Carter and Carter Into The Dark

The champagne was still cold. That was the thing Michael Carter kept coming back to later, in the dark hours when there was nothing but time to think. The champagne had still been cold when everything fell apart.

Carter Global Investigations occupied the top three floors of a converted Victorian warehouse in Southwark,it was part of the great Carter Global Enterprises possibly the biggest news gathering service in the world and on that particular Tuesday evening it looked genuinely splendid. Someone on the team had strung lights across the exposed iron beams, there were bottles open on every surface, and the skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows was doing that thing it sometimes did at dusk where London looked almost impossibly fine. Michael stood near the window with a glass he hadn't touched, watching the city and feeling something he rarely allowed himself to feel, which was satisfied.

"You're supposed to be celebrating," Nicky said, appearing at his elbow. She had changed from the operational gear they'd worn on the boat at Lake Garda into a dark dress, her blonde hair loose for once, and she looked entirely at ease in the way that she always managed to look when Michael felt the opposite. "You're doing the thing where you stare at the city like it owes you money."

"I'm celebrating quietly," Michael said.

"That's not celebrating. That's brooding with a glass in your hand." She reached over and took a sip of his champagne without asking, which was something she had done since she was old enough to reach the table. "The Mussolini papers are with the right people, Rocco's lot have the names they needed, and nobody shot us. That is, by any reasonable measure, a successful week."

He almost said something then. There was a thought at the edge of his mind, some low-frequency unease that he couldn't quite name. He'd felt it since they landed at Heathrow, a faint wrongness, like a system running slightly too hot. He dismissed it. Nicky was right. It had been a good week.

Then the lights went out.

Not just in the building. Across the street, the office blocks went dark in a rolling wave, floor by floor, as though someone were drawing a blind across the city. The traffic lights died. The illuminated advertisements on the far bank of the Thames went black one after another, and within thirty seconds of the first flicker, London was running on nothing but battery torches and the pale glow of mobile screens tilted skyward in confusion.

Michael was already moving before Nicky said a word.

The server room occupied a reinforced section of the building's second floor, climate-controlled and card-accessed, the single place in the world where Michael Carter felt entirely in command. He took the internal stairs at a run, his messenger bag bouncing against his hip, and swiped through the door to find that the room was not dark. The servers were running on the backup generators, and every monitor was lit, and on every monitor was the same thing.

White text on a black background. Four words.

System Override Complete.

He stood in the doorway for a moment that felt considerably longer than it was. Then he crossed to the main terminal and his fingers were already moving across the keyboard before he'd consciously decided what to check first. The intrusion logs were a wreck. Someone had been inside the architecture for hours, possibly longer, moving through the system with the kind of patience that suggested they knew exactly where everything was kept. They'd used his own encryption protocols, the bespoke layered system he'd built from scratch over two years and which he had never shared with a single living person. The thought of it was physically unpleasant, like finding a stranger's fingerprints on something he kept locked away.

"Michael." Nicky was in the doorway. She had her phone in her hand and her face had changed completely, the ease gone, the calculation behind her eyes fully visible now. "The grid. It's not just London. Julie's been monitoring the feeds. France, Belgium, the Netherlands. They're all reporting the same thing."

"Someone used my code," he said. He heard how flat his voice sounded. "These protocols. No one else has these. Someone used my exact architecture to go through the national grid's security like it wasn't there."

Nicky crossed the room and looked at the screens. She didn't say anything for a moment, which was unusual enough that it registered.

"Can you purge it?" she asked.

"I'm trying." He was already attempting to isolate the intrusion, to cut the pathways the attacker had burrowed through his system. But whoever had done this hadn't just used his code. They'd woven it into the grid's own architecture so thoroughly that pulling it out now would be like trying to remove a dye from water. Every command he ran came back blocked. The system wasn't just compromised. It had been designed to look as though he had built it this way deliberately, as though Carter Global's servers were not a victim of the attack but its origin point.

"They're not just framing us for a hack," he said. He stopped typing. There was no point. "They've made it look like we built the bloody thing."

From somewhere below them came the sound of vehicles pulling up hard outside the building. Several of them, by the sound of it.

Nicky was already at the room's single high window, standing to one side of the frame the way she always did, not presenting a silhouette. She looked down for a few seconds and then stepped back, and her expression was careful in a way that made Michael's stomach drop further than it already had.

