Dead Water (42 page)

The effort – a requirement set by certain obscure global certification authorities – is purely formal: insurance in case this matter finds its way, God forbid, into a courtroom.

Havard snatches the first stack free of the printer.

COMMUNICATIONS
INSTALLATION VHF RT MF/HF WIRE
TYPE: STR-580E SRG-1150DM
OPERATION TYPE: F3E/F2B/G3E/G2B J3E,H3E,J2B/F1B
SERIAL NO: 3573-0470 3553-0854
OUTPUT RATING: 25W 150W
FREQUENCY RANGE: 156-166.065MHz
0.5-29.999MHz

‘Lyn.’

Lyndon Ferry reads the sheet. ‘Nice.’

‘On a twenty-five-year-old MV.’

‘Overkill.’

‘Yes.’

‘Which reminds me.’ Lyndon goes back to his screen and runs a history search. ‘There. Aren’t you glad we proprietized the software?’

Havard doesn’t need to leave his seat to recognize the on-screen branding of SOSid, the world’s most comprehensive satellite distress system.

‘The Ka Bham has SOSid?’

‘Had. The box was disabled within twenty minutes of the first distress signal.’

A SOSid signal is supposed to bounce off the nearest satellite straight to the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur. Mindful of escalating insurance premiums, Moyse Line has added a level of discretion to its SOSid firmware so it can keep its lesser troubles to itself. This is not ‘proprietization’ so much as old-fashioned hacking and there’s a legal team quietly preparing the line’s defences against the day SOSid’s makers find out what they’ve been up to.

‘The captain hit the panic button at 14:45 UTC yesterday. There’s a five-minute window within which we can doctor the timecode before we bounce the signal over to Kuala Lumpur. Given the low value of the ship and the cargo, I killed the bounce. The IMB know nothing of this.’

‘Good.’

Lyndon crosses to the printer to rescue the next stack of printout. ‘You know, I think somebody’s after your attention. They want you to know they can take any vessel anywhere on the ocean, at any time. That’s what I think. And a crew like that, a crew that can run the gamut of the Sri Lankan coastguard and disable a SOSid in twenty minutes – they don’t make typos in their ransom demands.’ He crosses to the desk and slaps the papers down. ‘Now, you might want to be telling me what’s so precious about a few crushed Coke cans and a container full of Chinese pedal cars that it’s worth you installing SOSid on a tub like the
Ka-Bham
. Because if these pricks are who I think they are, taking the
Ka-Bham
out of Sri Lankan waters wasn’t a bit of fun. It was a threat. Like snatching your car keys and dangling them over a drain.’

‘Meaning...’

‘They want you to know how close you came to having a well-equipped coastguard crawling all over a Dead Water boat.’

Havard studies his hands.

‘Because when it comes down to it, really, what the hell else can this be about?’

Havard is shown to his room at the top of London’s Dorchester Hotel. His bags are already waiting by his bed. What his office has found so essential to put in these three huge suitcases is a mystery: he doesn’t expect to be here for more than a night.

Havard unpacks his laptop on to the table beneath the window. The porter unfastens his garment bag and arranges his suit on a hanger. Havard sees him out with a tip and the porter closes the door as he goes.

Lyndon Ferry has already uploaded the
Ka-Bham
’s manifest to Havard’s laptop. Havard can ignore the break bulk, which leaves him sorting through 280 TEU – ‘twenty-foot equivalent units’ – of containerized goods.

Havard remembers the day he assumed the presidency of the line. He remembers the phone calls. Ness Ziona. Farnborough. Groom Lake. ‘Where are our cans?’

With two million containers in motion over the earth at any one time, and no way to unpick Eric’s code, Moyse Line relies on intelligent software agents to catch glimpses of the system Eric Moyse set in motion. The line’s IT department has thrown any amount of code at Dead Water – everything from Glimpse to GAIS. Finally, under government pressure to deliver, Havard threw in the towel and phoned Google.

Havard types into his browser a secure, unindexed URL known only to him, Lyndon, and a couple of the line’s more stable board members. What lights up the screen is, to all appearances, a public search engine. One by one, Havard pastes container cargoes into the search box.

