Follow a laptop from the heart of a government agency, to the wringing hands of a mafia-linked assassin. Wince as he gives it to his senior colleague Edik Niemeyer, a virtual terrorist with the ability to decode its hard drive. Then cross your fingers and hope for the best as Joshua Burns, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, stumbles across it in a pawnbroker’s window and boots it up…

It all started when Nile Greenbaum signed the Official Secrets Act in 2004. Working for MI6 he was told about a threat to the World Wide Web that would render it useless for fifty years. In fact, he was told to write it! This new and dangerous application would be called the Ironclad virus. It was up to Nile to ensure that if and when it was ever deployed, it completely switched off the Internet.

Three years later, Nile has finished his virtual weapon of mass destruction. He’s told to dismantle it, divide it into three equal parts and give one part each to Britain's most trusted sleepers. Sleepers are government agents who never undertake covert missions or travel abroad. They just sit in their quiet, country homes and wait… and listen… and watch… while the rest of the clandestine world gets on with things. They will guard the components of the Ironclad virus. Hopefully, they'll never be asked to return them to GCHQ. If they are, it can mean only one thing. The Internet has been turned into a weapon, and that weapon turned against the UK.

Vic Mudrick began as a developer on Nile Greenbaum's elite team. Like all the others, he was given his own work’s laptop on which to cut new and intelligent code. But Vic made a mistake that put the security of the Ironclad project at risk. He was dismissed, told the payroll department would consider his CV, and put under close surveillance. His ego was badly bruised and revenge became his only ambition.

A few loose bricks in the Home Office firewall gave him just the opportunity he needed to hit back. He sucked information from their mainframe onto his MacBook, then put that information up for auction on eBay. Sold to the highest bidder, his computer briefly became the property of a small, Central American state. But the regime behind that small state was teetering on the brink of collapse. Their London ambassador got himself shot making his way to the airport. And the secrets of the Ironclad virus tucked away on Vic’s humble laptop, fell into the hands of his murderer.

Ray Daveen, a simple assassin, had no idea what to do with this encrypted data. But he had a close colleague who regularly boasted he could hack into the Pentagon if the Koreans would only back off for five minutes. Edik Niemeyer wrote malicious code for the mafia. He took the blood-soaked laptop from his friend and broke it open. A PowerPoint presentation played out. The story of the Ironclad virus was disclosed. And Edik became its latest, greatest fan.

Soon, Edik has acquired the postcodes of three UK locations, recognized by the underworld as Secret Service safe houses that hold its component parts. He sends Ray to retrieve them. The broken laptop, drained of life, sits on his windowsill staring up at the sky. When Ray returns, it’s jammed into the wastepaper basket under the rusty radiator by the door.

A few days later, Edik’s maid takes out the trash. Two black bin-bags get slung in a skip parked round the corner. They don’t stay there long. In this part of town, scavengers rifle through every take-out box and ready-meal tray they can find. The laptop is recovered, tidied up and placed in the window of a local pawnbroker’s shop.

Joshua Burn spots it there shortly afterwards. Joshua is fourteen. His mum confiscated his PC the day before to teach him a lesson. Now he can’t maintain the dozens of websites he works on. A laptop, of course, would solve all his problems. He could use it in town, at any Wi-Fi hotspot. Unable to resist the idea, he buys it, boots it up and kicks off a hard delete of everything on its two-gig drive. But something goes wrong, the Recent Files window pops open and a PowerPoint presentation begins.

Joshua’s adventure into the sinister alleyways and backstreets of the global village has begun. Places the authorities would have you believe don’t exist, swallow him whole. His only friend in this terrifying new world is his reconstructed laptop.

The plan to launch the Ironclad virus gathers pace while he fights to stay alive. Eventually, he’s forced to track down its original author. Nile Greenbaum helps him stall Edik and his cronies long enough to avert disaster. But the threat they pose is not passed. Joshua and Nile will have to hunt down, in person, each and every member of an organization called The Coalition, to silence the Ironclad virus forever.

I wanted to write a story that was immediately accessible to boys. Something with a hard-luck goody and a thoroughly-evil baddy. If I could also involve the mafia, MI6, some stunning UK locations and a load of up-to-the-minute technology, so much the better. But just telling the story was never going to be enough. I wanted to give it an edge, something that would make it stand out. I came up with the idea of following a humble laptop through the whole thing quite early on and never got tired of it. It just seemed to work.

