To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  ‘Maggie?’

  ‘No time to explain, but I need you to authorize entry for me into the Library of Congress. I need to get in there before—’

  ‘There’s no way I can do that, Maggie.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I can’t put an untrained, unarmed, unequipped person into harm’s way.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, I can look after myself, you know that.’

  ‘This is a counter-terrorism situation, Maggie. Given the pattern so far, after hours is exactly when the danger is greatest. It’s night-time: there’s no way I’m putting you in there.’

  ‘Andrea, please. I think I know how this is playing out. I need to—’

  ‘The answer is no, Maggie. And that is my final word.’

  Maggie drifted away from the cordon and found herself pacing aimlessly. Her foot was screamingly painful. It was telling her what she did not want to hear: that it was time to go home, that it was time to give up.

  As she approached the kerb, thinking how far she’d have to walk to have any chance of hailing a cab, her phone vibrated. It was a text. Where the name should be, it simply said No Caller ID. She read the message twice.

  Go to the rear service entrance. Around the corner from the steel shuttered gate, there is a narrow side alley. Currently unmanned. There is an unmarked door with a keypad mechanism. Enter the number 657843.

  It would be lunacy to follow this advice: it was so obviously a trap. Whoever had sent this message either had some way of seeing that she was here, trying to get in, or had guessed that that was what she would do. She would be walking right into their lap.

  And yet, what if this was a miscalculation on their part? Maybe the sender of that text did want to lure her in, but once inside the library she could look after herself, couldn’t she? At least she’d be in, with a shot at stopping the fire. Out here she was useless.

  She walked around the perimeter until she found the steel-shuttered entrance to an underground car park in an area populated with oversized bins. This had to be the service area, protected as far as she could tell by at least four armed officers. She kept walking until, as promised, she reached a gap in the cordon. It opened to a narrow alleyway between two brick walls: you’d walk straight past it if you weren’t looking for it.

  Maggie darted inside and came to a locked brown metal door. Even the keypad was barely noticeable. She had to squint in the darkness to type in the six numbers.

  It opened with a clunk and, at last, she was in. She was standing in a bare, concrete stairwell, possibly a fire escape. She walked upward, pushing her way through double-doors and then a series of narrow corridors, hoping for something recognizable.

  After several wrong turns, she pushed into what she guessed was a suite of back offices. Suddenly there was a sound, a movement from the floor above her. There was no doubt about it: there were footsteps.

  Hesitantly, she emerged, looking in the gloom for a staircase. She took it, moving as noiselessly as she could up each step.

  She was in a lobby, which led through to a vast reading room. That was where the sound had come from.

  She moved inside and then called out.

  ‘This is the FBI. Who’s there?’

  Nothing.

  ‘I’m armed,’ she lied, hoping there was no tremor in her voice. ‘Put your hands in the air and reveal yourself.’

  Maggie held her breath. Was she about to put a human face at last to the plague of fire that had devoured one great library after another, and that sought to destroy this one?

  As quietly as she could, she pulled out her phone and activated the flashlight. The beam lit up stack after stack of books, scoping the empty space until, at last, it picked out a distinct, undisguised face. Maggie recognized it straight away.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The Library of Congress, Washington DC, 9.18pm

  His hands were up and, Maggie could see, they were trembling. Even the whiskers of his long, biblical beard seemed to be quaking. Irving Herman, Principal Deputy Librarian of the Library of Congress, looked terrified.

  ‘Mr Herman?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, shielding his eyes from the light. It was only then he made out Maggie’s face. His expression changed. Something like a smile appeared. ‘I told you, didn’t I, Miss Costello? I’d do anything for these books. I’ve given my lifetime to them. Why wouldn’t I give my life?’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘In the library? Every night since this started.’

  ‘Standing guard?’

  He looked sheepish. ‘Trying to, yes.’

  ‘And no one’s seen you? None of them?’ Maggie gestured at the armed presence outside.

  ‘They’re relying on the CCTV to see what’s happening inside,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think it’s working. But I can see outside. That’s how I saw you, through the window.’

  ‘So that text was from you.’

  He nodded. ‘What can I say? You seemed to care.’

  Maggie smiled. ‘I do care, Mr Herman. I don’t think we have much time and I need your help. I need you to take me to the server room.’

  Instantly Herman turned and led Maggie through the reading room, out and down two flights of stairs to a lower ground floor level. They went past the coat check area and a locker room, until finally they faced a series of brown doors that were marked Staff, Private and finally Authorized Entry Only. Herman, who had an ID card on a lanyard around his neck, now tugged at it so that it stretched on a long string, enabling him to unlock a reader whose small red light instantly turned green.

  The temperature increase hit her straight away, even before the lights turned themselves on. Fans were grinding away noisily, but still the air was thick and stuffy. She was in a room full of machines, stacks of slim black boxes – each one the size of a component from an old-school hi-fi system – held in vertical racks. All of them were flickering away, the lights signalling a code that to her was utterly opaque.

