The Darkfall Switch (24 page)

‘Poor Joe,’ Janet said, looking sadly into her glass. They were standing at the bar of a pub near
Goddess
’s moorings.

‘Yes indeed,’ Foster responded. ‘Poor Joe. I’ve seen plenty of accidents in my time, but never murder.’

‘But it’s all over now, isn’t it?’ she asked.

‘I hope so.’ But even as he spoke those words he knew that there was far more to come.

She detected the doubt in his voice and frowned at him. ‘You’re still not sure, are you?’

Before he could answer, an item of news on the television screen above the bar interrupted. The newsreader was talking about a murder outside a restaurant in Chelsea. No motive was apparent, and the police were asking for anybody with any information to come forward. Then the programme passed on to the next item.

‘That was brief,’ Janet observed. ‘A murder on the streets of London? I suppose that’s becoming less uncommon these days, but a mysterious American assassinated in broad daylight, surely that’s worth more than twenty seconds of news time?’

Foster looked round to make sure nobody was in earshot before saying, ‘They’d give it far more coverage if they got wind of the fact that an American agency was murdering people in London.’

She shuddered and looked pensively through the window across the darkening river. ‘Poor devil,’ she said quietly. ‘He seemed a lonely sort. Do you remember him on the boat, talking about his ex in Washington?’

‘Yup!’ Foster agreed. ‘No wife or children. The Darkfall project was his whole life.’

‘For a moment there, on the boat, I thought that he really seemed to be enjoying himself.’

‘I felt that too.’

‘Do you really think he killed that boy in Connecticut?’ she asked.

Foster shook his head. ‘No, I’m sure it was done by somebody else. I think – and I’m not sure why I think it – that Joe felt it was distasteful. I know I didn’t like him; he was a callous sort of bastard, but a lonely one too, and I felt he didn’t like what happened.’

Janet took a long, thoughtful sip of her wine.

‘And who do you think told them where Joe would be?’ she asked.

‘We have four candidates,’ Foster said. ‘There’s Forsyth, Grant, Ballantyne and Mrs Andrews.’

‘Surely not her!’

‘Why not? She knew all the moves.’

‘I suppose so. But didn’t you say she seemed to be genuinely upset over the boy’s death?’

‘That I did,’ Foster said. ‘Doesn’t mean she wasn’t involved, though.’

‘So you think she was the informant.’

Foster shook his head slowly. ‘No, I guess not.’

‘That leaves the three men.’

‘Two working for Coward’s, one with the government. I’d trust Forsyth with my life. Grant’s new, but he seems genuine enough. No, I’m suspicious of Ballantyne. He’s very….’

‘Very what?’

‘Well, smooth. Confident. Self-assured.’

‘Those aren’t necessarily characteristics of guilt,’ she said.

‘Perhaps not. But I’m wary of him.’

‘You’re wary of all civil servants,’ she laughed.

‘Perhaps so,’ he replied, ‘But anyway, let’s go.’

She looked at him.

‘Yes,’ he answered her unasked question, ‘back to the boat.’

On the way back to
Lake Goddess
they picked up a Chinese takeaway. ‘I’m not in the mood for cooking,’ he apologized.

‘That’s fine. I’ll set the table.’

But before he had started to open the first container a quiet chime
from his laptop intruded. The machine was perched on a nearby bookshelf. Foster frowned in annoyance at the interruption but looked across at the display; then his jaw dropped.

‘What?’ she asked in alarm, as she saw his expression.

He walked over to take a closer look at the screen before replying, ‘It’s an email…. It’s from Joe. It was sent a few minutes ago.’

‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought….’

He tapped at a key and read the message in silence. ‘Good God!’ he breathed and then without any further comment he tapped in a few commands. A few seconds later a nearby printer whirred into action. He took the page that emerged from it, brought the paper to the table and sat down to read the text to her.

As he read, her eyes widened in shock, and when he had finished she said, ‘That certainly clears up a lot of questions, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes it does. It surely does.’

As he silently reread the message she said, ‘But I still don’t understand. How come he sends you an email after he’s dead? He
is
dead, isn’t he?’

‘Definitely. Very dead. I was too horribly close to his body for there to be any mistake. I’ve seen fake injuries in stage shows, but poor Joe had a massive hole clean through his chest. There was no mistaking that.’

‘Then how did he send that message?’

Foster’s brow furrowed. ‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘He says that he set up something that would automatically send out that message if he didn’t access it regularly to prevent it. Some sort of script, I suppose. It’s an idea they use in computer control systems sometimes – to detect when a process has stopped working. They call it a watchdog timer. Joe told me that he’d been an engineer once; he was certainly quite
clued-up
. Perhaps he adapted the idea. It’s a clever ruse; it’s a last-ditch,
catchall
way of making sure that the truth would come out if anything happened to him.’

‘And what’s that reference to a password?’ she asked.

‘It’s a word Joe gave me as we were leaving Ballantyne’s office.
Nightjar
. I used it just now and it unlocked a very secure mailbox. There’s a file in it that I haven’t opened yet.’

He stood up and looked out of the window at the lights of the restaurants and pubs across the river. The reflections swam in the quiet water of the Thames gently swirling past.

‘This is all too horrible,’ Janet said. ‘What do we do now, Dan? What
can
we do about this?’

He shook his head slowly and shrugged. ‘Don’t know, sweetheart,’ he said simply. He took a deep breath and looked again across the river, deep in thought.

