PROLOGUE
He grimaced and pinched his nostrils as he made his way up the dimly lit staircase towards a set of double doors.
The stale-smelling offices Lee Dalgleish was about to enter were located close to the banks of London’s river Thames and a stone’s throw away from the former Battersea Power Station. The heatwave was making the odour of stagnant water and damp crawling up the walls particularly putrid.
Two empty desks and a chair with a broken spine were the only pieces of furniture to be housed in this section of the building, alongside a bank of empty telephone sockets stretching the length of the floor and two broken television screens hanging lopsided from a wall. There was no indication to the untrained eye what else might be hidden under this roof.
‘Much of the government’s most important work isn’t carried out within the walls of Westminster or Downing Street,’ he had been informed the morning of his orientation, months earlier. ‘It’s in places like this. It’s all about hiding in plain sight.’
Dalgleish handed his canvas shoulder bag, mobile phone, wallet, tablet and coat to one of three security operatives before stepping through the full-body scanner. He had passed four other guards earlier, located at the entrance. And like the ones before him now, they too were armed.
Being scanned always gave him the jitters. It made no sense as he went through the same routine for every shift and he had done nothing that contravened the many rules governing him. He behaved in the same manner each time he approached the airport ticket desk orNOTHING TO DECLARElane at Heathrow – like a man burdened by guilt. He opened his mouth as an electronic saliva reader glided across his tongue before a green light flashed.
‘You’re all clear,’ said the guard without a smile. She was a new face he didn’t recognise. Her delicate features, large, blue eyes and long lashes contradicted the muscular frame that rippled under her white shirt and body armour.
‘Thank you,’ he muttered, and quickly looked away, realising he had held her gaze for too long. Strong women, either physically or mentally, scared and aroused him in equal measure.
He held his hands shoulder height and pressed his fingerprints against a screen, then spoke as both biometric devices scoured his eyes and his voice patterns. Then a final set of metal doors ahead slid open.
The recently rebranded global heating was to blame for another hot, sticky March morning which left Dalgleish feeling irritable. He had kept the windows of his second-floor flat wide open but the adjacent nightclub must have overhauled its sound system because the thump, thump, thump of electronic beats was all he could hear for much of the evening. He had eventually managed to fall asleep with balls of toilet paper stuffed into his ears but slept through the alarm on his phone. Each time he missed a gym session – which was rare – it made him recall the bullied, overweight teenager he once had been and a mild anxiety spread through him. One workout wasn’t going to bring back the Dalgleish of old, he reminded himself. But he still vowed to go to a spin class no matter how late he finished work to make up for his morning absence.
He pushed his shoulders back and forth to release the building tension as he made his way to the unisex changing rooms. Under the watchful eye of another security operative, he stripped off all his clothing and placed the garments inside a metal container. Only then was he presented with his daily uniform: a fresh set, never been worn before. It was made of an undisclosed fabric with no pockets or hems to smuggle anything in or out. Underwear and socks were not permitted under this standard-issue T-shirt, trousers and sandals.
Once dressed, he made for his workstation inside a windowless, open-plan room. He counted forty or so people, each holding or operating tablets, wearing earpieces or VR headsets. Dozens of television screens were projected onto walls, each featuring separate locations but none of which included buildings or people – only roads, motorway bridges, the sky and stretches of water.
He tapped the shoulder of a man on a seat. He was fixated by a screen in front of him. ‘Oh hey, Lee,’ he responded and yawned. ‘Is it that time already?’
Dalgleish nodded. ‘Sure is. What have I missed?’
‘Same old,’ replied Irvine. ‘Nothing. No traffic route deviation, the power levels are still running about eighty per cent and tyre pressure is constant.’
‘Where are we heading today then?’
‘We should reach the M90 and Queensferry Crossing Bridge in a little over an hour, then up to Perth and Dundee before turning around and heading back through Scotland. By the time your shift comes to an end, we’ll be somewhere in the region of Newcastle.’
Irvine rose to his feet, removed his earpiece and smart glasses and dropped them both into an electronics shredder under his desk. ‘See you tomorrow,’ he said and tipped an imaginary hat.
Dalgleish took his seat and typed a seven-digit code into an aluminium security box he’d picked up on his entry.When the lid opened, he retrieved and slipped on a fresh pair of smart glasses and inserted a new earpiece. Then he removed a protein bar from his drawer and made himself comfortable.
The image he would be watching for the rest of the day was the same one he had watched each day of his employment. It was the empty cab of an autonomous articulated lorry. The corner of the screen revealed that the vehicle had been travelling for seventy-six consecutive days with no stops. It recharged its batteries using wireless energy from coils under roads and its tyres shed their skin like reptiles to reveal another set underneath. Travelling at a steady 55 mph, the lorry calculated and chose for itself the routes it would take. Dalgleish’s job was to ensure there was no threat to its security.
As he chewed on his bar, he checked the status reports sent to his computer from the cab’s central console to confirm Irvine’s update. Then he monitored the outside of the vehicle and its surroundings from a multitude of cameras attached to the sides, rear and undercarriage. The only section his security clearance made it impossible to oversee was inside the trailer.
To other road users, this articulated lorry was indistinguishable from any other on British roads. It was an unbranded, mass-manufactured driverless vehicle. The only difference was the cargo it carried. That was more important than anyone could ever imagine. Only a restricted number had a vague idea of what was hidden inside, including Dalgleish. Even fewer knew the precise details. He had signed countless Non-Disclosure Agreements and Official Secrets Act papers forbidding him from telling anyone what his job entailed.
He glanced in the direction of his other colleagues’ workstations. Most were doing the same as him, focusing on their own lorries. Two also kept their eyes on a solar-powered plane and a small team was dedicated to observingthe deck of a cargo ship. It was loaded with containers and travelling on an infinite loop across the North Sea, alternating its direction to avoid storm tides and changes in barometric pressure.
With Dalgleish’s right eye returning to his own lorry, his left was getting up to speed with the day’s news as it appeared on the lens of his smart glasses. It had taken a couple of weeks for him to quietly perfect this type of multitasking but even now his eyes ached by the end of a working day. Viewing the same image day after day was, as he once told Irvine, ‘as boring as hell’. And quietly, he wondered how much more he could take before he begged to be removed from this surveillance detail and put on to something more challenging.
An hour passed and Dalgleish had moved on to his third Sudoku grid when an image on screen caught his attention. Something had flown past the lorry. It was fleeting and likely a large bird of prey, so he almost didn’t bother to rewind the footage. But he was duty bound to investigate everything.
He slipped off his glasses: playing it in slow motion made the image clearer. It wasn’t a bird, it was a drone. They were a regular occurrence in British skies and he had seen them fly past his lorry before. But after viewing this one from a dozen different camera angles, he realised it seemed more persistent than the others. It was as if it was following the lorry, keeping it within its sights. His stomach tightened. Something about this scenario was making him uncomfortable.
Dalgleish turned his head to look for his supervisor, Dominique, who sat at a desk in her office in the corner of the room. Nervously he approached and tapped on her door.
‘Dom,’ he said. ‘Sorry to bother you, but I think I might have a potential amber alert.’
She shut the lid of her laptop. ‘Why, what’s happening?’
