Zero days, p.26
Zero Days, page 26
Cullen stood, the sudden movement tipping over his chair. ‘Is that it? You demanded this meeting just to slander Efren Bell? We need Schoenberg. That’s the priority. And your time is running out.’
‘There’s one more thing,’ said Drayton, as Cullen made for the door. ‘You asked if I found anything at the office of Digital Futures in Rangoon. I did.’
Cullen turned, picked up the chair with one sweep of his thick arm and sat back down.
Then there was a knock of the door. The woman entered holding a cell phone. ‘I think you’ll want to take this, Ric. It’s urgent.’
Cullen left the room, and Drayton opened the window to get some fresh air.
Then he listened, listened hard.
The sounds were chillingly familiar.
First he heard a clanging and screeching, getting louder and then fading, followed by the ringing of a bell. A tram was passing below the window and around a bend in the track. Then a sound that was like faint bursts of static. Below the window, a woman was sweeping the sidewalk. Then a deep rumbling, as a truck passed along the cobbled street.
Finally, from the café below there was the sound of jazz. It was Brubeck’s ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’.
*****
Drayton lowered himself out of the window, stepping first onto a narrow ledge and then onto a striped awning that covered the outside seating area of the café below. The awning strained under his weight. He felt for its frame under his feet, keeping close to the wall, inching towards the edge from where he hoped he could lower himself to the ground.
Then one foot slipped onto the fabric of the awning, which began to rip, tearing from one corner. He felt himself sliding and then falling, his arms swinging for something to grab hold of. For a moment he managed to grip one of the awning’s metal supports, until it started to buckle and bend, but at least it broke his fall before he crashed onto a table below and then to the ground.
And then he ran as fast as a throbbing ankle would carry him, sticking close to the buildings and following the tram tracks until they reached a wider road of expensive shops and restaurants. A little ahead of him was the old Checkpoint Charlie border crossing, surrounded by a clutch of kitschy souvenir shops and the usual throngs of tourists.
Dobberman’s smartphone had been in that room when it last came online. The sounds were unmistakable. Somehow it had got from Bangkok to the mansion in Hong Kong and then to Cullen’s Berlin office. Perhaps there was a rational explanation. That Cullen had somehow got hold of it as part of his own investigation.
Cullen also knew about Anna. Perhaps there was an explanation for that too, but he wasn’t inclined to hang around and ask.
A side road led to series of low kiosk-like shops, painted bright yellow. One was serving coffee and sausages, another selling tickets for a hot air balloon promising a bird’s eye view of Berlin. There were cars parked in front and out the back of the kiosks, which Drayton recognised as old Trabants, the box-like pre-fabricated car built in the old East Germany.
Then he spotted the OmniX with its darkened windows, two men climbed from the back, the men from Bell’s villa, walking quickly towards him. He made for a crowded shop with a big sign, ‘Trabi Safari’, above its entrance, where he inserted himself among the tourists poking through shelves of model Trabants, as well as keyrings, mugs and T-shirts, all with images of the old car.
Drayton lifted a small green Trabant from one of the shelves, rotating it between his fingers, all the time looking beyond the little car and out of the window, through which he could see his pursuers waiting by a neighbouring café, biding their time.
The crowd in the shop began to thin, the tourists leaving through a rear door towards a wet and pot-holed car park where several Trabants were lined up amid deep puddles. From behind the shop’s counter, a man with a scraggy beard and long earrings looked up from where he was feeding an old black dog and told Drayton it was his last chance.
‘We have just one car left,’ he said. ‘The next safari leaves in five minutes, following the course of the wall. Come join us. Self-drive your own Trabi, man. What do you think?’
Drayton started to say thanks, but no thanks, but then felt a hand on his arm, and a familiar voice interrupted him.
‘We’ll take it,’ said Vika.
*****
Vika was wearing a silver wig and a pair of big round sunglasses. She handed Drayton a yellow ‘I love Berlin’ baseball cap and lurid red-rimmed shades as they walked out the back towards a line of eight Trabants. They were parked one behind the other, bumper to bumper, with a small electric vehicle at the front, preparing to lead the convoy.
