Marcel shrugged. “He was a skilled forger, and he never cheated. More importantly, he was one of us. Two strangers walk into town, take advantage of our hospitality, and respond by killing one of our own. What would you do?”
Henri couldn’t answer that. He also couldn’t answer the biggest question of all; why hadn’t the Portuguese smugglers used the forged passports? Marcel had summoned him because the Toulouse underground believed the men had returned to the city, despite the obvious danger. Why? Why hadn’t they gone with the shipment to England, as must surely have been the plan?
Marcel was so preoccupied with the smugglers’ offences toward Toulouse that the question didn’t come up, and after switching cabs three times they finally took a ride out of the old town, toward an industrial district that didn’t look much newer. The cabbie was reluctant to take them too far in, and from the broken windows and rusting barbed wire Henri glimpsed from the car, he wasn’t surprised. Modern Toulouse was a thriving hub of modern industry and technology, but every city had its black spots, and this was clearly theirs.
He followed Marcel, squeezing through a gap in a wire fence, climbing over a gate where the barbed wire had been snipped away, and finally entering a long-abandoned factory building. They picked their way over fallen roof tiles, broken flooring, and discarded raw materials long rusted in the rain. Henri used the LED flash on his phone to see, while Marcel had been prepared and brought a flashlight. They made their way up to the first floor, and as they climbed the concrete stairs, Henri heard an involuntary sniffle from up ahead.
Marcel heard it too, and called out. “It’s me, Marcel. I’ve brought you food.” To Henri’s surprise, it was true. Marcel reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two sandwiches wrapped in cling film, holding them up so they could be seen in the beam of his flashlight. “I’m coming in.”
They were hiding in a former supervisor’s office, overlooking what would once have been part of the factory floor. Two men, huddled against the far wall, flinching in the sudden light, sobbing with pain and misery. Or rather, one of them was. As he drew closer, Henri saw that the crying smuggler was holding onto the other with the desperate grief of recent loss. Both had greying, sallow skin, but only one was silent and unmoving.
Henri took one of the sandwiches from Marcel, unwrapped it, and offered it to the sobbing smuggler. He recalled Old Philippe saying how ill both men had looked, that one of them seemed ready to keel over at any moment. “Your friend was already very ill when you reached Saint-Malo, wasn’t he? Is that why you didn’t travel to England?” The smuggler took the sandwich with one hand and bit into it with furious hunger, nodding in silent reply as he chewed. “And you thought you could make it back to Portugal instead, find a friend who could help you.” Another nod. “Did you know what you were carrying? Did the client tell you?”
The smuggler nodded again, but Henri said nothing, waiting for more. The man swallowed too quickly, coughed three times, swallowed again, then said, “But he told us it was sealed. That if we didn’t open the package, we were safe.”
“Why tell you at all?” Marcel asked. “Isn’t is always safer for the courier not to know what he’s carrying?”
“That’s terrorism for you,” said Henri. “People like that, they want everyone to know. Even if these guys had been caught in Saint-Malo, as soon as they said ‘radioactive’ the place would be sealed off, news cameras everywhere, lots of publicity and people saying ‘My God, they came so close, we could have all died.’ It’s a textbook play.” Marcel shrugged with disdain, and lit a cigarette. “Give him one,” said Henri. Marcel was about to protest, but sighed and handed his cigarette to the smuggler. He lit another for himself, and stepped outside the room.
“You’re doing very well,” Henri said. “Just a couple more things. First, what address was on the package? Where was it going in England? Do you have it written down?”
The smuggler pulled on the cigarette and shook his head, then coughed for ten seconds straight. Henri took out his phone and pulled up the photo of Novak and Marsh from the bar. “What about the client? How were you contacted, how were you paid? Did you see either of these men?”
