The Annihilation Score Read online

  “But no such organization exists!” I protest, horrified. I’ve got to battle supervillains in public? Worse: I’m working for the Home Office? The Laundry is part of the security services, answerable to the Ministry of Defense, while the Home Office is all about law enforcement. “Two cultures” doesn’t even begin to describe the scale of the divide.

  “The organization you will be in charge of exists as of now, at least on paper.” The SA’s smile is fey. “Mrs. MacDougal, the dossier, if you please . . . ?”

  Emma gives me a sympathetic look as she slides a ten-centimeter-thick dossier across the table towards me. “Sorry dear,” she says: “I’m afraid you’re promoted—sideways.”

  “Better read quickly,” the Senior Auditor adds. “Because that phone call was the Chief Secretary to the Cabinet Office. They’re expecting you in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A in forty-two minutes precisely. Just in time to update the Deputy Prime Minister on your new assignment.”

  * * *

  I thought I’d hit rock bottom on my way into the Admiralty building: little did I suspect how much further there was to sink!

  Emma’s dossier is a doozie. If it’s to be believed, I have been promoted three whole grades in a single bound. I am now attached to the org chart of the sprawling bureaucratic empire popularly misidentified as MI5, about three management tiers down from the top and so far off to one side that I’m teetering on the edge of a virtual cliff, with dotted lines leading off the edge of the paper in the direction of the iceberg labelled Home Office. And what a view this cliff overlooks! I have no less than five subdepartments under me, and something like forty staff. But it’s a skeleton crew for now. Their niches on the org chart are all blank for the time being, a tabula rasa labelled INSERT RECRUIT HERE; half of them are tagged SUPERHERO. I have a budget of three million a year, an open requisition for a Secret Bunker and a Team Headquarters (subject to authorization, approval, and planning permission), and an entire back story to memorize for my decades-old career as some kind of high-level counter-espionage expert.

  It’s utterly humiliating, that’s what it is.

  What I really wanted and expected was to receive my entirely justified bollocking behind closed doors, then to go home and take a month of garden leave and several sessions with a security-cleared therapist and maybe a talk with a marriage guidance counselor. Not to mention a discreet word with Emma about commencing the search for a suitable candidate to take over a certain bone-white cross that I bear. (It’s a long shot but it just might work, although the search might take a while to bear fruit.)

  Instead, they seem to think they’re doing me a favor by promoting me, dumping a huge load of unfamiliar management responsibilities on my shoulders, and putting me in charge of my very own department (in another organization, to boot).

  Once my speed-reading session with the dossier runs out of time, they form a protective phalanx around me and march me in bureaucratic lockstep down marble corridors and the pavement alongside Whitehall, past the Scotland Office, unto the front steps of the Cabinet Office building. Or maybe they’re just making sure I have no opportunity to escape before the ritual feeding of the newly commissioned departmental director to the ministers.

  As I climb the steps and present my ID to the policemen on duty, all I can think of is a silly book that Bob told me he was reading a couple of years ago, by some dead famous author, who came up with a clever neologism, what was it . . . an out of concept problem? No: an out of context problem. Something which organizations or cultures encounter in very much the same way that a sentence encounters a full stop.

  I can’t shake the sense that today is my very own hyper-personalized out of context problem. I talk to my violin in the privacy of my own head: fine. When my violin talks back and tries to use me as a puppet to murder my husband, that’s not so fine. When I go on to nearly kill a man in the middle of Trafalgar Square live on network TV, that’s even less fine. But then there’s this.

  What should I expect next, if the day continues to go downhill at this rate? An invading army of elves for after-dinner amusement?

  I’m so wrapped up in myself that I nearly walk into a familiar-looking man in a rumpled suit clutching a battered red leather file box under one arm. I flinch violently and nearly push Lecter’s quick-release button by accident: “Whoops, sorry,” I say, trying to force my heart back down into my chest where it belongs.

