Chapter 407 — A Nation on Edge III (Bonus)

Chapter 407: Chapter 407 — A Nation on Edge III (Bonus)

The last time England’s hand had become impossible to ignore, it had been because of James Ganner. A teenage necromancer had walked into this building and refused to sign. When the Bureau had pulled on that thread, what came out was rotten. There had been Irish officials, *Irish* officials, inside this building and others, who had quietly let foreign representatives at protected records. They had opened administrative doors and turned a blind eye for money or favours or something worse. Some had been caught. He had always assumed, privately, that not all of them had.

"Pull everything we had from the Langford investigation," he said. "All of it. Every name, every contact, every access log, every thread we closed because someone upstairs told us to close it. Anything that touches on what happened last night, however loosely, goes to the national security people. Today."

"To them, not us."

"To them. It’s their investigation. We give them what we’ve got and we tell them what we think. That’s our job." He rubbed his eyes. "Nobody in this building is going to start arresting people."

Niamh wrote it down.

---

The emergency briefing was at two, in a room in Government Buildings with no windows.

There were perhaps twenty people round the table. There were senior Gardaí, the Defence Forces’ Chief of Staff and two of his officers, and the National Security Analysis Centre. There were officials from the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Foreign Affairs, and a woman from the Department of Defence who had been the dead man’s Secretary General until last night and now had nobody above her. O’Shea was at the far end, as the Bureau always was.

The room was tense from the first minute.

Ireland had suffered a mass-casualty attack on its own capital and the assassination of a cabinet minister in a single night. Nobody in that room had ever had to deal with either of those things before.

The first hour was the part everyone agreed on. They needed to protect the public, find whoever had done it, and secure anybody who might be next. Every remaining minister got a protection detail, and so did the Taoiseach and the senior opposition. Every public event in the country for the next fortnight was under review. A Garda commissioner went through what they had, which was not much, and what they were doing, which was a great deal.

Then someone said the word *Britain*, and the room split.

A man from the Department of the Taoiseach went first.

"Two attacks. One night. The same words both times. On top of everything we already know about English interference, Langford, the contracts, the people inside our own departments. At some point we have to stop saying *we can’t be sure* and start treating this as what it plainly is. It’s an external threat to the state."

"*Plainly*," said the woman from Foreign Affairs. She had her hands folded on the table. "With respect, nothing about this is plain. You are talking about accusing another government of ordering the mass murder of children. On the basis of three words that anybody with a keyboard could type. If we say that out loud and we’re wrong, we will have done something we can never take back."

"And if we’re right and we say nothing?"

"Then we say it when we can prove it."

"People are *dead*—"

"I know people are dead. I’m trying to make sure more of them aren’t."

The Chief of Staff said nothing for a long time. When he did speak, it was to say that his people would be ready for whatever the government asked of them. He made it very clear that he had not yet been asked anything, and that he would like whatever he was asked to be based on something more than a screen.

A senior Garda said the only thing that would prevent another attack was finding these people. That meant investigators doing their jobs without having a war declared on top of them.

The man from the Taoiseach’s department said that if they found the people and the people had been sent, then what.

It went round like that for some time.

Eventually somebody looked down the table.

"O’Shea. The Bureau had the Langford file. What do you think?"

O’Shea sat forward.

"I think the history makes it serious," he said. "Serious enough that we’d be fools not to take precautions on the assumption it might be what it looks like. We know England has run operations on Irish soil before. We know they had help from inside. We’ve never been sure we found all of that help." He looked at the woman from Foreign Affairs. "But I haven’t seen anything from last night that proves who gave the order. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I have. I’d recommend we act as if it might be England, and that we don’t say it is until we know."

Nobody liked that very much. Nobody could argue with it either.

By four they had a decision. Security coordination was stepped up across every agency, starting immediately. There would be an urgent request to London, through diplomatic channels and not through the press, for clarification and cooperation. The Gardaí would keep running the investigation, and the Defence Forces would review their readiness, quietly.

They did not accuse anybody, and they did not rule anybody out.

