Zero

Cyn wakes up with a throbbing head in spite of Chander’s prophylactic painkiller the night before. The surrounding scents tell her she isn’t in her own room. She opens her eyes but the piercing pain in her brain quickly makes her shut them again. She remembers having had a lot to drink. And she remembers Chander. She reaches out to one side and touches his body. He’s asleep right next to her. Apart from her head, her body feels very nice. She savours this feeling for a few minutes as she listens to his regular breathing. As she carefully tries to move into a more comfortable position, she becomes aware of the scar. The scar! Instinctively she lays her hand over the spot, extricates herself as quietly as possible from the sheets and gathers her belongings, which are scattered halfway across the room. She steals into the bathroom, hurriedly gets dressed and haphazardly arranges her hair. Then she tiptoes back to the bed and gives Chander a peck on the lips. He stirs into half waking, and she whispers, ‘See you later.’ His eyelids flutter drowsily and he stretches a hand out towards her, but she’s already at the doorway and a second later has disappeared through it.

Back in her room, she takes a shower. The warm water does her head good, but soon the previous day’s events force their way back into her thoughts. Almost being drowned. She’s suddenly gasping for breath. She stumbles out of the shower and stands in front of the mirror, fighting for air. Not a pretty sight. Still trembling, she wraps herself in the bathrobe. She combs her hair, leans back against the wall and stares at the mirror. Her bathrobe slips, exposing her scar. She pulls the robe shut again, and her thoughts turn to Eddie. Are there any connections here? Welcome to paranoia. She pulls herself together, runs her fingers through her hair once more and rubs cream into the scar, recalling the sensations on her skin last night. For a moment she longs for Chander.

In the taxi to the airport Anthony feels obliged to describe his TV appearance again. It only lasted for two minutes, but boy, was he brilliant! Not only that, he made it on to television before Cyn to talk about the search for Zero, as befits an editor-in-chief! He didn’t get round to giving them all the details of his appearance over breakfast. He’s brought with him the hotel’s Austrian and international newspapers, all of them featuring reports on the incident in Vienna. With photos. To the sound of loud rustling, he shows every single article to the others, who are sitting in the back of the cab.

‘We’re pretty big stars now,’ he drones on, ‘and the Daily has taken a giant leap in terms of international prominence and online hits. This trip’s been worthwhile for that alone.’

‘Zero’s prominence has leaped even further,’ Chander remarks. ‘After all, we’re the ones who’ve been conned.’

‘Because you can’t control your drone properly!’ Anthony says with a snigger.

‘Because we did a live stream. Otherwise we might have our interview by now,’ Cyn objects.

‘Or else the CIA would have him in its clutches,’ Anthony snaps back. ‘What on earth is wrong with you? You weren’t being serious yesterday, were you? About not wanting to look for Zero any longer?’

‘Let’s discuss it calmly back in London,’ he says, fobbing her off and leafing through to the newspaper’s business pages.

‘I can’t make it into the office this afternoon,’ she says in a funereal voice. ‘I have to look after my daughter and a dead boy’s mother.’

He’d completely forgotten about it! ‘That’s fine,’ he says without looking up from the share prices. Having swiftly skimmed through them, he puts the paper down and activates his glasses as Chander blurts out, ‘I’ve just received an alert. Anonymous is recruiting people for an attack on the Daily after yesterday’s operation.’

‘Recruiting people for an attack?’ Anthony frowns. ‘What kind of attack?’

‘You should warn your IT department immediately. Unless, that is, they’ve already installed an alarm against this.’

‘What the hell?’ Anthony says indignantly. ‘How’s it supposed to work? I thought Anonymous worked covertly, as the name suggests.’

‘Anonymous, not covert. This is a typical approach for Anonymous. They post videos on YouTube from anonymized accounts, tweet and so on, then everyone can take part. All you have to do is download a small piece of free software from the internet on to your computer or on to certain websites. Those are then used to carry out denial-of-service attacks and the like.’

‘Swamping our website with a deluge of questions until it crashes and can no longer be accessed?’ Anthony enquires.

