Dead Letters Anthology (8 page)

Roy was anxious for the event to be over. As he waited in one of the many hospitality suites with the other engineers and architects he forced himself not to think about what could be going wrong just beneath the surface of the resort.

The geologist had duly appeared and registered mystification. If the igneous particle had once been alive, it was not now, and had hardened solid in the temperature-controlled air. Raj chose not to come up to the hospitality suite. Someone else had smoothly slipped into his empty space. No gaps could be allowed to show in the organisational structure.

An Arabic singer had taken centre stage in a flowing silver diamanté dress and hijab, and had just started miming to her most popular hit when the power went out.

At first Roy thought that the outage had only affected the stage, but when he looked around he realised that the entire resort was in darkness. The crowds remained silent, expecting some grand display, fireworks or computer-choreographed fountains, but as the seconds passed it grew incrementally warmer and quieter. The ice-mists were no longer working. Somebody tapped him on the back.

‘Roy, come with me.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s better we talk where we can’t be overheard.’

Raj Jayaraman led the way back into a makeshift service corridor that connected with the side of the hotel. ‘The power is out through the entire fucking complex. I mean everywhere. You understand what this means?’

Roy realised the implication at once. Different sectors within the resort had their own generators in case the main power grid should fail, so it was impossible for two areas to lose power at the same time. There was only one thing that united them: they shared the same computer operating system. The network was still being patched after a number of security flaws had been discovered, and the upgrade wouldn’t be finished until several hours after the opening.

‘It feels like the OS has been attacked, and the power killed from a point inside the resort,’ said Raj.

‘Has anyone been out to Unit Two?’ asked Roy. The Atlantica’s secondary IT resources were handled from a secure unit further along the coastal highway.

‘There’s a team on its way there right now, but I don’t think they’ll find anything. The problem’s here.’

Raj ushered Roy into a bare-walled concrete operations office and closed the door. ‘This is not just electricity,’ he said. ‘All of the resort’s utilities have been shut down.’

‘How is that possible? I thought the system was foolproof.’

‘There’ll be time to discover how this happened later. Right now we have a serious problem developing. There are two hundred VIP guests inside the hotel on the mid-level viewing floor. The lights are still on inside because there’s an emergency generator on the roof.’

‘I didn’t think they were opening that viewing floor to anyone,’ said Roy. ‘There are still some windows missing. H&S must have had a shit-fit.’

‘The guest invitations were increased at the last minute. They had nowhere else to put them.’ He indicated the blank closed-circuit screens. ‘The atrium doors have sealed and the air-conditioning has shut down.’

‘The air-con was never designed to be turned off, only to go down to its lowest setting,’ said Roy. ‘You know the ground-floor windows can’t be opened. Anyone left in there will run out of air.’ The hotel atrium was hermetically sealed to prevent cold air from escaping. All the floors were sealed off from one another, except for a series of service airlocks.’

‘How long do they have?’

‘I can give you a rough estimate. Have the emergency services been called?’

‘Mr Lau is anxious to avoid creating a public disturbance. He has all of the directors here from Guangzhou, and can’t lose face in front of them.’

‘He’ll lose more than face when those people start passing out. You need to call in the fire service now. You don’t have to tell them everything.’

‘You know I can’t do that without Mr Lau’s approval.’

‘Then you need to call him, Raj.’

‘There must be something you can do.’ Raj was sweating pints. ‘I cannot trust anyone else to handle this problem.’

‘Let me go over there,’ said Roy. ‘If the OS is down I can only do the same as anyone else – try and break the doors in.’

‘Yes, but you need to do this without—’

‘Without any fuss? I don’t know, Raj. Somebody has to keep the crowd from suspecting anything. There’s a very expensive PR team out there waiting to be told what to do.’ He called Davenport.

‘What can we say?’ asked Davenport when Roy had finished explaining the problem.

‘Get them to make an announcement. Use an American, they always sound more formal. Don’t try to make light of it, but don’t tell them any more than they need to know. There are candles – get every performer to carry two each on stage and continue the show acoustically. Make it look like a deliberate fallback plan.’

