'Do you think that George suspects what we're really after?' Daisy asked the question as she thought about the progress or at least the education she was making in her quest.

'What are we after anyway?' Alex asked.

'We know that our bomber is a precise man! Or woman! Let's not be sexist!' John remembered the chilling message. 'Whoever it was said a precise time, which in itself shows a certain arrogance. They told us when it's going to happen! To the exact hour and the exact minute!'

'What did the message say?' Daisy was trying to remember. 'Today is April the first and on June the first in London at precisely eight forty-five a bomb will explode.'

'Correct! Note the precisely!' John had brought up a calendar on the screen. 'That's a Sunday this year. He wouldn't kill many at that time! Do you think he's bluffing? Do you think he just wants to get his way? Perhaps he's not such a hard man after all? What if...'

'You're speculating!' Daisy cut him short. 'We could think up reasons why he'd want it early on a Sunday morning! It's quiet! Most people would wake up to shocking news! You're right in that he wouldn't kill many! But supposing he wanted to make a statement. Blow up a building or something! The Cenotaph? Tower Bridge? We just don't know!'

'But suppose it isn't this year?' John clicked on the calendar. 'Next year the first is a Monday. What happens if you dismiss everything as a hoax after nothing happens and then a year later it all goes bang? Can you afford to ignore it?'

'We never do that! Never! Never!' She pointed a finger at John with every word. 'We've had no major incident for some years and it's because we've been absolutely vigilant! And to be fair so has the public!'

'I'll accept that!' John was not using a concilatory tone. 'But also could it have been luck?'

***

George returned carrying a plastic box containing several small devices and a lot of assorted cables, clips and plugs. 'I've brought some interesting bits of technology which will show you what can be done.' He placed the various items in a neat line on a table and the others gathered round. The two women sat together with John pulling his wheel-chair in at one end. George remained standing at the other.

'So what have you got?' Hardware had always been a mystery to John. 'It looks like a load of boxes and cables to me! Been sorting out your junk recently?'

'Can I start with a personal premable?' George had remained standing. 'I think it's relevant! You may not!'

'Yes! Go on!' John affirmed.

'I was born in Felixstowe just twenty kilometres down the road from here in 1952!' George looked at everybody before continuing. 'You might think what has that got to do with all these bits and bobs on the table. Well it has a lot to do with them. And especially for me!'

'Why is that?' Daisy couldn't see the relevance.

'Around midnight on the 31st of January in 1953, there was an awful flood in Felixstowe. It was just part of the horrendous East Coast floods that struck all the way down the coast from Yorkshire to Kent. But it was personal for me, in that my grandparents who lived in a prefab down towards the Dock, were two of the thirty-nine people who lost their lives.'

'I'm sorry! I didn't know that many died there!' John interjected. 'I've lived there for some time and no-one talks about it!'

'They don't!' George continued. 'They never did. When I grew up you could still the filthy tide marks on some of the houses in Langer Road as you went down to the Dock and the beach. After all the sea did rise over three metres in places. Any defences would have been overwhelmed! They probably would be today, as well! And global warming is probably making it more likely!'

'That's why I live on a hill!' Alex spoke for the first time in several minutes. 'How many died in the UK?'

'In the UK it was bad. Three hundred or so drowned, a car ferry, the Princess Victoria, went down between Stranraer and Larne, hundreds of thousands of hectares flooded ...' He paused. 'If it was bad here, it was far worse in Holland where nearly two thousand died.'

'Didn't anybody get any warnings?' Alex asked another question.

'No! The message never got through, as the wind and rain brought all the phone lines down. My father was a police sergeant at the time and the first thing they knew about it was the storm. Many died in their beds and it still affects him now! He just wished he could have done something! Done anything at all!'

'I've met officers who feel like him in the States.' Daisy broke in. 'They just wish that somehow they could have forseen 9/11 and stopped it!'

'It's difficult isn't it!' George walked to the whiteboard behind the table. 'Just do this little calculation! Thirty-nine died in Felixstowe, which then was a town of about fifteen thousand people. If you think of London then as being about eight million, it would have been equivalent to about twenty-thousand deaths in the city. That's a lot more than 9/11 and about half the number who died in the Blitz! We now get very upset when a few die in a train crash. I'm not saying we shouldn't, but my father has to live with the fact that people died because the warning system failed. Failed is rather charitable! It was non-existent!'

'I'd feel I'd failed if I was in a similar situation!' Daisy was agreeing with George. 'So what should we do?'

***

'I brought up the floods because they show how we should deal with terrorists, bombers and others.' He paused for effect. 'And also because it's very personal to me, as I've explained!'

'How do you mean?'

