by Jon Evans
The two-digit return code informs Keiran that all went well, that the threat he recorded from Laurent last night has just been conveyed via an untraceable voice-over-IP connection. As far as the French police are concerned, a man with an Arabic accent just phoned them and informed them that a large bomb will level the Tour EDF within the next fifteen minutes.
The police react with impressive speed. La Défense’s security systems report that the Tour EDF’s fire alarm is triggered less than two minutes after the phone call. When the first of the International Trade Council representatives sets foot onto the plaza of the Esplanade, ready to brave the hundred-metre journey behind police barricades between the parking lot and the CNIT conference center, office workers are already spilling out of the Tour EDF’s atrium like water from a ruptured pipe.
The crowd surges towards the barricades. Most of them can’t know that the attendees have arrived, but even without sound Keiran can tell from the the pictures, by the protestors’ hate-contorted expressions, by the way they shout and shake fists and banners with new intensity, that some kind of vibe, some primal bloodlust, has run through the mob’s collective mind, told them that battle is at hand. Even those who would never participate in violence, even those who ordinarily deplore it, are swept up in the collective wave of rage. This, Keiran realizes, is the real secret of the black blocs. If they worked only for themselves, they would be powerless to affect anything; but those armoured men with clubs are the crowd’s id, the expression of its dark and secret desire for blood.
The Wobblies strike first, the group in white, best-organized and most violent of the black blocs. They leap the waist-high barriers with military order and precision, attacking the gendarmes all at once. The riot police had only a few seconds’ warning before the raging but peaceful protestors suddenly melted into an armed and armoured mass of a hundred organized troops. They bend before the wave. The battle is medieval, clubs and shields, and the tactics medieval as well, it could almost be a scene from Spartacus. As the first blows are struck, the demonstration’s background noise of raucous cries and chants swells into full-throated roars and screams, a deafening wave of primal noise from seven thousand throats that carries up twenty-two floors and through the Sheraton’s thick windows, so overwhelming that it makes the gendarmes falter. Then a smaller black bloc hits them, supporting the Wobblies, and the police line breaks, and the black blocs are running loose through overturned barricades, and the battle has degenerated from ranked troops facing one another into swirling knots of violence. Keiran sees onscreen a gendarme wielding his riot shield two-handed, smashing the edge of it onto the helmeted head of an opponent down on one knee. He sees two Wobblies kicking a fallen policeman so hard that blood splashes onto the concrete from his cheek, peeled open by a steel-toed boot. He can hardly believe that what he is watching is actually taking place just twenty-two stories below.
Keiran connects his headset to Laurent again. “The window of opportunity has been smashed open,” he says. “Go.”
He switches to the camera aimed at Laurent and Angus. Surrounded and ignored by the hangers-back and outliers of the protesting crowd, they strip off their coveralls, revealing green police uniforms underneath, and make their way towards the Tour EDF, Laurent in the lead. Even uniformed it takes them a little while to fight their way upstream through the men and women in conservative dress who are adding to the chaos on the Esplanade.
“Perfect,” Keiran says. He switches to the camera with the best view of the stage, just to check on Danielle and Estelle. His eyes narrow, then widen, and in a very different tone, he says, “Oh, bollocks. Shit. Fuck.”
Chapter 18
Danielle gapes openmouthed as a riot swirls around the stage. She can’t believe how fast it happened. The moment the police lines broke, the demonstrators became a mob, a whirlpool of violence and chaos, and an eddy current has already surrounded them. The stage was placed not far from the police barricades, a media move, to ensure that TV cameras would capture the menacing ranks of gendarmes in riot gear looming behind the speakers. That placement now seems like a major mistake.
Small knots of police battle black bloc members all around the stage, while around them, a frightened melee of protestors try to get out of one another’s way. Clouds of light-coloured smoke rise from the Esplanade, mostly where the crowd is thickest. Tear gas, Danielle realizes. A darker cloud of smoke is visible closer, between the stage and the police lines, and pale flames flicker beneath. Danielle recognizes the smell. Burning gasoline. Some of the black blocs must have brought Molotov cocktails.
The smoke-smeared scene by the barricade line looks like a vision of civil war. Police with their backs to a wall, gas masks making them look like giant menacing insects, fire into a crowd of protestors with bullets Danielle devoutly hopes are rubber. The gunshot sounds are lost in the roar of the crowd. A half-dozen black bloc members, in gas masks of their own, regroup, shouting at one another, one of them on a cell phone, apparently waiting for instructions. A dozen police surround a pair of wounded comrades, one with a visibly broken leg, bent at a sickening angle, the other a small woman with bloodsoaked blonde hair, weeping and covering her eyes with her hands, affected by the gas after her mask was torn off. Civilian protestors with useless rags tied around their eyes, their cheeks awash with tears, stumble blindly around, moaning with pain, arms extended and groping like zombies in a horror film, colliding or tripping and tumbling hard to the ground. A woman in a peace-symbol T-shirt sits wide-legged on the concrete with a comical expression like she just remembered something amazing, clutching her stomach and trying to breathe. Danielle thinks of the lathi she was struck with in India and winces with sympathy.
