by Hammond, Ray
As they shot past the flaming wreck of the lead security vehicle a second truck pulled out from behind trees lining the westbound carriageway and drove across the oncoming half of the highway towards the sideways-parked dumpster truck. The road ahead was now completely blocked.
The chauffer spun the wheel and the great limousine started to slide on the verdant grass. Then the tail suddenly spun and, after few shakes and shudders, they were no longer moving. The driver still gunned the powerful engine, but the rear wheels of the heavily armoured limousine had sunk into the soft-lawned central reservation. The automatic irrigation system generously supplied to the city by the Mondo Corporation had been watering the highway divider with recycled water all evening.
Lie flat, repeated Lisa, more insistently.
‘Deflate the tyres,’ shouted the bodyguard and the driver hit the dashboard display icon that would automatically expel the air from the rear tyres.
Even as the chauffeur revved the engine again, Harrold Darrenbaum saw a white van appear alongside the limousine. With a stab of fear he realised what was coming next.
Four men in white coveralls sprang from the back of the van twenty yards from where the limousine sat helplessly flinging tufts of wet grass and mud high into the air. Each man wore a white ski-mask, well aware that the limousine’s on-board security cameras would still be recording activity in all directions, even though all mobile broadcasting systems had been jammed.
The men formed teams of two, one man kneeling, the other placing a slim black tube on his partner’s shoulder before carefully loading a small, silver missile into the launcher.
Harold Darrenbaum watched all this from inside his blacked out windows as if watching one of the many training videos the security consultants had shown him over and over again. His enhanced vision took in every detail of the attackers and their weapons.
You know what you have to do, said Lisa. Stay calm. Your blood pressure is now 160 over 110.
‘Turn off the engine,’ Darrenbaum ordered over the limo’s internal intercom. The driver complied immediately. He too knew from his training that if the vehicle now moved suddenly there would a real risk that one of the kidnappers would panic and actually fire a missile.
‘Open the doors,’ ordered Darrenbaum and he heard the loud snaps as the high-security door locks were released.
The four attackers outside of the limousine made no gesture. Both of the men standing over their kneeling partners seemed to be adjusting something on the launchers.
‘Throw out your guns,’ Darrenbaum ordered his bodyguard – a former SEAL, a man who had been with him for over ten years.
Lowering the front passenger window, the security man tossed his automatic onto the grass in front of the four men, then the sub-machine gun before holding his arms out of the window to display his empty hands. Still the men made no movement.
‘Wait for their instructions,’ ordered Darrenbaum. ‘Don’t worry, they won’t use those things. I’m of no value to them dead.’
Show yourself to them, said Lisa. I’ll radio an alarm the minute I get a signal.
With that the trillionaire lowered the thick black-tinted window on the right side of the passenger compartment and stuck out his world-famous youthful face – again, just as the security consultants had instructed – so the hostage takers could see that they really did have their man.
The tallest of the white-suited attackers turned his head towards the Mondo president and studied him for a few seconds.
‘Fire!’ he ordered and the two depleted-uranium-tipped high-explosive missiles rocketed from their tubes, entered the limo’s passenger compartment and exploded simultaneously, ripping back the vehicle’s roof as if it were the lid of a sardine can, instantly killing all three human occupants and destroying one copy of Lisa.
*
Every news channel is leading with the Darrenbaum story, said Mondoboy Carl as Nicole Sanderson resumed manual control of her vehicle and turned the wheel to pull into the underground car park. Want some music instead?
We’re nearly there, Nicole told her virtual assistant, even though he always knew their precise location.
Oh, oh, I’ve got your boss for you, said Carl.
Nicole nodded and her cerebrally-implanted VA patched the caller onto the vehicle’s speaker system.
‘Where the hell are you, Nicole?’ demanded Mike Ryan. ‘I need you in my office. Now!’
‘I’m downstairs, sir, just parking,’ replied Nicole, as she spun the steering wheel and eased the agency-issue red Nissan into a vacant slot. She wondered why Ryan hadn’t bothered to checked her GPS transmitter. ‘I’ll be there in five.’
Switching off the engine she noticed it was 7.36 a.m. The evening before she had worked until gone eight o’clock and now Ryan was making her feel guilty for not already being back in the office.
At the car park elevators two security guards watched carefully as scanners checked her biometric pass and micro-RFID arm implant, even though they both knew her well, and then she was riding the elevator to the fifth floor of the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Agency’s recently-built headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.
By 7.45 a.m. Nicole had stopped by her own office, collected a cappuccino from a vending machine and was now tapping on her boss’s half open door – a door marked, Director.
‘Morning Nicole, take a seat, said Ryan, his voice now more friendly. ‘You’ve heard the Darrenbaum news?’
‘It’s like there’s no other story,’ agreed Nicole. ‘When then world’s richest man is hit it makes headlines.’
