by Simon Sloane
Chapter 14
Je Te Donne
Friday, 1:45pm CET
It was the largest crowd that Khaled Sharkhor had ever seen. They waved their flags, drowning the Tuileries in a sea of blue, white and red. Although he wasn’t born in France, Khaled had to stop himself from chanting along.
“Don’t block my view, four-eyes!” a teenage girl behind him complained as she raised her mobile in an attempt to take a photo of the president of France.
Khaled took a moment to realise she was talking to him. He still had to get used to the zero-dioptrine smart glasses he had received directly from the Elysée Palace. He moved aside with a shrug.
Next to the Louvre Pyramid, Christian Casimir-Perier was a commanding figure even in the wheelchair he had been forced into by a hunting accident in his youth.
“Not since seventeen eighty-nine has our choice been starker,” the incumbent said, laying out the closing argument of his reelection campaign. His voice boomed from the truck-sized loudspeakers that framed the monument. “Bigotry or tolerance? Oppression or freedom? Violence or peace? You have to choose tomorrow.”
Khaled didn’t care about politics. He was there, because the head of state himself had asked him to check the crowd for men who shouldn’t be there. Al-Antqam’s tentacles still spread around the world, and the president trusted Khaled to understand the organisation on a deeper level than any of his security officers.
Khaled realised he had spent more time in French state employment than with the terrorist organisation he had abandoned six years earlier. Al-Antqam still vowed to avenge Western intrusion of the sacred lands of the Prophet, and the SSI suspected that its Parisian cell had been reactivated.
“Vote for the values we’ve cherished since the birth of our republic!” Casimir-Perier beckoned. Closing out his speech, his voice crescendoed to match the upward movement of his arms. “Vive la démocratie! Vive la France!”
Roaring applause washed over the largest square of the capital. The party’s campaign song blasted from the loudspeakers: “Je te donne” was a bilingual 1980s hit that the president had selected in a bout of Europhile nostalgia.
Khaled wished his country of birth would take a leaf out of the book of France. The ideals of freedom, equality and solidarity hadn’t been brought to perfection anywhere in the world. Nevertheless, Khaled conceded that the French Republic had advanced further than others. Here the son of a crime lord could work for the head of state. Khaled had let go of religious fundamentalism as well as the illicit profits earned by his clan. Surely, no one back in Alexandria would believe his story.
Khaled looked over the crowd, but his wirelessly connected eyewear failed to make a match with any of the twenty thousand terrorist suspects in the database of the Service de Sécurité Intérieure. Finally, Casimir-Perier rolled his wheelchair past his microphone, waving at his exuberant voters. Khaled exhaled. The campaign’s final high-risk event was coming to a close.
Out of the corner of his eye, Khaled saw a young staffer hurrying away from the presidential entourage. Her blond hair fluttered in the wind as she talked excitedly on her mobile. Khaled hoped the campaign wasn’t in trouble, considering what might happen if Casimir-Perier lost the following day.
A vibration in Khaled’s pocket caught his attention. He checked his phone as the officers selected half a dozen schoolchildren to shake hands with the president.
“Hugo’s alive!” Sarah had written in screaming capital letters. “They caught him in Dubai.”
Chapter 15
Under The Weather
Friday, 2:00pm CET
Hugo had made up his mind. He knew what to ask for in return for helping the ATF, and he didn’t care about what they would think of him.
Before he could say anything, though, Control resumed the videoconference after another brief distraction. Visibly upset, she slammed her wrinkled fists on her table like a judge dropping her hammer upon conviction. “Do you want another reason why we think you’re behind the global weather disruption?”
Hugo cocked his head. “Enlighten me.”
“In the last three months alone, the Arabian Peninsula enjoyed more precipitation than in three years prior. Desert nations are growing grain, oranges, even avocadoes—the most expensive vegetable in the world.”