‘We can’t do that. The whole thing’s on playback. They can’t sing.’

‘Jesus, they must be able to do something – what the fuck were they employed for? You have a lot of people out there standing in the dark and any minute now they’re going to start getting antsy.’

Roy left the office and headed for the Atlantica. He could see dark figures moving behind the smoked glass of the hotel’s upper windows, but had no way of getting to them. He rang Davenport back. ‘Who do we know who’s on the viewing platform? I need a list of mobile numbers.’

Although the ground-floor doors could be released from outside, the fail-safe system relied on swipe-cards that needed to be reset, and the screens were still a scramble of static. An engineer called Darroll Jones was working inside the only IT suite that remained on-site. Roy called him.

‘Darroll, why isn’t the override generator program responding? Is it just a crash and reboot?’ He was waiting for Davenport to contact those employees trapped inside the building, and felt powerless to take action.

‘The attack isn’t on any single part of the resort’s access protocols,’ the stocky Welsh IT engineer explained. ‘It’s on the system as a whole.’

‘That’s not possible, is it? There must be hundreds of separate components.’ He knew it would take a small army to sabotage the mainframe, all armed with the right codes. A single mistake anywhere would trigger warnings.

‘This hasn’t been carried out by a single person,’ Jones replied. ‘It’s the work of a very large group with a lot of inside knowledge. Has to be. But that doesn’t make sense. The information is way too protected for any outsider to get hold of it.’

The words ‘large group’ triggered a response. He thought of the Atlantica built on a bedrock of stone that somehow wasn’t stone at all, that could liquefy and become something else, all the while emitting electrical pulses.

‘How much air do they have in there?’ He looked up at the darkened windows.

‘I’d have to work out the building’s cubic capacity but—’

‘Take a guess.’

‘With so many people inside, maybe two hours. The heat will make a difference.’

One of the senior engineers had found him. ‘Roy, there’s a flaw in the glass near the ground-floor reception area,’ he explained. ‘One of the seals came down a couple of nights ago and we replaced it with a temporary plastic resin. There’s about three metres of it.’

‘Are any of the JCBs still on-site?’

‘There’s a loader and a couple of speed tractors nearby.’

‘Can you get someone to bring over whatever’s the heaviest?’

The yellow steel tractor had trouble making it through the milling crowds. With the exit signs no longer illuminated, some spectators were starting to search for ways out of the grounds. A swell of raised voices was washing through the site now.

‘Come with me,’ Roy told the engineer, hopping into the tractor cab and throwing its lights on high-beam. ‘Can I see the replacement resin?’

‘No, it’s the same colour as the normal seals.’

‘Then I need you to point it out to me.’

The glass angles of the Atlantica’s grand lobby were picked up by the tractor beams. People moved out of the way, puzzled by the appearance of the tractor. ‘There,’ said the engineer, ‘to your right.’

Roy could make out a thin grey strip connecting the panels. He pumped the tractor into high gear.

‘You’re just going to ram it?’ asked the engineer, disturbed.

‘Only to push the plates far enough apart to admit air. There’ll be bigger problems starting in a few minutes if this place doesn’t get back online fast.’

They buckled up as the tractor shot forward, slamming into the join. The plastic strip gave slightly but refused to break. He put the tractor in reverse and tried again. He could feel the crowd shifting apprehensively behind him. This time, the tractor punched the seal out. Roy looked up and saw that one of the glass panels had been separated from its surround.

He span the tractor and raced it back as the sheet fell, exploding around him in a million iridescent shards, like crystal rainfall. The spectators at his back were agitated now and seeking to move away, animals sensing their journey to the abattoir. There were shouts. Hundreds of mobile phone screens wavered in the dark, like the audience at a rock concert. Roy parked the tractor and ran back to the security stand, where he found Raj.

‘We have to evacuate the entire park right now,’ Raj warned.

‘We can’t do that. You won’t be able to get the gates open.’

