The FBI and police swarmed into the plane, weapons at the ready. They were looking for someone specific. Seconds later, the burly FBI agent stood over him and said, “Malik Khan, you are under arrest for the murder of Nigel Faraday...”
***
Tuesday, February 21st, 2045 11:20pm EST: Andrews AFB, MD
The medical tent set up in the vast, empty hanger was a hive of activity. The fall from de facto leader to enemy of the state had been precipitous for Malik Khan. Although innocent until proven guilty, the evidence was strong enough to place him in the murky world of the CIA. He lay unconscious under general anaesthetic covered by the blue gown; his head fixed still by a metal restraint. The wires disappearing into his exposed brain led to the computer and display on the workstation behind. The medical team were just monitoring Khan at this stage, ensuring his brain and the implanted computer system continued functioning long enough for the CIA to get what they needed. Beth Collins watched on as her colleague—Adi Dutta, a Cybernetic Computer Systems expert—sat at the workstation interrogating the data. Collins knew that, while the ICS was the plotters’ highly secure communication method, it was also their weakness if the hardware itself could be accessed. Not an easy task when it required a direct connection to the computer at the base of someone’s brain. But not out of the question either as the case at hand proved. Dutta had worked on most of the recent detainees and was becoming a bit of a legend in intelligence circles. His work had foiled several terrorist plots and gained valuable information from foreign spies. Now, with the tacit approval of the new de facto leader, Admiral Shawcross, the sole MI5 representative, Sophie Walsh, and King William in exile, Collins hoped they would soon uncover the true nature of events across the Atlantic. The attorney general, the director of the CIA and the president himself had all authorised Khan’s ‘interrogation’ because the threat was unprecedented—not just for the UK, but also for the national security of the US. If their theory was correct, the coup was a prelude to something far bigger. They also knew that once the plotters’ hold on power in Britain was complete, there would be no way to dislodge them without a full-scale military invasion. And that was an undertaking nobody was willing to sanction.
“That’s it,” said Dutta. “That’s the entire cache downloaded and decrypted.”
Collins nodded to the lead surgeon. “We’re done with him. Patch him back up and leave him restrained. Our guys’ll be along to get him later.”
Dutta said, “A few more minutes and the software will have done its work.”
Collins said, “So what it is going to give us exactly? I mean the software?”
“It’s very clever. Takes the encoded data and transcribes it into a visual and audio representation for us. It’ll splice it into a long—very long—file. We can play it like a movie and search it for keywords, faces, places et cetera. It’ll also give out readings from senses inputs. It will have captured everything he’s seen, heard, felt and thought since it was implanted.”
“Well, let’s just hope he knows enough to blow the lid on this thing. This download could be sending us to war in the next forty-eight hours...”
25
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2045 12:30pm: Suburban West London
“How many times have I got to tell you?” shouted his mum from downstairs. “It’s time for lunch!”
Thirteen-year-old David groaned. He scrolled down the mission list on his head mounted display, looking for his next adventure. Just one last time before he tore himself away from the first-person shooter that had gripped him throughout the school half term holiday. He sighed. The bonanza of great-paying missions on Mercenary Wars had become increasingly sparse as the past week and a bit had gone on. Still, he couldn’t complain. The game that pays to play had netted him ten times his subscription that month already. At school, he wasn’t that great at maths, but even he wondered how E-Vision made a profit on this. He figured that perhaps he was just a lot better than most other players. They can’t all be making more than their subscription, he thought.
He placed his headset on the bed and reluctantly made for the stairs and lunch. No doubt Mum—and Dad when he came home—would be moaning about the events that had been playing havoc around the country. He didn’t even know what a coup was until before it started happening. He had to admit though; the news footage was pretty cool. It was like a computer game—robots versus humans, but in real life. Still, no one he knew had been hurt and they only seemed to be fighting the military and a few coppers. Nobody seemed to know why. He just hoped it meant that they'd extend the school holidays a bit more. He doubted it. Unfortunately, the bots hadn't destroyed the school. Plenty of locals had seen them in the area, but they'd left civilians alone. He wondered what it would be like if people in Britain actually owned guns. Carnage most probably. That old fool, Brian, from next door had come over for tea the previous day and was talking to Dad about protest and resistance. Resistance with what? he thought. A garden rake?
He reached the dining room and said, “Oh no, not that rotten stew again!”
“Well, count yourself lucky,” said Mum. “The disruption’s terrible. A lot of things aren’t available—even by drone delivery.”
David sat down and tucked in. The quicker he ate, the quicker he could get back to Mercenary Wars.
26
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2045 8:30am EST: Camp David, MD, United States
Sophie sat opposite Admiral Shawcross in the small private office. Have our hosts bugged it? Probably, since it turned out even Faraday’s suite was under surveillance, thought Sophie. But it hardly mattered now—without American support, the plotters’ grip on power would be impossible to remove. And the CIA may have just exposed the workings of the coup for the first time. She’d just finished reading Collins’ preliminary report on the Khan interrogation on her scroll tab. Shawcross was still studying the display on his makeshift desk. She waited quietly, letting him absorb the almost unbelievable revelations. Unbelievable to her in her younger days when tech wasn’t what it had become and she’d not seen the lengths some would go to seize power. Naive, innocent days, before getting involved in the dark world of espionage…
Shawcross looked up, shaking his head. He let out a deep sigh. He cupped his mug of black coffee, looking into it as he swirled it around and around.
