Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  The room filled quickly. One of the new arrivals was the doctor who’d been called in to assess the suspect’s condition because of the circumstances of his arrest. He immediately took over. He worked on the collapsed man for several minutes but without any response, and finally had to admit that he was completely unresponsive. Dead, in short.

  That wasn’t the result North had been hoping for, and clearly the two men he assumed were from Millbank felt the same way. He buttonholed one of them in the corridor outside the interview room.

  ‘You’re from Five, right?’ he began, and the man nodded. ‘Okay, I’m C-TAC, so we have a high-level interest in this. To save us having to hack our way through a jungle of red tape while our lords and masters decide exactly where the buck is going to stop and how best they can cover their arses, just tell me what happened in that room.’

  ‘Let me see some ID.’

  North obliged him by again producing his MOD Form 90 and his C-TAC pass that allowed him access to SIS headquarters at Vauxhall Cross.

  ‘Okay. We’d hardly even started with the suspect, just organised coffee and were trying to empathise with him. You know, softly, softly to get him to start talking, but he just asked for a solicitor and then clammed up. No response at all, even if we were well off subject, like asking him if he took sugar in his coffee and if he would want to eat halal meals while he was in custody. We kept on trying but we really weren’t getting anywhere. He hadn’t been carrying any kind of ID or anything else that would identify him, and the same went for the stiff with half his head blown off, so we didn’t even have his name or the name of the man in the boat with him. What we did know was that he was clearly really upset that they hadn’t managed to pull off the attack. That was quite obvious, but non-verbal.

  ‘The only thing he did say didn’t make too much sense, and that was clearly deliberate. He kept checking the time on the wall clock as if he was expecting something, or maybe somebody, to walk into the interview room. Then he seemed almost to relax, but he still didn’t say anything. But a couple of minutes before he collapsed he came up with what sounded like a memorised and prepared short statement, almost like the kind of videos that shahids make before they carry out their attacks as justification for what they’re about to do. But his statement was really short. He just said the West was going to pay – so nothing much new there – and the next attack would be much bigger and on a much bigger target.’

  ‘Did you note down exactly what he said?’ North asked.

  The man from Millbank nodded. ‘Yes, and both of us had digital recorders running from the moment the interview started.’

  ‘Right. I’d like audio copies of both those recordings sent to C-TAC please, so we can do our own transcription. Then what happened?’

  ‘He just sat there looking at us across the table as if he was expecting us to react to what he’d said, but of course we didn’t. And then he keeled over, just fell sideways out of the chair. No warning, no indication that he was sick. He just collapsed. I’m not a medical man, but I don’t think it was a heart attack. I mean, he didn’t gasp for breath or clutch his chest or do anything like that.’

  ‘So what do you think killed him?’

  The man from Five shook his head. ‘You know that their boat was rammed? Well, perhaps he hit his head on something when that happened. That could have caused bleeding inside his skull, but the doctor didn’t find any evidence of head injuries when he gave him the once-over, so maybe it was something else. I don’t know.’

  North was experiencing something akin to déjà vu. What the man from the Security Service was describing seemed to him to be remarkably similar to what he had personally experienced in the helicopter above Brize Norton: a person apparently acting normally and then suddenly totally losing consciousness and with death supervening seconds or minutes later. But that suggested links and motives that appeared to dramatically increase the seriousness of the situation. And it could of course all be some kind of bizarre coincidence, though North really wasn’t a fan of that kind of explanation. It was certainly worth investigating, to get an answer to the obvious question.

  ‘You’ve probably got more top weight around here than I have, so let me suggest something for you to follow up. When they do the autopsy make sure they pay particular attention to the composition of his blood. What they’re looking for is a couple of unusual chemicals, but more importantly they need to fractionate a blood sample and check for a discolouration above the plasma layer.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘This was all new to me until a few days ago,’ North replied, ‘and I haven’t got time to explain it to you. Just remember what I’ve said and make sure that the pathologist who does the autopsy is made aware of this. I’ll submit a formal request to Millbank as soon as I get back to Vauxhall Cross to get it all in writing. But if what I suspect is true we – all of us – are looking at a much bigger problem than a couple of nasty bastards trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament using a sodding great IED.’

  ‘I still have no bloody clue what you’re talking about, but I will pass it on.’

  Chapter 19

  Heathrow, West London

  Mahdi Sadir knew that something must have gone wrong, simply because all the news broadcasts he watched that evening on the wall-mounted flatscreen television in his hotel room just north of Heathrow Airport were mainlining on yet another government crisis. When they weren’t interviewing a couple of MPs or officials or alleged experts with diametrically opposed views, the newsreaders did their best to dissect the half-truths and rumours that passed for investigative journalism in British newspapers or banged on about sporting events about which Sadir knew nothing and cared less. But what they didn’t mention was an explosion, or indeed any other sort of an incident, on the River Thames.

