Sunfall

by Jim Al-Khalili

  ‘Maybe because this is easier,’ replied Sarah. ‘And it still ensures the failure of the Odin Project. Maybe they don’t want humankind to bring about its own, sudden demise. Maybe the Purifiers themselves want to survive long enough to see their mission through, to be a part of the slow suffocation of all life as the planet loses its atmosphere. I don’t know, Marc. It’s all so fucking sick.’

  Marc felt he was grasping at straws. ‘But this way, we would try again. We would have to.’

  ‘No, Marc, we wouldn’t. Global opinion would swing away from the Odin Project, maybe back to the MPDs, and that would be that. You know how hard it was to make the case for the Project in the first place. Do you really believe they would sanction a second attempt? Besides, how can you even contemplate signing the death warrant of millions of innocent people? I know I can never forgive myself for not doing more in Rio back in March. I watched so many people die and just saved myself. This is different. You would be knowingly committing genocide.’

  Marc felt anger rise up to the surface. What was she saying? That he would instead sacrifice his own daughter?

  ‘Please spare me the moral philosophy, Sarah. I can’t think beyond Evie for the moment. Can’t you see that?’

  They sat in silence. Finally, Sarah whispered, ‘You know we can still find Evie, if you allow Shireen to help. Don’t be fooled by her age – that young woman is astonishingly resourceful.’

  Marc felt broken and emotionally drained. ‘I have to, now, don’t I? Otherwise, if I do as they say I will be buying my daughter’s life with the blood of millions of others … other Evies and their families – people I will never meet. And you know what gets me most? It’s that the kidnappers are so sure I would make that choice.’

  Suddenly his wristpad buzzed again. But this time instead of a message it showed a grainy-looking video feed. It was very dark and hard to make out, so Marc cupped his hand around it to block out the harsh sunlight. His mouth went dry and he let out a quiet whimper. ‘Oh, Jesus, no!’ It was her. It was Evie. His daughter was lying unconscious on a rug on a filthy brick floor. Or was she just sleeping? He hoped she was sleeping. The lighting was just good enough for him to make out the gentle rise and fall of her chest. At least she was alive! Behind her, a stained brick wall and curved archway led into darkness. It looked to Marc like a cellar. Or a dungeon. Then, without warning, the screen went blank.

  ‘Oh, my God, Marc, where is that?’ said Sarah softly.

  He was too shocked to answer. Seeing his daughter like that had brought the full, horrible reality of the situation clearly into focus. Finally, he looked up at Sarah, a fire burning in his eyes. ‘What time is it? We need to meet your friend.’

  As if on cue, Sarah received a message. It was Shireen. She showed it to Marc.

  Go dark. Turn off your devices and disconnect your AR feeds. Then leave your table and walk around to the other side of the piazza. It’s busier there and we can lose whoever it is that seems to be watching you.

  Sarah looked at Marc. ‘I told you she was good. She’s been watching us too. Come on, it’s time we fought back.’

  35

  Tuesday, 10 September – London

  Gaining access to several Covent Garden surveillance cameras had been straightforward enough. Now, standing in the shadows on one side of the bustling piazza, Shireen studied her retinal feed carefully. On one side of the split screen she had a bird’s-eye view of Sarah and Marc sitting at their café table, while on the other half she could see the two men who were watching them. One was an older man with a shaven head who seemed to be in charge; the other, younger with a wispy beard, looked like the tech guy. She smiled to herself. The watchers were now the watched. She had no idea what they wanted, but whatever the issue, it was serious. Marc and Sarah seemed tense and animated. She’d hopefully find out soon enough.

