The Edge of Madness

by Michael Dobbs

  The wind that filled D’Arby’s sails was restless and consuming. He turned his sights on Shunin. ‘And what will happen when the cyber attacks hit Russia? How long will it be before the factory lights go out and you’re back to the days of bread lines in the street? It could even be worse than that. Gorbachev lost you the Soviet Empire. Next time you might lose Russia herself.’

  Shunin’s hands were in his lap, out of sight beneath the table, but beside him Harry could clearly hear a knuckle crack. The Russian wasn’t used to taking insults, least of all comparisons with Gorbachev, a man whom he regarded as being on a similar level of evolution as a slug. And Shunin knew precisely what the Englishman was implying. If the government in Moscow were seen to weaken, let alone lose control, then every separatist dog in the country would be baying for the moon. The race to destruction would be on. He wouldn’t survive, and D’Arby was suggesting that perhaps Russia herself wouldn’t survive. That was possible. Give a Chechen an excuse, and he’d grab not only your balls but your immortal soul.

  ‘We can all speculate, Prime Minister, but how do you know all this?’ the Russian snapped, angry, echoing the American President’s query.

  ‘Because we’ve all had too many episodes of computer systems that have failed or gone haywire that no one can explain. And in your case, because of Sosnovy Bor.’

  ‘You cannot prove a thing!’ Shunin exploded, pounding his fist on the table, rattling the silver.

  ‘Then why are you here?’ D’Arby fired back. ‘I wrote you a letter and you came running! Why did you do that if you didn’t believe it’s true?’

  The Russian didn’t respond but sat staring at D’Arby, drawing short, wheezing breaths, his broad nostrils flaring. Then his chair scraped backwards on the flagstones. The others watched as the Russian rose, very slowly. For a moment it looked as though he might be walking out on them, and certainly it was a little piece of theatre designed to remind them that he could do precisely that, but instead of leaving he moved to the end of the room where a decanter of whisky had been left on the vast Gothic sideboard alongside a number of cut crystal glasses. Slowly he poured, two fingers, then a little more. The rest watched as the peaty liquid washed into the tumbler. He took a sip as he turned and moved towards the smoke-streaked fireplace. ‘Speculate as much as you want about Russia, but your country is a target, Prime Minister, without question, otherwise why did you invite us here?’ He threw D’Arby’s taunt back at him, but his voice was measured, under control. ‘Be so kind as to explain this to me. Why should I risk Russia–for you?’ He took another, longer draught. ‘No, I tell you, this is fantasy. Nothing but fantasy. Perhaps better that I leave.’

  ‘Even better that you stay, otherwise your journey would have been wasted.’

  ‘I came out of curiosity. Yes, I am a curious man, I wanted to know what you had in mind. But this–’ the Russian shrugged, affecting disinterest–‘is not enough.’

  D’Arby smiled, like a theatregoer offering approval of a performance. He stretched for one of the bottles of wine that stood on the table, so far untouched, and carefully spilled a measure into his glass. Two could play at that game. He raised his glass in salute to the Russian President, but he didn’t drink. When he spoke, his voice had lost its stridency and was like that of an old friend. ‘You are here, Sergei Illich, because you are a wise man. Wise enough to be afraid–afraid that what I am saying is true, for you know that the Chinese have more reason to hate the Russians than any other country. All those wars and border confrontations, all the land that over the centuries Russia has grabbed from China. And all the oil and gas that now is plundered from beneath that same ground and is sent back to China at exorbitant cost. Russia has never been happy unless it had its neighbours by the neck. Now Mao wants to repay the compliment.’ At last he took a mouthful of wine, savoured it. ‘Oh, and by the way. Your missile systems. The ones you’ve got aimed at China–and at us.’

  ‘Our defensive systems,’ Shunin replied doggedly.

  ‘Computer controlled. With each computer controlled by a chip.’

  The Russian said nothing, it wasn’t necessary.

