Marc Elsberg is a former creative director in advertising. His debut thriller Blackout is a frighteningly plausible drama of a week-long international blackout caused by a hacker attack on power grids. An instant bestseller in Germany, it has sold over a million copies and has been translated worldwide. Marc Elsberg lives in Vienna, Austria.
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Originally published in Germany in 2012 by Blanvalet Verlag, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Transworld Digital
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Paperback edition published in 2017 by Black Swan
Copyright © Marc Elsberg 2012
Published in arrangement with Literary Agency Michael Gaeb
Cover design by Richard Shailer/TW
Marc Elsberg has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473541399
ISBNs 9781784161897 (B format)
9781784161880 (A format)
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Piero Manzano hit the brakes as hard as he could and braced himself against the steering wheel with both arms as his Alfa hurtled towards the light-green car ahead. His eyes frantically searched for an opening, some way to steer himself out of danger, but there was no time. In his mind he could already hear the awful sound of the two vehicles colliding. Brakes screeching, tyres skidding, the lights of the cars behind him in the rear-view mirror. Then the moment of impact.
And all the while, Manzano thought absurdly of chocolate, of the hot shower he’d been looking forward to, of the glass of wine on the sofa afterwards. Of falling into bed with Giulia or Paola over the coming weekend.
The Alfa jolted to a stop, millimetres away from the other car’s bumper. Manzano was thrown back into his seat. The street was pitch-black. The traffic signals, green a moment ago, had gone out, leaving only the trace of an afterglow on Manzano’s retinas. An ear-shattering din of honking and scraping metal enveloped him. From the left, the headlights of a delivery lorry came rushing his way. A massive jolt slammed Manzano’s head against the side window, and his car was spun around like a carousel before a second impact stopped it.
Dazed, he looked up and tried to get his bearings. One of his headlights illuminated dancing snowflakes above the black, wet tarmac. A chunk was missing from the bonnet. The lorry’s tail lights flashed a few metres up ahead.
Manzano didn’t have long to think. His fingers flew to his seat belt to release it, he felt for his mobile phone and leapt out of the car.
He found the first-aid kit and triangular reflector in the boot, and inspected his car. The lorry had crushed most of the front left side and grille, the front left tyre mashed deep into the mangled metal. The driver’s door of the lorry was hanging open. Manzano went around the front of the cab and froze.
The lights of the cars in the oncoming lane shimmered in the icy night air, creating an eerie glow. There had been a few scattered collisions and now all traffic was at a standstill. The light-green hatchback was completely caved in on the driver’s side, jammed crookedly beneath the bumper of the lorry. Steam rose from under the bonnet, or what was left of it. A short, sturdy man in a sleeveless T-shirt was tugging at the twisted driver’s door. The lorry driver, guessed Manzano. Manzano stumbled over to the car. What he saw made him stagger.
The impact had torn the driver’s seat from its housing and literally set it in the passenger’s lap. The driver hung lifeless in his seat belt, his head strangely twisted, the airbag limp in front of him. All that could be seen of the passenger was her head and one arm. Her face was covered in blood, her closed eyelids fluttered. Her lips moved almost imperceptibly.
‘Ambulanza!’ he shouted at the lorry driver. ‘Call an ambulance!’
‘No signal!’ yelled the lorry driver.
The passenger’s lips stopped moving. The small bloody bubbles that formed in the corner of her mouth were the only evidence that she was still alive.
A huge crowd of onlookers had now gathered. They stood in the falling snow and gaped.
‘Back off!’ Manzano shouted, but no one moved. And then he realized something. The street lights were off. In every respect the night was blacker than usual.
‘My God, what happened to you?’ a man in a parka asked him. He pointed to Manzano’s forehead. ‘You need a doctor.’
Only then did Manzano feel the pounding in his head. A warm trickle seeped down and pooled at his neck.
He tried to walk, but his legs wouldn’t obey. He stumbled to his knees, willing himself not to pass out. From the wreck came the sound of a car horn, ringing out into the night like a final, drawn-out cry for help.
‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Valentina Condotto, still punching frantically at her keyboard, glanced up at her colleague in alarm. A system alert was bleeping incessantly, while a whole battery of lights blinked on the monitors. ‘The frequency suddenly skyrocketed, and then the automatic shutdown kicked in. The whole of northern Italy is gone! Just like that. No warning!’
Condotto had joined the team at the Terna control centre on the outskirts of Rome as a system operator three years ago. Since then she’d spent eight hours a day monitoring the flow of electricity through Italy’s transmission grids, as well as the exchange of power with grids in neighbouring countries. The large projection screen in front of her displayed the Italian power grid as myriad coloured lines and little squares against a black background. Monitors to the left and right showed current data from the networks. On Condotto’s desk were four smaller screens with still more rows of numbers, curves and diagrams.
‘The rest of the country has gone yellow!’ Grid Operator Giuseppe Santrelli called across the room. ‘I have Milan on the phone, they’re trying to come back online but they can’t get a stable frequency from Enel. They’re asking if there’s anything we can do.’
