Two hours later she was still thinking about it, while she shovelled ready-meal vegetable pasta into her mouth with zero enthusiasm. She reconsidered everything she knew about Bowman, and now realised it was entirely second-hand. Steve Wicker had found the ID fraud; Andrea Thomson had followed him from the meet with Novak; they’d visited ‘Nigel Marsh’ at the Shoreditch office together; and now the only tangible record they had of that office was a dump of network traffic, most of which was completely uninteresting and useless because Bowman’s technology efforts had all been centred around wifi, both the real stuff and his physics-breaking ‘quantum state’ rubbish.
At three in the morning, as Through the Night played quietly on her iPhone, something from Bridge’s insomniac episode two nights ago kept scratching at the gates of her mind. But she couldn’t find the key.
* * *
She slept until one the next afternoon, and while she woke still tired, it was just her normal state of perpetual tiredness rather than the exhaustion of the past two days. She brushed her teeth, showered, put an old Year of No Light CD in the stereo — her computer was full of MP3s, but she’d never got round to hooking it up to her hifi speakers — and poured herself a late bowl of cornflakes while the kettle boiled. It was the first time in weeks she’d sat down to eat breakfast without the deadline of her imminent commute to work, or a shopping trip into town, or a hangover from clubbing the night before. Given time to actually take in the state of her flat as she mechanically crunched cereal, she now realised she hadn’t cleaned it since before going to Agenbeux.
Chaos was Bridge’s default mode for living, but the flat was getting beyond the norm. Boot socks tossed over the arm of the sofa, two pairs of tights and a bra over the back, a tangle of t-shirts and leggings on the floor, three used dinner plates in danger of growing legs and walking themselves to the washing-up bowl, a half-finished mug of coffee that could have been there a few days or a few weeks… Even her desk was messier than normal, covered in parts of a failed old tower Compaq from which she was trying to rescue the hard drive, and the various tools she’d been using to take it apart.
Something itched at the back of her brain. Taking apart. Computer parts. Tools.
Andrea’s report on the Shoreditch office. A line, innocuous: ‘A workbench appeared to be in heavy use, covered in broken-down computer parts. GCHQ liaison advises these consisted mostly of wifi chips and antennae, likely to build signal transceivers and range extenders.’
Steve Wicker wasn’t officially named in the report for security reasons, but Bridge guessed he was the ‘GCHQ liaison’ in question. And Steve knew his hardware. If he said Marsh/Bowman had been taking apart and building range extenders, that was good enough for her.
Range extenders. Wifi-controlled drones. Fissile material that you’d want to unleash in a crowded environment, an urban gathering, some kind of party…
Bridge spilled milk from her cornflakes as she scrambled for her HP, memories of Agenbeux racing through her mind. Montgomery, vain and egotistical, desperate for recognition and reward. Preening at the thought of Whitehall noticing what a good job he was doing, convinced they were throwing a party just for him, to sing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and pat him on the back.
She opened the laptop, established a secure connection to the office, and started typing. Three hours later she still hadn’t had any coffee, but she did have a theory.
78
GROUP: france.misc.binaries-random
FROM: zero@null
SUBJECT: new art
79
The post from Novak was unexpected, but Bowman had learned very quickly the Russian was full of surprises. That was why he’d been hired, after all.
But it could wait till after mission end. Novak had already missed the previous week’s deadline for final code leaks, and nothing he could offer now would help anyway. He probably just wanted more money. Bowman’s own deadline had been yesterday, leaving today for debugging only. Too late to incorporate any more information from Exphoria, and there didn’t seem much more to learn. His own work, combined with the leaked code he’d seen, would suffice. He did miss the Shoreditch office, and wished he could have stayed there to see out the mission, but comfort was for the weak. Only completion mattered. This place in Rotherhithe was fine, and he was glad of the foresight to take out a cash rental on it months ago, as a backup. But it was further out from the target than Shoreditch, and freezing cold.
More than anything, it was England’s cold he’d been unprepared for. Even during the summer, it was merely clement compared to the heat he was used to.
Thinking of home was a mistake. He struggled to shut down such thoughts. Memories of his parents, unbidden and unwanted, scratching at the edges of his awareness. Trying to overwhelm him. His mother, hanging in silence, her arms stiff and lifeless by her side. She opened her eyes to stare at him, asking without speaking, How could you let this happen, Daniel? He turned away, shaking. He had no answer.
All he had was now, this moment, this vengeance. Here, in London, not Hong Kong.
Get a grip, lad. His father, invisible and deafening. We didn’t raise you to be soft.
He took a deep breath, chanted a mantra, and cleared his mind. He was focused. He was in the moment. He got a grip.
The first wave, five quadcopters of varying design, rose quietly into the air at his command, fingers dancing over the keyboard of his Acer laptop, manipulating with practised ease the control program he’d spent so long perfecting. Each drone was different, but they were all fitted with identical low-slung cargo attachments. He let them hover at eye level and walked among the mismatched flock, triple-checking their cargo and flying condition. Get a grip.
