Zero kill, p.14
Zero Kill, page 14
21
Gone midnight, Elsa and Camille opened a heavy steel door, covered with graffiti and torn gig flyers, that was barely visible halfway along a stinking alley in central London, and walked into the cold, damp space inside.
A single caged bulb on the wall above the door threw sallow light on a spiral staircase that twisted steeply into the depths of the earth. A faint rumble came from below, a Tube train running deep underground.
‘Have you got the pass?’ asked Camille.
Elsa patted the zipped pocket of her hoodie, which contained the small plastic rectangle of Zoe Castle’s SIS security ID. She was still incredulous at what she was expected to do. ‘That’s all I need to get in?’
‘Just leave the rest to us.’ Camille handed her a Maglite xenon flashlight. ‘Good luck.’
When Camille left, the door clanged shut in Elsa’s face, sealing her into the dank space. She shone the torchlight against the Victorian tiled wall, its glazed cream surface obscured by a thick layer of grime, and found the top of the staircase.
In her earpiece, she heard Camille’s footsteps on the pavement outside. ‘Give me a minute to get back to the van.’
Elsa still had so many questions. ‘You’re sure we’ll be able to maintain contact when I’m underground?’
She’d been rushed away from the Soho party in the back of a white van and driven around streets she couldn’t see, while people talked at her.
Camille had given her a couple of bananas, a bag of chocolate bars and an energy drink. Usually, Elsa wouldn’t go near sugary stuff, sugar was bad, and she told her clients to avoid it like the plague, but because she was feeling almost dizzy with fatigue she wolfed the chocolate down, dropping the wrappers to the floor, while a couple of geeky-looking people – a young man and woman – gave her instructions she didn’t understand as they typed frantically on laptops balanced on their knees.
‘You’re Zoe,’ said the guy.
‘But I’m not Zoe,’ Elsa told him.
He sighed, as if he was explaining something to a dim child, even though he looked barely old enough to vote. ‘Tonight, you’ll be Zoe.’
Elsa clapped her thighs. ‘But they’ll see I’m not Zoe.’
‘Explain it to her again,’ Camille told them patiently.
Elsa wanted to punch the geeks in the face. In the last twenty-four hours she’d discovered her fiancé of five seconds was a deep cover agent; she’d been stabbed and shot at and hunted by assassins. All she wanted to do was get back to Harley and India and fly them somewhere safe. She didn’t have time to be lectured by these patronizing snowflakes.
‘What are your names?’ Elsa asked them.
‘I’m Simon.’ The young man narrowed his eyes. ‘But I identify as Flex.’
‘And you?’
‘Jo.’
Elsa stuffed half a banana into her mouth. ‘Say it one more time.’
So they explained it to her all over again as the van moved through the dark streets. It still didn’t make much sense to her tired mind, and all the simultaneous laptop activity was giving her a headache in the small, noisy space.
She had to go underground, they said, and into a dead vault, which was an archive deep beneath the headquarters of British intelligence in Vauxhall, where classified data about forgotten intelligence missions, initiatives and strategies was stored. There was a hidden exit, which didn’t appear on any map, and she could get in through that.
Then she had to log on to a computer and attach a magic box to the drive that would crack the access credentials. To do that she had to do this thing and that thing, but definitely not the other thing, because ‘If the system detects any anomalous behaviour, it will start hacking right back’. Flex and Jo started talking over each other, both trying to explain to her about attack path modelling and generative adversarial networks, and Elsa felt like her brain was going to explode. She could barely manage to file her taxes online every year, let alone be expected to access a highly restricted government computer terminal.
Flex handed her a smooth rectangular box, slightly bigger than a packet of fags, with a wire attached.
‘What does this do again?’
Jo lifted her eyes from her laptop screen. ‘What do you know about iterative brute force authentication algorithms?’
Elsa, who never liked to admit a lack of knowledge, shrugged vaguely.
‘Right, just plug it in and we’ll talk you through the rest.’
