Billy was at the door, tugging on the handle. He felt a hand grab his oily jacket, pulled on the door and heard the fabric rip. He slipped into the corridor, head down, and sped along the hard floor. Looking up, he saw a steward in a white uniform, silver tray aloft. Billy crashed into him; the man staggered backwards, and the tray flew several feet along the passage, smashing into the wall. Remnants of a late breakfast scattered, milk splashed up the wall and a silver pot of tea fell to the floor clanging across the metal, its contents slopping all around.
Billy didn’t pause for breath. He heard the steward yell but he was at the end of the corridor and out along another passageway headed for the deck.
A maintenance man repairing an electric light on the wall close to the Grand Staircase saw the boy rushing towards him. He quickly downed his screwdriver and made to block Billy’s path. The boy swung to his left, then to his right like a footballer taking on a defender, slipped under the man’s outstretched arm and straight into a gentleman who had at that moment emerged from a corridor diagonally opposite.
Billy protested loudly and tried to wriggle free — then he looked up into the eyes of Egbert Fortescue.
27
Colin Edwards had only been in the job for a month and he was filled with excitement and pride that he had made it to Satellite Interpretational and Correlation Directive Assistant (a SICDA). He had emailed his parents about his promotion as soon as he heard back in September, but he was a professional and had remembered to be absolutely circumspect when it came to how much information he could pass on to them, which was actually very little. Even so, unknown to Colin, his email had been intercepted and given a light censorial dusting by a colleague called Martin Fillmore, an Internet Interpretational and Correlation Directive Assistant (an IICDA) who Colin had chatted to in the canteen once or twice.
Colin was monitoring signals originating in the northeast of the United States and passing through NATO satellites with UKUSAJMA, or British-American Joint Military Assets designations, when he noticed a tiny abnormality in the signal. It was something trivial — a one per cent difference between the bandwidth of the input and output signals from a single satellite, RANOS-132, currently in geosynchronous orbit over the mid-Atlantic.
Anyone less keen than Colin, or with fewer hours at the monitoring console, would almost certainly have failed to notice the discrepancy. But Colin did notice it and he acted upon it. Isolating the part of the output signal that was different to the inputted one for satellite RANOS-132, he ‘snipped it’ — that is, he cut the digital impulses from the rest of the signal and isolated it in a file on his computer.
This stage, Colin knew, was almost always the easiest. He’d done it before in training when he had isolated and snipped a rogue emission from a fictitious orbiter in a simulator. It was one thing to capture information, quite another to read it and far more difficult to interpret it.
He tried to open the snatched file, but it resisted his efforts. He then ran a program to decipher regular satellite emission files, but that also came up empty. At this point Colin decided to call upon the help of his supervisor, Gordon Manners, who worked at a slightly larger console to his left.
Gordon surveyed Colin’s screen. ‘That’s not one of ours,’ he said matter-of-factly.
‘But how could that happen? It’s from a NATO satellite.’
‘Show me the positions and telemetries of all the orbiters within a hundred miles of RANOS-132.’
Colin ran his fingers over the keyboard of his console. A series of dots appeared on his screen. Each had a serial number attached that appeared as a red alphanumeric immediately beneath it.
‘There,’ Gordon said, his finger indicating a point on the screen. ‘A Chinese satellite within ten miles of RANOS. Must have leaked a signal. Ranos picked it up and it became embedded in the output signal from the NATO orbiter.’
‘Shit!’
‘Pass it on to Decryption. Could be useful.’
‘Hang on, sir, I think I can get it out,’ Colin said, filled with enthusiasm.
Gordon Manners sighed quietly. He didn’t really like this kid, thought he was a little too full of himself, but he had been taught that good managers give their staff enough oxygen to breathe. He stood beside Colin Edwards’s terminal, arms folded, as the young operator tapped away, shuffled the mouse, thought for a few moments, wrote in something fresh, had it knocked back, waited, typed again and pushed himself back in his chair.
‘Gotcha,’ Colin Edwards declared.
On the screen a set of equations appeared. The Satellite Interpretational and Correlation Directive Assistant scrolled down and whistled.
Gordon Manners leaned in to study the screen. ‘What in God’s name is that?’
28
Hans Secker only ever appeared contrite in the presence of one person. He dined regularly with presidents and argued with prime ministers, none of whom fazed him; but now, with the onerous task of breaking bad news to his boss, Glena Buckingham, contrition slithered across his face automatically.
They were seated on opposite sides of a Louis XVI table that the Sultan of Brunei had given Buckingham for her fortieth birthday. Secker had a MacBook in front of him.
‘If your face is anything to go by, I don’t think I’m going to like what you have to tell me, Hans,’ Buckingham said and studied her fingernails.
‘We still have no idea where Newman is.’
Buckingham looked at the table for a few seconds and when she raised her eyes to meet Secker’s her expression was surprisingly neutral. ‘I find it hard to believe that Professor Newman could have evaded Van Lee and two of his best men at JFK after you were tipped off that he was switching planes there.’
‘He is a clever man, Glena.’
She slammed the table with the palm of her right hand, making Secker jolt. ‘We are cleverer,’ she hissed. ‘Well, at least you and Van Lee had better be.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Alert every foreign agent. I want that man found. He cannot be allowed to disappear, not with the precious cargo he carries. Now, what of the other copies of the EF material?’
Secker brightened. ‘I thought I would give you the bad news first.’ He risked the faintest of smiles. ‘Copies in the hands of the navy and the two marine archaeologists Kate Wetherall and Lou Bates have been retrieved or destroyed and we have the originals.’
‘And you got them cleanly?’
He paused. ‘Successfully, Glena.’
She glared at him. ‘Explain.’
‘Van Lee’s men stole the originals from the lab at the Institute of Marine Studies and they destroyed the hard drive that had been used to store the copies Wetherall and Bates made. Van Lee lost three men in the effort. He had ordered them to stay behind at the institute so they could check that the marine archaeologists didn’t have a copy.’
Buckingham frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘Yesterday morning, the two archaeologists went to the house of George Campion. Apparently the woman, Dr Wetherall, is a family friend. Van Lee assumed they had left a copy at the scientist’s house. They searched the place but came up empty.’
‘Hold on,’ Buckingham snapped. ‘He raided the home of Professor George Campion?’
‘Yes. But…’
‘But what, Hans?’ she asked menacingly.
‘Van Lee’s men were a little heavy-handed.’