He said, “I feel like I’ve just woken up after a nightmare and found it wasn’t a bad dream after all...”
“Know what you mean,” she said. “So Khan was in on it all along. That was pretty clear from Collins’ report. And the triumvirate, as he kept calling it, is himself, Zane and Hardcastle with Becker and Sinclair as vital allies.”
“These guys go back a long way and all share the same political views. They want to seize power and run the country how they see fit. I get all that, but there are a lot of people around the country who didn’t like how it was run—some of them organised groups. What made this lot different?”
She said, “Simple really: they had the means. Access to the robot army, a way to direct and control it and enough people on board to make it happen... What Khan calls The Faithful and The Westminster Circle—operational and political wings of the plot.”
“And they were able to keep their mouths shut about it—”
“Absolutely,” she said, nodding. “That’s usually the downfall of these types of plots—on the one hand you need a large group to execute the plan, but the larger the group the more likely leaks and infiltration of the group are. That’s a principle we’ve always relied on through the years. But it all changed... All of those involved have implanted computers.”
“Or they’re robots,” he added.
“Correct. But the real nugget from Khan is how they’ve managed tactical control of the bots. Pretty ingenious, although it seems very logical now with hindsight.”
“Well, I didn’t see it coming... I mean who would have thought video gamers could have been used in that way? What on Earth would possess them to
betray their country and fight against British troops?”
She said, “Reading between the lines, I don’t think the thousands of Mercenary Wars gamers did know.”
“How so?”
“I should have thought of it earlier … Admiral, did you ever see the movie, Ender’s Game?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, it’s thirty years old … But, anyway, in a video game they could have represented targets as anything they liked. All the gamer is doing is moving his allocated robot around and targeting the ‘enemy’. They could have represented their enemy—British troops and police—as IC fanatics or terrorists, the game world could look like anywhere on Earth or even a completely made-up world.”
“Ah, I see... But in reality the gamer is directing the robot and firing on British troops without knowing it?”
“Precisely, Admiral. Precisely...”
Shawcross shook his head in disbelief. Sophie suspected he’d not gone near a video game since he was a child, and that was a long time ago. It was probably a very alien concept to him.
He said, “Well, can’t we just tell them to stop? Obviously, the perpetrators won’t heed our calls, but the gamers might. Hell, I know we don’t have control of the airwaves and media anymore, but even a leaflet drop or word of mouth...”
“Not a good idea,” she said. “I mean I’m sure most civilians in Britain would stop if we asked them to, but overseas? And what if our enemies in Russia or IC hear of this? They’ll have recruits queuing up to use the robots against us!”
Shawcross sighed, and then nodded wearily.
He said, “Can we not cut off the subsea cables and take out the satellite links?”
“In time, with enough help from the Americans, yes, probably. But what if they’re using foreign or privately-owned satellites? Quite apart from the lead-time, it’s just not practical in the circumstances...”
“I know. You’re right of course.”
“But there is a way—”
He said, “Yes. Collins mentions that their system using Mercenary Wars has an Achilles Heel.”
“Correct. By taking out the servers at E-Vision Entertainment’s campus in Scotland, they think we can bring down the control network.”
“They’ve already tried a DDOS attack—Distributed Denial of Service, as they explained to me. They tried many times. It didn’t work and even the NSA don’t know why. They’ve suggested an airstrike, but we can’t countenance that until we make sure it’s clear of civilians and we give them a chance to just power it down.”
“Well, it’s your op, Admiral, but if you want my personal opinion I tend to agree with you. We need eyes and ears on the ground whatever we do. To stop this thing we need to kill or capture the ringleaders... After all, for all we know they may have a back-up location and we can’t shut down the entire internet in Britain.”
“Well, quite... They control most of it now anyway and have the run of the country.”
She said, “The other so-called Faithful and Westminster Circle will need to be rounded up later.”
“Indeed... One thing still puzzles me that we’ve not really addressed,” he said. “Who is this leader Khan keeps referring to? Collins seems to think it’s not Hardcastle or Zane but a woman. A woman he has been seeing for many years and is intimate with. A woman he only refers to as Eva.”
“It’s got me stumped too. I’ll check with some of our people, but at the moment no one, including the CIA, know who she is. What’s really bizarre is the way he seems to almost worship her and obey her completely, like she has some kind of hold over him. At least, that’s how Collins interpreted it. I’ll need to see the download from his ICS myself at some point...”
“I agree... It’s like this leader has been the real driving force and there’s a deeper motive.”
“Makes sense—motive has always been the thing we struggled with since we put forward this theory.”
