The Edge of Madness

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘So, security–what do we do here for security? I haven’t seen much. In fact, I haven’t seen any,’ he asked pointedly, twisting a slice of rare roast beef around his fork.

  ‘Walls three feet thick. A stout front door that’s withstood everything from battering ram and cannonball to marauding horde,’ d’Arby responded.

  The Russian stopped eating, looking up from his plate with a cynical eye.

  ‘Our security lies–’ D’Arby paused, trying to hide the irritation in his voice–‘in the fact that no one knows we are here. That’s at the heart of it all.’

  ‘Security based on nothing?’ Shunin snapped.

  ‘If no one knows we are here we have total safety. You’ve got nothing more to worry about than a vexatious seagull or two, Mr President.’ D’Arby was trying to make light of the matter, but he had slipped into a formal means of address. The atmosphere was stiff, not yielding to his charms.

  ‘Then what are the rules of engagement?’ Shunin continued in his dull middle-European accent that took the passion out of words, making it difficult to tell if he were merely impenetrable or indeed had a fine sense of irony.

  D’Arby laughed, hoping for the latter. ‘No rules, Mr President. We need to be as free and as open as we can. And no written record, I suggest.’ He stared intently across the table to where the American National Security Advisor, his plate already pushed aside, was scribbling in a notebook. ‘I hope that’s in order with you, Mr Washington?’

  The American stopped to consider the proposition as if he were sucking a candy bar. ‘I always used a little axiom when I taught at Princeton,’ he mused. ‘A statesman never forgets the need to win every battle twice–once at the time it’s fought, and yet again when the historians start writing about it. So contemporary jottings, scribbles, whatever they may be, have an extraordinary value. They’re much more reliable than the official record.’

  ‘I’ll leave others to judge how much of a statesman I am. There will be no written record of any kind,’ D’Arby responded quietly, his lips drawn thin and unamused.

  ‘Then what’s posterity going to rely on?’

  ‘The results.’

  ‘I think we owe it to others.’ Washington returned D’Arby’s stare. ‘But I see you object.’

  ‘Let’s concentrate on the matter in hand, not worry about what people might say later, shall we?’

  ‘But we ought to be thinking about history,’ Washington countered, tapping his chin with his pen. ‘And whichever way we look at it–’ he glanced around the table–‘this is already a rather unusual piece of history.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ D’Arby persisted.

  Washington sat still, debating with himself. He made a point of not looking to his President for instruction, he was insistent on making up his own mind. Then, very slowly, almost insolently, he put his pen away.

  What the hell’s going on here? Harry began to wonder. They hadn’t got beyond a couple of lettuce leaves and already the boat was rocking. If they were here to forge an alliance, they’d made a pretty miserable start. They hadn’t even got the fire going.

  Late Friday afternoon. The coastal resort of Beidaihe, China.

  The coastal resort at Beidaihe, three hours east of Beijing and overlooking the Gulf of Bo Hai, couldn’t claim to be the most spectacular in the world, but the sea was clean, the beach shelved gently into cool waters, the resort town itself was sleepy and laid back, and the sea food was superb. A little to the north the might of the Great Wall swept down from the hills to meet the shore. The beach at Beidaihe was scarcely breathtaking but it provided a welcome retreat from the cloying heat of the Chinese capital, and it was here that the Chinese leaders were accustomed to spending their summers, in villas set back amongst the groves of pine trees that clung to the beach.

  Mao Yanming’s villa was no different from the rest, relatively modest, its privacy protected by a high wall and a police guard, its cool white marble floors leading to a veranda that overlooked a garden of little more than an acre. Around the garden ran a whispering stream that bubbled forth from a small granite outcrop. This was unusual in the dry countryside around Beidaihe and made the villa a prized location. Its lawns were the colour of deepest jade, the pool glistened with flashes of ancient carp, and fruits of deep orange filled the branches of the shizi trees. Wind chimes announced the arrival of every cooling breeze.