"Armed police," she said. "Six units that I can see. They've got the front and the side entrance covered." She paused. "And Sheila Vance."

The name landed oddly. Michael knew it, of course. DI Sheila Vance, senior liaison with the intelligence services, a woman he'd met twice at government briefings and who had struck him both times as precisely the sort of exhausted, sensible civil servant who kept the machinery of the state running without anyone thanking her for it. The kind of person who arrived at scenes like this to manage them, not to cause them.

"She got here fast," he said.

"Remarkably fast," Nicky said.

They looked at each other across the bank of screens, and neither of them said what they were both thinking, not yet, because saying it would make it a fact and there were still other explanations, theoretically.

Below them, a loudspeaker crackled to life in the street, and a voice that carried the particular flat authority of someone who had done this many times before instructed all occupants of the building to remain where they were and await further instruction. Then, cutting through the electronic fuzz of the address system, came another voice. Quieter. Almost gentle.

"Michael. Nicky." Sheila Vance's voice, amplified but still managing to sound concerned, almost maternal. "We know you're in there. Please, don't make this worse than it already is. These are frightened people out here. Let's talk."

"She sounds worried about us," Nicky said, in a tone that communicated the precise opposite of what the words suggested.

"Tremendously worried," Michael agreed. He looked at his screens one last time. The intrusion was total. There was nothing left to purge, nothing to prove, nothing on his own servers that didn't now look like evidence against him. He reached under the main terminal, found the physical isolation switch he'd installed when he built the room, and pulled it. The monitors went dark. It was the only move left to him, and it was purely cosmetic at this point, but he wasn't leaving the room with those screens still running.

"Service tunnels," Nicky said. She was already moving toward the door. "I had a look at the building schematics when we first moved in. There's a maintenance corridor that runs behind the kitchen on the ground floor. It connects to the Victorian drainage system beneath the street. Unpleasant, but functional."

"You looked at the escape routes when we moved into our own building," Michael said, following her out.

"One of us has to." She glanced back at him as they took the stairs down, her voice dropping to something quieter. "Michael. Whoever did this knew your architecture. They didn't guess it or steal a fragment of it. They knew all of it."

"I know."

"That's a very short list of possibilities."

"I know that too."

The ground floor was dark, their team having already had the sense to clear out when the police arrived, which meant the building was essentially empty by the time Michael and Nicky reached the kitchen at the rear. Nicky went straight to the utility cupboard in the corner, shifted a stack of catering supplies with practised efficiency, and pulled open the maintenance hatch behind them. The smell that came up from below was everything the word drainage implied, and Michael made a sound of genuine protest.

"I'm not doing this for fun," Nicky told him, and dropped into the dark.

He went after her.

They moved through the tunnels for nearly twenty minutes, Nicky navigating from memory in near-total darkness, one hand trailing the curved brick wall, her other hand occasionally reaching back to guide him. Michael kept his mouth shut and his thoughts focused, which was harder than usual because the thoughts were loud. His code. Someone had taken his code and used it like a key, like they'd been inside his head, and the result was a continental blackout and every law enforcement agency in Europe looking for a pair of siblings from Southwark who had apparently decided to switch off the lights for the entire western seaboard.

They came up through a grate into a narrow alley two streets from the building. The night air was cold and smelled of the river, and it was profoundly dark because the streetlights were still dead. Around them, the city was running on confusion, people moving in clusters with phone torches, voices carrying the particular pitch of uncertainty that came when familiar things stopped working.

Nicky pulled out her phone and held the screen so he could see. She'd caught a news feed loading on a patchy signal. The headline was updating in real time.

CARTER SIBLINGS IDENTIFIED AS PRIME SUSPECTS IN CONTINENTAL GRID ATTACK — INTERPOL ALERT ISSUED.

Below it, a photograph of the two of them, pulled from somewhere public, smiling, looking for all the world like exactly the sort of wealthy, well-connected people who might consider themselves above consequence.

Michael stared at it for a moment. Then he looked up at the dark London skyline, the skyline he'd been admiring from his own window less than an hour ago, now just a black shape against a slightly less black sky.

"Right," he said.

"Right," Nicky agreed.

They walked, together, into the dark.