  So Sadir knew that the carefully planned attack must have failed, but what he didn’t know was how or why. The last mobile phone call he’d received from Hassan had suggested that the cabin cruiser had been on track and on time and that the vessel had attracted no attention whatsoever on its voyage. About the only thing he could deduce, from the lack of any further contact from the shahid, was that there hadn’t been a malfunction of the IED because in that case Hassan had been told to abort the attack and return to the boathouse, and to immediately call and explain the situation. If the blasting cap had been faulty, for example, it was possible that Sadir’s contact would be able to supply another one to allow the attack to be attempted again over the next few days. This probably meant that somehow the two shahids had been intercepted and stopped before they could detonate the explosives, and also that this had happened so quickly that Hassan had been unable to make a call to explain what was going on.

  The only news item that appeared in any way relevant was one of those little filler pieces, tucked in to quite literally fill the time before the next ad break. It just stated that the sittings in both Houses at Westminster had been disrupted for about twenty minutes that afternoon because of a suspected gas leak. The building had been cleared as a precaution while the matter was investigated, and it turned out to be a false alarm. Most of the newsreaders made some kind of a weak joke about a gas leak in a building where people went to gas – to talk – and where leaks of one sort or another were all a part of normal government procedure.

  Sadir did not find any part of this news item amusing in any way but it did peripherally confirm that the attack must have been detected and the building evacuated while Hassan and Khalid were either captured or killed.

  Perhaps the only surprising thing was that there was also nothing on any of the social media sites that he visited about an incident on the Thames, and he was quite certain that somebody on one side or other of the river must have seen what happened. But he was also aware of the power of the British intelligence services and assumed that pressure had been brought to bear on the providers to ensure that nothing was promulgated. And of course if the press had
got wind of it they could well have been told the incident was subject to a D-notice to prevent any publication.

  Later that evening Sadir did find a couple of social media posts referring to what one person described as a collision on the water quite near the Palace of Westminster, the man who’d written the post suggesting it might have been a part of a film, a staged event. But after that, nothing.

  Just before midnight, having spent the last five hours channel hopping on the television system and looking for any further information on the Internet, Sadir finally opened his laptop and began preparing a very different email from the one that he had hoped to be composing. In it, he explained that the major attack he had been supposed to carry out in London, the precursor strike directly targeting the British government and intended to be almost as devastating as the main strike against the American administration, had completely failed. He had to conclude that the boat loaded with explosives had been intercepted just before the detonation was supposed to take place.

  He apologised for the lack of any definitive information and explained why he had nothing else to tell Rashid and the elders back in Iraq. But he was able to reassure them that even if the two shahids had been captured alive by the British authorities, they would not be able to compromise the second, and much more important, part of the mission. First because, although all four members of the cell knew there was going to be a second and much bigger attack in America, only Hassan and Khalid had been told any of the details, and only enough to convince them of the vital importance of their sacrifice. So they had no critical information they could divulge. And second, Sadir had taken his own precautions to ensure the permanent silence of the two shahids.

  The sealed vials he carried in his luggage had been designed by the scientists at Vektor for precisely this kind of situation. Before Hassan and Khalid had set off that day, Sadir had given each of them a drink of water. Both men had remarked that it was somewhat cloudy, and Sadir had then explained that each glass contained a substance that would ensure they would enter paradise at a particular time that very day in an entirely painless manner even if something went wrong with the attack.

  It was, in its own way, something of a final test of the commitment of the two shahids, and both men had swallowed the drink without even a pause. Sadir had calculated that the detonation of the IED would take place in mid-afternoon, and the chemicals in the drink would only be released, through the magic of nanotechnology, after five o’clock, around two hours later. So all the two men had to do if they were captured was to tell the authorities nothing at all in the certain knowledge that the gates of paradise would be standing open to welcome them before nightfall.

  He didn’t explain this in his email, but simply said that he had ensured the silence of the two volunteers. He had absolutely no doubt that the two shahids in the cabin cruiser were dead, because as well as the live demonstration that the Vektor management had arranged for him to see in Koltsovo, he had also spent a little over a week in the Hereford area visiting local pubs and looking out for two things: the right group of people and the opportunity he needed.

  Although he knew that the hated British SAS – Special Air Service – had left Iraq in 2009, the year before the disastrous assault on the safe house at Tikrit, he also knew the soldiers from that unit of the British Army had been responsible for killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of his Muslim brothers. And just as he knew that the SAS liked to move in darkness, like ghosts, the ability to exact a form of revenge upon them by employing an invisible killer had seemed too good an opportunity to waste. He had eventually found himself sharing the bar of a public house with a group of about a dozen young men that he had been certain were soldiers.