While Anthony has an animated conversation via his glasses with the technicians in London, and Chander chips in with some judicious comments, Cyn stares out of the window at the scenery sliding past. As they drive along the motorway, the city’s outskirts give way to industrial zones and fields. She thinks of Annie and Eddie. And Vi. For a moment she feels her knee brush against Chander’s and she presses her lower leg against his with extreme caution, ready to pull it away if Anthony were to look round. Briefly returning the pressure, Chander turns to her and smiles, then focuses once more on his conversation.

She looks out of the window again. What’s she going to say to Annie? A flock of starlings is coalescing into a living cloud over the fields, but the taxi has already sped past it.

Anthony gets out of the taxi and pays, holding simultaneous conversations with the driver and his glasses. After the baggage drop-off and security checks, he tells them, ‘I need to go to the lounge and work.’

Cyn is red to the roots of her hair. Chander simply smiles at her and shrugs. ‘Let’s grab a coffee.’

As they come into the immigration hall at Heathrow, several officials block their path and say, ‘Please come with us.’

Even before Cyn can ask a question, two female officers have separated her from the men. ‘You’re suspected of supporting terrorism,’ one of them explains. Cyn freezes midstep. The two officers push her rudely on.

‘You must be confusing me with someone else,’ she says, feverishly contemplating what this might mean. Those men from yesterday evening come to mind. She recalls the scandal in the summer of 2013 when the partner of an American journalist was held at the airport for nine hours. Harsh hands on her back force her forwards.

They show her into a bare room. In the middle are a plain table and two chairs, with a bed along one wall. One of the officers takes Cyn’s handbag away before she can object and empties its contents on to the table.

‘Why?!’ Cyn’s beginning to panic. She thinks back to the attack the day before, and her fear of dying underwater hits her again.

‘Oh yes, we do,’ the woman retorts, adding in an irritated voice, ‘Don’t make this any harder than necessary for your sake and ours. You just take off your clothes for a moment, we search you and soon it’ll all be over.’

Cyn looks around. She spots two small cameras at ceiling level in the corners. ‘And you’re filming this?’

Cyn tries to calm herself down. She’s starting to realize the point of this whole show. Harassment. Intimidation.

‘Don’t you touch me!’ Cyn declares as firmly as she can muster in the situation. Pointing to the cameras, she says, ‘They’re filming this. You just admitted it.’

Cyn doesn’t have a clue what these people are allowed to do. They stand there for what feels like several minutes, even though Cyn knows the whole scene lasts only a few seconds.

‘OK,’ the woman says at last, pointing to one of the chairs. ‘Sit down.’ She turns away and opens the door.

A small triumph, Cyn thinks. Or a pyrrhic victory? She chooses the other chair. Mind games. But she has trouble suppressing the shaking that washes over her like a fever. With jelly-like knees, the few steps to the chair are akin to several miles. I’m not going to show any weakness in front of you!

Another woman and a man enter the room, both in plain clothes. They introduce themselves by rank and name, but Cyn’s in such a state she immediately forgets this information.

‘We’re questioning you in relation to the Terrorism Act 2015,’ the woman explains.

‘This isn’t a TV series,’ the man replies coolly. ‘You can choose to cooperate with us or not.’

‘There’s nothing to cooperate over,’ Cyn shoots back angrily. ‘I’m just doing my job.’

‘And we’re doing ours. Where’s the young man’s laptop? You picked it up in Vienna and took it with you.’

‘And then stuffed it up my arse to smuggle it into this country?! Are you mad? I lost it in the sewers during the hunt.’ She can feel her anger at this gratuitous interrogation goading her to contradict them. ‘But then you must know that. You must have viewed all the images that people have posted online, and probably the footage from surveillance cameras in Vienna. So you will have noted that I emerged from the sewers without a laptop.’

The man inspects the items on the table from her handbag. He picks up her mobile phone and says, ‘We’re confiscating this.’

His partner turns to Cyn. ‘Your actions yesterday helped a suspected terrorist to escape.’

‘That’s nonsense, and you know it. I neither helped Zero nor, going by everything we know about him, is he a terrorist – even if he was involved in the Presidents’ Day operation.’

By now Cyn is hopping mad. She has to keep herself in check so she doesn’t raise her voice. ‘And now if you would kindly let me go! A friend of mine died yesterday, and I have to go and see his mother.’

