‘I’m trying to find out.’
‘Please take your time.’
‘I’m looking.’
Latency. Bad packets. He looked at the network structure and the routes, the sockets, the listen queues. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. No dead or screaming clues.
He considered again whether an error might produce this. A bug in the key manager somewhere? A slip-up in the handling of the keys? If it was possible it was also unlikely.
He decided to increase the refresh interval. He sent new keys every two seconds—thought about sending them with every packet but was afraid he’d blow the connection to the drone.
*** Interception alert ***
*** Interception alert ***
He examined the logs again. Didn’t want to stare in case his audience saw that he was out of ideas. He ran every diagnostic available and dumped to file. He drew a diagram of the links using an automated tool: the hut to the Creech network to Nellis, the web of backbone connections, the satellite, the drone—he couldn’t see it. The keys went out and were changing mid flight but it didn’t seem possible to know where.
He looked up at the screens, the hills, the green earth of the surface following into the horizon’s heavy line.
He didn’t want to be doing this.
He wanted it to go away.
It was infuriating and embarrassing. Wolfe’s quiet breathing. Gray’s eyes on the monitor. He needed the idea to come like lightning—how he could find the person who was responsible for this and destroy them.
The CIA men were reading his every command, as if they were sighting his line of fire.
Twenty-five miles and five minutes past the event and still the keys were being watched.
The new scripts! Could he have made some kind of mistake?
‘Can I drop the encryption?’ Daniel asked. ‘I want to restart the system.’
‘Can you guarantee it comes back up?’
‘No.’
‘Then, no.’
Wolfe interrupted, ‘Don’t tip them off. First rule: whoever they are, do not let them know that we know.’
*** Interception alert ***
‘Call it in.’ Gray’s voice broke Daniel’s train of thought. ‘I want every man at your company on this and right now.’
Daniel rang a surprised Michael Sett. Sett called every engineer at LinkLock to a war room on the third floor at Northbourne Avenue. Daniel spent an age executing their commands, examining the routes and segments, trying to discover the source of the problem, the root cause.
‘Forensic,’ Sett kept telling them. ‘I want a forensic trace.’
The requests piled up faster than Daniel could execute them. Into the telephone he read packet identifiers and latency numbers. They went to level four debugging. They wanted to perform a reset but Gray would not allow it. He was still instructing Ellis and O’Grady in the hunt for Abu Ja’far.
*** Interception alert ***
Then something very strange happened. The latency on the connection got longer in tens of milliseconds and then in full seconds, a gap quickly widening, the drone flying forward into time they couldn’t see.
Daniel read the numbers out. From the room on Northbourne Avenue there was silence.
Twelve seconds.
Sixteen.
Soon, the drone was a full minute ahead of them. Daniel read the numbers; it seemed that something was dragging on the whole connection, a gravitational pull.
One minute, twelve seconds.
One minute, twenty-five and still increasing.
Daniel said to Ellis, ‘Maybe switch on the autopilot.’
The man turned from his controls and said, ‘What is going on?’
Sett told Daniel to tell Gray they had to remake the secure connection, even if it meant going raw. Daniel explained this to Gray, adding that if the latency kept rising this way they’d probably lose the drone.
‘Do it,’ Gray said.
He brought down the encryption. He spoke the commands aloud so that LinkLock could follow what he was doing.
When it was done, they waited. But it didn’t work. If anything, the latency rate increased.
‘Bring it back up,’ Sett told him.
He executed the instruction but the system couldn’t do it—couldn’t get a secure key pair.
Now the drone was three minutes into the future. Ellis asked for an order and Gray said, ‘What is protocol?’ Ellis said he’d set a dump point, a place at the end of their fuel reserve where the drone would crash into the earth.
Daniel tried to repair the connection. The engineers in Canberra shouted suggestions over the phone but nothing worked; the time between station and drone only grew, a warp that became more and more elastic and which nobody understood.
It had to be something foreign, Daniel thought. There weren’t any new segments on the link and therefore it had to be a compromised node. He said this over the phone. What could possibly be compromised? Sett wanted to know.
Five minutes. Then six and a half. It wasn’t strictly an exponential gain but bad enough. The engineers barked further commands and Gray spat did he need to get someone else in here before their MQ-9 crashed.
Daniel’s fingers were sweaty on the keyboard. He desperately wanted to figure this out. He thought, How would you go about it, what would you need to get up on the link?
*** Interception alert ***
Where would you need to be? He didn’t see how you could do this on the air between satellite and drone. You’d have to have access somewhere on this side of the connection. And you’d also need to know—what? The structure of the circuit. Where to stand to intercept the link. That meant knowing how the link was constructed.
O’Grady began talking to Bagram. He wanted an intercept on a lost asset and he gave the drone’s heading and identifier.
‘Is this shoot down?’ said the voice.
‘Potential.’
Eight full minutes. Daniel was surprised there could be that much elasticity in the link. He asked the room in Northbourne Avenue for advice and was told to wait.
‘Phantom has visual,’ said the voice in Bagram.
