As Sedgwick jumped out of the limousine ten minutes after the conversation had begun, accompanied by the evening traffic on the South Bank of the Thames, he was smiling in the dark.
For five long years he had been developing a system that was not allowed to exist. Day after day he’d arrived at an office that was something other than what it claimed to be, waiting for an order that never came, working on tasks that didn’t exist. On the occasions when somebody asked, he was working on cyber security, which was a simplification but at least not an outright lie, and over the years he’d learned to describe his job in such soporific terms that he could be confident of never being asked any follow-up questions. Even his own wife would sometimes call him over, in the middle of a garden party or a social gathering, to ask him to ask what it is you do exactly? His daughter had been known to tell her classmates that he was a hacker. So far, that was the closest anyone had got to the truth.
Simon Sedgwick entered an opulent lift and pressed the button for the top floor. Through its transparent sides he could see London from all angles as he was transported skywards. The London Eye, the Thames, and the Houses of Parliament.
How many of them knew what they were paying him for, that consultant who would turn up in his awful jeans and give them security assessments. That if they followed him, they’d find him taking the lift to an office that had never existed, working on projects that no one had officially commissioned? This was his hiding place, not even a mile away, in plain view.
It was no accident that the premises were located here. London was the best place to start–strategically, but also technically. Here was the world’s largest node for internet traffic, and ridiculous amounts of data coursed through its thick, physical cables each and every second, volumes that were increasing year after year. Each second, more than twelve terabytes passed through London–every minute of every day. That was the equivalent of two thousand CDs, packed with information. Per second.
If they were going to start anywhere, it had to be here. And once they were confident that the technology worked, they had distributed it across the world, and now it was everywhere, ready to activate on their command.
And today was the day.
Sedgwick was still smiling as he swiped the card through the reader, walked into the large office, stood in the middle of the floor and cleared his throat.