by Marc Elsberg
As the briefing continued and more details were provided, Hartlandt realized that the situation was far worse than news reports on the radio had led him and millions of others to believe. With the grid likely to remain out of action for several days, governments were considering emergency measures on an unprecedented scale – including mass evacuation.
The identity of the culprits remained unknown, as did their motive. ‘At present we cannot rule out a politically or religiously motivated act of terrorism, or even an act of warfare.’
The last comment sent a new round of murmurs through the room.
‘In two hours I want to see a preliminary report reassessing all the facts at our disposal. I want to know why we were not forewarned. Hartlandt, you’ll coordinate the investigation.’
The Hague, Netherlands
Marie carried the suitcase out to the car. The children each carried a small backpack with their favourite toys in.
‘We’re going on holiday!’ Bernadette skipped out of the door with excitement.
‘But I don’t want to go,’ whined Georges.
‘Please, Georges, stop. You were happy enough when we went to the airport to visit Grandma and Granddad on Friday.’
‘But we didn’t go anywhere.’
‘Well, we’re going somewhere now – come on, in the car.’
Marie was afraid. Last night, when he finally made it home from the office, her husband was more agitated than she’d ever seen him. He could not and would not tell her what had made him so worried, all he would say was that he had made arrangements for her to take the children away for a few days. Paris wasn’t an option: they didn’t have enough fuel left to make it to her parents’ place. So he’d found them somewhere local that could offer guaranteed power and hot water.
‘Is Papa coming, too?’
‘Papa has to work. He’s coming tonight.’
Marie locked the front door. In the narrow street with its old townhouses, everything seemed as it always had.
Traffic was heavier than usual. No surprise – everyone had switched to driving. She turned on the radio: the only stations still operating were broadcasting nothing but news reports on the outage. Marie wondered where the radio stations got the power to broadcast.
Past Zoetermeer the satnav led her off the motorway. She followed the instructions until they reached a stately farmhouse, the exterior made almost entirely of timber, crowned with a steep, sloping thatched roof. In the gravelled courtyard stood a four-wheel-drive vehicle, two saloons and a tractor.
‘Time to get out, kids!’
She rang the brass doorbell and a woman with blonde hair and a kind face opened the door. Marie estimated her to be about her own age, and she was dressed like a typical farmer’s wife in corduroy trousers, a checked shirt and a wool sweater.
Bollard introduced herself and the children. ‘I believe my husband spoke with you,’ she said.
‘Maren Haarleven,’ said the mistress of the house, a smile lighting her face. ‘Welcome. Would you like a little something to drink, or do you want to see your room first?’
‘The room first, please.’
It was warm in the house. There seemed to be few straight walls or edges, but it was charming and well maintained, and the furnishings had been tastefully selected in keeping with the style of a country estate. Their room turned out to be spacious and comfortable, with soft sofas and armchairs covered in a floral fabric, rural antiques, plenty of white.
‘This is one of our suites,’ said Maren. ‘Here we have the living room. Next door you’ll find a kitchen with a dining table, leading off to a bathroom and two bedrooms.’
‘A bathroom!’
Marie tried one of the taps: running water! She let out a happy sigh, imagining the shower that she would be taking as soon as possible.
‘Oh, this is marvellous.’
‘Yes,’ laughed Maren. ‘The power outage is nothing to us – it would be disastrous if we suffered a blackout. Come with me, and I’ll show you. Don’t worry about your things – I’ll have them brought up for you.’
Maren led the way downstairs and out the back of the house. To the left and right stood two large outbuildings, one of which had a large wooden gate. Inside, Marie could see the floor was teeming with chicks. Lamps hung from the ceiling, giving off a warming light.
‘This is where we raise chickens.’
Georges and Bernadette squealed with delight.
‘Imagine what would happen if we didn’t have heat. After a few hours they would all freeze to death.’
She shut the gate and set off in the direction of a modern extension with a metal door. The room beyond was dimly lit and all Marie could see was a large green box with pipes and wires leading off of it.
‘Our heat and power system,’ Maren explained. ‘It can be fuelled with logs and wood pellets. Thanks to this, we don’t have to rely on the public power grid. We’ve got our own well, too, so the blackout hasn’t had much of an impact here so far.’ She closed the door. ‘Except that all of a sudden we have guests in winter. In fact, since this morning, we’re all booked up. Within a half-hour. Some of your husband’s colleagues, I gather. Haven’t a clue what’s going on.’
We’ll all find that out soon enough, thought Marie, and she felt her eyes prick with tears.
Paris, France
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Guy Blanchard greeted the horde of journalists crowding into the press room. Ordinarily he would have been beaming with satisfaction at the size of the turnout, but he was conscious of the TV cameras and photographers recording his every move and knew it wouldn’t do to be captured looking smug. ‘Today is a good opportunity to point out that it’s time Frenchwomen, Frenchmen, Europeans and the rest of the world should recognize that the initials CNES belong not only to the Centre National d’Études Spatiales, our illustrious space exploration agency, but also to the control centre for France’s electric grids, the Centre National d’Éxploitation du Système – among whose directors I may, in all humility, count myself. If it weren’t for the Centre Système, the space agency wouldn’t even have power to make coffee.’
