Free State of Emergency by Sam Fisher Page A

there's a complete
security lockdown, or they've had a tip-off but nothing
specific.'
    'Okay,' Mark said. 'Keep monitoring it, Tom. The first hint
of anything clearer, let me know.'
    He was about to add something more when a technician
came in. 'Sir?'
    Mark approached the technician, who whispered in his
ear. Mark looked grave. Turning to Maiko, he said. 'Mai, can
I have a private word?'
    They stepped into the empty corridor. Through a large
window they could see palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze.
    'What's up?' Maiko asked.
    'It's a private matter, Mai. It's your mother. She's had a
stroke.'
    She stared at Mark, her expression blank with shock. Then
she suddenly seemed to jolt into awareness. 'I have to go,'
she exclaimed, looking around as if she was trying to find
the exit there and then.
    Mark fixed her with his eyes.
    'You do understand, don't you?' Mai said.
    Mark ran a hand over his forehead. 'Yes . . . yes, of course,
Mai,' he said heavily. 'Leave it with me.'

19
    At 2.54 pm Josh was woken from a deep sleep by the buzzer
beside his bed. Only six hours earlier he had completed a
48-hour sleep-deprivation exercise.
    'It's Mark,' came the voice at the end of the line. 'You'd
better get to Cyber Control, fast.'
    When Josh arrived, looking bleary-eyed, he found Mark
already there. Pete entered a few moments later, then
Stephanie, who had been down in the hangar getting
instruction in how to use the Mole.
    'What's happened?' Josh asked, as they gathered near
Tom's computer module.
    'About 30 minutes ago the CIA comms network went into
overdrive,' Tom replied. 'Both the US and UK governments
have gone to their highest alert levels. Neither have made
it public yet.'
    'Anything specific?'
    'I'm trying. Sybil's analysing the comms. Everything's
encoded, of course. I've got the system to pick keywords
from the intelligence traffic. Here we go.' The holographic
image shifted in front of Tom's eyes and he slid his fingers
over the metal surface where the keypad was visible as a
light projection on the desk. 'Here're the top three.'
    Three lines of numbers appeared from the confusion of
text.
    'It's an RSA code,' Josh said, suddenly wide awake. He
felt energised by the fact that he could at last employ his
knowledge of cryptography.
    'Which is?' Pete asked.
    'It's like the system used for credit cards,' Tom interjected.
'It depends on the level of encryption, but most of them are
considered completely unbreakable.'
    'Well, yeah, that's true for commercial transactions,' Josh
added. 'The PIN number you use, or your bank password,
is almost impossible to crack. But if you look at these
rows of numbers, you can see they break up into smaller
segments.'
    'Tom,' Mark said, 'can you put them on the big screen,
please?'
    A few seconds later, numbers a foot high appeared on the
wall.
    'It's been estimated that to crack the very best of these
codes it would take all the computers in the world – even
working together – something like 12 million times the age
of the universe,' Josh commented. 'But this doesn't look like
a particularly complex one.'
    'And we have one shit-hot advantage,' Tom added, patting
the desk in front of him affectionately. 'The only quantum
computer in the world.'
    'Okay, Sybil,' Josh said. 'I think the spooks have used a
third-level factorising equation to get these numbers. Which
means we have to reverse the process. Let's take the first
number cluster – 657609873. What do you make of it?'
    All eyes were on the big screen. Then Sybil's synthetic
voice cut through the quiet. 'Best fit is REHKTHY.'
    No one spoke for a moment, then Tom laughed. 'Fantastic
– that's C-3PO's mom, right?'
    Josh sat down and ran his hands through his hair. He had
dark rings under his eyes. He leaned forward, elbows on his
knees, and peered at the screen. Then he stood up suddenly.
The others looked on in silence.
    'Sybil,' he said after a long pause. 'Good try. Let's look at
the second number cluster – 6858876568.'
    Another few