The latency became jerky, and finally they lost it. The images froze on the screen and their commands went unanswered.
‘Drop the link,’ said Gray. ‘Terminate it and reconnect.’
That was O’Grady’s job, not Daniel’s. He watched the man kill the connection. Everything went dark. On the phone Sett asked Daniel what was happening, but he didn’t want to break the silence to reply.
The connection did not re-establish. For a long time, they listened to O’Grady’s keystrokes and watched the screens.
Gray’s breathing became heavy. ‘Technically, can I even give the order?’ he hissed.
Ellis spoke to Bagram. He said this was a shoot-down request.
‘Authenticate bravo x-ray. Parties please acknowledge with initials.’
‘Tango Juliet.’
‘Mike Kilo. Bagram?’
‘You have asked for shoot down. Phantom will engage.’
It took only thirty seconds. The voice told them the target had been destroyed. Ellis and O’Grady swivelled in their chairs, faced the room. Gray stood facing the empty monitors, his fingers on the sunglasses in his breast pocket.
‘We launch again tomorrow,’ he said. ‘By then, I want to know what on God’s earth this was.’
Daniel sat alone in the control station with the Northbourne Avenue war room on the phone. He’d been reading aloud messages and outputs for the better part of three hours and he felt wasted, worse than tired.
The engineers were trying to figure it out. Their conclusion so far was that the interceptor must have had knowledge of how the link was built: the ability to watch it being established, or in the very least access to a trace.
Sett was anxious about the fallout. He wanted Daniel to reiterate to Gray the fact that, without LinkLock, there would have been no knowledge of the interception at all. In fact, in
the wash-up, it would probably turn out that the system had done its job perfectly.
They worked until Daniel dozed off. He woke numbly to hear Palmer repeating his name.
‘Go and rest,’ Palmer told him. ‘Call us again in four hours.’
He walked to the dorms and found a bed.
His dream was of streets, a desert city; at first he thought it was Indian Springs but he was soon walking by mud-brick houses and even mud skyscrapers and everything felt ancient.
When he woke there was still an hour left to sleep. He shut his eyes and wanted to drift but now something was keeping him ever so slightly awake.
Whatever happens, remember that it is my fault.
They had been her words, hadn’t they?
For a moment he tried to slip again into the desert city but the thought of her held him out.
A trace. To understand the circuit. There had been several on his laptop. Even better: the manuals for the system itself.
The face that came to him was Austen’s. ‘Has anyone tried to get close to you, Daniel? Has anyone inexplicably tried to befriend you?’
Are you taking a woman in or are you not?
He suddenly felt cold. He lay still but the thought grew heavier. Surely it wasn’t possible?
He’d met Ania when? It had been after the mugging. He must have already been at Creech for weeks, possibly longer; more than enough time for someone to know who he was. He knew that these things happened in the world. There were people whose job it was to orchestrate such plots. But no, it simply couldn’t be the case. Weren’t he and Ania genuine? Didn’t he feel that?
You know, it isn’t so easy for me. This.
He stared up at the faintly lit ceiling. The more he thought about them, together, the less he was sure.
Then he wondered: Did their being genuine even matter?
There was nothing to stop them from being real while Ania was also otherwise employed. That day at New York New York—the saddest place in the city, alright, but it couldn’t have been that she was crying about. Was it too much to think that she was already regretting it, what she was doing to him?
An agent. He said the word and it frightened him. He tried to remember when exactly he and Ania had first shared a table—had she been sitting at one he’d joined, or had she sat down at one with him?
He thought hard. He thought with his mind and with his gut.
The idea of her playing him began to feel more than possible. It began to have the tenor of truth.
The husband. A convenient story, a way to get Ania deeper in?
The break-in. A way to get their hands on his computer while leaving the agent in place?
And only once she’d had to leave, their connection to him ended, had they chosen to attack.
Isn’t it part of the game we have chosen to play?
A woman like Ania approaches someone like him. Objectively it really didn’t seem likely, did it? It felt . . . enacted. Improbable. Arranged. Things like that never happened, especially not to him; beautiful foreign women wanting to share their lives, to share themselves, with complete strangers in casino bars.
Was she invented? A lie? He could suddenly believe it. The crying for help. The Inderal. How could it have taken him so long to realise? She was the bug of some foreign country against America that was now crashing about their network, trying to learn what the empire was up to, trying to get at its secret toys.
I am sorry.
He felt weightless. He felt again that there was no way she would do it to him, then he was again sure that she had.
He kept his eyes open and on the ceiling. This was one for the books, he told himself. He must have been the most naive simpleton ever to go to war.
It was galling, it was the biggest trap that anyone, anywhere had never seen coming. He pictured her. He felt her mouth on his lips and he detested her, he was disgusted; he felt her pressing against him and it was vile, she was repulsive, she was filthy. The idea that he’d felt something for her appalled him. He felt furious. He glimpsed suddenly the extent of the humiliation, the most intimate details about him written up and reported on in offices abroad, committees of management, this dope who we all of us are fucking, ha ha.