This witty aside prompted a journalist from one of the regional papers to point out that, for the past weekend, no one south of Lyon had had power to make coffee.
‘Granted, the current pan-European outage has not spared the French power grid. We regret this inconvenience and would like to apologize to the French people who have had to go without light and heat. However, thanks to the heroic efforts of our employees, we have managed over the course of one night to re-establish the power supply in many regions, at least partially – unlike many of our European neighbours. An outage on this scale places great demands on everyone involved. For example: France derives the majority of its energy from nuclear power. To shut down and then restart the reactors is no simple task, but thanks to our highly trained technicians the procedure was handled in textbook fashion.’
‘Monsieur Blanchard.’ The insistent voice of his assistant sounded in his earpiece.
Taking no notice, he continued his lecture.‘We are one of the very few countries in Europe to have managed this.’
‘Monsieur Blanchard, it’s really very important.’ The voice in his ear was beginning to annoy him.
‘Our stable French grids will provide a base that will allow us to rebuild those in the rest of Europe.’
‘Stop the press conference.’
What was that the button in his ear said?
‘Stop the press conference. It’s an emergency.’
Wondering what kind of emergency could possibly warrant interrupting his carefully rehearsed speech, he reluctantly informed his audience, ‘I’m afraid that’s as much as we have time for. My thanks to all of you for coming.’
Ignoring the journalists hurling questions at him, Blanchard hurried off the podium and strode out of the side door to find his assistant.
She was waiting for him, her eyes wide as if in fright.
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��This had better be important, or you can start looking for another job right now!’
‘You’re needed in the central control room, immediately.’
‘Why? Come on, woman, spit it out!’
‘They don’t know. That’s the problem.’
Cursing her incompetence, Blanchard took the lift. When the doors opened on to the control room he froze, taking in the scene. Some of the operators were gesticulating frantically, arguing with colleagues or engaged in urgent telephone conversations, others were simply staring at their screens with dazed expressions, as if unable to comprehend what they were seeing. The large display on the wall showed the graphic of the network, apparently unchanged from the last time he’d seen it, just before the press conference got under way: some green regions, some red ones.
The screens at the workstations, however, were all blue.
His stomach dropped to his knees.
Turner stared blankly at the empty podium. Around him, irate journalists were yelling at the CNES press officer, demanding that Blanchard return to take their questions. But the podium remained empty. After a while, they began to pack their things and leave. Eventually, Turner gave up too; grumbling about the lack of professionalism and shoddy media relations, he made for the exit with Shannon following in his wake.
Shannon tuned out his whining, preoccupied with trying to fathom why someone who craved media attention as much as Blanchard would call a sudden halt to his moment of glory. As they drew near to the exit, her suspicions grew. She heard cars honking in the street. Through the glass doors she saw people running, people waving their hands in agitation as they spoke, people typing nervously on their mobile phones … The sky was grey. An unpleasantly cold wind was blowing as they stepped outside. And then Shannon registered the cause of the commotion. Not a single window display along the street was lit, the traffic lights at the junctions were dark, traffic was gridlocked.
‘Not again,’ groaned Turner. ‘Didn’t the guy just announce that this was all over with?’
‘OK, so we go back in,’ Shannon suggested. ‘They owe us an explanation.’
She turned on her heels, ready to stride back into the building, but the security guards had already locked the doors.
Ischgl, Austria
After breakfast, they all sat out on the bench in front of the cabin. Those who couldn’t find a seat set up deckchairs. This is surreal, thought Sophia. But how else were they supposed to deal with the situation? Wailing and gnashing their teeth wouldn’t help anyone. After swearing off alcohol that morning, they had quickly thrown their oaths overboard and ordered a bottle of Prosecco. She and Manzano were the only ones not drinking. Fleur and Chloé had made a plan to spend the afternoon cross-country skiing. But as they uncorked a third bottle of Prosecco, Sophia doubted it would happen.
In the distance, they spotted two men in uniform walking towards them between the cabins. ‘Piero Manzano and Sophia Angström?’ the shorter of the two asked.
Sophia sat up, suddenly alarmed.
‘We’re from the police. We’ve come to pick you up. There’s a helicopter standing by in the valley.’
There was an immediate hush among the friends. Piero and Sophia exchanged nervous glances. When Bollard had said that he would arrange to fly them both to The Hague, they’d assumed that, with civilian flights grounded, he would arrange transport from the nearest military base and phone back with details of where they needed to get to and what time their flight was due to leave. It had never occurred to them that he would send a helicopter – that suggested the level of urgency had increased in the few hours since they’d last spoken to him.
One of the police officers tapped his watch and signalled for them to get a move on, so they hurried into the cabin to retrieve their bags. When they emerged, the others were standing, silently waiting for them. In their faces, Sophia read the worry and fear that up till then they had been pushing away with alcohol. She hugged her friends and watched as Manzano embraced old Bondoni. The warmth between them surprised her. Or maybe it was that the old man had an inkling of the dangers that might await them.
