Shockwave, p.10
Shockwave, page 10
‘One of you fetch the others, the other help me plate up,’ Kotler instructed.
I headed off to find Xander and Caleb. They were in the bunk room. Caleb, lying on his side in one of the lower bunks, had his back to the room. When I entered, he rolled over stiffly and did his best to lever himself up, using his good arm. His face was the colour of the whitewashed wall behind him. Xander, meanwhile, his face tinted blue behind his open laptop, didn’t even look up when I said, ‘Hungry?’
Caleb shivered. ‘I suppose so.’
I repeated myself. ‘We’ve been slaving to make a decent meal of the fish you caught out here – surely you want some?’
‘Hmm,’ Xander said, looking deep in concentration. ‘Yeah, sure, just give me a minute.’
I was gobsmacked. Having been through the same day as I had, I’d imagined they’d both be as famished as I was.
Caleb followed me into the main area, where, on a rough plank table flanked by two long benches, our food sat steaming on plates. I immediately tucked in. Amelia did likewise. And Kotler, looking us over with a glint in his eye that might even have been pride, seemed to enjoy his portion as well. Caleb mumbled something about it being very tasty, but he seemed to have to fight down each mouthful.
Perhaps he was just too whacked to eat. Xander joined us eventually. He ate fast and thanked us for cooking, but I’d never seen him look so distracted. He was miles away. If I hadn’t known him better, I’d probably have put it down to the fact that exhaustion can take many forms. But he seemed genuinely preoccupied. What was he thinking about? When Kotler left the table to fetch more potatoes, I whispered, ‘What’s up? Are you OK?’
He nodded briefly. ‘Yeah, I just need to get back to my laptop. If what I’ve uncovered means what I think it does, you’re not going to believe the stuff I’ve dug up on GreenSword Investments.’
28.
Once we’d finished eating, I offered to do the washing up, releasing Xander to continue his research. I desperately wanted to find out what he thought he’d found out but, to keep Kotler off our backs, we needed to draw a proper line under the day. Amelia and I made a good job of clearing up, thanking him for taking us ice fishing and showing us how to prepare and cook what we’d caught.
‘You’re welcome.’ He shrugged. Something about the gesture made it clear he’d only done it because it was his job to do so. Just like Lukas and Tikaani, Kotler had a poker-faced coolness towards us.
I tried to engage him, saying, ‘I know one thing for sure’ once the last plate was on the slatted wooden drying rack.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ll sleep well tonight.’
He gave another shrug.
‘All that exercise, plus a belly full of fish and spuds.’
‘Spuds?’ he said.
‘Colloquial English for potatoes,’ said Amelia. ‘Jack’s right: we all need a rest after today. Even you must be tired, right?’
Kotler, looking nonplussed, waved us away with a tea towel. ‘Get some sleep then. Tomorrow you will experience snowmobiling and learn how to construct an igloo,’ he said.
We made our way to the bunk room to find that Caleb had already crashed out, curled on his side. He hadn’t even bothered to climb into his sleeping bag, and didn’t flinch when Amelia unfurled it and spread it over him. Xander barely looked up from his laptop as she did this.
‘What’s the score?’ I asked him.
Still tapping away, he muttered, ‘Just wait a sec.’
‘More dark web stuff?’ Amelia suggested.
‘Um,’ he said.
‘I get it,’ said Amelia. ‘You’re concentrating.’
The two of us sat beside him on his bed as he worked.
‘What’s the dark web?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I know it’s a dodgy part of the internet. But what is it specifically?’
When Xander didn’t reply, Amelia filled the silence. ‘Think of it as concentric circles,’ she explained. ‘The internet encompasses a lot of stuff. The World Wide Web is a subset of it, made up of publicly searchable websites, also known as the surface web. Your standard search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on – trawl through all these surface sites and come up with results according to key words and search terms. At this level, everything is traceable. Search engines can track which sites you visit and which pages you look at, for how long, etc. It’s all in the open, like the information on the sites themselves – you just have to click on the link. There are also subscription services, which hide stuff behind paywalls, like newspaper articles, and they require a passcode. But that’s still all accessible to anyone who’s willing to pay. There’s way more to the World Wide Web than just these bits though. There’s loads of stuff behind paywalls, a more secretive side to the internet.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘The dark web.’