‘Sicily’s red now, too!’ The control centre operated a traffic-light system: green meant everything was in order; yellow meant the grid was in difficulties; red signalled a blackout. Every system operator in the centre could tell by a single glance whether there was even a hint of a problem in the power grid. Given the complete international integration of the grid, this was an absolute necessity. For the most part, computers handled all necessary adjustments, responding in a millisecond to increase or reduce the flow of electricity. In the event of a large fluctuation, the system was set up to automatically shut down affected parts of the grid. The illuminated red area on Condotto’s screen told her that the computer had taken almost all regions north of Lazio and Abruzzo off the grid. Sicily was off as well. According to the map in front of her, only the bottom half of the boot was still being supplied with electricity. More than thirty million people were in the dark.
Condotto watched helplessly as more power surged into the rest of the grid, triggering further automatic shutdowns.
‘Ffffp! And there they go’ – Santrelli shook his head in dismay – ‘Calabria, Basilicata, parts of Apulia and Campania red. Remaining service areas turning yellow. And look!’ There was panic in his voice as he pointed at the screen. ‘The French and Austrians are in trouble now too!’
Herwig Oberstätter looked up from the switch box, straining to hear a repeat of the sound that had triggered his sense of unease. Like the vaulted ceiling of a gothic cathedral, the steel-and-concrete roof of the power plant turned the interior into a vast echo chamber, amplifying the drone of the generators. Hearing nothing untoward, he leaned over the railing of the high metal walkway that wound around the southern power plant’s interior, and peered at the three red generators below. Their casings stood in a row like gigantic barrels, each one housing magnets that weighed several tonnes, kilometres of coiled wire cable, spinning at several hundred revolutions per minute, propelled by steel shafts as thick as tree trunks that connected them to the truck-sized Kaplan turbines through which flowed the waters of the Danube, newly released from the massive dam with its thirty-four-kilometre reservoir, at a rate of over a thousand cubic metres per second.
The power plant, built in the 1950s and situated between Ybbs and Persenbeug in Lower Austria, was one of the largest on the Danube. After nine years in the job and extensive training in mechanical engineering, Oberstätter understood the process by which the rotating magnetic field induced voltage in the stator’s conductors, thus converting kinetic energy into electrical energy. Even so, he never ceased to marvel at the power of the three sleeping red giants under his care, miraculously generating the power that drove modern life, even in the remotest hut in the country. Aware that the instant this power dried up, the world would come to a standstill, he tended his machines like a father watching over his children, constantly monitoring their progress. And tonight his senses had picked up on some irregularity that as yet he couldn’t quite place.
It was Friday evening. Workers were returning home, looking forward to opening the front door and being warmed by central heating, a hot shower, cooked food, relaxing in front of the television. Even with Austria’s power plants running at full capacity, at this time of day it was necessary to import power to meet demand. Oberstätter moved a little further along the walkway to listen again. And as he did, the noise level in the power plant began to increase.
Instantly grasping the implications of what he was hearing, he reached for his radio to alert the switch room to the problem.
Through the static hiss and popping of the receiver, it was all he could do to make out his colleague’s response.
‘We see it too. We’ve got a sudden drop in frequency across the grid!’
The droning in the room was now punctuated by an irregular pounding. Oberstätter cast a nervous eye over the cylinders; what he was seeing was the exact reverse of a drop in frequency. The generators were clearly overburdened, not under. Who could be using so much power all of a sudden?
He shouted into the microphone, ‘The frequency’s too high – the generators are cracking up. Activate shutdown immediately.’
If the frequency in the power grid was so unstable that it was reaching his generators, this was a much scarier problem than a surge in demand caused by a small part of the grid dropping off. Had the power gone out over large areas? If so, tens of thousands of Austrians were now in the dark.
Oberstätter looked on, horrified, as the red giants began first to vibrate, then to jump. If the number of revolutions became too great, their own centrifugal force would destroy the machines. The system should automatically have shut down by this point, but the safeguards had obviously failed.
‘Cut it!’ he bellowed into the radio. ‘Shut it down now, or this whole place’ll be blown apart!’
He froze, transfixed in the face of this power. The three super-machines rose and fell unevenly. His heart pounded in his chest, anticipating the moment one of them would explode through the roof like the lid blowing off a pressure cooker.
And then the vibrations began to decrease, the giants stopped their jumping and settled down once more. The shaking could only have lasted seconds. To Oberstätter, it had seemed like an eternity. The silence that followed was eerie. It took a while for it to sink in that the strip lights had all gone out. The power plant was illuminated only by the red glow of the emergency lights.
‘Sweden, Norway and Finland to the north, Italy and Switzerland to the south – all gone,’ said the operator whose shoulder Jochen Pewalski was looking over. ‘Same with parts of Denmark, France, Austria … also some regions of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. E.ON is reporting a few outages, Vattenfall and EnBW have gone completely yellow. Same story from suppliers in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Britain.’