‘Put them on,’ Vika said, as Drayton hesitated at the glasses. ‘When the cars pull out, they’ll be looking for a single, straight-looking guy.’
Vika chose a light blue Trabant in the middle of the pack, and when Drayton went to climb into the passenger seat, she said, ‘The other door, Drayton. You’re driving.’
A bubbly guide, speaking heavily accented English, moved down the line, helping to start each car. He told Drayton to keep his foot on the pedal, to pump the gas while he turned the key. The engine came to life with a roar, before spluttering and cutting out.
‘Jesus, Drayton. Have you never driven a car before?’ said Vika.
‘Never a car like this.’
He tried again, and this time he pumped so hard on the accelerator that the roar quickly became a scream. The guide told him to ease off, and this time the spluttering was punctuated by a series of pops before the Trabant settled into a steady but shaky chug, sending up clouds of smoke from its exhaust. The guide explained the controls, which didn’t take long. Three pedals and a spindly gear stick protruding from just below the steering wheel. He wished Drayton good luck, and said to just follow the car in front.
The car radio then came to life with the guide talking from the lead electric car, joking about the Trabants. ‘This is a socialistic car. So the radio is one way. I can talk to you, but you can’t talk back to me. Let’s go.’
The chugging and gasping convoy pulled out of the compound, engulfed in stinking exhaust fumes, and onto the road in front of the yellow shops. Drayton struggled to keep the engine alive, pumping the accelerator while wrestling with the gearstick that initially refused to move from first gear. The steering wheel was heavy and the brakes like mush.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said, as the car jolted and shook.
‘Don’t knock it,’ Vika said. ‘My grandmother had one of these. There was a fourteen-year waiting list. I think they’ve got personality. It’s cute. She used to say that the headlights were like two big innocent eyes staring at you. She said they were the only eyes she could trust.’
‘Well, yeah,’ said Drayton, not finding it quite so cute and the personality more than a little prickly. ‘And in any case. What happened to you? Why did you run from Hong Kong?’
‘Not now,’ Vika replied. ‘And I didn’t run. Drive.’
Through the crackly radio, the guide was giving a running commentary on the sites they were passing. A stretch of the old wall preserved as a monument, which Drayton recognised as one of the places he’d visited with Milo. Then the solid marble and limestone façade of the German Finance Ministry, which had been Hermann Göring’s Ministry of Aviation under the Nazis, before it became the headquarters of the Soviet military administration and then home for Communist East Germany’s Council of Ministers.
So many ghosts.
‘Beware of bicycles,’ the guide said. ‘But especially be aware of big capitalistic cars driving fast.’ Because at that moment one big capitalistic car in the form of the OmniX was driving fast. Very fast. Right behind the convoy, pulling out and alongside them before being forced back by an oncoming bus.
The Trabi convoy turned east, heading into the heart of the old East Berlin, taking a narrow cobbled street, along which the little cars bounced and rattled. The guide said something about the suspension, but it was drowned out by static. Drayton didn’t need to hear. He could feel every bump, every stone, and in his spindly rear-view mirror he could see the big black OmniX, lurking behind the pack of Trabants like a hungry predator waiting to pounce.
Vika was right, the men in the OmniX couldn’t be sure in which car Drayton was travelling. There were three Trabants with solo male drivers. Numbers six and seven, immediately behind them, and another, two cars ahead. And the Trabants were low and dark. It was tough to identify clearly those inside.
The convoy spluttered past a statue of the whiskered authors of the communist manifesto, Marx and Engels looking suitably pensive for a group of snap-happy tourists, who turned their cameras on the passing Trabants.
‘Trabis are made out of a kind of fibreglass, a combination of resin and cotton waste that came from the Soviet Union,’ the guide was saying. ‘So they are a triumph of recycling. Except pigs would sometimes eat them. They had to position the petrol tank as high as possible because they had no fuel pumps.’