‘Technically,’ she corrected me, ‘there are two levels. First the deep web, which is just sites that don’t show up on normal search engines for one reason or another. Within the deep web there’s the dark web, which is stuff that’s deliberately been hidden.’
‘What’s it hidden for?’
‘Lots of reasons,’ Xander cut in. ‘Some of which are despicable. Things like –’
‘I can guess,’ I cut him off.
‘But governments and corporations also use the dark web to keep their communications private – both for national security and to prevent industrial espionage. The dark web works on anonymity: nobody knows for sure who’s who and people switch identities all the time.’
‘Sounds confusing.’
‘It is, until you learn to interpret it. There are special browsers that can help with that. But compared to the surface web, the dark web is slow and difficult to navigate.’
‘So, to recap, there’s this dark corner of cyberspace –’ I began.
‘Hardly a corner. It’s enormous. The dark web is estimated to be about 5,000 times bigger than the surface web. It’s big business too. There are billions at stake. Much of it has to do with shady trading of drugs, weapons and dodgy information. But some of it is legit. The thing is, for every anonymiser, like TOR, for example –’
‘TOR?’
‘The Onion Router. So-called because it wraps up a user’s identity in layers and layers of “relays”, like onion skins, to conceal their location and usage. Somebody is always trying to come up with a way to pierce the layers and reveal what’s actually going on. It’s a constant battle.’
‘And you’re a soldier in it?’
‘I wouldn’t say that. I’m just … interested. You like maps in the real world, Jack. I like finding my way around in the virtual one. And it’s lucky for you that I do.’
‘Go on then, what have you found out?’
‘You know how I said that the original leads, revealing Armfield’s interest in GreenSword and the itinerary for his trip here with Finn Macmillan, dried up? I thought they’d probably got wind that they were being snooped on and re-encrypted everything, so they could carry on their conversation elsewhere under different aliases, but it looks as if it must just have been routine archiving.’
‘How come?’
‘Because in the time we’ve been away, the same traceable digital fingerprints have started cropping up all over the place again. And this time they’re linked to more specific stuff.’
A scraping noise filtered in from elsewhere in the building: Kotler moving a chair on the floorboards or something. The reminder that we were not alone made Xander lower his voice as he went on. ‘I’ve not intercepted anything from Armfield this time. But the addresses he was communicating with – and others linked to them – have been active. There’s a lot of chatter about the Nordic next-generation power project – stuff we know about. The thing that caught my eye was some chat about something they call the disruption event. I don’t know exactly what it refers to. It’s like they’re deliberately not spelling the thing out. But they refer to “operatives” tasked with “delivering the optimisable blow”. Look.’ He angled the laptop screen our way and scrolled through a series of screenshots showing messages to and from addresses with names like 3drE78?-+jkb@flss80.
‘NNGPP obviously refers to the Nordic next-generation power project,’ Xander explained. ‘And here, I think DE is short for the disruption event this guy refers to in the previous message … here.’
I scanned the messages. There were reams of them, many of them full of indecipherable – to me – sets of numbers. ‘What do you think these are all about?’ I asked, pointing at some strings of digits.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Xander.
‘And those sets of random words,’ Amelia said. ‘Tightrope.Schools.Baffle. Frivolity.Repetition.Escalates. Plus Kicky.Threaded.Protest and so on. Looks like gibberish, but it can’t be. What on earth is that all about?’
The same scraping noise percolated through to us again. The noise made me pause while I was still staring at the strings of digits and words, and I found myself sitting back against the wall, arms crossed, a smile on my face.
‘They’re locations,’ I whispered eventually.