  She tried to divine the logic that might govern this room. Several of the stacks were indeed labelled, but not in language that made any sense to her. One was marked PHP Server, another SQL Database. She guessed that LOC Intranet referred to the internal website of the Library of Congress. Otherwise, she was clueless.

  Herman was looking at her hopefully, as if she might be able to unlock this puzzle.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I think the threat is coming from the outside. I don’t exactly know how they’re doing it, but someone is hacking into the system that controls everything in these buildings – the heating, the lights, the air-conditioning – and using it to start a fire.’

  ‘They’re turning the building against itself.’

  ‘Exactly. The only way we can stop them is if we just break the connection. Somehow we need to prevent any instructions they’re sending – to the fire controls or whatever – from getting through. Which means this room. So Mr Herman, I’m asking you: do you know how any of this works?’

  She knew the answer even before asking the question. He gave a shrug that told her he was as baffled by all this as she was.

  ‘All right. I need you to call whoever operates this room. Ideally, whoever set it up.’

  ‘I have a number for the head of IT?’

  ‘Call them,’ she said. Herman hesitated, as if awaiting more detailed instructions. ‘Now, Irving. Call them now!’

  His phone had no signal, so he stepped outside, his foot keeping the door ajar. She watched his face as he waited. And waited. ‘Not even voicemail,’ he said.

  Maggie now pulled out her phone and dialled Liz’s number, which she’d taken care to memorize.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered, as she waited for a ringing sound. After what seemed an age, there was a first ring, and then a second. And then a third. No reply and, once again, no voicemail. That was odd. Liz almost always picked up. Her phone was with her at all times, and even if she screened other people, she always took a c
all from her sister.

  Were these calls – from her, from Herman – even going through? Was whoever – or whichever programme – that was doing this somehow jamming any phone signal that came from deep inside this building?

  Whatever the explanation, she was on her own.

  She looked again at each stack of servers, seeking to decipher these meagre labels. What the hell was PHP? Could the H refer to the heating system? And what of SQL?

  Herman was standing next to her. She turned to him. ‘Have you ever heard people refer to the electronic system for the maintenance of this building?’

  ‘You mean the temperature and so forth?’

  ‘Exactly. What do they call it?’

  ‘Obviously curators and conservators and suchlike refer to “climate control”. And sometimes, I think I’ve heard them say “environmental control”. Does that help?’

  Maggie was off looking through the racks, their lights dancing merrily. No sign of CC or EC or anything like it.

  Perhaps it was the heat or the frustration or the raw throb coming from her right foot, but at last the frustration got to her. ‘Jesus Christ, where the hell is it?’ she said, pounding the wall.

  ‘I could take you to the boiler room perhaps?’ Herman said.

  She looked at him, sure he was wrong. That would be the room full of dumb machinery – all pipes and tanks – when what she needed was the brain in charge. But she had drawn a blank here. She gestured for him to lead the way.

  More corridors, more stairs as Maggie frantically checked her watch. It was late in the evening, approaching the hour when so many of the other libraries had been struck. And there was only one left. The machines that Austin Logica had programmed – or who had, themselves, learned how to wreak this havoc across five continents once given their broad mission – were doubtless readying to strike at any moment. Perhaps they already had: the fuse wire, or its electronic equivalent, had been laid in the last few days or hours or minutes and the match was about to be lit any second now. Sometimes events have a momentum of their own.

  They’d arrived at the boiler room. As they walked in, no motion-sensitive lights came on to illuminate the room. Once Herman had found a manual light switch, she could see why.

  Inside was an old furnace, including a coal oven of the kind you might find in the engine of a steam train. There was a copper boiler attached to an enormous cylindrical tank and a thicket of pipes. All of it was defunct. It looked like an exhibit in a museum. Which in a way, in a protected, historic building like this one, it was. This was the Library of Congress: even a disused boiler room was deemed to be of significance, and therefore had to be preserved.

  She looked at Herman, who rather than looking downcast seemed to have a new resolve. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. Please, follow me.’

  He led Maggie to the basement level, to what seemed to be less a room than an oversized store cupboard. There was something that looked like an elaborate fusebox, and the rest was a series of electronic panels, glowing with various shades of cool blue light. Her eye ran over each one: fire alarm, burglar alarm, lighting. Eventually, in the right-hand corner, she saw it: a sophisticated panel, displaying multiple squares, each window suggesting a zone of the library and dotted with numbers, which Maggie guessed indicated times, target humidity and the like. Even at a glance, she could see that the temperature setting was not normal: it displayed not a number, but the word ‘Maximum’, alongside a red warning triangle containing an exclamation mark.

  She pressed at the touchpad, but that brought up a boxed message which covered most of the display: Manual override disabled. Contact your system administrator.

  The box faded and she tried it again. The same message appeared. Whoever it was who had hacked into the central nervous system of this building, one thing was clear: their control was now total.

  Maggie had already decided on the action she would deploy in this situation. She grabbed at the cable that fed into the climate control panel and which had been neatly stapled to the wall. She tugged at it once, then tugged at it again. On the second attempt, the cable broke free of its neat plastic brackets and was easier to grip. But it was still feeding power to the panel.