The second wave consisted of four identical drones, with enclosed blades and sound bafflers that rendered them almost silent in flight. He’d removed all identifying marks from their exterior, leaving a jet-black body that would be invisible in the night sky. They sat patiently on the concrete floor, in formation and ready to rise at his command. To deliver the killing blow.
The endgame had begun, and Daniel Bowman smiled in the certain knowledge that as he spent the last weeks of his life in agony, the man from the market wouldn’t even know he was playing.
80
“Ms Sharp has a theory. You’re going to want to hear it.”
Bridge’s call had caught Giles as he left a budget meeting, irritable and short on patience. When she arrived at Vauxhall, he was waiting in the CTA office with Ciaran and Monica. She explained her thought process, and showed them what she’d found that afternoon. They spent the next two hours checking her findings, and digging further into the records, while Giles arranged an end-of-day meeting with everyone concerned.
Now they were in Broom Two, the second-largest briefing room in the building. Andrea Thomson and Sunny Patel were on video link, Henri Mourad was on speakerphone, and in the room were Emily Dunston, Giles, Ciaran, Monica, and several assistants — including one from C’s office.
Bridge had her lightsaber pen in one hand, impatiently clicking and un-clicking the top. She realised with some surprise that she was nervous, and eager to get this right. Maybe she wasn’t ready to quit, after all — assuming she didn’t fuck it up completely and get fired instead. She took a deep breath and said, “I think we were focused on the wrong target. Bowman never intended to attack yesterday’s Exphoria demonstration. There’s a project launch party tonight, here in London, with all the bigwigs present. I think he’s going to hit that instead.”
“We’re aware of that party,” said Andrea. “The Prime Minister is scheduled to drop by for ten minutes of handshakes, so Five sent a team to work with the police for security. What makes you think it’s Bowman’s target?”
“When you went to check out the fake startup — actually, Mr Patel, could we call Steve Wicker in on this? — you described a bench full of range extenders, wifi ant
enna, and so on, all in various states of being built or dismantled. And Bowman said he was working on a breakthrough in wifi technology.”
“Yeah, but I read that file, and it’s nonsense,” said Sunny. “There’s no ‘quantum state information’ in radio signals, he was feeding you a load of bollocks.”
“I know that,” said Bridge, reassuring him. “But what if he came up with that story so people wouldn’t ask why he was building wifi transceivers?”
“Hiding the truth in plain sight,” said Giles, elaborating for the room. “Go on, Bridge.”
She took a breath to calm herself. “Bowman still has the radioactive material. Naturally, we assume he intends to use it. But if you’re going to set off a dirty bomb, where’s the best place for it? Not a wide-open space like an airfield. You want a populated, crowded, urban area.”
“So why not a shopping centre, or a football match?” asked Mourad, on the phone. “Why a party in Whitehall?”
“First, because if Bowman’s mission is to sabotage Exphoria, all the higher-ups dying in a terror attack would put a big black mark on the project’s reputation. Plus the mole himself, James Montgomery, was scheduled to be at this party. What better way for Bowman to tie up a loose end than by killing the mole, while making it look like he wasn’t the target?”
Emily Dunston nodded. “That makes sense. But Montgomery is dead, so why bother going ahead with the attack?”
“Because I don’t think he was the prime target. Getting him would have just been a nice bonus, but the principal target is the head of the Exphoria project, Sir Terence Cavendish.” She paused to let everyone take this in, before turning to the speakerphone. “As for the second thing, Henri…the party isn’t in Whitehall. It’s halfway up the Shard.”
A murmur rippled through the room. Any attack on the Shard, the country’s tallest building and a symbol of modern London, would make headlines and instil fear; the aim of any serious terrorist.
“The CTA unit has been looking into this,” said Giles, and Bridge half-smiled at his determination to ensure everyone knew his brainchild was leading the way. “We’ve found compelling evidence, much of which was simply a matter of connecting dots we hadn’t previously looked for. But in light of Bowman’s identification, they became clear. Ciaran?”
Ciaran cleared his throat. “We went through the ICRs — that’s Internet Connection Records, all the traffic at a given IP address — from the Shoreditch startup office. Bowman didn’t use it much, as we assume he was on a cellular signal most of the time, and without the device he used we can’t trace that traffic. But what he did use the hard connection for was interesting. He looked up a lot of details and biographies of Sir Terence, for example, over the course of several weeks.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Emily. “Sir Terence is a public figure. If Bowman knew of the project’s existence at all, it would make sense he’d also know the Air Vice-Marshal is in charge.”
“But he’s going to be at the party,” said Ciaran, as if that explained everything.
“We think —” Bridge began, then corrected herself. “You know what, I shouldn’t hide behind the unit, here. I think that this is personal, something between Bowman and Sir Terence. Otherwise, why keep looking him up? And those searches ceased immediately after Andrea visited the Shoreditch office, as if he suddenly assumed the connection was being monitored.”
“Are you implying Sir Terence is in league with Bowman?” asked Andrea.
“No, no,” said Bridge, “there’s no suggestion he’s involved with the leak, or being blackmailed. But I think he was always the principal target, for personal reasons.”
“Why go to such trouble over an RAF officer?”
