Bob Swift walked into the Arena. His four-hour sleep break, mandated every twenty-four-hour period, had been fitful, his mind jittering just below the surface of consciousness. As the newest arrival and the youngest member of the Agency, he was still having trouble leaving the rolling crises behind when he took his rest break.
Swift sat down at his desk and looked at the right side of his forty-two-inch monitor, where a separate window showed his in-box. He worked in the web-monitoring team, which patrolled the infinity of the Internet. A steady stream of new flags appeared constantly: new material on old pages, new pages on old sites, and new sites. A continual flow of information; over a billion websites, and three hundred million more added each year.
He looked at the latest flag that had dropped into the in-box.
It contained a link to a website that had been up and running for less than a minute. A ‘crawler’ – a software tool similar to an RSS feed that hurtles through the web searching for relevant material – had tagged it.
Swift scrutinized it.
The site had a clean and simple format, like the Google home page.
Underneath was a thirty-minute backwards countdown. The Agency’s search algorithm had picked it up as a site with a high probability of risk.
Swift probed. There was nothing sinister on the site’s face.
0:27:53.
He went back to the algorithm’s reference and decoded the flag.
There it was.
A link to the official MI6 website.
0:26:12.
He checked the MI6 site to see if there was any related new activity.
Nothing.
He checked the link again. Swift thought for a second. A link was traditionally a cross-promotional event between two sites. A link from only one site was simply an appeal for attention from the other. A public ‘shout out’ as opposed to a private correspondence. The mystery site wanted anyone watching to know it had hailed MI6. As Swift was considering this, another flag arrived on the mystery site.
0:25:32.
He went to the algorithm immediately this time. A new link, this time to the MI5 website. He was reviewing the site for any clue to the mystery site’s purpose when two more red flags dropped into his in-box.
Two more sites. Both UK military.
He stood up quickly.
0:24:15.
He walked through the cubicles of the rest of the Internet team towards the centre of the room to find Hunter. Before he left his station, the red flags were cascading in a heavy waterfall into his in-box. The mystery site was linking to every military intelligence site in the UK.
Daniel Spokes and his team parked their jeeps two hundred yards away from the box.
The bomb disposal team was on its way from London in a Lynx helicopter, having given him instructions en route on setting up a safety perimeter. Assuming it was a bomb – and that seemed a reasonable working assumption – it was best to wait for the professionals to deal with it.
Spokes used the broad rule of thumb that a thousand-pound bomb has a blast radius of two hundred yards. Assuming the box’s function was only to act as a bomb, and all its capacity was used to house explosives, he guessed it must be in the range of a five-hundred pounder. He doubled the distance assumptions needed to be safely outside the blast impact and told his men to stay in their vehicles.
He kept his binoculars trained on the box. There was something strange about it that he couldn’t put his finger on.
0:15:00.
‘Do we know what the countdown is in reference to?’
Waterman looked at Swift with a blank look.
The young programmer had not been able to find Hunter. Unfortunately, the next up the chain was Waterman, and speaking to him was going to land Swift in hot water. The atmosphere in the Arena was poisonous since Sam Taylor’s collapse and Waterman’s battlefield promotion. Hunter’s computer systems team had been at odds with Waterman’s intelligence analysis unit ever since. But Swift didn’t have the option of wasting precious seconds looking for his boss.
‘I’ve looked into any global events that could tie into it, but there’s nothing of significance. Should we take action?’ asked Swift.
‘Yes,’ said Waterman. ‘Shut it down.’
Swift jogged to his cubicle. The Agency had the technical and legal ability to exercise powers that were not available in the private sector, namely to hack websites and shut them down. The manner in which they did this was more direct than their hacktivist counterparts, who usually bombarded sites with denial of service attacks until the sites collapsed. Swift’s group took the direct route, walking in the front door and shutting it down from the inside. The process required no court order and with most sites took less than a minute.
He sat down at his computer and started punching the keyboard. He hacked into the site quickly and then went through the registered files, deleting them one by one.
‘Something’s not right,’ he muttered, loud enough for Waterman to hear, ‘it’s not coming down.’
The fog continued to make any close inspection of the surface of the box impossible. Spokes couldn’t shake the creeping feeling that he should reverse the jeeps and drive back to Ultra as quickly as he could. His instinct told him this was a trap, but he had little choice but to proceed.
He dropped the glasses to his chest and checked the sky again. What he needed was visibility, at least to tip the odds more in his favour. The mist hemmed him in on all sides.
