ICE. In Case of Emergency. Like now, like this emergency, right here.
Adrian’s little joke. Adrian’s blood.
Bridge’s sense of humour, silenced by the hammer of bullets.
5
“You seem distracted this morning. What’s on your mind?”
Bridge stared into her coffee, only half-hearing Dr Nayar’s question. Last night had been a bad one. The same episode over and over, reliving Adrian’s death, helpless to save him, unable to prevent it. No, that wasn’t true. She knew that. What she didn’t know was, why now? She hadn’t suffered a Doorkicker nightmare in months, yet this morning she’d woken up sweating like a goth at the beach.
“You don’t have to talk, Brigitte, but if you don’t tell me then I can only make assumptions, and I’m sure they’re worse than the truth. Family trouble?”
Dr Nayar’s tone was soft, friendly, comforting. Everything about her was comforting. Her lightly aged skin, her soft brown eyes, the gentle grey streaks in her gently styled hair. Her office, in a corner of the SIS building at Vauxhall Cross, was soft, quiet, and comfortable. The whole package, designed down to the last detail to put intelligence officers — men and women trained to be permanently suspicious, alert, verging on paranoid — at their ease.
She often wondered how many of her colleagues came in here, sat on this oh so comfortable sofa, every day, every week, to unburden themselves and ensure their psych evals were up to date. Surely not that many. Prior to the Doorkicker incident, Bridge had only encountered Dr Nayar during her interview and selection process, and that had been in the Doctor’s regular Marylebone offices, which were well appointed but not quite so comfortable. Here, though, she had an entire corner office to use whenever she needed.
Even Giles Finlay didn’t have a corner office.
But over the past three years Bridge had come to know every inch of this room, this comfortable sofa. Every other day at first, then every three days, then once a week, then monthly — until she argued with Giles before the Carter mission, and discovered Dr Nayar had betrayed her trust. This was her first session since, but while Giles had undoubtedly briefed the good Doctor on the sting, she hadn’t mentioned it, or Bridge’s absence.
“No, my family’s fine. I’m having dinner with Izzy tonight, Mum’s still in Lyon, Dad’s still dead.” Her father had passed away long ago, while Bridge was still a teenager, but she half-hoped Dr Nayar would rise to her flippancy.
No such luck. “Do you think about him a lot?”
“Dad? All the time. What kind of question is that?”
“When was the last time you spoke to your mother?”
“Last week,” Bridge lied. “She’s fine.”
“But you’re not. What are you angry about?”
“How long have you got?” She fixed Dr Nayar with a stare. For a moment she was fourteen again, glaring defiantly at her mother from under a fringe carefully cut to seem like it had been achieved without a care in the world, and bracing herself for an unbroken string of French expletives.
Dr Nayar sipped at her cup of tea. “Giles tells me you still don’t think you’re ready for another bash at OIT.”
“I’m not. I nearly threw up yesterday.”
“Nearly, but you didn’t. I’ve seen the tape, and I thought your performance was excellent. You did exactly what you needed to, and no more, without seeming at all outwardly nervous.” Bridge didn’t know what to say to that, so stayed silent. “Brigitte, I think you’re ready to take the next step. It’s completely natural that you’ll be nervous at first, and honestly, I’d be concerned if you weren’t. But I’m just as confident you’ll overcome it. I’m going to formally advise that you’re ready for OIT.”
“I had the nightmare again last night.”
Dr Nayar paused mid-reach for her reading glasses. “The whole incident?”
“Just the part where I got my partner killed.”
“You know that’s not what happened. Adrian Radović was an experienced officer, and the senior operator in theatre. It was his job to assess the risks.”
“And my job not to freeze up when someone pointed a gun at me.”
Dr Nayar sighed. “A relapse is unfortunate, no doubt. But this is the first time in…” She consulted her notes. “In four months that you’ve had this nightmare. That’s a really good sign. I wonder what triggered it now?”
