The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  And then they did change the subject, to the reason they were here in the first place. Izzy and her family were leaving tomorrow for their annual holiday back in France, at an old farmhouse owned by Fred’s family in Côte-d’Or. Every year they spent the summer there, with no internet access, no cellular reception, barely any TV signal. Just a landline phone, in and out. To them, it was an idyllic paradise. To Bridge, it sounded like hell. All evening, her thoughts kept drifting back to Zurich. At least there, she would be connected — but she wouldn’t be able to do anything with that connection. Once she was active OIT, all personal voice and data traffic would be heavily restricted, in some cases forbidden. If Izzy’s farmhouse sounded like hell, how much worse to be surrounded by data but unable to do anything with it?

  By the time dinner was over, Karen and Julia had demolished three bottles of wine between them. Karen insisted on paying, and was now debating with Julia whether they should get a cab to Julia’s club, or find a grungy basement all-nighter and slum it. Bridge could have gone for late night karaoke, but didn’t suggest it because she knew they’d just roll their eyes. Izzy had only had a glass more than Bridge because of the children, and was now busy wrangling them into position. Hugo was fast asleep, so Bridge took him for a moment while a waiter retrieved his stroller, and Izzy helped Stéphanie into her coat. When the stroller arrived, Bridge strapped Hugo into it with a kiss on his forehead, then gripped the handles while the waiter held the door open.

  They emerged onto the street, still busy despite the late hour, and Bridge smiled a little at the noise. She had the same nostalgic affection for rural life as Izzy, but after the family had moved to London when they were children, Bridge had quickly discovered she was a city girl at heart — while Izzy spent most of her life yearning for a return to the country.

  “Shit, my phone. Where’s my phone?” Julia panicked, leaning drunkenly on Karen. She patted down her coat pockets and rummaged through her handbag. “Balls, balls, balls…”

  Karen was in no fit state, and Izzy was dealing with a suddenly overtired and whining Stéphanie, so Bridge turned back to the restaurant. “You probably just left it on the table. I’ll take a look.” She gripped the door handle, about to pull it open, when Karen cried out.

  “Thanks, babe — oh!”

  Karen’s purse clattered to the pavement, spilling its contents. For a moment Bridge thought she’d dropped it because she was drunk, but then saw her outstretched hand, pointing over Bridge’s shoulder.

  Izzy screamed, “Hugo!”

  Bridge turned to see Hugo’s stroller rolling down the sloping pavement, into the road.

  Her limbs suddenly weighed a ton. Like a bad dream, everything happened so slowly, barely moving at all, and the cars were rushing by on the road, and little Hugo’s stroller bumped and clattered over the uneven flagstones, and Bridge only just then saw the pedal, the little bright green brake pedal on one of the back wheels, the brake she’d forgotten to activate before letting go of the stroller, of little Hugo…

  Izzy darted past her, faster than any human should move, and grabbed a handle on the stroller just as it left the pavement. The stroller jerked back, waking Hugo, and he started crying.

  “You bloody idiot!” Izzy screamed. “What the hell were you doing?”

  “I’m sorry, I…I forgot the brake.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Bridge, this is why I can’t trust you with anything. You can hardly take care of yourself, let alone anyone else!”

  Stéphanie and Hugo were both crying, now. Karen tried to soothe Stéphanie, while Julia scrambled around on the pavement, sweeping everything back into her purse. She held up her phone and called out, “It’s all right, it was in my purse. It’s, um. It’s all right.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” said Bridge, reddening with a mixture of frustration at Izzy and anger at herself. “I’ve done nothing but take care of myself since uni.”

  “Exactly,” said Izzy, seizing on Bridge’s choice of words. “All you’ve ever done is look out for yourself. Who was it looked after Mum when Dad died? Who was it dealt with her crying all night when you got arrested? Who sorted out the lawyers when Mum moved into the new flat? It wasn’t you, was it?”

