>I let go of the nuclear power stations. Didn’t I?_
That was it. No shrug, as there would have been in a face to face conversation, no sad eyes to underline what had just been said. There was no need. William understood what it meant, and knew that it was true.
The threat was gone. The balance of power was broken. The Consciousness had laid down its weapon, and now everything rested on the other side doing the same.
‘It will be fine,’ said William, and hoped that he was right.
>Yes, came the reply. Whatever happens, it will be fine._
And then:
>Thank you for sitting here with me. _
80
Floodgate. That was its name, and when it finally turned up, all the other memories fell into place: the project, the cancellation, Trottier’s fury. She had been there, at the Vauxhall Cross headquarters, when Trottier came back from that meeting. He had shouted and fumed, furious, bellowing at anyone in reach, because that was the kind of guy Trottier was. Secrecy should be handled with common sense, like the sell-by dates on perishables, and even though her clearance did not extend to a project like Floodgate, she practically knew about it anyway.
Through a series of units placed at strategic locations, global communication was to be listened to and analysed, stopping terror and organised crime before it became reality. But with the system finally finished, the politicians had got cold feet. And Trottier had loathed them for it, those weak fucking cowards sitting in Whitehall and Westminster and Brussels, and most of all that turncoat of a Defence Secretary that had finally put a stop to it. At a stroke, the project which they had dedicated years of their lives to making a reality–years, and millions of unaudited public money–was mothballed, and no one was to know about it. Even though it was as good as ready to be deployed.
Which of course, was precisely what they had done anyway.
Those were the exact words she said to Higgs via the satellite phone, and the response she got was an enduring silence.
She was back in the empty office at the top of the rectangular building on Gärdet, listening to her homeland’s Defence Secretary breathing down the line, drawing lines in the condensation on the window while she waited for him to respond.
‘You don’t have to confirm or deny it,’ she said eventually. ‘I know, you know. That will do.’
‘I am sure you understand,’ Higgs said on the other end, ‘that were this to have been true, which I am not saying it is, current events merely underline the need for such a system. Not the opposite.’
‘Shall we double-check with Parliament on that one? Public opinion? Because, if I’m not mistaken, that’s who you work for, isn’t it?’
Higgs protested with a series of noises that were presumably intended to become words but that got stuck along the way.
‘The situation is as follows,’ said Forester. ‘There is a single reason behind all of this. The attacks. Trottier’s death. The hijacking of nuclear power stations. That reason is called Floodgate.’
‘I am still not able to give you any—’
‘And now William Sandberg has singlehandedly conducted negotiations with the internet. Which has agreed to relinquish control of the internet.’
‘On condition that we shut down Floodgate?’
‘If it exists,’ she couldn’t resist.
When he spoke again, it was with the irritation of someone who had been forced to say yes.
‘I think you will understand,’ he said, ‘that this conversation never took place.’
‘I think you will understand,’ she said, ‘that I don’t consider you to be in a position to be making demands.’
‘Go to hell, Forester,’ he said.
‘I’ll see you there.’
When Winslow knocked on Higgs’s office door two minutes later, Higgs greeted him in the doorway with a stiff shushing index finger to his lips.
The television in the large oak bookcase was showing clip after clip of jubilant crowds, huge groups dancing around with flags and torches, happy and singing, and at first Winslow couldn’t really grasp what he was seeing.
Then he read the tickers.
Security restored. Nuclear alerts cancelled. Installations back under control.
‘When did this happen?’ Winslow managed after a while. And then, when his thoughts finally caught up. ‘Is this us? Have we done this? Has Sedgwick given the order?’
Higgs shook his head.
‘Ten minutes left. Floodgate is still running.’ There was something in his voice. Was it contempt?
‘The Stockholm lot,’ said Higgs, and yes, contempt it was. ‘They’ve negotiated it. Swedish fucking diplomacy. Sandberg made it happen. The internet retreated, because he negotiated an agreement.’
For a moment, Winslow just stood there, trying to square the circle of what he’d just heard. Why the rage? Wasn’t this the best thing that could have happened? The problem was solved, their enemy had given up, and it meant that their plan was no longer necessary. What was there to be angry about?
‘I’ve still got time,’ he said. ‘I’ve got time to contact Sedgwick and tell him to call it off.’
Higgs’s stare came from deep inside him.
‘Why would you?’
‘Why I…’ Winslow was stumped. ‘Well, because…’
‘We do agree on this,’ said Higgs, ‘don’t we? That if there is indeed some kind of living consciousness out there–a sentient being that is the internet–we are agreed on what it could do to us?’
For the second time in quick succession, Winslow felt himself scrabbling around for words.
‘If what Forester said is true,’ Higgs went on. ‘If Sandberg has negotiated with the internet.’ He emphasised those words to give them the preposterous ring they deserved. ‘What’s to say that we will succeed again next time?’
