Blackout: Tomorrow Will Be Too Late

by Marc Elsberg

  Shannon smiled with thin lips; she wasn’t celebrating. After ten more minutes she risked following the satnav’s instructions again. The race had used up a quarter-tank of petrol. She would have to ‘fuel up’ again at the hospital.

  Nanteuil, France

  Annette was scared out of her wits. There were two men in protective suits standing at the door. Luckily, they had come to their aid.

  ‘One piece of luggage per person,’ said the crackling voice behind one of the masks.

  Behind them, frightened people were crowded into the back of an open lorry.

  ‘We’ll get to come back here afterwards, right?’ asked Celeste.

  ‘We don’t have any information,’ answered one of the men. ‘Our job is to evacuate people.’

  Annette had read about Chernobyl and Fukushima. She’d wondered then what it must have been like for people, having to leave their homes in a hurry, afraid they may never return. Panicked that they might already have been severely, even mortally, affected by the radiation. With the prospect of starting again in a strange place instead of living out their twilight years in their own home. This was the fear she now heard in Celeste’s voice. For eleven generations, over three hundred years, the family had lived on this property, despite the upheavals of the French Revolution and two world wars. Never had Annette imagined that one day she herself would have to join a refugee convoy. When she and Bertrand had left Paris, she’d told herself it was nothing more than a brief vacation. Only after they had killed all the Bollards’ chickens and used up all their supplies, having been barred from leaving the house, did she admit to herself that she was now a displaced person.

  Her attention shifted to her body. Did anything feel strange? Unusual? Some sensation that would indicate that the radiation was already gnawing away at her cells?

  While the two men in suits stowed their luggage in a compartment under the cargo bay, Bertrand gave her a hand-up. The people on the wooden benches slid closer together to make room for them. Celeste sat down next to her, her eyes never leaving her farm. As the doors closed and they set off, all Annette could see of the Bollards was the backs of their heads. They were both watching their beloved home grow smaller, not knowing if they would ever see it again.

  Düsseldorf, Germany

  Shannon parked the Porsche in the underground car park, right in front of the door to the staircase. She grabbed the laptop and the torch, jumped out of the car and hurried up the stairs to Manzano on the third floor. She stumbled, out of breath, into the ward where she had left him. He was lying on one of the beds, covered in blankets, his head turned to the side.

  ‘Piero?’ she said, breathless.

  When he didn’t move, she called to him more loudly, hurried to his bedside.

  ‘Piero!’

  His eyelids fluttered, he raised his head sluggishly.

  ‘We have to get out of here!’ she said, holding up the laptop and waving it around. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Where … where did you get that?’

  ‘Later!’

  She tore the blankets off his legs. A glistening dark spot the size of a plate stood out on his right trouser leg. When she froze, he said, ‘It’s fine. Give me the crutches.’

  As fast as his injury allowed, Manzano limped after her. In the stairwell Shannon lit the way. When they reached the door to the car park she put a finger to her lips and signalled for him to wait. She turned off the torch, opened the door a crack and peered out. In the darkness she could barely see a thing, no Audi either.

  ‘The Porsche is right by this door,’ she whispered. ‘I’m going to unlock it now with the remote. Then you come through and climb in.’

  Shannon edged the door open. The lights of the Porsche flashed as she unlocked the doors.

  Manzano hobbled forward, caught the shadow that fell over Shannon’s face. Someone was standing in the doorway, blocking his way. Manzano recognized Pohlen’s powerful figure. With all his strength, Manzano rammed his crutches into the policeman’s stomach. Pohlen doubled over, Manzano brought a crutch down hard on his head. Once, twice, a third time. Pohlen fell, held his arm up in defence. Manzano kicked him in the chest with his good leg, the injured one almost giving out. He heard a whistling sound, landed one more kick. Pohlen cringed, but didn’t fight back. Behind the Porsche a second man was kneeling over Shannon, Manzano could only make out the back of her head. Before the man could defend himself, Manzano had already knocked him in the skull twice with the crutches. He fell to one side, unconscious.

  Shannon pulled herself up to sitting, looked around in a panic, screamed: ‘The keys! The laptop!’

  Manzano saw that Pohlen was getting to his feet. He limped over to him and struck him in the face once more with the crutches.

  ‘Got them!’ cried Shannon.

  As Manzano turned back towards the car, Pohlen reached out to grab him. The passenger door was already open, Shannon had started the engine. Manzano threw himself into the seat and the Porsche tore off, motor revving and tyres squealing, Manzano panting in the passenger seat as the door snapped shut on its own. Shannon skidded around a curve, braked so suddenly that Manzano almost hit the dashboard, came to a stop next to a grey car. She ripped open the door, a hand in the side compartment.

  ‘Ouch! Dammit!’ She kneeled next to the car, jabbed at the front tyre with something. When she ran around the back he spotted a small blade in her hand. She punctured the rear tyre too, let go of the scalpel and was back in the driver’s seat before the clatter of the blade against the tarmac had died away.