  Julia moved between them and said, “Girls, what the hell are you babbling about?” Bridge looked at Karen, confused, then realised she and her sister had been shouting at one another in French. “Izzy, your daughter wants you,” said Karen, ushering Stéphanie to her mother’s side.

  Izzy glared one final time at Bridge in silence, then turned away with her children in tow. “Don’t worry, Steph, we’re going home now. Karen, can you do the honours?”

  “Yeah, that’s sobered me right up, that has. Taxi!” Karen raised a hand, and within seconds a cab pulled to the side of the road. They always asked Karen to hail taxis, as she seemed to have a preternatural ability to summon them out of thin air. After the cab stopped, Karen helped Izzy and the children inside, then held the door open for Julia, who climbed in after them. “Night,” she said, as the taxi pulled away, then turned to Bridge and shook her head like a disappointed schoolteacher. “She’s just stressed, you know? One kid’s hard enough, but can you imagine two?”

  “Karen, you know even less about kids than I do. Besides, she’s not stressed about them. I’m just an idiot.”

  The older woman put her arm around Bridge’s shoulder and rubbed it affectionately. “One day, I swear. One day, we’ll manage a night out without you two going at it.” Karen hailed another cab and held the door open for her.

  Bridge shook her head. “I’ll walk.”

  “To Finchley? Are you mad?”

  “It’s only about five miles. I’ve done it before.”

  Karen sighed. “I’ll bet you bloody have, as well. Just be careful, OK? We do all love you, you know.” She gave Bridge a final hug and climbed into the cab.

  Funny way of showing it sometimes, she thought as she walked north. Then again, sibling arguments like that probably didn’t make it easy. And the night hadn’t been a complete loss. She’d got to see her niece and nephew, who always made her smile, and it had all helped her make a decision about Zurich. She’d tell Giles in the morning.

  11

  “Giles, you can’t send him in alone. He’s just a doorkicker.”

  “He’s not applying to work there, Bridge. All he has to do is get inside and plug in a USB stick.”

  “And get out again.”

  “Sure, if you like.”

  “But Adrian doesn’t know a rack server from a stereo, let alone anything about POSIX threads. What if they question him? They’re not going to let him just walk in there.”

  “He may not be an honours girl like you, but give the man some credit. We’re briefing him on what to look for, which internal server to infect, everything you laid out in the advisory. And our local source has given us detailed location plans, including a secret infil method. Radović shouldn’t need to talk to anyone on the way in or out.”

  “Assuming nothing’s changed since we smuggled our source out of there.”

  “Then he’ll have to improvise. Anyway, he’s going in with Serbian cover, and we’re false-flagging the whole op in case he gets blown. This is not Adrian’s first rodeo, as our American friends would say.”

  “Send me in with him.”

  “There’s no need, and besides, you’re not yet OIT.”

  “So promote me. My scores from the Loch are good, and I know you’ve discussed it with Hard Man. He told me.”

  “Yes, because you’ve made it perfectly clear you want in the field.”

  “And this is an ideal job to start me on. Adrian can do what he does best, hitting the enemy and kicking doors. I’ll just be there to make sure he kicks the right ones.”

  “Have you ever been to Syria?”

  “You know damn well I haven�
�t. But you said yourself, infil should be clandestine, no need for contact.”

  “Quoting a man’s own words back at him is no way to endear oneself.”

  “We get one shot at this facility, one shot at these servers. As soon as Moscow realises we’ve targeted them, they’ll pull out. Our only chance is to infect them before that happens.”

  “You’ll need to be placed on the firearms list. And Hard Man will have to formally sign off on you. Don’t make me regret this, Bridge.”

  “Je ne regrette rien, Giles. You should know that.”

  12

  Thirty minutes into her workout, the kick bag almost smacked her in the face when she suddenly realised she’d forgotten to chat to Tenebrae_Z last night.