Jochen Pewalski looked up at the vast display board for confirmation. Sixteen metres wide and four metres high, it delivered up-to-the-minute information on energy transmission throughout Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Around him, systems operators manned workstations loaded with state-of-the-art technology. It was a far cry from the office he’d occupied when he first joined Amprion GmbH thirty years ago. The Brauweiler building on the outskirts of Cologne had been transformed in the intervening years, thanks to the ever-increasing demand for energy. Transmission grids were no longer confined by regional or international borders; nowadays, energy flowed right across Europe, from the place where it was generated to wherever there was demand. And as head of Grid System Management, it was Pewalski’s job to oversee and coordinate this constant give and take of energy, not just for Amprion’s own transmission grid and those of the other German operators, but for the entire northern sector of Europe.
Usually the board that loomed above him reflected a state of energy equilibrium that could be maintained by relatively minor adjustments to generate precisely the amount of energy needed. Tonight the display showed a network in chaos.
‘This is worse than 2006,’ groaned one of the operators.
Pewalski recalled the night in question: Saturday, 4 November 2006. A cruise ship from the Papenburg shipyard was being towed along the canals to the coast, and to allow it to pass under overhead cables, E.ON had shut off the power. Unfortunately, they had failed to give neighbouring networks prior warning. As a result, lines became immediately overburdened, triggering automatic shutdowns. Despite the efforts of Pewalski and his colleagues to balance the system, the cascading knock-on effect proved unstoppable. Fifteen million people across Europe found themselves plunged into blackout. It took an hour and a half to re-establish operations. They had come within a hair’s breadth of the complete collapse of the entire European grid.
The current situation was looking far more catastrophic.
‘The Czech Republic is totally red now, too,’ the young man reported.
Twenty minutes earlier the Italians had been first to experience problems. Then, as things were falling apart to the south, the Swedes had started having massive difficulties, followed by the rest of Scandinavia. And already reports were coming in that the cold winter weather was claiming victims all over Europe.
‘We have to secure the German grid at all costs to ensure the East–West connection isn’t interrupted,’ Pewalski urged his team.
He commanded the operators to redirect power to lines that were still clear, shut down power plants, bring others online, send any surplus energy to pumped-storage plants for as long as they still had the capacity to receive it. Where necessary, they began load-shedding – which left some factories on a mandatory break and thousands of people in the dark. But just when their efforts seemed to be working, a number of lines on the board suddenly began flashing red.
Pewalski tried to remain calm, but his mind was racing. Provided a substantial part of the grid continued to function, they could use the power generated to reactivate downed networks relatively quickly. But if the blackout were to spread until the entire grid was taken out, it would be a very different story. Nuclear reactors and coal-fired power stations could not be brought back online within minutes.
‘Spain’s gone yellow.’
‘OK, that’s enough,’ Pewalski declared, reaching a decision. ‘We’re sealing Germany off.’ And then, more quietly, ‘If it’s still possible.’
‘I hope we’ve got enough petrol left,’ said Chloé Terbanten anxiously. Her friends, Sophia Angström and Lara Bondoni, who’d been sitting in the back seat admiring the snow-covered landscape, both leaned forward to peer at the dashboard. Fleur van Kaalden, in the front passenger seat, broke off tapping her thigh in time to the music on the radio and suggested, ‘Maybe we should fill up again before we cross the border, just to make sure.’ The Austrian border couldn’t be far now. And then they’d be only an hour away from the ski cabin they had booked for the coming week. The foothills of the Alps were already visible in the moonlight, which now and again peeped out from behind the clouds. Sophia could make out the shapes of individual farmhouses, all in darkness; people in this part of the world must go to bed really, really early.
They were travelling in Chloé’s Citroën, the boot crammed with oversized suitcases, skis and snowboards. They had already stopped for petrol once en route, spending longer than they’d intended in the service station café, drinking coffee and flirting with a couple of young Swedish guys who were on their way to Switzerland to go snowboarding.
‘Services in one kilometre,’ said Fleur, pointing to the sign as they whizzed past.
Sophia scanned the roadside for the lights of the service station, but all she could see was the moonlit landscape.
Chloé took the exit, a long, drawn-out curve.
‘It’s probably on the other side of the autobahn,’ said Lara, as a wide expanse opened up in front of them with lights dotted at intervals along the slip road.
Chloé slowed. ‘What on earth …?’
The petrol station was in darkness. The lights they’d seen turned out to belong to the cars queuing for the pumps, their headlights casting bright spots on the front of the building. Here and there, beams of light darted back and forth in the night – torches, probably. Leaving the headlights on, they got out.
Immediately Sophia felt the cold penetrate her jeans and sweater. The car ahead of them had a German licence plate. She spoke the language better than the others, so she went forward and asked what was happening.
‘Power’s out,’ explained the driver through the half-open window.
She then approached a man in overalls standing by one of the pumps. He gave the same answer.
‘So we can’t get petrol here?’ she asked, beginning to panic a little.