  She pressed the palm of her right hand onto the device, pinning it to the wall, and with her left hand she gave a third yank to the wire, pulling downward. To her intense satisfaction, she felt it wrench away, its copper endings now exposed. The screen fell dark.

  She turned to look at Herman, catching his smile. The pair stood there, enjoying the moment of stunned relief. ‘Does this mean the books will now be safe?’ Herman said.

  ‘It should do,’ Maggie said. ‘Now, whatever instructions the hackers are sending to the equipment in this building, none of it will get through.’

  ‘What was that?’ Herman said, cupping his ear.

  Maggie was about to say it again, this time shouting to be heard, when she stopped herself. The fan in this room was still going.

  Without saying anything, Maggie ran out of the basement riser, up the stairs to the ground floor and into the corridor, running until she saw a grille in the wall. She held her hand up, to feel the breeze coming from the vent, stretching on tiptoes to reach. There was no doubt: air was still coming through.

  Which meant she hadn’t turned off the system. She had only prevented new instructions from getting through. Whatever settings had already been programmed, they were still in place, the building’s fans and heaters dutifully obeying their command.

  And that would include the most recent commands, issued just a few minutes ago by those bent on destroying the last of the world’s great libraries. Now they would be implemented and she was powerless to stop them.

  She turned back to find Herman, who was looking at her, baffled.

  ‘Irving, I need you to think. What is the driest room in this building? What has the oldest books?’

  ‘What? I don’t understand.’

  ‘If you were going to burn this building down, where would you start?’

  Herman dipped his head and scratched the space just above his ear. Maggie felt the impatience pulse through her. Her foot seemed to be flashing red with pain.

  ‘Please, Irving. Where?’

  ‘Rare books,’ he said at last. ‘The Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room. Second floor.’

  They took the stairs together, galloping until they reached two wooden double-doors. Maggie hesitated for a second. What if this room was already on fire? What if opening these doors released a fireball that not only killed both of them but devoured the rest of the library? Perhaps there had been a moment like this in Paris, in Tehran and in Moscow: a moment when someone, in their desperation to save a library, had destroyed it. She thought of that librarian in Tokyo, giving his life to rescue a collection he loved – and doing so in vain.

  But there was no time to pause. She pushed the door open and felt a marked increase in temperature. She looked for any sign of fire, but there was none. The heat was less natural than that: it felt like someone had left all the radiators on full blast.

  Herman looked towards her, as if waiting for a cue. She was walking along one wall, past the antique maps kept under glass and the notices announcing future exhibitions and advising that last requests for books was at five pm, looking upward, waiting to see an air vent. She found one and indicated for Herman to bring over a chair. While he held it steady, she climbed up, letting out a yelp as she put pressure on the exposed flesh of her right foot.

  As soon as she reached the right height, she could feel it: the heat seeping through the metal slats. She touched the grille, the first step towards an attempt at removing it. But it was too hot to touch. She was in the right place; she knew it.

  She looked back down, presuming she would find Herman still gripping the chair. In fact, he’d already disappeared behind one of the librarians’ desks, emerging a few seconds later carrying a slim, metal ruler.

  ‘I was looking for a screwdri
ver,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid this is all I could find.’

  Maggie thought of summoning one of the men outside: they were bound to have tools. But there was no time. She took the ruler and began prodding and probing at the grille, looking for a weak point where she might prise it loose. To her surprise, the horizontal strips of metal bent easily. Perhaps they were melting in the heat.

  Soon she had created an opening wide enough for her to put her hand through. She tugged at her sleeve to shield the skin of her fingers, forming a makeshift glove as she pushed her hand in and worked away at the edges. She pushed at the frame of the grille, her fingers working their way around its border. It was working, the metal rectangle becoming looser each time. Finally, and using the cloth of her sleeve, she grabbed hold of the grille by clutching several of the bent metal strips and yanked it towards her. It came away in her hand.

  She let it drop to the floor and now closed her eyes to brace herself for what she knew would be a near-impossible exertion. Other women her age were at the gym four or five times a week, if not daily. Their arms were taut and sinewy: a pull-up bar would hold no terrors for them. But Maggie was not one of those women.

  To her sister’s irritation, Maggie remained slim with minimal exercise and she could take a flight of stairs without gasping for breath. But what fitness she had was native, rather than worked. Yet now she would have to pull herself up and into this small opening, a manoeuvre more demanding even than lifting her own body weight, for it also required a gymnastic pivot into a narrow space (and gymnastics had never been her strong point).

  She looked down at Irving Herman’s face, which was simultaneously hopeful and desperate. She looked back up at the vent, girded herself, closed her eyes for a second.

  With all her strength she got herself up to the right height, her hands gripping the lower edge of the opening. Now she would need to plunge her head and shoulders in, inserting herself as far as she could.

  But she hadn’t reckoned on the blast of heat. It came at her like a punch, a thick jet of hot air that almost choked her. It made her lose her grip and plunge back down onto the chair, landing on the raw wound that was her right foot.