by Greg Elswood
His booming voice was amplified by the tunnel-like Arcade. At the sound of his words, Paddy turned and fired a shot at Jacob. He missed by quite a margin, but it had the desired effect. Pandemonium broke out. Already unnerved by Brandon’s dramatic ring-tone opera and the failure of their phones and the cash machines, at the echoing report of the gunshot, the mass of people on the concourse surged towards the exits. Fear gave way to outright panic, and the sea of fleeing, screaming people parted in front of Paddy and he had a clear run at the first cart. Orla and Maria stood petrified with yoghurt pots still in their hands, but Maria threw hers down and pulled Orla away from the cart. At the sight of Paddy, her memories of the last two days came flooding back and she realised what she’d done.
The human tsunami swept up the stairs, out of the main station entrance and straight into the path of an armed counter terrorism response team, alerted by the Refuge’s earlier call. Alongside them, Harry Saunders and other officers struggled against the tide of people streaming out of the station, but pushed their way through to confront the danger.
Harry leaned over the railing and saw Paddy closing in on the cart, now alone in the middle of the concourse as commuters scrambled and stumbled away. ‘Shoot the lead man, not the guy following!’ The marksmen took aim.
Below, Orla and Maria rushed past the oncoming terrorist straight towards Jacob. He knew he was too late to stop Paddy, and he grabbed the two women. He thrust them towards the exit by the Arcade, running behind them to shield them as they went.
Shots rang out from the balcony, but they thudded into the cart as Paddy slid behind it. He wasn’t done yet. He was determined to finish the job and, sheltering behind the wagon from a barrage of further shots, he rolled it in the direction of the second cart, determined to leave no evidence behind. But moments later Paddy was hit in the shoulder by a round from above, and he slumped back against the compartment. Undaunted, despite the pain, he reached underneath and found what he wanted.
‘Down, hit the deck!’ Jacob pushed the women to the floor, glanced back at Paddy and saw the hateful look of triumph in his face.
The world turned upside down in a ferocious fireball of unbridled fury and savagery. The force of the blast cleaved through the Liverpool Street air and exploded upwards to the historic great roof and across the modern sweeping concourse. Glass from the roof, windows and shop-fronts shattered into millions of tiny projectiles, and steel and iron structures buckled. The shockwave ripped through the station, twisting platform barriers and obliterating merchandise in the shops. Worst of all, it lifted people from wherever they were cowering or fleeing and slammed them into walls and railings, killing and maiming indiscriminately.
The destruction continued for several seconds, although to anyone there it seemed to last a lifetime. For some, it did. But slowly the onslaught subsided, the deafening noise and the searing heat abated, and the echoes of the blast receded into the distance.
For a fleeting moment, there was silence, but for many of the outrage’s witnesses, what replaced it would haunt them as much as the brutal power of the explosion. Shards of glass and metal came to rest, but beneath the rising smoke, the full horror of the carnage and butchery revealed itself, and the unbearable torrent of noise and heat unleashed by the terrorists’ bomb was replaced by a torment of agony and despair.
Harry was one of the first to rise, his skin lacerated by fragments of glass and his ears pounded numb by the explosion. His first thought, that he was happy to be alive, turned to guilt when he surveyed his surroundings.
People were raising themselves up, others were moaning, but bodies also lay prostrate and lifeless just a few feet from where he had fallen. Death was random. The railings around the walkway had buckled and splintered from the raw power of the explosion, and none of the glass panes within those balustrades or the huge windows behind him had survived the blast. The war memorial just feet away was spattered with drops of blood, and petals from the flower stall fluttered down and settled onto the carpet of glass beneath it.
Yet despite all of the death, blood and devastation, Harry’s enduring image of that day was the giant departure board, which still hung above the walkway where Brandon had stood earlier. Acrid smoke and dust swirled around it, but the sun shone through the shattered roof and bathed the board in light. Like St. Paul’s in the Blitz, it appeared untouched as everything around it burned, except for one detail. Whether by fate or simple design, every service was now showing as cancelled.
Beneath Harry, in the dark, ruined carcass of Liverpool Street station, Jacob opened his eyes to a scene of unutterable horror.
21
On his way back to the loft, Brandon donned his jogging bottoms and hoodie and tripped along Worship Street. Moments away from his apartment, a loud echoing boom reverberated in the crisp morning air and the ground trembled. Some ravens took flight and Brandon looked up at the clear morning sky, but he dismissed the disturbance as noise from a local building site. He entered the building and thought nothing more of it.
Once in the loft, Brandon stripped off all of his clothes and slipped into his familiar garb of T-shirt and jeans. His hair and make-up would have to wait. Undistracted by any news or price feeds, he settled down in front of his screens and surveyed the progress of the programs he had left working. He was encouraged.
As he had anticipated, all of the major banks were suffering significant system issues. His Surveillance program showed that none of their online or mobile banking services were available, and each of their website homepages had a banner message warning of outages. All payment services were suspended, and even bank branches had no access to customer balances or transaction data. The financial system was in meltdown. Brandon had expected problems, but he was astonished that attacking the banks’ personal and mobile banking interfaces had wrought such havoc in so short a time.
