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  Jessica raised her eyebrows. ‘So she’s opened up a way to the roof?’

  ‘Hopefully.’ Steph stood up, shuffled around the table and took two steps towards the dozen survivors grouped together on the other side of the café.

  BOOM.

  The room shook. A shockwave crashed through the café from the mall. A terrible roar rattled the room. Steph shot a glance upwards just as a chunk of concrete about a metre square ripped away from the ceiling. It span through the air and smashed into thousands of pieces on the marble floor.

  67

  Base One, Tintara

  Tom reacted with lightning speed. His reflexes with a computer were a match for any of the team in the field. His fingers flew over the light keyboard, inputting an emergency code sequence to wrench Sybil from the web, isolating the computer from external cyberforces. But he had to move incredibly quickly. Whoever or whatever had taken over the ITAM system in Geneva had spotted Sybil and was now attacking. The holoscreen flashed, then filled with new images and figures replacing the devil’s face.

  Tom held his breath involuntarily, then he realised what he was doing and started to draw oxygen into his lungs so fast he was almost hyperventilating. ‘Come on,’ he hissed. ‘Come on.’ He moved his fingers even faster, his mind now on overdrive. Invasive tendrils of the Geneva hacker were reaching out as Tom dragged Sybil offline and safe behind the firewall protecting Base One.

  ‘That’s it . . . that’s it!’ Tom exclaimed as he wrestled back control and shut down all connections between Sybil and the outside world. Keying in a final alphanumeric sequence, he pushed himself back against the pillows and took several more very deep breaths.

  ‘Sybil,’ he panted.

  No reply.

  He tapped another sequence of keys. ‘Sybil. Answer me, damn you!’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Oh, thank Christ! Sybil, run a full diagnostic, please.’

  Two seconds of silence passed. Then: ‘Integrity 100 per cent. Returning non-core operations back to the web, enab- ling comms and satellite links. These are triple encrypted.’

  ‘Okay,’ Tom sighed deeply. He knew it would now be virtually impossible for anyone to get into Sybil’s systems and they had made progress. They now knew both the power and limitations of the ITAM hacker. Tom was the best in the business and had spent the past 12 months upgrading every aspect of the hardware and programming of the E-Force computer system, paying particular attention to defence. He felt a stab of anger at the fact the hacker had almost breached his system. He hated being taken by surprise. He had let his guard down.

  ‘That was a close one,’ he said, bitterly.

  ‘It was indeed, Tom. The Geneva hacker is a formidable force. We came within 0.05 seconds of infiltration. But you did a good job.’

  ‘Gee thanks.’

  ‘And we have gained an unexpected advantage.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The ITAM hacker had to lower his defences in order to attack us. I was too quick for him. I accessed and copied everything on the company’s mainframe . . . and everything in the hacker’s system.’

  ‘You are amazing, Sybil!’ Tom said gleefully, hardly able to believe what the computer had told him.

  ‘Yes, perhaps I am.’

  68

  ‘God, Sybil, you’re sounding more like me every day!’ Tom laughed. ‘Okay, so what you got?’

  ‘Almost an exabyte of data, Tom.’

  ‘A what? A million terabytes? My God! Okay, question one: can we break into the hacker’s defences? Can we get control of the ITAM mainframe?’

  ‘No,’ Sybil replied with typical frankness.

  ‘By that you mean we cannot break through the hacker’s defensive shield?’

  ‘That is correct. His name is Light Touch, by the way, Tom.’

  ‘Light Touch? You sound as though you almost admire the bastard.’

  ‘He is an exceptionally proficient hacker.’

  Tom bridled, then took a deep breath. ‘Maybe he’s good but he’s not the best.’

  ‘That has yet to be verified.’

  Tom gave the computer a contemptuous, ‘Yeah, right,’ and studied his holoscreen. ‘Okay, we will return to this discussion at a later date, believe me. Question two: is this Light Touch working for the Four Horsemen?’

  ‘Yes he is.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They obviously want to destroy ITAM.’