  He’d picked his moments with care, ensuring he was standing at the bar ordering a drink at the same time as a couple of the men from the group were buying a round. He’d slipped a prepared syringe out of his pocket and ejected the contents – a long-delay dose of the product he’d obtained from Vektor – into one of the pints of beer waiting on the bar, then repeated his action with a second syringe in another pint. Half an hour later, he’d done exactly the same thing with two more pints. Then he’d left the pub and returned to his hotel, certain that he had enacted some form of revenge. The headline in the local newspaper had been an unexpected but welcome confirmation.

  So he had no doubt Hassan and Khalid were dead, and the other two members of the cell knew none of the details of the American component of the plan, only that an attack was going to happen. Sadir had made sure of that.

  He was using a web-based email client, and he read his message through several times before saving it as a draft. Rashid or one of the other elders would log on to the same email account before the morning and read and probably copy the message before deleting it. In that way, there was no possibility of the message being intercepted by any law enforcement agency, because it had never been sent. If it was never on the system it was, by definition, impossible for Echelon or any of the other national and international monitoring systems to detect it. It was a very basic but extremely effective way of communicating important information with complete security.

  Chapter 20

  EDF Data Centre, London

  ‘I have no idea why you’re even in the building.’

  It was almost lunchtime the following day and Nigel Foster was clearly irritated at what he perhaps saw as an unjustifiable and unnecessary interference in his domain. He was, Morgan guessed, in his late forties, though he looked older, the brown-tinted frameless glasses, obvious comb-over and wispy beard evidence of his desire to retain at least the appearance of youth. If that was the reason for his trichological uncertainty and inadequate and ill-advised growth of facial hair, it wasn’t working.

  ‘As I told you before,’ Morgan replied, his patience slipping away by the minute. ‘There are two ways of doing this. We can work together so I can find out what’s happened and what you’ve done about it, and then I’ll be on my way. Or, if you prefer, you can shout and scream and kick and throw all your toys out of your pram and at the end of it I’ll still be here, if necessary with a ministerial directive or a court order, whichever I think will cause you the most personal aggravation and EDF the most adverse publicity. And I can have either of them delivered right here by courier within the hour. Frankly, I don’t give a shit either way, so it’s up to you, Nige.’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Morgan said with blatant insincerity.

  Then he sat quietly and waited. Silence can be quite intimidating, as he remembered one of his SAS instructors telling him. The corporal had been talking about interrogation – or rather how to resist interrogation and avoid telling whoever was questioning you anything that he wanted to know – but he guessed the same tactic would work in this kind of situation. Human beings are social animals, and social animals communicate. Silence – the absence of communication – can be difficult to cope with, and some people feel compelled to fill it. He guessed that Nigel Foster might be one of that type.

  After a minute or so he took out his mobile phone, placed it flat on the desk in front of him, opened up the Kindle ebook reader and picked up where he’d left off reading the previous evening, making quite sure that the other man could see what he was doing.

  He’d only read a couple of pages before Foster, clearly recognising that he’d been out-manoeuvred and essentially backed into a corner, broke the silence.

  ‘Oh, very well. What do you want to know?’

  Morgan switched off his phone and put it away before he replied.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You had a security breach. My organisation has a brief from the British government to monitor events of that type so I need to know three things. First, how it happened. Second, what damage was done in terms of data loss or anything else. And third, what you’ve done about it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me your lot investigate every single hacking event,’ Foster said, a distinct sneer in his voice.
‘You’d need a massive staff and it would be a full-time job.’

  ‘I didn’t say we did that,’ Morgan responded quietly. ‘But we do investigate attacks on mission-critical organisations, which obviously includes banks and financial institutions of all sorts, government websites and the utility companies, because a major hack of any of those could cause catastrophic damage to what’s left of Britain’s economy after the Covid-19 shutdown, and could also cause loss of life in certain circumstances. And that’s why I’m here. So what happened?’

  ‘We weren’t hacked. That’s the first thing,’ Foster said, starting to open up. ‘We could see the attack developing as they looked for vulnerabilities in the systems. They ran Firewalk to check for open ports in the firewall but didn’t find any, then used a mixed selection of hacking tools like Metasploit and Sn1per to look for weaknesses and finally ran John and Cain to try to break a password. We backtracked the origin of the attack through a whole chain of proxy servers. It supposedly started in Vietnam, but we’re fairly sure it actually began in America. I can supply you with the audit trail if you want it.’

  Foster looked at Morgan, apparently checking that he understood the shorthand.

  ‘Pretty much standard,’ Morgan said, nodding. ‘I would like to see any data you obtained, so I’ll give you my email address. But I gather they didn’t get anywhere?’

  ‘Nope. Not with the system we’ve got here. I presume you don’t want to know how we’ve configured the firewall or the security monitoring and analysis software we use? Stuff like that?’

  ‘No. I’m sure you know what you’re doing or you wouldn’t be in the job. I’m only interested in what happened and the results. But I do have a question. You watched the attack take place. It doesn’t sound to me like it was part of an APT but more like a brute-force attack. Was that your impression as well?’