“We need to get out,” Estelle says. Danielle didn’t notice her appearing. Almost everyone on the stage has clustered in the middle, in front of the big screen, as far away from the fighting as they can get. Danielle has stayed in the back corner, looking for an opening in the brawl, an avenue of escape.
Danielle nods. Just beyond the edge of the stage, maybe five feet in front of her, the tops of their heads level with her feet, two men in black with crowbars and body armour exchange blows with two gendarmes armed with clubs and plastic shields. She can hear the grunts as they swing their weapons. She can’t believe they are actually trying to hurt one another. Far easier to believe it is some type of paintball game or Medieval Times re-enactment.
“We just have to wait, it’ll cool down,” Danielle says.
Estelle shakes her head. “I mean before the tear gas hits. We’re no use if we’re blind. It’s drifting this way.”
Danielle looks over her shoulder. The crowd has been thickened by the thousands flooding out of the Tour EDF, many of whom have been swept up in the confusion of the riot. The cloud drifting towards the stage isn’t so much a colour as a visible shimmer, like heat-warped air on a hot summer day. A wave of humanity flees before it, many of them clutching their faces as if they mean to tear their eyes out. When the front line hits the stage it shudders as if struck by an earthquake. Danielle realizes to her horror that people are being crushed against the stage’s scaffolding as others climb desperately over them and onto the stage.
“Now,” Estelle says sharply. The four warriors have moved twenty feet away. There is another whorl of chaos on the other side, a half-dozen ordinary protestors with no weapons or armour clawing and kicking two gendarmes barely able to keep their feet in the chaos, but there is a little space between. Danielle vaults down, lands on all fours. Estelle does the same, stumbles but rights herself, and they join the escaping protestors, a panicky throng, half-blinded, keening with pain and terror. About twenty seconds after joining this mob Danielle realizes it was the worst thing they could have done.
* * *
“Where are you?” Keiran asks.
“Mostly there,” Laurent answers.
“And about fucking time,” Angus says hoarsely. He is in good shape, but not like Laurent, who doesn’t even seem to
be breathing hard despite having just climbed sixty flights of stairs. “What about the real bomb squad?”
Keiran scans the automatic transcription of the Paris police radio channel that overlays one of his monitors. “On their way. But there’s absolute fucking chaos outside, you’ve got plenty of time.”
So far the plan has worked perfectly. Angus and Laurent are probably the only people still in the Tour EDF. They will have plenty of time to pick their way through Kishkinda’s offices and do their work, while outside the real police are stymied by the ongoing riot. Even if something goes wrong, Keiran should have plenty of notice, all Angus and Laurent have to do is get out of the building and they will quickly be lost in the mob.
“Sixty-five floors. The power’s still on,” Laurent warns.
“Not for long. They’ll cut the power soon. Standard procedure for a bomb threat.”
“What about the cameras?” Angus asks, alarmed. “We walked right past them in the lobby. They can’t know our faces.”
“Relax,” Keiran says. “I own the cameras. You were never there.”
“Sixty-eight,” Laurent says. “Here we go.” The sound of the stairwell door opening. And then, “There it is. Looks fucking solid.”
“Send me a picture,” Keiran says.
He switches one of his screens over to the incoming signal from Laurent’s camera. It takes a little while to download; encrypted wireless connections are slow. It resolves, line by line, into a picture of a double door, solid wood, with the Kishkinda logo in its stylized font above. There is no visible handle, just a flat white panel next to the door, a card reader, and a numeric keypad above it.
“What if they don’t cut the power?” Angus asks.
“Then we’re fucked, aren’t we? But they will.” Keiran knows from hacking into the manufacturer’s system that the door will open in case of power failure, lest people be trapped by a fire.
“You can’t switch it off yourself?”
“I didn’t have time to hack Paris’s power grid. Even if I could, they’ve got a backup power system only the fire department can shut down remotely. That system’s a closed loop, no physical connection to the Net, hacker-proof.”
“So what do we do?” Angus asks.
Keiran opens his mouth to say, “You wait,” when the screen he is using to monitor the La Défense security system flashes with updates. No signals are being received from Tour EDF.
“Somebody turn out the lights?” he asks.
“Yes,” Laurent says. “Flashlights on. The door opened. You were right.”
“Of course I was right.”
“We’re in.”
“Good. You know what to do. Send me a picture of anything you’re not certain of.”
The backpack Laurent carries is full of small plastic devices cunningly crafted by Keiran’s associate Mulligan, the American known affectionately to the hacker world as Einstein with a soldering iron. These devices are bugs. Angus and Laurent will plug them into computers, between existing keyboard or network connections. These bugs will then track and recall every data packet that enters or leaves that computer, and every key typed by its user. Each one has a tiny Bluetooth transceiver that allows it to communicate with other bugs like it within roughly ten metres. The resulting ad hoc bug network will record all information going through the computers they feed off, then anonymously send this information to Keiran twice daily via a wireless base station that will also be hidden in the office. Even a hacker as skilled as P2 will never detect them without actually looking behind the machines in question, and computer security zealots are almost invariably software-oriented, disinclined to dirty their hands and minds with hardware.