A gust of wind caused the vapour tendrils around him to eddy in waves, parting to reveal more of the landscape. He stared at the dancing swirls. The sight of them stirred something in him, a faint wisp of an idea that he reached for, but even as he pursued it, it fluttered away.
At face value, there was little he could do to influence the weather. And yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there might be.
The box drifted in and out of view as the fog shifted around it, and as it did, that same idea fluttered up again, borne by a mysterious tailwind of neurological impulses that sparked through his brain.
Spokes stood stock still, as if any movement might cause the impending thought to waft away from him again. He realized he had stopped breathing. And then, with a mysterious drop, as if the idea had hit an air pocket, it settled directly in his palm.
The Lynx.
As Waterman was moving towards Swift’s desk, Hunter marched quickly past him.
‘Step aside, Bob.’
Swift stood up, and Hunter took his seat, putting on a pair of outsized glasses and staring at the screen. The site remained there, the clock intact and running backwards at its steady speed.
Hunter looked up at Swift.
‘Put it up on the wall.’
A minute later, the site was projected on to the large screen on the front wall. Swift could feel the tension in the room. The usual air of focused industry had been replaced by a sense of anticipation.
0:02:00.
‘What’s the countdown in reference to?’ asked Hunter.
‘We don’t know. So far, there’s only one thing we can be sure of …’ said Waterman.
Hunter stared at the screen as the seconds ticked down.
‘… and that’s whoever is behind it wants our attention,’ said Hunter, finishing Waterman’s thought.
One minute to go.
Swift stood up in anticipation. Around him he noticed that others were getting out of their seats too and standing motionless, their eyes trained on the screen. Everyone in the room held their breath.
In the distance, he heard the thud thud thud as the Lynx approached.
Spokes’ plan – that the downwash of air from the helicopter would disperse the mist – was already working. The fog was churning, beating down into the ground and swirling outwards in a huge convex flow.
Spokes tightened his grip on the binoculars, readying himself.
Almost there.
He lifted up the field glasses and trained them on the box. He could see it more clearly now.
It was actually an inner container encased in a Perspex reflective outer casing.
Packed into the eight corners of the outer cube were thick wedges of what looked like C-4, from which a cluster of wires sprouted.
The chopper’s blades were getting louder now, and around him the mist was shredding and evaporating, widening his field of vision, revealing more of the scrubland around him.
Ahead of him, something caught his eye. It was coming from the patch of ground where the tyre tracks ended.
Spokes squinted, doubting what he saw.
The air above the patch of ground seemed to be shimmering, like a mirage in a heat-haze.
He shook his head in disbelief.
He turned his binoculars in the direction, but the image warped and flickered, as if he was racking the focus of the glasses.
Then, with a flapping sound, the wheel of a jeep materialized from nowhere, standing upright in the grass.
‘Shit,’ muttered Spokes. He pressed the intercom. ‘We’ve got a cloaking device.’
Britain was only one of a handful of countries that had cloaking technology. It was used on air and land vehicles, which employed carefully arrayed tiny glass panels to cover them, causing light to be bent around, making them disappear from eyesight.
The chopper was directly above him now. Its blades pummelled the air with such force it ripped off the moorings of the reflective tarpaulin covering the jeep. It sailed off across the moors like a bedspread torn free from a washing line.
The attackers’ truck was less than twenty feet from Spokes. It had been in front of him the whole time.
Spokes scanned the interior of the vehicle, searching for assailants.
It was empty.
The mist had cleared now, and he could see clearly in all directions for a few hundred yards.
And it was then that he saw them.
There was not one box, but four.
Placed at intervals so they surrounded his convoy.
Their inner containers were made of dimpled silver metal casings, with black rubber seals that ran along their corners. They had no markings, other than on top, where yellow-and-black adhesive stickers covered most of the surface area.
The sign on the sticker didn’t require any decoding. Spokes knew it as soon as he saw it. It resembled a stencil representation of a propeller, three blades attached to a central shaft.
The symbol of radiation warning.
Spokes had turned and had taken the first stride back to his vehicle when the detonation caught his heels, lifting him up off the ground and throwing him into the windscreen of the jeep.
Screen one went blank.
It was the first movement in the site since it was first posted, other than the downward countdown.
After an extended moment, the site had returned to its home screen.
Words appeared, one by one.
I’M COMING FOR YOU.
The countdown underneath had a new number attached to it.
168:00:00.
167:59:59.
167:59:58.