“Evacuate, now!” shouted Andrea, struggling to be heard above the cries, screams, and roaring wind.
The officer opened his mouth to respond, and the second drone exploded.
83
“What the hell do you mean, explosions?” Giles shouted into his phone.
“Two so far,” said Bridge on the other end of the line. “The software’s going as fast as it can, we’re at over a hundred thousand botnet agents now. That has to be enough to stop it.” She sounded more hopeful than sure, to Giles’ ears.
“Casualties?”
“No report from the party, yet. None down on the ground, but we’re probably all coated with caesium.”
“Thirty seconds,” said the driver, accelerating out of a hard corner.
“Just keep at it, Bridge. We’re nearing the source, but we don’t know how many more of those things Bowman might have up his sleeve. If he gets wind of us, he might send them all crashing in at once.” The car stopped. Giles leapt out, narrowly missing a collision with the police assault van he’d summoned during the journey as it screeched to a halt. He faced a row of shops, with single-storey flats over them. “Shit. Can Steve narrow it down? Looks like the target’s in a flat above some shops, but there’s a dozen of them.”
He heard Bridge relay the question, then say, “No, sorry. We’re dealing with wireless signals here, not a fixed line. Area radius is as good as it gets.”
“Then where the bloody hell are you, Bowman?” mused Giles, looking at the row of buildings. The shops were closed, dark except for the odd soft glow of a security nightlight, while most of the flats above had lights on behind drawn curtains. “He had to move here fast, possibly at short notice. Maybe he’s squatting in a flat?”
“Not if it was a planned contingency,” said Bridge. “He’s been smart so far. We can probably assume he had a backup on standby. Can we check occupant records?”
“It’ll take too long. And once we breach, the game’s up. Like you said, he’s smart, and he’ll have an escape route. Something hidden…” He trailed off, noticing something different about one particular shop front. The windows were papered over, the business closed, but there was no ‘To Let’ sign above the frontage. And a dim interior light illuminated the newspapers covering the glass. “Stand by, we may have him. Sergeant,” he waved to the officer in charge of the waiting armed police, “that closed-up store. Breach immediately.”
Giles stood back as the police took positions, broke down the shop door, and charged inside with flashlights blazing, making enough noise to wake the entire street.
After thirty seconds the sergeant called out that it was clear, and Giles approached. He hadn’t heard any shots fired or shattered glass, and everyone had stopped shouting. That meant either Bowman was incapacitated and silenced…or that his hunch had been wrong.
It wasn’t wrong. An Acer laptop sat open on a trestle table, running specialised software, with video feeds of aerial cameras playing in small windows. Empty packaging boxes of expensive consumer drones, the models from the ID fraud purchases, were stacked neatly in a corner. Several units lay around the edges of the shop interior, many partly dismantled.
But Bowman was gone.
84
Bridge sipped her tea as Giles explained what they’d found. Since they’d last spoken there had been one more explosion, before the MaXrIoT package finally succeeded and disabled the two remaining drones. They hovered in default mode less than a hundred metres from the Shard windows, while the firemen who’d arrived after Giles departed raised ladder platforms to reach them.
It felt like a pyrrhic victory. She’d prevented two more explosions, and Andrea assured her that while there were some nasty injuries, there had been no fatalities. But three drones had still exploded, and that meant Bridge, Andrea, everyone at the party, all the gathered police and firemen, and probably everyone in the building would all have to be decontaminated of fallout. It was possible they were beyond saving, but Bridge was oddly calm about that. She was more concerned that the whole area might be off-limits for years, potentially decades to come. They might even have to pull the Shard down and dispose of it, but in light of events, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Otherwise it would become a constant reminder, an empty symbol of terror with its shattered windows.
The windows. Something about that bothered her. Why had each of the bombs flown into a separate window, rather than flying in through the first breach?
There was definitely an element of terror to Bowman’s operation, and shattering the windows high up in a skyscraper had obvious connotations that would scare people. But radiation aside, nobody had been killed by the actual explosions. Half the material would have been directed outward with the blast in any case, and as each explosive took out the drone carrying it, they couldn’t somehow ‘inject’ the radiation through each broken window after it smashed.
It was wasteful, inefficient, and left a lot to chance. And that didn’t seem right. Bridge had never met Bowman, but so far he’d been smart and careful. To put in so much work for such a low percentage of success in the final attack was out of character for any terrorist, and especially one who’d gone to so much trouble. According to Giles, Bowman hadn’t stuck around
