Free The Edge of Madness by Michael Dobbs Page A

prodding and poking, they couldn’t find a damn thing wrong with her.’
    In the distance, two armed policemen were on patrol, Heckler & Kochs in the crook of their arms and a dog at their heels.
    ‘If it wasn’t hardware that brought that plane down, it had to be a software screw-up. These things happen, of course.’ D’Arby blew smoke into the light air where it scattered and disappeared. ‘I remember once writing a speech for the party conference–typed it up myself. A fine piece of work it was, too. Spent bloody days on it. Something to be proud of, I thought. So then I pressed the save button and the whole thing simply vanished, like a wife’s lover when he hears a key in the lock.’
    ‘No, like the lover, it doesn’t vanish, it simply scatters,’ Harry countered. ‘You simply need to know where to look for it. You find it lurking in some corner–in the closet or behind a curtain, if you like. Some firms make a fortune out of retrieving lost data.’
    ‘Correct. Top-of-the-class stuff, Harry. And on the 777 we employed the best. Ran all the software, stood it on its head, turned it inside out, and you know what? It checked out perfectly. Which means…’ He ground out his cigarette on the arm of the bench. ‘If someone did tamper with the software, they made such a good job of it they left not a trace.’
    ‘The perfect crime?’
    ‘Far worse than that. These last couple of years, particularly these past few months, there’ve been anynumber of foul-ups in computer-controlled systems that no one can explain–not just in Britain, elsewhere too, but here more than anywhere. They don’t simply crash, they start giving out the wrong signals, coughing up false information, and the world goes haywire. It’s like being lost in a forest at the dead of night, stumbling through the dark with bear traps on every side. We’ve come this close to disaster’–he pinched his thumb and forefinger together–‘and it’s getting worse. The attacks are more frequent. We’ve managed to hide some of it, even allowed ourselves to be blamed for incompetence. Better that than the truth. Someone out there is hitting us, hitting us hard, and knows a damn sight more about some of our vital systems than we do.’
    ‘Not just hackers?’
    ‘It’s all been too consistent, too well coordinated. Anyway, hackers brag about their conquests; no one’s claiming credit for this.’ D’Arby looked towards the embers of the sun, his eyes squinting into the distance. ‘And I believe it’s about to get very much worse. Up to this point the bastards have been playing with us, flexing their muscles, trying out their skills and testing our defences. No outright disasters, not yet, but that’s all about to change. You see, it’s not just a perfect crime, Harry, it’s the perfect war. It’s about to start, and we are intended as its first victim.’ He shivered, despite the evening warmth.
    ‘But who, Mark? Who’s behind it?’
    ‘China,’ he whispered, so softly that even thesparrows couldn’t hear. ‘The yellow tide. And it’s about to swamp us.’
    Thursday evening. Balmoral.
    The route from the river back to Balmoral took them past the estate’s cricket pitch, on which the local village team was playing. Shouts of triumph rose as another wicket tumbled, followed by polite applause for the victim. So very un-American, Blythe thought. Her mom would never have approved of the game, she’d been a baseball girl, through and through, a Red Sox fan, raw, unambiguous, who liked things no better than when the benches emptied and the entire squad got stuck into the opposition. Showed team spirit, she said. Only last year, at a reception in the White House, she’d piled into the pompous figure of the baseball commissioner and told him to check out a proposed rule change with his father, if he had one. Damn, she missed her mother.
    When they arrived back at Balmoral they tumbled in through the entrance hall with its jumble of