Nano (22 page)

74

It was a short drive to Geneva, at least it would have been under normal circumstances. But for the past week snow had stopped falling for a total of less than three hours. Day and night it had come down as huge, powdery flakes covering everything, turning cars and trees and even some houses into amorphous lumps of white stuff.

The worst bit was the first 2-kilometre stretch, the drive from Michael's isolated cabin to the main highway. Once on the freeway, the going got a lot easier because the roads had been cleared and salted. By the time he reached the outer suburbs of Geneva, the place had taken on a semblance of normality and the traffic was moving.

The headquarters of ITAM was situated on Rue de Lausanne in the CBD. It was a 10-storey, squat, ugly building put up during the late 1990s when the company moved to Switzerland from their former home in France. Driving along Rue de Lausanne, Michael kept up with the traffic in his compact green Smart Car and swung around the far, north-end of the block.

On a normal day, over 900 people worked in this building. It was the nerve centre of the company. Today though was no normal day. The building had been emptied. This had been ‘Demand Number One' from Light Touch. To get his way, he had simply threatened to destroy the Swiss government's entire computer network if they refused to comply. When the authorities decided to test him by leaving a small contingent of six Swiss armed police in the building, Light Touch had sealed the doors around the group, sucked out the air from the two rooms the men had occupied and only released them minutes before they would have suffocated. After that, the government and ITAM had wholly capitulated.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Light Touch's demands were rather straightforward, even modest. No one was to come within 20 metres of the building and no attempt should be made to interfere with utilities. Any moves to cut power or comms would result in the destruction of the Swiss network. The police had cordoned off the ITAM building and had stationed hundreds of troops and police around the perimeter.

Michael Devlin could see the troops as he drove by. They were armed with machine guns. An armoured car turned onto the road directly ahead of him, its turret spinning menacingly. All of this, he knew, was a total waste of time and resources. Light Touch was waging a thoroughly modern campaign and the authorities were still living in a bygone age.

He knew from the schematics that the computer centre – the very heart of the ITAM network – was two floors below ground level in a vast, specially designed, nuke-proof basement. He pulled over to the side of the road and plucked the printouts of the schematics from the passenger seat. Placing the papers on his lap, he ran a finger along the criss-crossing lines marking out the internal layout of the complex and its various links with the outside world.

The rear of the building stood directly across the street from his position. A temporary fence had been thrown up and he could count some 25 paramilitaries through the window of his car. An Air Force chopper hovered low over the building and just outside the cordon stood a large group of reporters, camera crews and TV network trucks. He counted six vans with huge aerials protruding from their roofs. Intermingled with these were groups of civilian onlookers.

Returning his gaze to the diagram, Michael stopped his finger at a spot almost 50 metres from the ITAM building. It lay to the west, well beyond the cordon and perhaps 10 metres or so from the last media vehicle. It was the far side of a small, low-rise building the schematic told him was a Chinese laundry.

He pulled himself from the driver's side, slung a leather bag over his shoulder and stepped onto the sidewalk. Glancing briefly over to the ITAM building, he walked briskly west, towards the marker on the schematic.

There was a narrow back alley behind the Chinese laundry. He could smell the cleaning chemicals, an acrid, cloying stink drifting over from the opened rear door. He sped up a little. Turning a corner in the alleyway, dark morning shadows threw regular, sharp-lined patterns across the gritty path. A few metres ahead, he saw a manhole cover.

A dozen more paces and he was there. He glanced around, listening. Pulling off the shoulder bag, he laid it on the floor, heaved up the manhole cover and left it close to the black opening of the drain. Next he pulled the bag close, released the catch and pulled out a small metal box about 10 centimetres to a side. He rested the box on the floor, lifted the latches and lid. Pulling on a pair of magnifying glasses, he peered inside.

The box was padded with foam and in the centre lay a very odd-looking object. It was the size and shape of a fly, except that it possessed the sheen of synthetic material around the body, a plastic and carbon-resin perfection.

He lifted the object, a flying nano spybot he called a nanofly, and held it up into the half-light. He felt incredibly proud of this creation. Resting it on the edge of the drain, he removed his laptop from his bag, tugged on the lid and watched the screen come alive. Tapping at the keys, he opened a channel with the highest level of encryption, a set-up guaranteeing complete anonymity. Tom's face appeared on the screen.

‘I'm at the drop site,' Michael said.

‘Excellent, dude.'

‘Now it's over to you. Good luck.'

75

A relatively straight stretch of drain ran from a splitter about a kilometre to the west of the ITAM complex, then under the manhole cover and onto the building itself. At the foot of the exterior wall, close to the northwest corner, the drain narrowed to a 10-centimetre PVC pipe. This stretched along the wall before splitting into dozens of tributaries leading onto 27 washrooms dotted around the 10-storey building.