Bridge shrugged.
“Well, do come and talk to me if they become more frequent. It’s possible the anticipation of getting back in the field will trigger an anxious response. Again, perfectly natural, but I’ll want to stay abreast of it.”
They’d danced this waltz many times before, and Bridge knew every response the Doctor would give, just as she in turn must surely know what Bridge would say. But this time, she was changing the steps. “I don’t think I should go back on OIT.”
“As I said, I know you don’t think you’re ready. But your own actions demonstrate otherwise.”
“I want you to take me off the list completely.”
Dr Nayar paused for a moment, then said, “Brigitte, if you don’t get back on this horse now, I fear you may never ride again.”
“Good.” Bridge stood, picked up her leather jacket from the back of the sofa, and walked to the door. “Tell you what, make it permanent. If I can’t trust myself, how can I ask another officer to?” She tried to slam the door on her way out, but it was rigged to close slowly, ruining the effect.
6
The child had seen the man before, in the market. There were always a lot of people there, but he was very sure it was him, because of the way the man looked at the child’s mother. The same way his father sometimes looked at her, though not very often these days, since everything changed.
Now the man was in his father’s bedroom, but he wasn’t looking at the child’s mother in the same way. He was shouting, in that very quiet fashion grown-ups sometimes had when they didn’t want other people to hear. But the child heard, because the teachers had sent everyone home from school today. His teacher said the pandas were coming to ruin the school, but that didn’t sound right. He’d seen pandas on the television, and they seemed nice. They wouldn’t ruin a school.
That was what the teacher said, though, and the children were sent home. He played with his friends for a while, until he got bored of running around the streets, and he went to the shop. But his mother had already left to do housework, and the child made a sad face. His father ruffled his sandy blond hair, told him to get a grip, and sent him home to help her with the chores. He set off, but had no intention of telling his mother what his father had said. He hoped she’d let him read a book in his room instead.
He heard the man whisper-shouting when he entered the house, and at first he thought maybe it was the new friend they’d made when everything changed, the man who never smiled. Instead it was the man who the child assumed was only friends with his mother, because he’d never seen the man say hello to his father. Not even after the man met his mother that time in the market, and kissed her on the cheek.
The child’s mother began to cry. He peeked through the doorway and saw the man from the market get out of bed and start to dress. He was still whisper-shouting at the child’s mother, and she was still crying, and suddenly the child was too upset to stop himself from bursting into the room and hitting the man over and over and screaming at him to stop hurting his mother but the man was too big and strong and he threw the child against the dresser and things fell off on top of him and then the man stomped out of the house and his mother was shouting at him and crying at the same time and everything was horrible.
Months later his parents would be dead, and he would learn the truth.
7
“Ciaran, did you nick my pen? The lightsaber. It was here yesterday.”
Ciaran Tigh looked up from his screen on the other side of the
tiny Cyber Threat Analytics room. There were only three desks in the CTA unit office — one each for Ciaran, Bridge, and Monica, who was currently in a briefing — yet it was still too small for them. Bridge had once stood in the centre of the room and swung a two-foot piece of string around her head, just to test the theory about dead cats, and it was a pretty close thing. Almost took out the holiday calendar on the back wall.
“First, what would a Trek man like me want with a lightsaber? Second, how the hell can you tell?” Ciaran’s desk was immaculate, a sanctuary of order, precision, and calm. Every notebook squared off, every document tray in alignment, every pen and pencil arranged in parallel and accounted for.
By contrast, Bridge’s desk was, well, a contrast. She liked to think it reflected a creative mind, and was working on a desk-tidiness-correlation theory about Star Trek fans like Ciaran vs Star Wars fans like herself, although Monica’s desk (somewhere in the middle, not as neat-freak as Ciaran’s but tidier than Bridge’s) threw the whole thing for a loop. Monica preferred Aliens.
