The Black Hole

by Hammond, Ray

  You’re right, of course, she agreed. He’ll definitely target a Mondo campus.

  Alexander Makowski had made his webcast earlier in the day, just as the British Counter Terrorism Unit had predicted and the arch-terrorist had repeated his threats against the United States and against Europe. Although he hadn’t stated which cities the HFDA were preparing to bomb, he had issued a further two week ultimatum. Again, just as the Brits had said he would.

  ‘The Brits have always been reliable when it comes to getting field information,’ Mike Ryan had commented as he broke the news of the British warnings. ‘Incredible, when you think how tiny their operational budget is.’

  Nicole zoomed in on the city of Mountain View and the Mondo campus.

  Just over ninety thousand people in the city, Carl told her.

  When are the police moving the residents out? she asked her VA.

  The military have been preparing reception centres down the coast, south of Carmel. They start the evacuation tomorrow.

  Tell the local police to narrow their search to a two mile radius around each of the Mondo Campuses, Nicole told Carl. Tell them to search every single building, every car park and every open space.

  It’s done, said her VA. Then he broke off for a moment. There’s a news item coming in from the UN you should see.

  Nicole nodded and the map of Silicon Valley was replaced with a live feed from the General Assembly chamber of United Nations. The camera was focussed on a dark, swarthy man wearing a suit and tie. The man was speaking in Spanish. At the bottom of the picture a strapline read, Venezuela Tables UN Resolution To Ban Transhuman Technologies.

  Suddenly the image switched to a news anchorwoman. ‘Venezuela today tabled a resolution at the United Nations to prohibit further development of transhuman technologies,’ she said into the camera lens. ‘The motion is supported by a dozen other countries with communist alliances including Cuba, Paraguay, Syria and Palestine.’

  Jesus! What an unholy alliance, remarked Carl.

  But it might make the HFDA hold off, thought his owner.

  This country’s never going to agree to ban transhuman technology development, Nicole, Carl said firmly. The stock markets would collapse.

  Fifteen

  London’s evacuation plan was unfolding satisfactorily. With the royal family, the government, diplomats and major financial institutions already safely out of town, the task now was to get the capital’s ordinary citizens out of danger.

  In the outer zone all major roads fanning out from the capital were filled with cars and buses moving people out of harm’s way. Police officers and military personnel stood at each intersection hurrying the traffic along, but the entire process would take at least another week.

  The Home Office had now advised all residents and workers to evacuate central London, an area it defined as being from Hammersmith in the west to Stratford in the east. Holloway marked the northern boundary, Streatham the southern. The reason cited was the high risk of a major terrorist attack by the Humans First military wing, an attack that could even be on a nuclear scale.

  But even though all of the populace had seen Alexander Makowski’s threatening video many failed to take the Home Office’s advice seriously and, for the moment, went about their lives and their business as before. At this stage evacuation was not mandatory.

  In central London an intensive search of all cargo containers was under way.

  *

  Five days after Floyd had been caught placing a phone call to Gary Tipton’s mother, the British under-cover agent had a high-tech American-made stealth parachute strapped to his back. Along with the rest of the HFDA detachment, he was standing in the tree line 200 yards away from a newly laid but uncompleted trans-continental highway that had been cut through the dense rain forest of the Venezuelan jungle.

  A wide swathe of trees on either side of the broad highway had been felled, partly to keep jungle animals well back from the road, partly to deny cover to any ambushers who might want to intercept traffic once the highway was open.

  Sergeant Ramon Resigo stepped out from under the trees and scanned the sky to the west with his binoculars. Floyd also leaned forward and gazed into the sky.

  ‘It’s coming,’ called Resigo.

  A few seconds later Floyd saw two pin-points light – a plane descending.

  The HFDA group had now moved back to ‘Le Castel’ and Floyd had learned that the hill-top complex had belonged to a local drug baron who had recently been killed. Now it served as a regional HQ for the FARC guerrillas and was temporarily on loan to the direct action wing of the Humans First Party. Over 200 trained HFDA men were billeted in the main house, in the many outbuildings and in the prefabricated cabins erected for construction workers. But no construction work was going on at the castle. Like this broad strip of tarmac that cut a huge swathe through virgin rainforest, many building projects in FARC-controlled territory remained incomplete.

  The plane had almost touched down. Floyd saw that it was an old cargo jet with Venezuelan markings. As the plane’s tyres kissed the recently laid tarmac, Sergeant Ramon Resigo turned to the group of HFDA men under his command.

  ‘Pick up the sacks. Let’s go,’ he shouted over the roar of the jet’s reverse thrust. ‘Go up the stairs in pairs.’

  Floyd and fellow volunteer Rod Kantor each grabbed a corner of a brown plastic sack filled with refined cocaine and ran towards the parked plane. Behind them HFDA soldiers ran carrying similar sacks. As they arrived at the tarmac, a broad door opened behind the wing and a wide steel ladder was lowered to the ground.

