No Refuge

by Greg Elswood

  He stepped forward to put his arm around Orla, but she pushed him away. ‘Get off me. You seem to be spending a lot of time apologising recently, and I’m not sure I know who you are anymore.’

  ‘Let’s not have this conversation here,’ Michael said. ‘Let’s talk tonight and I’ll explain everything.’

  He glanced at Jenny, who was trying hard to conceal a smile, and then at Maria, who appeared shaken by Orla’s arrival, and even more by her sudden aggression.

  Orla followed Michael’s eyes and looked around the group. Everyone stared back at her, waiting for her next move, and immediately she felt embarrassed at her outburst. Perhaps Michael was right. After all, he was doing this as a favour for someone else, so maybe he wasn’t to blame. She closed her eyes and let out a long sigh.

  ‘OK, OK, let’s do it later. This isn’t the time, you’re right.’

  Paddy had heard enough and he clapped his hands to attract everyone’s attention.

  ‘OK, we’re all here now, so let’s get going. This is how it’s going to work.’

  Michael and Paddy had rehearsed their instructions beforehand. Paddy gave them a two-minute briefing on the fictitious company behind Blarney Yoghurts, in case anyone asked when taking their snack. He then split them into two teams, pairing Orla with Maria and Jenny with James, and told them where they would be standing.

  Then Michael gave Jenny and Orla one final instruction. ‘When you get down to your last tray of yoghurts, call me. I will then get the van back here so that we can pack up as soon as we’re done. I know you have other places to be afterwards.’

  In reality, however, none of them would ever see the van again. The calls from Orla and Jenny would be the signal for Michael to detonate the bombs. They would be ringing their own death knell.

  ***

  Timing is everything.

  Brandon tapped his painted finger nails on the railing and waited for the crowds to arrive, for the right moment when the unwitting pawns in his game would be most vulnerable. He remembered the previous day’s TV images and knew he would be able to judge when the throng on the concourse and the queues along the walkway were at their most concentrated. He watched commuters jostle by the closed shutters of the Underground entrance, as if hoping that the service would suddenly resume. He saw them congregate around two bright green carts that stood between the platforms and the station exits, grabbing a free snack on their journey to work. And he observed the looks of resignation on the faces of those who joined the long bus queues that snaked around the raised walkway and past the shops on the station’s upper level. They queued, they ate their free snacks and they stared at their phones.

  Brandon took his position on the raised walkway, immediately beneath the station’s main departure board. He was only a few steps from the bus queue and he could almost touch the crowd on the concourse below. The ideal birthplace for Proximity. From here he could see hundreds of smartphone and tablet screens, and all were within reach of his creation. He was ready, his prey lay before him, it was now or never.

  Brandon took his laptop from the rucksack and felt a tremor pass through his whole body. He imagined being seen, that somehow someone knew what he was about to do, and he looked both ways. But no one was paying him any attention. Everyone was engrossed in their own lives, troubles and concerns, so why would they look twice at just another businesswoman? He lowered his gaze and the Proximity icon glowered at him, urging him on. Everything had been pre-set.

  He pressed the button.

  For five or six seconds, nothing happened. No hits were registered and no pop-up messages appeared on the screens below. Brandon held his breath and looked down at the sea of people. Then suddenly, right in front of him, a bright purple flash filled a screen, then another, a few feet to the right of the first. He heard a faint ping. Proximity had contaminated its first victims with Replicant. The bug was in the open. Several more purple messages flashed, more pings and ringtones sounded, both below him and in the bus queue next to him, and his screen registered the hits. These are just the first level infections. Now come on, replicate! He closed his laptop and put it back in his rucksack.

  All around, fingers prodded purple screens to dismiss the message that read:

  HAVE YOU BEEN IN AN ACCIDENT IN THE PAST FIVE YEARS?

  If there was one unsolicited question designed to annoy people, other than one about payment protection insurance, that was it, and Brandon knew it was the perfect bait. Everyone would close that screen, but hitting ‘X’ would only prompt a new pop-up, this time in orange rather than purple:

  YOUR DEVICE IS BEING UPDATED. PLEASE WAIT AND DO NOT SWITCH OFF.

  A frustrating screen for many gadget owners, but they had probably seen similar ones before and it shouldn’t cause any alarm. Behind that message, though, all hell was breaking loose in their phones. Brandon watched purple screens turn orange, accompanied by further chimes and pings, and he waited for the next stage. For the replication, the ripple.

  When it happened, it was far more startling than Brandon had ever imagined when he sat in his den writing the programs. A circle of purple screens suddenly surrounded the small group of orange ones, more pings, chimes and ring-tones sounded, and they soon turned orange accompanied by another chorus. Then a third circle of purple appeared, this time more quickly than the second. A fourth, a fifth and a sixth soon followed, each successive one faster than the last, and from above it looked like a purple ripple of water spreading out from a stone dropped into a pond, that filled with a pool of orange as each new purple ring changed colour. The momentum grew, the ripples became less distinct, blurred around the edges as people reacted at different times to the arrival of their pop-ups, and within a minute the concourse was an ocean of orange lights, with the occasional speck of purple.