Monica spoke for the first time. “You said the FCO suspected Bowman’s parents of being spies for Beijing. ‘Peking Ducks’, which by the way is so incredibly offensive, I can’t even. Well, guess who first raised that suspicion with the former British Governor, while serving at RAF Sek Kong?”
Emily Dunston groaned in frustration. “Oh, bloody hell. Sir Terence Cavendish.”
“Squadron Leader Cavendish, as he was then,” said Giles. “We assume this is also why we have no record of the Bowmans past a couple of years after handover. Beijing has never liked loose ends, and if they found out the family’s cover was blown…well, I wouldn’t fancy their chances.”
“But young Daniel Bowman survived somehow, and now he wants revenge on the man who effectively killed his parents,” Bridge added.
Andrea sighed. “How did we miss this before?”
“To be fair, we didn’t even know who Bowman was until you found his DNA. And Sir Terence is hardly the only RAF officer who served in Hong Kong.”
“He also returned several times as a civilian, after the handover,” said Monica. “Again, not unusual for someone with his record, but at a certain point there are so many coincidences, they start to look more like a pattern.”
“Assume you’re right, and Bowman’s going to set off an RDD at the party,” said Andrea. “How? Like I said, we have officers co-ordinating with police, and they’re already on alert because of the PM’s visit. How’s he going to get in the venue?”
“Who says he has to be anywhere near it?” Bridge turned to the GCHQ video feed, where Steve Wicker had quietly slid into view beside Patel. “He’s been buying up drones for testing, and now he has the means to control them at a distance. Right, Steve?”
He nodded. “Afraid so. If he’s been working on signal range extenders and custom transceivers, he could be half a kilometre from the place, maybe more. And without knowing where he’s likely to be, isolating and tracing his signal will be tricky. A dirtbox would grab every signal around, but how would we know which one was him?”
“Hang on, before we get too technical,” Giles interrupted, and checked his watch. “Can’t we just cancel the party, or move the venue? It doesn’t start for thirty minutes.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Bridge. “This is our chance to draw Bowman out. If we evacuate, he’ll know we’re onto him and vanish back into the shadows, complete with his radioactive material and drone collection.”
Giles nodded. “Replacing an attack we’re expecting with a future one that’s completely unknown to us.”
“He may not wait long,” said Henri over the phone. “The smugglers both succumbed to radiation poisoning, and they only had the material for three weeks, tops.”
“Bowman’s surely better prepared to handle it,” said Bridge, “but point taken. And it reinforces our theory. He timed the material’s arrival so he wouldn’t have to store it for long before using it.”
“I was going to suggest a sniper team around the building to shoot the drone down,” said Andrea, “but if the drone itself is carrying a bomb…”
Ciaran said, “Steve’s right, locating the signal will be tricky. But if we can, then we could swamp the source. No signal; no flying instructions. Most drones will default to hovering in place, or safely descend to earth, when there’s no signal or a low battery.”
“Perhaps I should have emphasised the difficulty more,” said Steve. “If he’s using multiple extenders and transceivers, combined with the hundreds of active wifi signals at any given location in London, this is like half a needle in ten haystacks. We’d have to get down there, figure out which local signal might be Bowman, then hack and piggyback it to trace to source, and finally hope we’d picked the right one to start with. And on top of all that, we have to assume he’s built redundancy into the system.”
“We also couldn’t begin isolating until the drone was in range, because we have no idea where Bowman himself is,” added Ciaran. “It’s not enough time.”
“So just cut them all off,” said Monica. “Use a jambox to shut down everything around the venue.”
Bridge shook her head. “Too many legit signal
s that might get shut down. Guy’s Hospital, London Bridge station, God knows how many internal signals to keep the Shard itself operating. Jamboxes are chainsaws, when what we need is a scalpel to attack only the drone signal…” She stopped herself, an idea forming.
Giles saw the change and raised an eyebrow. “I can almost hear gears turning. Bridge?”
“Ciaran’s right, we don’t know where Bowman is. But we do know where the drone will be, and that means we can lay a trap, so long as I can get to the venue in time. As soon as the drone comes within range, boom.”
“I’m on my way there as soon as I get off this call,” said Andrea. “I can swing by and pick you up. But what kind of trap do you mean? Something to catch a drone?”
“Something like that. It’s called MaXrIoT.”
81
At any other time, Bridge would have enjoyed watching Andrea’s driver break enough traffic laws to get his licence revoked every hundred metres. Instead she was focused on her HP laptop, running a custom signal scanner and packet sniffing software. As Steve had said, the streets of London were saturated with hundreds of wifi signals and gigabytes of online traffic at every moment. Bridge knew the signal she was looking for wouldn’t be in range yet, as they raced toward the Shard, but it was better to get the software up and running early. Andrea was in the front passenger seat, Giles in the back with Bridge. Both were talking non-stop into their phones, taking reports and issuing clipped instructions.
“Three minutes,” said the driver as he ran a red traffic light and leaned hard on the wheel, to weave between the opposite lane of traffic and an illegally-parked white van. Bridge held the HP tight as she and Giles slid across the back seat.
The Exphoria Code Page 33