  She’d realized as soon as she arrived that she wasn’t the only one using the camera aimed at the two scientists’ table and had tracked down the source of the other hack to a bar on the south side of the piazza – far enough away for what she had in mind. But the timing had to be right. Having sent Sarah the message to go dark she waited until the very last moment before she and Marc stood up to kill the feed from the café camera. She watched as the two men, after a moment’s blank shock, broke into an animated discussion, presumably about why they no longer had eyes on their quarry. Shireen smiled to herself. Not so clever now, are you, boys? Suddenly, they both jumped up from their table and made their way out of the bar in a hurry, but it would take them a couple of minutes to reach the café – ample time, she hoped, for Sarah and Marc to lose them.

  Making sure her baseball cap was pulled down to hide her face, she came out of the shadows into the harsh sunshine. She briefly caught sight of Sarah and Marc and made a beeline for them through the crowd. As she brushed past them she spoke under her breath without slowing or looking up. ‘Follow me.’

  A minute later, she was standing near the back of a throng of people gathered around a street performer. She couldn’t see him clearly through the crowd but whatever he was doing – some conjuring trick, most likely – his patter was so infectiously enthusiastic that he had drawn a large audience. She had flicked on the squelch jammer in her rucksack as soon as she’d arrived. It was more sophisticated than the one Hashimi had given her in Tehran and she was now invisible to any drones or satellites overhead. She hoped it would also shield Sarah and Marc from being spotted once they were within range. Hopefully, it would give her enough time to find out what was going on.

  It was just after 5 p.m. by the time Shireen arrived back at Bletchley and she was eager to get started. There were at least ten people still working at their desks, but no one had noticed her come in, their VR visors locking each of them away in a world only they could see.

  Back at her desk, she pulled on her visor and accessed the vast repository of information she had built up on the Purifiers’ network. For the first time, she now had a real lead to follow, only she had hours rather than days to infiltrate their cyberspace.

  Her first task was relatively easy. Before she could find where Evie was being held, she needed to locate the kidnappers, and it didn’t take long for her to trace the IP source of the original message sent to Marc the day before. She wasn’t surprised to find that the kidnappers had put in place clever diversions, trapdoors and firewalls, but there was nothing she hadn’t negotiated a gazillion times before. It appeared that whoever these people were, they had covered their tracks in a hurry, and that meant they would have been sloppy somewhere along the line. If she kept prodding and probing, she knew she would find what she was looking for. The Trojan horse spyware she was currently using had been modified significantly by the team at Bletchley. It was now more powerful than the original code she’d created.

  Humming along to music as she worked, she let it guide her movements until she was swaying and manipulating her virtual displays in sync with the beat. She had recently become a fan of fusion punk, a synthesis of West African rock and angry Asian K-pop, and she found the urgency of the beats just what she needed to stimulate her thought processes when immersed in the dark web. Despite the magnitude of her task, Shireen felt happy, at one with cyberspace. Almost omniscient.

  And while she worked, her spyware code flowed silently through the dark web, a digital ninja searching and probing for weaknesses, following leads, building up correlations, looking for patterns.

  By 5:45, she had pinned down the origin of the messages to Marc. They had come from somewhere inside the British Library on Euston Road in the centre of London. And, whereas cyberhackers would normally build in a delay to make it hard for anyone to determine the exact timing of the hack, in this case, the messages had been created and sent in real time. There. That was very sloppy. It took her less than two minutes to access the library’s computer system and locate the record of everyone who had used it during the one-hour window between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., which was when the final me
ssages had been sent to Marc.

  Of the one hundred or so people who’d used the library’s computers, only seven had blocked their idents. Of those, five had left several minutes before the final message was sent, which meant there were just two suspects. Both had left the library just after 3 p.m.

  All she had to do now was hack into the data from street cameras in the neighbourhood of the library to catch them leaving. Simple. Sure enough, they had left the library separately: a man and a woman, both in their early to mid-thirties. She now had sufficient biometric data to search for them.

  The search for a match among the more than ten million Londoners captured on the city’s many thousands of cameras took just a few seconds; she found the woman first, in a coffee shop across the road from the British Library. She was sitting in a corner with a milkshake, reading a book and looking like every other customer in there. Nothing suspicious. Shireen was almost certain she could rule her out as a kidnapper.