  Brandon stood transfixed by its beautiful progress, but it wasn’t only the colour, the aura from the screens that hit him. It was the sound. What had started as an initial faint chime of half a dozen phones, built with each successive ripple into louder choruses of pings, jingles and old-fashioned rings. Like a hymn, where the organist starts with one quiet note and then introduces more and more until eventually every organ pipe vibrates at full volume, the glorious crescendo grew and filled the immense Liverpool Street nave, before flowing along its cloisters and out towards the open air.

  Startled at first, then far more impressed than he had ever dreamt, Brandon was euphoric. The climax of pings, beeps and even the odd claxon transformed him into the character Jobe, and he longed to stand on the railing above the concourse and shout with all his energy, ‘Lawnmower Man!’ It would be a fitting tribute to his cyber success and the genesis of his idea for Replicant.

  The atmosphere was electric. Everyone in the station looked around, wondering what had happened. For the first time in ages, if ever for some of them, commuters talked to the person next to them, then checked each other’s devices to see if they had the same message or if their phone was working. They were excited, chatty, even friendly to their fellow travellers.

  But the orange glow persisted and the devices remained in the ‘updating’ mode, and people returned to type. Excitement gave way to frustration and surly faces looked down at phone screens, all thoughts of chatter forgotten. A few people tried turning off their phones, but to their dismay discovered that they wouldn’t react to the usual method of pressing and holding a button. Others removed the battery, only to find on placing it back into the device that it remained stuck on the orange screen, whereas many phone owners realised for the first time that the latest model they’d acquired no longer had an accessible battery. Their devices were unusable, and they experienced their first withdrawal symptoms.

  Brandon smiled. Replicant had disabled the on/off function and was already onto its next task, the Denial of Service attack on their banks. He knew it may take a while for this to happen, as the bug needed to infect a lot more devices first. However, after seeing the rate at which Replicant had spread through
out the station, accelerating with each successive wave, he wanted to make sure that he didn’t miss it, and he picked up his rucksack so that he could see it unfold from a better position.

  He walked past the war memorial and the flower stall by the main entrance. He turned down the steps towards the concourse, but stopped on the landing halfway down, directly above a set of cash machines. He leaned on the hand rail, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, and waited.

  Since the Lawnmower Man moment, Brandon had sensed the mood change. Now, nearer the concourse, he could hear some of the commuters’ conversations, and he recognised the new emotion that rose up at their continued inability to use their phones. Anger. Brandon was surprised at how quickly people became lost without their phones, how dependent they were. But then something else happened that changed the course of events that morning. They also lost access to their money.

  Brandon knew that the banks’ infrastructure would struggle in the face of a flood of internet traffic directed at their websites and mobile banking apps. Failure of their ATM networks was inevitable, and he witnessed the moment it happened at Liverpool Street.

  First one young woman, then a middle-aged man, came away from the cash machines below him, both shaking their heads. The latter spoke to the next person in the queue behind him. ‘Great morning this is turning out to be, eh? No tube, no phone and now no cash. Whatever next?’ He sidled his way through the crowd without looking back.

  Despite the warning, the next few people in the queue stepped up to the ATMs, only to be confronted with ‘out of service’ messages. Brandon had seen enough. He knew that Replicant was in full flow, infecting hundreds of new devices every second to harass the banks’ computer systems. The deluge would increase over the next couple of hours and the banks would struggle to coordinate a rapid response with so many mobile phones disabled, and while they grappled with the onslaught and invoked their contingency plans, Brandon intended to reap the rewards.

  He climbed back up the steps and walked past the bus queue. He heard the conversations, the urgent whispers and the consternation in people’s voices. And then something else. Anger was turning to fear.

  ‘I don’t like this, first all that ringing, then the phones not working, now the cash machines.’

  ‘Let’s walk, I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.’

  ‘This is really giving me the creeps, let’s go.’

  People started to leave Liverpool Street. Spooked by the symptoms of Brandon’s viruses, a foreboding dread settled over the congregation and, first a trickle and then a stream, they headed for the exits. Brandon smiled. He didn’t care if they left. They were infected and now they would spread the virus further and faster.

  If Replicant had been less voracious or if it had taken longer to spread, if Brandon had admired his work and left ten minutes later, or if the yoghurts had been taken from the green and white carts much sooner, events that day would have turned out differently. As it was, he left behind hundreds of bruised and battered people, all praying that their day would get better. Like them, Brandon was unaware of the maelstrom only moments away.

  Timing is everything.

  20

  Michael and Paddy left the teams in position and checked that they knew what to do, then strolled out of the station and into the sunshine of Broadgate Circle. After parking the van two blocks away and wandering back to the station, they sat at a café, drank coffee and smoked, like two friends without a care in the world. What more could two men want than the sun on their faces, in the company of a comrade, just minutes away from the greatest triumph of their lives?

  From here it should be easy. They would let the crowds build, wait for the signal that the yoghurts had almost gone, and then walk back to the van before detonating the bombs. Until then, they wanted to stay close by in case of any last-minute hitches. But everything was in place and it was a simple matter of calling a number, so what could go wrong?