It would only take a line or two of Java to automate this – but what would be the point? Peder Halstad, inducting Havard into Dead Water, said that only one container had ever fallen out of Dead Water, vanishing in transit along the Sher Shah Suri Marg in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Years ago, and long before Havard’s time. Everything Havard’s ever had to deal with has turned out to be a false alarm. So Havard’s content to keep the whole business a kitchen-table operation. Even Lyndon doesn’t get to see which combination of cargoes lights up the board.

It’s mid-afternoon by the time he hits upon the correct container. There are currently six containers on line or line-chartered ships with the same contents, in the same quantities and configuration, as a container on board the
Ka-Bham
.

This, among all the brilliant things about Eric Moyse’s system, is perhaps the most brilliant: it is platform-independent. It will function for as long as cargo ships carry containers about the seas. The contents are the code.

Havard pastes the serial shipping container codes into a text editor. Each code is twenty digits long.

The first two zeroes are an application identifier.

The next number is an extension digit set by the line.

The next three digits code for one of the member states of GS and are not manipulable. Every Moyse Line shipping container carries 788 in its serial number – the code for Liechtenstein.

The next five digits represent one or other arm of Moyse Line.

The serial number ends with a modulo-ten check digit.

Sweeping aside all this shrapnel leaves an eight-digit serial reference with which to identify an individual Moyse Line container.

Havard pastes the container numbers into a spreadsheet: they add up to 278,999,924.

He takes the figure back to eight digits by deleting the leftmost 2, then appends 6 to the right-hand side. Six is the number of matching containers. Now comes the magical part: the bit he has never quite wrapped his head around, no matter how many times he’s had the Luhn algorithm explained to him. Six will function as a check digit for the number he has just created. He types the number into a Python applet and, yes, the check digit confirms it: the new number is valid.

The chances are very small that anywhere in the world there are six containers in transit each containing an identical cargo. The odds that these containers have numbers that add up to a new, valid, yet completely fictitious serial number, are infinitesimal.

This is not a false alarm. This is not a drill. There’s a Dead Water cargo on board the
Ka-Bham
.

Havard Moyse hauls his way out of Victoria Underground station, drymouthed and afraid. After three days of booking his own taxis, ordering his own dinners, and making sure he turns up on time to confidential meetings, he’s a nervous wreck. Good God, he can barely bring himself to ride the subway on his own! He leans against the stair-rail, a sixtyyear-old man in a nice suit, clutching a fabric laptop bag to his chest. He shrinks from the crowds surging up and down. It’s preposterous: Havard the milk-bathed pasha, come to a rough landing on the mean streets of Putney. He’s going to have to do better than this.

It is Havard’s third day off the radar, busy with activities it’s best his office does not know about. His job, as president of the line, is ninetynine per cent negotiation. The other one per cent is – well, call it plausible deniability.

For most of his life the line has felt like his family. The powers sitting around his boardroom table were all of an age, after all. They shared a vision and a history. The bitter truth, however, is that while Peder, on his pedestal, has only ever had the line, the others all went and got themselves other, better, richer lives: wives and children and homes and friends.

Havard is well looked after by his office but he is weary of pretending that his staff are family. They are more like nurses. ‘When would you like the car, Mister Moyse?’ ‘Shall I arrange that telephone call for you?’

The Thames’s meander has fooled him: he expects to come out at the river around Vauxhall Bridge, opposite the SIS Building, MI6 as was – even the secret services have succumbed to rebranding – but he ends up in Chelsea instead, staring with mounting panic at the shell of Battersea Power Station. There are no free cabs. There is nothing for it but to walk.

Grosvenor Road runs parallel to the river. It’s a stretch of embankment Havard remembers from his youth, his tiny, soon-aborted stab at independence when he was borrowing small sums from Eric to support fairly ruinous retail experiments on Carnaby Street. He remembers early mornings, staggering, faintly stoned, out of boat parties at expensive moorings along here. The boats are still here, still pinned between pilings, square and unseaworthy; boats with mailboxes and electricity on tap. Behind them, a single police RIB cuts and slews about the river, having fun: CO19 firearms officers cling to its pontoons.

The road moves away from the river now, making room for an unfrequented Greek restaurant, a derelict drinking club, and weedy tennis courts. It’s a strange stretch of river, as though the capital has suddenly forgotten itself. On the other side of the road from the river stands Dolphin Square: Gordon Jeeves’s art deco ‘city within a city’. Serviced apartments for men and women even more infantilized than he is. It was a hit in the 1930s. De Gaulle’s Free French operated out of here. By the 1960s it was a joke and it’s surely an even bigger joke now. Why in hell did the Home Office pick this for a rendezvous? The SIS is only across the river, so the choice isn’t even discreet.

