The Edge of Madness

by Michael Dobbs

  Harry swore, coarsely and with passion. Konev was nowhere to be seen. The street was narrow, in one direction leading up towards the old slate quarry and in the other down to the harbour. Paths and alleyways led off in all directions. The bloody man could be anywhere. Harry swore again, but it didn’t make him feel any better. There was little point in trying to chase after the Russian, he had no clue which direction to take, and it would mean abandoning the American, who was locked in the depths of his telephone conversation, his head lowered and his shoulders hunched. Anyway, Konev had presumably disappeared by choice and Harry wasn’t his jailer, although right now he felt like applying for the post. He stood in the middle of what felt like nowhere, wondering, as Shunin had, what the hell he was doing here.

  It was some time and several coins later before Washington finished his call. He emerged from the phone box, his brow creased in agricultural furrows beneath his shining pate.

  ‘Lavrenti’s gone,’ Harry said.

  ‘Eaten by locals?’

  ‘We’ve got to find him.’

  ‘We have to get back,’ the American corrected.

  ‘Not without the Russian.’

  Washington shrugged in indifference. ‘He wanders off, that’s his funeral. You may have picked up on the fact that there are considerably more important things at stake here than a clown from the Kremlin. I need to get back.’

  ‘Then you walk.’

  Washington’s eyes grew bright, like pebbles in the surf, washed with impatience. ‘What sort of security are you?’

  ‘Crap, evidently.’

  ‘How many times can you Brits screw up? Losing your empire is one thing but losing your telephone, then losing your guests, that’s an entirely different order of incompetence. When are you going to realize that this isn’t your show any longer, never was? Just get me back to the castle so the grown-ups can get on with it.’

  ‘We stay.’

  They stood their ground, neither giving quarter. Raucous seagulls circled overhead and squabble over perching rights on the roof of the Range Rover. The two men were still contesting the issue when the Russian reappeared, walking back up the hill from the direction of the harbour, flapping away at the accompanying midges.

  ‘Where have you been, Mr Konev?’ Harry asked, trying to shake the irritation out of his voice.

  The Russian affected to look puzzled by the question, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to get into any difficulty.’

  ‘No difficulty. I just went down to the harbour to use the other phone. Thank you for your concern, but we Russians don’t need babysitters, Mr Jones.’

  Lavrenti offered him a smile. Harry looked into the Russian’s eyes, saw them dancing in agitation. It reminded him of a calculating machine working out the odds. He knew the man was lying.

  Late Friday evening. The Room of Many Miracles, Shanjing.

  The room was filled with remorseless concentration–heads bowed, keys tapping, faces lit by the glow of the screens, voices that earlier had been loud and youthful now fallen to whispers as energies were focused on the task in front of them. Fu Zhang was sweating, little pearls of perspiration strung beneath his hairline. ‘Why is nothing happening?’ he asked.

  ‘The deadlines have been brought forward, Minister. We were given no warning. We need a little more time.’

  ‘How much time?’ Fu snapped.

  ‘This is not something that can be over in a minute, or even a day,’ Li Changchun persisted. He sighed; he didn’t care for this man with lips like wriggling worms who had descended from Beijing to turn their plans upside down. It was the blind leading the quietly brilliant. And Fu didn’t show respect. Computer programmers were often gifted souls but, simply because they seemed at times to have pulled their clothing straight from the bottom of a dirty laundry basket, they were regarded by the likes of Fu as alien life forms.

  Yet despite appearances, many of them were supremely talented. It was their kind who had built the cyber highways and online architecture that defined the Twenty-first Century, but that didn’t stop them being treated like slaves from ancient Egypt, forced to toil over their master’s pyramid. So, in the manner of all slaves, they were constantly in search of shortcuts, ways of lightening their load–like creating a trapdoor through which they could come and go whenever they pleased. Just as with the pharaohs’ tombs, these digital pyramids were intended to be impregnable, but they never were. There was always a way in or out. It meant the modern slave could often complete his work not under the eye of his master but from the comfort of his own bedroom simply by hacking into his own programs–and while he was at it he could also brighten up his spare time by borrowing a few hundred gigabytes of computer space to store games or a little pornography. It was strictly against the rules of the game, but the programmers were always better players than the bosses. The programmer’s view of life was often as simple as his clothes were crumpled and his programs were complicated. You build it, it’s yours.