  This place was Lao Wang’s idea of heaven. If her next existence could give her this much happiness she would want for nothing, and now was a moment of particular joy, for she expected the arrival of her beloved boy, her xiao Yanming. Lao Wang was in her eighties, of the old school, from the days before the revolution when women like her were allowed to dote on young children rather than be dragged off to work in the fields or foundries. She had been the closest friend of Yanming’s mother, and when the unfortunate woman had died of a broken heart brought on by her husband’s brutality, Lao Wang had gladly become the child’s ayi, or nanny, filling the gap that had suddenly and so cruelly emerged in his life. Both she and the boy hated the father. For years they were forced to endure his drunken tyrannies and unpredictable tempers, and when at the height of the Cultural Revolution Yanming had denounced his father for a multitude of ideological sins, the father had been dragged away by Red Guards and was never seen again. That had been a moment of profound celebration for Wang, for it gave her undisputed ownership of Yanming. Some had spread vile rumours that the boy had personally executed his father with a lump of rock, but Wang didn’t listen to scuttlebutt, she had more than enough to do caring for Yanming, and it had grown to be the loyalty of a lifetime. As Yanming had clambered and dragged himself up his mountain, she had travelled with him; she knew how he liked his food, his flowers, how cold he wanted his beer, how to fold back the linen on his bed in just the right manner. She saw much less of him now, of course, for he was too burdened with affairs, but his time in the summer at Beidaihe made up for all the lonely months of absence. And Lao Wang was queen of this place. She was no longer sprightly enough to carry the burden of hard physical work but she retained a voice more than strong enough to order others in her meticulous, pernickety way. ‘No! No! Do you want to choke Mao Yanming with the dust you have left?’ or ‘Are you in the pay of some foreign power? Are you deliberately trying to poison our beloved Mao Yanming?’ or ‘You should be hacked down, just as you have hacked down Mao Yanming’s favourite flower!’ As they prepared for the leader’s arrival, her voice would ring out across the marble floors and make life a misery for all.

  She knew they hated her but she was from the old world and no one had sacrificed as much for the boy as she–why, hadn’t she forsaken marriage, a husband, children of her own? Yet why did she need such things when she had Yanming? She wove her life around him.

  And any moment he would be here. He was already late, which made her ever more nervous, and her voice redoubled with instruction and denunciation of the staff. She fussed and she bustled, waiting only for the commotion that would announce that her beloved charge was outside.

  So when the telephone rang to tell her that he wasn’t coming after all, it was as though the thread of her existence had been snapped. Her misery was total. The staff didn’t try to hide the malicious glint of pleasure that filled their eyes, she could sense their sniggers, even if her old ears were too dull to hear. Her time, her moment, was gone. She couldn’t understand it, what had detained him, was it illness, or some political indisposition? But she had received neither explanation nor apology. She felt insulted, humiliated. From near at hand, within the kitchen, she heard laughter loud enough even for her muffed ears to catch. They were mocking her. It was more than the old woman could withstand. Lao Wang let forth a wail of misery so prolonged, so heartfelt and shrill, that it not only drowned every other noise in the house but might have been heard as far away as Beijing. The wheel of fortune had moved on and passed right over her old toes. This wasn’t right. Something was desperately amiss, she could feel
it in her old bones. Her world was being torn apart, and her motherly instincts told her that nothing would ever be the same.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Friday lunchtime. Castle Lorne.

  D’Arby pushed his plate away, clearing the deck. ‘Cyber warfare is a monster,’ he began. ‘No bombs, no explosions, nothing, really. You don’t even know it’s happening, until it’s too late. But it will revolutionize the nature of war as fundamentally as did gunpowder. I seem to remember that the Chinese invented that, too. But unlike gunpowder it doesn’t attack its targets and leave them in ruins, it destroys them from the inside. His voice was soft, almost hushed, but filled with emotion; his audience listened attentively. ‘Capture the computer systems that control our modern world and our societies will soon be paralysed. This new Chinese game is a little like acupuncture, or one of their martial arts. Find the right pressure point, squeeze, and your enemy is rendered powerless.’ His fingers grasped at an imaginary opponent. ‘Unable to defend themselves, unable soon even to feed themselves. And that is precisely what Mao is planning. Not a declaration of war, not any statement of outright hostility, and certainly not a conventional military attack, but a series of incidents that will result in a catastrophic undermining of morale in our countries.’