‘The pumps are powered by electricity from the grid. Until it comes back on, we can’t get the fuel up from the underground tanks.’
‘Don’t you have backup power?’
‘Nope.’ He shrugged in apology. ‘It should be back on any moment, though.’
‘How long is it going to be?’ asked Sophia, glancing back at the long line of waiting cars and the restaurant’s packed-out car park, also in darkness. A travelling Friday before a week of winter holidays.
‘Maybe fifteen minutes.’ Not a hope, thought Sophia as she made her way back to the others. Chloé, having reached the same conclusion, pounded her hand on the roof of the car and yelled ‘Get in, guys. Let’s go find the next service station!’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
The interior minister stood before the screen; a tall man with a red face, thinning hair and a thunderous expression. He had probably been pulled out of a gala dinner, judging by his tuxedo. Frauke Michelsen couldn’t remember ever having seen him in the Interior Ministry’s incident room. Probably because she was rarely there herself. Tonight the room was full. Civil servants, information technology specialists, federal police, public security, as well as crisis management and civil protection; Michelsen knew more or less all of them.
Helge Brockhorst from the Joint Federal and State Information and Command Centre in Bonn could be seen on the screen. ‘It’s not that simple.’
Wrong answer, thought Michelsen.
‘With your permission, Minister,’ State Secretary Holger Rhess spoke up. ‘Perhaps Mr Bädersdorf here can shed some light on matters for you.’ Michelsen groaned inwardly. Bädersdorf had worked for the German Association of Energy and Water Industries for years, until eventually the lobbyists had succeeded in installing him within the ministry itself.
‘Imagine the power grid as a human circulatory system,’ Bädersdorf explained. ‘Perhaps with the difference that instead of one heart, there are several. These are the power plants. From the power plants, electricity is distributed to the rest of the country, like blood being carried around the body, only instead of blood vessels it relies on power lines. High-voltage power lines are the main arteries, transporting large quantities across broad stretches; then there are cables with average voltage, which transport the energy further to the regional networks, which then distribute to the individual end receivers – the latter are the capillaries that bring blood to every cell.’
As he spoke, he tapped on the relevant parts of his body. This wasn’t the first time he had delivered this particular lecture, and Michelsen had to acknowledge, without envy, that it wasn’t a bad analogy.
‘Pivotal here are two aspects. First: in order to keep the grid stable, a consistent frequency must be maintained. We can compare that to blood pressure in a human person. If it gets too high or too low, we keel over. That’s unfortunately what has happened with the power grid.
‘Second: you can’t really store power. Like blood, it must flow continuously. The quantity needed varies dramatically throughout the course of the day; so in the same way that the heart has to beat faster if a person suddenly breaks into a run, power plants must deliver more energy at times of peak demand. Either that, or additional power plants must be brought online. Make sense so far?’
He looked around the room and received several nods. The interior minister, however, was frowning. ‘Yes, yes, but how does that explain what’s happening across Europe? I thought the German power grid was secure?’
‘It is – in principle,’ answered the lobbyist, as Michelsen secretly dubbed him. ‘That can be demonstrated by the fact that Germany was one of the last countries to lose its power supply and one of the first to start bringing individual regions back online. But the German grid is not an island within Europe.’
He tapped away at the keyboard on his computer and the large projection screen came to life, displaying a map of Europe that was covered with a thick network of coloured lines.
‘This is a map of European power grids. As you can see, they are tightly interconnected.’
The image on the wall changed into a blue graphic on which symbols for power plants, transformer stations, factories and houses were connected by a network of lines.
‘In days gone by, national energy providers both generated power and distributed it. They also managed each aspect of the supply chain. Through the liberalization of the energy market, however, this structure has fundamentally changed. Today there are, on the one hand, those who generate power …’
The power plant in the graphic changed from blue to red.
‘And on the other, there are those who operate the grid.’
The connection lines in the graphic turned green.
‘Completing the circuit between them, so to speak, there are now additionally’ – in the loop appeared another building symbol with a euro sign – ‘energy exchanges. Here, power generators and power traders negotiate prices. The power supply therefore consists today of many different players, who in a case such as the one we have before us must first coordinate with one another.’
Michelsen felt obliged to expand on his remarks. ‘And their foremost concern is not optimally supplying energy to the population and to industry, but rather securing a profit. That means bringing many different interests together under one roof. And, in the event of a crisis, doing so within minutes.
‘As yet, we don’t know the cause of the outage. But you can be sure that everyone is working towards the same goal.’
‘Why don’t you know the cause of the outage?’ asked a member of staff from the public security division.
‘The systems these days are far too complex for that to be determined immediately.’
‘How much time will it take to re-establish the supply?’ asked the state secretary.
‘According to our information, most regions should be getting power back by tomorrow morning.’