Ryan nodded. ‘The Brits are saying it may have been a Humans First operation.’
‘I thought Humans First were out of business?’ said Nicole with a frown. ‘We haven’t heard of them for years.’
‘Well, MI6 spoke with Homeland overnight. They say that Alexander Makowski has resurfaced.’
Nicole shook her head dubiously. The name Makowski had once been very familiar. It had been mentioned constantly during her induction training, seven years earlier, but not in recent times.
‘Didn’t we get Makowski years ago – in Venezuela, along with a lot of his FARC comrades?’ she said.
‘We certainly thought we did – but although we got pictures of his body we never actually got any hard DNA evidence,’ Ryan told her. ‘But now it seems that our assumption might have been wrong. The Brits say they have received reliable information from field sources that not only is he alive, he’s reformed the Humans First Party, and its so-called military wing, Humans First Direct Action.’ The agency director shook his head in disgust. ‘The Darrenbaum assassination has all the HFDA hallmarks – a specific targeting of the Mondo Corporation, a military MO and the utter ruthlessness. Local CSI are saying Darrenbaum’s bodyguard had thrown out all his weapons before they were hit.’
‘Do you think there might be more to come?’ asked Nicole.
‘Yes, if Makowski really is back in business,’ said Ryan. ‘Our psychs concluded he was criminally insane years ago – one of those unstable geniuses who go over the edge. And he always had a liking for the spectacular. Were you told anything about Operation Fourth Base when you joined?’
Operation Fourth Base. The words had been bandied about the agency with glee not long after she had first arrived, but in the ATA’s culture of intense need-to-know secrecy the new girl had never been told what precisely it was that her more senior colleagues had been so pleased about.
No information, said Carl.
‘Only the code name, Mike,’ she said. ‘No details.’
Ryan issued a mental instruction to his own virtual assistant and the image of a gaunt, emaciated-looking man with a head of thick dark hair and a dark moustache appeared on the wall screen in 3D.
‘That’s Makowski,’ the director told Nicole. ‘But the picture’s more than ten years out of date. Humans First demanded that governments ban all bio-interfaced computers, nanotechnology research and genetic engineering developmen
ts.’
‘Dream on,’ said Nicole rolling her eyes.
Ryan nodded and glanced back at the wall screen. ‘Makowski’s a British citizen, of Polish descent – with an IQ so high it’s off the measurable scale. He moved here to do advanced research at Stanford University. They say he was one of the world’s most brilliant physicists until his entire family was killed in a plane crash. Afterwards he had some sort of breakdown, but then he discovered communism and turned against all forms of advanced technology.’
‘He became a cuckoo in the scientific nest,’ Nicole offered.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Ryan. ‘He formed his anti-technology group a year after the plane crash and almost immediately used extreme violence to try and achieve his ends. That picture was taken a year or so before HFDA terrorists smuggled a nuclear bomb into Manhattan.’
‘A nuke in Manhattan!’ exclaimed Nicole, almost spluttering into her coffee. It was the agency’s worst nightmare – the long-term and ongoing fear that a terrorist group would somehow succeed in exploding a nuclear weapon inside a major American city.
‘That was Operation Fourth Base,’ Ryan explained. ‘We caught them just before they planted the warhead. But it wasn’t live. A British under-cover agent had posed as a black-market arms dealer and sold them a dud. We let them get it into position near Wall Street, then we took the cell out.’
‘I never knew….’ breathed Nicole in amazement. ‘It didn’t make the press.’
‘Of course not,’ said Ryan. ‘Far too sensitive.’
‘And Makowski?’ asked Nicole.
‘Well, until recently we thought we had eliminated him – and the other Humans First leaders. They were hiding out in Venezuela with the FARC communist rebels. We hit their training camps hard with cruise missiles. The word on the streets of Caracas was that we’d got Makowski and that Humans First and the HFDA were no more.’
‘But now he’s come back from the dead,’ said Nicole.
Ryan nodded. ‘So the Brits believe.’ The director turned back from the screen to face one of his most capable field agents. ‘How’s the airlines investigation progressing?’
Nicole shrugged. She had been asked to rate U.S. domestic airlines according to their security performance. It was to be a covert proactive investigation which would involve her and three other agents in trying to evade the airlines’ counter-terrorism measures.
‘We’re only just getting started, Mike,’ said Nicole, sipping the last of her double-strength cappuccino. She felt a coating of froth on her upper lip and licked it away. ‘Still doing our initial evaluations.’
‘O.K. – I want you to hand it over to Martinez,’ her boss told her. ‘As of now. The Brits have found something else that is worrying – you got a physics degree, right?’
Nicole shook her head. ‘Never finished. I switched to Crim Psych. I can’t remember much about physics now – it was a long time ago.’
‘What does this mean to you?’ asked Ryan.