Before the smuggler could answer, Marcel ran into the room. “We’ve got company,” he hissed, “I told you it wouldn’t take long for them to find him.” Henri heard distant angry shouts. They didn’t have much time before the Toulouse underground would be here to take revenge on the smugglers, assuming they weren’t both dead before the mob arrived. The smuggler was coughing incessantly now, and threw the cigarette away. Henri tried to help the man to his feet but he bent over, coughing and wheezing, too weak to stand. “Strange English-looking man,” he gasped between coughs, “found us in Sines…”
Henri propped the man up against his own knee, holding the phone screen to his face. “Why was he strange? Did he look like this? Like one of these?”
The smuggler lifted a finger toward the screen, but couldn’t hold it long enough to point at anyone in the photo. “On his mobile,” whispered the smuggler, “sounded like Chinese…” The man’s body softened, as if the tension held within his chest had dissolved into air, and he was gone.
Henri and Marcel left, taking a different route to avoid the mob. As they clambered out of a broken ground-floor window, the angry shouts of criminals denied vengeance echoed through the concrete and steel.
75
Giles was talking about Nigel Marsh/Daniel Bowman, about the radioactive material, about drones and targets. Bridge was listening attentively, hearing every word, but distracted by an insistent, incessant thought at the back of her mind. Something just didn’t add up.
She’d spent most of the night failing to find sleep, tossing and turning long after the sleep timer had silenced the almost inaudible Radio 3 feed on her iPhone. The confirmation from Mourad that Daniel Bowman had commissioned the matériel chaud smuggling operation — and on a shoestring, by the sounds of it — had begun a flurry of secure phone calls, encrypted emails, records searches, plus warrant applications on both sides of the river and across it, as SIS and Five argued about who had jurisdiction and primacy over whatever was about to happen.
That it was connected to Bowman’s interest in drones seemed obvious. A dirty bomb flown into central London by consumer drone to explode somewhere like Oxford Circus would be devastating to the population, to transport, to the economy, to the government. But if that was the plan, why bother installing a mole on the Exphoria project? He didn’t need that to buy and control remote drones. And what was the startup in Shoreditch all about? Had ‘Marsh’ made up that rubbish about quantum state information in wifi signals just to get Andrea and Steve off his back? Steve had filled Bridge in when she returned to London, and her guess was that Bowman knew all along they weren’t from a local business bureau. Otherwise, why clear out so fast after their visit? Perhaps he wasn’t some genius physicist working on an impossible technology. Perhaps he was doing something much simpler with existing signal technology, which explained the routers and signal units Steve saw on Bowman’s workbench. If you were going to run a drone attack on the Exphoria demo, you’d need range extenders and signal boosters in order to maintain a signal across the security perimeter. You’d want to place them in advance, test their reception.
But security around the Lincolnshire airfield had been triple-A for weeks. Bowman would have had to infiltrate the location before Andrea and Steve paid him a visit. Nevertheless, it wasn’t impossible. Bridge, having given up on sleep, added a bullet point to the long email she was composing to Giles and everyone else involved. Then she went for a pre-dawn run round Highgate Wood, showered, and headed into Vauxhall.
She arrived to find a response from Steve Wicker at GCHQ, supplying the dump of ICR records from the Shoreditch startup office she’d requested. Internet Connection Records were often maddeningly vague, being only a list of top-level URLs visited, and she didn’t expect Bowm
an to have used the office connection much anyway. But it was a start, and when Ciaran and Monica arrived, she asked for their help to scan through them.
They’d barely begun when Giles stepped into the CTA unit to address the situation and explain the plan. “Everyone seems to be moving in the same direction with regard to method,” he said, “so our joint assumption is that Bowman plans to make a radiological dispersal device using the smuggled material, and deliver it using a small domestic drone of some kind. Where we all differ is on target, motive, and solution.”
“Just shoot anything that looks like a drone within a mile of the airfield,” said Monica. “How is that hard?”
“It’s hard precisely because domestic drones are so small they’re practically invisible to radar, and to the naked eye once they’re airborne above two hundred and fifty metres,” said Ciaran. “You’d need a thousand people watching ten thousand cameras to cover every possible angle.”