‘You might have to spend the next forty-eight hours here,’ the man explains. ‘That’s how long we’re allowed to detain you.’

For the next hour they keep asking her the same questions, but she sticks stubbornly to her story. They threaten her; they try to intimidate her. At some point she’s so annoyed that she falls silent and refuses to say another word.

Shortly afterwards a man enters the room and whispers something to the two detectives. They glower at Cyn, and the woman snaps, ‘You may go.’

Cyn puts everything back into her bag, apart from the mobile, which she leaves on the table.

‘You haven’t heard the last of this!’ Anthony shouts angrily over his shoulder at the officers, but Cyn can’t be bothered to discuss the matter. More important things await her.

Eventually they get their luggage back. She can tell immediately that someone’s been messing with her sports bag: the person hasn’t even bothered to zip it shut properly.

Anthony and Chander go straight to the office to press ahead with fending off the Anonymous attack. Cyn’s daughter is waiting for her.

She arrives home to find Vi pale and agitated. Cyn has held her tears back thus far, but now the dam breaks. She takes her daughter in her arms. For several minutes they stand sobbing in the hallway until Cyn regains her composure first.

Over a cup of tea Vi updates her mother on the investigation. ‘The police say it was an accident.’

Cyn can’t help expressing her doubts. ‘Eddie rang me shortly before I flew to Vienna,’ she tells Vi. ‘He wanted to tell me something. Did he mention anything to you?’

Maybe that was all Eddie wanted, Cyn thinks hopefully. But then why would he mention Freemee?

She tries her luck with Annie Brickle again from the landline. Someone picks up, and she feels sick to her stomach. She hardly recognizes Annie’s voice, and her own cracks as she stammers, ‘I’m so sorry, Annie. Should I come round? I can be there in forty-five minutes.’

Cyn takes a taxi. She feels safer that way. She hasn’t told Vi anything about the Viennese underworld. She doesn’t want to worry her daughter unnecessarily.

Annie opens the door and looks every bit as broken as her voice sounded on the phone. Cyn gives her a hug and wordlessly leads her to the kitchen.

With trembling hands Annie has a go at making some tea until Cyn takes the kettle from her and pours the hot water into the pot.

Meanwhile Annie talks haltingly and not always coherently. ‘It was an accident, the police say, due to the crush on the platform. The camera recordings don’t show anything clearly. Witnesses didn’t notice anything. They say nobody’s to blame.’ She sits down and stares straight ahead. The delicate lines of tears shine damply on her cheeks, trickling down to her chin.

Cyn places a cup on the table in front of Annie. I’d like to see those videos, she thinks. Mind you … ‘like’ is the wrong word. She forces back the suspicion that has latched on to her brain like a tick and is steadily growing.

‘He was so looking forward to learning to drive,’ Annie says in a lifeless voice.

Cyn says nothing, sipping at her hot drink. For a few minutes neither of them speaks. Cyn listens to the sounds of the kitchen and the noises out in the street. She can see Eddie there in front of her, at the playground with Vi, the pensive young boy with those big brown eyes who was always more cautious at play than her daughter. His timid smile and how it blossomed during puberty into an attractive laugh. It hadn’t escaped her that his feelings for Vi seemed to have changed in recent months.

Cyn stands up and hugs her from behind, the trembling of Annie’s frame transmitted to her own. She stands there for what seems like for ever until Annie’s body is once more still.

‘I’m sorry,’ sniffs Annie, wiping the tears from her face and sitting up straight.

‘There’s no need to apologize,’ Cyn replies gently. She’s reminded again of her last conversation with Eddie and wonders if she should tell Annie.

‘He …’ Annie begins, then falters before continuing. ‘The police say he phoned you before he died.’

‘He did,’ she answers with a lump in her throat. ‘It must have been shortly beforehand.’

She tries to recall his precise words, but she can’t. ‘He wanted to tell me something. About a company. I don’t know what. He said he might have a story for me. Do you know anything about it?’

‘A story?’ Annie looks at her helplessly. ‘What kind of story? No.’ Absentmindedly she smooths her dress and tidies her hair.

Annie shrugs. ‘What else? He was spending night after night on his computer, as he often did.’