Nicole saw an equation appear on the office wall screen:
D = 8 h c3 [() + Rabl a lb]
G M
No matches, Carl told her.
‘What do the symbols represent?’ she asked.
‘Not sure,’ said her boss. ‘The British signals guys extracted this from an encrypted HFDA videomail they intercepted. Apparently the computer systems had problems encrypting some of the specialized math characters so they defaulted momentarily to bit-map encoding.’
Nicole stared again at the symbols. It had been almost fifteen years since she had last looked at a physics text and she realized that without any clues to the values or concepts contained within the equation, any response would be sheer guess work.
‘M normally stands for mass,’ she ventured, as Carl provided her with the basic prompts. ‘And G is something to do with gravity. Pi is easy, as is the symbol for Planck’s constant.’
‘And C is usually the symbol for the speed of light, I think,’ added Ryan as his own VA, Tony, communed within his skull. ‘But what about the rest?’
‘I have no idea,’ admitted Nicole. ‘It’s way out of my league.’
‘The Brits think it might be something to do with high-energy physics,’ Ryan told her. ‘It was transmitted last week to a Dutch procurement company the Brits have linked to the HFDA.’
The agent glanced from the equation to her boss and back again in alarm. ‘You mean instead of trying to buy a nuke on the black market they’re now making their own?’
‘Remember Makowski used to be a particle physicist himself,’ said Ryan. ‘I want you to visit a few of our best universities and do so under the strictest secrecy. Take this equation and see if any of the top physics guys can make any sense out of it. You can’t risk using a mind-link or a videoconference, because that formula may not encrypt. And it’s urgent, Nicole, very urgent indeed. We must know what these people are up to.’
I’m making a list of people for you to see, said Carl.
Two
Over half a million cargo containers passed through the Hull Container Terminal each year – almost 1,400 per day, or 114 each working hour.
The busy shipping port – located on Britain’s Yorkshire coast, 200 miles north of London – received containers from all over Europe, the Far East and the Americas. All were one of three standard sizes
that could be transferred unopened between ships, planes, trucks and rail wagons across all parts of the world. Another important reason for the sizes being standardized was so that every single container could pass through large multi-technology scanners which searched for human cargo, explosives and even for components that could be used in making nuclear weapons. Such scanning – in use at all ports and airports – was a vital tool in the fight against terrorism and the proliferation and unauthorised distribution of nuclear weapons.
However, beyond this electronic check the international container security system worked largely on mutual trust. Through a series of complicated international agreements, national governments in the country in which a cargo originated took on most of the responsibility for ensuring that a container’s manifest accurately represented its contents. Local customs, immigration and security services serving the port of Hull could only carry out random physical searches on less than two per cent of incoming containers – storage units that must necessarily spend less than twelve hours on the dockside before being moved out. The fast turn-around was the only way to keep space available in the secure container park for newly arriving and departing cargo.
A ninety-eight per cent chance of the cargo clearing customs without being opened. The odds sounded good, but HFDA volunteers Alan Harding and Pierre Domenech still had their hearts in their mouths as they watched and waited on the top floor of an almost deserted multi-story car park. It was not quite midnight.
The volunteers’ battered white van, partially filled with plumbing supplies, was parked in the open air on the parking facility’s top storey, facing out across the port’s container parking lot, the docks themselves and the ribbon of dark sea beyond. It had been an unusually blustery evening for early June and the two young men could feel the wind off the sea slapping violently at the sides of their van.
‘They’re moving it,’ said Domenech in his French-accented English, staring at the screen of his hand-held computer.
Harding lifted his night-vision binoculars and focussed them on the particular rust-coloured container they had picked out from among all the others. The two mobile communicators that had been stowed inside at the beginning of the container’s journey from Caracas, Venezuela to North East England – a journey with three stops and one complete cargo reclassification – were still clearly transmitting their location. It was a tribute to the latest long-life, miniaturised nanobattery technology that hand-held devices could now run for years without a recharge.
The gantry crane was slowly setting the heavy container down on the truck that was due to drive it out of the docks and
on its way to its first stop in Bradford. The documents and radio-frequency identification tags inside the sealed waterproof case that was tethered to the container locks proclaimed the cargo to be scientific test equipment from Korea.
Harding handed the binoculars to his fellow volunteer and glanced around the windswept parking deck. Nobody else was around. The car park was mainly used when the ferries from Rotterdam and Zeebrugge arrived and departed.
With the container secured, the truck began to move slowly away from the loading area towards the large, multi-function scanner through which all departing cargo had to pass on its way to the exit.
The two HFDA members watched anxiously as the load drove slowly through the huge rectangular scanner – a device which included radiation detection equipment, penetrative thermal imaging scanning and conventional X-RAY emitters. The container took less than a minute to roll through the electronic inspection bay and then, after a short delay, Harding and Domenech saw the truck head for the container park exit.