‘I hate to be the voice of doom,’ Michelsen spoke up. ‘But we’re talking about most of Europe here. The corporations have no experience whatsoever with a crisis of this magnitude.’ She took care to maintain a controlled tone. ‘I’m accountable for crisis management and civil protection. If tomorrow morning public transportation isn’t running, train stations and airports are at a standstill, offices and schools can’t be heated, telecommunications are down, and the water supply for large parts of the population cannot be guaranteed, we’re going to have a huge problem. The best thing we can do now is start preparing.’
‘How exactly will the supply be re-established?’ asked the interior minister.
Bädersdorf got in before Michelsen could speak. ‘In general, you go little by little, build up small grids around the power plants, make sure that they maintain a stable frequency, and then successively enlarge them. Then you start to join these partial grids together and to synchronize them.’
‘How long does each of these steps take?’
‘For building back up, it depends – anything from a few seconds to a few hours. At that point, the synchronization should go relatively quickly.’
‘You say regions throughout Europe have been affected,’ said the minister. ‘Are we in contact with the other countries?’
‘Happening as we speak,’ confirmed Rhess.
‘Good, put a crisis team together and keep me up to date as things develop.’ The minister turned to go. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.’
Speak for yourself, thought Michelsen. For some of us it’s going to be a very long night.
Delayed.
Delayed.
Delayed.
In the past hour, the departures and arrivals boards had shown one flight after another as delayed.
‘Will it be much longer?’ asked Bernadette, her favourite doll clutched to her chest.
‘Read it yourself,’ ordered her older brother pompously. ‘It says right up there that our flight is delayed.’
‘But I can’t read.’
‘Baby,’ mocked Georges.
‘Am not!’
‘Baby! Baby!’
Bernadette started to whine. ‘Maman!’
‘That’s enough now,’ François Bollard told his children. ‘Georges, stop annoying your sister.’
‘So now it’ll be midnight before we get to Paris,’ groaned Bollard’s wife, Marie. Dark shadows had appeared under her eyes.
‘Friday night,’ said Bollard. ‘It’s not like this is the first time.’
They stood among a cluster of people craning their necks in front of the announcement boards. The new departure time was 22:00.
The long rows of seats in the waiting areas were overflowing. Those without seats were squatting on their suitcases. In the fast-food restaurants, massive queues had formed. Bollard looked around to see if he could find a quiet spot for them somewhere, but everywhere he turned there were hordes of people.
‘What’s up there now?’ asked Bernadette as the boards above them suddenly came to life.
‘Oh, great,’ Bollard heard his wife say. He looked up at the display.
Cancelled.
Cancelled.
Cancelled.
Lauren Shannon kept her camera trained on James Turner, CNN’s correspondent in France, as he thrust the microphone under the nose of his interviewee.
‘I’m standing here in front of the headquarters of the Paris fire department on Place Jules Renard,’ said Turner. ‘With me now is François Liscasse, général de division, head of the Brigade de sapeurs-pompiers de Paris, as the fire department is called here in the French capital.’
In the glare of the headlights, the snowflakes shone like fireflies.
Turner turned towards Liscasse.
‘Général Liscasse, Paris has been without power for more than five hours now. Has there been any information on how long the situation is going to continue?’
Despite the weather, Liscasse wore only a blue uniform. His cap made Shannon think of Charles de Gaulle, which in turn triggered a recollection that the Paris fire department was a military unit that reported to the Interior Ministry.
‘I cannot provide any information on that subject at the present time. Throughout Paris and the surrounding areas all available men have been mobilized – several thousand of them. We do after all have the largest firefighting organization in the world, after New York. The population of Paris can therefore feel secure. At the moment, we are busy freeing people caught in the Metro and in lifts. In addition, there have been many traffic accidents and a few scattered fires.’
‘Does that mean that some will have to wait until tomorrow morning to be rescued?’
‘We’re assuming that power will be back on soon. But we will free every single individual, that I guarantee.’
‘Général—’
‘Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, please, I must get back to work.’ Brushing off the dismissal, Turner faced the camera and intoned, ‘James Turner, Paris, on the “Night without Power”.’ As soon as he’d given Shannon the signal to cut, he pulled up the fur collar of his coat and set off in the direction of the car, calling over his shoulder, ‘It’s about time I asked these guys at the Interior Ministry a few questions. Come on, let’s drive there now.’
As Turner’s camerawoman and chauffeur, Shannon had mastered the art of weaving her way through the streets of Paris – or so she’d thought, until the traffic chaos of a few hours earlier. The situation on the roads had calmed since then, but even so it took them more than twenty minutes to cover a distance they could have walked in ten. The Rue de Miromesnil was blocked off to prevent access. Without giving it a second thought, Shannon parked in a driveway.
She had lived in Paris for two years. The plan had been to travel the world after college, but she’d ended up here. Her intention to carry on studying journalism had also fallen by the wayside when she landed the job as camerawoman for Turner, which took up way too much of her time. Turner was an arrogant scumbag who thought he was Bob Woodward – despite the fact she was a better researcher, found better stories and had a better grasp of how to tell them, he refused to let her in front of the camera – but on the plus side she’d been around a lot and had learned loads. In her meagre free time, she made her own features and put them up on the web.