Pace was the cornerstone of my early plot run-throughs. I loved the idea of a guy being handed a commission from the UK’s intelligence services to deliberately set about sabotaging the World Wide Web. Kids at my local school were hungry to read more after tasting the first couple of chapters so I knew I was doing something right. From then on, I just tried to keep the characters real and the scenery contemporary. Hope it’s enjoyable.

A piece of malicious code has been conceived by a think-tank working for MI6. If it were deployed, the information super-highway would become a virtual car park, the World Wide Web no more than a provincial tangle. Nevertheless, cyber-technicians in London are instructed to cut batches of script that could, one day, be consolidated and compiled to form this super bug.

The modules of code are installed onto three microchips and the microchips given to Britain’s three most trusted sleepers. Sleepers are agents who live normal lives in rural communities, never crossing international borders but occasionally passing on information for their MI6 contacts. They will stand guard over these microchips. Hopefully, they will never be brought together. If they are, it can mean only one thing, the Internet has been turned into a weapon and that weapon turned against the West.

Every aspect of the project is classified. All its supporting documentation is either destroyed or encrypted. There is only one word to describe the level of security surrounding it, Ironclad. But the trouble with iron is, over time, it rusts. And so, through a series of administrative blunders and management slip-ups, someone, somewhere learns the truth. The existence of the three computer chips is no longer a secret…

Vic Mudrick, a maverick developer working for MI6, knows the value of a good government leak. He sells the information he’s uncovered to a Central American ambassador with a fat roll of bank notes in his pocket. But there’s a coup in the ambassador’s home country. Before the ambassador can pass on the details he’s obtained, he’s murdered. Now his assassin is in possession of his personal laptop. A laptop that contains detailed information on the Ironclad virus. The assassin’s name is Ray Daveen.

Ray Daveen has no idea what words like polymorphic or prolific mean. He comes from a world where words like pump-action and peacemaker are enough to get you by. But he knows a man who can help him with his vocab’. A senior member of the same Cosa Nostra family he works for, takes an interest in that sort of thing. 

Edik Niemeyer is a cripple, a psychopath and an accomplished systems architect to boot. He lost both his arms in an industrial accident years ago, but he manages to type with a pen set into a cradle on his forehead. The code he writes comes to life slowly and gradually but it’s always of the highest quality… brilliant, concise and deadly.

He receives Ray distrustfully into his cramped flat. The laptop’s recycle bin quickly gives up its secrets. A PowerPoint presentation plays out, detailing the concepts behind the Ironclad virus. For Edik, the decision to unite its hidden components is a simple one. It will cause pain and suffering on an unprecedented scale. It is therefore a good idea.

Of course, it won’t be easy. Edik knows that. He’ll need help from Ray Daveen and his gangland associates, who call themselves The Coalition. His ruthless mind focuses on solving the maths problems concealed in the PowerPoint slides. Slowly, they reveal the zip codes of the hidden microchips.

IV40 8QH – a cottage in the Kyle of Lochalsh with a bright-pink, corrugated-iron roof.

PL26 7OW – a bed and breakfast within sight of the Eden project near St. Austell.

And OX1 4AL – an Oxford don’s untidy flat at the top of a Balliol College bell tower.

The chips are found and embedded into an unassuming motherboard. Soon, this motherboard will give birth to the ultimate computer virus, a corrupted worm that will eat its way through the West’s IT infrastructure. The countdown has begun. But as his evil plan progresses, Edik realises he no longer needs Ray or his blood-encrusted Apple MacBook. He instructs his maid (a ruthlessly efficient Czech lady who’s always claimed she could clean up any kind of mess) to get rid of them. Silvia sweeps them into the catering bins in the street outside. But the dustbins in this part of town are picked over by scavengers.

Kamal Alli, the owner of a local pawnbrokers shop, fishes the laptop out, dresses it up and puts it in his high street window. Joshua Burn steps through his whitewashed glass door an hour or so later. His mum has confiscated his computer, again, so he needs a new one. A laptop would solve all his problems. He haggles over the price and eventually takes it away for a fraction of its real cost.

Sitting at a table in the local McDonald’s restaurant, he plugs himself into the nearest Wi-Fi connection point and kicks off a hard delete of its two-gig drive. But something goes wrong, minutes later the last slide of the PowerPoint presentation closes. He panics. Snapping the laptop shut he takes it home. MI6 begin to track him after their servers pinpoint the exact location of the laptop’s last log-on.

