The Darkfall Switch (5 page)

She stopped, turned to look at him for a moment and said, ‘I won’t.’

While she was out of the room, her husband said, ‘I understand people died, Dan.’ His voice was subdued and sombre.

‘Yes,’ Foster said. ‘Forty-eight people were killed in the London Underground system when the power went off. Ordinarily, a power blackout would just be, well, inconvenient. Though if you’re in a lift, or if you’re a surgeon mid-way through an operation, you might think it’s more important than that. But in this incident it happened at exactly the same time as another major fault.’

‘Luke couldn’t have known about that, surely?’ Proctor protested, a puzzled frown on his face.

Foster shook his head. ‘No. The other fault was entirely different, and it was quite coincidental. It was an overheated cable that failed. But the two things happening together were more than a delicately balanced power system could handle. And as London dropped off the grid, most of the rest of the national system collapsed. You’ve had the same sort of thing happen here.’

Proctor nodded. ‘I remember the New York blackout,’ he said, slowly shaking his head as the unpleasant memories came back. ‘I was there at the time. Got trapped in an elevator. It was crazy, just crazy.’

Foster was about to continue his explanation when Hilary Proctor entered, followed by her pale-faced, gangly son. Dark hair, long and greasy, framed his face, his sweatshirt hung over a thin chest and his jeans were tucked up over grimy trainers. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

‘Luke,’ she said, ‘this is Dr Foster. He’s come all the way from London, England, to talk with us.’

Foster shook the thin-wristed, weakly proffered hand. It was a limp shake, without any attempt at eye-contact on the boy’s part. ‘Hello, Luke. Can we all sit down?’

As they took their seats Foster caught a worried look in the boy’s
red-rimmed
eyes, and wondered what Worzniak had told him, and whether he had primed him for this meeting.

‘Luke,’ he said, ‘I presume that Mr Worzniak told you why I’m here.’

The boy finally lifted his eyes to stare at him sullenly, without giving any indication of whether or not he knew anything, so Foster continued, ‘Well, I’m going to be brutally frank with you. This is not a criminal investigation, but I think you should know that what you did a few days ago could have led you to be subjected to such an investigation.’

At last he saw a response in the lad’s face. It was rising defiance and he rushed to calm him. Foster needed co-operation, not sullen stonewalling. If he lost Luke’s co-operation now it would end all hopes of finding out what he’d done. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ve come here just to find out a few facts. If you are open and honest with me that’ll be the end of it. Oh, you’ll be asked to give us an undertaking, but that’s all.’

The boy said nothing, and Foster noticed that he was avoiding looking at his parents. ‘Luke, I’m sure you know we’re aware that you hacked into a computer system the other day.’

There was still no response, so he expanded, ‘We have a comprehensive track on the actions. So we know that the attack originated from a computer in this house.’

Now the defiance in the boy’s expression began to develop into something else – defensive anger, perhaps. Foster had to get him on his side, so he decided to try to gain his interest. ‘Look. I’m not really concerned about the fact that you did it,’ he lied, ‘but I need your help. Because there’s something much more important behind what happened.’

‘What do you mean?’ the boy asked. It was his first words since he had come into the room and as he spoke them a faint flicker of curiosity showed in his face. Foster allowed himself a small sigh of relief. Did this sign of interest give a hint that the boy was coming round to the idea of co-operating?

‘Luke, I’m a powerplant engineer,’ he explained. ‘I specialize in the control systems of power stations. I troubleshoot them.’

Curiosity gave way to interest, and then became something else: there was now a hint of awe on the boy’s face.

‘I’ve had a look at the system you hacked into,’ Foster continued, ‘and I can see how you got in, but what I don’t understand is how you managed to shut the plant down so expertly. And I don’t know how you disabled it afterwards so that it took so long to restart it.’

‘I didn’t….’ the boy began. ‘I just hit on something. I invoked….’ His voice suddenly trailed off and his expression turned from awe to worry. He frowned and stared down at his trainers in silence.

‘Invoked? You invoked something?’

In the silence they all stared at him. Eventually his father said, ‘Luke, you have to help Dr Foster.’

‘What did you invoke, Luke?’ Foster asked.