  The cyber world was a world full of trapdoors. If you knew where to look for them, they allowed anyone access, and if you didn’t know, you might well be able to buy the details off those who did in a surreptitious online trade. Then you could raid the pharaoh’s tomb, run off with a few gold goblets tucked under your tunic or leave rude messages daubed all over the walls. Or you might just leave a logic bomb, primed and waiting to explode. A logic bomb is a chunk of malicious computer code, bad software–malware–that, once triggered, can inflict the most extraordinary damage. It might give instructions for the next pyramid to be built as a rectangle, or in the wrong location, with the wrong name above the door or with no door at all. Or it might allow the pyramid to be built to apparent perfection and then, many months later, and for no apparent reason, for the whole bloody thing to be blown to smithereens. Like the fate that had nearly overtaken Sosnovy Bor.

  ‘We have established trapdoors into all these systems, Minister,’ Li was saying, ‘but we must take care to keep them open.’

  ‘And you can do that?’

  ‘So long as the other side don’t know the trapdoor is there.’

  ‘And if they do?’

  ‘Then we will have to hurry to finish our work before it is closed. Or find a different means of entry. There is only one golden rule, Minister. Adapt.’

  Yes, Fu muttered to himself, it was like any other aspect of life. Adapt. Or be crushed.

  Li Changchun understood the punishment for failure would be terrible. Fu didn’t say as much, he didn’t need to. The director already knew. When he’d been offered the job in charge of this establishment, one of the vice-ministers had entertained him to lunch. Li Changchun had asked what his new responsibilities might be. The vice-minister had put aside his chopsticks and poured more beer.

  ‘Consider this as a military appointment,’ he had said, weighing his words, ‘with the difference that you don’t report to those stubborn recidivists in the People’s Liberation Army. Technically you will be a unit of the Ministry for Innovation and Enterprise, but in truth your orders will come direct from the leader’s office. Your commanding officer will be Mao Yanming himself. Yet as with any military operation, in a time of war, the general staff may need to find a special means of encouraging the troops.’ He had paused, offered a cold smile. ‘At some point they may require that someone be taken out into the courtyard, put up against the wall, and shot. And, as director, that is your job,’ the vice-minister had said. ‘You must either find the body. Or be the body.’ Then he had laughed, as if he hadn’t meant it at all.

  Now that war had begun. There would be a need for bodies. Yet, as he glanced around him, Li saw no problems. The operation was underway, his units advancing stealthily on all fronts. He wasn’t one to believe in the inevitability of success, he’d spent too long struggling with mangled lines of computer code to take things for granted, but he was young, loved life, and wanted to get rid of this pompous and self-preening pol
itician. The minister was drawing closer, under the pretext of looking ever more carefully at the computer screen, pretending that he understood. Li could smell stale garlic and he had this awful sense that the man was about to make a lunge for his thigh.

  Fu Zhang stared, and wiped his flushed face. He found himself looking at what appeared to be a control-room monitor from some sort of facility. The details were offered up with astonishing clarity but at first he was confused. The script on the screens was in English. Fu Zhang’s understanding of the alphabet was miserable, but slowly he spelled the words out.

  Sizewell B. Britain’s newest nuclear reactor.

  His heart was pounding with excitement. The moment had come. No more holding back. Time to open the door to a new world–no, to kick it off its hinges so that it would never again close!

  With a nod, Fu Zhang gave the signal for the new miracle to begin.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Late Friday afternoon. Castle Lorne.

  Harry had waited in Sullapool only long enough to make his own telephone call–to the duty clerk in Whitehall, as instructed by D’Arby–before heading back. The drive had seemed twice as long and far more tortuous than the journey out. Both the American and Russian sat in silence, Washington oozing with sullen resentment while Konev appeared lost in thoughts of his own.