‘How on earth is 528028 184834 or Host.Again.Flies. a location?’ Amelia said, then immediately said, ‘Oh, I see.’
‘I don’t,’ said Xander.
‘The numbers are eastings and northings – coordinates. And the words are from the What3Words app,’ I replied.
‘OK,’ said Xander. ‘So they’re exchanging locations. It will be easy enough to work out where they’re talking about from them. Tougher to guess what they’re expecting to happen there.’
‘Armfield and Macmillan are here to negotiate investing in the building of new power infrastructure,’ Amelia said. ‘But “disruption event” doesn’t exactly sound constructive.’
‘Do any other words or phrases crop up more than once?’ I asked.
‘A few,’ said Xander. ‘Some of which we’ve heard before.’ He scrolled through the messages. ‘Here, for example, these guys are talking about the Polar Flow. That’s the ship Armfield and Macmillan have chartered, right?’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s mentioned a few times. And there’s one other word that crops up more than once in relation to the disruption event.’ His fingers flashed around the keyboard typing in a search term, but he must have mistyped because he came up with no results at first.
I couldn’t head off my impatience. As he was re-typing, I asked, ‘What is it?’
‘This,’ he said, pointing at the screen. ‘Shockwave.’
29.
Although the three of us had been as exhausted by the day as poor Caleb, we couldn’t stop ourselves puzzling over the messages Xander had found. We made some headway with the locations. One was inside the Norwegian port of Hammerfest – where the Polar Flow was due to set off from. Another seemed to point to a nondescript stretch of coastline up in the Svalbard archipelago. A third location in the middle of the Barents Sea looked pretty random, but a fourth, also in the Barents Sea, turned out to be the coordinates for the Snøhvit natural gas field. All of this was consistent with the messages basically being about the Nordic next-generation power project stuff.
‘A disruption event could mean anything,’ said Amelia.
‘It sounds sinister to me,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but businessmen love to talk a big game, making perfectly ordinary deal-making sound all military. Read the Financial Times – they’re always banging on about war chests and fire sales, campaigns, hostile takeovers and battle plans. A disruption event could just be the launch of a new marketing slogan, for all we know.’
‘Codename Shockwave,’ I suggested.
‘Perhaps.’
‘What I want to know,’ I went on, ‘is why Armfield parked us in the literal middle of nowhere while he and shifty Finn Macmillan get down to the business that presumably makes sense of all these messages.’
‘That’s a bit harsh,’ said Amelia. ‘On the face of it, at least. He took you two to that introductory meeting. You admitted it was boring. He’s organised for us to do something far more interesting than sit around in an office. As far as he knows, we’re here to work on the On the Brink film project.’
‘On the face of it,’ I repeated. ‘But dig down a little and you have to admit it’s odd that the footage of that “boring” meeting has disappeared, and that we’ve been packed off out of sight of whatever else is going on. Plus, the trip seems to have been designed to wear us out.’
‘How’d you mean?’ Amelia asked.
‘Exhausting training over long distances. Also, running into those wolves. I know it’s daft, but do you think Tikaani could have crossed their path on purpose?’
Amelia snorted. I knew she was right: I was being paranoid.
‘Never mind us, she’d never have put her dogs in danger,’ said Xander, ever reasonable. ‘And you know,’ he sounded hesitant, ‘it’s possible that the missing film is my fault. I mean, I don’t think it is. I was sure I checked the camera. But we’d just got off a flight and things happened pretty fast at the start of the meeting. I could have made a mistake.’
‘Why are you mining the dark web for evidence that something dodgy is going on, then?’ I couldn’t help asking.
His voice dropped lower still. ‘Because I want to be wrong. I was hoping I might come up with something to prove I’m not going mad.’
‘That’s fair enough,’ said Amelia.
‘What’s our next step though?’ I asked myself as much as them.
‘I need more time,’ said Xander. ‘I’m getting somewhere, I think, but like I said, this stuff is so slow to navigate. I’ll keep at it tonight –’
‘But we’re all knackered!’ I said, stifling a yawn.