“You’re also assuming the airfield is the target,” said Bridge.
“But where else?” asked Giles.
“I don’t know. I’m still trying to understand why he bothered to infiltrate Exphoria in the first place. GCHQ has sent us the SignalAir ICRs I requested, so maybe we’ll find something in there.”
“Or maybe he only used the office connection for porn, and all his real comms were done over the cell network,” said Monica. “This guy’s supposed to be a technical whizzkid, right?”
Bridge shrugged. “It’s the current assumption, yeah. I know it’s a long shot, but it has to be worth trying. There’s something off about all this, and I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Then you have approximately four hours to get your finger in gear, so to speak, before that demo takes place in Lincolnshire,” said Giles as he left. “Keep me informed.”
“I can’t believe they’re going ahead with the demo,” said Ciaran. “Do they think we make this shit up for the craic?”
Bridge shook her head. “Worse. They assume we’re stupid, and have it wrong.”
“No offence, Bridge, but maybe we do,” said Monica.
“Honestly, I kind of hope so. But I doubt it.”
76
The drone rushed toward them over the airfield, buzzing like an angry wasp.
Air Vice-Marshal Sir Terence Cavendish was pleased to note there were no theatrics this time. He’d had a quiet word with the drone controllers (much as he appreciated their skill with the technology, he refused to call them pilots) after the previous demonstration, and made it clear that spooking the crowd was both unacceptable and unnecessary. Everyone watching had seen regular drone flights a hundred times before, and knew what they were capable of with a skilled human controller. What they wanted to see from Exphoria was how it flew without that human control.
The project had faced its share of obstacles. He wasn’t directly involved at the funding stage, but he’d seen from afar the difficulty of convincing some of his colleagues that the project was achievable. Having to co-finance it with the French, of all people, was testament enough to that. Then there had been the arguments over where the main project headquarters should be. Sir Terence argued for England, of course. Somewhere like this very airfield in rural Lincolnshire would have been perfect. But the French were putting up a significant amount of money, and had a lot of computer programmers ready to go. What finally won Sir Terence over had been the argument that nobody would think to look for a next-generation military software project in French wine country.
But somebody had. The final hurdle, a bloody mole of all things, sent by…well, they’d originally said Russia, which had surprised Sir Terence not one jot, but yesterday Devon Chisholme had said they now thought it was the Chinese, possibly a lone actor, perhaps intending to sell to the highest bidder. Thought, possibly, perhaps; typical hedging from the Service, never willing to commit. But Sir Terence had committed, to this project and this launch date, and nipped any suggestion of delay in the bud. The mole had been identified and eliminated, as had his handler, and they’d even recovered some of the leaked data, which to his eye didn’t look like much at all anyway. The only loose end was a computer chap here in England, who they said might have access to radioactive material. But Sir Terence had served in Hong Kong before the handover, and knew a thing or two about Beijing. For one thing, if this computer nerd spy had any sense he’d be lying low in Bucharest or Minsk, to avoid paying the price of losing his mole. Or perhaps the Chinese had already extracted him, and he was on his way to a Nanjing jail cell. As for the possibility of an RDD, that was outside his purview. But a state action of that magnitude, by China or anyone else, would focus on civilian population in an urban environment, not ministers and grandees in a field in the middle of nowhere. What would be the point of that?
Finally, of course, this was all supposition. The man might just be a freelancer, after all. In which case he was undoubtedly long gone, with a new identity in another country, working to concoct a new hare-brained scheme the Services could worry about anew.
All told, there was no reason to suspect the demonstration was in jeopardy, and Sir Terence had firmly insisted it go ahead. Security had been increased further, and everyone was on high alert, but that would suffice. Only a suicidal fool would try to infiltrate this location.