  “Not to—” He does a double take, noticing my violin case. “Ah! You must be the star of the show.” He offers me a handshake: I accept it instinctively. “Jolly good. See you later, must dash.” And with that, the Justice Minister—number five in the Cabinet—deftly sidesteps around me, body-swerves between Vik and the Senior Auditor, and barrels down the front steps.

  Oh dear God, I’ve fallen into “The Thick of It.”

  “Was that . . . ?” Vikram asks faintly.

  “Stiff upper lip,” murmurs Dr. Armstrong. “Yes, it was. If you’d like to go in, Dr. O’Brien, they’ll be expecting you. We’ll be back to pick you up at six, when the meeting’s over.”

  I will not show fear. I smile at him, baring my teeth like a good little girl. “Looking forward to it.” Then I enter the dragon’s den.

  * * *

  COBRA is Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, on the first floor of the Cabinet Office building on Whitehall. Contrary to media folklore, there is no such thing as “the COBRA committee.” That implies an implausible level of permanence. COBRA is simply the place where ministers and senior civil servants meet to be briefed on, assess, and respond to civil and military emergencies.

  It may be on the first floor rather than in a reinforced bunker, but there are no windows in COBRA’s reinforced walls, and the whole section of the building is surrounded by not one, but two Faraday cages and an airlock tunnel lined with metal detectors and other sensors. Naturally, there are discreet security checkpoints that make your typical airport boarding experience look like it’s run by Larry, Moe, and Curly, and the whole building is contained within the security cordon that embraces Downing Street, much of Whitehall, and the Houses of Parliament.

  On my way in to COBRA they take my handbag and phone. They don’t take my earrings or necklace, but they check them over with handheld emission detectors. As for Lecter . . . he’s just going to have to get used to the hand searches. The quick-release springs in his case worry them, but in the end we reach a tense compromise: after they X-ray and manually examine him, I leave him in a security locker (along with my handbag and phone), but they let me take both the keys to the locker.

  It’s funny: I’m fully dressed but I feel naked without my violin.

  The Briefing Room itself is nearly filled by a thoroughly modern bleached pine boardroom table. One wall is a solid slab of TV screens, and there are charge points for laptops and tablets on the table—internet, too, I gather, but not for the likes of me: requests for access have to be cleared in advance by CESG. Today’s session is chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, a last-minute substitution due to the Big Cheese himself being distracted by an opportunity to be seen rubbing snouts with his frenemy the Mayor by whatever proportion of the populace still bother watching the News at Nine. Also in attendance are Barry Jennings, the avuncular Justice Minister I nearly ran down earlier, and Jessica Greene, the Home Secretary, Lady High Executioner, and pin-up girl for the hanging’s-too-good-for-them electoral demographic.*

  In addition to the political heavies, there’s a small coterie of lower-level drones and minor flappers: the Commissioner of Police (London’s copper-in-chief), a female Assistant Commissioner attending on behalf of ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers), the Chief Secretary to the Cabinet Office, representatives from the Prison Service, and so on. It’s all a bit intimidating: I feel like a secondary school football coach who’s been summoned to a meeting of the Premier League chairmen. Who are, of course, very busy men (and want you to know
it).

  “Dr. O’Brien.” The Deputy PM starts up smoothly without any social lubrication: “Can you tell us exactly what happened in Trafalgar Square this morning?”

  I stand up, and deliver the cover story that the INCORRIGIBLE committee sweated their skulls over for me while I was heading home for a quick change and shower at lunchtime.

  I am used to giving lectures: this is no different, I tell myself. I can’t be suffering from stage fright, can I? I’ve done this thousands of times before—just to different audiences. I recall a trick I used to use at unfamiliar academic conferences, where I pretend I’m addressing a room full of sapient cauliflowers from Arcturus. It’s less nerve-wracking than lecturing some of the most powerful civil servants and policy-makers in the land, so I do that. It does indeed make everything easier, except for a slight tendency to get distracted (Bob really doesn’t like brassicas—even the smell upsets him—which leads to a hypnagogic vision of my husband choking as he tries to eat the Deputy Prison Minister’s head).

