One Life Remaining (Portal Book 2)

by Mark J Maxwell

  Louisa arched an eyebrow. She’d finally managed to rile him. ‘You tell me.’ She steeled herself for the onslaught, but it never came. Instead Drew took a deep breath and wearily pressed a hand against his eyes. She hadn’t noticed before, but he was dressed in the same shirt and tie he’d worn to the Tilbury Power Station bust. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

  ‘Okay, cards on the table,’ Drew said. ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s all I want.’

  ‘You were right. Our intel was related to Worrell, but it’s a Multiverse clan called the Sons of Babel that GCHQ are most interested in.’

  The Sons of Babel. If only the Red Flag hadn’t tripped. CADET could have flagged the clan as a link between Harrow and Baker. And it might have led me to Ben. From Drew’s considering look Louisa realised belatedly she hadn’t reacted with enough surprise. She gestured for him to continue.

  ‘The GCHQ selectors indicated the clan may be planning a terrorist attack. As to the nature of the attack, or when it’s due to happen, we’ve got nothing. Since then we’ve been backtracking through the sense footage, trying to make sense of their movements. We obtained a membership list from Multiverse but the clan members have all gone to ground. The in game chatter, which produced the selector matches, has ceased. They appear to be coordinating their movements using encrypted communications within Multiverse. So far GCHQ haven’t had any luck cracking it.’

  ‘What did Worrell have to do with the clan?’

  ‘GCHQ identified a payment made to Worrell from a Cryptex account set up by Killian Baker.’

  Louisa frowned. ‘I thought Cryptex transactions were untraceable?’

  ‘They are, in theory, but strictly between you and me we believe GCHQ have learned how to identify parties in the exchange. I don’t know how else they could have worked out Baker was paying Worrell.’

  If GCHQ could follow Cryptex transactions it would explain why the government wasn’t responding on calls to shut down the exchange. The Cryptex transaction history was a goldmine of illegal activity. But she was surprised GCHQ had handed over the payment details to Drew. It increased the chances someone outside of GCHQ would leak the fact that Cryptex had been compromised, and then criminals would stop using Cryptex entirely. Someone high up in the intelligence services wanted the Sons of Babel found.

  ‘We offered Worrell a deal,’ Drew continued. ‘We’d drop all charges if he helped us infiltrate the clan. He had a means of requesting meetings with them by leaving messages on a Multiverse discussion board. We had full sense coverage of the meeting venue, a cinema on Leicester Square. Then something happened to the sense grid. Portal went down across a whole block.’

  ‘Like at the power station?’

  Drew nodded. ‘We even had officers on the ground. Worrell simply vanished. That was five hours ago and we’ve been looking for him ever since.’

  The Sons of Babel weren’t just playing Multiverse games any more. They’d attempted to buy weapons from Fletcher, they had the ability to disrupt sense strips, and now they’d killed someone. What had Ben gotten himself mixed up in?

  ‘I think it’s your turn. Back at the station you avoided answering me. Do you know who this White Hat is?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Louisa’s heart thudded.

  ‘I watched Baker’s interviews. His conversations with you were markedly different. As if there was a personal connection between the two of you.’

  ‘I never met the man before the operation.’ She flashed him what she hoped was a relaxed smile. ‘You forget, I was somewhat famous after Benoit’s arrest. Peaking news feeds had my face plastered across them for weeks. Every criminal I’ve charged since then thinks they’ve been arrested by a celebrity.’

  ‘Then why would he ask you to deliver his message? What aren’t you telling me, Louisa?’

  Drew wouldn’t accept being fobbed off. She needed to give him something. A sudden desire to come clean about White Hat shocked her with its intensity, then passed with equal swiftness as the old familiar reasons for keeping the secret came to the fore. He’d ether think she’d lost her marbles or she was lying. ‘A teenager I fostered, Ben Kingston, went missing ten days ago. I tracked him to this location. The last we heard from him he’d joined the Multiverse clan you mentioned. The Sons of Babel.’

  ‘Ben Kingston?’ Drew adopted a puzzled expression, then his eyes flickered.

