Playing God

In this extract from ELEANOR CATTON's long-awaited new novel, "Birnam Wood", an eco-activist unwittingly becomes the pawn of a US tech billionaire planning environmental mayhem.

- ELEANOR CATTON

It had taken Robert Lemoine barely twenty minutes to execute the man-in-the-middle attack. He had first sighted Mira when she turned off the highway on to the gravel access road and stashed her bike in the patch of scrub, and had gone at once to his controls; by the time she reached the second gate, he had forced a connection with her phone, accessed her identifying information, obtained her stored encryption key, simulated her over-the-air transmissions, established a connection with the local mast, and then authenticated himself so that from that point forward, he could appear to Mira’s service provider as Mira’s phone, and to Mira’s phone as her service provider. Not only did he now have complete access to her data, both present and historic, he also had the power to intercept and change her messages in both directions; now, if he wanted, he could both alter what communications she received, and send messages – to anyone – as her. It was a flawless capture. Had she ventured a little further up the gravel road, she would have come upon the trailer-mounted mobile cell site, fitted with an IMSI-catcher device, that he had used to carry out the operation; had she taken her phone out of her pocket, she might have noticed that it was hotter than usual, and less responsive, and that the battery was draining fast; and had she looked directly overhead at any time while she was exploring the farm, she might have seen, high above her, the dark blur of a surveillance drone, hovering in place. Of course, she’d done none of these things – but that wasn’t surprising; no one ever did.