  High points:

  I run a very small, very new department within MI5 which keeps tabs on superheroes and supervillains.

  Sometimes the two are easy to tell apart; sometimes they’re indistinguishable.

  The number of them crawling out of the woodwork is increasing.

  I, myself, have some small talent in that direction.

  I happened to be in town on my day off when the Trafalgar Square incident kicked off.

  Yes, my department works with the Metropolitan Police. Together, we fight crime.

  I am at the end of my canned spiel, congratulating myself on a message well-delivered, when the Home Secretary herself fixes me with a brooding, brown-eyed stare.

  “Dr. O’Brien, what you’ve outlined to us is a purely reactive stance. But this incident isn’t an isolated event. We can’t afford to be on the back foot: the terrorism implications are dreadful. Where’s your strategy to get ahead of the problem?”

  “It’s coming.” I swallow. “With all due respect, I was called to this briefing at short notice. My department is in fact working overtime on a broad strategy for managing the superpowered. Unfortunately we currently have neither the budget nor the enabling legislative framework to implement the plan, but—”

  “You’ll have it on my desk by nine a.m. sharp next Monday morning.” She doesn’t smile: Jessica Greene only opens wide to swallow her prey. “You will personally brief my staff later that day, subject to scheduling.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say automatically. I don’t think a heel-click would be appreciated, but—“Is there anything else?”

  “No,” she says dismissively: “I think we’ve heard all we—”

  The red telephone next to the Deputy PM’s elbow trills for attention.

  “Yah?” Deputy Prime Minister Dennis Baker—at age forty-one the head of the junior party in the coalition, and one of the most powerful politicians in the country—actually yahs. He does it with the indolent, satisfied smirk of the utterly entitled; then something odd happens. He stiffens, an expression of sudden urgency wiping the grin from his features. “Oh dear. How unfortun— What?” (Another pause, during which all of us try to pretend we’re not holding our breath in hope of learning what could set Golden Boy’s face in such a severe rictus of dismay.) “Oh dear, that’s really rather serious, isn’t it? Yes, I can see why you felt it necessary to interrupt—yes, I’ll tell them. Keep me informed of any developments. Yes. Bye.”

  He puts the phone down, then leans forward and plants his hands palm-down on either side of his blotter for a moment. For a moment he struggles visibly for words.

  “Where is Officer Friendly when you need him?” he finally bursts out. Then he takes a deep breath and uses the moment to get a grip on himself. “I apologize, ladies and gentlemen. It appears that the incident in Trafalgar Square may have been a diversion.”

  “What?” (That’s my contribution to the sudden uproar.)

  “While Dr. O’Brien was defending our friend the Mayor from Strip Jack Spratt in front of the cameras around the Fourth Plinth, somebody broke into the Bank of England.”

  * * *

  “They broke into the Bank of England vaults,” I repeat later that evening, “crowbarred their way into one of the secure terminals, and downloaded the private keys to the currency serialization printer.”

  Vikram: “Who are ‘they’?”

  Emma: “What’s a currency serialization printer?”

  We’re in a private room at the Civil Service Club, a couple of blocks away from the Cabinet Office. Our booking on the room in Admiralty House ran out, and the New Annex is still out of service, so the Senior Auditor personally signed us into the club and agreed to a subsistence claim. Which is a good thing, because I am shaky and ravenous with hunger—I haven’t eaten properly since before last night’s reception on the oil rig.

  I push my hair back (isolated strands are making individual bids for freedom from the knot I imposed on them after I showered) and wet my lips before I reply. It’s a really nice Beaujolais: the SA has good taste in wine. “Nobody knows who ‘they’ are, which is in itself highly suspicious,” I explain. “The cameras saw nothing. Literally, nothing. The recording isn’t blank, it just shows what you’d expect to see in a room with nobody there, until suddenly there’s an explosion and bits of computer and broken glass and ceiling tiles all over the floor.”

