steps, which were a damned sight cooler than anything Michael Jackson ever recorded. And the best part was that he could get them to Rickroll* in the station without ever noticing the irony in the song’s lyrics.
? Named after the singer Rick Astley, whose fans turned up at stations to perform his greatest hit.
And here he would be, controlling them through a broadcast to 11,353 iPods, BlackBerrys and assorted PDAs, beamed into the grand concourse of St Pancras International station. He remembered the Kissroll staged there a couple of years back, two hundred lovers smooching beneath the disproportionately vast, tacky statue called ‘The Kiss’ that dominated the station atrium, but this was on a different scale entirely.
More importantly, it would bring an end to the argument he’d been having with Rajan and the others about pedestrian flow in public areas. Rajan had argued that the public could be persuaded to walk in non-instinctive directions if properly directed. Groups generally moved in broad clockwise circles, Nikos had told him, because the nation drove on the left and people were used to driving clockwise around roundabouts. Customers entering shops usually headed left, circling the store and exiting from the right; it was the natural thing to do. But in countries where they drove on the other side of the road, the system was reversed.
The webcam feeds sent back by his viewers a few minutes earlier showed that the group in the station was automatically following a clockwise route. Social engineering only worked if the instructions didn’t contravene human instinct. Certain rules held true whatever the circumstances; build a block of flats with elevators opening onto the street, Nikos had argued, and they’d be avoided by residents because the lift-space became the property of the street rather than the tenants. Design a public lavatory where the urinals could be seen from the pavement, and the British public would be reluctant to use them. Deep-rooted beliefs in what constituted public and private spaces were hard-wired into the human psyche.
Except that something was wrong. The cafe’s broadband speed was pitifully slow, but as he checked the incoming feeds he could see that no-one was dancing. The song was already up to its first verse. What had gone awry? The chorus was coming up.
It wasn’t exactly Rimbaud, but it felt about right for the duped drones down on the concourse. He studied the feeds again. Nothing.
Then he saw it.
Although the destination was correct in the body of the site instructions, the Flashbox he had created to run as a site banner was wrong. Where he had typed in the location of the event, a pre-logged template had set the destination to King’s Cross station instead of St Pancras.
He had forgotten that although the two stations shared the same complex, they were entirely separate termini. He had lost concentration for a moment and clicked through to the wrong place.
Breaking into a sweat, he toggled back to one of the video feeds and zoomed out to take in the whole scene. Instead of the great vaulted ceiling of the Eurostar terminal, he found himself looking at a cramped, tiled hall. He had sent his flash mob to the wrong station.
Christ. The concourse at King’s Cross underground was minuscule compared to the one at St Pancras. A sinking sickness invaded Nikos’s stomach. He had instructed 11,353 people to meet there. Maybe some of them had figured it out and had made their way to the right meeting point, but what if the rest were trying to cram themselves into the small underground ticket hall beneath the main station? The result could be a massacre, like the ones that occurred at Mecca or the Heisel football stadium; people could be crushed to death in the ensuing chaos.
Sweating violently now, he killed the video and wiped his trail, removing the online instructions, shutting down the website, clearing the computer’s history. He was using his backup laptop, the one he had stored in his UCH locker, the one the police didn’t know existed. If there was any comeback, at least he had bought himself some time – until someone ran a trace from the host.
He knew that he would have to go and see for himself. It would be like rubbernecking at a traffic accident, but he had to make sure that his conscience was clear. Slipping the laptop into his rucksack, he zipped up his jacket and ran out into the rain.
? Off the Rails ?
48
Maelstrom
The scene in the station was becoming nightmarish. The crowd had started dancing but there was no space to move, and their synchronised movements had quickly fallen apart. A party of schoolchildren was disgorging from the Victoria Line escalator, but the hall was so crowded that they could not pass through the barriers, and had become trapped halfway. Children were screaming and crying. The staircases were clogged with passengers unable to move in any direction. A sense of barely controlled hysteria was breaking out in the claustrophobic hell of the ticket hall.
John May could do nothing but watch. Longbright and McCarthy were nearest the barriers, and he could still see Ruby Cates fighting her way toward the tube escalators. Had she seen Theo Fontvieille nearby? And had either of them identified Meera or Colin?
“There’s no way of getting anyone out, Colin, so they’ll have to force people down onto the platforms and get them to board outbound trains. Try to connect with the others. I want you all on this floor. If you go to a lower level I’ll lose radio contact with you.”
“Okay, boss.”
Arthur Bryant and Fraternity DuCaine made their entrance into the station via a staff elevator that delivered them into the ticket office. Anjam Dutta was there to meet them. The security officer looked stressed but in control.
“We’ve got crowds backed around the exterior of the station,” he explained, ushering them through an unmarked door and walking them to the surveillance room. “I’m trying to clear the exits but I can’t close them, because I need to get people up first. We’ve never had a situation like this before. Usually only a tenth of the population should be travelling at one time. But we think we found the source.”
“What is it?”
“Somebody arranged the staging of a flash mob in the station, but the induction site was pulled a few minutes ago.” He got a sweetly blank look from Bryant. “It was a passing fad some while back. People click on a site that reroutes them to a different destination, and that destination sends instructions to laptops, mobiles and PDAs, telling them to meet in a certain public place and dance to music played out as MP3s. The craze died out after companies copied it to use as sales tools. We’ve got all our staff and the LTP trying to move the crowd. In general people have lived through enough terrorist alerts not to panic, but they’re getting pretty close to the edge right now.”
“We have PCU members out there tracking suspects,” Bryant explained. “Our leads may be connected with the situation you’ve got on your hands here.”
“You’re telling me there’s a murderer crowded in there with the general public? You’re supposed to be helping us, Mr Bryant, not making matters worse.”
Bryant looked up at the staff roster of security guards. Photographs of Anjam, Rasheed, Sandwich, Marianne,