The nanofly was a miracle of miniature engineering. Powered by a tiny solar energy generator, it had a storage system that could allow it to fly, fully charged, for up to 30 minutes in the dark. It had built-in sensors that allowed it to navigate through the tiniest openings in the complete absence of light in the visible spectrum. It was also incredibly strong. It could travel under water and in a vacuum. It could sustain external forces that, if scaled up to, say, human-size, would be equivalent to being hit by a 5-tonne truck travelling at 60 kilometres per hour.

The route along the drain was clear and presented no difficulties for the nanofly. As it approached the splitter close to the ITAM building, it slowed and received a complex set of instructions from Sybil on Base One, 12,000 kilometres away.

The last few dozen metres from the outer wall to the computer complex two floors below ground took 5 minutes to navigate. It was a convoluted route that brought the tiny device out into a washroom designated N23 on the building schematic. A final burst of power as the nanofly rose up through the pipes leading to the toilet, a quick sensor scan to check no one was actually using it at that precise moment and the machine shot up through the bowl and out into the bathroom, landing on the floor close to the hand basin pedestal.

The nanofly swept under the washroom door and out into the corridor. The sliding portal into the control room of the computer centre stood open. Believing he had total control of the complex, Light Touch had behaved rather casually. For the moment at least, he
was
in control, but that was about to change. The nanofly shot along a second corridor beyond the portal and followed a broad sweeping passageway, skirting the epicentre of the complex, the processing core.

The processor dominated an entire 3-metre-square room. The floor was a mosaic of metal tiles; the walls, polished steel. In the centre of the room stood a cube some 2 metres to a side and 3 metres high. It was completely plain, its metal sides catching the intense light from a cluster of ceiling LEDs. The processing core emitted a very faint hum.

Tom and Sybil brought the nanofly to a halt precisely 0.34 metres from the southeast corner of the cuboid complex in the centre of the room. Tom then tapped out a series of instructions on his light keyboard on Tintara. The information travelled to a BigEye high above Western Europe and from there the instructions went directly to the tiny machine itself.

The nanofly made a small sound. Forty million nanobots rushed through a narrow tube on the underside of the device and spread out across the metal floor. Less than a second later, the power source of the nanofly abruptly switched off and the nanobots began to eat the machine.

76

72 metres beneath the English Channel

‘Hands up.'

‘What the . . .?' Pete began.

‘UP! HANDS UP!'

Mai and Pete raised their hands above their heads. Mary lifted her free hand. Lucrezia glared at her, then she saw the baby. He was cocooned in the spare biohazard suit, the extra material scrunched up under him, his mother's right hand clasping him as close as she could.

Lucrezia was gasping for air, her face smeared with sweat and grime. Her pupils were large and filled with barely disguised fear. She flicked the barrel of her gun towards them. ‘Move. That way!' She nodded towards the corridor leading away from the hatch.

Mai took the lead, Mary in the middle of the three. Pete hung back a little but Lucrezia shoved the barrel of the pistol hard into his spine, making him step up his pace.

‘What's this all about?' Pete asked, his mind racing, plotting.

‘Shut up,' the girl responded. Her voice was hard, emotionless, but Pete could detect an edge of anxiety there. He turned. Lucrezia raised the gun.

‘I think we deserve an explanation.'

‘Do you?' Lucrezia produced a smirk. ‘I'm the one with the g–'

Pete reacted with incredible speed. His years of military experience and daily training on Tintara meant his reflexes were honed to perfection. His fist shot out and smashed into Lucrezia's face, shattering her nose. She fell backwards and the gun span in the air 2 metres to her left. But she was young and had undergone intense training for this mission. She kicked out both legs as she fell. They caught Pete behind the knees, bringing him down with her. Startled, he stumbled forwards and landed on top of the girl.

He rolled away towards the gun, stretched out his arm and felt an intense pain in the small of his back as Lucrezia slammed a fist into his spine. His hand missed the pistol. Lucrezia reached out for it and recoiled as the beam from a stun gun seared into her palm, knocking the pistol away along the corridor.

Mai was standing over her with her stun gun aimed at her head. ‘Get up.'

Lucrezia began to clamber to her feet, then she sprang forwards, crashing straight into Mai's abdomen. The force of her dive sent Mai sprawling backwards. Lucrezia kept her balance and flung out her left arm, using the wall of the corridor to steady herself. She took two steps forwards, crouched to pick up the pistol from the floor and ran.

Mary was only a few metres in front of her, clutching Billy to her chest, her face a mask of terror. Instinctively, she fell to the side against the wall, gripping the baby for all she was worth.