But the retail banks weren’t Brandon’s real target. He was only attacking them to weaken his true quarry, and he turned his attention to the next tab in Surveillance. He smiled at the results. The Bank of England’s website was unavailable, even though it hadn’t been subject to the cyber-attack. Unlike the high street banks, it didn’t rely on retail or commercial banking business, so Brandon hadn’t been able to destabilise it by forcing millions of customers to deluge its accounts. Instead, he had targeted the central bank as the custodian of UK financial market stability and, in particular, its role as banker to the banks it regulated.
As a result of the turmoil being faced by the UK’s banks, Brandon knew that the central bank’s crisis management team would have implemented various contingency plans. But this didn’t mean better, safer markets. The recent surge in demand for mobile, on-the-go banking applications had resulted in the retail banks investing heavily in new electronic interfaces and tools for their customers, but these were little more than thin, digital veneers wrapped around their older legacy payment and accounting systems, which had received little new investment.
Faced with the onslaught of Brandon’s Denial of Service attack, the banks would temporarily disable their new systems and would deploy older versions, ones that had supported the financial system in past times. They were considered a capable back-up when the latest generation of systems failed, in part because they were less woven into the fabric of today’s mobile infrastructure, and they were kept in reserve for this scenario so that key market operations and payments could continue through the central bank. Brandon knew this was their drill, so this is what he was now attacking.
It was a one-sided contest.
Many of the back-up systems used archaic software, programs and codes, most of which hadn’t been updated for years, and this twentieth century architecture was no match for the latest arsenal of computer hacking techniques. Brandon’s Old Lady program had prodded and probed the central bank’s firewalls since the release of Replicant, learning as it went which attacks were being repelled and which contained vulnerabilities.
Brandon looked at
his screens. The eponymous program had broken into the Bank of England before he had returned to the loft. He now had access to all of its accounts and records, including the log-in credentials of the bank’s senior management and supervisors in its settlement and technology sections. He could begin his task.
He sat in front of his screens and tapped out his commands. He overrode security protocols, he installed new codes that he had previously drafted, and he uploaded account and payment data into the bank’s settlement systems. Brandon felt like a conductor in front of an orchestra, where each of the programs he commanded was a virtuoso whose skill and speed far surpassed his own, but which he directed with a flick of his wrist or a tap on his keyboard.
Brandon worked without rest, other than occasionally stepping up from his chair to stretch his limbs or top up his coffee. After four hours’ effort, he sat back and surveyed his work. Was he done, had he set up everything? He had ticked each item off his list and felt he’d left nothing to chance, but the fruits of his labour wouldn’t be known for another couple of hours, once he’d turned off Replicant. The banks would immediately regain control of their accounting and reporting systems and should be able to bring customer systems back online before the end of the day. But it would only be when the Bank of England’s internal reporting systems were rebooted that the new transactions would become apparent. These irreversible, anonymous, encrypted trades had already taken place; the Governor just didn’t know about them yet. But she soon would, and her log-in credentials had approved them.
It was time to retire Proximity and Replicant. The programs had delivered everything he had desired, and more, but he had no further need for them. He could send a kill broadcast at any time, and there was no point prolonging the misery. He hit the button.
Brandon exhaled and slumped back in his chair, exhausted now that all his efforts were over. He’d catch up on the news and markets later, but first he needed to wash away his disguise forever. Removing his make-up, restoring his hair colour and having a long, relaxing bath suddenly felt more important than the news. Wonders will never cease.
He flicked the switch to turn on his news and market feeds and headed for the bathroom. On his way out of the den, he heard a single line of the newsreader’s main report.
‘... and of course, dominating our headlines today is the terrorist attack on Liverpool Street during this morning’s rush hour...’
Brandon knew that what he’d done could be described as a type of terrorism, although he didn’t see it that way himself. He looked forward to hearing more about it later.
***
The sheaf of papers in his hand quivered like long grass in the autumn breeze, and Aubrey felt the chill. He closed his eyes and knocked on the Governor’s door.
‘Come in,’ Governor Perkins called from behind her desk. She’d had her worst day in office since her surprise appointment less than three months earlier, and what could be wrong now? ‘Oh, hello Aubrey, what is it? I hope it’s better news. We could certainly do with it.’
‘Ah, actually, no... not really Madam Governor.’
She sighed at Aubrey’s use of the old-fashioned title but ignored it. ‘Go on.’
‘We have a problem,’ he said, and passed her the report from the top of his pile. He waited for her to review the columns of data and then explained. ‘The column you need to look at is the third-to-last one, before the totals. It’s headed “BTC” ... which stands for Bitcoin.
‘What? Bitcoin? But that’s not a reserve currency, in fact it’s not even a real currency at all.’ The Governor knew that nit-picking wasn’t going to change the fact that it was listed on the report as one of the Bank of England’s international reserve currencies, but it didn’t make sense. ‘Why’s it on this report?’
‘That’s the problem, Madam Governor, we don’t know. But the thing is, we actually do own this Bitcoin, it’s been checked out. We apparently bought a load of it during the outages this morning, and we’re still trying to work out how.’ He paused to let the news sink in before dropping the second bombshell. ‘There are also Bitcoin balances in the reserve accounts we hold for each of the clearing banks, which you’ll see on the next page, so we can’t rely on these balances or our liquidity calculations at all.’
