Newton’s Fire (15 page)

‘How can you not know things like that?’

‘Because it’s the nature of such worms to separate into a million little pieces, each bit of which then embeds itself out of sight. If this truly is a worm, then it’s brilliantly designed, better than anything we’ve got. It doesn’t respond to simulations. We think it’s been designed to lie dormant until launch commands are given for real. Only then will we be able to see exactly how extensive the infection is, what its effects will be. If we’re lucky, it will be like the millennium bug: all anxiety and then nothing.’

‘And if we’re not lucky?’

‘Then it could be …’ She closed her eyes for a moment, as though trying to think of the right words: ‘…
truly significant
.’

‘And what does truly significant mean? You can’t seriously be suggesting that this … this
worm
could deprive us of our missile defence?’

‘General, I’m saying that, for all we know, we could launch a strike at Tehran, only to hit Tel Aviv instead.’

Ysrael Levin could feel the blood draining from his face. No more did he feel that small thrill of gratification. All he felt in the pit of his stomach was an extraordinary dismay. ‘When will you know for sure? When will you have it fixed?’

‘With respect, General, I only just learned of this myself. I assumed you’d want to know at once. I’m here to advise you that we have a problem, not yet to tell you the solution.’

‘How widespread is it? Will it affect our submarines?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘The only way to tell quickly is by running diagnostic programmes. But we fear they may be one source of infection. If we run them, therefore …’

‘You’ll only spread the infection further.’

‘Yes, General. My advice is that we close down everything while we study the code itself to learn precisely what we’re dealing with. It’s not as if we’ll be completely without nuclear defences. We still have our artillery and our planes.’

The Chief of the General Staff didn’t bother to say what they both well knew. Their guns only reached sixty kilometres and their few aircraft capable of delivering nuclear payloads were a generation out of date. ‘How long before you fix this?’ he asked.

‘I can’t say. Maybe days. More likely weeks or months. Possibly years.’

‘
Years
?’

‘General, it’s possible that we’ll
never
be able to fix it, not to the level of confidence we need for nuclear warheads. It’s possible we’ll have to strip out our systems and start again.’

The Chief of the General Staff shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. I thought we designed our systems in silos precisely to make sure this kind of thing couldn’t happen.’

‘We do.’

‘Then …?’

‘Someone got lucky,’ said Judit. ‘At least, we think that’s what must have happened. The earthquake damaged several of our locations, and took out our firewalls, exposing our systems to infiltration. We think they must have had the worm ready, then took advantage. And then of course we ran our full suite of diagnostics to see if we’d suffered any damage.’

‘Spreading this worm throughout our network?’

‘That’s what we suspect. But, as I say, we don’t know anything yet. Not for sure.’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘If one of our technicians hadn’t been on the ball …’

A moment of stillness, rage building inside. ‘Who did this? Was it the Iranians? Is this payback for Stuxnet?’

‘It’s possible. The technology is light years beyond anything we thought Tehran had, but they’ve been building up their capability fast. My money would be on the Chinese, though, or possibly the Russians. You’d know better than I who’d benefit most from something like this.’

The Chief of the General Staff put a hand to his head. ‘Will they know how much harm they’ve done?’

‘They’ll likely know that they’ve successfully infiltrated their worm into our systems. They probably won’t know how far it’s spread, whether we’ve spotted it, what our countermeasures are like or how long it will take us to sort it out. Not unless there’s some other vulnerability in our system we haven’t yet identified.’

‘And what’s the likelihood of that?’

‘At this time yesterday I’d have told you that there was no possibility whatsoever of there being a worm like this in our system.’

The Chief of the General Staff sat back in his chair. This would have been disastrous news at the best of times; and this was far from that. Three weeks ago, on May 15th, Arabs here and across the broader region had started making trouble, rioting and throwing stones in protest at the anniversary of Israel’s independence. Usually, these
Nakba
protests lasted a day or two before fizzling out, but the earthquake that had wrecked their nuclear defences had also put fissures in the Dome of the Rock, sparking a massive increase in the scale, intensity and duration of unrest.