They hurried to the blockade on foot.
‘Press,’ Turner informed the police guard, flashing his credentials. ‘Step aside, please,’ was the policeman’s only response.
Shannon saw the headlights of several cars coming towards them.
Without slowing down, the cars drove past them through the small gap that had been cleared by the police officers. Shannon kept the camera on them, turned when they did, but couldn’t make out a thing behind the darkened windows.
‘Well?’ asked Turner.
‘I got the shot,’ Shannon answered. ‘Looking was your job. So who was it?’
‘No idea – too dark to see.’
‘For God’s sake!’ huffed Isabelle Marpeaux as her husband, Yves, pulled a thick jacket on over his warm sweater. ‘You work in a power plant, and here we sit, fifteen kilometres away, without electricity.’
Covered in layers of sweaters and jackets, she looked even more unshapely than usual, sitting there in the candlelight.
‘And what am I supposed to do, huh?’ he demanded.
‘It’s the same thing with the kids,’ she repeated for the umpteenth time.
She had managed to track down their son on his mobile phone an hour and a half after the power had gone out, their daughter a few minutes after that. Their son lived with his family near Orléans, their daughter in Paris. ‘I’ve been trying for ever to get through,’ she had explained, ‘but the mobile phone network …’
Marpeaux hadn’t been able to tell the children anything, except that they too were without power.
‘You can imagine how your mother is complaining.’
He closed the door behind him and left his wife there in the cold, dark house. After all the hours of nagging he’d endured, it was a relief to be getting away. Outside, his breath was a white cloud rising into a sky that was free of stars.
The Renault started without a problem. On the way, Marpeaux surfed the radio for the latest news. Many stations were silent, one or two were playing music. In the end he gave up. Looking out at the dark winter landscape of bare fields and leafless trees, it was hard to believe that he was driving through one of France’s most popular holiday destinations. When spring came, millions of tourists would flood into the region, shopping for wine and souvenirs, and hoping to catch a whiff of savoir-vivre as they ventured into the heart of France on the trail of bygone generations of aristocrats who’d inhabited the chateaux in the hills along the Loire. Marpeaux had come to the region twenty-five years ago, not for its beauty, but for a well-paid job as an engineer at the Saint-Laurent nuclear power plant.
After twenty minutes, the village of Saint-Laurent-Nouan, uncommonly dark that night, with the streetlights off and no lights on in the windows, appeared silhouetted against the sky. Behind it, lit up as if in mockery, rose the cooling towers of the reactor. As always, it reminded him of a giant steam-engine house, the kind they’d built in the early nineteenth century. The fundamental concept underlying the technology remained pretty much the same, as did the riverside location to allow for drawing water from the Loire; the main difference being that instead of burning wood to power the generators they relied on fissionable uranium or plutonium.
Marpeaux passed the security checkpoint at the entrance and parked the car in his usual spot. France received 80 per cent of its energy from nuclear power plants. If the news reports of the past few hours were correct and the grid had almost completely collapsed, then most of the reactors would have been shut down, thought Marpeaux. The automated mechanisms would sink the controlling rods between the fuel rods in order to bring the nuclear chain reaction to a halt – or at least, as much of a halt as possible. The reactor would continue to produce heat and would therefore need to be cooled to prevent a meltdown. Normally the cooling systems drew their energy from the grid; in the event of an outage, the emergency systems sprang into action. The facility in Saint-Laurent possessed three of these per block, each independent from the others, all fed by diesel engines, with sufficient fuel for seven days.
As he opened the door to the control booth he was greeted by a cacophony of alarms. A twenty-year veteran in the job, Marpeaux didn’t bat an eyelid. Inside, a dozen of his colleagues were calmly going about their work, monitoring screens and gauges, making adjustments. Even the less experienced members of the team had been well drilled in dealing with emergencies; during their training they’d have been through simulations of every conceivable emergency scenario.
The duty shift leader came across to greet him. ‘One of the diesels in Block 2 broke down, right at the outset.’
‘The others are running?’
‘Without any problems.’
‘Do you suppose it had anything to do with the test?’ Marpeaux asked. Three days ago they had checked over the emergency power systems and their readings had shown that one of the diesels was defective. When the engineers had gone down to examine it, they could find no problem; it appeared to be working perfectly. At the time, they’d put it down to a malfunction of the instruments used to perform the test.
The shift leader shrugged. ‘You know how it is. We might know in two months when we’ve investigated and reconstructed everything.’
Marpeaux groaned at the thought of the paperwork that investigation would entail, then donned his shift supervisor badge and nodded for his colleague to begin the handover briefing.
‘Deep breaths, in and out,’ instructed the doctor.
The cold stethoscope pressed into Manzano’s back.
‘I’m telling you, I’m absolutely fine.’
The doctor, a young woman with TV-star looks, came around to face him and shone a small torch in Manzano’s eyes.