  She guessed he was searching for Ben on the NCA Subnet, cross-referencing him with the clan. A thought struck her. He doesn’t know about Ben. But that didn’t make sense. If he had the clan’s membership list then he should already have Ben’s details.

  Drew looked up at the flats and touched his ear. His officers must have found Worrell’s body. His lips moved, subvocalising. When he finished he returned his attention to her, but Louisa spoke first. ‘I want in on your operation.’

  He shook his head. ‘Absolutely not. This is a closed NCA job. No outsiders. Especially since you have a relationship with one of the clan.’

  ‘I know Ben, Drew. Whatever the clan is planning, he’s not a part of it. He’s nineteen years old. Practically a child, for God’s sake.’

  ‘The moment we have more information on him, I’ll make sure you’re in the loop.’

  ‘I need more from you than that.’

  Drew sighed. ‘I’ll do my best to keep him from coming to harm. It’s all I can promise right now.’

  Louisa scowled. Drew’s reassurances fell flat. The NCA wouldn’t be in a forgiving mood when they finally caught up with the clan. The next time she saw Ben he’d either be paraded on a news feed as a home-grown terrorist, or he’d be dead.

  ‘Louisa, the clan is a serious risk to national security,’ Drew said. ‘The MET has no part in this investigation and neither do you. Am I making myself clear?’

  She heard herself agreeing, making the necessary reassurances. But she wasn’t about to abandon Ben to the whims of the NCA. She needed to find him before Drew did. Or worse, before the Sons of Babel carried out whatever they were planning.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The buildings surrounding Portal’s headquarters housed a multitude of tech companies, each eager to associate their own brand with Portal, if only through physical proximity. Nanometrix, the company that manufactured implants for interacting with Portal’s network, was a newcomer to the area. For a company less than two years old their rise had been meteoric, rivalling even Portal’s in its formative years. With an imminent broadening of Nanometrix’s implant range rumoured, market forecasters were bullish on the company’s future.

  When Louisa decided to seek out Nanometrix’s CTO she hadn’t headed to their plush new office. Instead she stood in an alley behind a fish restaurant on the outskirts of Bromley. She wasn’t even sure the alley had a name. A green plastic basket filled with vegetables sat by the back door. She faced a row of twenty garages, their up-and-over doors closed. They were the kind of units someone might use for storing cars or odds and ends they didn’t have room for in their homes. It was hard to believe Ed Cooley and Kenneth Barry started Nanometrix in these very garages with a handful of employees. The office didn’t have a Portal interface, or even a buzzer (the garages weren’t exactly set up for visitors), so Louisa banged on a garage door.

  ‘Ed!’ She waited, then banged again. Louisa muttered under her breath. Ed was probably jacked in under full immersion, oblivious to everything. He hadn’t responded to any calls or messages.

  She walked around the side of the last garage. A precarious tower of wooden pallets stacked shoulder-high blocked her way. There looked to be a narrow gap at the rear of the building, between it and a high wall topped with loops of razor wire. Louisa grabbed hold of the top pallet and pulled it off the stack.

  A few minutes later, the stack was no longer a leaning death trap. She eased over it, careful not to catch a foot between the boards. A few garages along the entryway she spotted a wide, narrow window at head-heigh
t. Her shoulders scraped the brick walls on either side as she shuffled along. On tiptoes she could just see over the window ledge. The interior was dark.

  She had second thoughts. What if Ed had moved to the new office? They hadn’t spoken for months.

  No, she had to get inside. She didn’t have time to drive all the way back into town.

  Louisa had taken a baton from the car. She slid the thin metal cylinder from its belt pouch. Keeping it retracted, she covered her eyes with an arm and rapped the baton’s base against the glass. The window shattered. She ran the baton around the frame, clearing away any remaining shards.

  Now came the hard part. She pulled herself up to the sill, then used her feet to brace herself between the garage and the wall behind. The window proved shallower than she thought. She’d have to turn her head to fit through. Even then it would be tight.