Without a word Annie leads her to Eddie’s room. It looks as if he’ll be getting home any minute. There are posters of rappers on the door and the wall unit, and the smell of a boy’s bedroom. Annie lingers in the doorway; she obviously can’t bring herself to enter the room. Cyn steps gingerly over the threshold. The laptop’s on the desk, closed. An accident, after all? thinks Cyn. If someone did murder him because of a story he wanted to tell Cyn about, wouldn’t that person have got hold of Eddie’s laptop?

Just because you believe you were attacked doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing happened to Eddie, she tells herself. You’re making links between the two events because they took place on the same day, but they probably have nothing to do with each other.

‘He wanted a pair of those glasses,’ Annie says dully. ‘Like the ones that other boy had.’

Cyn snaps the computer shut again and rests her fingers on top of it. ‘I—’ she begins, but breaks off. She tries again. ‘May I … take it with me? You’ll get it back, of course.’

Cyn tucks the laptop under her arm and leaves Eddie’s room. ‘When—?’ she tries to ask, but she can’t pronounce the words because of what feels like a golf ball stuck in her throat.

Annie knows what she was going to say. ‘I don’t know yet,’ she replies. ‘In the coming days.’

‘I … I have to leave town tomorrow morning, but you can ring me any time.’ I’ll need a new mobile! it occurs to her. ‘I’ll be back in a few days.’

‘It’s OK. Mali and Ben and a few others will be around. Thanks for coming.’

Marten leaves his glass cube and hurries over to the technicians. On one of Luís’s screens he sees the home page with the waterfalls on it. The monitor next to it is full of text.

‘This has just come in from the NSA,’ says Luís, pointing to a list of email and IP addresses along with a great deal of other confusing information.

‘While checking the visitors to the waterfalls, they came across an IP address used to send mails from addresses including DaBettaThrillCU@ …’

‘The better thrill, see you?’ says Marten, reading the misspelled abbreviation, but at the same moment he grasps what it really is. ‘An anagram of Archibald Tuttle.’

‘That’s right,’ says Luís. ‘Our buddies kept digging for a while and after a few blind alleys they established a link to the Tuttle in Vienna. Good ole Archie’s indiscretions while registering with 3DWhizz weren’t the only ones he made when he was younger. However, DaBettaThrillCU, aka Archibald Tuttle, only visited the waterfalls once, in 2010, shortly after it went online. Never again. I don’t think that one time was a coincidence, though.’

‘“There’s something else behind it.” Remember that scene in Jurassic Park where the kids hide behind the waterfall?’

‘There’s an even better example in the Tintin comic book Prisoners of the Sun—’

‘Tintin finds the secret entrance to the Aztec sun temple behind a waterfall.’

‘Action films and comics. We might need to talk about your cultural education sometime.’

Marten laughs. ‘So what’s hidden behind these waterfalls? It’s a website.’ He makes a show of peering behind the monitors. ‘Nothing back here,’ he says. ‘Nothing but wires.’

‘That’s where my education comes in handy,’ says Luís. ‘OK, this is me putting one and one together. Did you see the film Contact when it came out?’

‘Remember when Jodie Foster and her blind colleague hear a second signal emerging through electrostatic noise?’

‘Steganography.’ Marten’s turned serious all of a sudden. As a boy he’d enjoyed writing secret messages with lemon juice that could only be read when you held the piece of paper over a candle and the dried juice turned brown. Knowing how to hide messages in a totally harmless-looking medium is one of the basic techniques of warfare, whether practised by the intelligence services, freedom fighters, guerrillas or terrorists. ‘But why would someone hide secret messages in these waterfalls of all places?’

‘There are two reasons why they’re the perfect hiding-place and medium,’ Luís explains. ‘For technical purposes you need a moving picture, and I mean completely moving: no pixel is allowed to stay the same during the critical period. Otherwise that would be the Achilles heel by which you could intercept the message. But I’ll spare you the technical details. Waterfalls are ideal in close-up. Everything is constantly in motion. Second, they look harmless, so they don’t raise any suspicions. Who would ever imagine that an esoteric website conceals a hidden communications platform for internet activists?’

‘I can’t. That’s what makes the idea so brilliant. So long as they don’t make a mistake, it’s simply a page with waterfall videos and streams. We can’t even determine if there really are messages hidden inside there, let alone read them.’

