Parked up in a street close to the back entrance of Derkind, they sat in the panel van, Plug in the driving seat, his huge hands gripping the steering wheel as if readying himself to rip it from its mounting. North knew Plug was angry because, as he ground his teeth, he was flexing a muscle in his jaw, which historically meant he planned to hit something or someone hard enough to break something or someone. His friend was angry about the dead boys they’d had to leave behind in the crypt, and furious that North had been reckless enough to lose Fang.
In the passenger seat, his own gaze was fixed on the digital clock. They had one hour and fourteen minutes. before Syd went live – make that one hour and thirteen minutes. And what did Lilith mean by ‘in good time’? Didn’t her buyer need time to pull the kill switch? The future of the human race was at stake. If Lilith was right about Syd being back at Derkind, he had a chance to get back Syd, and maybe Hone and Esme could figure out a way to turn on the kill switch? But if he did that, Lilith would cut Fang into little pieces. He had a choice – save Fang or save the human race.
That would be save Fang then.
From the back of the van there was a frantic storm of keyboard tapping. They were going nowhere fast.
‘You left the country a month ago after a whole bunch of important people died.’ North had never told Plug what he did after the army, but he knew Plug had guessed some of it. In another life, his friend would have made a fine detective.
There was a moment’s hesitation before the question came. ‘Did you kill them? Is that who Lilith was talking about?’ Did he kill them? North gave Plug an even look. Yes, he’d killed the guilty. Those he’d vowed would curse the day he was born. Those who had to be punished for what they’d done – the fatal decision they made. Life wasn’t grey – it was black and white, there was good and there was evil, and he knew how far he was prepared to go for the sake of the good.
‘It’s best you don’t know all of it, mate.’
‘Remember that guard?’ Plug said. Six months into North’s sentence, Plug had acted as lookout while North beat a sexually sadistic guard to a pulp with a pool cue. Between the two of them, they crippled the warder and made it clear they had enough evidence of his crimes to make sure that retirement on the grounds of ill health was his best option. They’d never talked of it since. ‘Three lads hanged themselves because of that bastard.’ Plug’s face was grim. ‘Nobody hanged themselves after what we did. I figure whatever you’ve done since then, you’ll have had your reasons. As I will if that bitch hurts Fang, because I’ll hunt her down and take her apart piece by piece.’
North had thought the danger to Fang was Chin and his monster, Octavia. But Chin would have to stand in line and whistle. Because the more immediate danger was a monster called Lilith. He owed Hone nothing – not least when the guy had fired him. Chin was one thing, but Lilith was a real and present danger to Fang. North was getting Syd back and Lilith could sell the system to some Russian oligarch or the UK government, or sell it to Chin direct. If Esme was right, it wouldn’t even matter, because give Syd the time it needed and Syd would be the one in charge. Every which way you looked, it was bad. But his immediate priority had to be saving Fang, who was family. Who had turned to him when she needed help, but instead of getting her mother back, he’d made everything so much worse. It was like that postman said in the Berlin bar: you never know what you have till it’s gone. Except he did know. His life mattered to him. He had friends who meant something. And all he could do for Esme was to ask Syd which of the Thinkers murdered Tobias before handing the machine over to Lilith. Once he had Syd and Fang was safe, he was moving on to ‘any other business’ before Syd wiped out the human race.
Plug’s thumb drummed on the steering wheel. Making a tick-tock sound, marking the passing of time. They had one hour and ten minutes left. Seventy minutes.
He didn’t know why Kirkham had killed those boys, but the General obviously wanted Syd badly enough to murder Tobias and two dozen other bystanders in the British Museum. North planned to ask Kirkham about it at the first opportunity. Along with the Right Honourable Ralph Rafferty, MP, because the only way you could shut down a church and fake a smallpox contagion in the capital city was with official backing from a department with the power to evacuate church officials and shut down access, all in order to bury more than thirty bodies in an unmarked grave. Like the Home Office. Moreover, Rafferty was Home Secretary in charge of young offender institutions. And somehow, under his watch, thirty-three young offenders had ended up dead.
The boys had been murdered. Not even executed. No double taps to make it quick and sure. Their bodies were riddled with bullets and shredded by explosives. They had been slaughtered. Someone had played God with the lives of boys who didn’t have families, who were in the care system. Boys with mental health issues and troubled histories. And even if there were families wondering about their sons, North knew there would be plausible explanations. A spate of suicides would account for a few – screwed-down caskets or ashes returned in an urn. An unexpected early release, when the boy never arrived home. Then there would be boys who decided that they didn’t want visitors any more, cutting off all communication till they were no more than a memory. Governors explaining to even the pushiest and most desperate of parents that they should ‘give the boy time’ to get back in touch. That when a minor faced a long sentence, they needed space and time to habituate themselves – but rest assured, their lad was in the best of hands, and they weren’t to worry. After all, these weren’t parents with access to lawyers and the funds to fight the system. The boys were easy prey and he should know, because he’d been there.