Hugo laughed. “And you think the Emiratis paid me to do that?” The ATF were about to make fools of themselves with their hare-brained weather theory.
“However,” Control continued, “elevated rainfall in Arabia perturbed the weather elsewhere: droughts in Europe, floods in Asia, locust invasions in Africa.”
“So, now I’m guilty of the weather on a worldwide basis?” Hugo asked in the mocking manner that had made him a loner in his teenage years. “You must have skipped your meds.” He laughed at the grey-haired woman who had ordered his arrest. She really seemed to think that Hugo had mastered the butterfly effect. Although the fluttering wings of a butterfly in Brasil could trigger self-reinforcing effects that might ultimately cause a hurricane in China, Hugo couldn’t think of an artificial intelligence powerful enough to calculate such complex weather phenomena. Even with all the processing power in the world, one required a complete overview of the state of the lower atmosphere as well as anything that happened on the surface of the Earth.
The spook was unimpressed. A graph flashed on the screen next to her grim face. It displayed a red curve going up. Rising slowly at first, it inclined ever more steeply. Hugo noticed several bumps occurring at ever-shorter intervals.
“Global corn prices,” Control said, highlighting the caption on the chart.
“Why haven’t I read about it in the news?” Hugo looked at Diana, but she shrugged. Maybe it was above her pay grade, and she had only been tasked with his abduction.
“As I said,” her boss replied, “you won’t have noticed anything in Dubai, since the Arab peninsula has become flush with home-grown food. And in the West, media outlets are obliging their governments to avoid destabilising the public mood.”
“But people are bound to notice when they end up paying a lot more for their weekly groceries, aren’t they?”
“They already do,” Control said, “but only in Asia and Africa. Europe and America are glossing over the crisis. They’re liquidating emergency storage while importing extra calories from poorer regions—”
“Which is exacerbating the food shortage in places like India,” Diana added. “The Foreign Office issued a briefing about lootings in New Delhi and other cities.”
Hugo remembered the time when his father had worked for the Foreign Office in Paris while his mother had studied a few blocks away. They might never have met, had it not been for one of his old man’s rather unsavoury predilections.
He lost his train of thought when Diana looked at him with a penetrating gaze. “The Indian government might not be the only one to fall,” she said. “That is, unless we find whoever is disrupting the weather on a worldwide basis. We must neutralise them.”
“What about the spikes?” Hugo asked, pointing at the accelerating kinks in the crop price curve at the Chicago commodities exchange.
“They coincide with freak weather incidents,” Control said, “as well as other irregularities affecting crop yields: prolonged droughts, insect invasions, blazes in grain storage facilities. Markets know that all those have an impact on food supply.”
“Europe will be next,” Diana said. “In Britain and across the continent, it’s getting harder every day to conceal that shelves are going to empty soon.”
“Any society is only three meals away from anarchy,” Hugo said, growing more concerned the more he learned. “I don’t know who said it first, but—”
“Only a quantum computer,” Control said with a stern expression, “could model the myriads of weather variables and their relationships. Armed with superior AI, a single eco-terrorist could make the butterfly effect his friend. He could cause weather disruption by doing something as little as releasing a fl
ock of birds at the right time and in the right place! And since you were the first one to build a functioning quantum computer, Dr Hyde, do you still wonder why you’re a suspect?”
Hugo laughed. “I should be exonerated soon then.”
“Why?” Diana asked, her eyes wide. For a moment, she appeared to empathise with his loss, but it might have been just another technique to manipulate him.
“You destroyed it, remember? You blew up my facilities in Dubai. If things were to go back to normal today, I admit, I might look suspicious. But if they don’t,” he pointed at Control’s image on the screen, “you should resign!”
Control raised an eyebrow. “Let’s not play games, Dr Hyde. The more you tell us about your forays into artificial intelligence, the more we’ll be inclined to offer a lenient sentence. We could even—”
“Fifteen minutes!” Hugo pointed at the digital clock on the conference room wall. The feeling of intellectual superiority gave him a rush. “The next incident driving corn prices will happen fifteen minutes from now.”
“Excuse me?” Diana asked with a furrowed brow that Hugo found rather attractive. He wondered what would have happened had they met in a bar or something like that.
“Just look!” With a sigh, Hugo pointed at the corn price chart again, wondering why all the brilliant ATF analysts had missed the pattern.
Chapter 16
Pyramid
Friday, 2:15pm CET
Khaled’s stomach flinched when Christian Casimir-Perier concluded his speech to thundering applause. As the audience chanted the national anthem, his thoughts returned to Hugo. If Sarah knew about his survival, soon so would everyone.
Their relationship had always been complex, especially since Khaled had informed geek-o-matixx about the hardware design of Sibyl. Hugo had been particularly furious when his arrangement of the AI’s quantum bits had been unveiled.
“How did you find out?” Khaled had asked Sarah. He wondered who else from the former Sibylon team knew about Hugo’s survival. Opinions about him had been divided even during their heyday. But then the same people who had cursed Hugo the previous year now saw it as a badge of honour having worked for him.
Khaled’s eyes returned to the stage. The pale-skinned president was surrounded by young pupils. The future of France met her past. If reelected, Casimir-Perier would celebrate his eightieth birthday just before the end of his second term. And yet a slim majority seemed to prefer the incumbent over an opponent three decades his junior.
An olive-skinned schoolgirl stepped forward with a red rose. She smiled at Casimir-Perier, who patted her head in a grandfatherly manner. Khaled wondered if her Hello Kitty schoolbag had been properly examined. His intuition prompted him to scan the crowd behind the cordon. They all looked joyous as they waved their tricolore banners.
Just one man frowned.
The mustached Northern African’s skin colour resembled the girl’s. His curly hair and greying beard alarmed Khaled, although the smart glasses didn’t identify him as a suspect. Nevertheless, Khaled didn’t consider him the type who went to campaign rallies to clap and cheer. He moved closer to find out what the man clutched so tightly.
A detonator.
“Assass—!” Khaled shouted in a desperate attempt to alert the presidential bodyguards, but the explosion knocked the air out of his lungs.
Diving to avoid the debris, Khaled felt the assaulter’s kaftan slipping through his hands as he reached out to capture the villain. All he grasped was air.
Khaled covered his head from the shards of flying glass. He thrust his way through the panicked crowd, just a few yards behind the Arab who had sacrificed a ten-year-old girl to kill the president of the France.
Looking over his shoulder, Khaled was shocked by the smouldering carcass that used to be the Louvre Pyramid. Everyone was running away from the scorched monument. People trampled on each other, not even trying to avoid the necks and backs of those who had been felled by the concussion wave. Just a moment of hesitation, and the terrified masses would have bulldozed Khaled to death.
A few yards ahead of him, the man in the kaftan sprinted toward Rue de Rivoli.
Chapter 17
Sequence
Friday, 2:30pm CET (4:30pm local time)
Diana couldn’t believe what she was seeing on the screen. She had switched to the news channel after Control had been called into another urgent meeting.
Hugo cradled his forehead at the sight of the Louvre Pyramid, now a ruin of broken glass and crooked metal. Corpses littered the square in front of the museum. Ambulances struggled to reach the victims, their sirens blaring.
Diana’s gaze rose up the curved plastic of the onboard conference room’s beige ceiling. Just a moment earlier, the recessed lighting had turned from purple to red. Fortunately, Hugo didn’t know what it meant. She remembered the helicopter pilot swallowing hard before unleashing the missiles on the Burj Al-Arab. It was clear the attack would trigger an armed conflict in the Middle East. But military protocol was unrelenting, and the captain had complied with Control’s order.
“We received confirmation,” the anchorwoman said gloomily, “that the president of France is among the fifty victims identified so far.”