Marten ponders what Luís has just said. ‘They’ve made mistakes before,’ he eventually remarks. ‘Everyone makes mistakes. That’s your theory. Do you think it makes sense to pursue it?’

‘As you say: everyone makes mistakes. And if anybody can find them, it’s us – us and our friends from the other agencies.’

‘Two friends dead in the same week,’ Vi says. Despite her tone, she strikes her mother as being relatively calm.

They’re sitting at the kitchen table, eating Vi’s home-made macaroni cheese. Neither of them has much of an appetite and they only half clear their plates. Cyn feels completely torn. As a mother she’s worried about Vi, as a friend she’d like to be there for Annie and yet she is desperate to go to New York where she’ll meet the vice-president of Freemee and where the company has its headquarters. Should she tell him that a young man who’d wanted to talk to her about Freemee has died – what’s more only a few hours before someone tried to murder her? She’s also longing to find out more about the claims made by the stranger in the sewers of Vienna.

‘I don’t know if I really ought to take that plane,’ Cyn answers. ‘I should really go to New York for another reason I can’t explain to you right now, but I’d actually rather stay with you two and miss the TV programme.’

She’s also a smart cookie. Cyn goes to her room and comes back with the slip of paper on which she’s noted the numbers. ‘Here, this is the hotel in New York. This is my new mobile. The Daily has got me one, and they’re bringing it to the airport tomorrow.’

‘Then we can have breakfast together,’ says Vi, still staring at the list of phone numbers. ‘This is mad,’ she whispers, then a little louder, ‘Don’t you think?’

At this time of day? It’s just after eight o’clock. Cynthia presses the button for the front door downstairs, then waits and peers through the spyhole. A minute later a female bike courier appears in the entrance, carrying a parcel the size of a shoebox. From the kitchen Cyn hears the sounds of Vi clearing the table. She hesitates when the courier knocks, but then opens the door.

‘Who’s it from?’ asks Cyn. The woman shrugs and presses the box into her hands. It’s covered in plain wrapping paper. It’s unmarked except for their address. She turns it this way and that until she finds a large oval drawn in felt-tip pen on the narrow side. It looks like an ‘O’. Above it, in small, careful block capitals, it says, ‘Best regards.’

The courier proffers the electronic receipt pad. Cyn signs, steps back inside her flat and closes the door. She carries the parcel into the kitchen and puts it down on the table.

‘“Best regards”,’ Vi reads out. ‘“O”.’ She glances at her mother. ‘“O” as in “o”,’ she says slowly, ‘or “0” as in zero?’

‘It might be a bomb,’ says Vi. ‘That lot have every reason to be mad at you.’

‘I’ve made a public apology and have abandoned the hunt,’ Cyn reminds her. Also, the guy in the sewers really didn’t strike her as the bomb-sending type. Her daughter doesn’t know that, however. ‘It might just be someone playing a stupid prank.’

She slides a fingernail under a fold in the packaging and rips it open. She does feel a little queasy. The paper comes off easily and she notes that it’s got a metallic coating on the inside. A plain brown cardboard box comes into view. She pauses before saying, ‘Go to your room.’

‘You must be nuts!’ cries Vi. ‘If you really think there’s something dangerous in there, then don’t open it!’

Before Cyn can stop her, Vi lifts the lid. Cyn tries to clamp her hands over the top of the box, but it’s already open. Inside is a see-through plastic box the size of a cigarette packet containing a circuit board and other small bits of technical gear. Her heart misses a beat. This is exactly what bombs look like in films. Next to it is a folded sheet of paper. There seems to be some kind of keyboard underneath the plastic circuit-board box.

Dear Cynthia Bonsant,

The circumstances of our meeting weren’t so nice, but your announcement that you were quitting the hunt for us was. Here’s the answer to your last question, just in case you feel like doing more than quitting. We’re curious to see your next step.

Sincerely yours,

Zero

‘What question?’ Vi asks, immediately continuing, ‘Do you think this is genuine?’ Without waiting for an answer, she reads on.