Their agents move in to pick him up, convinced Joshua must be part of some terrorist cell. But he manages to escape by laying a false trail for them to follow. For a while, he and his laptop survive alone. But the net around them is gradually closing in. A phone number in the machine’s Outlook address book delivers Joshua to an anonymous mobile mailbox. Desperate for a way out, he leaves a message, explaining what’s happened.

Vic Mudrick checks the mailbox twice a day. He’s been expecting a call from a contact in the UK Passport Office. He’s not been expecting to hear from a frightened, fourteen-year-old boy. The panic in Joshua’s voice begins to eat away at him. Before long, Vic has contacted his old boss, Nile Greenbaum, and the two have driven to meet Joshua.

With police backup, they crash Kamal Alli’s shop in Fulham. Kamal points the finger of blame at the maid he saw dumping a body in a private dustbin. The maid is traced to Edik’s flat, but the flat has been hastily vacated. Nile, Vic and Joshua search the few personal possessions Edik’s left behind. Among them, they find references to a website Joshua maintains. Bulletproof.net highlights flaws in the code of several popular operating systems. Flaws that could leave them exposed to deadly attacks by malicious software writers. Nile realises Joshua has stumbled across some of the very principles upon which he has based the Ironclad virus.

Impressed, he asks Joshua to scour the web for activity that could lead them to Edik. Vic and Joshua work together to intercept Coalition e-mails. An Ironclad microchip, bound for an address in Putney Bridge, is seized. It is destroyed but a copy has already been made. The address turns out to be an empty industrial unit. The trail has gone cold.

Then, a frail, Eastern-European woman turns up at the Putney Bridge postal drop. Silvia Fleckenstein has the place sparkling like a palace ballroom inside half an hour. Unwittingly, she leads Nile and his team back to her home across town. There they find Edik Niemeyer, struggling to release the compiled Ironclad virus onto the Internet.

Edik pushes himself away from his desk, mad with excitement. ‘It’s too late,’ he cries, his pen still jutting out of his forehead like a shrivelled rhino’s horn. ‘I’ve done it. I’ve destroyed the World Wide Web.’ The computer screen behind him shows the progress of the virus as it spreads across the globe. Joshua notices the legend splashed across his T-shirt. ‘Not just a wanna-be anymore!’

‘We’re too late,’ Joshua groans. ‘He’s done it.’
‘Too late,’ Nile agrees, ‘to stop him releasing it.’ He boots up Vic’s old laptop. ‘But not too late to stop it paralyzing the systems it touches…’ he adds. He, Joshua and Vic fight to prevent the virus developing into its mature form. Eventually, they manage to contain it.
The virus is booby-trapped to explode across the web if it detects it’s under attack, so they daren’t destroy it. For the time being it will have to remain a latent threat on a million home computers. Joshua is rewarded with funding for a string of new websites he wants to set up. MI6 support him in his efforts to promote safety and security on the Internet.

The laptop he bought from a pawnbroker’s shop in Fulham is left alone for a while. After gathering dust in an evidence tray in Paddington Police Station for over a year, it’s eventually scraped clean and passed to the Prison Service. As part of a project to get habitual criminals involved in the communications revolution, they’re collecting unused machines, which they can dismantle for spare parts.

By mistake, Edik Niemeyer receives the intact laptop in his cell the next morning. Attached is a pre-printed letter from the Prison’s Minister.
‘Please rate how well this computer meets your personal needs,’ it says.
Signing onto the Strangeway’s network, Edik is happy to give the battered and bruised machine a confident ten out of ten...

 
Ironclad : meaning without flaws or loopholes. A watertight, bulletproof form of protection against any threat, however serious.

In one of MI6’s premier conference suites in London, England, a voice that commanded respect was addressing a handful of fresh-faced young agents. He spoke as if the fate of the free world hung on his every word.
‘Total destruction,’ he said. He could have been recording a trailer for the next Hollywood blockbuster. ‘Nothing less will do. We want something that will reduce the World Wide Web to rubble inside twenty-four hours. Is that clear?’

Heads nodded slowly, their owners obviously shell-shocked by his no-nonsense attitude.
‘Security surrounding this operation will be tight,’ he warned. ‘In fact, it will be so tight you won’t be able to breath for surveillance equipment and high-tech snooping devices. Under no circumstances will you be allowed off the complex, here at Benhall, until your task is completed. Understood?’