‘Just don’t download anything,’ said Simon or Flex or whoever. ‘If you do that, you’ll activate security protocols.’
‘Download what exactly, and how?’ Elsa must have missed some vital detail among the thousands of confusing instructions they’d given her. ‘Am I meant to stick my fingers in the USB port?’
‘You don’t download anything,’ said Jo urgently. ‘We just told you that.’
Elsa looked at Camille, help me out, but she was doing something on her phone.
‘So how am I meant to remember what comes up on the screen?’
Simon/Flex gave her a small digital camera. ‘You’ll have to go Old Skool Spy. Photograph the screen.’
And then Flex and Jo started arguing with each other in low, tense whispers about what else Elsa should and shouldn’t do. It felt very claustrophobic in the back of the van, with everyone’s knees and shoulders clashing every time it took a corner, as it rattled around the West End. Elsa didn’t understand why they couldn’t just go to a Burger King and talk about it over a coffee, but had to admit that would probably be very foolish and dangerous in the circumstances.
‘Can you hear me?’ she asked Camille now as she clanged down the metal stairs, aiming the torch ahead at the hundreds of narrow, slippery steps circling endlessly into the darkness below.
Despite her fatigue, Elsa tried to find an instinctive rhythm in her precarious descent, let muscle memory drop one leg in front of the other, let her foot connect to the next step, as she went round and round into the seemingly bottomless depths. On top of everything else, she was getting dizzy.
‘We’re here,’ said a voice in her ear.
‘Simon?’
‘It’s Flex,’ he corrected her. ‘We’re right with you.’
But they weren’t physically beside her as she descended into the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the city. They weren’t likely to get hopelessly lost, dismembered by a train, or eaten by rats. Even now the rattle of a Tube echoed on the walls around her as it shunted through the darkness somewhere below, taking home the last of the evening’s bleary-eyed revellers.
Elsa finally saw the damp outline of a floor in the torchlight: she had reached the bottom. There was no light at all down here. She shone the beam along the sloping, slippery tunnels. Snaking bundles of wires and cables disappeared along the concave walls. Here and there, stalagmites lifted from the floor.
‘I have no idea where I’m going.’
All she knew was that she was meant to access a so-called dead vault and, once inside, break into a computer that could provide the information they needed about Carragher’s disastrous Buenos Aires incursion, of which Elsa, Camille and Saint were the only survivors.
The deep-level tunnels were supported by circular metal rings, protrusions like the ribs of some prehistoric beast. When Elsa took a step, her feet froze in ankle-deep water, which shone oily black in the torchlight. In their haste, nobody had thought to give her a pair of sturdy boots or waterproof jacket.
‘You should see a junction ahead,’ said Camille faintly in her ear. ‘Turn left and continue walking.’
‘I still can’t get my head around how I’m going to be able to just walk inside?’
‘RedQueen established an undetected presence inside the British intelligence security system years ago, waiting for just this kind of eventuality,’ Camille explained. ‘We planted a trapdoor in the system that will enable us to bypass all the usual access procedures. All we needed was an active security pass, and Zoe Castle’s death gave us that.’
‘Good old Zoe,’ muttered Elsa.
‘Her accreditation hasn’t been revoked yet, but it’ll only be a matter of hours.’
Elsa approached a metal hatch at the end of the tunnel. Her trainers were soaked through, her feet already numb with cold.
‘The dead vault has an emergency exit in case it somehow gets sealed off from the main building. Nobody’s used it for years, maybe ever. Very few people even know it exists. Castle’s pass will get you inside.’
‘But there’ll be a camera, yeah?’ Elsa pulled open the hatch, as heavy and solid as a door on a submarine, and its hinges screeched with cold. She still couldn’t get her head around what they’d told her. ‘They’re going to see me.’
‘They won’t see you,’ interjected Flex.