Inside this box you will find a preconfigured Raspberry Pi minicomputer, a small keyboard and a few cables. Use the cables to connect the Pi to the keyboard and your TV set, as shown in the sketch below. The device will immediately log on to a free Wi-Fi network nearby. Memorize your username in the dialog box. Don’t write it down. Don’t let anyone you don’t trust 110% touch the computer. Do not take it abroad with you (baggage control!). Hide it in a safe place when you’re not using it. In an emergency destroy the SD card (see sketch).

‘Well, now you can ask them.’ Vi’s already disappeared into the living room with the box. Two minutes later she’s connected the Pi to the keyboard and the TV. A chaotic muddle of moving, rushing images appear on the screen, covering it like tiles on a wall. Everything appears to be moving. There doesn’t seem to be a single still spot.

‘It reminds me of white noise. Surf. Hey, that bit looks like water flowing! Are they waterfalls?’

A white window of the kind Cyn is familiar with from her email software pops up out of the flickering recordings.

Hi Cynthia!

This is a secure platform. Nice conversation we had. Apology accepted. And thanks again for yesterday.

Cyn excitedly grabs the keyboard from Vi. As she starts to type, a username appears above the text.

Guext: What did you tell me down there?

‘What is this? Guext? Is that now your username?’ asks Vi with some irritation just as the answer arrives.

Jakinta0046: Is that a test? Background and funding of the hunt for Zero.

‘It’s better that way. I’ll explain later. You should probably leave me alone for a while.’

Vi shoots her a hurt look, but Cyn defies her and nods encouragingly until her daughter gets up, goes over to the doorway, from where she can’t see the screen, and stands there with her arms folded.

Guext: Down in the sewers I told you about a friend who wanted to tell me something before I left London. Something about Freemee. He’s died. An accident, shortly before I was attacked in Vienna. That too would have looked like an accident. A coincidence? Could it have been about the hushed-up financing story?

Jakinta0046: No way. Must have been something else.

Guext: I have his computer. It’s encrypted.

Jakinta0046: Then we can’t get into it for now. Can you ask someone else?

Guext: Yes. Planned to do so tomorrow.

Jakinta0046: Let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help.

Guext: An interview with Zero ☺

Jakinta0046: What we need to say we say ourselves. But maybe we can help you with your story. Tell us when you have more. Next time you’ll need a password. Enter one you can remember now. At least ten characters, including numbers, upper- and lower-case letters, and symbols.

Cyn has to give this some thought. The crucial part of their dialogue has now slid out of the window.

Guext: Md18.Ablonde

Jakinta0046: OK.

‘Md18.Ablonde?’ asks Vi. Cyn looks up, startled. She was so absorbed in her chat that she didn’t see or hear Vi coming nearer.

‘I told you—’ she lashes out, but Vi interrupts her: ‘You wouldn’t have come up with it if not for me.’

Cyn purses her lips and relents. ‘“My daughter”, your age and your hair colour.’

Jakinta0046: Camouflage. Talk again soon.

For a few seconds they stare silently at the screen, but the only things moving are the noisy images.

‘I don’t feel happy with it in the flat,’ Cyn answers, her mind going back to her interrogation at the airport. ‘We’ve just been in contact with wanted terrorists.’

She removes the lens-sized SD card from the Raspberry Pi, as shown in the sketch, pulls out the cable and packs everything except for the card into the box.

‘In the extractor hood above the cooker,’ says Vi. ‘It doesn’t work anyway.’

Back in the kitchen, Vi removes the filter from the hood in a few quick movements, pushes the box into the hole and then snaps the filter back into place. Cyn puts the SD card in a small dish containing keys, fobs, pens and other stuff in the hall.

‘Hidden in plain sight,’ she says. ‘Like in that Edgar Allan Poe story. And don’t you dare touch it!’

Cyn checks the door locks one last time before going to bed. She packs enough clothes for four days and a smart outfit for the talk show into the only battered suitcase she owns. Can she really leave Vi on her own right now? Should she worry even more because of that little box? She remembers how her daughter opened the parcel and plugged in the device. She’s braver than me, thinks Cyn. Why should I worry? She knows less than I do. And that’s how it must stay.

She takes her laptop to bed with her and finally gets round to swotting up on Sheeld. It’s a little-known start-up, but she can’t discover any link to Freemee via its staff or any common investors. She can’t get to sleep. Too much has happened in the past few days, and too much of it she doesn’t understand.

Saturday