Impossible. Something was very wrong. He sent out an even higher priority message to the island's private military base, but all its lines were engaged. Someone had turned off his connection to the base surveillance cameras as well. He flicked to one of the low-orbit satellites and focused in until he could see movement—a great flurry of movement, in fact, like an ant army on the march. His troops were boarding a line of company ferries. Being evacuated.
Jongleur could sense the machineries of his heart trying to race, then the equipment compensating. He felt the cool placidity of countervailing chemicals flushing through his system. He found the override controls and turned down the tranquilizing flow: something terrible had happened, was happening right now, and he did not want to be lulled.
The basement, he thought. That first. He brought up the displays. The bottom of the building was indeed full of smoke—it had clouded the underground floors and leaked all the way up to the atrium lobby—but he could see no sign of flames. He checked the timing on the alarms. Almost two hours since the fire was first detected. Jongleur could make no sense of it. A smoldering fire that was mostly smoke could certainly last that long, but was it enough of a threat to abandon the building completely, let alone the whole island? Where were the fire crews? He asked for a quick analysis of the building's air system and found no unusual readings, no surprise toxins.
What in hell is going on?
The reactor incident might have been the answer but the records showed that those alarms had not even been triggered until half an hour after the fire began, although they were almost certainly the reason behind the mass evacuation of the base. It made no sense, though—the power plant was on a tiny offshore island, separate from the main island with its base and tower. Jongleur had wanted a small reactor under his personal control to make sure the narrowcast of the Grail network's operating system always had a source of backup power, but he had not been fool enough to put it next to the corporate offices—next to the place where his own helpless body was kept.
He brought up a bank of readouts from the power station but they were muddled and inconclusive. An alarm had definitely been sent out and the facility abandoned but he could get no clear picture of what had happened. The visual evidence gave no clues: the reactor itself seemed in perfectly normal condition, and a closer inspection of the reactor management data showed that it was shut down, temperatures normal, and in fact appeared to have been shut down well before its own alarm warnings went out, as though the technicians had responded to some completely separate order, securing the reactor and raising the containment shields before evacuating in an orderly fashion.
So if the fire was a minor one and the reactor wasn't in danger, why was everybody leaving?
Could it be one of my enemies? Has Wells also escaped offline? But why would he risk destroying the entire network, risk his own massive investment, just to strike at me?
Dread. It came to him like a winter's chill—for a moment he even saw his former employee's face blur into the terrifying features of Mr. Jingo, his childhood nightmare. This must be his work. Not content with stealing my network, that street thug, that petty murderer, has attacked my home, using my own operating system. But what could he possibly think he can accomplish, even if the entire island is deserted? Doesn't he know I have several different sources of available power—that I have enough resources available to survive in my tank for months if necessary?
The more he thought about it the more puzzling it was. For the moment all thought of triggering the Apep Sequence was pushed aside by the mystery before him.
Jolted by a sudden fear, he made a quick surveillance of the hangar-sized room that contained the Grail machinery, checking to make sure all was still functioning properly. On the cameras he could see that the huge space was empty of technicians, the banks of processors and switchers untended but still doing what they should.
So what is John Dread up to? Is he just testing my defenses? Or is it something less rational—he always had a childish mind. Perhaps this is some million-credit equivalent of a prank call to his old employer. Perhaps he doesn't even know whether I'm dead or still online.
Feeling much better, certain now that there was no true immediate danger within the building, Jongleur went back to the preparations for the Apep Sequence, but an anomaly in the program's readings brought him up short. It seemed an obvious fallacy. Somehow, he decided, in the riot of false information throughout the island, of alarms and alerts, even the crucial Grail network data had been corrupted. According to what was before him, the Apep program had already been triggered, which could not be right. The time recorded for the event was close to two hours ago. But he himself had only just begun initialization a few minutes earlier.
It must be an error, he thought. It must. The most obvious evidence was that the trajectories were completely nonsensical. Then a flicker on one of his surveillance screens took his attention away from even as important a matter as the fate of his rogue operating system.
Someone was moving. Someone was still in the building.
As he enlarged the picture, pushing the other camera views into the background, he saw the camera designation. A burst of terror went through him. The intruder was here—on the same floor as his own tank! For a hallucinatory moment he could feel himself plunged back into childhood—the smell of the airing cupboard, the starched towels and sheets pressed all around him, stifling him as he hid from Halsall and the other older boys. He could almost hear them.
"Jingle? Jingle-Jangle? Come out, Frenchie. We're going to debag you, you little sod."
With a little noiseless whimper he pushed the memory away. How? How could anyone get into my sanctuary?
The desperate hope that it was some brave technician who had elected to remain behind shattered into cold fragments as he studied the view-window. The intruder was a woman, a middle-aged woman with short hair. He had never seen her before. More astonishing still, she was wearing one of his own company's custodial uniforms.
A cleaning woman? On this floor? On my floor? It was so ridiculous that if he had not been gripped by fear at the invasion of his privacy, full of confusion and suspicion about all that was going on outside, he might have laughed. But at the moment he did not feel at all like laughing. He stared at her face, trying to see something in it that would tell him who she was, what she wanted. She was walking slowly and looking all around, clearly uneasy and surprised, exactly as someone would be who had stumbled into the room by accident. She showed no sign of an agenda, none of the intensity of a saboteur or assassin. Jongleur breathed a little more easily but he was still frightened. How could he get her out? There were no employees available—not even his security guards. He felt rage bubbling up.
She will hear me, he decided, and she will hear me loud. Like the bellow of an angry God. That will set her running. But before he let his voice thunder through the audio system he pulled up the room's security records, wanting to know how she had gotten in.
It was a simple blanket priority approval, the same thing his approved team of technicians used as they moved between floors. Olga Chotilo, Custodial Worker, it read. Something about the name seemed slightly familiar. More surprisingly, there was a code listed on her security trail that he did not at first recognize. Where had she just been? A long moment passed as he tried to remember—he had not seen that code for some time.