She came and stood beside him, and then slipped her hand in his.

‘I’m going to tell Forsyth and Grant,’ he said eventually. ‘Then we’ll tell Sir James. I’m going to have to trust him.’

Sir James Ballantyne made them welcome in his office and asked what the call had been about: Forsyth had been very brief when requesting this meeting. Although clearly mystified by his request and his unwillingness to discuss the background, Ballantyne had agreed to meet him with Grant and Foster.

‘Dr Foster has received a communication,’ Forsyth said, as they sat down.

‘Oh?’ Ballantyne asked. ‘What sort of communication?’

‘You might say it’s a voice from beyond the grave,’ Grant said archly, and Ballantyne frowned.

Foster opened his document case and took out the printout of the email and the message that he’d unlocked.

‘I got this last night,’ he explained opening out the email. ‘It’s from Joe Worzniak.’

Ballantyne’s eyes widened in amazement. ‘But….’

‘Yes, I know. He’s dead. But he arranged for me to get this if anything happened to him.’

Foster started to read out the message:

‘
Well, Foster, so you win after all. Or is it just that I’ve lost? Either way, if you read this you’ll know that something’s happened to me. Something bad – for me
.

‘I’ve set this up so that if I don’t refresh my Blackberry every day, the message will be sent off to you. It’s automatic. Nobody can stop it. So if this gets to you it means I didn’t stop it. Which probably means I’m dead. It’s a funny thing, you know, writing about your own death. It’s strange, but I can handle it somehow. Anyway, I’m going to tell you a few things that you should know. You’re a funny bastard, Foster, and you screwed up everything I’d been doing for the past several years, but I know you’re straight up. I know that I can trust you. I’ll tell you everything and then
you can decide what to do about it
.’

Foster looked up. Ballantyne was shaking his head in disbelief. Then he continued reading. ‘
You know all you need to know about the OSP, but what you don’t know is that your own people were involved with it
.’

‘Good God!’ Ballantyne exclaimed. ‘Stop there. This is unbelievable; I swear I knew nothing about any of this affair.’

‘Let me finish first,’ Foster said.

‘
Like the OSP in the States, the people who were involved on your side operated in total secrecy. Very few people knew about it. I’m pretty certain that the guys you were talking to were kept in the dark
.

‘
Anyway, we needed co-operation. We had set up the Darkfall project, but it was obviously going to be more effective if our allies knew about it and if they could be involved. You see, the Darkfall project was a blanket thing, like all the other strategic projects my office was working on. We couldn’t be selective. When we shut down the power plants, the GPS system and the Time Standard, it would be very important that our allies were prepared
.

‘
So we approached various people in friendly countries and, as soon as we were sure they would be receptive, we got them to play ball. Very few people knew about what was going on – very few. Darkfall was so simple that it would be very easy to disable it. We could not risk any leak. We had to strictly control the number of people who knew about it
.

‘
But the real fuckup happened when the kid hacked into the Darkfall link. One of the designers had goofed and left a back door open into the system. Nobody realized until the London blackout. Then we saw what had happened and everybody panicked. The trigger we’d set up for our own use was open to anybody with a computer
.

‘
That did it. Every bastard who’d supported us when things were bright and shiny, all of them, they started to back off as quickly as possible. Their shoes must have been on fire, they moved so fast
.

‘
Anyway, I’ve put a list in a secure mailbox. It gives the names of everybody who was involved, including the people in your own government who knew about it
.

‘
They kept quiet, Foster. Your own people. They could have spoken up after the subway disaster. But they didn’t
.’

Foster sat back and looked at the ashen-faced Ballantyne. Then he took the second document out of the case. It was several sheets of paper, neatly stapled together.

‘He gave me a password yesterday,’ Foster said, holding on to the sheets, ‘just before we went to lunch. He must have suspected something. I didn’t know what it meant then, but that email includes information on how to access the mailbox. The password Joe gave me let me into the box. The list of names was in it. This’s it.’

Ballantyne was sitting very still, his expression still shocked. ‘There’ll be hell to pay if somebody on our side knew about Darkfall,’ he breathed. Then he stood up, walked to the window and looked out, deep in thought. Finally he turned and looked at the trio opposite.

‘All right,’ he said grimly, ‘I’m going straight to the PM with this. A lot of heads are going to roll.’ He reached out his hand. ‘Can I have the list?’

‘In a second,’ Forsyth said grimly. ‘But there’s one thing you should know first.’

Ballantyne looked at him quizzically. ‘What’s that?’

Forsyth thumbed through the list and folded it over when he reached the fifth page.

‘Foster showed us the list,’ he said. ‘One of the names on it is someone who’s been involved with this all along.’

There was a long silence before Ballantyne said, ‘Somebody who knew about the Darkfall Switch?’

Foster nodded. ‘Yes. And the one who told the Americans where Joe Worzniak would be.’

Ballantyne took the list and looked at the page Forsyth had opened.

His shoulders slumped and he looked up, plainly horrified.

‘Christ almighty!’

‘Yes,’ Foster said. ‘The one person who has sat with us through all these meetings, from the beginning. The one who kept so quiet.’

Ballantyne looked down at the copy of the list in his hand, shook his head in disbelief. ‘Margaret. Margaret Andrews.’

Foster nodded. ‘There’re other names there,’ he said. ‘Some quite highly placed. But she’s the one who was involved with us from the beginning. She knew everything I was doing.’

From
The Times
, two months later: