Yoyo looked at him, a small, steep line of thoughtfulness between her eyes.
‘Because the person in question wasn’t able to carry out the ignition as planned. Because something happened.’
‘Correct. So I sent Diane on the hunt. There’s information on the internet about all the space missions in the last year, and I stumbled across Thorn. A fatal accident during an external mission on the OSS, on 2 August 2024. It was completely unexpected and happened before he could take up his position on the Peary Base, but the most significant thing is that it was almost three months to the day after Mayé’s satellite was launched.’
Yoyo gnawed at her lower lip.
‘And the Chinese? Have you checked?’
‘You can’t “check” the Chinese,’ said Jericho. ‘The best you can find is their own statements, and according to them there was no loss of personnel in 2024.’
‘Apart from the Moon crisis. The commander of the Chinese base was imprisoned by the Americans.’
‘Oh, come on! First they shoot an atomic bomb up to the Moon as part of some unbelievably elaborate and sophisticated camouflage manoeuvre, then a few taikonauts stumble into American mining territory like a couple of idiots and get themselves caught?’
‘Hmm.’ Yoyo wrinkled her forehead. ‘So someone took the elevator. But to do that they would either have had to plant someone in an authorised team—’
‘Or bribe someone who was already in it.’
‘And Thorn was in the team.’
‘On his mission to the Moon, all official and above board.’ Jericho nodded. ‘In the role of a commander, with almost unlimited access. And above all, he knew his way around up there like the back of his hand. He’d been there before.’
‘Have you told Shaw and Norrington about this?’ Yoyo’s eyes were gleaming. Suddenly she was a Guardian again, infected by curiosity.
‘No.’ Jericho stood up. ‘But I think we should remedy that right away.’
Shaw and Norrington were wandering around somewhere in the Big O with delegates from MI5, but Edda Hoff gobbled up the fillet steak of their investigations hungrily. She knew about Thorn’s case of course, but so far no one had come up with the idea that the respected two-time commander of the Peary Base might have been the chosen one for blowing Gaia to smithereens. She promised to put together some information about Thorn and fill her superiors in on Jericho’s theory. Then Tu Tian reappeared, looking perfectly composed, as if nothing had happened. He told a joke and listened to the latest news before retreating into the guest area.
‘Business,’ he said, with an apologetic gesture. ‘The day’s just getting started in China. Armies of hard-working competitors are sharpening their knives; I can’t act as if I don’t have a company to run. So if you don’t need me to save the world—’
‘No, not right this moment, Tian.’
‘Excellent. Fenshou!’
Shaw and Norrington came back in, but Hoff was tied up in a video conversation with NASA. Jericho was just about to speak to Shaw about Vic Thorn when Tom Merrick announced that, in all probability, he had found the reason for the communication blockade but was unable to lift it.
‘Knowing why it doesn’t work is still progress,’ said Shaw as they gathered in the large conference room.
‘As I already mentioned’ – Merrick’s gaze flitted from one face to the next – ‘to be able to cut the Moon off from all communication, you’d need to interfere with so many satellites and ground control stations that it would be practically impossible. So my guess is that it’s something else: IOF.’
‘IO what?’ said Shaw.
Merrick looked at her as if he found it incomprehensible that people didn’t talk exclusively in abbreviations.
‘Information Overflow.’
‘Paralysis of the terminal device by botnet mass mails,’ said Yoyo. ‘Data congestion.’
One of the MI6 people present looked confused.
‘Imagine there’s someone sitting in a room, and you want to silence them,’ she explained. ‘And you don’t want them to be able to hear either. Assuming that you succeed in getting your hands on all the keys, you’ll try to bolt all the doors in order to cut them off from the world. The doors are the satellites and ground control stations, but you can’t stop more and more doors being built in, not to mention the fact that you won’t be able to get all the keys anyway. The alternative is incredibly simple. You just go into the room, put a gag in their mouth and cotton wool in their ears.’
‘So, as far as I understand it, that man is Gaia’s computer.’
‘Two men,’ said Merrick. ‘Gaia’s computer and the Peary Base system.’
‘Don’t they have any mirror systems?’ asked Jericho.
‘Okay, four men then.’ Merrick waved his hand impatiently. ‘Or even more, as it’s possible the shuttles’ satellite receivers were gagged too. In any case, the procedure is much more efficient because you only interfere with the terminal device, that is the IP addresses of the people you want to target. Everything is fine with the satellites –, you can have a million of them flying around and it won’t change anything, quite the contrary. Nowadays, satellites and ground control stations function increasingly as knots in an IP network, like an internet in space! The botnet can jump from one knot to another in order to fight its way through.’
Jericho realised immediately that Merrick was right. In essence, botnets were old hat. Hackers gained control over as many computers as possible by implanting special software. Generally speaking, the users didn’t know that it would make their computers turn into bots, soldiers of an automated army. Theoretically, the illegal software could lie dormant in the infiltrated computers indefinitely, until it awakened at a pre-programmed time and prompted its host computer to ceaselessly send emails to a defined target: totally legal enquiries, but in torrential proportions. On the black market for cyberterrorism, networks with up to 100,000 bots had been exposed. When the botnet struck, it simultaneously fired billions of emails and flooded the target with data, until the attacked computer was no longer able to cope with the volume and perished under IOF, Information Overload.
‘What are your thoughts, Tom?’ asked Shaw. ‘How long can they keep their attacks up for?’
‘It’s difficult to say. Botnets are usually unstoppable. You tell the software in advance how long it should keep at it for, then smuggle it in. After that, there’s no way of getting to it.’
‘So you can also program into the software when it should stop?’
‘Sure, you can do anything. But my suspicion is that the one we’re dealing with is a little different. The attack came as a direct reaction to our attempt to warn Julian and the Gaia, so someone must have started the bots individually.’
‘Which means they must have directed a query at this someone after the software was installed,’ said Yoyo. ‘And that question was: Shall I attack? So the person in question must have said yes at some stage.’
‘And while they were attacking the Gaia and the Peary Base, they directed another query at Mister Unknown,’ nodded Merrick. ‘This time: Shall I stop?’
‘So if we only knew who started it—’ said the MI6 man.
‘Then we could make him stop it.’
‘Where could the person be?’ asked Shaw.
Merrick stared at her. ‘How should I know? There could be a number of people involved. The person who set the attacks in motion could be on the Moon. If he smuggled control software into the Gaia’s computer, then it would have been no problem for him to start the bots from there, although admittedly he would have crippled himself in the process. So I suspect the jerk who can stop all this madness is somewhere on Earth. For heaven’s sake, Jennifer!’ His arms flailed around wildly. ‘He could be anywhere. He could be here. In the Big O. In this very room!’