Besides, where everyone else saw nothing but a mess, Bridge saw a system. She might be the only one who understood it, but she was the only one who had to, and she always knew where everything was. Except, at this precise moment, her favourite pen.
She stood at Monica’s desk, scanning the surface, but it wasn’t there. She knew it wouldn’t be. Why would Monica need to take someone else’s pen? Why would anyone need to? This wasn’t high school.
Ciaran had resumed reading, already lost in the morning’s wires and scan alerts from GCHQ as they scrolled up his screen. Bridge returned to her own desk and flopped in the chair, which belched an ergonomically-designed pneumatic sigh in response. “Only ten-thirty,” she sighed. “How much worse can today get?”
Giles entered, smiling. “Bridge, there you are. Broom Eight, please, in five minutes.”
Without looking up from his monitor, Ciaran smiled, but said nothing. She scowled at him anyway. “Will I need to take notes?” she asked, opening her pen drawer. “Only I’ve — ah.” Her lightsaber pen stared back at her.
Giles, still in the doorway, shook his head. “No notes. Problem?”
It took all of her self-control not to slam the drawer shut.
8
The drone came rushing toward them over the airfield, buzzing like an angry wasp.
Some observers cried out, but Air Vice-Marshal Sir Terence Cavendish remained motionless except for an imperceptible sigh. This was all part of the display, designed to put them in a heightened state and get the heart rate going, so they were more inclined to gasp and be impressed by the drone team’s feats today. Not that Sir Terence didn’t want everyone to be impressed, including himself. The programme was under his purview, and if the boffins could pull off what they promised, the RAF would leap from zero actionable capability to the forefront of active engagement drone technology within two years. That was a noble goal, and made it worth sitting through these interminable slide shows, meetings, and demonstrations. He just wished it didn’t require quite so much theatre.
As he predicted, the drone pulled up at the last moment. It buffeted the crowd with the thrust blowback from its single rear rotor, giving the crowd a close-up view of the X-4 code number stencilled on its side before ascending to turn and resume its regular path. Sir Terence made a mental note to give the pilot a talking-to for getting quite so close, then turned his attention to the targets and missiles on the ground.
The missiles were a standard four-by-two array, rear-mounted on a jeep for mobility. Not that the jeep would need to move today, as it wasn’t the target. The focus of this demonstration was at the far end of the airstrip; a cluster of cars, a dozen blue models surrounding a single red one.
A klaxon sounded to signal the start of the final exercise. First the drone carried out some impressive, but standard, high-speed manoeuvres. Everyone knew drones had no onboard pilot by definition, but Sir Terence found it often took an extra moment of enlightenment for non-RAF personnel to truly understand the capabilities made possible by that omission. No pilot meant no concerns about g-forces, oxygen pressure, inertia, or indeed any life support systems whatsoever. It meant the craft could turn on a sixpence, as it was doing now — changing speed, direction, and altitude in ways no human pilot could attempt, much less endure.
But the manoeuvrability display was a minor part of the demonstration. That was for the hardware boys to show off, to prove they could make drones as capable and impressive as anything America had tucked up its sleeve.
The drone righted itself out of a barrel roll, turned, and made its final approach to the airstrip. The jeep lit up as it fired a single ground-to-air missile at the drone, a green-tipped ‘dumb’ rocket that streamed a fuel trail in its wake. The drone easily took evasive action, banking right, and the rocket passed harmlessly by, flying on into oblivion. But two more missiles had already been fired, and these bore white tips — the mark of ‘fire and forget’ self-guiding weapons. The X-4 dodged and weaved through their paths, even as they made their own automatic flight adjustments, slowing and turning to re-seek their target within seconds. But unlike a manned vehicle, the drone could fly just as fast as the missiles, and it soon became obvious they would run out of fuel before catching it.