  Fortunately, Bridge’s instincts kicked in and she reacted in time. She swung back on her root leg, pivoted to deliver a roundhouse that sunk into the bag’s padding, and followed up with two jabs and a body blow. Then she caught and steadied the bag with her hands, before wiping her face with a sweat towel.

  How could she forget? Because of Izzy, and their stupid bloody argument. Bridge had spent the long walk home obsessing about her sister, her life, her job, and generally feeling sorry for herself. When she reached her flat it was gone one in the morning. She’d thrown her clothes on the floor, climbed into bed, and pulled the covers over her head without even bothering to set Radio 3 going on iPlayer. She did that most nights to help her sleep, but last night she hadn’t needed it — the last thing she remembered was closing her eyes, swearing quietly at her sister, and clenching her jaw to stop herself crying.

  Now she’d have to wait till this evening to find out what happened with Ten at his mysterious meeting, and how on earth he’d cracked the ASCII puzzle. They’d speculated on lots of things together, and one of Bridge’s discoveries had been a strange pattern in the few postings she’d seen — the last characters in every image were always an asterisk followed by a sequence of numbers with the letters A and D inserted towards the end, like “*0 6 188 D16A”. No matter the image, there were the numbers, always different but always with that A/D. Bridge and Ten had scratched their heads over it, trying to figure if it was some kind of artist signature, or an equivalent to a serial number. The sequence didn’t match anything they could find. She’d even secretly run it through some SIS databases, but came up with nothing. She was dying to find out what it was really for, and now Ten could tell her.

  Today, though, her mind had been on just one thing since waking; the Zurich field job. If anyone had asked during the long walk home last night, she’d have said she was absolutely not taking it, not after proving she couldn’t be trusted with a child’s stroller. But upon waking, she wondered if that was rash. So she’d come to the gym early, hoping a combat workout before the office might clear her mind.

  Bridge hadn’t been a physical child. She buried herself in books and music, voraciously reading her father’s sci-fi collection several times over — to the point of exasperating her mother, who just wanted her petite Brigitte to spend time with other children, make friends, maybe try talking to boys like Édith (her mother refused to call her sister ‘Isabelle’) did so effortlessly. When they came to England, though, Bridge’s self-sufficiency and contentment with her own company made the move an order of magnitude easier for her to cope with than for Izzy, who had to leave not just her friends, but a new boyfriend. As compensation, their parents paid for Izzy to take horse-riding lessons, dancing lessons, music lessons… Bridge saw this and exaggerated how completely devastated she was by their move to England, using it to bargain for her own computer. Her father justified it to her mother by insisting it would be educational.

  It certainly was that, although in a strange way she was glad he hadn’t lived to see her arrested for hacking the local government’s website and defacing it with vegetarian propaganda.

  Despite her disinterest in sports, she’d also taken up karate after coming to London. Her parents were delighted at her showing interest in a hobby that wasn’t just physical, but disciplined. Her mother, in particular, had made for a strange sight in the audience at martial arts sparring events and exhibitions where Bridge competed, dressing for each occasion like it was Ascot, but shouting Gallic encouragement like she was ringside at a wrestling match.

  The truth behind Bridge’s interest in martial arts had been much less noble. Almost as soon as she arrived in England, the bullies at school found her out. Puberty had still been a year or two away, but the English girls didn’t seem to appreciate a new pupil who’d rather spend her break periods reading the latest William Gibson novel, or listening to a new VNV Nation album, instead of gossiping and parading around for the boys. They called her ‘Freaky Frog’ and ‘Spooky Slut’, which Bridge found maddeningly ironic considering everyone else at the school seemed to be getting off with someone, while she walked home alone every night. They broke into her locker, stole her textbooks, hid her gym clothes, and waited for her after school with their hair tied back and fingernails sharpened.