'What we've done is stage a war against the sea. A bit different to Bush's so-called 'War on Terrorism', because we have used technology correctly. Very importantly, rather than trust to judgments which are at best dubious and at worst political, we've analysed every scenario.' George paused again. 'You must first understand the reasons for the problem and then throw all the technology you can trust and afford against it. And if that fails you must have a fall-back! A Plan B! But above all you must be scientifically correct!'

'So is that where the stuff on the table comes in?' Alex asked the question.

'Yes!' He picked up an unassuming grey box with what looked like an aerial at one end and lots of wires at the other. 'This is a bit old hat now, but it's basically a mobile phone, that is connected through these wires to lots of sensors. Temperature! Wind! Water height! Anything that might be useful! It reads everything continuously and sends data back to a central reporting system. Similar devices are also used in those roadside weather stations with the solar panel you see on main roads.'

'I always wondered what they are?' Alex spoke. 'I'm not very technology minded! I'm a lawyer after all!'

'Later versions of these sort of devices have cameras, can control things like sluice gates and they are completely independent of fixed services such as electricity and phone lines.' He picked up a very small box about two centimetres square. 'This is the latest version. It would be much smaller, but for the connectors!' He handed it to Daisy. 'Feel the weight!'

She bounched it in her hand, before handing it to Alex. 'It weighs nothing! Does it have a battery and an aerial?'

'No! Those are external, but you only need pretty small ones.' George pulled a mobile phone from his pocket, slipped the cover back and pointed to the white block underneath. 'This is the battery and that's all you would need! And the latest phones are even smaller!'

'So what could this controller do?'

'Well! For a start it has precise timing and positioning! This is based on GPS from satellites and is extremely reliable. In our flood scenario, it contains a complete set of sun, moon and tide tables, so that it knows the conditions to expect and can take actions accordingly using very sophisticated calculations.'

'It doesn't seem very big?' Alex had spoken.

'It has a similar performance to the most powerful laptop computers!' George pointed to Alex's computer. 'And that is hundreds of times more powerful than computers were when I started working here in 1978!' He held up the small device. 'There is more than enough power and memory in this tiny computer to hold all of the tables for most of the world until the end of the century!'

'I take it that it can be fully programmed to do anything?' John was now handling the device.

'Yes!' George picked up a cable. 'This plugs it in to your computer, just as printers and those little drives do! Then you just transfer the programs! It couldn't be any simpler!'

'So let's get this right!' Daisy had stood up and had now taken control of the device. 'I could link this to a detonator and some explosive and then just give it a call and it would explode!'

'Yes!' George confirmed her thoughts. 'But then you could program it to go off at a particular time of day, when it was within a specific area as determined by the GPS system.'

'So you wouldn't have to phone?'

'Well you could set the phone to enable and disable it!' George expanded the possibilities. 'The possibilities are endless! Consider putting an improvised bomb on a petrol, gas or oxygen tanker that passed regularly through the centre of London!'

***

'You've thought this one through?' Daisy asked.

'Yes!' George replied. 'These devices are very very useful in the right hands. But they worry me! Used by a criminal or a terrorist they could be a very lethal weapon!'

'How much do they cost?'

'A couple of hundred Euros and all you need to do is add a SIM card for a valid mobile phone!' George removed the card from his phone and held it up. 'So if you use a Pay-and-Go type of phone then you can control it for a long time, without any chance of it being traced.'

'We've never liked them!' Daisy was giving the view of the Police. 'The preferred method of communication of drug-dealers and criminals. Usually, they pay a kid twenty Euros or so to get one with cash. We've tried to stop it, but they just find other bent dealers. You'd be surprised how many John Smiths have mobile phones!'

'I've done the analysis!' John spoke. 'A very significant percentage of mobiles are not connected to any valid address. They should have made them fully traceable. Look what happened when they did it for cars! Crime dropped significantly! Am I right, Daisy?'

'Yes! It was the best thing this Government did for fighting crime.' All vehicles now had machine readable number-plates that could be checked for all registration and insurance documents immediately. 'Ever heard of a drug-dealer, mugger or burglar, who was happy to go to work on a bus!' Her remarks brought a brief moment of humour to a rather glum meeting.

'George! You know this technology well!' He nodded to thank John. 'How many people could program one of these to make a serious bomb?'

'Can you use any of those Microsoft development languages, like Dot Net?'

'Yes! Of course!' John affirmed.

'Two of my children can!' Daisy added her answer. 'They've showed me how to do it. It doesn't look difficult!'

'It isn't!' George paused. 'There's probably one to two million in the UK alone who can do it and most could control one of these. Especially this one.' He indicated the latest device. 'Many do so that they can switch lights in their homes remotely! That sort of thing! There are even about ten magazines dedicated to automation based on this sort of technology.'

Copyright 2004 by Ewart Higgins