System Shock Part 7

Lattimer convulsed in shock and surprise. He had not heard Simpson enter the room. 'Lover's Lane time, it looks like.'

60.Simpson put a cup of coffee down, resting it on the novel.

Usually Lattimer would move it to the desk with a sigh and mutter 'Philistine!' But this time he ignored it. After a second he reached for the plastic cup, took a sip from it, and put it back on the book.

'Can you get in any closer?' Simpson asked. 'Could be security risk, you know,' he said with a wink.

Lattimer jostled the joystick slightly. 'They obviously don't know there are cameras.'

'Is that a leg?' Lattimer pointed at the screen.

'Could be.' Simpson looked up at the ceiling, listening. 'That sounds like thunder.'

'It'll take more than a shower to cool them off.'

But the rumbling sound was getting louder. 'Sounds more like a full storm.'

The rumble had built to a roar. It sounded as if it was right above them. Then suddenly it stopped.

'Lightning next,' Lattimer predicted. 'Might get a better view of the security breach then.'

'Doubt it. Look.' Simpson pointed to the picture. The car door was opening.

Lattimer zoomed out, and they watched as the couple got out of the car. The woman looked up for a moment, just before she got back in. She seemed almost to be looking right at the camera, her head swaying slightly from side to side. Then she opened the driver's door, her dark hair falling forward as she got into the car.

On the roof of the main house, nestling behind the Queen Anne parapets and hidden from sight from the ground, sat a small shuttle craft. The onboard systems completed final remote-controlled landing checks, then clicked off. The systems off-lined and the shuttle sat silent on the roof of Hubway, awaiting further instructions.

61.

05.

Office Work

Harry was keen to keep things 'close'. He was unwilling to involve anyone outside their immediate group.

'If we need Special Branch support I'll ask for Ashby again.

He's the driver who brought you here,' Harry said.

'Why do you need Special Branch at all?' Sarah asked, and Harry explained that the security service's remit did not extend to apprehending or arresting people. They relied on Special Branch to do that for them. 'Sometimes it's a bit tiresome.

Some of the lads still think the Branch should be doing a lot of the intelligence gathering and evaluation which now comes to us. Ashby is all right though. Reliable and efficient.'

'Great sense of humour, too,' the Doctor pitched in, and Harry looked puzzled at the suggestion while Sarah barely concealed a smirk behind her coffee.

The conversation turned back to Hubway and the CD.

Gibson seemed confident that they could arrange for the Doctor to get access to whatever hardware he needed. It seemed that most of the services were already on-line, the opening ceremony little more than a formality to be gone through.

'The network's being run all the time. We get stuff off it daily,' Gibson said. 'It's always been a good source of information, even before it got formalized into the Highway.

We pulled stuff on the Russian coup off InterNet well before the news agencies got it, and that was years ago. Posted by students in Moscow good stuff. The main trouble is finding what you want.'

'And what do you want? I mean what facilities will you need from Hubway?' Harry asked.

62.'Ah, now that's a good question,' the Doctor said. 'One that I think I shall need to find an answer to very shortly.'

'You mean you don't know?' Sarah asked.

'Well of course I don't know,' he snapped back. He was immediately apologetic: 'Sorry. Sorry, but without knowing what's on this thing,' he waved the CD, 'it's difficult to know how to a.n.a.lyse it.'

'Something of a problem, then.'

'Not really, Harry,' the Doctor smiled, 'I'll just have to find out what hardware our friends at I2 have. That will at least give us a starting point. I don't suppose your man Sutcliffe told you anything useful like that, did he?'

'Well ...' Gibson began slowly.

'I thought not,' the Doctor said glumly. 'So I suppose I shall just have to go and look for myself. Although first,' he said, stretching his arms high above his head and yawning loudly, 'I think a little sleep is in order.'

Sarah slept surprisingly well. She was exhausted after chasing round London, being kidnapped, and meeting a friend who had aged twenty years in the last couple of weeks. But the narrow bed in the corner of a spare duty officer's quarters in the MI5 building consisted of a board and a thin mattress stuffed with something that felt like a mixture of horse hair and pebbles.

She woke slowly, gradually becoming aware of the early sunlight creeping across the floor towards her, picking its way through the dust. Then she began to feel the hard edges of the mattress contents working their way into her side. She sat up and stretched.

Sarah's clothes were piled haphazardly on the chair by the bed. Eventually she found her watch buried in the heap. It was later than she had thought they had agreed to get together in the office to continue their discussions at eight-thirty. It was already nearly eight o'clock.