None of which made Drayton feel any better.
‘Oooh, that is an aggressive capitalistic car…’ said the guide, his voice trailing away as the OmniX swung out parallel to the convoy and accelerated beside it. It then turned in sharply and rammed a Trabant with the single driver, just behind Vika and Drayton. The little car jumped and span, then bounced across the sidewalk, coming to a standstill just in front of Karl Marx. Another metre or so, and it might have landed in his lap.
The tourists shouted and ran as the men from the OmniX struggled with the twisted front door of the Trabant before pulling out the driver and throwing him face down on the lawn in front of Engels.
Drayton swung his Trabant sharply to the right and down a side road, accelerating as fast he could, crunching the gears as he tried to find fourth.
‘That’s reverse Drayton. Not a good idea. And why the fuck have you come this way. We were safer with the convoy,’ Vika said.
‘Car number six, are you OK? And number five, you’ve gone the wrong way,’ said the despairing and fading voice of the guide from the radio, until his voice was drowned out by static as the signal was lost.
But Drayton wasn’t listening to that or to Vika, because the OmniX was back on the road. They’d seen Drayton turn off and were accelerating fast after him.
Vika had her laptop open now, and was working the keyboard hard.
The Trabi’s engine screamed and its tyres screeched as it slid around another corner, crossing in front of a tram, and then forcing a taxi to brake and swerve, hitting the side of a bus. Drayton mounted the sidewalk onto a small area of parkland, churning up the grass and mud. Vika looked behind them. The OmniX was following, right up onto the grass.
‘Hold on!,’ Drayton said, as the Trabi bounced down a series of steps and across a piece of wasteland, an old factory complex looming ahead. He slowed, Vika glancing at him, before accelerating into the yard of the complex, the OmniX close behind.
‘There’s no way out,’ Vika screamed.
Perhaps, perhaps not. It was Anna’s factory complex, the one where she had her gallery and where Efren Bell had his vision, where Drayton remembered a narrow, partially blocked exit at the rear, too narrow and low to be much good for anything, except perhaps a Trabant. The little car rattled and its engine shrieked as it crossed the old embedded railway lines, Drayton wrestling with its wheel, as he turned down the narrow path at the rear of the complex.
‘That’s impossible,’ Vika said, as she looked ahead of them.
The Trabant scraped along the broken wall and under the slumped archway, which gave way, bricks crashing to the ground in their wake. Not even the most intelligent car in the world was going to follow through there.
Drayton allowed himself the slightest of smiles, banging the top of the wheel in triumph, as he turned out onto a wide street beside the Spree River, only to find himself stuck beside a crippled tram. Then the Trabi’s engine cut out. He flooded the engine trying to start it. It came roaring back to life on the fourth attempt.
‘Shit,’ Drayton said, his fleeting moment of triumph evaporating as fast as the approaching OmniX, which again filled his rear-view mirror. He pressed the accelerator as far as it would go, but it was never going to be far enough.
‘Let him catch us,’ Vika said.
‘What?’
‘Let him catch us. I need a stronger signal.’
He glanced across at her. She was still working the keyboard.
A sudden heavy downpour pounded on the Trabant’s windscreen, the wipers spreading the water, not clearing it, as if the little car was submerging, diving into the murky depths, everything ahead turning to liquid.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘That car is full of sensors and micro-processors. It’s basically a computer with four wheels and an engine. The smartest car in the world, Bell calls it. Do you know how many computers this Trabant has?’
‘I’d say zero. Roughly,’ he replied, head bent forward, close to the windscreen.
‘That would be right, Drayton. Apart from this one,’ she said, patting her laptop. ‘No contest.’
The OmniX accelerated, trying to pull alongside. Vika tapped at her computer and the OmniX’s sunroof and all four windows opened. Rain swept into the car, as if a bucket had been emptied over it. The big car broke sharply and swerved. In his mirror Drayton could see them struggling to close the hatches, hammering at buttons that were no longer under their control. Another tap from Vika and even above the roar of the Trabi and the pounding of the rain, Drayton could hear loud music blasting, full volume. Heads turned all along the street. OmniX-treme audio, the brochure called it. Eighteen speakers, six independent channels of discrete audio, dedicated sound for all corners of the car. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi controlled. Perfect.