Elsa moved down another circular tunnel. The floor was dry, at least. The torchlight jerked left and right in her hand, a thin beam tearing through the darkness, illuminating steel beams and ancient wiring that rippled above her head.
‘We’ve created a deepfake version of Zoe Castle, rendered from hundreds of hours of footage of her walking around the SIS building. The image will be mapped around your face and body in real time. The person the night-time security guard will see on the screen will look like Zoe, will be dressed like Zoe, and even walk like Zoe – but it’s you.’
Elsa didn’t know how she felt about stealing the appearance and biometric data of a woman who’d died only hours ago, even if that identity was solely filtered through the dispassionate eye of a security camera. But if it was the only way to get inside the dead vault, she had no choice.
Elsa came to another junction. Shone the torch along the intersecting tunnels, left then right. Something squeaked in the shaft of light and scurried into the darkness.
‘Which way now?’
‘Go right,’ said Camille. ‘If there’s anyone in the vault, and there shouldn’t be at this time of night, you’ll have to take measures.’
Elsa moved carefully, squeezing past junk: rusted filing cabinets and rotting wooden furniture, inexplicably dumped decades ago in this remote place beneath the city. She came to another heavy door, which led into a wider access tunnel where caged bulbs provided dim light above the dirty concrete floor. A ventilation shaft disappeared into one side of the curved wall.
‘The computer where the information can be accessed is air-gapped,’ said Flex. ‘Which means it’s disconnected from the internet, and any third-party hardware that could compromise it.’
His statement made Elsa think again of the hard drive in the vault in Apartment 7b all those years ago.
She felt a low rumble in her cold bones. Metal pipes affixed to the side of the tunnel began to sing, as they did whenever a Tube train passed on the other side of the wall. Puddles of water on the ground trembled around Elsa’s frozen feet. The roar increased in pitch; for a few moments it was deafening as the carriages cascaded past, and then disappeared into the distance.
Elsa headed up an incline along one final unlit tunnel – and came to a dead end. The usual waist-high bundle of cables continued across the far wall and then back the way she had come.
‘I’ve come the wrong way,’ she said.
‘Except you haven’t.’
When Elsa pointed the torch at the dead end, she saw the faint rectangular shape of a door. The gathered wires that snaked horizontally across the door weren’t connected to the bundles on the walls on either side, they just looked like they were; the cables were fake. Even if some unhappy traveller hopelessly lost in the maze of underground tunnels had somehow accidentally arrived at this spot, and even if they had access to better light, they’d never in a million years notice the door unless they knew exactly what to look for. Elsa took out Zoe Castle’s pass.
‘Here goes nothing.’
‘There’s a panel to your left,’ Camille told Elsa, who pressed the pass against a smooth patch of dull metal embedded in the wall. There was a series of soft clicks, and then the door opened a couple of inches.
‘Sooner or later, questions are going to be asked about why someone’s walking around in the dead vault in the early hours,’ said Camille. ‘So be quick.’
‘You may have realized already, but I’m not very good with computers,’ said Elsa, stepping inside.
‘But we are, and we’ll guide you every step of the way,’ said Flex. ‘Let’s get to work.’
22
In a room full of surveillance equipment many storeys above the vault, Zoe Castle’s entry into the building was automatically registered.
On a small portion of a screen stacked with different CCTV images, the lights in the dead vault flickered into life as Deepfake Zoe – a digital composite of image and biometric data created by a sophisticated AI algorithm – walked down the bunker’s central corridor.
Not that any of the overnight security team who were on duty in the early hours of the morning knew who Zoe Castle was; thousands of people worked in the SIS building. But the computer said yes, because her biometric details and physical appearance corresponded with the identity of the woman on the screen, and that was good enough.
When one of the night security officers glanced up from his phone to see her walking along the corridor, he thought it unusual that someone was prowling the dead vault after midnight, but perhaps not that unexpected. In the last couple of days there had been some kind of alert happening and staff were working round the clock. He’d seen people running about on the upper floors, supervisors and upper management and suchlike, as if they had the weight of the world on their shoulders.