Today’s demonstration was more complex than the last, designed to show off the Exphoria system’s capabilities to its fullest now that phase one of the software was considered complete. The airfield was filled with obstacles, armaments, and targets, presenting the UAV with a gauntlet ten times as difficult to complete as the comparatively simple demonstration the crowd watched two months before. Several regular drones were brought out first, to attempt the exercises with a human pilot and standard software, and as each was damaged or failed, a replacement was substituted to pick up where it left off. In all, six drones were rendered inoperable by simulated enemy fire or surface collisions before the X-4 was launched. What followed was a flawless display of autonomous and self-correcting flight, targeting acquisition and compensation, and evasive manoeuvres that only the digital reflexes of a computer system could achieve. Twenty minutes after the demonstration had begun every countermissile was spent, every obstacle cleared, every target destroyed.
When the smoke cleared the gathered ministers, dignitaries, buyers, and dealers in the viewing stands stood and applauded, before filing out into the marquee for champagne and vol-au-vents. Later, Sir Terence and his French counterpart made short speeches to thank the attendees for their support, and reminded them of the official launch reception tomorrow evening in London. Then they all departed, car by car, to their offices, homes, or hotels.
Everything had gone perfectly, and Exphoria was set to be a roaring success. As his driver returned him to his home in Hampshire, Sir Terence dared to wonder if there might be a peerage in it for him.
77
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t he try anything?”
Ciaran and Monica were shutting down, ready to leave. The CTA unit, along with Giles and several other departments, had all stayed at Vauxhall throughout the Exphoria demonstration. Even after the main event, while the drinks reception took place, they kept searching through all the data they could, and waited for word that something, anything, was kicking off.
But nothing did. Finally the attending MI5 liaison phoned Andrea Thomson, to inform her that everyone except security and maintenance personnel had left the airfield without incident. Andrea called Giles, who called Emily Dunston and C, before walking into the CTA office and telling the team himself. Bowman hadn’t tried anything, and the demonstration had gone without a hitch.
“Maybe he’s cut his losses and scarpered while he can,” said Monica, shrugging on her jacket. “Whatever; it doesn’t matter. The demo went fine, the drone software works, everyone’s happy.”
Ciaran buttoned up his own coat and came to lean against Bri
dge’s desk. “She’s right,” he said.
“Wow, are you feeling OK?” Monica laughed. “Can you say that again while I record it?”
Ciaran ignored her. “There’s nothing more for him to do, Bridge. If your man got enough of the software, he’ll turn up on the black market trying to sell it, and then we can send an OIT after him. If he didn’t get enough, which, to be honest, is my guess, then he’s gone to ground and we’ll never hear from him again. Either way you’re grand, and you should go home and relax for once.”
Bridge chewed on her lightsaber pen and mumbled goodbye as they left, still staring unfocused at her screen and turning things over in her mind. Something still wasn’t right, and she couldn’t shake the notion she was missing an obvious connection.
Giles poked his head round the door, saw she was the only one left, and sighed. “Go home, Bridge. In fact, take tomorrow off. You of all people could do with the extra sleep.” She glared at him in silence until he backed out of the door.
But twenty minutes later, on the northbound Victoria line, she resigned herself to the wisdom of her colleagues. She really did need some sleep, and the Exphoria demo really had gone off without a hitch, let alone an attack. Bowman hadn’t hacked anything, hadn’t planted a bomb, hadn’t sabotaged the drone. He hadn’t done anything at all, despite the fact that he almost certainly had multiple state-of-the-art prosumer drones and a packet of radioactive material at his disposal.
Why bother, if he wasn’t planning to use them? Why go to the trouble of the ID thefts, the smuggling, the secret purchases? It didn’t make sense that they could be a red herring. The point of a distraction was to be so big and noticeable that people couldn’t ignore it, yet Bowman had worked hard to cover his tracks every step of the way. If the Exphoria demonstration wasn’t the target, what else could be in his sights? Was Bowman running two completely separate missions at once, and their only connection just happened to be drones? In a way it seemed the most likely answer, but Bridge couldn’t swallow it. If she’d learned one thing in the past eight years at SIS, it was the alarming lack of true coincidences in the world.
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