One way or another, Rafferty and Kirkham were going to pay for their crimes. He’d punished the guilty before and he could do it again. It was quite a long to-do list now he thought about it, but no problem, he had it covered.
If Lilith was right, then Derkind’s bunker was under the laboratory where Esme had installed the wreckage of the Lamborghini – a bunker dug deep enough to avoid cables and pipes and underground tunnels. And if the Ministry of Defence had dug it out before the building went up, then the government must have paid for it. Fang called Derkind a tech ‘unicorn’ – said that its value topped a billion dollars – but even she wasn’t able to see where the original funding came from. North would bet his life on the fact the original funding was government money, as it attempted to stake out Britain’s claim to an AI-enriched future.
‘How do we do this?’ Plug asked. They’d parked the transit van with blacked-out windows as close to the back entrance of Derkind as they dared. Plug had borrowed the van from a mate who didn’t ask questions, merely slapped on the cleaning company decal they wanted, switched out the plates and handed over the keys.
‘Got it.’ Paulie let out a triumphant whoop from the back.
They’d picked him up in Hackney. Paulie had opened the door, his face ravaged with grief. Even if they’d forced her to go back to China, she’d have sent word somehow, he’d said after North confirmed that Yan had been murdered by Chin. He kept the grisliest of the details from him, but he thought Paulie knew it had been bad. She told me she loved you, North said, remembering how the girl touched her heart before the monster came for her. Paulie had covered his face with his hand, his eyes squeezed shut. And North thought back to the gala and the noise of gunfire when he was trying to get the truth from Paulie about the leak. A desperate Paulie hadn’t run to save himself, he’d rescued Jarrod. Yan had been right to see something noble in this chubby, awkward egg.
Paulie had caught on quick. Yan was dead. Tobias was dead and there were dead boys under a London landmark. A kid called Fang was in danger. And Syd was back at Derkind and about to burn down the world. Tobias had stitched Paulie up so he didn’t have to give up any part of the glory for creating another intelligence, but Paulie wasn’t in this life because he chased glory, North realized. Even as North was talking, Paulie unzipped his Hufflepuff onesie to reveal jeans and a black sweatshirt.
North kept talking. According to Esme, before he died Tobias had made sure Syd would break through the air gap to connect with any and all of the other systems it could reach. Unless the kill switch was thrown, Syd would take over the world.
Paulie had grabbed his laptop and shut the door on his digs all in the same move.
Looking for the tablet, they’d stumbled upon a mass grave in the heart of London. Somehow, the grave had to be linked to the massacre at the museum. The chances were both the Home Secretary and the General in charge of the Defence Innovations Board were involved. I set up the company’s security system, Paulie had said. I can get you in.
And now they needed to break into a secret bunker underneath Derkind, because Syd was in there and it was the only way to save Fang from certain death. It had been Paulie’s idea to go in as cleaners. He was a different man, North thought as they followed him, hurtling down the same stairs Yan had run down the day before. Or perhaps Fate had created the circumstances to show Paulie who he really was.
‘I’ve pulled the original construction plans from the server,’ Paulie said now, standing up from the welded row of cinema seats in the back of the van. ‘These are an early draft so they don’t have everything, and they were hidden. All the later drafts were deleted, and needless to say none of this is officially registered.’ He leant over into the driver’s compartment and held out a laptop between Plug and North. A blueprint appeared on the screen of what looked like the architectural plans for Derkind, the massive bulging cauliflower form of the brain even more obvious on the page than it was in reality. Paulie clicked on something, and a shadow set of plans emerged.
The blueprint showed two more levels under Derkind.
‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’ Paulie sounded disappointed in Tobias all over again. ‘As your mate Lilith told you…’
‘Plug is my mate. Lilith is not my mate,’ North said, not even trying to keep the outrage out of his voice. ‘Lilith is a professional assassin.’ And, as if reminded, Plug opened the glove compartment and handed him another SIG and a belt rig, half a dozen mags and a Gerber Ghostrike knife. North unzipped the overalls to wrap the belt rig around, and slipped the gun into place before filling his pockets with the mags. Clipping the small knife in its sheath into his boot, he ran through his earlier conversation with Plug. Did you kill them? By the sceptical expression on the scientist’s face, there was a good chance Paulie considered his present company every bit as murderous as Lilith.