  Carefully she steered on to the street. Manzano saw that her right hand was bleeding.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re getting the hell out of here,’ Shannon answered.

  Berlin, Germany

  ‘Conference room,’ the chancellor’s secretary whispered to Michelsen. He hastened his step, Michelsen following in his wake. The cabinet members and crisis team were already tapping fingers impatiently in front of the screens as they awaited the start of the teleconference. Only the chancellor was missing. European heads of state, ministers and top officials peered down from the monitors.

  ‘Urgent crisis meeting,’ explained the defence minister.

  Whispers, murmurs.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ the chancellor called out as he stormed into the room.

  The defence minister shrugged.

  The chancellor lowered himself into his seat, where the camera would capture him, pressed the button to activate the mic and shouted his question into the virtual round.

  Michelsen had become familiar with these faces over the past few days. It wasn’t always possible for the same individual to represent his or her country at every meeting, but it had been agreed that each member state would confine its choice of representatives to a maximum of three. So Michelsen was surprised when she saw a new face on the Spanish screen. At second glance, she realized that the man wore a uniform. An uncomfortable feeling crept over her.

  The Spaniard, a bullish man with a moustache and heavy bags under his eyes, answered, ‘We wanted to inform our coalition partners as soon as possible that the prime minister and the entire government of our country consider themselves no longer capable of fulfilling the duties of office … In order to maintain public order, the army chiefs of staff under my leadership have declared themselves prepared to command the affairs of state until further notice.’

  Michelsen felt as though she had been trampled by the stampeding bulls at the annual fiesta in Pamplona. The military in Spain had seized power in a coup.

  The Hague, Netherlands

  ‘There was something important I had to do,’ said Bollard sourly. He had no interest in defending himself for having to find food for his family. ‘When the people in charge don’t provide enough food, then we have to find it ourselves.’

  Wrapped in a thick jacket, Bollard sat with the Europol director and the rest of the leadership team. Since the previous night the
building management had reduced the supply of electricity to cover essentials only. The heating had been dialled down to eighteen degrees. Most of the lifts had been shut down. Those who still made it in to work were all wrapped in thick layers.

  ‘We should arrange for a special provision for Europol employees and their families,’ Bollard grew heated. ‘Or soon we won’t be able to function. Half of the staff have already stopped reporting for duty.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Director Ruiz said guardedly.

  ‘Message just in from Interpol,’ one of the team called out as Bollard walked into the incident room. ‘I can’t work out if it’s good news or bad.’

  ‘Don’t talk in riddles,’ snapped Bollard, striding across the room to look at the monitor for himself.

  A photograph of a corpse filled the screen. He scrolled down and more images appeared: a close-up of the dead man’s face. Several bullet wounds to the chest … The images were accompanied by a police report from Bali, describing how the victim had been found that morning, local time, by farmers in a patch of forest near the village of Gegelang. The dead man had been provisionally identified as the missing German national, Hermann Dragenau.

  Bollard repeated the name while he sifted through his memory. ‘That’s the Talaefer employee they’re looking for – the chief architect of their SCADA systems!’

  They compared images of Dragenau with the photos of the dead man.

  ‘They do look similar,’ Bollard’s colleague said.

  ‘Is there anything there about who killed him?’ asked Bollard.

  ‘No. They found neither money nor valuables nor identification on him. Could be a straightforward case of robbery-homicide.’

  ‘You think this is a coincidence?’ asked Bollard. ‘A man on our shortlist of suspects for tampering with the SCADA systems of Europe’s power plants flies to Bali a couple of days before the devastating blackout that he might just be complicit in, and as soon as we start looking for him he turns up dead. Whatever he knew, he can’t talk now!’

  Bollard stood up.

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidence. Hartlandt’s going to have to go through every aspect of this Dragenau’s life and shine a light in its darkest corner!’

  Between Düsseldorf and Cologne, Germany

  The Porsche’s headlights cut through the twilight.

  ‘Shit,’ cursed Manzano.

  ‘What’s up?’

  She heard him typing frantically. For the past half hour, Manzano had been bent over his laptop, totally absorbed. He had murmured unintelligible things to himself, interspersed with outbursts of surprise.

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘There’s an IP address here,’ said Manzano, excited. ‘We need power. And an Internet connection. Urgently.’

  ‘No problem,’ Shannon replied. ‘Plenty of those to go round.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ Manzano insisted. ‘Every night at 1.55 a.m. my computer sent data to a certain IP address. You know what I’m talking about when I say IP address?’

  ‘IP as in Internet Protocol. It’s a computer’s address within a network, and on the Internet as well.’

  ‘Exactly. Theoretically, you can use it to locate any computer. And my laptop sent data to an address that I don’t recognize. My guess is that he broke in through the Europol network.’

  ‘So it was the Euro-cops then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I need an Internet connection to find out more.’

  He clapped his hand against his forehead.

  ‘I’m such a jerk! I know where we have to go!’

  He leaned forward, inspected the satnav.