  In contrast, the man was on the move. Each time-coded feed showed him at a different location, enabling her to plot his route across London. The most recent footage was just ten minutes ago when he’d entered the site of what looked like an old warehouse. The satellite data she accessed allowed her to survey the area and a quick search told her that it was near Tower Bridge, south of the Thames, a neighbourhood that had been among the worst flooded in London ten years earlier. Much of it was apparently still abandoned. Very private. Very convenient. She quickly accessed and commandeered a high-flying surveillance drone and zoomed in as tightly as she could onto the derelict building. Was this where they were holding Evie?

  Piecing together a sketchy profile of the man from the information she could find on the dark web wasn’t so easy. But while she couldn’t yet link him to anyone or anything to do with the Purifiers, there was enough to suggest he had much to hide.

  Removing her visor, she sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. It was almost 7 p.m. and there were five or six other people still working in the office. It occurred to her that she hadn’t had anything to eat since the slice of cake at her aunt’s apartment at lunchtime. But food could wait; like a lioness, she was closing in on her prey and couldn’t afford to stop now. She slipped the visor back over her eyes, leaving the physical world behind again.

  36

  Tuesday, 10 September – London

  Entrusting his daughter’s life to a stranger – a girl barely five years older than Evie herself – terrified Marc. But what choice did he have? This past twenty-four hours had been a living nightmare.

  Shireen had told them to avoid going back to the hotel, which was most likely being watched by the kidnappers. They needed to find somewhere with no surveillance cameras and wait for her call. Sarah suggested they take refuge at the Helios Institute, the solar research laboratory in the grounds of University College London where she was a regular guest and could gain access with her visitor’s pass.

  They had walked the two kilometres from Covent Garden to the Institute in silence. Marc couldn’t get the image of Evie lying on that filthy mat out of his mind and was grateful to Sarah for leaving him alone with his thoughts. They didn’t meet anyone on their way in. Sarah led him up to the fourth floor then heaved a sigh of relief when her thumbprint was recognized and the door of the office she had used on her last visit clicked open. The office was empty, and Sarah quickly closed and locked the door behind them.

  Marc slumped onto a chair by the window and stared down at his wristpad. Shireen had done something to their devices to make sure they were secure. But he kept expecting at any moment to get a message from the kidnappers telling him they knew what he was up to. Within minutes, he was on his feet again, pacing around the small office, stopping every few minutes at the window to stare out at the city bathed in late afternoon sunlight. Evie is out there somewhere, frightened and alone, and I’m stuck in here. Or maybe she isn’t even in London any more?

  Sarah was sitting at the desk, nursing a mug of coffee and staring into the distance, clearly not knowing quite what to say to make him feel any better. He shouldn’t have dragged her into all this, but not for the first time he felt grateful that she was with him.

  It was just after seven and fully dark outside when he got the message from Shireen via the secure route she’d set up. His heart missed a beat as he read it. ‘My God, Sarah. She’s found her! Shireen’s found Evie already.’

  ‘I told you she was good,’ said Sarah, rushing over to him.

  He showed her the message.

  Marc, I think they’re keeping Evie in an abandoned warehouse south of the river. I’ve sent you the coordinates.

  Sarah looked up at Marc. ‘So, what do we do now?’

  There really wasn’t much to discuss and he hoped Sarah would understand. ‘We aren’t going to do anything. I am.’

  ‘Come on, I know she’s your kid, but we’re a team now. And I’m not your dutiful fucking sidekick—’

  ‘Don’t do this, please, Sarah. You must know I would readily sacrifice my life if it meant saving Evie, but I can’t ask you to do the same. I need to see this through. Alone.’

