility for fluid spills and dripping pipes rather than wandering off to piss their salaries into the Gulf of Finland, but Rosenergoatom had got round that, not by simply duplicating the important systems but making them entirely separate. So Sosnovy Bor had one set of controls operated by computers, and another operated without computers, a belt-and-braces affair that provided two entirely different means of support and which was regularly tested to ensure both belt and braces remained in prime condition. Only one very small snag in all this: in order to test the safety system, the belt or the braces had to be taken off.

  With hindsight it was a pity that they chose to unbuckle the belt in the middle of a harsh winter when the power demand from St Petersburg was at its height, but you don’t put off an important maintenance schedule simply because of a little snow. So the control system that wasn’t based on computers was taken out of service. Only for an hour.

  But Sosnovy Bor had only a few minutes to live.

  The computer systems had been hacked, been lobotomized, but no one in the plant knew it. So they took the first safety system out of operation. Immediately, the second began to misbehave, allowing temperatures in the reactor core to soar. The process was instantaneous and precipitous, and with extraordinary rapidity the temperatures rose above two thousand eight hundred degrees Celsius. At this point the uranium-dioxide rods at the heart of the core started to melt, but there was no sign of this in the control room. The screens suggested the reactor was behaving itself, because the systems controlling the screens had been tampered with, too. The huge secondary array of lights and dials began to light up and flicker b
ut there was always some small irregularity, an oil leak or an open door, and for a few crucial moments no one paid much attention.

  That changed when the build-up of steam in the reactor core blew the pressure-release valves. The noise sent out a scream that made all who heard it freeze with terror. Other alarm systems began to sound. Operators began to shout, to panic. The plant’s huge turbines began to shake and shudder. Pipes cracked, seals blew. Inside the reactor, the rising temperature meant that more of the water supposed to cool the reaction was turning to steam, which made the temperature rise still faster. It became a race to disaster.

  How close Sosnovy Bor came to the point of overwhelming catastrophe, no one from Rosenergoatom was ever able to ascertain, even with hindsight, but it was at this point in the enveloping crisis that the hackers decided they’d overstayed their welcome and put the instrumentation back to normal. At last the terrified controllers could see precisely what was going on, yet even before they could react, the computers did it for them. At Chernobyl it had been too late, even for this, the melting rods in the reactor core had stuck together, preventing the circulation of water between them and so ensuring the core couldn’t be cooled down. It blew the entire lid off, leaving the radiation-spewing inferno open to the air and turning Chernobyl into the destroyer of children. But at Sosnovy Bor, the gods were on their side and, with agonizing slowness, the operators watched the reactor-core temperature begin to slip back down. Russia could breathe again. For the moment.

  There was no leakage of radiation beyond the reactor circuit, and none to the outside world, but the rods had melted and it was impossible to deal with them. They never reopened that burnt-out reactor Number Three at Sosnovy Bor, they just locked it up and threw away the key. Russia had survived a great terror, yet for some of those who thought about it there was a still greater terror lurking in the shadows. Despite all the analysis and examination and brutal inquisitions of those officials and operators who might have been responsible, the committee of investigation couldn’t find out what had gone wrong. They were blind. Which meant, as they quickly came to realize, that they had no way of preventing it happening all over again.

  Wu Xiaoling sat twisting the silken ends of the belt on her gown, overwhelmed with a sense of abuse and uncertainty. She was twenty-six years of age, slim yet profiled, exquisitely so, with remarkably round eyes for a Chinese girl. Something Occidental had swum in the family’s gene pool during their days way back in Hong Kong that provided Xiaoling with the allure of someone special, different–not that different was a welcome characteristic in the new China, but that hadn’t prevented her from becoming the most favoured mistress of the country’s leader, Mao Yanming. Being so close to one so high gave her considerable privileges, but also placed upon her the most awesome responsibility for keeping Mao satisfied. And he was no easy man to satisfy. She had been summoned peremptorily to his private pavilion that was set next to the lake in Zhongnanhai, the protected quarter in Beijing beside the ancient Forbidden City that housed the country’s government. As usual she had been met at a side gate to the compound by one of his personal guards who had led her directly to the pavilion, trying to shield her from enquiring eyes, but others knew, of course. Men are such fools; such things can never be kept secret. Even Mao’s wife knew, Xiaoling had seen it in her eyes.

  Mao had been waiting for her, but it had become immediately apparent that something was wrong. He had spent no time in small talk, had no little gift for her, but had screwed her roughly, brutally almost. Not that it had ever been Xiaoling’s role to complain and in truth there was nothing he did that gave her any pleasure. He was a man of the provinces, not sophisticated, not even very clean. The road from his birthplace in Gansu had been long and dusty, and she was glad for the scent of honeysuckle and sweet camphor that filled these rooms and covered his trail. She had learned many ways of giving him pleasure, of distracting him from those avenues he sometimes liked to explore that gave her none, and she was skilled in easing away his cares with fingers whose touch was as light as an eagle’s feathers. That was why he talked, and allowed her to steal his troubles from him, yet today he had uttered barely a word, except to give her instruction, and had taken her crudely, in a manner he knew she loathed. Afterwards she had cried quietly into her pillow while he made phone calls. Then he had returned, taking her again, hurting her, as though he were penalizing her and had seen through her wiles and little deceptions. It was as though he knew.