‘Then we’ll need to find a way. What about manual overrides?’

Roy shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Could the aquarium blow out?’ A vast marineland of sharks, rays and thousands of tropical fish ran along the rear wall of the viewing deck, extending three floors up.

‘The glass will hold. It’s a foot thick. But the tank doors aren’t up to spec. They’ll punch out first and the cubic capacity of that thing – without operational limiters, the water pressure will just keep building. By now it will already be way into red. And the gardens—’

‘What about them?’

‘There are two hundred and seventy thousand submerged water jets out there getting ready to burst.’

‘Can’t the city cut the supply?’

‘The separate main water management systems are in the basement. We didn’t want to risk human error so they’re controlled and co-ordinated by the system—’

‘—that’s down. You’re telling me you have no other fail-safes.’

‘Why would we need them? The system is—’

‘Don’t say it’s fucking foolproof, Raj, okay?’

‘It could only be attacked from multiple locations and we know that level of co-ordination is impossible without the right codes all being inputted at the same time. We never allowed for a mass blackout.’

Davenport leaned down from the scaffolded press platform and stopped Roy as he passed. ‘We have a team of engineers working on the gates,’ he said. ‘Nobody can get out. The Sheikh just called, asking when power would be restored. He was very upset.’

‘You’ll have to physically cut the barriers open.’

Davenport rarely betrayed any emotion, but now he looked horrified. ‘How would that look?’ he asked. ‘There are cameras filming this everywhere. The press booth has its own portable generator. Everything is going out live.’

‘I don’t know, how would it look to have hundreds of people trampled to death in the dark? Look at them! At the moment they’re just confused, but it won’t take much to start a stampede. The power’s not coming back on. Turn off the generator in the press booth. Then get a team down there and do it the old-fashioned way; cut down the service truck barriers with rotary saws, anything that runs on diesel. Those who want to leave the resort area will try to do so in a hurry. If something else panics them, you’ll need to cut down the perimeter fences fast.’

‘We cannot do that!’

‘We have no choice.’

‘But the press—’

‘Do what you have to do and mop up afterwards. Firefight the big stuff. There’ll be plenty of time later to worry about what the world thinks.’

Defeat stained Davenport’s melancholy features. He knew that whatever happened now, his career was finished. Below them, the crowd milled and eddied in the gloom, waiting for instructions that would not come.

Roy turned and looked back at the darkened hotel, at the crowd of photographers, press agents and journalists who were surging out of the shattered wall and buffeting up against the crowds between the stands. He was filled with the sensation of having missed something obvious.

It has to be them
, he told himself.
Say these things actually managed to short out the entire place. The timing is as exact as a terrorist attack. It’s like they can think. That’s just fucking ridiculous. How would they move, roll themselves along the walkways like hairballs or tumbleweed?

He looked around the darkened arena, the manicured emerald grounds dotted with chairs and tables. He began walking toward one of the hotel’s service-entrance doors, where an attractive young woman in a floor-length blue gown was struggling to release the latch.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked. Her head lifted and she turned to look at him, stepping into the light. As she opened her mouth he saw one of the beige lava-sponges entirely blocking her breathing passage. She stared and stared, then returned to the door.

Suddenly it all made sense: they needed the warmth and moisture of human tissue to reactivate themselves. It was how they moved about. In human hosts. They interfered with the electrical impulses of the brain, encouraged people to pick them up and ingest them, the simple and effective technique developed by all parasites.

Once the young woman had managed to open the serviced door, he followed her inside. She didn’t seem aggressive, just motivated to follow a path. He wasn’t used to climbing stairs, and stopped on Level 5 to catch his breath. His heart was pounding. Below him, the line between calm and panic was quickly eroding. He could hear shouting even from here.

There were no open areas above the viewing floor. Guards had been placed in the stairwells earlier, but they had all left. The young woman had continued upward without him. He presumed she was going up to the angled concrete outcrop of the observation deck. There were three situated at different heights in the building. The middle one was another seven levels above him. He carried on after her.