Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

of them would ever say it out loud, having a second man on board, a man just as committed to the mission as the first, would ensure that there would be no hesitation at the crucial moment. Not all martyrs were always prepared to go all the way, as evidenced by the number of truck bombers whose ultimate commitment and sacrifice were known to have been guaranteed by a set of handcuffs linking them securely to the steering wheel of their vehicle and a detonation system that could be triggered remotely.

It was important that the explosion should take place during the day, to ensure the maximum number of casualties and the greatest possible disruption to the centre of London. Accordingly, the two men who had volunteered to accept martyrdom for the cause – Hassan and Khalid – had set off from their requisitioned boathouse in mid-morning when they expected the volume of river traffic to be high. Their intention was to reach the target early that afternoon when most of the occupants of the building should be back from lunch.

Chapter 6

Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

‘A what?’ Angela Evans demanded.

Natasha Black held up her hand, but North shook his head.

‘I know you know, Natasha,’ he said, ‘because you seem to know quite a lot about almost everything. Okay, for the benefit of everybody else in the room, we’re talking about nanotechnology, another subject I’d never even heard of before this thing happened. This past week has been a bloody steep learning curve for me, let me tell you.

‘Nanotechnology is basically the manipulation of atoms and molecules, and what I also didn’t know is that it’s not a new technique. It’s been going on for centuries, and to see a really good example of it all you have to do is visit a medieval church and take a look at the stained-glass windows. The artists in that period mixed gold and silver particles to create the different colours in the glass, and that process actually changed the composition of the materials. That was a form of nanotechnology, though obviously nobody realised what it was until modern times.’

‘But you’re not talking about some accidental process, I assume,’ Morgan said. ‘It wasn’t something he could have picked up out walking his dog or mowing his lawn. From what you’ve described the grey substance found in O’Brien’s blood is presumably artificial.’

‘Yes, and definitely a form of enemy action. Anyway, the background is that the element carbon has the ability to catenate, to form long chains or rings of atoms and to have other elements attached to it, and the entire science of organic chemistry is the study of carbon and its compounds. A fullerene is another form of carbon molecule called an allotrope, and it’s different because it forms a closed mesh. It comes in a wide variety of shapes, including balls and tubes and flat sheets. The balls are known as buckyballs and all the various kinds of meshes are called fullerenes.

‘Both those names come from a man named Buckminster Fuller who, strangely enough, had nothing to do with nanotechnology. His connection is that he made the geodesic dome structure popular in his lifetime – he died in 1983 – and that’s pretty much an identical structure to one particular buckyball, C60, which somebody named buckminsterfullerene. The geodesic dome is just a hell of a lot bigger. The scientists needed names to call these things, and fullerene and bucky just kind of stuck. And there are bucky onions and bucky tubes and similar names for other structures.

‘Anyway, the point is that what the electron microscope showed was that the grey smear recovered from O’Brien’s blood sample consisted entirely of buckyballs, and that’s what I meant when I said it was enemy action. That’s the commonest fullerene that occurs naturally. It’s in things like soot and it’s even been detected in deep space, the space between the stars, but there’s no way O’Brien could have ingested it in its natural form. It had to have been administered to him, somehow.’

‘Empty or full?’ Natasha Black asked. ‘The buckyballs, I mean.’

‘Sorry, I should have explained that better. What the technicians working the electron microscope saw weren’t buckyballs as such, but the remains of buckyballs.’

‘There you go, then. That’s your smoking gun.’

North noticed the slightly blank expressions on the faces of everybody else in the room and decided to clarify what he’d been told.

‘One of the ways scientists expect to be able to use nanotechnology is to deliver precise dosages of drugs to specific locations in the body. The shape of the buckyball means that a drug can be carried inside it, or chemicals can be attached on the outside and then released. What Natasha means is that because all the buckyballs that the technicians could see with the electron microscope had broken apart, the payload, whatever was inside the balls, must have been released.’

‘And you think that was what killed him?’ Morgan suggested.

North nodded.

‘That’s what the medics think. By a process of elimination they ruled out everything except the foreign bodies, the buckyballs, so the only conclusion they could come to is that whatever they carried was the cause. So then they did another check for drugs. Initially, they’d been looking for so-called recreational drugs – heroin, cocaine, crack, that kind of thing – but then they did a broad-spectrum analysis, and that produced something really unexpected.’ He paused and looked at Natasha Black before he continued. ‘His blood contained traces of sodium thiopental and potassium chloride.’

‘That’s two-thirds of a lethal injection,’ she said immediately. ‘Sodium thiopental is a barbiturate normally used as a first step in general anaesthesia for patients undergoing operations and it’s really fast acting at very low doses. Potassium chloride shuts down the heart by cocking up the electrical conductivity of the muscles. The other drug usually included in a lethal injection is pancuronium bromide, which works like curare. It’s a muscle relaxant that blocks the action of acetylcholine and