The Governor sat back and stared at the report. ‘Aubrey, you’re not making sense. We don’t have authority to hold Bitcoin, even if we were mad enough to want to. Someone would need to authorise a transaction to buy some, including paying for it in another currency, presumably dollars or sterling, for which payment approvals are needed.’
She slapped the report on the desk in exasperation and Aubrey resisted the urge to speak further. He hadn’t told her yet that their systems revealed her as authorising the trades, and he sensed it wasn’t a good time to broach it.
‘We don’t have a Bitcoin account to settle the transactions,’ Governor Perkins said, and Aubrey could see that she hadn’t finished. ‘Our systems wouldn’t just invent this column on the report, it had to be done deliberately. So that’s several reasons off the top of my head why this cannot happen and I’m sure there are more. Is this someone’s idea of a joke, because if it is, it’s the wrong day to play it, given what’s happened in the City today?’
‘No, Madam Governor, it’s not a joke. The Bitcoin ledger confirms all of the transactions were authenticated, and we definitely own them.’
‘OK, well let’s just get them to reverse the trades, and then we need someone to look at what happened as a matter of urgency.’
Aubrey shook his head. ‘That was our first thought too, but that cannot happen as Bitcoin trades cannot be reversed. New trades can be entered into, but the prior ones cannot be undone. It’s all to do with the way the blockchain process works and how the register is verified. And to agree new trades, we’d need to know the identity of the other party... but we don’t.’
‘How’s that possible? Surely with all of today’s anti-money-laundering rules we must know who we’re dealing with.’
‘Not with Bitcoin. We could be dealing with Elvis Presley and not know it.’ Aubrey instantly regretted his attempt at levity when he saw the Governor’s scowl, and he rushed to explain. ‘Bitcoin digital wallets don’t need to be in your own name and you can have a different wallet for every transaction if you want. It’s just how the system works.’
‘My God, so we may be dealing with terrorists here? And do we know where the sterling or dollars were sent?’
‘Yes, we know that bit,’ Aubrey said, and he handed over several sheets of paper with a list of hundreds of names. He paused to allow the Governor to review the pages. ‘This is where the money went, and it’s weird. If we were dealing with terrorists, why would they do that?’
‘Wow, you’re right, this is weird. No, it’s crazy.’ The Governor collected her thoughts. ‘OK, so in theory we could contact everyone on this list and ask for our money back, and give them back the Bitcoin?’
‘In theory, yes. But there are two problems. The first is the obvious one of publicly asking all of them to send us back the money. The political fall-out could be huge.’
‘Yes, you’re right, and there’s no way we could keep it quiet with so many people involved. And the other problem?’
‘The second is that we rather overpaid for the Bitcoin.’ Aubrey paused. This was the bit he most dreaded telling the Governor. ‘We’re not sure every name on that list owned the Bitcoin before today, or even if they know what Bitcoin is. The point is, according to all the records, they made a legitimate sale of Bitcoin to us, and we paid about a hundred times the current market rate.’
The Governor leaned forward and buried her head in her hands. She needed to consider all of the implications, including who else could be blamed. ‘Surely there are controls to stop that happening. Why weren’t our operations or settlements people alert to this?’
‘They didn’t know about it, as the trades took place when we were on contingency systems and only appeared in our
accounts when we returned to regular operations. Bitcoin didn’t even exist when some of these old systems were last used. But as far as the price is concerned, that’s another issue with these cryptocurrencies. They are valued at whatever you pay for them, as the market price has no basis in reality. That’s one reason why they’re so volatile. As you said, they’re not really currencies at all, not in the conventional sense, so normal rules don’t apply.’
‘So how much did we pay, exactly?’ the Governor asked, although she knew that the answer was on the first page of the report and she thumbed back to it again. She slumped back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling as if in prayer. Her head was reeling. They were facing something new, untested and alien, and she would have a lot of explaining to do to Her Majesty’s Treasury.
‘Aubrey, call another crisis meeting, as if we hadn’t had enough of those today. And then I think we better have a word with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He’s not going to like this.’
***
‘Have they sent you here to interrogate me, Detective Constable Saunders?’ Orla asked, propped up on the gurney in the overworked corridors of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
‘No, Orla,’ he said with a tender smile. ‘So you may call me Harry.’
Orla considered herself lucky. She had stitches in some gashes on her arms and head, now wrapped in bandages, and she was waiting for a couple of X-rays, but she was sure that everything would soon heal. The same could not be said for all of the explosion’s victims, many of whom had suffered life-changing injuries, or worse.
‘Do you know how Jacob and Maria are doing?’ Orla looked at Harry, who glanced down the corridor before answering.
‘Jacob’s fine, although he’s added a few more cuts and bruises to his collection. He looks like a prize-fighter after a street brawl and I’m sure he’s had worse.’
‘And Maria?’
‘Not so good, I’m afraid. She’s in intensive care and hasn’t come round yet. But she’s fighting, hanging in there.’