by Marc Elsberg
Eberhart scratched his beard. ‘We’re not allowed. Emergency laws. We have to distribute the stuff for free. It’s strictly rationed.’ But as he spoke he fixed her with an intense stare, as if he were waiting for her to make an offer.
‘Just a small amount,’ Shannon tried. ‘For my colleague and me. You can see for yourself he’s in a bad way.’
Eberhart glanced over at Manzano, who sat in unusual silence.
Shannon rummaged in her pocket.
‘I have fifty euros here. That’s got to be enough.’
‘A hundred,’ said Eberhart and reached for the notes. Shannon pulled them back.
Eberhart turned back to the road as if nothing had happened. They drove like this for a full minute, enough time for the acid in Shannon’s stomach to spread right across her insides.
Finally, Shannon gave in. ‘Sixty.’
‘We’re at one-twenty now.’
Shannon cursed silently. Next thing, he would throw them out of the truck.
‘Eighty.’
‘I had a decent breakfast this morning.’ Eberhart kept his gaze fixed squarely on the road. ‘And soon I’m going to have a proper lunch. If you’d like one, it’ll cost you one hundred and fifty.’
‘I don’t have that much!’
‘Those who don’t have the means, shouldn’t offer.’
Asshole! ‘OK! A hundred! I’m not paying any more than that!’
Eberhart gave Carsten a sign. The lorry came to a halt.
Eberhart turned to Shannon, held a palm out towards her.
‘First the food,’ demanded Shannon.
Eberhart got out and returned with a package.
Gritting her teeth, Shannon swapped it for her hundred euros.
She tore off the packaging, found a loaf of bread wrapped in plastic, two cans – one of beans and one of corn – a bottle of mineral water, a tube of condensed milk, a packet of flour and another of noodles. Fuck! She had just handed over one hundred euros for a goddamn bag of flour and noodles. Useless without a stove or at least a fire. Hurriedly she fumbled the bread out of the packaging, tore off a piece, handed it to Manzano, ripped off another and stuffed it down greedily. Manzano ate beside her in the same starved manner. With his fingers he spread some of the condensed milk onto the bread.
Eberhart and Carsten were having a good laugh about something.
Shannon couldn’t have cared less.
Ratingen, Germany
Hartlandt’s colleague had the radio telephone glued to her ear. When she saw him she ended the conversation and hung up. ‘That was Berlin. I just sent them something – here, take a look.’
She opened up an image file on her computer.
‘These are files recovered from old hard drives found at Dragenau’s place. Either the guy wasn’t especially careful, or it didn’t matter to him if something was traced.’
The group photo brought together at least sixty people of all nationalities, with a city in the background that Hartlandt didn’t recognize. The faces were hard to make out. Shanghai 2005, read the photo caption.
‘In 2005 Dragenau took part in a conference on IT security in Shanghai. The photo must have been taken sometime during this conference. Here’s Dragenau. And over here is somebody else we might know.’
She enlarged the photo until the face was visible. A good-looking young man with a tanned complexion and black hair smiled into the camera.
‘He’s the spitting image of …’ She brought up a second image, lined it up next to the face in Dragenau’s Shanghai photo.
Hartlandt recognized one of the facial composites that had been made of the suspected Smart Meter saboteurs in Italy. ‘Five years between then and today,’ he said. ‘His hair is shorter now. But other than that …’
‘Berlin, Europol, Interpol and all the rest are being informed as we speak. Let’s see who this is and if anyone has information for us.’
‘All the rest’ meant every secret service and intelligence agency across affected territories – in the present situation, they could count on that.
Command Headquarters
So they’d found the German’s body in Bali. Now they’d be looking that much closer at Talaefer AG. Well, they’d be looking for a long time. Nobody sifts through several decades’ worth of code – millions of lines of it – in just a few days, even if they put the entire BKA on it. And those guys were so incompetent, they couldn’t even hold on to a single hacker.