  ‘Hang on! Back up, Syb. Why on earth would they want to do that?’

  ‘I suspect because they have a big investment in the company.’ There was a momentary pause. ‘Indeed, according to several global finance groups I’ve just accessed, the Four Horsemen are between 31 per cent and 33 per cent shareholders in ITAM, depending upon whose figures you believe.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make any sense at all! Why would they want to destroy a company that they’ve invested in? Hang on . . . ITAM are major shareholders in both the Cloud Tower and Eurostar. What the hell is going on here?’

  ‘It’s a principle called “Playing Put Options”.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Engaging in a subtle financial game, really, Tom.’

  ‘Explain, Sybil.’

  ‘A “Put Option” is a contract giving the buyer the option to sell stocks at a later date. They buy the stocks at a nominal price – let’s say, one euro per share – and they are sold in blocks of 100 shares. If exercised, they give the holder the option of selling selected stocks at a future date at a price set when the contract is issued. For example, suppose an investor has a million euros to spend. They could tie up 10,000 shares of, say, British Airways at 100 euros per share. But crucially, they don’t actually have to pay the full amount for them. They just pay one euro a share for them. They have simply bought an option and, most importantly, the seller of the option is obligated to buy them back at a pre-agreed price if the buyer says so. Now, suppose the stock falls to 50 euros when the contract matures, the holder of the option can purchase the shares for 50 euros and immediately sell them back for 100 euros – regardless of where the market then stands – because that was stipulated in the original contract.’

  ‘But why would any seller do this?’

  ‘Two reasons. First, the markets are so competitive they have to take extraordinary measures to acquire a profitable slice of the global market. But perhaps more importantly, the seller gets capital investment that they can use as the contract plays out. In my example, the buyer pays one euro per share and has the option on 10,000 shares. This means the seller has 10,000 euros to play with for a pre-agreed time.’

  ‘Very risky.’

  ‘From what I understand of the stock market, Tom, risk is its essence.’

  ‘Yes okay. So you’re telling me that the Four Horsemen have Put Options on everything linked with Eurostar, the Cloud Tower and ITAM.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they want the companies to collapse because they’ll make vast profits from shares.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘And they have no compunction in killing thousands of people to meet their ends.’

  ‘That would seem to be the case. I assumed we had already established the way the Four Horsemen operate. Mammon appears to be their God.’

  69

  Cloud Tower, Dubai

  Chloe had stopped the Cage less than a metre away from the dead snake charmer. She broke the comms link with Steph and looked up at the door into 199. She was about to move forwards when she thought she saw the man’s right hand twitch.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s . . .’ She unbuckled her safety harness and depressed a pad on the control panel, releasing the door mechanism. She heard the lock click and the door start to swing open. Then the explosion hit.

  The floor shook. The servos of the Cage automatically snapped into a higher gear, stabilising the machine in a fraction of a second. But Chloe was already out of the harness and was thrown forwards, her body slamming against the
control console.

  The boom of the explosion resonated around the bare concrete walls of the emergency stairs. Then came another sound, nearer, the snapping of steel girders, the sliding of shattered bricks and concrete. Chloe looked up as the ceiling crumbled and a torrent of debris crashed down. A metal bar landed squarely on the head of the snake charmer, crushing his skull. The Cage slipped to the left, throwing Chloe around inside. She slammed into the side of the Cage, her face crashing against the polycarbonate resin window. A sharp stab of pain shot through her left temple and she was thrown backwards, landing half-on and half-off her seat.

  Jerking her head upwards, she saw a rectangular slab of ceiling fall through 3 metres of air and land on the opened door of the Cage, yanking it half off its hinges. The Cage wobbled. Chloe jolted around, trying to ignore the crashing pain in her head. She shot out a hand to grip a backup joystick close to the control panel, but her hand slipped as the machine rocked.