  As soon as they returned they disappeared to report to their masters. Harry had precious little to offer. There was still no trace of Wesley Lake, and Sammi Shah had disappeared, too, although whether under his own steam or under armed guard was not clear. The Chinese ambassador in London had also gone, recalled to Beijing for what were described as ‘new instructions’. That meant that the ambassador’s deputy had to be summoned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to receive a formal complaint about the scenes outside the British embassy in Beijing, but since the Foreign Secretary himself was away on holiday, the ritual rebuke had to be delivered by one of his junior ministers. It rendered the whole exercise pretty pointless, like puppies growling at each other.

  Harry had also attempted to have Flora’s phone reconnected, but even invoking prime-ministerial authority hadn’t been sufficient to get the job done, not after close of play on the first weekend in August. No one was answering their phones, so Flora’s would be left unanswered, too. The only solution would have been to sound trumpets of alarm in all directions, but that wasn’t at all what D’Arby had in mind. Harry had been given all kinds of assurances by the telephone company that everything would return to normal on Monday. Somehow he doubted it.

  He found D’Arby in his bedroom. The Prime Minister listened without comment to Harry’s report, thanked him, then turned back to staring out of the window, doing his Greta Garbo impersonation, wanting to be alone. Harry had no desire to talk either, his eyes were still on fire and his head seemed filled with cooking fat, but as he made his way up to his own room, hoping desperately to snatch some sleep, he almost collided with Nipper on the stairs. The boy had the sort of earnest stare that only those who haven’t yet become teenagers can manufacture.

  ‘Hello, Mr Jones. You’re important, aren’t you?’

  It was a boyish question delivered with such certainty that any degree of disappointment would most certainly bring the roof crashing in upon him. Harry had experienced many forms of cross-examination in his time, even at the point of a bayonet, and as a politician he knew many ways of rewrapping the truth, but a child’s wide eyes were an interrogation technique he found totally unable to resist.

  ‘No, Nipper, not at all.’

  ‘Granny says you are, all of you. Important.’ Nipper hesitated. ‘But none of you are any more important than me, she says.’

  Harry laughed. ‘She’s right.’

  Nipper sucked his lower lip in thought. As a Highlander he’d been brought up to take the obligations of hospitality most seriously. ‘Would you like to see my collection of model planes? I’ve made most of them all by myself.’

  Harry was ready to drop, his mind focused on nothing but satisfying the pressing demands of sleep, but the child’s enthusiasm burst upon him like a fountain of colour in a world that in most other directions had turned to shades of grey. He straightened his back. ‘I’d love to,’ he said.

  Nipper led him up another two flights of stairs, to the very top of the castle. The boy’s room had a low ceiling and sturdy walls decorated with brightly coloured posters of Scottish heroes–a cartoon of Rob Roy, a film poster of Mel Gibson made up as William Wallace, and there was even one of Superman in a tartan cape. The duvet cover was the blue-and-white saltire of the Scottish flag, pillows to match, and on the table beside the bed was placed a football covered in the signatures of the Scottish national team. As if to confirm the point, on one wall was pasted a map of the world that had Scotland at its centre. There were books, too, Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan and many other adventures that started in, finished at, or passed through these lands.

  ‘You let foreigners like me into your room?’ Harry enquired, staring into Nipper’s face and smiling.

  ‘Only if you swear an oath to defend Castle Lorne against all aggressors, whether they be English or infidel. But particularly the English.’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘No! You’ve got to swear on the dirk,’ Nipper protested, leading him to a small glass and mahogany case that stood on his chest of drawers. In it was a small dagger, around six inches in length. Age had dulled its blade but not its charm, and it had semi-precious stones set into the curved hilt. A woman’s blade. Nipper lifted the lid of his case with care. ‘It belonged to my great-great-something granny,’ he whispered, his voice hushed in reverence. ‘We call her the Lady of Lorne. Her dirk is magic, you see–my Grandda’ told me. And so long as it’s here, in the castle, it means the MacDougalls will be here, too.’

