Cyber Terror

by Rose, Malcolm

Almost at once, Toby looked crestfallen. “I don’t know the number!”

  “What number?”

  “Airport security. I’ve got it on speed-dial. I don’t need to remember it.” He glanced at his watch again. Panicking, he yelled, “That flight’s always on schedule. They’re about to take off!”

  A crowd of neighbours had assembled on the lawn outside. One or two were brave enough to approach the front, but they probably thought no one was at home. They might even think they’d seen Toby leaving earlier.

  Jordan reclaimed his phone and keyed in his emergency number again. “I know someone who can help. Is it going from Heathrow?”

  Toby nodded. “Flight BA460 for Madrid. Terminal 3.”

  “What’s the problem?” Angel asked in Jordan’s ear.

  “You’ve got to stop Flight BA460 from Heathrow to Madrid. Two-thirty. One of the pilots isn’t who he says he is. He’s going to crash the plane in London. On Parliament.”

  “What? Okay. I trust you. I’ll get on to the airport. Stop it first, ask questions later.”

  Jordan ended the brief call. He could just make out a distant siren. No doubt one of the locals had called the emergency services to the scene of the explosion.

  “Is that it?” Toby asked.

  Jordan nodded. “My...friend will sort it out.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Toby looked blank. “Who are you?”

  Jordan shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. But...”

  “What?”

  “They’ll take you to hospital,” Jordan said. “Fix you up. I’d like to have a talk, but I’d rather not be around when the police arrive, if I don’t have to be. Best not to mention me, eh? It complicates things. I’ll visit you in about an hour. Okay?”

  “I suppose so. But how do I know the plane...?”

  “Watch telly while you’re waiting. Hope there’s nothing about one coming down on London.”

  To avoid the swarm of concerned neighbours, Jordan made for the back door.

  Of all the threats to airport security, a terrorist piloting an aeroplane was the scenario that the authorities feared most. Angel did not tell them that his information came from a teenager. He simply activated the coded alert and Heathrow swung into action.

  Flight BA460 had left its gate and was taxiing slowly towards the main runway. Allocated a slot, it was in a queue for take-off. It was too risky to recall the aircraft because the rogue pilot would guess that he’d been rumbled. The security staff dreaded what he might do.

  They decided to invent a crisis that would allow them to cancel all flights instead of picking on one. Air traffic control announced an immediate airport shutdown. “We have a Boeing 757 turning back for emergency landing with a fuel leak from its right wing. Clear all air traffic. Repeat. Clear all traffic. Return to gates in sequence.” To make it look realistic, all of Heathrow’s fire appliances raced to the runway and lined up in readiness.

  As soon as Flight BA460 pulled up to its gate, it was stormed by specially trained officers. The fake pilot was led away and the authorities set about repairing the chaos to their schedules. Hundreds of disgruntled passengers never got to know that a boy called Jordan Stryker had averted carnage. They knew only hours of disruption to their flights.

  Dodging round patients, visitors and staff, Jordan hurried to Accident and Emergency, where Toby Cotterill had been taken.

  Parts of the pilot’s arms and legs were sheathed in bandages. His bruised face was patchy blue and his dark hair was still dusted with powdered plaster. He looked like he’d just survived a few rounds with a champion boxer.

  Jordan waved a hand towards the television attached to the ceiling. “Have you heard? No crashes on the news. Just a false alarm over an iffy plane and major delays.”

  Toby nodded.

  Jordan waited for a nurse to stride past before pulling up a chair. “I wanted to ask you a few things.”

  “Fire away,” Toby said. “I owe you.”

  “How did you get on with Captain Lazenby?”

  “He’s a fine man and a good work colleague. I mean, he was.”

  “That didn’t stop you having a go at him in the newspapers.”

  Toby’s battered face took on a red flush. “I hope it didn’t come across like that. I was having a go at everyone else, because they treated him like a god and the rest of the crew like we didn’t matter. You’d think we were all sitting around having a laugh and a drink while Phil saved our lives. You know, after the Edinburgh incident, I didn’t work with him much.”