  ‘You mean public opinion?’ Shunin asked in a disinterested tone that refused to engage with the Englishman’s sombre mood. He shrugged. ‘I like public opinion. I have an entire collection of it mounted on the walls of my hunting lodge.’

  ‘It’s more than that,’ D’Arby continued, ignoring the provocation. ‘It’s no longer a matter of who has the bigger bombs but who has the most sharp-witted hackers, who has the ability to know more about the opponent’s system than sometimes he does himself, enough not only to mess up those systems but also his will to fight. I suppose it’s a little like marriage, Mr President,’ D’Arby added, deciding to return Shunin’s joust.

  The Russian was married to a former Aeroflot stewardess who reputedly was familiar with every excuse in the book and kept this most awesome man on a tight domestic rein, the price for having provided him with two daughters on whom he doted. Yet Shunin was a man who had never loved, not to the bottom of his soul, anything apart from his country. He’d married for companionship and convenience, and his wife had earned his respect, but not always, in those early days, the respect of others. Once, in the early days of their marriage and his service in the KGB, he’d overheard one of his colleagues describe his wife as ‘cabin screw’. Years later that colleague had become one of his first sacrifices, poisoned by a radioactive isotope mixed into the man’s meal during a mission to New Delhi, years before Alexander Litvinenko had been murdered by similar means. No one had raised an eyebrow, it had been diagnosed simply as a bad case of curry. Oh, but it had felt good. Khuy, very good! Another victim, another speck of suffering on his country’s history that Shunin had discovered was no speck at all on his conscience.

  D’Arby was still speaking, painting a lurid picture of the future. ‘By the time you realize you’re under attack, it’s too late. Your transport system chokes, your economy disappears down a black hole, your food supplies dry up, and your country begins to fall to pieces. It’s almost like history comes to an end. We’ll be back in the Middle Ages.’

  They had listened attentively to him, but at this point Washington began shaking his head. ‘No, not that, not that at all. The Middle Ages…’ He chewed distractedly on the end of a carrot stick as though trying to dredge up sufficiently simple words that they might understand. ‘The Middle Ages,’ he pronounced, ‘had a degree of certainty and order about them–you know, the feudal system. Everyone knew what was expected of them, how they should live, what they should do, even who they should marry. What you describe is not that, but quite the opposite. It’s an age of no order at all, it’s not feudal, simply brutal.’

  ‘Let’s not dicker about words, Marcus, I think the Prime Minister’s point has merit,’ Blythe Edwards intervened, for the first time. ‘We rely totally on computers to the point that we’ve forgotten the art of thinking without them. We all know that.’ Her tone was gently scolding, but if it were rebuke, it bounced off Washington.

  ‘You’ll forgive my historical inexactitudes,’ D’Arby retorted, intent on pursuing his argument and buggered if he was going to be lectured by some sort of irradiated rabbit, ‘but the point I was trying to make is that if we get caught in the crossfire of a cyber war, we’re already history.’ He offered a thin smile. ‘No matter how many notes we take.’

  ‘Some of this cyber stuff is certainly worrying,’ Blythe responded. ‘Chinese industrial espionage is truly massive. We’ve graded it as the single greatest risk to American technological security. But you’re proposing something in an altogether different league, that they intend to use this not for industrial purposes but as a military weapon.’