  She fell forwards again, her side catching a sharp length of maxinium that had been twisted inward from the hinge as the Cage was struck. The shard ripped through Chloe’s cybersuit, tearing the material above her right thigh and cutting into her flesh. She tried to twist away but was caught. Her left foot was trapped under the chair. The Cage started to topple. In desperation, she brought her arm around, grabbed her thigh and did a half-turn to her left. A second huge chunk of rubble smashed down onto the opened right side of the machine. Spears of metal and twisted plastic shot into the cabin.

  70

  ‘Chloe? Chloe? Come in.’ Steph was clambering over a pile of debris stretched across the floor. A large portion of the café ceiling had landed where Steph and Jessica had been treating the others a little earlier. The med-kit and the Hopjet were smashed to fragments. Jessica came up behind Steph. ‘Everyone okay?’ She scanned their faces. They were all terrified but there were no new injuries.

  ‘What in the name of Allah was that?’ Saeed gasped.

  Steph ignored him. ‘Chloe? Come in please. This is Steph. Chloe. Answer, damn it!’

  She looked up as Frank and Carmen approached. ‘What’s happening?’ Carmen asked, her cheeks streaked with tears. ‘I’m at my wit’s end.’

  Steph looked at her, keeping her face neutral, calm. ‘I’m not surprised,’ she said and placed a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘That was obviously quite an explosion. But it wasn’t on this floor.’

  ‘It could have been anywhere,’ Saeed exclaimed. ‘Anywhere. We could all be crushed any second. Or the floor . . . the floor could collapse.’ He was sliding into hysteria, his face wreathed in sweat and dirt. Steph noticed his bandaged arm was soaked through with blood.

  ‘Calm down,’ Steph said, taking a couple of steps towards him. She went to lift Saeed’s hand to inspect the bandage.

  He misinterpreted the gesture. Eyes ablaze, sweat running into them, he took a swing at Steph. She reacted instantly, moving to one side as the blow missed her by a foot. But Saeed had lost all reason. He span around with surprising agility, flailing the air with his good arm. Again he missed Steph. She grabbed his wrist, spinning him on his heel and yanking his hand to a point high up between his shoulder blades. He squealed, spittle flying from his mouth, his face screwed up into a ball of fury.

  ‘Please,’ Steph said with almost supernatural patience. ‘Please, Saeed. Try to calm down. We won’t get out of here if we don’t keep our heads.’

  She glanced around at the confused and horrified bystanders. Saeed was still wriggling and writhing. Then he suddenly went completely limp and slumped to the floor, his head falling forwards as he sobbed into his palms.

  Steph didn’t allow them time to think. ‘Frank and Mohammed?’

  She nodded silently towards Saeed Khalid’s crumpled form. They understood straight away and leaned in to help the man to his feet. He seemed to have given up and simply went along with it.

  Steph turned to the others. ‘We need to get to the emergency stairs back over there.’ She pointed to the southeast corner.

  ‘But the way up and down is blocked,’ one of the women in Charlotte Emmington’s group said, her voice shaky.

  ‘They were but hopefully my colleague has cleared a route up to the roof. She’s waiting for us.’ Steph turned to her comms once more. ‘Chloe?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Right, let’s go.’ Steph span on her heel.

  Outside the café, the place looked much the same. There was no sign of further damage. They made it along the side of the building without incident and in the space of 90 seconds they had reached the door to the emergency stairs. It had shattered and behind it the stairwell was steeped in rubble. Stephanie could just see the edge of the Cage buried under tonnes of rock.

  71

  72 metres beneath the English Channel

  Pete and Mai led the way back through the carriage and out into the red glow of the tunnel. Mary stepped down onto the rumpled tracks and stood looking around in disbelief. Her shock was clear even through the visor of the biohazard suit. Pete and Mai could hear the woman breathing heavily into a small comms device built into the suit.

  ‘My God!’ she said quietly. She sounded on the verge of tears. ‘How . . . how could anyone do such a thing?’

  Pete and Mai stood, silent. Mary turned to them and shook her head slowly.