‘Headache? Dizziness? Nausea?’
‘No, nothing.’
Manzano sat bare-chested on a gurney in a tiny room in the emergency ward of the Ospedale Maggiore di Milano. Although he had regained consciousness after briefly losing it at the scene of the accident, the paramedics had insisted on taking him with them. His car was a write-off anyway – the fire department would deal with it before he could.
‘Mouth open.’
Manzano complied, and the doctor inspected his throat. How this was supposed to help with a small laceration on his forehead was a mystery.
‘Sew this thing up and let me go home,’ he told her.
‘Is there someone there who can look after you?’
‘Was that an offer?’
‘It was not.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay here?’
‘If we can share a bottle of good wine, I’m perfectly happy to stay.’
‘Tempting,’ she replied with a cool smile, ‘but here we only use alcohol for disinfecting.’
‘Well, in that case, I suggest a decent Barolo back at my place. Hopefully we can do without the X-ray.’
‘That we can,’ she said and pulled out a syringe.
Manzano felt sick when he saw the needle.
‘I’m giving you a local anaesthetic, close to the wound, and then you can go. Watch out, this is going to hurt a little.’
‘Is this really necessary?’ he asked.
‘Would you like me to sew it up without the anaesthetic?’
Manzano began to sweat. Keeping a tight grip on the gurney, he turned his gaze to the floor so as not to have to look at the doctor. ‘The power’s out here too?’ he asked, hoping to distract himself.
‘All over the city, it looks like. For the past hour I’ve been getting nothing but guys like you in here. There’s more waiting outside. Car accidents, because all of a sudden the lights aren’t working. People who fell over when the Metro came to a halt. So, that’s you sorted. There’ll probably be a small scar, nothing too bad. Makes a man more interesting.’
Manzano relaxed again. ‘As interesting as Frankenstein’s monster.’
This time a real smile skittered across her face. Manzano put his shirt back on, with its bloodstained collar, then his coat, which had red stains on its sleeves. He thanked the doctor and found his way out.
Outside he looked in vain for a taxi. He asked the man at the hospital’s information desk, who shrugged apologetically.
‘Assuming I can get through, I’d be happy to book a cab for you, but right now the wait time runs to at least an hour. With public transport out of action, the taxis are in demand. It’s like the big blackout of 2003.’
A date every Italian remembered: the whole country had been without power for twenty-four hours. Hopefully this one wouldn’t last that long.
He thanked the man, turned up his coat collar, and trudged off.
In the streets the lights of the cars blurred together into a single stream that sluggishly pushed its way through the dark canyons between buildings. The icy wind sliced through his coat.
He weaved slowly through the alleys towards the cathedral, accompanied by a never-ending concert of car horns in the background. Once past the church, he turned down Via Dante in the direction of Parco Sempione. The honking grew louder as drivers grew increasingly frustrated at finding their progress blocked by abandoned trams. He carried on walking through the dark, congested streets, at times having to squeeze between shopfronts and cars that had mounted the pavement in an effort to continue their journey. Most of the shops were closed, even if the signs showing their opening hours said differently.
Fascinated, he realized he was discovering things that he’d never noticed by daylight or streetlight. Clever bits of signage above shops, for example, or buildings he would have passed by, where now he paused to look at the façades. In a tiny alimentari a stooped figure was rummaging around by candlelight. In the glass door hung a sign that read Chiuso: Closed. Manzano knocked all the same. The figure inside stopped rummaging and came to the door; it was an old man in a white smock. He eyed Manzano suspiciously for a moment before opening up. A bell chimed above the entrance.
‘What do you want?’
‘Can I buy something?’
‘Only if you’ve got cash. Electronic payments won’t work.’
The smell of sausages and cheese, antipasti and bread met Manzano’s nose. He fished out his wallet and counted.
‘I’ve got forty left.’
‘That should do. You don’t look like much of an eater. What happened to your head?’
He left the door open and went off behind the counter.
‘Small accident on account of the power outage.’
Manzano chose bresaola, salami finocchietta, Taleggio, goat’s cheese, marinated mushrooms and artichokes, and half a loaf of white bread. All for sixteen euros. He said goodbye and left with his spoils.
For three years Manzano had lived on the fourth floor of a crumbling building on Via Piero della Francesca. With no light on in the entrance, he could barely see a hand in front of his face as he climbed the stairs. But once inside his own apartment, he was struck by how he’d managed to get there as if on autopilot – lifting his hand to exactly the right height to find the keyhole, locating the coat hook by touch, setting down the laptop bag and groceries, making his way to the bathroom – all without seeing a thing.
There was a rattle after the flush and that was it for the water. Manzano missed the soft hiss the water normally made as it filled the tank. He turned the old-fashioned tap at the washbasin, which coughed out a few drops before going quiet.
This blackout was beginning to get on his nerves. He could get by for a while without power, but now he was supposed to get by without water too? It wasn’t a prospect he relished, considering how dirty he was.
The knock on the door made him jump.