  ‘Let me guess, I stay here where it’s safe, while you do your Indiana Jones routine and go beat up the bad guys?’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ said Marc, with no hint of a smile. ‘I know you can take care of yourself … It’s just—’

  ‘Fuck you, Marc Bruckner.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, holding her shoulders gently. He pulled her closer to him and looked into her eyes pleadingly. ‘She’s my baby girl. And I know you want to help, but if they even get a whiff of what we’re up to I don’t know what they’ll do. And I can’t risk that. Not even to spare your pride. I’m sorry.’

  Sarah seemed to relax a little and sighed. ‘So, what’s your plan, Indi? You haven’t got a gun or a whip. Dammit, you don’t even have a hat.’

  Marc smiled weakly. ‘Look, if Shireen is right, then I can make it there by myself. At least I have the element of surprise on my side. If I find the odds are stacked against me then we can think of calling in the cavalry.’

  Sarah suddenly reached up and kissed him gently on the lips. Somewhere deep inside him was a thrill that Sarah felt the same way about him as he did about her, but right now he was consumed by his fear for Evie. Sarah grinned at him as she pulled away.

  ‘For luck,’ she said. ‘Please don’t try anything stupid.’

  I’m about to go after a bunch of maniacs who are holding my daughter captive, unarmed and with no plan. Define stupid.

  He did his best to give her a wry smile and hurried out the door.

  It was a warm and sticky evening and beyond the Institute’s courtyard the roads and skies were busy with traffic. It suddenly occurred to him that he couldn’t risk getting a road or air cab in case the kidnappers traced him when he paid the fare. He had to stay as inconspicuous as possible. He looked around the courtyard until he found an unlocked bicycle, which he commandeered and wheeled out as quickly as he could, hoping the jammer Shireen had given him did its job. This would take him longer, but he couldn’t take any risks. And it meant he could arrive unannounced. He hoped he wouldn’t live to regret the delay.

  He quickly worked up a sweat as he cycled in the early-evening humidity. He tried to stay as focused as he could, but the image of Evie locked away in the dark warehouse somewhere kept resurfacing. What did he expect to find when he got there? What would he do if the place was guarded, or if there were several people?

  The traffic had thinned out dramatically by the time he reached Tower Bridge. He’d not been south of the Thames before and was shocked by the wasteland of abandoned office buildings, warehouses, and tower blocks. The rising sea levels had overwhelmed the Thames estuary, now five times larger than just a few decades ago, with much of the surrounding countryside in south-east England now underwater. London’s flood defences had done a reasonable job of minimizing the impact on the capital, but large swathes of land south of the river
had been sacrificed. He checked his surroundings against the map on his lenses, trusting Shireen that, like his wristpad, it was now safe to use his AR without being detected.

  Many of the roads in this part of the city had become shallow waterways – a poor man’s Venice – and he needed to negotiate a route through the few streets remaining accessible to road traffic. The area was deserted and appeared devoid of surveillance cameras, the ideal location to hide someone.

  Just then, he heard Shireen’s voice in his earphone.

  ‘Marc, I’m tracking you and I can see you’re nearly there. I’m still monitoring the warehouse and there’s no sign of activity yet. I think you’re safe to approach.’

  His AR told him that the warehouse was just up ahead. Abandoning the bike against a wall, he ran the rest of the way. Keeping as close as he could to the buildings as he approached, he almost tripped over someone sleeping in a doorway. The man sat up, grunted and waved a large kitchen knife in Marc’s direction. Already on edge, the incident gave Marc a scare. He didn’t slow down.

  The warehouse was in the middle of a fenced-off derelict site. He stood by the open gate for a few seconds to catch his breath. There were no windows on this side of the building, so he sprinted across the open yard to the nearest wall and waited to make sure he hadn’t been spotted. Shireen’s voice came through again.

  ‘Marc, I can see you at the building. I have no idea what’s waiting inside. Please be careful.’

  He didn’t reply. Instead, he peered around the corner, spotting a small window at about shoulder height just a few paces away. With his back tight up against the wall, he edged towards it and peered inside.