Viper Nine Read online

‘Here we go,’ Mo said, hitting enter.

  * * *

  Alan Winn nodded awake. His head dropped again – and again, he started in his chair.

  The room was warm, his belly full of his wife’s pasta, warmed up in the work microwave and sitting heavy in his gut. He considered his waistline a moment, protruding over his belt as he attempted to stay awake at his station.

  In fifteen years on the job, little-to-nothing had ever happened in the control room other than a few irregularities in the readings. In that time his hair had fallen out and whitened over at the ears, while the blue cotton shirt he wore had popped a button.

  Lost in a sludge of mental fatigue, Winn felt the pull of gravity on his leaden eyelids.

  That was until the jarring thud of a soft football struck him on the back of the head.

  Winn snapped to attention and spun in his chair. Paul, a fellow engineer with a greying black ponytail and the look of an ex-drug addict fell about with laughter.

  Scruffy in a salmon-pink shirt, Paul settled down into a goofy yellow-toothed grin. ‘Wake up, Homer!’ he yelled in a broad Cumbrian accent.

  Winn retrieved the ball from the floor and threw it back with interest. ‘Bloody fool.’

  Paul tutted and bit into a homemade corned beef sandwich. ‘Falling asleep on the job, Alan. That’s a direct violation of code seven, subsection forty-two.’

  ‘As if you have a bloody clue,’ Winn replied, looking around the claustrophobic space they shared of an evening. ‘Not like anything ever happens here anyway—’

  Suddenly, all six monitors bleeped into life. Winn wheeled his chair into the desk, faced with a vast grey control panel awash with the sea of buttons and dials it was his job to monitor. Several of those buttons were flashing on and off. Many of the dials winging wild left to right.

  As Winn checked his readings on his computer screen, Paul dropped his half-eaten sandwich and attended to his own.

  ‘This can’t be right,’ the senior engineer said, instant perspiration on his brow. ‘Water levels are down.’

  ‘Temperature’s rising,’ said Paul. ‘Increase the pressure.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ Winn said, clicking on his mouse. ‘Nothing’s happening. Try from your end.’

  ‘Same here,’ an anxious Paul replied. He looked across at Winn for guidance.

  ‘No need for panic,’ Winn said, standing and peering at the readings on the console. ‘Let’s try a manual override,’ he continued, trying to keep his cool, if only for his junior colleague’s sake.

  Winn pushed a sequence of buttons on the console and checked the temperature bars on his screen. With insufficient water supply, the reactor was heating up fast.

  ‘Tell me you can fix this, Al,’ Paul said, sweat rings darkening around the sleeves of his shirt.

  ‘Maybe it’s a fault with the readouts, not the reactor,’ Winn mumbled to himself.

  ‘Or maybe we’re goosed, Al.’

  Winn looked across at Paul. ‘Call it in – now!’

  His junior picked up the phone and initiated emergency protocols. But Winn could only watch as the temperature rose, the fuel rods boiling the in-flow of water faster than it could replenish its levels. With reduced water levels, the fuel rods would melt both the core and the steel containment vessel.

  Paul held the phone to his chest with a doomed expression. ‘It’s not the readouts… Danger of critical mass.’

  As if to confirm the gravity of the situation, the control room lit red. A low-pitched alarm sounded. Winn pulled the instruction manual from his top draw, as heavy as a concrete slab. He slapped it on his desk and rifled through to the section at the rear: Shutdown Protocol.

  * * *

  ‘It’s happening,’ Mo said in Driver’s ear. ‘We’re up against the clock.’

  She watched the progress bars move painfully slow. A young man a couple of empty desks to her right wheeled his chair over and offered her a high five. She took it.

  ‘What was that for?’ Driver asked.

  ‘Sellafield,’ the man in his red flannel shirt and glasses said. ‘I’m watching their communications; they’re confirming the reactor’s out of control. Impressive work, you beat the time limit for the test.’

  Driver checked her watch. She – or Mo, to be more precise – had beaten the deadline set for the task by over a minute. And that including starting late.

  Melissa caught Driver’s eye. She nodded and smiled, giving her the thumbs-up.