Still nothing.

Frustration turned to rage. Unbidden, anger began to well up again in Foster. If Luke clammed up now they’d probably never know the truth. He stared at the boy but failed to renew the brief eye contact he had established a moment earlier. ‘Luke,’ he said, trying to contain his rising emotions, ‘partly as a result of what you did, several people were killed.’

‘That wasn’t me!’ the boy blurted out. His eyes began to glisten as though he was on the verge of breaking into tears.

‘Not completely,’ Foster said, somehow managing to stay calm. ‘There was another, unrelated, incident at the same time. But without your initiating the shutdown the situation could have been contained.’

‘I don’t care,’ the boy said. ‘It was tough luck.’

Foster reeled back as if he had been hit in the face. ‘Tough luck!’ he shouted. ‘People died in the most appalling conditions because of something you did, and you say it’s tough luck!’

The boy’s response was defiant. ‘Sure! Just tough luck.’

That reply was more than Foster could stand. ‘You little idiot!’ he shouted, ignoring the parents’ obvious alarm. ‘You just don’t realize, do you? Well, I do.’ He regretted his next words almost as soon as he’d spoken them. ‘Because one of the people who died was somebody I cared about very much.’

Immediately the atmosphere in the room changed. All three Proctors stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment.

He calmed down and said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. I shouldn’t have said it.’

‘But you did say it, Dan,’ Cyrus Proctor said, his voice very quiet and restrained. ‘You said you knew one of the victims. Who was it?’

He hesitated, but the truth had to come out now. ‘It was my fiancée.’

‘Oh my God!’ Hilary Proctor breathed. ‘Oh God, I’m so, so sorry.’

‘No. I should apologize to you. I shouldn’t have let you know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it might indicate that I wasn’t being objective. That I might have a personal vendetta against Luke.’

‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did,’ she said. ‘After a loss like that, when you know the engineering background, who could possibly blame you?’

He stared at her, while he struggled to suppress his own doubts. ‘That’s it,’ he said finally. ‘It was a terrible coincidence that I, a professional engineer, should have lost somebody because of an engineering incident. But there it is: I’m one of a small handful of experts who could hope to find out what happened. I’m certainly the one the government would call on, as they did. When they asked me to look into it, I couldn’t refuse.’

The boy had been staring at him as he spoke, his face stricken. Suddenly he looked at his father, then his mother. He gave a choking gasp and at last the tears started. He flung his arms over his head and rocked back and forth. His mother stood up and reached out to him, but at her first touch he scrambled to his feet and ran from the room. She called after him but it was no use.

Foster broke the silence. ‘Mr and Mrs Proctor,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry. That really wasn’t meant to happen. I lost control….’

Cyrus Procter’s head shook slowly. ‘No. Luke’s attitude there was unforgivable.’ He looked at his wife and said, ‘Honey, will you go and speak with Luke?’

She nodded and left the room.

The two men sat in silence. It was a lengthy silence. Eventually Proctor said, ‘How did it happen, Dan? I mean, your fiancée….’ His words tailed off in embarrassment.

Proctor stared at him in horrified silence as he recounted what had apparently happened at Oxford Circus.

When he had finished there was a brief silence and then Proctor blurted out the first thing that came to his mind, and he felt it was quite
trite even as he spoke the words. ‘What was her name?’

But Foster was glad of the break. ‘Fiona,’ he replied. ‘We were going to get married next month.’ He paused before continuing on another tack. He had to steer the conversation away from his personal loss. ‘Who can say who’s to blame when these things happen?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, Luke undoubtedly had a part in it, but then there’s a big argument going on about the cable fire. Somebody should have spent some money on dealing with known problems with the power distribution system. People had been worried about the cooling system for years—’

‘Cooling system?’ Proctor interjected.

‘Yes. The cable was meant to be cooled by a flow of water. When that failed the cable overheated. It’s not the first time it happened, but it was the worst. It blacked out the city. And there was a precedent for that.’

‘Precedent?’

‘Yes, in New Zealand – Auckland.’

‘What happened?’