  ‘Let’s not beat about the bush, Blythe, every single one of us is looking at these options,’ D’Arby responded. ‘Correct, Mr President?’ He looked towards Shunin. Some years earlier the entire Estonian banking and parliamentary systems had been closed for several weeks as a result of a cyber attack, believed to have been launched from within Russia. Shunin offered nothing in reply but a gentle shrug.

  ‘But you’re suggesting the Chinese are about to use this in an unprecedented fashion,’ she continued. ‘Can you be more specific? It all seems a little vague–how can you be certain?’

  ‘We can’t, not of the details. The whole point of cyber warfare is largely psychological–you outwit your opponents, undermine their will and their ability to respond. Take a moment to think about what would happen if your power supplies could be switched on and off by others–as they already have been.’

  ‘That’s not proven,’ she persisted.

  ‘Can you take the risk? Premature babies left without incubators, the elderly without heating, kids without schools, fathers without work, mothers without food. That’s what you’re threatened with. And the beauty of this mind game is that you know who’ll get the blame? Not Mao–because, as you say, you couldn’t prove a thing. Even if we tried to say this was all his fault we’d get laughed out of the saloon. We’d be back in the desert all over again searching for weapons of mass destruction.’

  She winced. That thorn would still be sticking in their backsides on Judgement Day.

  ‘Remember the Millennium Bug? We were swept with panic over Y2K, the fear that our computer systems would go down because they couldn’t handle the change of date. Billions were spent trying to prevent that happening, flights were cancelled, emergency workers were kept on alert, leave was cancelled in parts of our armed forces. You all know that our governments were secretly rocking with fear of a catastrophe–that’s even part of the reason why Boris Yeltsin suddenly decided to retire days beforehand, isn’t it?’ D’Arby demanded, turning to Shunin. ‘Many people thought he’d just had a bottle too many, but he was no fool, he knew his health wasn’t up to dealing with such a catastrophe if it happened.’

  Across the table, Shunin didn’t respond, but neither did he rush to deny it.

  ‘And the Millennium Bug was nothing compared to what we face today. Mao’s men have made some sort of collective breakthrough–you all know how hackers have been pounding your most sensitive sites, but my information is that they’re no longer knocking on the door but creeping in through the back window so we don’t even know they’re there.’

  ‘But you don’t know that for certain,’ the American President continued to insist.

  D’Arby nodded, as though accepting the point, but immediately returned fire. ‘There’s only one thing you can know for certain, Blythe, and that’s this. Forgive me for putting it bluntly. If New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago is knocked out, the one person who can be blamed, who is certain to be blamed–is you.’

  She flinched. He was being unnecessarily violent, but it was all too believable. She had watched the presidency of George W. Bush buried beneath the bl
ame for the war in Iraq, she’d even participated in the interment. The rules of the game were clear; those who lived in the White House had nowhere to hide.

  It was at this point that Washington re-emerged from his salad. ‘But from what I’ve seen, the main target isn’t America, or even Russia. It’s you here in Britain. As for the rest of us–well, frankly I don’t think he’d dare.’

  D’Arby smiled, a genuinely insincere gesture. ‘You know, Mr Washington, I never taught at Princeton, but I seem to remember precisely that argument being used in one of my history books when I was at school. What was it now?’ He touched his forehead, as though in confusion. ‘Yes, it’s coming back to me. I think it was called The Road to Pearl Harbor.’

  Washington sniffed in disdain.

  ‘Why on earth would Mao spend his time focusing on a small, faraway island like Britain?’ the Prime Minister scoffed. ‘We’re merely the trial run, nothing more than the appetizer before he starts on the main course. You all know what he wants.’ He glared around the table. ‘World domination. And he won’t find that in Piccadilly Circus!’

  Harry sucked his cheek. It wasn’t quite the story D’Arby had relayed to him in the car. What words had the Prime Minister used? Something about that yellow bastard having made Britain his number-one target? But perhaps it didn’t matter so much, he reflected, D’Arby was in the middle of the game of his life–perhaps even a game for his life–and all negotiation requires a little flexibility.