  A reactor was about to meltdown. How could they be so blasé? It’s as if they saw everything in terms of pure data, without any real-world consequences.

  The hacker in the flannel shirt leaned in close. Driver turned to face him, blocking his view of her screen.

  ‘You’re Super-Fly, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Driver replied. ‘Don’t spread it around.’

  ‘I’m a huge fan,’ the man said. ‘Isn’t this cool?’

  ‘Oh yeah, cool,’ Driver replied. ‘Now if you don’t mind…’

  ‘Sure, I’ll leave you to it,’ the man said, wheeling away.

  Driver turned her attention back to the screen. The progress bars were eighty per cent there, but slowing down.

  ‘What’s taking so long?’ Driver muttered.

  ‘I’m pulling a lot of files from their servers,’ Mo replied over comms. ‘And the virus is designed to infect their systems undetected. But for that to happen it has to bypass their failsafe systems, which takes a little time.’

  ‘Well can’t it hurry up about it?’

  ‘This is a custom-written program,’ Mo continued. ‘Have you any idea how complex this shit is?’

  ‘Spare me the details,’ Driver hissed.

  She was close to telling Mo to cancel the hack on the Sellafield plant. If the reactor failed, the nuclear fallout could be devastating – releasing a deadly cloud of radioactive material across the UK and Europe. It was the latest chilling move in the cyberterrorists playbook. Another show of strength, doubtless designed to hasten a ransom payment from America and her allies.

  Perhaps Melissa would ask her to cancel the attack at the last minute. A mere warning shot across the bow. But there was no sign of her intervening. And if the worst did happen, it would be on Driver’s own conscience.

  But no, she had to hold her nerve. If they cancelled the hack now, worse would surely follow. And any deal with the terrorists could be off the table permanently.

  There was also the danger of alerting the room to the malware currently worming its way into their systems. Not to mention the priceless data downloading itself onto Mo’s secure drive in Geneva.

  As Driver waited on the edge of her office chair, she went back and forth over the moralities of her actions. It was yet another example of the concerns she’d expressed to Gilmore.

  Some ends didn’t justify the means. Just ask Denys Kravchenko.

  Chapter 10

  Rios rode in the back of the black Mercedes MPV with her black padded rifle bag across her lap. She gripped the door handle as the body of the van rolled to the left, hugging a tight right turn.

  Tyres squealed but the van held, Baptiste at the wheel, quick-shifting through the gears.

  Anna had forwarded Driver’s location, courtesy of Lim. Or at least, they hoped she would be there. Anna had triangulated the 4G signal of one of the men who’d grabbed her – whether she was alive and in the game was another thing.

  Had the hackers smelled a rat and kidnapped her for torture, or worse? No one knew, but Rios was itching to find out as Baptiste followed the navigation system on the Mercedes to the man’s last known location.

  She lurched forward as the van skidded to a stop in the middle of the street.

  ‘This is it?’ Wells asked from the front passenger seat.

  ‘According to the GPS,’ Baptiste replied.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Pope, broad as a house on the backseat next to Rios. He scratched the heavy brown stubble on his rugged, almost-handsome face.

/>   ‘Maybe they tossed the phone,’ suggested Rios, peering out of the window and seeing little other than a strip of bars, clubs and late-night stores.

  ‘Let’s split up,’ Wells said.

  Baptiste nodded. ‘I’ll drive around, see what I can find.’

  Rios slid open the rear passenger door. ‘I’ll go for higher ground.’

  She jumped out of the van with the others, Pope and Wells hurrying in opposite directions and Baptiste pulling clear.

  A quick three-sixty over the rooftops presented the perfect spot across the street. Rios ran to the opposite pavement and a steel gate next to a seven-storey building.

  They tended to build low in Europe. So it would be high enough to give her a good view of the surrounding streets and rooftops. She looked around, found no one watching and strapped the rifle bag to her back.

  With a short run-up, Rios jumped onto the gate and caught hold of the bars. She scrambled up and over – they didn’t call her ‘Tree Monkey’ for nothing when she was a kid. She could climb just about anything that wasn’t marble or glass.