  Harry received a nod from the boy and reached out, placing his fingers on the hilt. ‘I so swear.’

  ‘Then you are welcome.’

  The formalities done, Nipper whirled round the room to show off his collection of airplanes. They seemed to occupy every spare corner, on bookshelves, the top of the cupboard, even suspended by fishing wire from hooks in the ceiling. By the open window, swinging on their wire in the draught, a highly painted Spitfire engaged in a dogfight with a stealth bomber. One of the larger exhibits was a model of a Tiger Moth made completely out of matchsticks.

  ‘That’s my favourite,’ Nipper announced, his eyes bright with enthusiasm. ‘Grandda’ made it for me. He used to fly one.’

  ‘Would you like to learn to fly, Nipper?’

  ‘I’m going to! Although Granny says I can’t because I’ve got a silly sickness. It came after my fall. It’s called epilepsy.’

  A mist of sadness settled on Harry. That made it impossible, of course, for Nipper to fly, not with such a disability. They’d never let him off the ground, not on his own. But Nipper seemed to pick up on Harry’s doubts. He drew close, whispering, like a conspirator. ‘But Granny also said that Grandda’ couldn’t smoke his pipe. And you know what, Mr Jones? He did! Every time we went for one of our walks.’

  On the wall directly above the matchstick model hung a black-and-white photograph of a young clansman in full ceremonial dress with his right hand resting on the hilt of a claymore. Grandda’, Harry supposed. And above the bed Harry noticed what might have been that self-same claymore, fixed firmly to the wall. Suspended from its tip by another piece of fishing wire was a space shuttle.

  As Nipper was showing off his collection of models, Flora appeared at the door. ‘There you are, Nipper, I wondered where you were hiding. Time has this awful habit of flying, too, you know, and I’ll be needing your advice in the kitchen.’

  ‘I was just showing Mr Jones my room, Granny,’ he replied, brimming with good humour. ‘It’s all right, he’s sworn the oath.’

  ‘Then we’d better make sure there’s some dinner ready for Mr Jones. It wouldn’t do to let your new recruit go hungry.’

  ‘O
K,’ Nipper said, skipping happily towards the door. He stopped at the threshold and looked back at Harry. His boy-serious face had returned. ‘I will learn to fly, you know.’ With that, he ran down the stairs.

  Early Friday evening. Castle Lorne.

  They had gathered in the library for drinks before dinner. Harry loved libraries, their smell of knowledge, their passion, the air of peace, yet the library on the third floor was unlike any he had known. Almost one entire length of wall was taken up by a series of mullioned windows that offered the most spectacular views across the water to the purple-green archipelago of the Inner Hebrides, to Jura and Islay and Mull. There was gold in these islands, he knew, liquid gold that made up the most stunning selection of malt whiskies. He felt sure Flora would have a cache.

  The library was on the seaward side of the castle and below him Harry could see nothing but swirling waves and spray-soaked rocks that cast back the reflection of the evening sun. Gulls competed in a show of aerial acrobatics while two dark-feathered cormorants scythed low across the water, racing each other back to their evening roosts. For a while Harry was content to lose himself in the view, trying to identify the different species of birds, until he realized he wasn’t alone. Blythe Edwards was tucked away in one corner, perched on the arm of a cracked leather chair, staring idly at an old globe, looking uncomfortable and out of place.

  ‘Evening, Madam President.’

  ‘Don’t give me that “Madam President” crap, Harry Jones,’ she replied, offering her cheek for him to kiss.

  ‘You’re looking…’ Harry hesitated. Suddenly he saw that she looked drained, her eyes rimmed with pain or fatigue, almost as if she’d been crying. ‘Wonderful,’ he added, a fraction too late.

  ‘Not you, too, Harry. I need someone to tell me the truth.’

  ‘OK. You look as if you need a good night’s sleep. In fact, several of them.’

  ‘That’s better. Or at least more accurate,’ she replied, trying to rustle up a smile of appreciation.