  “You fell out?”

  “No. We do what our masters tell us. We just didn’t get paired up that often.”

  “Did he have anything to do with drugs?”

  Toby raised his eyebrows. “We all do. Our sleep patterns are all over the place. One pill to help us sleep, a different pill to keep us awake. Passengers like their pilots to be awake at the controls.”

  Jordan smiled. “What about illegal drugs?”

  “No chance. He wasn’t that sort.”

  “Where were you when you heard he’d died?”

  “In a Paris hotel, watching BBC News, waiting for the sleeping pill to kick in,” Toby answered. He shook his head sadly. “News was scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Hero pilot dies.”

  Jordan remembered that Paris was the first place mentioned in the Lemon Jelly song. He said, “You get around. Could call you a ramblin’ man.”

  Toby’s face creased with puzzlement. “Um... I suppose so.”

  His reaction was not suspicious. Jordan changed tactics. “How did you meet Carlton Reed?”

  “Who?” Toby said, genuinely mystified.

  “Sorry. I thought... Anyway, how about someone or something called Forew?”

  Toby shook his head. “You’re strange. And I never found out how you got into my house.”

  “Through a bedroom window.” With a wry grin, Jordan added, “I might have damaged it a bit.”

  “It’s not the only damage. I won’t press charges of breaking and entering.” He pointed at the wall clock and said, “The police are coming to interview me in a few minutes. I guess you’ll want to evaporate before they arrive.”

  Jordan nodded. “I can do without the hassle.”

  “If I thought for one moment you were a bad guy...”

  “I’m not.”

  “I can tell,” Toby replied. “Are you still off the record?”

  “It’s best, yes.”

  Smiling, Toby shook his head. “You’d better do your disappearing act, then.”

  Jordan stood up. “Thanks for the warning,” he said. “This time, you can have the glory for keeping a planeload of passengers safe.”

  “I’m annoyed with you,” said Angel.

  Jordan knew that Unit Red’s chief had a stern side to his nature. He stretched out his arms and asked, “Why? What have I done?”

  “You took unauthorized time off your case. You went outside your brief.”

  For a moment, Jordan didn’t get it. Then he laughed. “You mean, saving the Houses of Parliament and a lot of politicians?”

  Angel’s face finally cracked. “The public will never forgive you.”

  “They’ll never know.”

  “That’s true,” Angel replied. “Neither will the passengers. They’ll be enjoying Madrid, not realizing how close they were to dying in a disaster.” He hesitated before adding, “You did well.”

  “I got lucky.”

  “Not as lucky as the MPs,” Angel said. “But I’m glad you’re getting used to the Unit Red way of doing things.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Plenty of hard work, quite a bit of danger, a small amount of luck and no credit at all. But up here,” he said, tapping the side of his head, “you feel good. Sometimes – like now – very good indeed.”

  “I’d feel even better if I’d got Short Circuit as well. I’m pretty sure it’s not Toby Cotterill. For one thing, he was in Paris when
I was in Ipswich with Phil Lazenby. And the bloke with the bomb didn’t do things like Short Circuit, did he?”

  “No,” Angel replied. “We’re interrogating his mate – the fake pilot – right now. Leave that angle to me. Kate said you were sniffing out a drug connection.”

  Jordan shook his head. “No sign of it yet.”

  But Angel’s comment made him think again. He remembered the first line on the pilot’s notepad. Ipswich 28/4. Using his BCI, he went online and searched on Ipswich 28th April 2012. It was a Saturday and there were several events on in the town that day. One in particular caught his eye. There had been a stamp fair. He wasn’t sure what happened at a stamp fair, so he logged on to the organizer’s site. Apparently, about twenty dealers had turned up to sell collectible postage stamps.

  Jordan closed his eyes and sighed.

  “What’s up?” Angel asked.