The same heads nodded again. They were honoured just to be in the same room as Colonel Nile Greenbaum.
‘You won’t be allowed to discuss your progress with anyone, not even your closest colleagues, the people sitting beside you now, in this very room,’ the briefing continued. Colonel Greenbaum snatched an A4 pad off the desk closest to him and flung it in the wastepaper bin beneath the room’s only shuttered and bolted window. ‘And you won’t be writing anything down,’ he sniffed. ‘Everything must be recorded in here,’ someone had his stubby forefinger jabbed into their unsuspecting temple. ‘No notes, no data flow diagrams, no evidence you ever worked on this project. Is that clear?’

Someone’s pager bleeped, disturbing the moment. Everyone looked fearfully about. What was the penalty for allowing your pager to interrupt this guy? A sound flogging before dawn? Instant transportation to Australia?
Colonel Greenbaum’s thick moustache bristled but his movie-tone voice never wavered. ‘That reminds me,’ he said. ‘You’ll surrender all forms of communication with the outside world to me. Immediately. They’ll be returned when the job is done.’

He strode casually between the rows of desks towards the smooth, panelled door in the far wall. Leaning out, he summoned two security guards from the silent corridor beyond. They entered, drawing their guns as they did so.
‘It’s alright,’ he said, putting them at ease. ‘No need to panic.’
The guards relaxed but for some reason, did not immediately put their weapons away.

‘Soldier!’ Colonel Greenbaum barked in the left ear of the first. ‘Holster that sidearm!’
Like a robot, the man did as he was told. His colleague followed suit, swiftly tucking his gun into the folds of his smart, army-issue, grey jacket.
‘I told you I’d call you in after a few minutes,’ Colonel Greenbaum’s voice was as soft as silk suddenly. ‘Remember? You know what to do.’
The men frisked everyone, individually. Two minutes later, they left with a small cash of mobile phones, blue-tooth headsets and palm PCs in a wire basket. It looked as though they’d been shopping for a couple of spoiled teenage kids.

‘Sorry about that.’ Nile Greenbaum assumed his position at the front of the group. For an instant, his nametag, pinned to his lapel, was illuminated by a halogen bulb, recessed into the ceiling high above him.

‘Senior Technical Officer, National Clandestine Services,’ whispered a member of his audience. ‘Wow. He’s the real deal.’
Nile smiled. Taking a moment, he grabbed a can of soda from his briefcase. ‘I’m sure you understand,’ he cracked it open, ‘the necessity for total secrecy, when dealing with matters of national security.’ He gulped down some of the fizzy liquid inside. ‘The consequences of a leak could be catastrophic,’ he let a trickle of pop drip off his chin onto his tie. ‘Leaks can be costly,’ he sighed, struggling to wipe the stain away with his handkerchief. ‘I may have to get this dry-cleaned. Any thoughts or comments while I mop up? Anything else need dry-cleaning while we’re at it?’

The room fell silent. Surely, no one had the gumption to say anything.
‘Is there a plan to reverse the effects of our code. If it all goes horribly wrong?’ a fragile young girl wearing thick-rimmed spectacles asked. Nile was impressed she’d decided to take the plunge.
‘No,’ he shook his head at her. ‘None at all. Once the Internet’s broken,’ he inhaled slowly, ‘it’s broken. There’ll be no going back. We’re preparing for a kill or be-killed event here. No safety nets. No crash mats. If we run your script, I’m afraid it’s goodnight Vienna. Forever…’
‘And what are we doing to make absolutely certain this deadly code is never run by accident?’ someone else chipped in.

Colonel Greenbaum sucked in his cheeks. ‘Obviously I can’t say much,’ he closed on the young lad who, rather embarrassingly, still had his hand in the air. ‘I can tell you we’ll be encrypting your programs, installing each one separately on its own microchip. Each microchip will then be taken to a secure location somewhere in the country. Only I will know the precise locations of the chips. So, as you can see, there’s no chance the virus will be run without my say-so.’
‘Virus?’ it was the first time anyone had used the word. A few heads twitched when Nile Greenbaum said it.