  ‘GO, GO, GO,’ shouted Resigo and Floyd and the other men struggled towards the ladder carrying their sacks, their parachute back-packs slowing them down still further.

  *

  ‘We’ve searched every inch in the Harley Street area,’ reported David Evans. ‘There’s not a single container or storage area unaccounted for. The bomb’s not there.’

  Ray Fox and Sue were staring at a large 3-D street map of London’s West End that was displayed on a screen in the CTU control room.

  ‘What about lock-ups, basements, old church halls?’ Fox asked his deputy.

  Evans raised his hand and drew a circle on the map. Where his fingertip touched a green line was laid down.

  ‘Every building in the W1 postal district has been searched, some of them several times. It’s the safest area in London.’

  ‘Then perhaps we should evacuate to there, rather than deepest Somerset,’ said Fox gloomily.

  Much to Fox’s annoyance, the whole of the CTU, and Britain’s other security services which inhabited the Embankment building, were shortly to be evacuated to the Henlow Hill back-up facilities. There was only forty-eight hours to go before the Humans First extended deadline expired.

  Earlier in the day the U.S. president and Britain’s prime minister had stood side by side in a simultaneous telecast to tell the world’s media that neither nation was about to give in to terrorists. Both leaders had reiterated that in a free democracy only the people’s vote could determine policy. There would be no legislation introduced to limit developmental work in transhuman medical technologies or in the development of super-cognitive computing. The leaders reiterated that no company or research centre pursuing this work would be forcibly shut down.

  ‘We’re intensifying the search in the rest of central London,’ Evans said. ‘But it’s a needle in a haystack task.’

  ‘Concentrate on the areas around the major hospitals,’ said Floyd. ‘Almost every hospital has a private wing that carries out the sort of procedures Makowski would object to.’

  ‘Sir?’ The voice came from behind them. It was one of the building’s security guards. ‘We’ve got to pack up now sir. Time to leave.’

  Your car’s waiting, said Sue.

  Sixteen

  By six p.m. on July 29th, the day that Alexander Makowski had decreed the HFDA’s attacks on Europe and the United States would take place, there had s
till been no attack on London. Those who knew that the capital had been the intended European target were beginning to feel the glimmerings of hope that the city might somehow be spared.

  With plenty of advance warning the government’s emergency response committee had managed a thorough and rapid evacuation of Central London. The Stock Exchange and banks, brokerages and other financial institutions had moved their operations to premises around Canary Wharf in the east or to disaster-recovery facilities elsewhere outside of city. Patients in central London hospitals had been transferred in rolling convoys of ambulances to healthcare facilities in the suburbs.

  The nation’s leaders left central London according to a well-planned schedule laid down by the Metropolitan Police. Most politicians and civil servants who saw their bosses departing thought it wise to do the same thing well in advance of the official evacuation order. The back-up government facilities at Henlow Hill in Somerset now housed over 2,000 people in underground nuclear-proof bunkers – Britain’s long-maintained ‘last resort’ governance facility – and a further 6,000 administrative staff, military personnel, lawyers, judges, essential workers, health-care professionals and those others serving government were now dormitoried in a string of specially sub-divided and equipped aircraft hangars at nearby R.A.F. Norton Comb. The sprawling Royal Air Force facility had been mothballed ever since the end of the Cold War against just such an eventuality.

  The entire hierarchy of Britain’s intelligence services was now based deep within the extensive Henlow Hill complex. Ray Fox and his team resented their enforced evacuation and the collective feeling of helplessness which followed. To add to their frustration there had been no further word from their undercover agent Harry Floyd.

  Meanwhile, security in and around London, and in the nation as a whole, could not have been tighter. All traffic had been banned from the centre of London and all bonded container parks on the Thames Estuary and at the airports of south east England had been searched and searched again. All trucks moving around the perimeter of the capital had been stopped and examined. All cargo on the rail network around London was being searched – even container barges on the river were inspected. And in the evacuated city centre 6,000 police and military personnel were on the streets, searching every likely building, determined to prevent any attack. Everything that could be done was being done.

  *

  Alexander Makowski sat alone in an upstairs bedroom of his rural retreat. Despite the villa’s isolation, all curtains and blinds in the building remained drawn throughout both day and night.

  On the wall screen was the image of an elderly man lying prone beneath a large circular medical scanner. Despite long periods during which little seemed to be happening, the leader of the Humans First Party found it hard to resist watching the live web feed from a New York hospital complex. The author Henry James Lampton had begun the process of uploading his mind to a computer chip. A caption at the bottom of the screen reported, 618,973 people are currently watching this Mondo experiment.

  With a quiet whir, the robotic arm supporting the medical unit slid the scanner clear of the patient’s head and then lifted it away from the bed. The author raised himself onto one elbow and the video camera closed in on his deeply lined face.

  ‘I feel absolutely nothing as the penetrative brain scanning takes place,’ Lampton whispered to the camera in best video-diary style. ‘Each session lasts about twenty minutes – which is the maximum time I can lie fairly still.’

  The camera pulled back slightly and the author swung his pyjama-clad legs over the side of the bed.

  ‘Thank you for all your emails,’ he continued, his halo of white hair almost transparent. ‘I have received thousands and they are ten to one in favour of my experiment.’

  ‘Liar,’ Makowski shouted at the screen. ‘The majority of people are disgusted by you. Remember what happened to Marvin Nesbitt!’

  ‘One question comes from Michael Seifert of Dorset in England,’ said the author as he reached out for a slip of paper on a side table. ‘Michael asks me why I haven’t ever availed myself of any of the transhuman rejuvenation therapies. Well, Mike, the reason is that I wanted to feel what it was like to get older so that I could write truthfully about that part of the human condition. It’s the same reason that I am now uploading myself into machine memory. It is just natural human curiosity.’

  ‘BUT IT ISN’T NATURAL,’ yelled Makowski, jumping to his feet. ‘THERE’S NOTHING FUCKING NATURAL ABOUT IT!’

  ‘I’ve written a poem about the future of the human species to celebrate this experiment,’ continued Lampton. ‘I’m performing it now for the first time. I hope you all enjoy it’

  The screen image refreshed and, against a white background, three verses appeared and Lampton cleared his throat.

  ‘It’s called “Successor Species”,’ the author announced.

  ‘NO, NO!’ yelled Makowski as he sprang forward across the bedroom. ‘NEVER, NEVER!’

  He threw himself against the plastic wall screen attempting to tear it from the wall, then he picked up a small bedside table and smashed it into the image of the poem. Still the damage-resistant display transmitted Lampton’s prophetic words into the gloom of the bedroom

  Makowski kicked at the power supply at the bottom of the screen and the display went dead. Then he ran at the darkened screen again and got his fingertips under one of its slender edges. With a furious roar he pulled the flexible display from the wall, hurled it to the floor and kicked it repeatedly as if it were a mortal adversary who had fallen to the ground.

  *

  Sergeant Kevin Knowles and his colleague P.C. Wayne Bolton were on ground patrol in an area of old central London known as The Borough, home to the Guy’s Hospital campus and to the private London Bridge Hospital. Both healthcare facilities had been thoroughly searched and now the effort was fanning out to nearby areas.

  As Knowles and Bolton entered deserted Druid Street, just to the east of London Bridge Station and just south of the River Thames, the sergeant glanced at his database read-out. Stretching ahead of them was yet another long row of dingy converted railway arches that had still to be inspected.

  Most of the high arched vaults beneath the railway viaduct had been enclosed by large steel shutters to create workspaces for welding shops, motor repairs units and low-rent warehouse premises. All seemed deserted.

  Kevin Knowles hammered on the steel shutter of the first unit, but received no reply.

  ‘It’s all dark inside,’ Bolton told him as he peered through a letter box. ‘I think I can just make out some cardboard cartons.’

  Sergeant Knowles nodded, made an entry to the database and moved on towards the second unit in the row of converted railway arches. It was 6.42 p.m.

  As he arrived at the large steel doors that had been fitted to the second unit, the police sergeant heard a low rumbling that appeared to emanate from inside. He put his ear to the door.

  Now he could hear both a low-pitched rumbling and a high whine.

  ‘Look up there,’ said Bolton, who had come up behind him.

  The sergeant followed the direction of the PC’s outstretched finger and he saw a cloud of blue fumes being vented from an exhaust high above street level. Beside it the lens of a CCTV video camera gazed down at them impassively.

  ‘There must be a bell,’ Knowles told his colleague and the two men scanned the large double doors for some means of gaining entry. Bolton saw a letter box and attempted to open the flap.

  ‘It’s stuck shut,’ he reported.

  Kevin Knowles banged hard on the steel door with his fist. He had no reason to be unduly suspicious. Although Central London had been evacuated, many businesses had left air conditioning and refrigeration systems running to protect their stock.

  There was no response to the sergeant’s knocking. He banged again, even harder. Meanwhile Wayne Bolton checked the database to see what information was known about Unit 2, Druid Street, London SE1.

 
‘We’re attempting to gain entrance to a railway-arch industrial unit in Druid Street,’ Sergeant Knowles radioed in to control. ‘Nobody’s answering but I can hear heavy machinery and a whining noise coming from inside.’

  ‘Supposed to be a carpet warehouse, Sergeant,’ reported PC Bolton as he read the results of his database enquiry. ‘Can’t think why they’d be running any sort of machinery inside.’

  Kevin Knowles nodded as he waited to hear back from control. Then his radio crackled to life.