The duty office was equipped with a small shower room, part.i.tioned off the main office. There was also a kettle and a jar of coffee that looked about twelve years old. Sarah prayed there was no milk lurking anywhere. She emptied the kettle of 63 the stale, limey water inside and refilled it from the cold tap over the basin in the shower room. Then she turned her attention to the antique shower, thin towel and fin de siecle fin de siecle plumbing. plumbing.

When she had finished dressing, she took a mouthful of black, bitter coffee. Then she carefully poured the rest of it down the sink and went to see if the Doctor and Harry were up yet.

The Voracian Wednesday morning weekly status update meeting started exactly on time at eight-thirty. Stabfield's meetings always started exactly on time, Marc Lewis mused as he sat with his arms folded in the front row.

Stabfield started, as ever, with a slide showing the evacuation routes in the case of an attack by human forces.

Seventeen of the eighteen members of the audience politely took note, and Lewis scowled. Then Stabfield moved on to the agenda for the day.

The first item was a chance for each of the Voracians in turn to give an account of what they had been doing since the last meeting. Most muttered that everything was going according to plan and they had little to add to what they had said at the last meeting (which had been much the same report as this time). Undeterred, Stabfield nodded appreciatively as each of his team reported in, and made notes on a laptop computer.

Only Marc Lewis and Johanna Slake had much to update the others on. Stabfield had insisted Lewis describe the loss of the CD. Stabfield then commented on the need for increased vigilance and said that the main plan was not at all impacted by this unfortunate incident. Lewis was seething, but he did his best not to show it partly because it would simply seem like bad grace. Mainly, though, it was because it would give Stabfield a chance to comment in public on Lewis's apparent inability to keep his emotions in check.

Johanna gave a brief account of the remote landing of the shuttle at Hubway. Stabfield nodded and made a point of displaying a Gantt chart of the project's activities and checkpoints to date so that he could update it to show another critical activity one hundred per cent completed.

64.Eventually the meeting broke up about an hour after all the necessary business had actually been concluded, since Stabfield insisted on going through the slides he used for the I2 management board. Most of the board members were human, due to the vagaries of the Stock Exchange, and the slides were devoted to market share, stock fluctuations, and product penetration.

One could argue, and Stabfield did, that there was value in understanding the business side of things, and that the penetration of Vorell and the XNet family of products, since this was the Voracian vehicle for success in the overall strategy. But Lewis preferred to believe that they were subjected to the lecture mainly because Stabfield had found a new graphics package which enabled him to produce even more indecipherable hieroglyphic charts than before. Johanna and the others nodded in interest and appreciation as each slide went up. Lewis sank lower into his seat and tightened the fold of his arms.

'So the strategic outlook for the company is buoyant, and we're maintaining our win-win grip on the marketplace,'

Stabfield concluded at last almost exactly the same words as he had used to conclude the meeting every Wednesday morning for the last five years. Lewis was one of the first out of the room.

'I worry about Lewis,' Johanna told Stabfield when the two met in Stabfield's office immediately after the status meeting.

'Did you see him today?'

Stabfield was checking over his logic diagram on the laptop.

'Lewis is, you have to remember, organically disadvantaged.'

'His emotions do sometimes go to the top of his personal agenda.'

'Indeed. But that in itself can have its uses,' he did not sound convinced, adding the caveat 'if properly directed and tempered.'

Johanna considered commenting on the pun, but doubted if Stabfield would appreciate it. He considered humour even less productive in the normal flow of things than anger. 'The next stage?' she asked instead.

65.'The next stage is now on the critical path. You should take team Alpha and initiate the distraction program.' He tapped the enter key with a flourish and watched intently as the diagram redrew itself across the screen. Johanna waited for him to continue. After a period of examining the status reports generated by the project control application, head swaying in satisfaction, Stabfield said: 'I am now authorized to release the Bugs to you.'

A part ofJohanna's consciousness made the observation that Stabfield must therefore be authorizing himself. Most of it, however, started clicking through the subprocedures to be executed at this stage targets, access techniques, estimated damage inflictions...

Stabfield meanwhile unlocked a drawer of his desk and took out a grey metal strong-box. It was sealed and locked, and he took a moment to open it. Then he removed three small cubes, each one a transparent plastic box about an inch long each side.

He handed them carefully to Johanna.

Johanna glanced at the cubes. Each contained a silicon chip, the surface of each chip a tangled ma.s.s of minute filaments forming an integrated circuit.

'The activation sequence for each is in the Read-Me circuit.