Of course, that was assuming the remaining five missiles didn’t slow it down first. They fired simultaneously, bathing the jeep in a glow of hot exhaust as a mixture of white and green tips sped toward the drone. One dumb rocket almost winged it, but the X-4 rolled at the last minute, flipping its wing out of the attackers’ flight path while diving to avoid the high path of a self-guided missile. The sky filled with fuel trails, obscuring the view, but this was also part of the demonstration. A human pilot would have been flying blind in the middle of such chaos, but the drone’s ‘eyes’ were made up of dozens of sensors and cameras that ‘saw’ straight through the fog of battle.
Nearing the end of the airstrip, while still taking evasive action from three remaining self-guided missiles, the drone fired its own weapon. A single rocket soared out from under its wing, aiming for the cluster of cars. The red car exploded in a ball of flame, leaving the surrounding blue cars untouched. Bullseye.
The drone continued on, performed a loop, then flew to its landing zone at the far end of the airstrip and came to rest. Behind it, the chasing missiles dropped to earth as the demonstration team aborted them.
An impressed silence fell over the airfield, quickly followed by enthusiastic applause.
Anyone not versed in the project might have thought they were applauding the human pilot controlling the drone from a nearby bunker; that the live fire part of the exercise was another hardware demonstration, to show off the drone’s responsiveness to its remote pilot. But the pilot had done very little. In fact, after the opening aerobatics display, his only action had been to activate the evasive manoeuvre autopilot, and trigger the payload release. The evasive action itself, dodging and weaving to avoid the barrage of missiles, and the corrective targeting required to bullseye the target car while engaged in those manoeuvres, were all calculated by the drone’s own software. It was all part of a new and highly advanced system for which Sir Terence had been assigned responsibility.
Exphoria.
9
Giles had commandeered Briefing Room Eight, one of the smaller ‘Brooms’, for privacy. Bridge followed him inside, and took the seat he indicated for her.
Every Broom was a soundproofed, windowless box, and a baffled signal zone. No cellular, no wifi, no RFID or bluetooth. Even old-fashioned squawkbox walkie-talkies could barely penetrate the walls. The only outside connection was through a computer, housed in a separate secure server room, and accessed solely through a single wired mouse and keyboard placed at the top end of a four-seater conference table. Several wall monitors mirrored the computer’s display, which currently showed a slow, gentle camera pan over verdant green fiel
ds. Bridge had come to hate that screensaver after several years of staring at it in various Brooms and departments, but as Giles sat down he made no move to log in to the computer and thereby remove it.
“I have a job for you,” he said.
“I thought you said I wouldn’t need to take notes.”
“This isn’t the briefing. First I need to know if you’re willing to take it on.”
Bridge’s mind raced, trying to figure what analysis subject Giles might think she would potentially shy away from. She was the youngest member of the CTA, but there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen during the past seven years.
The Cyber Threat Analytics unit was Giles Finlay’s concept, created following the 7/7 London bombings. At the time he was a young, recently-promoted SIS ops controller, with an old school friend among those killed on the Russell Square tube-train explosion. Although the attack itself was on home soil, making it MI5’s jurisdiction, Giles argued the security services had been left behind when it came to digital communications, especially terror co-ordination through private ad hoc networks and encrypted consumer channels. GCHQ did the best they could, and MI5 had stepped up their own ‘real space’ monitoring in the UK. But SIS’ foreign knowledge and intel, if combined with the technical skills required to monitor and analyse digital comms, would place it in the best position to connect the dots between resident actors and their mentors abroad.
It had taken a year of persuasion, and no small amount of politics, but Giles was eventually authorised to create and recruit for the CTA. Ciaran had been his first hire, headhunted from his role as a technical analyst in another SIS department. Soon after, Giles had poached Monica from GCHQ and they’d operated as a two-person unit for a while until Bridge joined, fresh from Cambridge. She knew there had been other potential recruits along the way, both for Monica’s position and her own, that Giles had rejected. But their identities were never disclosed, and if either of her colleagues knew, they weren’t talking.
The Exphoria Code Page 3