  “Do go on.” Dr. Armstrong’s spectacles twinkle: reflections from the candles in the middle of the table.

  “They broke into the vault where they keep the secure computer system the bank uses to generate the numbers on banknotes. It’s an anti-forgery measure: the serial numbers aren’t purely sequential, and they aren’t random. They’re actually a sequence number and a cryptographic hash function generated by a very private key indeed. Banks can use a copy of the B of E’s public key to verify that high-denomination notes aren’t forgeries. It’s a back-stop: even if an enterprising crook can get hold of a supply of the right paper and ink, beg borrow or steal a secure hologram-capable intaglio printer, and manufacture currency plates, they still have to get the number right.”

  “I thought they used RFID chips these days?” says Jez Wilson. “And DNA?”

  “The DNA tagging hasn’t been rolled out yet; when it is, it can be sampled and amplified by PCR to authenticate the new banknotes. RFID chips—not for anything small, they’re too expensive. Euro zone issuers use RFID chips in fifty-euro notes and up, but the Bank of England doesn’t do that yet. The key security measure is still the cryptographic checksum in the machine-readable number.”

  “So they stole what, the private key?”

  “Not known.” I take another sip of wine. “What we do know is that they ran off a couple of tapes full of signed serialized numbers. At least, that’s what the Treasury people are saying they think happened. All the room contains is a terminal and a pair of minicomputers, old enough to vote and with all but two of their i/o ports soldered shut. They generate sequences and dump them onto magnetic tape, which is then transported under guard to a secure banknote printing site, loaded onto the printing station that adds the serial numbers, and then degaussed on the spot to prevent the tape being reused.”

  “How do they know the tapes were taken?”

  “There’s a mechanical rev counter inside the tape drive they use—not visible if you’re looking at the front panel. It’s all very old-school: they open it up every week and write down the number of tapes that have been written in a ledger. Apparently someone ran off a couple of reels of twenty-pound notes. Each tape can store a million valid currency numbers, so they’re good for twenty million pounds of perfect forgeries per cartridge. Then they left behind an EMP bomb—a shaped implosion charge wrapped around a small electromagnetic coil. It made a mess of the room, and more importantly fried every chip, hard drive, tape, and floppy disk within
twenty meters.” That’s when the security guards noticed: there was a bone-rattling thump from the basement and their mobile phones died.

  “Charming,” murmurs the SA. “So they’ve got no idea who did it, except that the culprits knew exactly what they were doing, could bamboozle TV cameras, and got away with a couple of incredibly portable items that are worth twenty million pounds each. What makes them think it’s connected with Strip Jack Spratt’s song-and-dance session?”

  “Well, there are two clues to work on.” This calls for another sip of wine. “Firstly, as near as we can tell, the break-in happened at exactly the same time that Jack started building his pornographic sculpture on the Fourth Plinth. It might be a pure coincidence, but what are the odds? And secondly”—I pause for another sip—“the thief left a calling card.”

  The SA winces almost imperceptibly. “What did it say?” he asks, clearly nerving himself for bad news.

  “It said, ‘The World Shall Hear From Me Again! Tremble, Fools, Before It Is Too Late!—Professor Freudstein.’

  “And it was printed in Comic Sans.”

  So. First we have an outbreak of superpowers . . . and now we have a soi-disant Mad Scientist with really bad typographic taste on our hands.

  How could things possibly get any worse?

  5.

  THE OFFICE

  The next day I awaken early, with a mild hangover and a bad case of oh dear God did I really say that to the Senior Auditor? I roll over and reach out, meaning to ask Bob’s opinion, and hit cold air on the other side of an unfamiliar hotel bed. Everything crashes down on me at once and I sit bolt upright. Then reflex takes over: I reach for my laptop.