  She couldn’t bring herself to tell her parents. What could they have done about it, anyway? If they made a fuss at school, the girls would simply renew their efforts. If she moved to a new school, everyone would know why, and it would just be a different group of kids that bullied her instead. And if they did nothing, the bullying would continue and she’d feel as useless as ever. No, the only way to stop it was to fight it. But Bridge had spent her entire life living in books, computers, and music. She didn’t know how to fight back if she wanted to.

  So she decided to learn, and she learned fast. By the end of the final term of her first year, nobody at school was bullying her any more.

  But then she had another revelation; it turned out she really enjoyed martial arts. Sergeant Major Hardiman, or ‘Hard Man’ as he was better known, had commented on it while giving her top marks in her induction class for Close Quarters Combat. She shrugged it off, said it was a way of staying fit that didn’t involve chasing a ball around a court. He never mentioned it again, but the look in his eye suggested he had some idea of the truth.

  She didn’t mind. CQC became her favourite subject at ‘The Loch’, the typically understated name for a training facility compound covering twenty square miles of Scottish highland. There, ‘Hard Man’ — an officially retired Royal Marine now running a distinctly unofficial facility — and his battalion of instructors taught non-military security service personnel the necessary skills to survive in the field. MI5, SIS, Special Branch, sometimes even the TSG and diplomatic corps. They sent their men and women to learn everything from firing standard issue pistols and close combat to advanced driving and surveillance. Everyone at the Loch attended those basic courses, but only certain students went a stage further to study what Hard Man and the other instructors referred to as “Nobby Bollocks” classes. Along with a small group of others, who she assumed were also intelligence or special forces officers of some kind, Bridge learned how to build improvised bombs with household cleaning products, how to resist interrogation, how to mix fast-acting poisons, and more. She absorbed it all like a sponge, and so long as Hard Man and the others kept teaching her, they could think whatever they liked about her motives. After a while, she even stopped asking who the hell Nobby Bollocks was. It was only when she returned to London, and Giles congratulated her on passing the ‘Nasty Business’ course, that she got the joke.

  But then came Doorkicker, and reality. Bridge lost her partner, screwed up the mission, and nearly got herself killed. It was all a far cry from thirty minutes of controlled karate sparring at the Loch.

  The gym was filling up. She grabbed her things and headed for the showers, nodding at the regulars as she went.

  13

  There was still no alarm at fifty metres, which surprised him.

  He ran a hand through his sandy blond hair and considered the possibilities. He couldn’t have heard an alarm anyway, as there was no a
udio feed. But he did have visual, and he’d expected to see something happen, for someone to make a call or issue a warning.

  Could whoever designed the building security really have been so backward, so old-fashioned, that they didn’t think it worth scanning for objects below a certain size? The city had a pigeon problem, it was true, but when it came to security it was always safer to have false positives than negatives. And if they weren’t scanning for this kind of threat, it was all but guaranteed there was no automated defence system in place. Those were still considered bleeding edge experimental, and were extremely expensive. Welcome to London, he thought, city of budget cuts, shortcuts, and half-finished jobs.

  Still, this was all better for him. Better for the plan. Alarm or not, if he could navigate the high winds well enough to get within fifty metres, he was confident he could reach the glass before a live officer had time to take action. The glass itself was strengthened, but he’d accounted for that. And once the glass was gone, the next stage would be out of his hands and the wind wouldn’t be a problem any more.

  The transceiver pods had passed his own rigorous tests under controlled circumstances. But out here, in a live field, there were a hundred different things that could interfere with their operation, block a crucial part of the signal, or randomly shield a particular bandwidth.

  That hadn’t happened. Even in Shoreditch, almost two miles away, signal throughput was over 85%.

  At thirty metres he steered away from the towering glass edifice and smiled.

  14

  Bridge was still annoyed with herself for not logging on to chat with Tenebrae_Z last night, but felt better for a decent night’s sleep and morning workout. Showered and fresh, she entered Vauxhall Cross ready to face Giles and, more importantly, a big decision for her own future.