Marches in Damascus, Amman and Cairo and along their borders had turned into violent anti-Jewish riots – though quite how the Jews were to blame for the earthquake had never been made clear. Missiles had been lobbed into Jewish towns and villages from the Gaza strip and southern Lebanon. Israel’s own forces had had no choice but to strike back. They’d bombed Hamas and Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, had
sent in ground-troops to take prisoners. Alert levels had
gone up on all sides, army groups had moved closer to their borders. Firebrand politicians and religious leaders had cursed each other from behind the safety of TV cameras. And everyone had been intensely aware that this was all prelude to the region’s other great anti-Jewish anniversary: the week long festival of hate and rage that commemorated the Six Day War, which had kicked off earlier today.

Until now, however, this had all seemed to him part of the usual theatre: alarming, certainly, yet essentially manageable. But what if there was more to it this time? What if this were part of some larger plan?

He stared down at his desk. For some forty years, Israel’s strategic defence had ultimately relied on nuclear deterrence. Their Arab neighbours, for all their bluster, had never truly contemplated Israel’s destruction, lest Israel take the whole region down with her. Now, at a stroke, they’d effectively been reduced to conventional forces. And while Israel was a theoretical match for its neighbours’ combined armies, hot wars chewed up armour and aircraft at a terrifying rate, depleting stocks of petrol and munitions rapidly. The Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians could all expect swift if surreptitious resupply from Iran, China, Pakistan and Russia. Israel, by contrast, would be almost entirely dependent on the US. Yet tonight their Prime Minister was making a major foreign policy speech seeking stronger ties with the European Union at the expense of Washington, not least because they didn’t want to be too reliant on a US administration led – since the botched assassination attempt – by a thin-skinned crazy woman who believed in the imminence of the Rapture.

He looked up at Judit. ‘You’re to work on nothing else,’ he told her. ‘You’re to requisition any and all resources you need, but you’ll find out the extent of this as soon as possible. And then you’ll fix it. I’ll want briefings twice a day until you do; and immediate updates if anything new emerges.’

‘Yes, General,’ she said. ‘But, with respect, this happened under my command. This failure is my responsibility. I therefore wish to tender my—’

‘Not yet,’ cut in the Chief of the General Staff. ‘Sort this mess out first,
then
make the offer. I might even accept.’

‘Yes, General.’

‘Good. Now get to work.’ He watched her out the door, wondering who to take this to. By rights, he reported to the Defence Minister; but the Defence Minister was in South Africa this week, discussing nuclear security, of all things, and there was no time to waste. He picked up his phone, dialled an internal number. ‘I need to see the Prime Minister,’ he said.

‘She’s leaving for her speech in a minute,’ said her assistant. ‘I could fit you in afterwards or—’

‘Her speech will have to wait,’ said the Chief of the General Staff. ‘I’m coming over now.’

There was something about having the roof down. Rachel’s spirits lifted from the rush of open air and sunlight on her face, from the noise of the road and passing traffic. Her life had become drab with duty recently. That was the truth of it. To be whirled away from it, even under these extraordinary circumstances, felt bizarrely like release. And it was a pleasure, too, simply being with people that she liked. And she did like Luke and Pelham, she realized, rather to her surprise. She liked them a lot.

They passed Aylesbury, traded A roads for country lanes. Pelham slowed to a more leisurely pace, allowing her to admire the landscape, quaint villages separated by woods, pastures and fields of grain. It grew cooler. The late afternoon sun began a little alchemy of its own, turning a line of leaden clouds low on the horizon into streaks of glorious gold. Rachel leaned forwards between the front seats, as much for a windbreak as anything, and squinted against the windscreen’s glare.

‘Don’t take this wrong, guys,’ she said, ‘but why on earth would a man like Newton fall for nonsense like the philosopher’s stone? He didn’t really believe transmutation was possible, did he?’

‘Just because a theory turns out to be wrong, doesn’t mean it was stupid,’ said Luke. ‘Alchemy was far more sophisticated than people think.’

‘And it was immensely productive too,’ added Pelham. ‘The scientific method is hypothesis, experimentation, observation, inference, peer review, replication. All devised or developed by the alchemists.’