The boxes are numbered to match the target instructions.'

Stabfield handed her a plastic folder.

Johanna quickly scanned the pages inside, then tucked it under her arm. 'Are all the planned incidents potentially fatal?'

Stabfield nodded. 'They are all potentially life-transitioning,'

he said as he carefully re-sealed the box.

Sarah arrived in the office just ahead of Harry and Gibson.

They both looked as though they had enjoyed a full night's sleep. Gibson was carrying a plastic tray of plastic cups. They contained what looked and smelled like plastic coffee.

The Doctor was already sitting at the table. He was absorbed in his work and looked as though he had been there all night which, Sarah reflected, was probably the case. He appeared to be examining a watch. He had the back off and was peering inside.

66.'Ah, there you are,' he said without enthusiasm as they trooped in almost together and sat round. Then he stuck a jeweller's gla.s.s in his eye and went back to work.

'What's that you've got, Doctor?' Harry ventured after exchanging glances with the others.

'It's Sutcliffe's watch,' the Doctor mumbled, his words catching in his scarf. 'At least, I think it's his.'

'We found it near the body,' Sarah explained, blowing enthusiastically at the surface of her coffee.

'If it isn't his, then it's extremely interesting in its own right,'

the Doctor said as he placed it carefully on the table in front of him and dropped the eyegla.s.s into his pocket. He tossed the metal backplate of the watch to Sarah. She caught it, looked briefly at both sides and pa.s.sed it to Harry. She had no idea what the motif engraved on it meant.

'I2,' Harry said, gesturing at the eye in the square.

'So what have you found, Doctor?'

The Doctor leaned forward, a pair of tweezers miraculously appearing in his hand. He pushed them into the exposed mechanisms in the back of the watch and pulled out a tiny computer chip. 'This,' he said, holding it up for them all to see.

Gibson was not impressed. 'It's a digital watch,' he pointed out, 'operated by a silicon chip.'

'Quite right. But not this chip.' The Doctor flipped the watch on to its back. The read-out blinked at them, changing from 8:33 to 8:34 as they watched.

'So what is it?'

'You know, Harry, that's a very good question.'

'And?'

'And I haven't the faintest idea.'

'Terrific,' said Sarah.

The Doctor continued to tinker with the watch as the discussions proceeded. Occasionally he paused long enough to make a point which changed the direction of the conversation or ratified someone else's comment. Gradually a plan emerged seemingly a joint set of decisions, but Sarah suspected the Doctor had somehow steered the entire debate with his few observations.

67.The Doctor would be responsible for examining the CD and its contents and also, now, the silicon chip from Sutcliffe's watch. He seemed intrigued by it, especially when Gibson mentioned that the head of MI5 had recently been killed when the onboard systems of her car were sabotaged.

Sarah meanwhile would take Sutcliffe's place at I2. This was against Gibson's advice, but she was backed by the Doctor's mumblings and Harry's unswaying confidence. 'Are you sure about this, old girl?' Harry asked seriously. Having established that she was, Harry treated the subject as closed.

The plan was reasonably straightforward, Sarah told herself.

She would pose as a journalist, which she was, an expert in information technology, which she was not, and push for a placement with the company to write a series of very positive articles about OffNet and their other products and how I2 was effectively bringing the information superhighway to life.

'Any company worth its salt in the industry would jump at the publicity,' Harry said. 'If they don't, we know they're up to something and can push for an official enquiry. We know they're up to something anyway, which means they can't afford to say no.'

The Doctor concurred with the logic of this, suggesting that they would at the very least check Sarah's credentials. This seemed to be the sort of casual manipulation of the truth that Harry and Gibson were more used to. It was strange, Sarah thought, to hear Harry talking in such an off-hand manner about fabricating evidence, about rewriting history albeit in a small way.

The Doctor and Harry began to discuss the logistics of the Doctor's work on the CD how long he would need at Hubway, when he would be able to say what equipment he wanted. Gibson took Sarah to his office, ostensibly for a better brand of coffee and to leave them in peace. For the rest of the morning he filled her in on the background to I2 and what Sutcliffe had reported.

It was only when he began to explain the details of the information superhighway and OffNet and to recommend reading for her that Sarah realized she was being briefed by her case officer for her undercover work. She felt a tightening of 68 the muscles in her stomach. She wasn't sure if it was antic.i.p.ation or fear.

Had the chief information officers of BritTrack, ElecGen and a small privately owned chemical company in London's Docklands happened to meet and compare notes at the end of the day, they would have been surprised. But they did not.