---

They were gathering their papers when the official from the Department of the Taoiseach spoke again.

"There’s one other thing."

He had a printout in front of him. It was a headline from that morning’s international press. *IRELAND: WORLD’S STRONGEST TOWER NATION SUFFERS WORST ATTACK IN ITS HISTORY.*

"We’ve built a lot of this country’s standing on the Tower," he said. "On James Ganner. On Guild Zero. The whole world watched them clear Floor 40 and kill one of the Seven a month ago. We have Challengers who can do things nobody in this room can explain." He put the printout down. "And it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. Last night somebody put a bomb in a festival and a knife in a minister, and the strongest Challengers on the planet were at home watching it on the news with the rest of us."

Nobody said anything.

"So I want to know," he said. "What do we do if the next one isn’t a bomb? What if it’s trained Challengers? Or something built specifically to deal with ours?"

The room turned, slowly, toward the end of the table.

O’Shea thought about Ganner Corp.

He knew England had been building something. He had known for over a year that Ganner Corp held an English defence contract it would not talk about. He knew there had been a programme, that it had been aimed at Challengers, and that it had been shut down once and quietly opened again. He knew the shape of it and the names round the edges of it.

He did not know what it was now. He did not know what it could do, how many of it there were, or whether it had ever been finished. Every attempt the Bureau had made to see inside it had come back with nothing.

"I can’t give you a full picture," he said. "Nobody in Ireland can. We know England has worked on weapons designed to counter Challengers. We know Ganner Corp has been involved. We don’t know where that work stands today, or what it’s capable of." He looked round the table. "I think that should worry every person in this room. I think it should be treated as a serious gap in what we know. I’m not going to guess at it."

The room was very quiet.

Then the Chief of Staff said, "No. Don’t guess," and wrote something down.

---

????

---

James got home at half eight.

The guild had done what it could. The medical team had gone out to St James’s in the afternoon with two vans and come back at seven. Security had driven eleven staff home. The operations staff member’s cousin had been found, alive, in Beaumont with a broken leg and burns down one arm. The woman had cried at her desk for five minutes when she heard, and then gone back to answering phones.

There were enough people in the building to run it overnight. James had made sure of that before he left. He had rung his mother when he got there and rung her again when he left.

All the way home the radio had nothing else on.

The names were coming out now. Photographs had started to appear on the news that were not appeals any more. Underneath them, quietly, the words had changed from *seeking information* to dates of birth.

His mother was cooking. The kitchen smelled of onions and the new pan was on the hob. Nyra was on the sofa with a panel discussion on the television, and she moved her legs off the cushion without being asked when he came in.

He sat down beside her.

It was the same footage. It had been the same footage all day, the square from the balcony, the cordon, the screen. Then a slow pan across the front of the hotel on St Stephen’s Green, with a single Garda at the door.

"That’s the fourth time they’ve shown that," said Nyra.

"I know."

On the screen, a man in a suit was saying that the message *For the King* could only be read one way, that it was a direct threat from the Crown to the Irish state. Another man was saying that it was irresponsible to draw any conclusion before the investigation was complete. Somebody had to be careful, because that was exactly the conclusion whoever did this wanted the public to draw. The presenter kept trying to bring them back to the victims.

James listened, and did not say anything.

He was thinking about Ronan. And Darragh, and Mara, and Ren. They had buried them three weeks ago. They had gone into a floor knowing what it was, and died in it, and he had carried Ronan out.

On the screen the photographs came up again, the young man in the GAA jersey and the woman at the wedding. None of them had ever been near the Tower. They had gone to a festival.

He had spent years getting stronger. He had become strong enough to survive a fallen angel, to come back from the dead, and to put one of the Seven on a leash. There was nothing on Earth that could do what he could do in a fight.

None of it would have done anything for anyone in that square.

He could not summon a skeleton at a bomb that had already gone off. He could not put a scythe through a woman nobody had seen. He could not raise Turiel at three words on a screen.

"Dinner," his mother called.

Nyra turned the volume down. She did it reluctantly, as if muting it might mean missing something.