Their internal arguments about Saint-Laurent and the other nuclear power plants, plus various chemical factories on both sides of the Atlantic, had calmed down. They had deliberately not infiltrated these facilities’ IT systems; the responsibility for any accidents or failures therefore lay solely with the operators and their insufficient backup systems. Anyone with a conscience had to accept this.
When it was all over, the people who had suffered most wouldn’t let the corporations and politicians get away with any more lies or excuses. Under the new order, they would be called to account. Only then would things really begin to change.
Orléans, France
Annette stood in front of the cloudy mirror. Holding her breath as the stench from the toilets assailed her, she ran her fingers through her hair, then stopped dead when she saw the strands of hair in her hand. She ran her fingers through her hair again, pulling gently. More grey strands came away. You always lose a few hairs, she thought, I’ve been losing them all my life. She began to recall images from an anti-nuclear war film from the eighties. In it the main characters began to lose their hair a few days after they had been irradiated by the bombs. Within weeks they had suffered an agonizing death. She felt her face growing hot.
To her left, a woman her own age was scrubbing her arms with a flannel, to her right a young woman bathed a baby in the sink.
Trembling, Annette ran her hand through her hair once more. This time nothing came out. But she hadn’t dared to pull on it. She hurried to leave the communal bathroom. Its tile floor was so filthy that even with shoes on she could barely stand to tread on it.
The air was clammy and cold in the broad corridor that circled the arena, the light of a few forlorn neon lights flickered from the ceiling. Throughout the day a shroud of whispers, talk, snoring, crying and screams filled the shelter, which had been built to serve athletes and crowds. Annette walked up to the entrance gate, where volunteers assigned space to new arrivals, distributed food and blankets, answered queries. A man in uniform, who might have been the same age as her daughter, sorted tins of food.
‘Excuse me,’ said Annette.
He stopped for a moment, turned to her with an open expression.
‘We came here yesterday from near Saint-Laurent,’ she went on, noticing how hoarse her voice had become. ‘When are we going to be checked for radiation?’
The man put his hands on his hips. ‘Don’t worry about it, madame,’ he replied.
‘But don’t we need to be checked?’
‘No, madame. This evacuation is only a precautionary measure.’
‘After the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011, they showed people on television in the emergency shelters with these devices—’
‘This isn’t Japan.’
‘I want to be checked!’ demanded Annette. Her voice sounded strange and shrill.
‘Well, we’re short of the equipment right now. But, like I said, there’s no need for you to be afraid. Nothing in Saint-Laurent is—’
‘But I am afraid!’ she cried. ‘Why else would we have been evacuated?’
‘I’ve already told you,’ the man replied, brusque now. ‘As a precaution.’ He turned back to his work.
Annette felt her body shaking, her face burning. Tears came to her eyes. She shut her eyelids to hold them back.
Near Aachen, Germany
Eberhart and Carsten had distributed food in two other towns. Manzano and Shannon stayed in the cab. Shannon thought his forehead felt less hot. Maybe the medicine from the hospital was beginning to w
ork.
Twilight stars appeared in the sky. They were close to Aachen, rambling through a low-built area broken up by fields and woods, when Carsten braked so suddenly that Shannon was thrown forward. When she straightened up she spotted a tree lying across the middle of the road.
The doors on either side of Eberhart and Carsten were ripped open. There was shouting. Shannon saw gun barrels, then the tops of heads. Bandannas wrapped over faces, caps and hats pulled low over foreheads.
‘Out!’ the masked men screamed, and pulled themselves up on to the lorry. Carsten slammed the lorry into reverse but one of the armed men struck his hand with the butt of his gun. Another shoved the top of his gun to his head. With a howl of pain Carsten let go of the gearstick and raised his hands. The men grabbed him; he came close to falling out of the cab, he was just able to catch himself. He tumbled out as Eberhart had done the other side. Shannon flattened herself against the back of the seat; automatically she put her hands up. The men waved guns in their faces, screaming. Shannon undid Manzano’s seat belt, hauled him up so he could climb out of the cab on his own. She threw her rucksack, still with Manzano’s laptop inside, over her shoulder. A man pulled Manzano out, and was about to fling him down onto the street. Shannon held Manzano back, pushed herself past him, cried out, ‘Easy! Easy!’ Leaning against her shoulder, Manzano climbed out without falling onto the tarmac. On the roadside Eberhart and Carsten were writhing on the ground, one was holding his head, the other his groin.