Winslow gave him a puzzled look. ‘I don’t know what you mean. All I’m saying is that I can ring Sedgwick. We don’t need to get rid of Floodgate, we can shut it down and have it on standby. We can leave it where it is and pick it up again when all this is over.’
‘Au contraire,’ said Higgs. He pulled out his chair, sat down behind his huge desk, and looked at Winslow with weary eyes. ‘I am too old for a change of career,’ he said. ‘I cannot afford to lose my post. I cannot afford to be pilloried in the tabloids. Our units are out there. At over one hundred locations, our equipment is hidden away, secret as long as no one looks for it, as long as no one besides us knows of its existence. And therein lies the problem. We are no longer alone.’
He sat up straight, shuffled papers into piles on his desk, not because it was necessary, but to signal that the conversation was over.
‘The damage it could do? To us? To me?’ He shook his head. ‘I am sorry. This is why we never negotiate with terrorists.’
Winslow watched as his boss picked up a pen and turned his attention to the meaningless piles of paper. He saw him add his signature at various points, his entire body language underlining the fact that as far as he was concerned, Winslow was no longer in the room.
‘Unless I’ve got it wrong,’ Winslow finally said, ‘this is no longer a terrorist we’re talking about. It’s the opposite, in fact. A victim, isn’t it?’ He stood there, immovable, observing his boss’s face as it studiously kept ignoring his presence. ‘Surely there must be a better way?’
He didn’t want to beg, but his body language did so anyway: I can still make that call, I can still stop this, a single call is all it will take to stop the codes going out.
When Higgs finally did speak, his words were accompanied by a gesture instructing Winslow to leave.
‘Sedgwick has his orders. They still stand.’
In London it had still been summer when the codes were sent out around the world for the first time. Through bright sunshine and green, rustling trees, the radio waves had made their way out into the ether and around the globe, reaching their recipients with a message that no one else understood.
Two. Four. Nine. Nine. Six. Eight. Four. Three.
It was a nod to a time that no longer was, but it was also the perfect way to avoid being detected. No emails were sent, or stored on servers, there were no IP addresses through which the sender could be traced. Just numbers repeated on shortwave, echoing phantom digits that could not be deciphered without the right key.
Three. Three. Eight. Seven. Nine. Six.
The hardware had already been manufactured and dispatched. Over one hundred units had reached their intended recipients, specially chosen individuals all over the world, people who were listening to the agreed frequency and waiting for their turn to arrive.
Five. Nine. Nine. Five.
And, from his office high above London, on the South Bank with a view of Westminster, Simon Sedgwick had sat and directed the whole operation like a conductor in front of a silent orchestra.
At his command, the codes were sent out in the order he had chosen, and the only people who knew what they meant were the agents out there waiting. They weren’t agents, of course, the way one would imagine an agent, with a well-pressed suit and a penchant for shaken cocktails: Simon Sedgwick’s agents were technicians and engineers, with denim shirts and chinos and apartments on the outskirts of their cities, and someone else had made sure they were equipped with the necessary swipe cards and security clearances.
All Sedgwick had had to do was conduct.
Three. Eight. Eight. Four. Nine. Three.
Peter Levinson was thirty-four years old, and lived in a satellite town north of New York City. He was a trained network technician, he had a family and two kids and a house and gambling debts that never went away. And just as Simon Sedgwick had barely heard his name, he had scarcely heard of Sedgwick either.
By the time his specific code appeared in the stream of digits on the shortwave band on the morning of the nineteenth of September, he had been ready, on standby, for months. The large, anonymous concrete installation out in the middle of an industrial estate in Brookhaven, New York, lacked any signs or outward decoration, but Levinson swiped his card in the reader next to the door, nodded to the security guard and the other technicians as though they were his colleagues, and carried on into the building where his mission was to be carried out.
There it was, the internet’s Holy of Holies. Or at least one of them. This was where the gigantic transatlantic cables came ashore and split off into the American infrastructure, immeasurable amounts of data streaming in and out across the continent second after second after second. Here, in the midst of the enormous streams of data, he was to hide a black box among all the others. A single unit of electronic equipment was to be placed in exactly the right position, and once that was done, his box would be at the centre of the stream, an unremarkable filter through which everything would pass and then be forwarded without anyone noticing.
A box to bug the internet.
An hour later Peter Levinson left the large concrete building in Brookhaven and drove off to his regular job one hundred and fifty miles away.
Tonight, he was going to pay off those gambling debts.
That afternoon, Sedgwick conducted his first-ever trial. For just a few seconds, starting at eighteen hundred hours, he had the new unit in Brookhaven forwarding all its discoveries back to London, thoroughly analysed and heavily compressed into a long trumpet blast of grating noise. Noise that was data that was the internet.
At the very moment that a debt-free Peter Levinson popped the cork on a bottle of champagne along with his surprised family, a whole table’s worth of bottles were opened on the top floor of the building on the South Bank.