‘Similar thing. Cables feeding a city where the demand for power had soared over the years. Air conditioning demands in a hot, dry summer, in a city where once upon a time everybody would have simply gone away to escape the heat. A cable overheating. Yes, if anything, that should have rung alarm bells. If somebody cut a budget somewhere, they were just as much to blame. And then there’s whoever started the panic on the underground. In fact, the blame could be pinned on many people’s actions and inactions, and on other factors, or on a combination of them.’

Just then Hilary Proctor came back into the room. She was shaking her head sadly and, from her red-rimmed eyes it looked, like her son beforehand, she too, had been crying.

She made a visible effort to compose herself, took a deep breath and said, ‘He’s locked himself in his room. I can’t get him to say anything. But I think I can hear him crying.’ The thought was too much for her and a tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of a hand and shook her head. ‘I can’t help him’ she sobbed. ‘My boy. I can’t do anything … and just when he needs the most help.’

‘Should I go to him?’ her husband asked, but she shook her head and took another deep breath while she dried her eyes with a tissue. ‘Leave
it a bit, honey. I’ll try again later.’

Silence settled on the room again. Uncomfortable silence.

Foster wondered about them. They seemed to be a nice couple: close, warm, caring. A teenage son who was difficult to control was something they would take in their stride with trust and good humour. In a few years he would settle down to a career, marriage and possibly children. They’d be delighted by that; they bore all the marks of becoming wonderful grandparents.

They all started to speak together and just as suddenly stopped. Foster took the lead in breaking the impasse. ‘Look, I’m really sorry.’

‘No, no!’ Cyrus Proctor said. ‘I don’t blame you at all. Luke’s been an idiot. You held back as long as you could. Man, it must have been tough for you. And then, hearing Luke say what he did just then….’

He shook his head in disbelief.

Then, after what seemed to be an interminable, awkward, silence, the telephone rang. It was a relief, and Hilary Proctor answered it. After a short conversation with the caller she held the handset out to Foster. ‘It’s for you. It’s Joe Worzniak.’

Foster took the handset from her. ‘Doctor Foster,’ the caller said. ‘Joe Worzniak. I’d hoped to meet you before you got to Watertown. I hope we can still meet up.’ The voice was confident, assertive and strong.

‘Yes, that would be useful.’

‘I understand you’ve spoken with Luke.’

‘I have.’

‘Find out anything?’

‘No.’

‘Neither did I.’

There was a moment’s silence before Worzniak continued, ‘We’ve got to move on. I can meet with you tomorrow if that’s OK with you. Where’re you staying?’

‘I’m at the Red Bull in Waterbury. And tomorrow would be fine.’

‘OK. I’ll be there at twelve. Lunch OK?’

Foster agreed and handed the phone back to Hilary Proctor to end the call.

‘I’m meeting him for lunch tomorrow,’ Foster said. ‘We’ll decide where we’re going after that.’ He looked at the woman. ‘Meanwhile, can you please try and reason with your son, Hilary? Get him to see that the best way out is for him to help us. I still need to talk to him. He has the
key to this whole thing. Probably in a couple of days…?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll try.’

‘I’ll have a man-to-man talk with him,’ her husband added. ‘Never know. It might help.’

Foster looked at him sympathetically.
Who knows how to deal with teenagers these days?
he thought.

It was 3 a.m. when someone or something set off the hotel fire alarm. Although it was a considerable annoyance to the other guests, Foster was already awake when it happened.

When he had arrived at the hotel the night before, he had taken a light meal before going up to his room. His body-clock had rebelled at sustenance being taken at that late hour, but he didn’t want to wake while it was still dark, his stomach aching for breakfast. He had stopped off briefly at the hotel’s cocktail bar where he ordered a Scotch with a little water. He managed to persuade the pretty blonde waitress to stop the bartender from adulterating it with ice. When she brought the tumbler to his table she brought a small jug of water and added it to the whisky, watching for his indication of when to stop. He noted that the bartender had brought the level of liquid up to the line marked on the tumbler, oblivious to the fact that with no ice to make up the volume this meant he was getting far more than a single shot for his money. He surprised the waitress by nodding a sign to stop pouring when she had put only a thimbleful or two of water in the glass. She walked off and Foster smiled as he imagined her amazement at the strange habits of the Limeys.