A masked man had already taken over the driver’s seat. Two crowded into the back of the cab, there were three more in the passenger seats. They slammed the doors.
The driver reversed, steered the lorry into a dirt road, turned the vehicle around and drove off in the direction they had come from.
‘Assholes!’ Eberhart shouted after the lorry as it grew smaller and vanished in a cloud of dust.
Look who’s talking, thought Shannon.
Eberhart had sat up by then, but was still groaning.
Shannon felt no pity. He had earned himself a beating for extorting them. All the same, she asked, ‘Everything OK?’
‘The cargo bay was empty anyway,’ groaned Eberhart.
Carsten was sitting up.
‘How much further is it to Aachen?’ asked Shannon.
Eberhart pointed down the street.
‘Maybe four kilometres.’
Berlin, Germany
Michelsen was checking a statistic on the country’s remaining food reserves when someone whispered in her ear. ‘Into the conference room. Now.’
Michelsen watched as, one after another, her colleagues received the same whispered summons. It made no sense: why whisper if you’re going to invite every person in the room?
In the conference room the chancellor was already seated, along with half the cabinet. They had long since discarded their ties.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the interior minister began once everyone was assembled. ‘The attack has escalated to a new level. Our IT forensics team has just informed us that our communications system has been infiltrated by the attackers. We still don’t know how they did it, but one thing is clear: your computers are compromised. We have further confirmation from Europol, the French, British, Polish and three other crisis teams on the continent.’ He raised his hands in a placating gesture. ‘To avoid any misunderstanding: we don’t believe anyone present has anything to do with this. The intrusion into the systems must have been organized at the same time as the attacks on our energy infrastructure.’
He lowered his hands, cleared his throat. ‘Most important, the attackers are not content merely to eavesdrop on our communications. No, they are manipulating them quite deliberately in order to sabotage our activities. Unfortunately, it was only after several such instances that we became aware of what was going on. You must assume that all of your messages are being read, every telephone call and every conversation tapped.’
Michelsen, listening in disbelief, heard a whisper from the other corner of the room.
‘Yes, conversations too,’ repeated the interior minister, who apparently had heard what was said. ‘Your computers are equipped with cameras and microphones that someone with the right software can activate remotely. In this way they hear and see everything that the cameras and microphones pick up.’ He spoke more forcefully now. ‘The attackers have their eyes and ears here, in the middle of our operations centre! It’s the same in France, Poland, Europol HQ and at the Monitoring and Information Centre of the EU. We haven’t heard anything yet from NATO, but it wouldn’t surprise me …’
He had to take a breath to calm himself. ‘Every exchange of information with external authorities, whether domestic or foreign, must be confirmed through a separate communications procedure, effective immediately. When you receive information or a directive via the Internet, you must call the other party over the radio to verify its authenticity; likewise, if you send information, you must call to make sure not only that it has been received but that the contents are consistent with the message you sent. For the moment we can assume that the official radio channels have not been infiltrated and are secure.’
He looked around to assure himself that everyone in the room had understood him.
Aachen, Germany
‘Damn, it’s cold!’ exclaimed Shannon. Manzano watched her as she looked for a sweater in her rucksack.
‘I am so done with all of this,’ she groaned. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a warm bed in my own apartment, a hot shower, or even better, a hot bath!’
Manzano hadn’t the energy to reply. He couldn’t stop shivering – whether from fever, the cold, exhaustion, or all three. They’d spent the whole evening searching in vain for somewhere to stay. By the time they’d reached the train station, it was snowing steadily. Shannon had led the way to a rear entrance; inside, dozens of people were encamped under the roof that covered the platforms, lying side by side, wrapped in sleeping bags and blankets. The underground passageways that connected the platforms to the main hall were blocked off by rolling shutters, with sleeping people leaning against them. It was far from ideal, but at least they’d be somewhat protected from the wind and snow here. Most of the unoccupied spots stank of piss, but eventually they found a free corner. Manzano sat down, rested his back against the wall.
‘Lean against me,’ he told Shannon. ‘That way we can keep each other warm.’
Shannon sat down between his legs, pressed her back against his torso, stuck her hands under her arms, pulled in her legs. Manzano put his arms around her. She felt his warm breath in her ear, and then, slowly, the warmth of his body, radiating through the layers of clothing.
‘Helps a little, at least,’ he whispered.
She turned around, tried to see how he was.
Manzano had let his head fall back against the wall, his eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell evenly, his arms went slack. Gently Shannon tucked them under her own, let her head sink back against his chest, stared at the hall’s dark ceiling, stray snowflakes drifting through it. Then she fell into a dreamless sleep.
Day 9 – Sunday
The Hague, Netherlands
Bollard had cut the last heel of bread into eight slices. Four thick ones, four onion-skin thin. They were in desperate need of supplies. In the house, there was barely anything left to eat. Bollard caught himself staring out the kitchen window, lost in thought. He, who was usually so in control. The lawn of the little yard was green even in winter. The bushes around it were leafless, like the neighbours’ hedges. Behind one of them he saw a man crouching on the deck of the house next door. Probably Luc. Motionless, his arm held out towards the lawn. Now Bollard spotted a cat a few metres away who sloped cautiously towards the neighbour. He seemed to be luring it with something. It raised its tail and approached with a bound, reached Luc, licked at his fingers. With a lightning-quick motion the neighbour grabbed its neck with one hand, struck its head with the other. In his hand was a T-shaped object that Bollard in tha
t moment recognized as a hammer. His neighbour rose, the bloody hammer in the one hand, the lifeless legs of the slaughtered animal dangling from the other.
Gingerly, Bollard set down the knife with which he had sliced the bread.
The children stormed into the kitchen, Marie followed them wearily, though with more strength than the previous day. Bollard, glad for the distraction, set each of the four thick slices on a plate and placed them in the centre of the table. Then he took the thin ones, held them up in front of the children’s faces.
‘Let’s pretend that these are tasty salami slices that we’re putting on the bread.’
He placed the thin slices on top of the thick ones, watched the children expectantly. He still couldn’t get what he had just seen out of his head.
‘That’s bread, not salami,’ argued Bernadette and looked dismissively at her plate.
‘It’s salami for me,’ insisted Bollard. He bit off a piece of his bread.
‘Mmmmhhhh! That’s goooood!’
Bernadette eyed him sceptically. Marie tasted her piece and likewise made a show of how good it tasted. Bollard chewed with relish, nodded at his bread with approval.
‘De-li-cious. You two don’t want to miss out on this.’
Georges, who like his sister had sat there, sceptical, let himself go along with it and took a big bite like his parents, accompanied with mmmmhs and aaahs.
Bernadette stared down at her bread, unsure; her parents and her brother stepped up their show. Shaking her head, she reached for her slices and said, ‘You’re all totally nuts,’ and took a bite.
Aachen, Germany
‘Good morning,’ whispered Manzano into Shannon’s ear. Despite the freezing cold and the uncomfortable position, he must have slept for a few hours. He felt better than the day before; the fever seemed to have gone back down.
Shannon started, restlessly moved her head this way and that, then buried her face in his neck and went back to sleep. He could barely feel his hands, feet, buttocks or back thanks to the cold. A little way ahead of them, a sleeping bag appeared to be moving. The train station was slowly waking up. Tired faces, rumpled hair. Most of them seemed to Manzano to be long-term street-dwellers, with weathered faces and matted hair.