“So,” Hugo said in a dry voice dripping with English sarcasm, “did things go back to normal after you kidnapped me?”
“Is that all you have to say?” Diana asked. “You don’t even look surprised. Maybe you’ve been orchestrating this for weeks! After all, you predicted that something would happen right down to the minute of the attack. And you even managed to leak your own abduction!”
“Hugo Hyde Spotted in Dubai” had been the headline on geek-o-matixx moments before the president’s death. The story was duly buried by the hyperventilating coverage of the assassination, but Diana was surprised how much weight Hugo’s name still carried among fellow computer nerds.
Now he gave her a sardonic grin. “Remember when I called you ‘Sarah’ just before they assaulted us in Dubai? Just a mention of my former associate’s name triggered a live transmission from my penthouse to her secure server.”
“And I’m on it too,” Diana groaned, “stark naked!” Hugo would be a dead man if the footage leaked out. She felt like strangling him, but Control wouldn’t forgive her if she harmed the suspect other than during his interrogation.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Hugo said with an appreciative glance at her tight-fitting uniform. “After all, I’m convinced you’re going to release me soon—with an official apology!”
“Why would I do that?” Diana asked, wondering if he was deranged. “On the contrary, your precise forecast makes you look even guiltier.” The two soldiers at the conference room door nodded at her, reminding Hugo there was no way out.
“Don’t you see the pattern?” Hugo pointed at the monitor with the corn price chart. He tapped on the headlines that accompanied each one of its recent bumps.
Diana looked at the incidents. The climb had started several months earlier with apparently isolated freak weather incidents. Droughts. Floods. Hurricanes. Fires.
“And then?” she asked. Why couldn’t Hugo simply get to the point? He must have taken as much pleasure in proving he was smarter than anyone else as Cynthia had felt when they voted her the hottest girl of their school. It was on the same day that Diana had caught her sister kissing Diana’s boyfriend, but that was another story.
Hugo’s finger moved to the end of the timeline—the assassination of Christian Casimir-Perier. “That was just a few minutes ago, when I was sitting comfortably in your airplane, my artificial intelligence reduced to ash.”
“You could still have arranged this long before—” Diana began, but Hugo had already tapped on the preceding incident.
“’Fire Devastates Midwestern Corn Reserves,’ four o’clock Chicago time yesterday morning. It’s an arsonist’s favourite time slot.”
“‘Locust Invasion Decimates Harvests Along the River Nile,’ Tuesday a
t five o’clock in the morning,” Diana said.
“And the previous one happened at eight thirty Indian time last Thursday evening,” Hugo said. ‘Monster Typhoon Ravages South Asian Coasts.’”
“The intervals are getting shorter,” Diana replied. Somehow, she felt energised working with Hugo. He didn’t mind diving deep into the matter at hand, quite in contrast to the superficial poser she had presumed him to be. On the other hand, he might be the clever type of perpetrator who confused the authorities by feeding them meaningless bits of information.
“When do you think the next incident is due?” Diana asked, deeply concerned. Whatever it was going to be, Control already looked exceptionally worried. Vauxhall must have known there was more to come, and soon.
“Less than thirteen hours from now,” Hugo said with deadly precision.
“How do you know that?” Diana asked, still suspicious about the certainty with which he forecasted disaster after disaster. Had he imbued the wisdom of his doomed creation? Up to now, the entire world had believed that Hugo had expired along with Sibyl, his notorious artificial intelligence that had forecasted him to pass away.
“The intervals aren’t just getting shorter,” he explained after a pause, “but exactly cut in half each time.”
Chapter 18
Crillon
Friday, 2:45pm CET pm
Khaled rushed along Rue de Rivoli in pursuit of the mass murderer. On a hunch, he snatched a police radio from a distracted officer. “Suspect hurrying up Rue de Rivoli, approaching Place de La Concorde,” Khaled said into the wireless.
“But we’re chasing a suspect near Bastille,” another cop replied.