Gareth, the officer, stood up – he had worked nights for many months, but it was always difficult to stay alert in the stupefying ambience of the early hours – and pulled his jacket from the back of his chair.
‘Popping out for a fag,’ he said.
23
Elsa moved along the wide, softly illuminated corridor. In this part of the building, far underground, the blank grey walls were bare prestressed concrete, and cold to the touch. Up near the ceiling were what looked like air-conditioning vents, but which introduced security fog into the room in the event that the vault’s security was compromised.
At the far end of the wide corridor was a metal sliding door – the lift that connected the building above to this high-security archive. The black bulb of a camera squatted above it on the wall, staring along the corridor, and right at her.
‘Get to a terminal,’ Camille told her. ‘But don’t look like you’re in a rush.’
Elsa walked into one of the side rooms, a sparsely equipped office. A pair of desks were pushed together, a computer placed on each. Elsa was no expert where computers were concerned, but neither bulky beige terminal looked state of the art. The ceiling lights flickered on automatically as she sat at one of the desks. When Elsa touched the space bar, the computer came to life with a noisy whir. She took out the small box she had been given in the van.
‘Now what?’ she asked.
‘Plug it in,’ said Flex.
24
Hours after the fiasco in Cavendish Square, helicopters still flew above the city centre, combing the streets using thermal imaging equipment; surveillance had been increased on the ground. The police were looking for Elsa Zero, too, even if they didn’t know the truth of why. Facial recognition override protocols were in place – as soon as she walked in front of any smart camera in a public place, they’d find her.
But the car in which Zero fled in the first chaotic minutes of her violent escape was found abandoned in an alley in Kennington. Her prints were all over the dash, window and handle, but the identity of the driver who sped her away was a mystery. Whoever opened fire in that square had successfully disrupted SIS’s attempt to bring her in, had abducted Zero or abetted her escape.
Sitting in his office fourteen floors above the dead vault, Nigel Plowright’s concern was that Zero had already been spirited out of the country. He imagined her at that very moment sipping Dom Pérignon as she flew in a luxury jet towards the capital of an unfriendly foreign power. If that was the case, then God help everyone; his own disintegrating career would be the least of his worries.
After the square had been examined, and a suitable cover story about gangland violence activated for the benefit of the media – nutcase conspiracy theorists and keyboard warriors would kick up a stink, but fabricated evidence would keep the mainstream press running around in circles for the time being – Plowright had spent most of the evening watching footage of the fiasco, trying to piece together the sequence of events.
Situated in a building on the south of the square with easy access to Oxford Circus, the gunman or woman had melted into the evening crowd by the time an assault team managed to pinpoint their position.
One of Plowright’s team informed Castle’s family of her death and gave them a heavily redacted version of the events of the evening, while he spent a tense couple of hours in a conference room getting shouted at by his superiors via secure video link. He’d been obliged, when he could get a word in edgeways, to explain what he intended to do next, something he barely knew himself. All he could do was say that everything was under control, and assure them that Elsa Zero’s trail of chaos and carnage would soon be brought to an end.
He stared at his desk phone now, hoping someone would call to tell him she had been captured by a friendly nation, that she was already en route to a black site, one of those secret supermax silos the Yanks supposedly had embedded beneath the Nevada desert, and would never be seen or heard of again.
But that would just be too good to be true.
Night enveloped the city beyond his window. Plowright felt utterly fatigued. All he wanted to do was get home to his husband and dog, both of whom would probably be sound asleep. He’d grab three or four hours himself, then return to work before dawn.
‘Where would she go, I wonder?’ he asked Justine Vydelingum when she came in to sit, posture perfect, in the chair on the other side of his desk. To his annoyance, she looked as fresh as a daisy, despite the ridiculous hour. But she was young, full of energy and focus, while he was careening down the wrong side of middle-age; these days, even his aches had aches. ‘Give me something, anything.’