Another tap from Vika and the boot opened.
‘Whoops,’ she said. ‘I thought that was the bonnet.’
They were now passing the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining fragment of Berlin Wall, a memorial plastered with paintings and graffiti.
The OmniX was back beside them. It swerved and rammed the Trabant, which jumped onto the sidewalk, scattering more tourists standing beside a mural of a Trabant bursting through the Berlin Wall, a caption saying, ‘Test the Best’. They scraped along the wall under the painting of the old Soviet and East German leaders, Brezhnev and Honecker, kissing each other.
The Trabi bounced back onto the main road. The OmniX was waiting for them, but Vika was now driving it, the vehicle control system under her command.
The OmniX jerked and jolted, accelerated sharply, then broke hard. ‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘I’ve never driven one of these before.’
But she quickly got the hang of it, and as she clicked and tapped, the OmniX accelerated away rapidly and then span. Then it reversed at speed, hitting an oncoming tram and then a truck. Drayton could see the driver wrestling with the steering wheel and stamping on pedals that no longer responded. The men in the back were waving their hands wildly, pinned in their places by seat belts that just kept tightening.
The OmniX then reversed at speed across the road, through a fence and onto the bank of the Spree. Then it slowed, Vika struggling with the signal. But it had enough momentum to reach the edge of the river before dropping into the water a metre or so below.
Vika clapped her hands in triumph. ‘What did Efren Bell call them, ‘the future of transport’?’
‘Something like that,’ said Drayton, pushing at the battered door of the Trabi, which fell away on to the street. ‘Your grandmother was right. These things are pretty cute. When you get the hang of them.’
‘She was a sharp woman. Now cross the bridge and into Kreuzberg.’
As the Trabant spluttered and chugged across the river, a crowd gathered on the bank below, watching the bubbling water. There was no sign of the car.
Vika directed Drayton through the backstreets of Kreuzberg until they reached a narrow lane of old tenement blocks daubed with graffiti. They entered a small courtyard.
‘OK. Get out,’ she said.
Drayton followed her instructions, climbing out of the car.
They waited in silence, Vika checking her phone.
‘There’s something you need to know,’ she said. ‘The attack on the Mountville Memorial Hospital in Washington DC, the first time a version of the Cerberus zero day was used, it didn’t get round your defences. Your system was strong. It held.’
‘So how did it get through?’ Drayton asked. ‘How the fuck did it get through.’
‘Somebody let it in. Somebody killed your defences. Somebody on the inside, at the hospital.’
Drayton steadied himself against the door of the Trabant, hardly noticing the white van pulling into the courtyard and parking just behind. ‘But how …’ he began, his voice trailing away as a group of masked men rushed at him from the back of the van, pushing him hard against the side of the Trabant.
The last thing he remembered was a hand across his mouth, the sharp prick of a needle in his neck, and Vika’s words trailing away.
‘I’m sorry, Drayton,’ she said.
*****
The hours passed in a haze of muffled consciousness. Voices in a language Drayton didn’t understand. Hands firmly guiding him. A siren. More voices, raised this time as he was pushed and pulled through a jostling crowd. Echoey announcements, like at an airport. Or possibly a railway station.
Whatever they’d injected him with wasn’t enough to completely knock him out, but sufficient to dull any real sense of where he was or what he was doing. He was easier to transport that way. He wanted to shout, but couldn’t get the words out; wanted to struggle, but his limbs didn’t respond.
They sat him down for a while on a hard wooden bench. He could smell food and then a cigarette. They gave him water, helping lift and then tilt the plastic bottle into his mouth, but he could barely swallow, and it spilt down his front. There was another tinny announcement, one they’d been waiting for. They helped him to his feet, the world around him a fuzzy kaleidoscope of shifting light and colour.