  ‘And where do so many of those chips come from? Where are they produced? Whose miniaturized and siliconized and transistorized little bits of magic lie at the very heart of your defensive systems?’ D’Arby’s tone was almost mocking and demanded a response, but none came. They all knew the answer to the question he’d posed.

  China.

  The moment had been handed back to Shunin. D’Arby had challenged him to show how serious he was, about leaving, about staying. The Russian drained his glass and replaced it on the sideboard. He didn’t refill it. When he turned his face was as ever impassive, never smiling, the eyes direct and locked onto the Englishman. The head nodded, only slightly. ‘OK, I am still curious.’

  Friday afternoon. Beijing.

  Sammi Shah, the BBC foreign correspondent, had grown to loathe Beijing. The initial enthusiasm that had persuaded him to accept the posting had quickly been swept aside by the noise, the cloying pollution, the multitude, the unremitting battering of the senses that was Beijing. It was like standing under a waterfall, waiting for the moment he would be swept away. But most of all he hated the obtuseness of the place, the fixed Oriental eyes, the scorn of a sustained smile, the scream contained within a prolonged silence. Nothing could be taken at face value and he couldn’t crack the code, no matter how hard he tried. The Chinese were inscrutable, and unscrewable. He’d tried that a few times, too, without much to show for it. This was a land of endless subtleties, too many for an up-front guy like Sammi.

  Yet that didn’t stop him realizing that something was going down. The pond had an unmistakable ripple. Soldiers who had spent the day secluded in side alleys were, by late afternoon, to be found standing on street corners, their Type 95 assault rifles replacing the pistols of the traffic cops. An official news conference about crop harvests was cancelled at short notice, as was a concert at the Olympic Stadium that was supposed to attract tens of thousands. No explanation was given for any of this, but nothing happened in China without a reason. Even the doves in the Forbidden City seemed unable to settle. And Sammi Shah had picked up enough of the subtleties of the place to know that a ripple on the pond might be caused by a raindrop, yet it could also be a sign that the earth was about to crack.

  He tried his contacts at the British Embassy: the information officer, the defence attaché, the second secretary, who was responsible for the spooky stuff, even the ambassador. Sammi had all their numbers. He couldn’t get hold of any of them. It was at this point he began to suspect that something serious was amiss. Telephones rang inside the embassy, yet no one picked them up, and every one of the mobile-phone numbers he tried left him with nothing but a recorded message telling him that the service was not available. Perplexed, intrigued, Sammi decided to see for himself.

  That was when he found the answer. The embassy was located on Guang Hua Road, an area where many diplomatic buildings congregated, and outside every one of those embassies he passed he discovered that the normal complement of Chinese guards had been doubled. As he nosed around, he stumbled across a couple of parked buses with still more guards inside. The British embassy was a modest affair, a two-storey pink-stucco structure with the lion and unicorn emblem above the portico, built during the parsimonious times of the 1950s and rebuilt after it had been ransacked by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. When Sammi arrived he found visitors being pushed back behind the solid green railings, and when he tried to ask why he got nothing but the bark of command to join them. Whatever was going on had no clear shape and was all blurred edges, but something was up and it seemed enough to merit a short report and to cover his daily expenses. So he found his spot in the roadway directly outside the embassy and set up his equipment–by himself, he hadn’t been able to get hold of his producer, wayward bugger, but that made no difference. The gear was simple but immensely powerful–a battery-powered laptop w
ith a flip-up lid that acted as its antenna, plugged into a small video camera and connected to the Inmarsat satellite network that would link him direct to the BBC in London. All he had to do was stand in front of it and talk, and that’s exactly what Sammi did. As he found his spot, tugged at his shirt, and looked down the lens, he was still debating how he would finish his report. He didn’t realize the decision had already been taken for him. He never saw the officer, gun in hand, approaching him from behind.

  Friday afternoon. Shanjing.

