Deadlock by Mark Walden Page B

contained potential improvised weaponry like the kitchen or the workshops during that time. If they were quick, careful and a bit lucky, they should avoid detection. Tom was the first to arrive a couple of minutes later.
    ‘I can’t stay long,’ he whispered. ‘I’m supposed to be cleaning shower block D.’
    ‘Is Penny coming?’ Laura asked, looking around nervously.
    ‘She’ll be here,’ Tom replied. ‘She’s on laundry duty though, so she needs to make her pick-ups first.’
    ‘Hi, guys,’ Nigel said as he arrived. ‘Is it safe to talk here?’
    ‘As safe as anywhere is in this place,’ Laura replied.
    ‘That’s not terribly reassuring,’ Nigel said with a weak smile.
    A minute or so later Penny arrived, pushing a cart of dirty laundry in front of her which she parked against the wall before quickly walking over to them.
    ‘I’ve got five minutes before someone notices I’m taking too long with the collections,’ Penny said, ‘so what’s this all about?’
    ‘I have an idea for how we can get a message out of here,’ Laura said, ‘but I’m going to need your help.’
    ‘OK, I’m listening,’ Penny said. ‘What you got, Laura?’
    ‘This might sound crazy, but I need to get access to one of the camera drones,’ Laura said.
    ‘You’re right, that does sound crazy,’ Tom said with a frown. ‘They’ll execute all of us the moment we lay a finger on one of those things. Not to mention the fact that there’s the whole “they can fly and we can’t” thing.’
    Penny put a hand on his arm. ‘Let’s hear her out,’ she said. ‘Assuming we could get our hands on of one of those things, what then?’
    ‘I think I can reprogram one with a simple virus that will be transmitted throughout the camera drones and via them to the central server. If I can, I should be able to encode a simple message within that virus that can be hidden inside every data packet that leaves the central server. We wouldn’t necessarily know where the message was being sent, but since it would be contained within every data packet it would hopefully spread far and wide before anyone realised it was there.’
    ‘Then what? We just wait for someone to intercept one of these messages and hope it’s someone friendly?’ Tom asked. ‘Seems risky. What if it’s decoded by someone else and Furan finds out?’
    ‘Then I’m dead,’ Laura said matter-of-factly, ‘but at this point I’d rather risk that than just stay here slowly losing the will to live.’
    ‘So it’s a message in a bottle,’ Nigel said.
    ‘Effectively, yes,’ Laura replied with a nod. ‘I know it’s a long shot, but it’s got to be better than nothing.’
    ‘So where do we fit into all of this?’ Penny asked.
    ‘I need you guys because there’s one thing that I have to get for this to work – and only you can get it for me.’

chapter five
    Flack studied the latest status reports with a mixture of anger and frustration. He had always known that it was probably a vain hope that they would pick up some trace of Malpense at a border crossing, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the mysterious boy had once again slipped the net. He had reviewed the file on Malpense for what felt like the thousandth time and still he was no nearer to understanding who he was or where he came from. There were some records from an orphanage in London giving details of the boy’s younger years, but at the age of thirteen he appeared to have simply vanished off the face of the earth. That wasn’t terribly unusual; people disappeared all the time, but the fact that he then went on to be involved in events of such magnitude told Flack that there was probably much more to the disappearance than there initially seemed to be. He didn’t like mysteries, he liked solutions.
    There was a ping from his laptop and he put the file down and focused on the screen in front of him. The supercomputer buried beneath Langley that was responsible for all of the