‘Come on…’ he scoffed. ‘You knew that’s what you were being asked to write.’ His eyes studied the group carefully. He seemed to be weighing them up again, making a final assessment of their suitability for the task that lay ahead. ‘A virus like no other of course. A virus so dangerous few people would dare conceive of it. It will mean the destruction of billions and billions of computers, if it’s ever deployed. The virtual equivalent of an atomic bomb, it will be a nightmare to behold. But, as the war on terror deepens, we had to think the unthinkable.’
‘Why?’ several people cried at once.

‘Because,’ Nile Greenbaum’s voice was now a coarse, earthy growl, ‘the consequences of not building it, are even more severe.’ He slammed the desk in front of him. ‘We cannot, must not, allow the Internet to pose a threat to our way of life?’ His eyes were on fire. ‘What if it were turned into a weapon? A weapon of such immense power, we’d be forced to submit to it? Never…’ he shuddered. ‘Never can this be allowed to happen. We must have the capability, the option at least, to neutralise it, before it comes to that.’
‘And what are we going to call this super-bug?’ a girl, staring at her own reflection in Nile Greenbaum’s shiny, RAF-spitfire belt buckle asked. ‘What exactly is it we’re expected to build sir?’

‘I call it, the Ironclad solution,’ Nile spoke the words softly and reverently. ‘Ironclad for short,’ he repeated. ‘Because, if it’s ever activated, it will not fail to deliver. Its structure and design will be absolutely perfect. It will be… quite simply… unbreakable,’ he drove his fist into his open palm and set his jaw in a determined grin. ‘Like the hull of a thousand-tonne warship, it will cut down, destroy and crush anything in its path.  It will stop the enemy in their tracks. If and when, that day ever comes, that is…’
With that, the meeting was adjourned.

Work began on coding the Ironclad virus immediately. Colonel Nile Greenbaum was given overall control of its design and construction. From beginning to end, he would be its champion. No one else would ever see more than a tiny fraction of it. It was just too risky. What if the technology fell into the wrong hands? It was an ugly prospect. It didn’t bare thinking about…

Sixty miles away, Joshua Burn repeated a sentence in heavily accented Italian. He was trying to learn a few simple phrases for a school project on the Romans. Joshua was English, about as English as the Queen and cream teas. But even he would have to admit, he didn’t look very English. In fact, he looked decidedly European. Italian quite suited him.

His roots were a mystery. He clearly had a bloodline stretching back to some far distant Mediterranean shore. It was just, no one seemed to know which one. It didn’t matter. He was good looking. And frankly, good-looking was more than good enough.
His Key Stage II exams had recently marked the end of his 6th year at school. And what had he learnt, in all that time? Reading and writing, arithmetic, geography, history… Sure, the list was endless. It was a very good school he attended, crammed with the sort of facilities your average comprehensive would die for. But what had he learnt that made sense to him? What subjects had really captured his imagination?

None, if the truth be told. Joshua had drifted through his life so far with barely a single, independent thought to break the monotony of the carefully choreographed timetable he endured. School. Sports. Studies. School. Sports. Studies. The three S’s that robbed him of any free time. Until, at last, something grabbed him by the balls and lit a fire underneath him. Computers.

They were the future. He saw that at once. They were the way forward. They could save the planet. Or destroy it. They were sleek and sexy, endlessly adaptable, practical and best of all, affordable. They could project complex climate models far into the future, interpret radio waves from distant galaxies, monitor your heart rate or record Sponge Bob Square Pants on Sky +. They were, quite simply, amazing things that deserved his full attention. Joshua wanted to know everything there was to know about them, as quickly as possible.

Within weeks of returning to school from his summer holidays, he had clocked up nearly fifty hours on-line, learning all the basic principles. Two months later, he felt he had a good enough grounding in one of the Internet’s main languages, Java, to begin coding. He designed a web page on a PC his uncle leant him. His parents bought him one of his own for Christmas. And after that, there was no stopping him.

The next three years flew by. Joshua found time for his other passions in life, swimming, football and karate. But it would be his love of computers that drove him on, keeping him awake long into the night. For them, he was prepared to wrestle with his homework, cut short his school break times, rush his evening meals and occasionally, switch off an episode of Jackie Chan before it finished. The incredible web sites he designed were a testament to the hours and hours he threw at them.

But then, just when he thought he couldn’t get any better. Just when he thought his future as an IT professional was assured. Something sinister and ugly raised its head over the top of his gently glowing monitor, and stared at him through the half-light of his untidy bedroom. He didn’t know how it had happened. How it had ever come to this. But here it was. Unavoidable and inescapable. Here was a river of grief running straight through his life. Somehow, his S.A.T.s were less than a month away, and he hadn’t even begun to revise for them yet.