  “False alarm,” Jordan admitted. “Phil Lazenby had a collection of stamps. I saw Dutch ones. Maybe he had Colombian ones in a different folder. I bet he phoned someone about what was on sale at a stamp fair on the twenty-eighth of April. It was stamps, not drugs.”

  “It’s marvellous what you can do with an online brain,” said Angel. “Which reminds me. Raven’s got something for you. A file’s come in from Dipak Hardikar.”

  “Right,” Jordan replied. “I’ll go and see her.”

  13 MADISON FLINT

  When Jordan walked into the computer room, Raven twisted round and said, “Oh, it’s you.”

  It wasn’t the warmest of welcomes. “Hi,” he said. “Dipak’s sent me something.”

  “Yes. An e-mail with an attachment.” She threw a mass of black hair over her shoulder. “Want to see it on screen or are you going to do it in your amazing brain?”

  Approaching her from the side, Jordan noticed how skinny she was. She would have looked in place strutting down a catwalk. Not really tempted to take a peek at her with terahertz vision, Jordan answered, “The screen’s easier.”

  “Here you go.” She twisted the monitor so he could read it easily.

  In his e-mail, Dipak explained that he hadn’t yet been able to break into the bank that handled HiSpec’s finances, but he had found staff details from a five-year-old file buried in the deep web.

  Raven asked, “Do you want to open it now?”

  “Yes, please.”

  It was an out-of-date list of HiSpec workers and, at a stroke, Jordan had generated hundreds of suspects. Far too many.

  Raven laughed. “You look panic-stricken.”

  “How many people are on this?”

  “613.”

  Jordan swallowed.

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” Raven told him. “Look. Every name’s got a job description. I can eliminate all of the admin, cleaners and low-level staff in general. If Short Circuit’s here, he’s going to be working on microchip design. He’s quite senior.”

  “Unless being a cleaner is his or her cover,” Jordan said.

  “Doubtful. Internal security is tight, to say the least. Cameras everywhere. They’d spot a cleaner interfering with design.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Chip manufacturers are well known for obsessing about security. That’s why they wouldn’t tell us anything about personnel. That’s why you had to do it by the back door.” Raven looked down at her watch. “It’s late. Unit Red asks a lot of us, doesn’t it? You have to sacrifice your time because the job always comes first. Anyway, I’ll go through it in the morning, then save a filtered version. That’ll be more manageable.”

  “Okay. Thanks,” Jordan replied.

  Jordan’s mind had no real limits. The Unit Red computer system was available to him through a brain implant. Once logged in, he had the World Wide Web in his head. Its images were fed into his optic nerve. When he closed his eyes, he created a dark screen for browsing. His resources were infinite, but his skull felt claustrophobic. When he was online, it was crammed with pictures and information.

  Almost everybody else in the Unit Red house was asleep. Lying on his bed, Jordan could make out a guard’s slow steady footfall along one of the corridors. In the cemetery outside, shrubs rustled in the wind. Above his head, two birds were walking across the roof. Jordan could pinpoint the sounds. The unseen birds were two-and-a-half metres apart. He could detect the smell of damp fertile earth and growing plants, as well as the last meal cooked in the kitchen. Mixed with the airborne cocktail of chemicals was the faint whiff of oil from the workshop.

  On his internal screen, he put up Dipak’s unfiltered attachment and executed a search for anyone called Forew. He drew a blank. He scrolled through the list, but discovered nothing of interest and soon got bored. Checking HiSpec’s staff would be much easier once Raven had edited out unnecessary names, so he decided to wait. Instead, he opened the document’s properties. He was surprised to see that it had been created, modified and accessed today. Perhaps it bore the date of 23rd May 2012 because that was when Raven had received and saved it. Even so, he expected a record of its creation five years previously.

  In his mind, he formed an e-mail and sent it to Dipak, thanking him for the file, but asking him to send a fresh copy.

  Even though it was after midnight, Dipak must still have been online because, within three minutes, the second copy arrived. Straight away, Jordan examined the file’s properties and found its creation date in 2007. It suggested to Jordan that Raven had already started working on the document, modifying it in some way, before she’d saved it.