27
Thursday, February 23rd, 2045 5:30am: E-Vision Entertainment Campus, Dundee, Scotland
The fact that commercial air traffic had still been flowing in and out of the country made Sophie’s return to the UK far easier. The delays and cancellations were a predictable feature of the disruption, but she’d been lucky and had travelled from JFK to Glasgow in under an hour. She’d used a legend, as they didn’t yet know how far the tendrils of the new regime had spread—their people could well have taken control of the Border Force’s computers. Her autonomous taxi had taken her to a suburban area five kilometres from the E-Vision complex to the north of Dundee. In the MI5 safe house, she’d donned the adaptive camouflage suit under a long, bulky winter coat and equipped herself with smart contact lenses, ear piece and service pistol. She’d left the small suitcase—brought just for show—at the house. The brisk walk through the bitterly cold, cloudless night had been uneventful. The only sign of violence was the sporadic gunfire, which echoed in the distance. She, more than most people in Dundee that night, knew what it was all about. With almost two thousand Royal Marines being drip-fed into the locale, it was clear that at least some of them would make contact with enemy patrols. The navy had rescinded the order to send HMS Intrepid back to Devonport once Khan had been discovered and the E-Vision target confirmed. This impact alone had made her realise how crucial it was that they’d taken Khan out of play.
The streets were deserted, the streetlamps switched off. The two robot patrols she had seen so far had left her alone. One had watched her from twenty metres away—well within range of its sensors—but had let her pass. This told her one thing at least: her face had not been recognised; she remained absent from the national biometric database. Where the town met the countryside, she ditched the coat and activated the adaptive camo, pulling the full-face hood over her head. She was then a mere apparition double-timing through the chill night air along the empty country road. The latest generation suit gave virtually nothing away in either the visual or any of the other EM spectra. When she’d seen the suit two months ago—although it seemed like years—she’d likened it to looking through glass, but without the reflectivity. Just a slight refractive difference and no longer any lag in updating the background image projections on the thousands of tiny tiles that covered the suit. It was like a heat haze—a wisp of a shape that was nigh on impossible to detect.
She’d established contact with the recon drone standing off high in the cloudless sky. Its video feed had helped her plan her way in—past the front security gate then across the well-manicured lawn of the sprawling complex towards the main building. The E-Vision Entertainment campus was an interlinked collection of twelve two-storey, mirror glass cuboids surrounded by the green rolling hills two hours away from daybreak. She’d located the HVAC air intake, just visible on the roof near the edge of the building. Access to the roof would require equipment she did not have, but it didn’t matter, because she had another plan. She rested beside a nearby tree overlooking the server building. The wait began. Just two hours until enough staff would turn up to make the plan work.
She spent the time standing propped against one tree for ten minutes only to shift to another nearby. Although body heat leakage from the suit was minimised, it was inevitable some would escape, leaving a tell-tale thermal patch on whatever she’d been in contact with.
While watching the recon drone feed in her contact lens HUD, the voice of command roused her, “Ghost-one this is Intrepid Command. We have new intel on Hardcastle, Zane, Sinclair and Becker. They are confirmed present at the complex. We expect them to exfiltrate via Zane’s aero-car at around 0900 hours. Your mission remains the same, and we expect to deal with them in the air if they don’t surrender. Over...”
She tapped the air in front of her where she perceived a comms touch panel to be, confirming she’d heard and understood. Really, the panel and her hand were projections from her smart contact lenses, her suit tracking her finger position precisely. It allowed her to maintain verbal silence; the only hint of her prese
nce the microburst radio waves to and from her suit’s built-in comms gear. She shifted locations immediately as a precaution. This op was different from any other she’d been on, and not just because of its importance and level of personal risk. It needed to go flawlessly. There was little room for error. She didn’t have the luxury of police firearms unit backing her up. The Scottish Police Service was just as fragmented as in the rest of the UK and they were still reeling from the almost total destruction of their facilities. Not that a police SWAT team could do much against the centurions and sentinels lurking inside the complex. Even the Royal Marines from HMS Intrepid and the converging SAS units were avoiding contact until absolutely necessary. The marines were the only large-scale fighting force still operational. That was until others regrouped and regained some form of structure. The bottom line was, the sooner she could shut down the Mercenary Wars network the fewer lives would be lost.
It wouldn’t be long. The eastern horizon was lightening and with it, the butterflies returned to her stomach. She was a veteran of many covert MI5 operations, but this was different. This was more of a military setting than she’d ever experienced before. But time was in short supply and she had the background, the knowledge and the mission context. Right person, right time, right place. They wanted to shut down the control network then offer the plotters an ultimatum. They were expected to leave for London to make their victory speeches, so this left no more than two hours to do it in. The alternative was a series of massive airstrikes, which would blow the complex to Kingdom Come. That the offices would soon be occupied by hundreds of civilian staff—most probably oblivious to the role their company was playing—made it a complicated back-up plan. They’d be given time to evacuate, but there was always the spectre of the plotters taking some of them as human shields. With its own generators and the protection of an estimated five hundred centurions and fifty sentinels, taking the complex by force would be no easy task. Whichever way she cut it, if she failed many lives would be lost.
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