  At first glance the Sunrise Toy Manufactory on the outskirts of Shanjing appeared an innocuous facility. It was a trading warehouse, so the large sign above the perimeter fence suggested, but no one was fooled. The security was too tight for a simple toy shop, and there was no sign of the usual trucks and entrepreneurial bustle. Casual visitors were discouraged. When the proprietor of a soup kitchen attempted to set up stall near the main entrance, he was rapidly persuaded to change his mind by the barrel of a QSZ-92 semiautomatic pistol that was pointed in the general direction of his half-digested breakfast. Any further seed of curiosity that might have been sown amongst the locals was smothered when they saw that many of the visitors to the warehouse arrived in long-wheelbase Hongqi limousines, the ones with darkened windows. That smelt of something official. So it was simpler and far safer for the neighbours to avert their eyes and get on with their own lives. It was the Chinese way.

  When Fu Zhang arrived the director was waiting to greet him and immediately offered tea, which Fu declined. He found himself being treated with courtesy but also considerable caution; it wasn’t usual for State Security to dip their fingers into this pie and Fu had never been seen at the Sunrise Manufactory before. His arrival had been heralded by instructions from the highest quarters in Beijing and already dark rumours were swirling in every corner of the director’s office. Soon he found himself being ushered with an unmistakeable edge of reluctance into the heart of the complex–Mao’s so-called Room of Many Miracles. Not that those he found gathered there were a pious bunch. The room was about the size of a school gymnasium, high ceiling, no windows, lots of air conditioning, along with the constant low humming of computer drives. It was a little like a cinema with one wall covered in a huge screen made up of a series of smaller high-definition screens butted tight up against each other. Instead of rows of seats there were individual workstations with their own hi-def screens for around three dozen people, all of whom were young and mostly male.

  Fu Zhang didn’t feel at home. He was a fastidious man used to order and a proper way of doing things, and while the room itself was remarkably clean and lacking in any sign of clutter, those who worked here were not. Many of them dressed bizarrely in styles so outlandish or unkempt that not so many years ago they’d have been thrown in jail for deviation. Some of them weren’t even wearing socks. The director, Li Changchun, was deferential enough, indeed he seemed a little frightened, which gratified Fu, but most of the young staff seemed to ignore him, almost making a point of it. They drifted around, joking to their colleagues as they passed, indulging in horseplay or holding out their hands and ‘high-fiving’ in the Western manner. But perhaps it was only to be expected; most of them had been educated abroad, their sense of responsibility turned to mush by Coca-Cola. And to Fu, ageing and recently mocked, these people were guilty of the most heinous crime of all; they were young, scarcely old enough for a barber’s rash, even the director was no more than thirty. They reminded him of those wretched soldiers. They also reminded Fu that he had been young, once, a long time ago. Too long.

  Yet Fu Zhang needed these people. This was a day when the world would spin a little faster and these were the people who would do the pushing. That didn’t mean he had to like them. In his view, miracles shouldn’t come dressed in jeans and unironed T-shirts, and as though to goad him, in a far corner two of the miracle-workers burst into raucous laughter.

  ‘Do they think this is a time for amusement?’ he snapped at Li.

  ‘They are young, Minister, and nervous. That’s why they laugh, to expel the devils of anxiety.’

  ‘This is a war room!’ he screamed, sending spittle flying. He realized that he was nervous, too.

  His hostility seemed to shock the director and, like a silken sheet rippling in the breeze, the rest of the room gradually came to calm.

  ‘We are ready. We require only your instruction,’ the director said softly.

  Fu pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and hawked into it, letting the soiled tissue fall to the ground. The director was still looking at him, impassive, youthful, insolent.

  ‘So what are you waiting for?’ Fu Zhang barked, on edge. ‘Begin!’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Friday afternoon. Castle Lorne.

  Flora MacDougall stood at the counter in her kitchen casting her eye over the marbled cuts of venison she was preparing for the evening. She took things at her own pace, for she was no longer young, yet she was secretly delighted to be entertaining so many guests. She was never happier than when the old place was brought to life. The clans in this part of the world had lived on the edge of disaster for as long as memory could trace–they had been followers of William Wallace, the Bruce and the Bonnie Prince, and they had taken their share of the suffering that went with such loyalties, but the death of her husband Alan was a blow that the redoubtable Flora had found almost unbearable. The two of them had spent much of their young married life in the colonial service, travelling to some of the most impractical yet darkly exotic parts of the world, after which Alan had given a large chunk of his life to Westminster. But in the end, as they’d always intended, they came back to the place where it had all started, in Lorne. Then, and all too soon, she was left alone.