  Why?

  Jordan opened the new attachment side-by-side with the one that Raven had written onto the computer. Using a tool that compared two versions of the same document, he discovered that the new file contained 614 entries. Not 613. The comparison program found the extra record in seconds.

  For some reason, Raven had deleted all mention of a microchip designer called Madison Flint.

  “It’s running like a normal electric car,” Kate said as Jordan continued the trial drive of his Jaguar. “We’ve added a collision avoidance system, but most of the clever stuff’s waiting for new microchips. Your special features are only running at about twenty per cent. I’ve engaged the speed limiter, though. The car always knows where it is – clever thing – and it’s got a database of the speed limits on every road in the country, so it keeps you on the right side of the law. You can override it, but let’s not risk it today.”

  “Collision avoidance system?”

  “If you drive at that lorry in front – or veer off towards a barrier – the car’s radar will detect an imminent collision and slow down – or stop – to avoid it. You could be fast asleep or...whatever. It’d do it automatically. And if something comes at you from the side or behind, it’ll take evasive action.”

  If the collision avoidance system had been fitted earlier, Jordan thought, it would have detected a shop front in Ipswich, slowed down and kept Phil Lazenby safe. But perhaps Short Circuit would have been able to override that mechanism too.

  “What about me? You’re getting new chips for the car – ones that Short Circuit can’t attack – but what about the ones in my head and arm?”

  Kate shook her head. “I asked. They’re too specialized and too complicated to replace in a few days. We can’t do anything in the short term. You’re going to have to catch him before he can do you any damage.”

  Jordan eased off the accelerator, pulled over and stopped the car. On their left was an old abandoned industrial site. The nearest building was a large Victorian workhouse. All of its windows had long since fallen out and great cracks had appeared in its walls, as if a giant hand – or an earthquake – had shaken it to death. The place was surrounded by a sturdy wire fence and signs declared, Danger – Keep Out.

  “Is something wrong?” Kate asked.

  “No. Well, yes,” Jordan replied, turning off the engine. “I mean, not with the car. But there’s something wrong, yes.”

  “What?”

  Jord
an glanced at the dashboard. “Are there any bugs in here?”

  “Bugs?”

  “Listening devices,” Jordan explained.

  “Oh. Sorry,” said Kate. “I’m still a firefighter and engineer at heart. Not used to the spying jargon. No. Not as far as I know.”

  “Can I tell you something in secret? Something that mustn’t get back to Unit Red.”

  Kate nodded. “Of course. I’m a human being first, not just one of Angel’s servants.”

  “All right.” Jordan took in and let out a breath. “Last week, you said Raven’s on our side. But what do you really know about her?”

  Kate raised her eyebrows. “She’s part of Unit Red. Chosen by Angel. Trusted by Angel. That’s a good start.” Kate looked sideways at him. “I’ve got no reason to question Angel’s judgement.”

  “My mum used to say, ‘If you question nothing, you learn nothing’.”

  “I think we’re lucky to have Raven. What’s bothering you?”

  Jordan told Kate what had happened the previous day. He told her about Dipak’s document and the deleted information.

  “Well...” Kate shook her head. “You’re right. It’s a bit weird, but let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  “There’s only one conclusion to jump to,” Jordan replied. “Raven removed someone called Madison Flint from the list.”

  “But we don’t know why. Did you do any more research?”

  “Yeah. I found two people called Madison Flint. One of them’s young.”

  “How young?” Kate asked.

  “Last year she went on a TV talent show, singing and dancing. She did pretty well for a nine-year-old.”

  “So, she was four when the HiSpec list came out. What about the other one?”

  “She’s a Scottish MP so there’s lots of information about her.”

  “And?”

  “She’s always lived in Scotland. She studied history at university and never had a job in electronics.”

  “That’s all?”

  Jordan nodded. “A dead end.”

  Kate thought for a moment and then said, “You could ask Raven what’s going on.”

  “That’d be like accusing her of something.”