Free Dead Letters Anthology by Conrad Williams

inside the hotel on the mid-level viewing floor. The lights are still on inside because there’s an emergency generator on the roof.’
    ‘I didn’t think they were opening that viewing floor to anyone,’ said Roy. ‘There are still some windows missing. H&S must have had a shit-fit.’
    ‘The guest invitations were increased at the last minute. They had nowhere else to put them.’ He indicated the blank closed-circuit screens. ‘The atrium doors have sealed and the air-conditioning has shut down.’
    ‘The air-con was never designed to be turned off, only to go down to its lowest setting,’ said Roy. ‘You know the ground-floor windows can’t be opened. Anyone left in there will run out of air.’ The hotel atrium was hermetically sealed to prevent cold air from escaping. All the floors were sealed off from one another, except for a series of service airlocks.’
    ‘How long do they have?’
    ‘I can give you a rough estimate. Have the emergency services been called?’
    ‘Mr Lau is anxious to avoid creating a public disturbance. He has all of the directors here from Guangzhou, and can’t lose face in front of them.’
    ‘He’ll lose more than face when those people start passing out. You need to call in the fire service now. You don’t have to tell them everything.’
    ‘You know I can’t do that without Mr Lau’s approval.’
    ‘Then you need to call him, Raj.’
    ‘There must be something you can do.’ Raj was sweating pints. ‘I cannot trust anyone else to handle this problem.’
    ‘Let me go over there,’ said Roy. ‘If the OS is down I can only do the same as anyone else – try and break the doors in.’
    ‘Yes, but you need to do this without—’
    ‘Without any fuss? I don’t know, Raj. Somebody has to keep the crowd from suspecting anything. There’s a very expensive PR team out there waiting to be told what to do.’ He called Davenport.
    ‘What can we say?’ asked Davenport when Roy had finished explaining the problem.
    ‘Get them to make an announcement. Use an American, they always sound more formal. Don’t try to make light of it, but don’t tell them any more than they need to know. There are candles – get every performer to carry two each on stage and continue the show acoustically. Make it look like a deliberate fallback plan.’
    ‘We can’t do that. The whole thing’s on playback. They can’t sing.’
    ‘Jesus, they must be able to do something – what the fuck were they employed for? You have a lot of people out there standing in the dark and any minute now they’re going to start getting antsy.’
    Roy left the office and headed for the Atlantica. He could see dark figures moving behind the smoked glass of the hotel’s upper windows, but had no way of getting to them. He rang Davenport back. ‘Who do we know who’s on the viewing platform? I need a list of mobile numbers.’
    Although the ground-floor doors could be released from outside, the fail-safe system relied on swipe-cards that needed to be reset, and the screens were still a scramble of static. An engineer called Darroll Jones was working inside the only IT suite that remained on-site. Roy called him.
    ‘Darroll, why isn’t the override generator program responding? Is it just a crash and reboot?’ He was waiting for Davenport to contact those employees trapped inside the building, and felt powerless to take action.
    ‘The attack isn’t on any single part of the resort’s access protocols,’ the stocky Welsh IT engineer explained. ‘It’s on the system as a whole.’
    ‘That’s not possible, is it? There must be hundreds of separate components.’ He knew it would take a small army to sabotage the mainframe, all armed with the right codes. A single mistake anywhere would trigger warnings.
    ‘This hasn’t been carried out by a single person,’ Jones replied. ‘It’s the work of a very large group with a lot of inside knowledge. Has to be. But that doesn’t make sense. The