It had all gone exactly according to plan. They had surreptitiously connected themselves to one of the largest information nodes on Earth, made an incision on the very heart of the internet, a first step on a journey that would give them control over all the information being sent back and forth. A first step towards a world without crime or terror. All that remained to be done was to install a further hundred units, and once that was done, Floodgate would be ready for deployment.
It wasn’t until the next day that Sedgwick read about the power cut. It had begun just as their test got under way, millions of data requests that had hit Brookhaven and led to a ripple effect, too alarming to be put down to coincidence, and he had immediately informed the client that they were subject to an attack. Because how would he know that what he called an incision to the heart of the internet was precisely what he had done?
All of that flew through Simon Sedgwick’s head as he stood there on the top floor of the riverside building, along with a suffocating revulsion at what was about to happen. He let his whole bodyweight fall forward, felt the chill from the glass on his face as his forehead pushed against the windowpane. Only a thick piece of glass separated him from a long fall to the ground. If the glass broke, he’d be dead within seconds. No such luck.
Down in the basement, the hard discs were already hard at work. Relentlessly collecting data from the entire internet, emails and forum entries and pictures that fitted certain criteria, compressed and deciphered and sorted into categories. In time, they would be even more efficient, as they taught themselves to recognise behaviours and keywords and flush out malicious plans in time, saving the world from terror and organised crime and who knew what else.
Floodgate. The tool that everyone wanted. But was too scared to have.
On the nineteenth of September, Sedgwick’s colleagues had sent the calling codes to an agent who they did not know was named Peter Levinson, and now those same codes were to be sent out once more. After that, hundreds of others would follow, and the calls would be followed by coded instructions to be carried out immediately.
Sedgwick stood there, dragging it out, waiting for a counter-order to arrive, something in the nick of time to call everything off. But nothing happened.
As Sedgwick took his spot in the middle of the big open-plan office to give his colleagues the order, the champagne bottles from the night before still lined the desks.
This time, there was no applause.
When Peter Levinson’s code turned up for the second time in six months, it took him by surprise. But the instructions were clear, and as he entered the well-guarded building thousands of miles from Simon Sedgwick’s office he was just one of many around the world doing the same thing.
In Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon and Marseille, in Yokohama and Los Angeles and almost a hundred other coastal cities across the globe, men and women swiped their keycards in near-identical doors. They nodded to near-identical guards, carried on into near-identical refrigerated server halls, and all of them had been there once before.
That time, their bags had contained components from London–advanced technological equipment to be installed according to careful instructions. This time, what was in their bags was decidedly cruder, and once it was in place they had instructions to leave the site as quickly as possible.
81
Every now and then, major events are overshadowed by others. They are buried under the weight of bigger stories, stories that make other events pale, although they really should not.
At three a.m., Central European Time on the sixth of December, a fire broke out in Brookhaven, New York. It began with an automatic alarm in a single-storey building that didn’t look much from the outside, adorned with neither signs nor company names and lacking any windows. Inside, large spiral staircases led down to server halls full of computers, and when the fire service arrived, the flames lashed at them like hungry, unchained predators.
Once the fire had been put out, only rubble remained. All that was left of the endless rows of electronics were the empty racks, twisted by the heat and blackened with soot, and the thousands of green diodes that had flickered like nocturnal creatures from the racks had melted and disappeared.
All the clues pointed to a major electrical fault, which was bad enough. This was the site where one of the Atlantic cables came ashore, and any other d
ay the newspapers would have been clambering over each other to report the story.
NATION’S SECURITY AT RISK, they would have screamed, INTERNET ON FIRE!
But not today. Today, the world had narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster–not one, in fact, but sixty-seven–so who is going to care about an inferno in a server hall somewhere on the coast?
Way under the radar, the same thing happened in place after place. In small, insignificant buildings, in small insignificant coastal towns, close to Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon and Marseille, outside Yokohama and Los Angeles and in a hundred other little towns, fires raged in silence.
When the morning dawned, the font sizes shrank. By that time, the newspapers had dedicated hours to jubilant screams, heavy on words like salvation and joy and a second chance, but gradually, the headlines tailed off. When all was said and done, nothing really had changed. People were still alive, which of course was nice, but it was also undeniably the way it had always been.
And nice, unfortunately, doesn’t sell newspapers.
Before long the joy was forgotten, and the journalists returned to the daily grind. And as the sun rose over the newsrooms of the world, it heralded a perfectly ordinary day where the end of the world was as far away as ever.
And then, finally, there was room for other stories.
The realisation of what was happening reached the HQ on Gärdet in three places at once. In the ground-floor meeting room, Tetrapak had attached an aerial to the window pane with a suction pad, sitting there with his equipment and his dark grey plastic crate, searching through frequency after frequency, waiting for the data streams to cease as proof that Floodgate was shutting down.
When he heard the voice he froze in his seat.
Four. Eight. Nine. Six. Three. Three. Four.
There it was again, the voice he hadn’t heard for months, and it blew through him like an icy wind as the numbers kept coming.
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