  She pulled on the frame and simultaneously pushed with her legs. Her head and shoulders passed through the opening fine, and her torso too after she flattened her chest with her hands. Then she got stuck.

  She wriggled back and forth. No amount of squishing could flatten her rear. It was no good. She was wedged.

  ‘Louisa? Is that you?’

  Ed stood before her, brandishing a mop like a baseball bat, its blue and white cloth fronds jiggling his hands were shaking so much. Louisa burst out laughing.

  *

  Using the garages had been Kenneth Barry’s idea. He never did find out who was behind the raid on his tower block. Although she had no conclusive evidence, Louisa suspected they were after his stealth mask. Now that falsefaces were commonplace he should have been able to stop running, but his paranoia remained undiminished. The garages were his attempt to keep their work from prying eyes. Ken’s fear of discovery was such that when he recruited other programmers and nano-tech experts he insisted they live and work at the garages, with no-one allowed to leave. They were holed up for five months before Ken’s first press release unveiled their creation to the world. Louisa only realised Ed worked at Nanometrix when he sent her an invite for a beta trial of their optical implant.

  In hindsight, she’d reacted badly. From Ed’s brief description of how the implants worked she assumed they were based on Portal’s neural lattice experiment. The thought Ken and Ed might be trying to recreate what happened to Claire Harris horrified her. She met with Ken and Ed at the garages, determined to talk them out of their plan. However when she arrived she found herself on the end of a sales pitch. It turned out her free trial was Ken’s idea. He figured if they could convince Louisa to accept the implants they could convince anyone. And, she had to admit, they had been convincing.

  The implants used miniaturised terminals, similar to the one used in the neural lattice, although a tiny fraction of the size. The terminal was injected into an integration site, which for the optical implant was the eye’s vitreous humour. The implant then grew thousands of nanoscopic polymer filaments that attached to the ganglion cells at the back of the eye, near to the optic nerve. By stimulating the cells the implant relayed imagery through the optic nerve and into the brain. Cochlear implants worked on a similar principle, the terminal being injected into the inner ear and the filaments stimulating the cochlea. Following initial sound and vision successes Nanometrix moved to olfactory and gustatory implantation. The olfactory implants did an acceptable job of simulating smell. The gustatory implants were less successful. Everything tasted bland to Louisa, like they hadn’t quite managed to narrow down all the taste receptors.

  However the cranial implant initially gave Louisa the most concern. Its terminal inserted under the skin behind the right ear and grew a filament web over the skull. Similar in function to an EEG, it allowed the implant to measure voltage fluctuations resulting from current flow between the brain’s neurons. It was the cranial implant that allowed interactions with other implants using thoughts alone. When Louisa reminded Ken what had happened with the neural lattice he emphatically denied the aneurisms could ever happen with his implants. The filaments never penetrated the skull and were programmed to stay clear of any blood vessels or nerve endings. Consequently the filament web wasn’t nearly as effective as the neural lattice in interpreting brain waves. It certainly couldn’t read its user’s thoughts. Instead it discerned basic emotions and general intent, like if the user wanted to push a button, or stand up, or walk around. Even then, it took up to a week to become fully functional. The implant needed time to map the synapse firing pattern unique to each user’s brain. During this process the other implants could be controlled via a subvocalisation implant in the jaw, which used bone vibrations to determine what the user was saying or silently mouthing.

  Ken pitched the implants as the next evolution in wearable tech. A logical step up from sense bands, contact lenses and earbuds everyone used on a daily basis. And the user authenticated with their profile using the same biometric signature employed by Portal, so Ed assured her the user’s data remained secure.

  Perhaps it was the lack of direct integration with the user’s brain, or that the pair was being completely upfront with her, but Louisa eventually calmed down. However, despite their assurances, she refused to take part in their beta trial. It was only a year after their official release, when Nanometrix secured a government contract to supply every MET officer with the devices, that she finally took the plunge.

  Ed led her along the central corridor joining the garages, passing rooms filled with equipment he and Ken used to create their first prototypes. Since Nanometrix now needed to churn out millions of the implants every year they’d shifted production to China. One room resembled a pharmaceutical lab with racks of biological sampling trays, fridges and gas cylinders. Working with nanotech resembled chemistry more than physics, Ed told her once.