He swept away days worth of site maintenance he’d planned to do over the Easter break, and got to work learning what he should have known already. He cut the average time he spent on-line each day in half. He got a load of books out of the library and stacked them on his desk, where his printer was supposed to be. And he pawed over them, religiously, one by one.

But it made no difference. Joshua knew the moment he left the exam room, it had all been for nothing. He had failed. Actually, he knew it was even worse than that. Because he hadn’t just failed. He’d flunked, spectacularly, every single exam he’d sat. His mum would go bananas when she found out. His dad would have a fit. His computer would be banished to the loft and his career as a web developer would be over before it had even begun.

There was no question in his mind. His life, as he knew it, was over. His dreams of becoming an e-business millionaire before his fifteenth birthday would remain just that, dreams. Unless… he acted quickly, to avert disaster. Unless… he did something drastic at once.
Sat at his computer, on a wet Thursday, he tapped the space bar with his index finger. His desktop came up immediately. He logged onto the Internet and waited for his home page to load. He had no time to lose. Only one thought rattled round in his frantic brain as he navigated his way to his school’s website and drilled down through their tired, clumsy menu system.
His exam results might be stored on their server. And if they were, he might be able to update the table that held them, remotely, from his home PC in his bedroom…

It was a crazy idea of course, an urban legend. To suggest you could neglect your studies for a whole year, then fix everything in a heartbeat was a nonsense. Joshua didn’t really expect it to work, but it was all he had. His only chance for future happiness.
Perhaps it was so bold an idea, no one else would see it coming. He hacked into the school’s Records Office as his mum dragged the Hoover upstairs. It wasn’t difficult. Security on the site was very light.

The vacuum burst into life on the Landing outside his room. Inside, Joshua saw his grades flash up on his screen. He flinched. The letter ‘U’ was such a nasty letter. Getting past the disappointment of seeing them in front of him for the first time, he granted himself update authority to the page.

His fingers seemed to take on a life of their own. They danced over the sprung, black keys beneath them.  And doctored the figures against his name. It was hard not to get carried away. He didn’t want to give himself straight A’s, that would only draw attention to himself.
In a darkened cupboard, behind a locked door, on the other side of Tooting, the school’s server clicked and whirred. In no time, it was done. There was no going back now, Joshua had changed his future, forever. He killed the highspeed, broadband connection he’d opened a few minutes earlier and sat back.

He knew, of course, the path he’d taken to the school’s machine would be logged somewhere, but where? Probably, he smiled to himself, on some overburdened hard-drive in Croydon. It didn’t matter. No one was ever going to look for it. Why on earth should they? Of the billions and billions of on-line journeys begun every single day of the year, what made his so special? Nothing, he told himself. Nothing at all.

He cleared the history in his web browser and shut down his PC. The fan stopped. All he could hear now was the distant rumble of the Hoover, moving backwards and forwards over the carpet in his Dad’s study.
He shut the door of his room quietly behind him, tiptoed to the top of the stairs and descended to the whispering hall below. If anyone asked, he hadn’t been near his computer all day. He’d been out, with his friends, on his bike… Better yet, he’d been practicing his Italian, in the library…   

 
Like the needle-sharp beak of a pterodactyl, the pen came down onto the computer keyboard again and again. Relentlessly, it jabbed at the letters in front of it.
E-N-D  R-O-U-T-I-N-E… It spelt out. A sprinkling of dandruff settled on the desk behind it at the same time. Edik Niemeyer gave a sinister chuckle and looked up.

‘Enough!’ he said sharply. He was alone, but had anyone been in the room with him, they would certainly have flinched as he spoke.He twisting his body sharply around and threw off the uncomfortable harness clamped to his head. It landed with a metallic clatter several yards away. It was a strange thing, a twisted metal contraption that allowed him to use a regular QWERTY keyboard without making any alterations to it. No one dared joke with Edik, but if they had, they’d have told him it looked like a radio antenna strapped to his pastey scalp. It was painful to watch him work. But work he did.