‘Yoo-hoo!’

An elderly couple in fleecy tracksuits are braving the near-freezing river air to hit a tennis ball back and forth across a court with no net. ‘Would you mind terribly fetching our ball?’

She must be about ninety, going by the way her face has fallen off the bone.

‘There.’

Havard fetches the ball from the verge.

‘Thanks awfully.’

He throws it over the chain-link.

‘You’re Havard Moyse.’

‘I am?’

‘The silly buggers phoned us only this morning when we already had the court booked.’ Her tennis partner has joined her at the fence. He’s a bit younger than she is, though his absurd jet-black hairpiece does him no favours. ‘I’m John. This is Sarah. Can’t waste a booking. Bad form.’

‘Would you mind waiting while we get changed?’

‘I – No, I don’t mind.’

‘There’s a bar and grill in the Square. Very modern.’

‘No, John,’ says Sarah. ‘You booked the Contented Vine.’ She squints at him. ‘You did book the Contented Vine, John, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, quickly. ‘I did.’

‘Well, thank goodness for that.’ She says to Havard. ‘Do you know Sussex Street?’

The elderly couple go off to change and Havard, who has long since grown out of waiting for other people, searches Sussex Street out for himself. Sarah’s directions are clear enough and though it’s too early for lunch the brasserie is, as promised, already open. Havard is their first customer. A waiter shows him to a table at the back, where patio doors lead to a small paved garden shaded by a Taittinger-branded parasol. It has started to rain.

Havard is directed to a padded booth directly underneath a lurid four-foot-high acrylic painting of a lobster. Every so often he turns and cranes his neck to stare at the thing. He can’t shake off the feeling that it’s moving, ever so slightly, whenever his back is turned.

‘Mr Moyse.’

Sarah’s dressed in senior-citizen nondescript. John looks like he fell out of a
Carry On
film: a blue yachting blazer with a fried-egg crest, whites and – are those deck shoes? His feet must be frozen through. John hands him a Daunt’s bag. ‘Got you a present.’

Havard opens it. The red paperback inside is called
Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition
.

‘English buccaneers can’t all be William Dampier, you know. Anyway, I hope you like it.’

‘Don’t encourage him,’ says Sarah. ‘All week he’s been emptying his cannons into the poop deck.’

Havard stares at them, helpless.

‘So, what have you got for us?’

He feels around his wallet for the serial number. He’s written it down on a slip of paper. He hands it to John.

John snatches it from Havard’s hand, reads it, shows it to Sarah, and tears it to pieces. ‘I do wish people would learn to memorize things,’ he mutters.

‘Come along now, John. Mr Moyse isn’t a professional.’

‘Bloody laziness is what it is.’

‘John!’

‘I’m not blaming him. I blame the schools.’

‘Here we go,’ Sarah sighs.

The barman comes over with drinks. John shoves the confetti he has made into the pocket of his blazer.

‘Frankly,’ Havard says, his helplessness turning to anger, ‘I expected this would be dealt with by someone younger.’

They stare at him. ‘Well, what would be the point of that?’

‘Mr Moyse,’ Sarah says, ‘you surely don’t expect young people to go crawling all over Dead Water boxes?’

‘Hardly matters to us,’ says John. ‘A nasty leukaemia twenty years down the road is hardly our problem, is it?’

Sarah, meanwhile, is staring up at the lobster hanging above Havard’s head. ‘Oh!’ she exclaims. Havard flinches. ‘John! Don’t you remember? Five oh three one two two two eight seven oh oh two? It’s the yellow rain!’

‘Yellow rain?’ Havard’s voice is hardly more than a breath.

‘Ness Ziona. You remember.’

John stares at Sarah as though she’s just torn all her clothes off. ‘Sarah, for God’s sake, and in a bloody restaurant –‘

‘“Yellow rain”?’

‘Mmm?’ For all his horror at Sarah’s lack of discretion, when push comes to shove, John can’t resist the chance to tell a tale. ‘Oh. Yes. 1975. Yellow rain. This weird sticky yellow stuff started falling out of the skies over Laos and Kampuchea. Alexander Haig – he was Secretary of State – accused the Soviets of dropping mycotoxins. Only it turned out to be honeybee shit.’