Lucrezia sped past them as though they weren't there. Putting 5 metres between her and the others, she span around, still charging forwards and fired a couple of shots into the roof, the bullets ricocheting about the walls behind Pete and Mai, the crack of shells smacking into the concrete like fireworks exploding.

77

‘You go on to find the survivors,' Pete called to Mai as the ricocheting faded away. ‘Mary, you and Billy go too.'

‘What're you doing?'

‘I have to stop that girl – she has a gun still.'

Mai nodded. ‘Take care.' She put an arm around Mary's shoulder. The woman's face was pale and she was panting.

Pete sped away as fast as he could. The corridor curved left, then right and soon he found himself in a wider passageway. He stopped for a second and, using his cochlear implants, he tried to pick up the sound of Lucrezia's footfall. He could just make out the click of her boot heels hitting the concrete floor of the passageway some way ahead.

He turned to his wrist monitor and tapped at the screen. A series of figures and numbers sped across the display, quickly replaced by a schematic of the network of passageways and corridors within a 20-metre radius of his position. There on the screen he could see a red dot moving away from him. It was Lucrezia's thermal signature.

He took off in her direction, gaining on her rapidly. Turning a corner, he was in another wide passageway. There was a double door to the left. Checking his wrist, Pete could see that Lucrezia was in a room the other side of the doors. He pulled himself close up to the wall, leaned to his left and reached for the handle. He could see her thermal image. She was standing directly behind him on the far side of the wall. He swung around, kicked the door open and dived into the room, firing his stun pistol as he went.

Lucrezia was taken by surprise, but she moved to one side so fast the stun beam missed her by several centimetres. She leapt over Pete's prone form and sped back into the hallway.

Pete pulled himself up and dashed into the corridor after her. She had vanished. Checking his monitor, he could see there was another room a few metres ahead on the right. Another set of double doors led into it from the passageway. The thermal signature showed Lucrezia's position, on the far side of the room. He edged his way to the doors and slipped inside. The girl was nowhere to be seen.

Pete checked his wrist screen. She was now in an adjoining room. He could only just make out her thermal signal because there was a large heat source close by. He touched his screen and watched information scroll down. The room was part of the ventilation network for the Hub. The heat source was one of the giant turbines used to suck fresh air into the complex of rooms and passageways.

He crossed the floor and stopped in the doorway to the adjacent room, his gun trained on the girl. She stood 10 metres away, close to the far wall, tapping at a remote. Pete could just make out the shape of a vast, circular hole in the floor. Taking a step forwards, he saw the edge of the turbine blades as they scythed the air. The noise was horrendous.

‘What are you trying to do?' Pete shouted.

Lucrezia span around, levelling the gun at him. He had the stun pistol aimed straight at her.

‘Put it down!' Pete yelled over the noise.

‘Why? You put yours down. I have a job to do.' Lucrezia was holding the remote in her free hand and was edging away from the wall, moving closer to Pete. On her right lay the huge shaft and the spinning turbine blades. ‘I'm going to stop this turbine and the other two close by in this Hub.'

‘Letting in the nerve agent.'

‘Precisely.'

‘Why?'

Lucrezia stopped walking. ‘Just doing my job.'

‘Killing innocent people?'

‘No one's innocent.'

‘So you planted the bomb. Killed the passengers.'

‘My brother and me.'

‘For money?'

‘Er . . . let me think . . .!'

Her face was wreathed in sweat. She looked incredibly tired. Pete caught a flicker of movement from behind her. She saw him look.

‘Oh!' And she laughed. ‘There was me thinking you'd have more imagination than that.'

Pete looked back at the same spot behind Lucrezia and saw something move again. The girl took a couple of steps towards him. A shape shifted from the shadow behind her. She sensed it, span on one heel, flicking the gun away towards the figure emerging from the shadows. Then she tore back to Pete.

He saw panic in her eyes. Her hands started to shake, her finger whitening on the trigger. Pete dived forwards, just as the hidden figure stepped into the light.

Lucrezia was confused. Stepping back, her calves hit the raised parapet surrounding the turbine shaft. The gun went off, the bullet slamming into the ceiling, bringing down chunks of concrete. She tried to keep her balance. Pete launched himself towards her, reaching out for her arm but she twisted away from him, span 90 degrees and fell head-first over the parapet.

Pete crashed to the floor, coming up hard against the raised edge of the turbine opening. He felt a stab of pain across his shoulders and sensed someone crouching beside him. Turning, utterly bewildered and fighting the pain, he saw a familiar face.

‘Josh-bloody-Thompson,' he said, his voice completely drowned out by the noise.