  Rios dropped down on the other side into a narrow driveway. She found a boarded-up doorway, the building derelict. A swift boot and the board snapped inward. The Latina stepped inside over the broken board and jumped as a small flock of bats flew out through the door.

  The place stunk of bat shit. But she soon found an old staircase all the way up to the top. A solid shoulder-charge brought her out through a flimsy locked door onto a flat rooftop.

  Rios jogged to the edge and dropped to a knee. She surveyed the streets below, where Wells and Pope roamed, searching for any signs of their lost team leader.

  ‘Find anything yet?’ Rios asked, unzipping her rifle bag.

  ‘Nothing that looks suspicious,’ Wells sighed. ‘She could be anywhere.’

  Rios noticed Pope peering into the window of a local beer house. ‘Here Wells, I heard the Germans brew a good beer, mate,’ he said. ‘You reckon we’ve got time for a quick schooner?’

  Wells ignored the suggestion. ‘I’m going to try down here,’ he said, walking towards a block of old warehouse buildings, the source of a beating, pulsing nightclub. ‘You got eyes yet?’

  ‘I’m in position,’ Rios said, setting up her rifle and screwing on the silencer barrel. ‘Anything moves, I’ll let you know.’

  She flattened down on the roof and looked through the sighting, crosshairs sweeping left to right.

  Rios slipped a stick of gum in her mouth, watching Baptiste circle the area in the MPV. This was the place she most liked to be. At home, above it all, looking down as opposed to up, thanks to her five-three stature. The Mexican chewed slow on the fresh mint gum and swept the area again, Wells talking to the nightclub bouncers, fishing for leads.

  Pope ducked into a late-night convenience store, asking the woman on the counter if she’d seen a blonde woman.

  ‘Yeah, Sasquatch, it’s Berlin,’ Rios whispered to herself – like asking a narco if he’d seen a bag of dope.

  Rios expanded her search radius. The area was rough and industrial. Streetlight in short supply, the air warming up and the night drying out.

  Rios chewed and whispered. ‘Come on Blondie, where the hell are you?’

  Sellafield, Cumbria, England

  Alan Winn shook his head and typed his password again into the system. He clicked on Shut Down. He clicked the big red button again, to no avail.

  Paul was on his shoulder. Three other colleagues too, including the chief supervisor for the plant, Bob Thornbury.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Winn said.

  ‘You must have typed it wrong,’ Paul replied.

  ‘I didn’t bloody type it wrong!’ Winn yelled, a heartbeat away from throttling his younger colleague.

  Thornbury, a short, battering-ram of a man, sported more hair on the back of his hands than his head. He grabbed Winn in a super-human grip and pulled him out of the chair. ‘Let me in there, Alan.’

  Winn gave him the chair as Thornbury followed the shutdown procedure from the file.

  ‘Hurry up about it will you?’ Paul said as Thornbury one-finger typed.

  ‘Shut your sodding mouth,’ Thornbury barked, as the gauges quivered in the red.

  All the readings on the control room’s screens indicated an imminent meltdown, the only option was to turn off the reactor. Even then it would take a while for the water to cool the radioactive fuel rods enough to stop them melting and eating their way out into the atmosphere. Contaminated steam would only worsen the disaster. And then there was the ever-present danger of a huge hydrogen gas explosion due to overheating. It was too much for Winn’s blood pressure to bear. He felt his heart pounding against his ribcage as Thornbury typed in his password.

  Winn’s direct superior instructed the computer to shut down the reactor. Again it failed to respond.

  Thornbury himself, was an old-school taskmaster. Tough as brass tacks and someone you didn’t cross. Yet as he looked up at Winn from behind the desk, he had the eyes of a lost schoolboy. ‘Out,’ he ordered, his voice almost lost under the squawking alarm. He rose from Winn’s chair. ‘Everyone out, now!’

  Berlin, Germany

  ‘Come on, damn it,’ Driver said under her breath as the progress bars edged towards completion.

  The upload of Mo’s Duck Fuck virus was at ninety per cent. The download of the hackers’ files at ninety-three.

  Meanwhile, Mo’s hold over the systems at the Sellafield nuclear plant were cutting it close to disaster. A breaking news story on one of the giant screens confirmed it. The BBC reporting a potential meltdown of a reactor.