  They walked off along a narrow pathway beside the tracks. Mary was comforting Billy as best she could through the layers of plastic and, remarkably, he seemed to have calmed down. It wasn’t far to the hatchway into the Maintenance Hub. Mai was first to reach it. Stopping to let the others catch up, she pulled her container of Bioweb from her utility belt and ran her fingers over the controls on the side.

  ‘You’re constructing another anteroom?’ Mary asked as she and Billy arrived at the hatch.

  ‘I’m pretty sure there’ll be a positive pressure gradient that’ll push air out from the Hub,’ Mai replied.

  ‘But you can never be too careful?’

  ‘Precisely.’ She aimed the Bioweb at the hatch and went through the same process Pete had executed in the train. Within a couple of minutes she had the chamber in place – three walls and a ceiling.

  Pete checked it with his all-purpose wrist computer. ‘Integrity is fine, Mai. We’ll have to take this one-at-a-time. You go into the chamber, open the hatch, get through to the corridor beyond and then close the hatch before Mary and Billy go in. You got that, Mary?’

  Mai stepped up to the front wall of the antechamber. Running a finger along an invisible seam, she pushed into the membrane formed by the Bioweb.

  ‘I’m in,’ she said, resealing the door. She strode over to the hatch, opened it and clambered through.

  Mary and Billy went in next. Mary’s lab experience was invaluable. She knew what she was doing, which saved Pete a lot of time and energy trying to guide her through the procedure. She slipped into the hatchway and closed it from the other side, leaving Pete to follow her through.

  Once Mary and Billy were inside the Hub, Pete entered the anteroom and stood for a moment looking around. The red glow from the fire at the end of the tunnel was refracted by the material of the Bioweb. He felt isolated, cocooned. In here, it was almost womb-like. He reached for the handle of the hatchway, twisted it and pulled it outwards towards him. Clambering through, he sensed an odd stillness in the corridor. He locked the hatch from the inside, turned and felt the jab of a gun barrel in his ribs.

  72

  Base One, Tintara

  ‘So let’s get this straight,’ Mark said, his face filling Tom’s holoscreen. Tom pulled himself up a little on his bed. ‘The Four Horsemen are back and they are behind the three attacks.’

  ‘Yes, three coordinated attacks, Mark.’

  ‘And their objective is to deliberately destabilise the companies behind each of the targets so they can make a financial killing.’

  ‘Precisely. It’s been done before.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘9/11. Bin Laden
applied the same technique: "Put Options". A few weeks before the disaster, Al-Qaeda invested tens of millions in companies it knew would be the worst hit by the attack. As a result, they netted hundreds of millions – that has funded their cause ever since.’

  ‘All right,’ Mark sighed. ‘It’s all pretty academic. The main issue is this hacker, "Light Touch".’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘But you can’t get through his defences?’

  ‘Not fully. Not yet anyway.’

  ‘We don’t have much time, Tom. These three concurrent attacks will send the markets into freefall. The Four Horsemen will gain but almost everyone else on the planet will suffer, whether they’re investors or not.’

  ‘But whatever we do, the markets will already be damaged.’

  ‘True, but if we can shut him down, we can minimise the effect . . . restore confidence,’ Mark said, exhaling heavily. It was clear to Tom he was exhausted. ‘The Tower will go in . . . 37 minutes. To stop a cascade effect with the Euro- tunnel and ITAM we need Light Touch neutralised within an hour.’

  ‘In that case, there’s no chance of Syb and me breaking through in time.’

  ‘So what now?’

  There was a long pause down the line. Tom looked away from the screen for a moment. Turning back to Mark, he said: ‘There’s one possibility but it’s never been tried before. I have no idea –’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Experimental, risky . . .’

  ‘Sure, Tom. What’s the idea?’

  73

  Geneva, Switzerland

  Michael Devlin had known Tom Erickson since the E-Force cyberguru was a boy of 14. They had never met but had corresponded for years via a geek’s chatroom filled with people obsessed with the art of hacking. The cyber-acquaintances in the group had created their own internet protection software so that no authority or nosy individual could decode their chats, allowing them to develop their skills anonymously.