‘We don’t have much choice though, do we?’ he replied. ‘From what I gather, we’re heading into the wilderness tomorrow on snowmobiles, and we’re building igloos to sleep in tomorrow night. Which means no more Wi-Fi for two days. If I want to make progress, it has to be now.’
Xander worked on into the night. I stayed up with him for a bit, but watching somebody else key stuff into a computer – particularly when they don’t seem to be getting anywhere – is even more boring than watching another person gaming, and although there are whole YouTube channels devoted to that, it’s never been my bag. I’d rather do than watch.
No matter how hard I tried to keep my eyes open, they kept shutting. Amelia, having announced that it made no logical sense for us all to be more tired than necessary, climbed into her sleeping bag and was soon breathing the steady in and out of deep sleep. Xander, his eyes narrowed in concentration, muttered something to the effect that I should follow suit. I didn’t like to leave him to it but, given the uncertainty of what we’d be facing the next day, that’s what I did, and I swear I fell asleep before I’d even pulled up the zip on my sleeping bag.
30.
I woke before the others, thirsty as anything; Kotler had cooked dinner with a lot of salt. Careful not to wake anyone, I headed to the kitchen to grab a glass of water. Outside, dawn was breaking. Something was moving within the open door of the shed opposite. Curious, I took a step closer to the window, just in time to spot Kotler dragging a small orange box across the shed. Whatever was in it seemed heavy. As he bent to lift it, he looked up and saw me framed in the window. I couldn’t make out his expression, but he immediately hefted the box out of sight. There was something furtive about the way he did this: his body language suggested I’d caught him in the act – of doing what, I had no idea.
I retreated to our room to find Caleb awake and shivering.
‘How are you doing?’ I asked him.
‘I’m all right, but I admit I’m not up to snowmobiling. I’ve been thinking: we could turn it to our advantage. Tell Kotler that Xander should stay behind with me.’
Over breakfast of pancakes, bacon and syrup, which Caleb didn’t get up for, we persuaded Kotler – who didn’t mention having spotted me in the window – that leaving the two behind was the best plan. Xander had spent much of the night on his computer, he said, getting nowhere. He did a good job of looking genuinely disappointed to miss out, though the bags under his eyes told me that he was almost as exhausted as my cousin.
I half expected Kotler to object: the day before, he’d seemed determined to push us on at all costs. But he didn’t. Perhaps he thought he’d already broken Caleb and Xander. In which case, job done. With another of his dismissive shrugs he said, ‘Mr Lukas wouldn’t forgive me for truncating the trip entirely.’ Nodding at me and Amelia, he went on, ‘It’s safest to take the two of you out. At least I’ll have done my part of the deal if I do that.’
While Amelia and I gathered our gear, I thought about Kotler’s use of the word ‘safest’. Did he mean that letting Xander stay with Caleb would keep everyone safe, or that he needed to take some of us out as planned to be safe from the repercussions of disobeying Lukas’s orders? Surely the former. Kotler was no pushover. How could Lukas be that much of a threat to him? When I raised this with Xander, he opened his laptop and said, ‘See if Kotler will tell you any more about Lukas and Armfield when you’re out and about. I’ll carry on searching with this.’
Back in the yard, Kotler was in his element again. He’d already set out three orange and black snowmobiles. Once he’d issued us with properly fitting helmets – mine even had a GoPro mount, which would make it easy for me to film the day’s exploits – he walked us around one of the machines, explaining how it worked.
Basically, they have a Kevlar caterpillar track towards the rear on their underside. Open up the throttle and the track spins backwards, propelling the machine forward. You use the handlebars to turn the skis on the front to steer, and your body weight to shift its centre of gravity. As he was telling us to keep one finger on the brake lever at all times, it occurred to me that snowmobiling might be a bit like mountain biking, and although there were obvious differences I was more or less right.