Rachel gave him a doubtful look. ‘Yes, but turning lead into gold …’

‘People didn’t understand the nature of matter,’ said Luke. ‘They were brought up on earth, fire, air and water, with no real concept of atoms or molecules. The
alchemists
were doing their best to come up with a better model. And forget the get-rich schemes; those were for the charlatans. Gold wasn’t even really seen as a precious metal by serious practitioners like Dee, Newton and Boyle. It was their symbol for light, for the sun, for the divine nature itself. Making it, for them, was like winning it for an Olympic athlete: not the accomplishment itself, merely proof of it.’

Rachel smiled at the analogy. ‘So what were they after?’

‘A unified theory of everything,’ answered Luke. ‘How the earth and heavens worked, the nature of substance, the secret of life itself.’ He cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘And don’t make the mistake of thinking the philosopher’s stone was some kind of magical gem. It was much more subtle than that. Alchemists also called it sacred fire or secret fire or even the animating spirit, all of which are far better ways of thinking about it. Newton originally thought it was magnetism or maybe even light. Ultimately he came to believe that it was electricity. And that isn’t remotely stupid, if you think about it. Frankenstein’s monster. The spark of life. Cardiac paddles.’

‘But electricity had been around forever,’ pointed out Rachel. ‘Lightning was the weapon of the gods, remember? Not exactly
secret
fire.’

‘Its
nature
was secret,’ said Luke. ‘No one understood it.’

‘Yes, they did,’ said Rachel, shifting in her seat to stop the wind whipping hair around her face. ‘Not perfectly, I agree, but surely enough to demystify it. You get static everywhere, for one thing. And they knew it was connected with magnetism. The word electricity comes from the Greek for amber, electrum, because amber attracts or repels other objects when you rub it. And what about those Baghdad batteries?’

‘What about those what?’ frowned Luke.

‘Baghdad batteries. You must have heard of them.’

He shook her head. ‘What are they?’

‘There was this excavation near Baghdad just before the Second World War. They found these really weird earthenware jars with copper rods sticking up from their bottoms. Two thousand years old, give or take. Turns out they were most likely primitive electrical devices that used vinegar or some other acid to electroplate silver and other metals with gold.’

‘Are you serious?’ frowned Luke.

‘Of course I’m serious. You think I’d make them up?’

But Pelham held up a hand for silence before Luke could answer. ‘Oddington, guys,’ he said, nodding at a sign. ‘We’re here.’ He slowed almost to jogging pace as he searched memory and the twilit lanes for Olivia’s house. ‘There she is,’ he said at last, swinging down a potholed track bordered by wild shrubberies before pulling up in front of a low thatched house of vivid pink that sagged perceptibly in its middle, so that the frame of the front door splayed out towards the foot, leaving gaps for the winter wind. They slammed their doors to give notice of their arrival, and Pelham rapped out Beethoven with the knocker.

‘Who is it?’ asked a woman warily. ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s me,’ boomed Pelham. ‘Pelham Redfern the Third. Your friendly neighbourhood alchemist, remember? All lead turned into gold.’

Rustling inside, keys turning and bolts sliding and the door creaked open, revealing a tall, angular woman with silver hair swept back in a tight bun, reading glasses on a frayed grey string around her neck. ‘Pelham,’ she said, with the nervous warmth of a schoolmarm welcoming back some troublesome old boy. ‘Whatever brings you here?’

‘Hell of a story,’ he said. ‘I’m going to need a glass of your excellent whisky and water to help me tell it. But first let me introduce my two companions. This is Rachel Parkes of the great Caius College, Cambridge. And my old friend Luke Hayward, currently writing the definitive biography of Sir Isaac Newton.’

Olivia frowned. ‘There was a flap in London last year about a Newton scholar called Luke Hayward.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Luke. ‘There was.’

Olivia was silent a few moments, assimilating this information. ‘I knew your Vice Chancellor at university,’ she said finally. ‘He was a prick then, too.’ She stood aside to welcome them in, closed the door behind them, gestured them through. The passage was low with ancient beams, its walls crowded with portraits of the saints and religious curios. They reached a gloomy living room. She invited them to sit. ‘Now, then,’ she said, as they all settled into their various chairs. ‘Which one of you three wants to tell me what this is all about?’