  They arrived at the room Ed used as an office. She still wasn’t sure why Ed continued to work out of the garages. Fluorescent strips bathed exposed concrete walls in a sickly glare. The garage door had been coated in sprayscreen, pale blue in its deactivated state. Up against one wall sat a long wooden work bench with a couple of stools. The only other piece of furniture was a brown leather reclining armchair. Strips of black tape covered numerous tears in its battered upholstery. The unmistakeable cloying odour of fried food filled the air. Louisa tracked its source to four sugarcoated doughnuts in an open takeaway container on the table.

  ‘I’m eating breakfast.’ Ed looked at her expectantly.

  Beside the doughnuts a polystyrene tub contained a viscous brown liquid. Doughnuts with curry sauce. Ed’s favourite. Her stomach churned. ‘Please, go ahead and finish. I can wait.’

  He nodded and sat at the table, his back to her. He broke a doughnut in half, dipped it in the curry and took a large bite.

  After a prolonged silence which, to Louisa at any rate, grew steadily more awkward, she realised Ed had deemed their conversation to be temporarily suspended. She hadn’t seen the man since his mother’s funeral the previous November and there was no “how are things?”, or “what have you been up to?”. He’d continue to ignore her until he either finished his breakfast or she interrupted him.

  Louisa took a seat in the recliner. Escaping air hissed between gaps in the tape. She’d awoken fuzzy headed that morning after spending a fitful few hours tossing and turning, worrying about Ben. Once the kids were packed off to school she called DCI Lenihan requesting more leave. She’d been convinced Ed could help her. Now though, looking around the dingy garage, Louisa wondered if Ed had become destitute since they last talked. His white Nanometrix t-shirt and pale grey tracksuit bottoms both looked to be in need of cleaning. She also noticed Ed scratching in between alternate mouthfuls of doughnut. First his sides, then his arms. At one point he leaned down, rolled up a leg of his tracksuit and vigorously rubbed his calf. She guessed he didn’t have lice, so there was only one other probable cause. ‘Ed, how many implants do you have?’

  He answered without turning. ‘Forty-five.’

  ‘Forty-five
. What on earth are they all for?’

  ‘They’re mostly prototypes. I’m trying them out.’

  ‘So you do still work for Nanometrix?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s just, well, why don’t you move to the new headquarters?’

  ‘I like it here. It’s quiet. No-one bothers me. I can think better when it’s quiet. And Tony’s? Around the corner? They know what I like to eat. There’s no reason for me to leave.’

  ‘The fast food restaurant?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, the food’s great.’

  Ed had put on weight since the funeral, and he wasn’t exactly thin to begin with. Greasy takeaways were the last thing he needed. But convincing Ed to make healthier lifestyle choices would have to wait. ‘Ed, I need to show you something.’ She held out her hand. On her palm rested one of the cubes from the crime scene. Forensics had carefully gathered every cube, bagging them individually and keeping them separated in case they reactivated. It had taken hours. She hadn’t realised she’d pocketed one until she discovered it at home. She’d planned on handing it in to forensics, but then the case got transferred to Drew.

  Ed glanced at the cube and frowned. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me. We found thousands of them at a crime scene.’ Louisa hesitated. ‘It’s hard to explain. They all stuck together. Then they attacked a suspect.’

  Ed’s eyebrows arched. He clapped his hands together, shaking off the sugar, then took the cube and raised it to the light. ‘I could try running it through a terahertz scanner.’

  ‘Okay,’ Louisa agreed, but Ed was already up and moving.

  She followed him back along the corridor and into a room crowded with hulking, floor-standing equipment covered in white plastic sheeting. Ed pulled a sheet off one machine. It resembled like a miniature MRI scanner, although the hole in the middle was much too narrow to fit an arm through, let alone someone’s body. He placed the cube on a plastic mount in the centre of the hole, then flicked a switch. A console beside the machine came to life.