By nodding his head up and down, he could push the nib of his antenna into any letter of his choice. Then the next and the next. Gradually he formed words. Words formed lines of code. Lines of code were compiled into programs. And so on. Edik built whole systems like this. Slowly. Rhythmically. Painfully. He rubbed his aching shoulders with his chin. He’d have given anything to massage them with his hands, but he hadn’t got any. Hands were something he’d learnt to live without. He’d lost both in a freak factory accident, years ago. His arms finished just below his elbows now. On the opposite side of the room, the phone rang. Edik stood up, crossed to it and kicked it with his left foot. It seemed to know what to do. At once, its speaker burst into life.

‘Is it finished?’ barked a gruff voice on the other end.

‘Finished,’ Edik grunted. He rarely spoke more than one word at a time.
‘Excellent. When can I see it?’ The phone was on the floor. It was vibrating as the voice projected itself from inside.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Edik. He stood on the phone’s flex to stop it walking itself under his sofa.
‘I can’t wait,’ spat the filthy piece of plastic beneath him. It looked like a fish, bouncing on a length of fishing line.
‘Suit yourself,’ Edik was annoyed. He’d had to string two words together. He hated forming sentences. ‘Waterloo Station then. One hour.’
‘The Eurostar Terminal? Like before?’ came the immediate reply.

‘One hour,’ repeated Edik testily. The question barely deserved an answer. ‘Just you.’
'Yes, of course,’ the voice, now a little higher and more vulnerable, agreed. ‘As you like.’ He needed to broach the subject of money with Edik Niemeyer, the man he’d commissioned to write this particular computer virus for him.  But Edik sounded short-tempered and tired. They both knew what was at stake. It would be there, in cash, no questions asked so perhaps it wasn’t necessary. He began to say goodnight when Edik cut the call...

‘Idiot,’ Edik spat the insult into the stale air of his one-bed hovel. Moving around the various pieces of specially designed furniture that allowed him to live alone, without help, he approached the upright fridge on the edge of his tired kitchenette. The door sprang open as he touched it with the stump of his left forearm. On the top shelf, right in front of him, sat a row of identical bottles of Budwieser beer. Edik grabbed the neck of one in his mouth, removed the lid with his two front teeth and spat it into the sink. Then he downed its contents in one.
Belching, he fell into an armchair. The chair had been gutted. All its stuffing had been removed so that it was no more than a frame, covered with a few scraps of cloth, supporting a bed of sharp, steel springs. It was uncomfortable but Edik liked that. He hated his life. Nearly as much as he hated everybody else’s. But he enjoyed the concept of pain immensely.

He would be glad to deliver his latest piece of malicious code, to the contact he’d made at the Salamanta, a casino in Piccadilly Circus. It was perfect. As, indeed, was everything Edik wrote. And it had really, really hurt, getting it right. Make no mistake, Edik Niemeyer was an artist who suffered terribly for his work. He never smiled. Not a warm, kind smile you’d recognise anyway. But if anything made him happy, it was knowing his programs were born into the world on a tide of hurt and self-harm.

He shuddered at the thought of the voice recognition systems he’d tried working with in the past. Horrible things, making it so disgustingly easy to communicate with machines. Edik couldn’t abide them. Work was pain. Pain was life. That was how it had to be for him. He knew his way round a printed circuit board better than anyone. But he never made the mistake of thinking of his computer as his friend. It was a tool, a weapon he could use to bring hurt and suffering to the masses. Mosquito was the name he’d given this latest worm. It was supposed to send SPAM e-mails to people but Edik had decided to make it do something else too. He’d programmed it to scour people’s hard drives for their holiday snaps and delete them. That would upset them.

He copied it to a slim, black flash drive, which he slipped in his pocket. He’d spend the money he received in payment on some new clothes. The ones he was wearing were far too comfortable…

The Ironclad virus existed for a few seconds on 29th July, 2007. Then, it was destroyed. Broken up and divided into its component modules, it was shipped off to the furthest corners of the British Isles. Three microchips with the potential to hold many gigabytes worth of information were ferried to three secret locations. Each contained only a few compressed program objects. But that was all that was required of them.
In Benhall, the file on project Ironclad was closed. Directories were deleted, folders erased, paperwork shredded. The UK had its weapon. Now it would be mothballed, until the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary demanded its release. Hopefully, that day would never come.

Colonel Greenbaum was assigned to another project, this time working out of the Faslane Naval Base in Gare Loch. He said goodbye to the handful of people he’d dealt with in Cheltenham and caught the next plane out of Luton Airport. His team of software developers received commendations for their efforts. All of them took up senior positions inside GCHQ. All of them that is, except one.