  Yet she was an intensely practical woman, never maudlin, and retained a passion for her heritage as boundless as the ocean that lay beyond the end of the firth. Nipper was part of that heritage, and he was a survivor, too. He’d been out walking with her husband the day they’d both fallen. No one knew exactly what had happened, but the boy had been found unconscious at the foot of a cliff, with her husband dead beneath him. Nipper could remember nothing of the accident, but in her mind Flora imagined the child slipping, clinging to the cliff edge, and Alan stretching to reach for him, swapping his life for the boy’s. But the accident had done damage to Nipper, shaken his brain so badly that it had left him epileptic. It wasn’t enough that he’d lost his granddad, he’d lost part of himself, too, and yet with his freckled face and rolling lilt of an accent he was still a MacDougall, and no time was more precious to Flora than the weeks in the summer when he came to stay.

  He was with her now, in the kitchen, helping prepare the vegetables. She had switched on the small television that stood on the dresser in the corner, the volume turned down low and tuned to one of the news channels, for she still retained a fascination for those distant places she knew from her early married days with Alan. She wasn’t paying much heed, her attention was focused on the venison, so it was some time before she became aware of what the newsreader was discussing. When she had finished watching she put aside her kitchen knife and wiped her hands with great care on an old cloth.

  ‘What is it, Granny?’ Nipper asked, as ever alert.

  She turned to face him, a furrow on her old brow. ‘You know, laddie, I made a solemn promise that we’d no’ be disturbing them,’ she said, ‘but there are times in life when you have to be making up the rules for yourself. And I’ve a strong sense that maybe this is one of them.’

  Early Friday evening. Shanjing.

  In the Room of Many Miracles the tension was running high.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ Fu Zhang demanded. ‘I instructed you–begin!’

  Li Changchun fidgeted. ‘Of course, Minister. But may I ask–’ the young director stumbled as he reached for the appropriate phrase–‘whether this most awesome order should not be given in writing? It is historic. Our children and our children’s children should know what
has been done here.’

  Fu’s nostrils dilated in disgust. Posterity go hang, it was clear what the director wanted. His arse covering. The instructions had changed, the timing been brought forward, their carefully prepared system was being rattled, leaving the director ill at ease. ‘If you succeed they will chant songs to your memory,’ Fu replied. ‘There is no need for paper.’ The whole point of this facility was that not a soul should know what was going on here, not even the cleaners who were specially chosen for their dulling age and stupidity, yet this half-wit wanted to write it all down.

  ‘I do not wish in any way to contradict you, Minister—’

  ‘Then don’t!’ Fu snapped, letting forth a snort of irritation.

  Li Changchun paused, considering whether he should pursue the matter one more time. He lived in a world of logic where matters were always pursued to their limits, often to extremes, but he also enjoyed his elevated position and the material benefits that accompanied it. Those who sat in high seats sometimes had a long way to fall, and Fu was just the type that might give him a push. Anyway, if this failed he’d soon be scraping camel dung from the distant wastelands of Xinjiang, no matter how many pieces of paper he had to show for it. Reluctantly, he gave a nod. ‘As you wish, Minister.’ He turned to his workstation.

  ‘You know what to do,’ Fu muttered, impatient.

  The director produced a computer fob that was dangling from a rope around his neck. He examined it with the reverence he might have reserved for an ancestral bone, inserting it carefully into a lock on his computer console. He twisted it gently. It told the computer who he was, and that he was authorized. Li composed himself, made a fractional adjustment to the position of his keyboard, then tapped out a short code. Immediately the aspect of the room underwent a change. The long video wall flickered into life.