  He had dressed and left, instructing her to remain in the outside sitting room, where she now sat tugging in distraction at her silken belt, staring at the ancient calligraphy scrolls hanging from the walls and the large all-too-modern photo-negative image of old Chairman Mao Zedong inside a heavy black-lacquered frame. The picture had two embellished red eyes. They seemed to be staring at her.

  Then the door opened. Fu Zhang, one of Mao Yanming’s closest personal colleagues, entered accompanied by a guard bearing a tray of tea, which was placed on a small formal table. Fu nodded a silent instruction and the guard left. Xiaoling disliked Fu, he was insidious, cold, a man who treated with contempt anyone who hadn’t been with Mao as long as he had. That contempt increased ten-fold for women, for Xiaoling sensed that he saw no role in his life for the other sex. He was the sort who would prefer to sleep with goats, and probably did, yet now he invited her to join him at the table, where he was pouring tea, almost deferentially. Uncertain, hesitant, she exchanged the comfortable cushioned sofa for the hard, formal chair at the table. He invited her to drink. Pu’er, green tea, very old, as Mao liked it, with a hint of chrysanthemum.

  ‘I have been asked to tell you that our leader has held you in very high regard,’ Fu said as she took a few tentative sips. It took her several moments to realize that he had used the past tense. Why? she wondered. She was still gnawing away at the question when, with a rising sense of panic, she realized she could not move. Not her hand, nor a finger. Her limbs were frozen. The tea. The rest of her senses were still active, almost enhanced, her thoughts and sudden doubts scrambling over each other inside her mind, the scent of honeysuckle now almost powerful enough to drown her. And through it all, insistently, she could smell her own fear as with the silken cord of her gown Fu began binding her to the chair, looping it under her arms, tying it behind her, ensuring that she would not slip. Then he ripped her gown wide open, exposing her.

  She was screaming inside, but not a sound passed her lips. She could not resist him. For a moment she felt sure he was going to rape her, but no, he was a powder boy, he had no desire for what she had to offer. Then, from a small case withdrawn from his pocket, he produced a knife. A surgeon’s knife, hardened, razor-sharp steel that glowed in the sun reflecting from the lake.

  Within her mind she wriggled and thrashed, while in the chair she sat as passive as a rag doll.

  ‘You should not have betrayed us,’ Fu said, his fat lips wriggling like serpents.

  Then he started to carve.

  ‘Ling Chi’, they called it. The Death of a Thousand Cuts. Its literal meaning was to climb a mountain, very slowly. It was a form of execution practised in imperial China and not formally abolished until 1905, but even then it continued to be used. It involved cutting the flesh from the body in small pieces while the victim still lived, and was intended to be the highest form of degradation. That’s why they had decided to use it on Xiaoling. Despite all their efforts they knew they could never completely erase the marks of her existence or cover up what she had done. She had betrayed Mao Yanming, poured humiliation upon him, caused him to lose face, but there would be no sniggering amongst those who knew or might hear of such things because they would remember nothing but the horror of what awaited those who crossed their leader. It was a lesson in terror they could never forget.

  Wu Xiaoling felt no physical pain, but she saw her blood flowing thick and dark from the wounds on her arms, her thighs, and elsewhere. As her head dropped she wasn’t even able to avert her eyes. She was f
orced to watch every moment.

  In the few months since Sosnovy Bor was pulled back from the edge of oblivion, there had been other mysterious incidents. These didn’t occur all at the same time or in the same corner of the world, but a pattern had begun to develop, one that was as yet so indistinct that almost no one recognized it for what it was. Instead of indulging in thoughts of conspiracy, most people put this plague of misfortunes down to incompetence. All the fault of the politicians. It was an easy explanation to accept.

  On the north-east coast of America, in the midst of a summer heatwave that was stretching the resources of the electricity grid to its limit, a power line went down. Nothing unusual in that, the lines get struck by lightning all the time. There are always alternatives, other routes that are made to work that little bit harder, so long as care is taken not to overload them, otherwise they cut out, too…But imagine you have the capability to model the entire grid system on a computer, to simulate it, or steal its software, to copy the codes that control the switching, to check out its weak points and to see what happens when you take out this line, or that line. If you could do that, then you would become its master. Just flick the right switch at the wrong time, and you could get the whole cotton-picking power system to fall apart like a house of cards.

  And that’s what happened. At a time when the system was under acute pressure from all that air conditioning and beer refrigeration, and with one line down from a summer lightning strike, another line suddenly dropped out. There was no apparent reason for this, no one ever found out why, but soon power lines were tripping all over the place and large swathes of the east coast were being plunged into darkness. There was no undue panic; hell, it had all happened before, everyone remembered the blackout of 2003. America had been promised it would never happen again, of course, those who were responsible for these things had sworn on a stack of Bibles, but it did. Promises were cheap, yet action costs money, lots of it, and time. When the day came that their time ran out, millions of Americans were left to sit in the dark and sweat.