Laurent and Angus don’t seem to need help; their muffled conversation is one of brief and confident expressions. Keiran hopes they are picking the right computers. They have only enough bugs for maybe a dozen machines. He has to rely on them to do their work correctly. He switches back to his views of the protest-cum-riot outside, hoping to find Danielle and Estelle, but the stage has half-collapsed and he can’t see them anywhere in the smoke-filled maelstrom.
“Keiran,” Angus says, his voice crackling with tension. “The power’s back on.”
Keiran blinks. That he hadn’t expected. He looks back to the police-scanner transcription. It takes him a moment to mentally translate the written French. “Right. Crap. Their bomb squad’s at the tower, they can’t reach the front so they’ve gone around back. They turned on the power so they can open the emergency exit, it’s got an electric lock too. You better get going. They’ll be on their way up in a moment.”
“We can’t.”
“What?”
“When the power came up the door locked again.”
Keiran takes a moment to parse that sentence. He swallows, opens his mouth, and realizes he has no solution. He never even considered this possibility. Their only way out is the emergency exit – and that opens to a stairwell full of one-way doors, a stairway that the real Parisien police are already ascending. Angus and Laurent are trapped inside the Kishkinda offices, the police are on their way, and Danielle and Estelle are somewhere on the Esplanade, lost in the riot. Keiran stares blankly at his computer. He has no contingency plan for this. He doesn’t know what to do.
Chapter 19
The mob has panicked. A human tide sweeps Danielle back and forth, lifting her bodily off her feet for fifteen or twenty seconds at a time. Arms jab painfully into her and are replaced by new ones. Fingers clutch desperately at her for purchase. She feels herself step on someone who has fallen, stumbles and almost joins them, but the press of the mob saves her, delays her plunge long enough that she can grab at a shoulder and pull herself upright. Then the tear gas hits, she doesn’t know from where, the police must have fired canisters at them. It feels like acid has been poured into her eyes. Sobbing, she rubs at her eyes with one hand, she knows it doesn’t help and may harm but she can’t stop herself, and tries to use the other to hold her space in the solid, seething crowd of blinded, terrified humanity. Somebody grabs at her head, but their fingers slide out of her hair. A violent current of flesh carries her along, propels her shoulder into someone’s face hard enough that she feels and hears their nose break. Then something hard, an elbow, hits her in the back of her head. Dazed, she drops to her knees, and a hand smacks her in the face hard enough to bruise, she flails about, tries to pull herself up but pulls someone else down instead. She manages to get to her feet again, back into the press of bodies, hellish but better than being trampled. All she can hear are screams. Her eyes feel aflame, and she is coughing and sobbing, she doesn’t seem to be able to breathe enough, there isn’t enough oxygen in the air, and there are hands and bodies all around her, crushing her, she scrabbles furiously but can’t break free, all she can think about is her need to breathe, but she can’t, she can’t move at all, then the crowd shifts and she gets half a breath, the air here is mostly tear gas, it’s like breathing white-hot poison but that’s still better than breathing nothing at all, but the crowd has surged back, she is being crushed again, caught between two opposing currents.
With a violent, spasmodic effort, Danielle somehow dislodges herself, steps into a somehow uninhabited niche amid the crowd, and takes a mercifully deep breath of almost clean air. And she is swept up in the crowd again. There is no use fighting. She will go where it takes her. She holds her arms over her head to protect it, learning from the previous blows. Then she stumbles and almost falls, because the crowd is no longer propping her up, she is once again responsible for standing unaided, and the people around her are dwindling away, and the air is clear and fresh. Somehow she has broken free of the riot, it has spat her and those around her out and surged back to where it came.
Danielle stumbles away from the screams and clouds of gas, weeping so heavily she cannot see, and bumps into something hard. It takes her a moment to identify it as the same metal statue Angus and Laurent lounged against earlier, what feels like hours ago, whe
n the protest was still a peaceful assembly. She leans back against it, lets herself slide to a seated position on the ground, and weeps until the last of the fiery tear gas has been washed from her eyes, until her nausea and dizziness subside enough that she can stand without wavering.
The mixed smells of tear gas and burning gasoline are still so pungent that her eyes water and her nose throbs, but at least she can see. If it weren’t for the statue she would have no idea where she is; the gas and smoke have merged into a thick fog that limits visibility to maybe fifty feet in all directions. The ambient human noise reminds her of a football game or hockey match, the sound of a crowd at some violent and highly emotional sport when a disputed or dirty play has gone uncorrected. A few people mill about her in little clusters, protestors all, frightened and angry. Almost everyone has pulled their shirts up over their faces, and Danielle follows their example. She is surprised by how well she can see through the thick cotton.
Her senses are so heightened by adrenaline that the tugging sensation in her pocket makes Danielle start as if someone just kicked her. But it is only her cell phone. Her vision is still too blurred to read the number. She answers.
“Danielle,” Keiran says. “Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I guess,” she manages. Her gas-choked voice sounds like someone else’s. “I’m on the Esplanade.”
“Where’s Estelle?”
“I have no idea.”
“Listen,” he says, “we have a problem.”
“What?”
“This isn’t a secure connection. Do you understand?”