---

For a while it was ordinary.

They ate. It was chicken and potatoes, out of the new pan. His mother asked how the guild had been, and he told her about the vans and the drivers, and the cousin in Beaumont, and she said *thank God* about the cousin.

"Will it be open tomorrow?"

"The staff will be in. There’s a lot to do." He cut a potato in half. "We’re not going up anywhere. Nobody’s preparing anything. Not for a while."

His mother nodded. She did not say *good*, but James could see her think it.

Nyra was pushing food around her plate.

"People online are asking," she said, "if there’s a war. Whether Guild Zero’s going to fight in it."

His mother put her fork down.

"There’s no war," said James. "Nobody’s declared anything. Nobody’s asked us to do anything."

"But if they did."

"Nobody has."

Nyra looked at him. He looked back.

He did not know how long that would stay true. He did not say so. He did not need to. She was his sister, and she could see it on him perfectly well.

"Eat your dinner," said his mother, to both of them.

They ate their dinner.

---

His mother was clearing up in the kitchen. The tap was running and plates clinked in the sink.

James was still on the sofa with Nyra. The television had moved on to an international segment, a BBC World panel this time, two journalists and an academic in London talking about Ireland as if it were very far away. *Possible foreign involvement. The question of state sponsorship. A very dangerous moment for relations between the two islands.* Behind them, the footage of the big screen came up again, the black and the white letters. *FOR THE KING.*

Then the picture went.

It did not cut to another shot. It simply went, like a light switched off, and the sound with it. The academic stopped in the middle of the word *sovereignty*, and the screen was black.

"Brilliant," said Nyra, and reached for the remote.

She changed the channel.

Black.

She changed it again. Black. RTé Two was black, and so was Virgin. She went up through the numbers one after another, and every one of them was black, and silent.

"Is it the box?" she said. "Is it the—"

James had his phone out. He opened the RTé app to see if they had put out anything about an outage.

The live feed at the top of the app was playing a newsreader. Then, while he watched, she was gone, and the window was black.

The app closed itself.

He opened it again. Black.

*The network,* he thought. Something had happened to the network. A cable, a mast, something.

His phone buzzed.

It was a message from Ciara. *Is your TV doing something weird.*

Then another from a group chat he had forgotten he was in. *all the channels just went off??*

Then one from a number in New York he did not recognise. Then a notification from a Challenger forum. *SCREENS GOING BLACK IN SEOUL. ANYONE ELSE.* Then one from Germany. Then a post from **@kellyb_nyc**. *every tv in this bar just went black at the same time wtf.* Then a dozen more, from London, Tokyo, S?o Paulo, Lagos, faster than he could read them.

It was not the network. It was everywhere.

He went to open one of them.

His phone screen changed before he could.

The notifications went. The home screen went. Everything on it went. It was replaced with a video feed, as though someone had reached into the phone and put it there.

It showed a dark room.

James looked up.

The television showed the same room.

He was on his feet without having decided to stand.

Beside him Nyra had stopped pressing the remote. She was holding it out in front of her at the screen, not moving.

In the kitchen the tap was still running.

For several seconds nothing happened.

The camera did not move. It showed part of a room, very dark, with one faint light somewhere off to the side lying across a section of bare floor and part of the wall behind. There was no furniture that James could see. There were no windows, nothing to say what country it was or what time it was.

Then they heard footsteps.

They were slow and unhurried, somewhere off to the left, beyond the edge of the picture.

A door opened. They heard it rather than saw it, the click of a handle and the soft brush of a door across a floor.

A man walked into the room.

He came out of the dark at the edge of the frame and walked toward the camera, into the faint light. His face came up out of the shadow as he got closer.

James did not know him.

He was quite sure he had never seen him before.

The man stopped in front of the lens. He looked directly into it. He looked into it the way you look at somebody across a table, as if he knew precisely how many people were on the other side. Every television in the world, every phone, every screen that had gone black, was looking back at him.

He shifted slightly, getting his position right.

Then he smiled.

"Hi, everyone."