Jon Evans - Swarm

I made my way back up to the greenhouse, drawn there by instinct. Its fecund sights and smells were somehow life-affirming, and just then I needed all the affirmation I could get. I sat on the wrought-iron bench and stared at nothing, awed sick by the magnitude and horror of what Sophie had suggested. Twelve thousand kamikaze drones in the USA, armed and ready to be launched on an utterly devastating attack.

But no, it was too crazy. How could anyone plan to hit the USA with a crippling military attack and still hope to remain anonymous?

Then again, after such an attack, America might be too busy dying to mount any investigation. With twelve thousand drones you could wipe out most major power plants, refineries, pipelines, airports, hospitals, dams, bridges, rail lines, communications centres, server farms – the whole country would shut down for weeks. I tried to imagine New York and L.A. with no power, gas, communications or food deliveries, for maybe a month.

It was a terrifying thought. The USA was built on fragile infrastructure, as the 2003 power outage and Hurricane Katrina disaster had proved. If that infrastructure was all destroyed at once, there would be looting, riots, maybe even starvation before stability was reestablished, weeks or even months later. The economy would collapse like a punctured balloon, and take decades to recover. And that only if the enemy didn’t follow up the first crippling blow with others.

But it wouldn’t happen, I reassured myself, because we had a secret weapon. We could still use Sophie’s override to shut down their drones, and the enemy didn’t even know it existed. The only people who did were me, Sophie, Jesse and Anya.

The enemy. The power behind Ortega, if Sophie was right. Who?

I decided to go back and re-establish IM contact. What she had done to me was unforgivable but we had to work together now. There was too much at stake.

I stood and walked about twenty paces away from that metal bench. Then I stopped, hesitated a moment, and turned back.

Something nagging at my brain. That little piece of paper on the empty plot across from the bench, the one with the spiral diagram and the flowery footnotes – it looked oddly familiar. Not the diagram. The distinctive handwriting. That big, flowery, and somehow feminine cursive script. It looked very much like the writing on the note I had found in Jorge Ortega’s torture chamber.

A weird coincidence. My mind playing tricks on me in a stressful moment. I turned and walked away again. This time I got as far as the door to the greenhouse.

Then I turned back again, and returned to the bench again, and stared at that little piece of paper again.

It looked a lot like that note in Mexico.

Anya’s handwriting? Probably. This greenhouse garden seemed to be her personal fiefdom.

But of course it couldn’t have been Anya’s handwriting in that horrifying room of blood I had found deep beneath that abandoned military academy in Mexico. Right? Anya and Kharlamov couldn’t be on the other side, working for the shadowy forces behind Ortega.

No. Not even Kharlamov and Ortega combined were wealthy enough for what Sophie suspected. Like she said, it had to be a nation-state.

Like Russia. Could Anya be a double agent for the Kremlin? No, that made no sense: Russia’s president was scheduled for execution with the rest of the G8.

… Although he was just a figurehead. The real power lay with their prime minister. And losing their own president would add credibility to claims of innocence after the attack.

It occurred to me that if I were a former KGB agent turned Russian prime minister, and I was planning an all-out military assault on the United States, one level of deniable catspaws wouldn’t be enough. I would want an intermediary to reach out to Ortega and orchestrate all the details. A powerful and visible backup scapegoat who no one would connect to the Kremlin. For instance, a billionaire who had famously been exiled from Russia and very publicly nearly assassinated by the Russian government.

What if all that had been a deception, to put Kharlamov beyond suspicion?

Russians were everywhere in this mess, now that I thought about it. Ortega’s pet hacker, Dmitri. The hackers he said had brought him the Axon designs, Shadow and Octal; also Russian. And then there was Anya.

Anya who had begun to date Jesse, Sophie’s ex-boyfriend, shortly after Sophie published her first Axon paper; who had helped him to create the secret but powerful Grassfire network, whose tentacles reached seemingly everywhere; who had funded Convoy and thus won direct access to Sophie and her work; who in Haiti had been full of questions about the US military’s anti-drone capabilities; and who had demanded the secret override sequence within hours of my arrival in London, and seemed profoundly relieved and triumphant when she received it.

“Oh my God,” I said aloud.

Had I just given the enemy the one thing that might have stopped the attack? Had that whole notion of using Argus to find Ortega’s drones just been misdirection, to lure me into surrendering our sole secret weapon? Was she out there right now not to hunt them down, but only to verify what I had told her?

It was just supposition, I reassured myself, as I rushed back to the skylit studio. We didn’t even know Sophie’s apocalyptic scenario was true. The only evidence was circumstantial at best. And even if someone had smuggled a massive drone armada in to the USA, that was only the first step. They needed people to move them around the country, distribute them, warehouse them, hide them, reprogram them with new releases, arm them, launch them. That meant a vast and secret conspiracy, scores if not hundreds of people, an entire hidden network.

Like the KGB. They were called the FSU nowadays, of course, the name KGB had gone out with the cold war. The cold war that maybe had never actually ended. Russia was ruled by former KGB agents, and they were no less resourceful, no less capable, and no less dangerous than in the bad old days. Only weeks ago I had read about a dissident Chechen gunned down outside his Dubai apartment by masked assassins.

But even if Sophie was right, even if the Russians were planning to attack America, surely I was just being paranoid about Anya. The handwriting was coincidence, not evidence. She was on our side. Soon that would be clear again, soon this sick feeling of overwhelming guilt, like I had just accidentally condemned all my friends to death, would go away -

The MacBooks in the corner studio displayed starfield screen-savers. I sat down at one and swiped impatiently at the trackpad. A login screen popped up. I stared as if it was a pet dog unexpectedly replaced by a rabid wolf. Those machines had not demanded passwords before.

I decided to call Jesse on the land line. Just to check in with him. Just to see what was going on. There would be no harm in it, and just then I really needed to hear him tell me that I had not just damned the USA to bloody destruction.

There was no dial tone. I pushed 9, but nothing happened.

“Can I assist?” a man asked.

He had appeared as if by magic at the door, dressed in the black-and-ivory uniform of Kharlamov’s servants, but it didn’t seem to quite fit. His eyes were hard, his nose was much-broken, and his Russian accent was harsh and thick; but more than that, he didn’t disappear into the background like Kharlamov’s other liveried men. This was a man you couldn’t ignore. He didn’t seem like a servant. He seemed like a soldier.

“Just need to make a phone call,” I smiled apologetically, “what do I dial to get out?”

“Phones are down.”

“I need to make a phone call.”

He said nothing, just watched me, with those cold flat snake’s eyes.