It must have been quite the shock for them, when he’d shot their man dead.
This I would not have picked.
This city. It had taught him only how out of his depth he was. How dark was the world. It was his own inadequacy; his inability to imagine and to realise, to see how others saw, to latch his thinking to the shape of things.
He closed his eyes. There was the taste of metal in his mouth. He thought if he could escape this, if he could check out and bury himself somewhere far away, that would be a relief. If he could cut himself free and find a way to withdraw. It wouldn’t be not facing up to things—it would be a rejection of all of them and all of it, a declaration of enough.
What was going to happen when they discovered it, the fact of Ania, the reason for their compromised network and the vanquished drone?
He felt sick, everything swirling, unsteady, impossible to grip.
•
Come morning, and the LinkLock team remained unable to find a solution. Daniel was still working with them when Gray appeared. He gave the CIA man the speech that Sett had instructed him to give, about how the system was probably working.
Gray stood coldly with the door open to the desert and gave a look that said, ‘Suggest that again and I’ll tear you apart.’
They’d be going after Abu Ja’far at first light. Daniel went to the communications hut on the pretence of checking things over, confirming that the systems would this time function correctly.
What he kept thinking about was the ease with which she’d done it. That was the worst: what an easy mark he’d been, how unsuspecting, how eagerly he’d fallen for the ruse. She’d had to convince him of nothing. All she’d had to do was touch him. He’d done the rest of the work himself.
He imagined her laughing. ‘This ridiculous boy, I have only to show an interest. I go missing downtown and how heroically he rushes to save me!’
How effortlessly she’d manipulated him. Whoever they were, they had to be congratulated for picking the weakest link.
He remembered her clothes all of a sudden: those he’d found in that fleapit motel. He realised now that they meant she’d been there—that she had probably been with that man, whoever he really was.
It was that thought that did it. He felt abruptly that he had to let her know that he’d come to comprehend things. That she might forever have what she’d managed to do over him, but that she shouldn’t have the satisfaction of believing he’d never figured it out. He sent a single-line email: I should never have trusted you, bitch, and he was pleased with its brutality, its sense of conclusion.
The MQ-9 launched an hour later. Daniel switched on the encryption and they watched. For a moment, everything ran normally. But then it appeared.
*** Interception alert ***
He had Sett in one ear and when he said the words the silence on the line was pure. The message began to fill the screen and the latency also started; one second, two seconds, three.
‘Park it,’ Gray demanded. ‘Get it down before it dies.’
Ellis turned the drone. By the time he got the machine to where it needed to be it was landing nine seconds ahead of him. ‘Airspeed,’ warned O’Grady. The strip rushed up into the cameras but the fact they could see it meant the machine had survived.
That was when Gray turned around. ‘No answer, Daniel? No fucking idea?’
‘I—’
‘Because this is a good way to let us down. It’s a good way to hang us out to dry.’
Gray snatched the headset for the phone and what followed was a cloudburst of abuse. If Sett got a word in it was monosyllabic, Gray’s voice pounding down the line. Daniel sat quietly and tried to give the impression that he was taking responsibility for what was happening, just not too much. When Gray thr
ew him the headset it bounced from his hands to the ground and he fumbled to get it back on.
‘He shouldn’t be blaming us,’ Sett said. ‘Let’s fix this before we’re ruined.’
But the drones stayed on the ground. They activated LinkLock-equipped units at three bases across the globe. Even with the system disabled and the machines resting cold on the apron, the latency numbers began to grow. They were left with a strange air force sliding into the future, nothing they could do to stop it reaching the end of days.
They decided that Daniel should disassemble the system, this side. It was the company’s idea—Sett still wanted to prove that it was not their fault. Gray agreed to it very quickly. In fact he told them to take as long as they liked. It seemed to Daniel that Gray would never let the system go back online.
Daniel broke down the components. For each piece of equipment the engineers wanted him to burn copies of the logs and the diagnostics before performing a hard reset. He wondered if the proof that would condemn him was on one of these discs.
Several hours into the process it was O’Grady who came to inform him. There was a body. Or at least the rumour of one. A headless corpse roadside in a village just outside Afghanistan. Raul was going to try his utmost to get DNA, but it was exactly where Abu Ja’far could have been.
‘Then he’s dead,’ Daniel said.
‘Well, as dead as anyone in the circumstances can be.’
They left him alone then. He worked in the hut and when it was done he told Sett. Sett wanted him to start the rebuild straight away, but that could take days and he stood in the nothing zone out by the fence and decided that he’d had enough. He’d go back to the loft, switch off his phone, and rest.
The gateman offered a wave. He took the slip road to the highway. There was a tiredness that wouldn’t leave him. At the loft, he climbed into bed and set no alarm.
At midday the sun was strong on the windows, its forever glare. They’d soon be missing him at the base but he wasn’t sure that he cared.
He felt like a swim. He took a long one; stretched out in the water and blew deep breaths.
The call came on the loft’s line, a black wall mount. He didn’t think it had ever rung before.
Midnight Empire Page 18