  ‘Well, Michael, it’s been great working with you again. This time tomorrow you’ll be a hero of the Brethren, and in years to come they’ll still be talking about this day.’

  ‘You too, my friend,’ Michael said between puffs. ‘I’m just sorry that it will be our last operation together. We’ve had some good times, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yeah, not too shabby, but all good things come to an end.’

  They sat in quiet contemplation and enjoyed their final moments together, while they each considered the magnitude of their murderous project. Their silence would have lasted a little longer, had Michael not sat up, suddenly alert, and cocked his head to one side.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘No, what?’

  Michael looked around and noticed that one or two other people had turned towards the sound, which appeared to be coming from the station. ‘I don’t know, an odd sound, like a fairground ride. Ringing or music, something like that, and it’s getting louder.’

  Paddy had now heard it too and he nodded. Suddenly the volume increased and everyone in the café looked towards the station, and a cacophony of chimes burst out of Liverpool Street and rushed straight towards them.

  ‘What the—?’ Michael said, but before he could finish, his phone pinged and Brandon’s message appeared on his screen. He looked down at it with wide eyes.

  ‘My God, look at that. Bloody ambulance chasers, whatever will they think of next?’ He prodded the ‘X’ button.

  A moment later, Paddy received the same pop-up message and, like Michael and hundreds of others before him, he dismissed the message and his screen turned orange.

  Michael stared at his screen. ‘Updating?’ He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

  Like his screen, his face had turned colour in an instant and was now a violent shade of red. He prayed that the phone update would be quick, otherwise their entire mission would be wrecked, but he had a bad feeling about it. The way the message had come at them like a wailing banshee was not a good omen.

  He tried turning off his phone, but the button didn’t respond as it usually did. He then inspected the back of the case and saw that there was no cover for the battery compartment.

  ‘Damn, you know what this means, don’t you Paddy? We can’t send the codes. If this doesn’t clear, the operation’s over.’

  The men leapt from their seats and strode towards the station entrance. They needed to know what was happening. The crowds would be almost at their peak and they couldn’t miss their chance. Surely it wasn’t going to end like this.

  They stopped where the group had assembled earlier and stared down into Broadgate Arcade, from where the barrage of ringtones had come. Frozen by indecision, Michael’s eyes flicked back and forth between the distant concourse and his screen, and he willed the orange message to disappear. Paddy’s jaw was set in an expression of contempt, and his eyes burned with pure hatred as he thought of the unexploded bombs on the concourse.

  And then the situation changed again. People started streaming out of Liverpool Street, some with fear on their faces, others chatting nervously with their companions. Both men knew what this meant. Their prey was escaping and they had very little time left if they wanted to cause maximum bloodshed. It was decision time.

  Paddy grabbed Michael’s arms and confronted him with a face of steely resolution. ‘Run, Michael, run. Get away from here while you can. I’ll set it off.’

  ‘What? You can’t do that, you’ll go up with it. I can’t let you do that,’ Michael replied, his mind in turmoil. But he knew that he could. And he knew Paddy meant it.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. What have I got to look forward to, eh? Better to go out this way, as a hero, than to end my days in disgrace and in pain. Remember, we were warned not to leave anything behind.’ He let go of Michael and pushed him away. ‘Now be off with you, before I blow you up too.’

  Michael stepped back, but Paddy had a few last words.

  ‘Good luck to you Micha
el, and remember what you said to me. God works in mysterious ways.’ He turned and strode into the oncoming tide.

  Michael span round and started jogging back towards the Circle, but then he saw a sight that stopped him in his tracks. Hurtling down the stairs into the auditorium was a shabby man on a Boris Bike. Although he’d never seen him before, Michael knew instantly who he was: that vagabond Jacob, Orla’s homeless friend. What the hell was he doing here?

  The two men locked eyes and Jacob threw down the bike. He rushed at Michael, his fists balled and his teeth clenched. But Michael was saved by the sound of a loud bellow, as Bill and his two colleagues dashed out from the shadows, jumped on Jacob and wrestled him to the ground. Commuters fleeing the station forgot their anxieties for a few seconds and stood transfixed by the spectacle of a wild homeless man being restrained. But not Michael. He ran up the steps and sprinted away down Eldon Street.

  Jacob thrashed against the men. ‘You bloody fools, stop him. He’s got a bomb, in the yoghurt carts.’

  At his words, Jacob felt Bill’s grip loosen, and a mixture of fear and uncertainty crossed his face. Jacob sensed his chance and, using reserves of energy and strength he didn’t know he possessed, he pushed Bill off him. He looked after Michael and knew he wouldn’t catch him. In any case, the danger was in the opposite direction.

  He grabbed the stricken Bill by his collar. ‘Where’s the other guy, the older one?’

  Bill pointed down the Arcade towards the station. ‘Over there, that way.’ The ashen look on his face betrayed the chaos and confusion in his head.

  Jacob saw the back of Paddy disappearing into the distance. ‘Oh God, no, I’m too late.’

  Jacob roared. Without any regard for his own safety or the pain that racked every bone in his body, he sprinted after Paddy. He had to catch him, had to warn everyone to get away. ‘Stop him, he has a bomb. Someone stop him!’