Newton’s Fire

The papers began to rustle and flap on the back seat as they moved off. Rachel passed them to Luke to stow in the glove compartment. ‘Sous Ashmolean,’ she smiled. ‘What on earth’s down there? What was Newton working on when Ashmole died?’

‘In May 1692?’ replied Luke. ‘Not much. He was still recuperating from the Principia.’ It was understandable enough. Writing it had been arguably the greatest sustained intellectual effort in scientific history. And it had left him utterly exhausted. ‘But he began working again towards the end of the year. On alchemy.’

‘Triggered by whatever Ashmole left him,’ suggested Pelham.

‘The dates fit,’ agreed Luke. ‘And he worked himself sick over the next twelve months. And I do mean sick. He had a pretty severe mental breakdown, writing bizarre letters to Samuel Pepys and John Locke, accusing them of all kinds of fantastical stuff. Then he wrote them profuse apologies, blaming exhaustion and fumes from his experiments.’

‘Two letters hardly constitutes a breakdown,’ said Rachel.

‘There were plenty of other indicators too,’ said Luke. ‘For one, it looks like that year broke him. He published some ground-breaking work afterwards, particularly Opticks, but his breakthrough thinking was largely done. And then he wrote this notorious paper called Praxis that …’ He broke off, frowned.

‘What?’ asked Rachel.

‘Nothing,’ said Luke. ‘Just coincidence. It has to be.’

‘What has to be?’

‘This paper he wrote. It’s not dated, but we’re pretty sure he wrote it in summer or autumn 1693, because it doesn’t make sense unless he was going through some kind of crisis at the time.’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s the thing. He claimed in it that he’d achieved multiplication.’

Rachel shook her head. ‘Multiplication?’

‘It’s the ultimate goal of the alchemist,’ said Pelham, answering for Luke. ‘Newton was effectively claiming that he’d discovered the philosopher’s stone itself.’

FIFTEEN I

Office of the Chief of the General Staff, The Knesset, Jerusalem

It was the kind of briefing that the Chief of the General Staff Ysrael Levin had hoped he’d never have to be given, yet there was some little part of him that was perversely gratified despite that. People didn’t make careers in the Israeli Defence Forces unless they enjoyed a good crisis. ‘And you’re quite sure about this?’ he asked Judit Hafitz, his head of nuclear programmes.

‘We’re quite sure that we’ve found bits of code that shouldn’t be there,’ she told him. ‘What we don’t know yet is how they got there, or what they do. What we don’t know yet is whether they’re malicious or effectively benign. What we don’t know yet is what they mean for our warheads and delivery systems.’

‘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