‘Boo! It’s a ghost!’ The face of his neighbour, Carlo Bondoni, appeared in the doorway. He looked like something straight out of a Caravaggio painting, the candle in his hand giving off just enough of a glow to reveal his wrinkled face and the unkempt white hair that circled his bald spot. He held up the candle so he could see Manzano, then cried out in shock, ‘Dear God, what happened to you?’
‘An accident.’
‘There’s not a light on in the whole city,’ Bondoni reported. ‘Said so on the radio.’
‘I know,’ replied Manzano. ‘The traffic lights went out. My Alfa’s a total write-off.’
‘It was before.’
‘You always did know how to make me feel better.’
‘Here, light a candle for it,’ said Bondoni, producing a candle from his pocket. ‘Now you won’t have to sit in the dark.’
Manzano lit it from Bondoni’s flame.
‘Thanks. I’ve got a packet of candles stashed away somewhere, this’ll make it easier to find them.’
‘Hey, you know all about engineering and IT – can’t you do anything to fix this mess? No TV, no Internet – I don’t even know where I am any more. I blame these new-fangled electric meters …’
Manzano was hungry. He had known Bondoni long enough to guess where this conversation was headed. Without television, the old man was bored and desperate for entertainment. Well, what the hell. It wasn’t as if he had any plans.
‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘It’s too cold to hang around out there. Have you eaten?’
‘Nothing’s working here either!’ cried Chloé. ‘It’s unbelievable!’
Sophia leaned forward from the back seat and peered through the patch of windscreen cleared by the wipers. It was snowing heavily and the petrol station they’d just pulled in to was a repeat of the previous three: cars abandoned on the forecourt, others parked on the slip road, drivers trying to weave their way out of the chaos. She peered at the Citroën’s fuel gauge. A yellow light indicated that they were now running on reserves. ‘We won’t make it to the cabin on what we’ve got left,’ she reasoned. ‘That leaves us with two options: wait here till the pumps start working again …’
‘Which could take all night,’ remarked Chloé.
‘Or leave the highway and look for a place to stay,’ Fleur suggested.
‘But we can’t look for long,’ Chloé pitched in. ‘Because we won’t get very far. And I don’t want to end up stranded on some Austrian country road in this weather. At least here we’ll freeze close to a fresh supply.’
Sophia took out her smartphone to search for accommodation nearby, then swore under her breath. ‘No Internet connection,’ she moaned, putting the phone back in her bag.
The clock showed 22:47.
‘What I really wanted was to be sitting in front of a cosy fire with a mug of hot punch by now,’ she sighed. ‘OK, who’s for finding a hotel, who’s for waiting here? And … Go!’
A chorus of four voices: ‘Wait here.’
‘I’m hungry,’ Lara Bondoni added.
‘The shop and restaurant look closed,’ observed Chloé.
‘Well, I need to go to the toilet, so I’m heading over there anyway. Who’s coming with?’ asked Lara.
‘Me,’ answered Fleur.
Sophia and Chloé looked at each other and nodded, then the four of them set off.
The petrol station was indeed closed, most of the cars empty. They circled the building and found the bathrooms at the back. A horrific stench wafted out when they opened the door. It was too dark to see.
‘Oh my God, I am not going in there,’ Sophia declared.
They turned and made their way to the restaurant building. Weak light could be seen through the fluted glass of the large double doors. As they stepped inside, Sophia felt a thrill of adventure – a childish sort of adventure, like when she was at summer camp and they’d sheltered from a thunderstorm in an abandoned hut. Every table in the restaurant was occupied, and there were candles flickering on a couple of them. Some customers made conversation, others sat in silence or slept. There was a musty smell, but at least it was warmer here than outside. A man got up and came towards them. He was wearing a down jacket and a bow tie hung loose around his neck.
‘We’re full,’ he said. ‘Light, water, bathroom, stove, refrigerator, heating, booking and payment systems – none of it’s working. I was supposed to be off three hours ago. But we can’t lock people out. If you can find a little spot for yourselves, you’re welcome to stay.’
The nine men stood motionless, staring at the monitors in the control booth.
‘And … Go!’
Oberstätter pressed the button.
For three hours they had argued, run simulations, phoned colleagues in other stations, trying to establish what had gone wrong. So far, all they could say for certain was that most of Europe was without power. The power plants that supplied the grid had gone down like dominoes as automatic safety measures triggered by the sudden spike in frequency kicked in to deactivate the system.
Ybbs-Persenbeug should have shut down automatically too. Oberstätter still couldn’t understand why it hadn’t, and why the displays in the control booth had registered a drop in frequency even as the generators were shuddering and jumping before his eyes. He only hoped that the facility hadn’t been damaged. Run-of-river hydro plants like this one had a vital role to play in re-establishing the supply, since they could start up again without assistance. Not that it was a simple process of pressing a button. First, they had to let the water through the turbines; then switch on the generators; then step by step activate the various pressure valves and other components. Only then could they start feeding power into the grid.