  ‘Do you know how to use this thing?’

  ‘Where do we have to go?’

  ‘Brussels.’

  Shannon pressed a few buttons to bring up the route.

  ‘A good two hundred kilometres,’ she read. She cast a look at the dashboard. ‘There’s enough in the tank. So, why Brussels?’

  ‘I know someone there.’

  ‘And they’ve got power and Internet access?’

  ‘If the Monitoring and Information Centre of the European Commission has no power and no Internet connection, then we really are fucked. Pardon my language.’

  ‘Fine. The satnav says it’ll take two hours.’

  ‘But first, I need something to eat.’

  ‘Where do we get that?’

  Brussels, Belgium

  Sophia hurriedly stuffed a piece of bread into her mouth while the others trickled into the conference room. Last to come in was the head of the MIC, Zoltán Nagy. He got straight to the point.

  ‘We can forget about help from the US,’ Nagy said. ‘What’s more, any help we can expect from the Russians and Chinese, from Turkey, Brazil and others, must now be shared between Europe and the United States.’

  For a few seconds there was a stunned silence. Then they started to run through the latest updates.

  ‘NATO high command has invoked Article Five,’ Nagy said in a gloomy voice. ‘According to the principle of collective defence, members of the alliance will proceed with full resolve against the aggressors. There remains, however, no indication as to who those aggressors are.’

  Sophia was thinking of Piero Manzano. She hadn’t heard a word from him. Had he been able to help Europol in tracking down the culprits?

  The International Atomic Energy Agency had raised the accident in Saint-Laurent to level 6, one step below the catastrophes in Chernobyl and Fukushima. ‘The evacuation zone has been expanded to thirty kilometres,’ reported the team member tasked with following the matter. ‘Cities such as Blois and certain neighbourhoods in Orléans are among those affected by this. It’s possible that the area surrounding the power plant, including parts of the Loire Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, will be uninhabitable for decades, possibly centuries. France has officially asked us for help. Japan has offered to send experts.’

  ‘I guess they should know what they’re doing,’ someone commented sarcastically.

  ‘A similar scenario threatens the area around Temelín in the Czech Republic, which now stands at INES 4,’ the man continued. ‘The IAEA reports level 1 and 2 incidents at seven other nuclear power plants across Europe.’

  ‘It doesn’t directly affect us,’ said a colleague, ‘but a serious breakdown is also being reported at the Arkansas Nuclear One facility in America. The same failure of the backup power supply we’ve seen reported here.’

  They understood little about conditions for the civilian population across Europe. They could only extrapolate; all they knew were their own personal experiences here in Brussels. The early sense of solidarity had started to diminish. It was as if good deeds were now rationed too, with most people reserving their help for friends and family only.

  ‘Reports of unrest and looting are coming in from several cities,’ said a female colleague.

  Not even a hint of good news, Sophia sighed. The situation was as bleak as the night outside.

  Between Düsseldorf and Cologne, Germany

  Out of the darkness ahead of them a house appeared.

  ‘There’s a light up ahead,’ said Manzano.

  Shannon steered the car towards it. A narrow, paved road led off the street. Shannon followed it until a large farmhouse appeared before them. Three windows were lit on the ground floor. The residents must have heard the engine, because within minutes someone had opened the door. At first they could see only a silhouette against the light.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked a man; he was pointing a rifle in their direction.

  ‘Please, we’re looking for something to eat,’ said Manzano in broken German.

  The man eyed them warily.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I’m an Italian, and she’s an American journalist.’

  ‘Nice car you’ve got there.’ The man gestured towards the Porsche with his gun. ‘Still runs too. Mind if I take a look?’ He took a step towards them, let the gun drop.

 
Shannon hesitated, then she walked over to the car with him.

  ‘Never sat in one of these,’ he said. ‘Can I have a go?’

  Shannon opened the door, he sat down in the driver’s seat. Manzano had walked over to join them.

  ‘The keys,’ said the man and held out his hand. When Shannon didn’t react, he pointed the barrel of the rifle at her.

  ‘I said, the keys,’ he repeated.

  Shannon handed them over.

  The man turned the ignition. The car door was still wide open. The gun, held above his thigh, was pointing at Shannon.

  ‘Sounds good. And there’s fuel in the tank too.’

  He slammed the door and, before Shannon or Manzano could react, drove at high speed through an open barn door.

  Shannon and Manzano gave chase. When they got to the barn he had already climbed out and was pointing the gun at them.

  ‘Get out of here!’

  ‘You can’t—’ cried Shannon in English, but Manzano held her back.

  ‘As you’ve just seen, I can.’

  ‘Our things,’ said Manzano. ‘At least give us the things we have in the car.’

  The man thought for a moment, then he pulled Shannon’s rucksack out of the back seat and threw it at their feet.

  ‘The laptop, too,’ pleaded Manzano, adding, ‘but don’t throw it. Please!’

  He took a few steps towards the car, the man raised the gun barrel. Manzano froze.

  ‘What do you need a computer for?’