‘Dare I leave you here alone?’ Manzano asked Lara’s father in a playful tone.
‘What do you mean, alone? Look at me, surrounded by beauty,’ replied the old man, as if they were just engaging in their usual banter.
Lara wasn’t fooled. She put an arm around her father’s shoulders and said, ‘Don’t worry about us. Just take care of yourselves.’
Saint-Laurent-Nouan, France
The director of the power plant, accompanied by a PR officer, had arrived at the control room in search of good news. They wanted to be able to tell head office that finally, after all the aborted attempts and delays, the restart was going ahead in textbook fashion and the reactor would soon be up and running. Instead, they found the control room in chaos.
There were textbooks aplenty in evidence: plant operators were frantically scanning the pages, trying to find explanations for the various alarm signals and codes and warnings the system was churning out. The shift leader was tearing back and forth between them, discussing a possible course of action here, shouting an instruction there. Then he got on the phone. When he was finished, he came over to the director.
‘The pressure in the reactor and the temperature in the primary cooling system are climbing again,’ he reported, wiping a thin film of sweat from his forehead.
Marpeaux came over to join them as they ran through the countless possible reasons for the anomaly, from the vents opening or closing by mistake to electronic malfunctions in the system controls or defects that no one knew about.
‘What about the diesel engines?’ asked Marpeaux.
‘According to the computer, two of them didn’t come on, but the one that was showing as defective last time, did. Three teams are down there, inspecting the machines as we speak.’ Marpeaux and the shift leader both knew that if they couldn’t trace the cause of the problem and fix it, the temperature in the primary coolant loop would continue to rise, along with the pressure in the reactor vessel. Before long they would reach a point where the only way to avoid a meltdown would be to employ drastic measures such as letting off radioactive steam into the atmosphere. And with no television or radio, how would they be able to transmit a warning to the population?
‘Paris won’t be happy about this,’ remarked the director. At that moment, Paris was the least of Marpeaux’s concerns. He was far more troubled by the fact that no one seemed to have a clue what was going on in the reactor. For the last hour they had been as good as flying blind.
The Hague, Netherlands
The helicopter had delivered Manzano and Sophia to a military airport near Innsbruck. From there, a small jet had flown them to The Hague. With them on board was an Austrian liaison officer for Europol.
Cold winds and a light drizzle greeted them as they stepped off the plane. At the foot of the stairs was a man with short reddish-brown hair that was starting to thin. He introduced himself as François Bollard.
‘What happened to your head?’
Manzano wondered whether he should have a witty answer ready for when people asked about his stitches, but right now he wasn’t in the mood to crack jokes.
‘A traffic light went out,’ he replied.
‘And not just the one. We’ll take you to your hotel now, Mr Manzano. It’s located within walking distance of my office. In two hours there’s a preliminary meeting scheduled – and we’d like you to take part. Ms Angström, we’ve arranged a car so you can continue your trip to Brussels. It will be waiting for you in front of the hotel when we arrive.’
Manzano felt a twinge of regret that he would be losing Sophia’s company. She was a good listener, with a great sense of humour, and he had come to appreciate her direct manner. ‘By the way, when you’re working with us, you’ll probably want to use your own computer,’ said Bollard. ‘First, of course, we’ll need to give yours a quick check for malware. OK with you?’
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nbsp; Manzano hesitated. ‘So long as I’m present for it,’ he finally agreed. Bollard drove them through the streets of The Hague in silence. It was Manzano’s first time in the Netherlands and he was taken with the pretty, historic homes that reflected the merchant city’s former wealth.
‘Wait, I have a somewhat shameless request,’ Sophia said suddenly as the hotel came in sight. ‘Does the hotel have power? Could I come to your room to take a shower? In my apartment in Brussels it’ll probably be a while before I can have one.’
‘Of course.’ Manzano was happy for the delayed farewell.
Bollard placed a small map of the city in Manzano’s hand and showed him the route he should take to Europol headquarters.
While Manzano opened and closed the drawers in his room before unpacking, Sophia tiptoed off to the bathroom. Manzano sat on the single chair in the room and took off his shoes. He studied the hotel brochure and listened to the rushing of the shower. He let his imagination run wild for a brief moment, then he turned on the television, channel-hopping till he found a news broadcast in English.
A female reporter in a woollen coat stood outside a large warehouse. Behind her, men in white overalls were at work.
‘… beginning to spoil. I’m feeling very cold here outside, it is only nine degrees. But, it’s not much colder inside this cold-storage facility behind me …’
The camera zoomed past her to a large, open sliding door that led into the warehouse. Palettes of packaged goods were stacked on high shelves. ‘… Inside, nearly two thousand tonnes of food worth several million euros has been stored, but after over twenty-four hours without power, it is no longer fit for consumption. And this is only one of many across Europe. So the citizens of countries further to the north and in Central Europe might complain how much colder it is for them than it is for us in the UK, but at least their food stays properly refrigerated and edible even without power. I’m Mary Jameson in Dover.’