‘My bad,’ Paulie said, scrolling over the blueprint. ‘So, Tobias, an evil genius as well as a tosser, had a secret bunker. The first storey is what looks like laboratories and offices, the second is a more open space – some kind of hangar, the size of a football field, maybe bigger. The entire bunker is built deep enough to avoid the Water Ring Main, power tunnels and the deepest parts of the London Underground, which makes sense. It’s deeper than the deepest London tunnel that we know about – the Lee Tunnel, which goes down to eighty metres. This is a hundred metres down, with walls three metres thick, and all the services run into it.’
Part of Paulie was impressed at the engineering challenge of digging out and creating the bunker, North thought, despite his mentor’s secrecy. The secrecy, he hated.
‘No one in Derkind proper is working down there, because we’d have noticed the comings and goings. So this “Defence Innovation Board” you mentioned must have their own people down there working alongside Tobias. I’m guessing they have robotic expertise because Tobias fired a whole slew of robotics engineers and tech people a couple of years ago. Great scientists – no one could understand it. The thing was, none of them seemed that uptight about it. I bet they’re down there. Or at least they have been, till it all started unravelling. I believe Derkind’s work and the Defence Innovation work is bleeding into each other. It explains how many breakthroughs we’ve been having.’
‘Those people must be accessing the bunker somehow,’ Plug said.
North nodded. ‘Maybe through a shop or a café within half a mile radius, say? They go in for a regular morning latte, disappear into the bathroom and they don’t come out again. Without us knowing where their access point is, we have no choice but to go in via Derkind itself.’
‘And Tobias had to have his own point of entry from within the building,’ Paulie said. ‘I can’t see it on these drawings. But apart from going home and the odd business trip, Tobias hardly ever left the building. Everything was on site for his convenience.’
On site for his convenience? Something was almost within North’s reach, but not quite.
‘I need to check one thing,’ Paulie said. ‘Syd is on an apocalypse countdown – we only have sixty-two minutes on the clock. And we’re going in without any help from the police or soldiers? Just us?’
He looked at each of his colleagues in turn and, judging by his face, found them wanting.
No police, because somehow the Home Secretary was involved.
No army, because General Kirkham was in this up to his neck.
No one-eyed man, because Rafferty was the one-eyed man’s boss and North didn’t trust anyone on this. Plus, Hone had fired him, and North bore a grudge. Plus Hone would choose to save the human race rather than Fang, which was not an option.
‘You don’t have to do this, Bald Paulie,’ Plug said.
North winced at the nickname Plug had reached for. He turned, his arm on the back of his seat – he didn’t want to force Paulie into anything. He was a civilian and the woman he loved had just died, which North understood, if he understood nothing else about him. ‘You can still walk away, Paulie. You don’t have to be here.’
‘You can still walk away, “Bald” Paulie,’ Paulie corrected him with pedantic solemnity. ‘No, thank you.’ North flicked a glance at Plug and his friend winked at him. What could he say? He was good with people – knew how they worked. Paulie was an outsider. ‘Bald Paulie’ belonged. ‘And I have to come in there with you,’ Bald Paulie said. ‘Because I need direct physical access to the data centre. I can’t hack the biometric security for you to get into the bunker unless I can code a connection on-site. And I have to make the security system think that you’re Tobias or you won’t get into the bunker.’ Bald Paulie handed them each a lanyard. ‘But these should be enough to get us into the main building.’
‘Then what happens?’ Plug said.
‘Looking at this map, I have to get into Tobias’s office,’ North said. He traced his finger along the vertical lines running between the secret bunker and the Derkind ‘brain’. Everything was on-site for Tobias’s convenience, and Tobias needed a way in and out of the bunker – the capsule elevator in the corner of his office was the gate to Shangri-La.
‘Are you sure you can’t stop Syd connecting to the wider cyberspace?’ he asked Bald Paulie. ‘Esme said Tobias had a fail-safe code. Some sort of kill switch.’ Without the code, Syd would connect, and according to Esme, it wouldn’t be long before machines took over the world. But maybe he could disable Syd before he handed it over?
‘If we pulled the power on every computer in the country, then maybe,’ Paulie said. ‘Otherwise, Syd is going to do what Syd is going to do.’ Another door slammed shut on the human race.
North’s eyes went to the clock on the dashboard. Humanity had had a good run. He had sixty minutes to get Syd out and rescue Fang before Lilith killed her.
‘It’s like going to steal a golden egg at the Triwizard Tournament when the Hungarian Horntail is sitting on its nest,’ Bald Paulie said. Plug looked at the other man as if he was deranged. North translated.
‘He means it’s ridiculously dangerous.’
Bald Paulie didn’t seem unhappy at the thought.