  ‘This is too much,’ Mo said. ‘I can’t take it any longer. I’m going to undo the hack.’

  ‘Don’t back out now, we’re almost there,’ Driver said, pretending to work her computer.

  ‘I’ve done some questionable things,’ Mo continued. ‘But releasing a radioactive cloud?’

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ Driver whispered into the comms, as the progress bars both hit ninety-eight per cent.

  She was perhaps even more edgy than Mo, yet spooking the young techie wasn’t going to help. They’d come this far, there was no sense in pulling out now. Not when they were so close to taking down Viper Nine’s entire operation.

  But as the progress bars stalled at ninety-nine per cent, Driver spied a problem. She knew from the body language of Melissa – the floor supervisor in heated discussion with the hacker in the flannel shirt.

  Driver pricked her ears to the conversation a good fifteen feet away. He was telling Melissa of a glitch in the system. It had raised his suspicions. He was sure it was an intruder, snooping around the files… Or something even worse.

  Melissa’s look of panic mirrored the fist of tension in Driver’s gut. The woman turned and glared. The game was up; Driver was suspect number one.

  ‘Cancel the hack,’ she said.

  ‘You sure?’ Mo replied.

  ‘Do it now!’

  Driver looked to her screen. The progress bars hit one-hundred. Both the upload and download complete.

  ‘We’re done, get out of there,’ Mo urged her.

  Driver pulled the USB stick from the machine and sprung from her chair. A nervous glance over her shoulder told her Melissa was on her tail, striding across the floor with an armed guard by her side.

  ‘I’ve cancelled the hack,’ Mo said. ‘I’ve released control back to the plant.’

  ‘And what about the virus?’ Driver asked. ‘Is it in the works?’

  ‘Any second now…’ Mo replied.

  Sure enough, as she hurried towards the nearest exit, Driver noticed a commotion in the office.

  The giant screens cut to static. The lights shut down soon after – everything appearing controlled by computer.

  ‘It worked,’ she said, feeling an adrenaline-shot of excitement.

  ‘Of course it worked,’ Mo huffed, offended by any suggestion to the contrary.

  ‘Will it di
sable them permanently?’ Driver asked.

  ‘It’ll take months to clear the virus. And in the meantime, it’s wiping their hard drives clean.’

  ‘Good,’ Driver said, exiting the office.

  ‘What about you?’ Mo asked, his voice crackling.

  ‘Just get started on those files,’ Driver replied, rounding the corner into the chill of the surrounding passageways.

  ‘You’re… breaking… can’t hear—’

  Driver put a finger to her ear. ‘Mo?’

  Nothing. Only a fuzz of static in reply.

  The one thing she could hear were running footsteps from behind and Melissa yelling for her to stop.

  Driver broke into a run of her own, but heard a burst of interference on a radio around the next corner. She hung back as Melissa and the bleach-haired guard made up the ground, the man’s weapon raised.

  ‘Shoot her!’ Melissa ordered.

  The guard was only too happy to oblige, planting his feet and taking aim.

  Chapter 11

  Sellafield, England

  Winn, Thornbury and a sweat-soaked Paul breathed heavy and stared at the screens on the monitors. The alarm had stopped. The control room was back to its standard lighting and the cursor onscreen was an inch away from the button that would have shut down the reactor.

  All gauges were relaxing out of the red. And every other reading was normalising. Winn and his colleagues had control over the room again and, more important, the reactor.

  Paul wasn’t the only one sitting agape in a pool of his own sweat. Winn put a hand to his chest, his heart still having mini palpitations.

  ‘We’ve got full in-flow of water,’ Paul confirmed, reading off his screen. ‘Back to full pressure.’

  ‘Fuel rod temperature?’ Thornbury asked.

  ‘Still high, but stabilising,’ Winn replied. ‘And the core appears to be intact.’

  ‘Can we confirm no leaks?’ Thornbury asked.

  ‘No leaks, confirmed,’ replied Paul.

  ‘We’ll still have to shut down the reactor,’ Thornton continued. ‘Make sure we bring core temperatures back to safe levels.’