Vic Mudrick was not promoted. He’d been dropped from the Ironclad team almost a fortnight earlier. Vic had made one tiny mistake, that cost him dearly. He’d taken a maths problem home with him, and in so doing, put the security of the entire Ironclad project at risk. What he’d done was unacceptable but understandable. Nevertheless, he paid a heavy price.

When it was discovered he’d driven off the Benhall compound with classified information in his possession, the alarm was raised. The Doughnut, as the site is known locally, was locked down tighter than a drum. Cars were dispatched to intercept Vic before he could reach his quiet cottage on the Thames. They caught him as his Jeep Cherokee crossed the Ha’Penny Bridge into Lechlade. An unmarked secret service jaguar pulled right across his path. Another double-o car closed the road in the opposite direction. Armed men quickly stationed themselves at intervals along the main span of the river. Vic saw them; and panicked.

He was still moving slowly forward. He mounted the kerb and slammed into the stone wall that bounded the bridge. His radiator burst and steam poured out of it. Vic scrambled through the passenger window to stand on the rain-lashed tarmac like a little, lost sheep. He looked round. Dozens of screwed-up faces were staring back at him. Each had only one eye, the other hidden by the barrel of a handgun or rifle.
It was enough to turn any levelheaded individual to jelly. It turned Vic into a sort of wobbly mulch. He staggered forward a few paces, throwing his arms into the air in a gesture of total surrender.

‘Stand still!’ screamed someone. The words were distorted by a megaphone. Vic dropped to the ground.

‘All right, lie still!’ the voice went on. People began to approach. Vic was face down, spread-eagled in a giant, oily puddle. The wind howled across the bridge. He was a pathetic sight. Heavy boots splashed closer. A pair of handcuffs slipped over his knuckles, onto his wrists. He was blindfolded and tossed into the back of a white van. No explanation for what was happening was given. He was just taken. In a flash, the bridge was empty again and the road was re-opened to the small amount of traffic that had been delayed opposite the Storey Arms.
Hours later, Vic Mudrick felt the van’s engine shudder to a stop. Footsteps, this time on gravel, echoed outside and the rear doors opened. He was dragged out, thrown against a wall and beaten to within an inch (well a few feet anyway) of his life. Later, the interrogations began. They lasted a week.

Vic managed to convince his captors he wasn’t a spy, but only by the skin of his teeth. He had not been trying to pass information to a foreign power. He had simply been groping for a handle on some particularly sticky, complex equations. It appeared the virus malfunctioned on machines that weren’t Y2K compliant. He just wanted to understand why.

The authorities let him off with a caution. But no one could stomach the idea of him rejoining the Ironclad team. Instead, he was spectacularly demoted. A role as a data entry clerk was found for him in the organisation’s payroll department. After another week off sick, he returned to his new job in a foul temper. He’d lost weight. At first, the guard on duty at the site gates didn’t recognise him.
‘Vic?’ he asked. ‘Vic Mudrick? Is that you?’
Vic showed him his ID badge.
‘Where’ve you been lately?’ he said. ‘Not seen you around.’

Vic grunted, fidgeting behind his reconditioned steering wheel. He was anxious to get away. He didn’t want to talk to anyone; he just wanted to put the past behind him. As soon as the barrier went up, he drove forward, spinning his tyres on the painted chevrons surrounding the guard’s cabin. Moments later, the mouth of the underground car park swallowed him up. And he was safe again.
He took the elevator to his new desk, on the Data Entry floor and started work. But he had been badly bruised by the whole Ironclad experience. He couldn’t concentrate. He was easily distracted. He didn’t know it yet, but he would never recover from the ordeal he’d been put through. His life had begun to spiral downwards, out of control.

Soon, Vic Mudrick looked like a vagrant. He stopped eating, choosing to live on protein drinks instead. He stopped shaving, growing a long, straggly beard, streaked with grey hairs. And he stopped taking a shower every day, relishing the heady smell of BO that now clung to him. The resentment he felt towards Colonel Nile Greenbaum grew even faster than his filthy fingernails. But he managed to hang on to his job, for the time being. Revenge became his sole purpose in life. Other emotions fell by the wayside.
One day, he would get his own back on the government, on everyone. He would sell the whole damn country down the Thames… One day. One day, when he got the chance. He’d be waiting…