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Cyberstrike

Page 15

by James Barrington


  ‘That really doesn’t work for me,’ Morgan said, after a moment, shaking his head. ‘Developing nanotechnology to produce a weapon like that would be incredibly expensive. Logically, if it had been al-Qaeda and their intention was to take revenge for what happened in Iraq, why didn’t they just knock up an IED, identify a pub where troopers went for a drink and position it there? They would probably take out a lot of innocent bystanders as well as the targets, but al-Qaeda has never been bothered about collateral damage. That would have been far more obvious and devastating, and would have made the national media rather than just a headline about an unusual illness in a local paper, and most terrorist organisations actively seek publicity whenever they can get it. So for me that idea really doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I know, and I agree. Anyway, there’s nothing much more we can do about it here in the UK, unless you’ve got some brilliant idea. What I have done, though, is pass on what we know to the Americans, to Delta Force and DEVGRU – SEAL Team Six – because they were working with the SAS out of Baghdad during Operation Crichton. That was the codename for the combined op. It’ll be interesting to see if any of their personnel were also targeted by anything like this.’

  Morgan finished his drink and leaned back in the wooden wheelback chair.

  ‘I don’t often have brilliant ideas,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t got one now, as a matter of fact. But I do have a suggestion based on the facts as we know them. We’ve established that a lethal cocktail of drugs was administered to a handful of SAS personnel by persons unknown, and we also know that whatever delivery system was used worked and did its job. And we know that this would have been a really, really expensive way of killing somebody.’

  ‘I don’t see where you’re going with this, Ben.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do, really,’ Morgan replied, ‘but I can only think of one halfway sensible reason why whoever did this decided to use nanotechnology as a weapon rather than a couple of assault rifles or a few kilos of Semtex or C4, which would have been a hell of a lot cheaper as a revenge attack.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ North said, leaning a little closer.

  ‘I wonder if it was maybe just a test run. A way of proving that the delivery system worked, and that they could deliver the chemicals and have them released at a predetermined time by the fullerenes. Then maybe targeting members of the SAS was just convenient and nothing to do with Task Force Black or any other operations carried out by the British military. If that were the case then perhaps the perpetrators were nothing to do with al-Qaeda or ISIS or any other group of regular terrorists. They could be entirely unknown to us, and that worries me.’

  North nodded.

  ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘If you know the bad guys are al-Qaeda or some other known group you can make a pretty good guess at their likely targets. But if you don’t know who’s doing it, then you have no idea who their target might be. You’re right. That is a concern.’

  North’s mobile rang at that moment, and a few seconds later so did Morgan’s.

  ‘Did you initiate that, Dave?’ Morgan asked a couple of minutes later as he ended the call. ‘The test on the terrorist’s blood, I mean?’

  North nodded. ‘According to the man from Five, what he saw at Wapping was so similar to what I experienced in that bloody chopper that I thought it was worth suggesting they ran a check.’

  ‘Good call. So we have the mixture as before: sodium thiopental and potassium chloride.’

  ‘But if the Five guy was right in his interpretation of the interview, I think the terrorist knew that he was going to die, and more or less when it was going to happen.’

  Morgan’s expression changed. ‘You need to explain that,’ he said.

  ‘According to him, the terrorist kept on looking at the clock in the interview room but refused to say anything except that he wanted to see a solicitor. He seemed quite tense, which is what you’d expect bearing in mind where he was and what had happened. And then he seemed to relax, made that statement about “The West will pay” and a few minutes later he was dead. Unless the man from Millbank was completely misinterpreting what he was seeing, it looks to me as if the terrorist knew the fullerenes and their lethal payload would be activated after a particular time that day. Five o’clock, in fact.

  ‘And that,’ North finished, ‘gives us some answers – but it also poses a hell of a lot more questions.’

  Chapter 22

  Washington D.C., United States of America

  Mahdi Sadir had landed in America and walked through passport control and US Customs with no problem at all, although both his briefcase and carry-on bag had been opened and searched. The customs officer had stopped short when he saw a packet of syringes and what looked like a grey fabric washbag in the briefcase and had told the Iraqi to open it.

  ‘What’s this?’ he had demanded, pointing at the bag.

  ‘Is cool bag,’ Sadir had replied briefly, thickening his accent and stumbling slightly over the words to disguise his fluency in the language. ‘For medication.’ Then he’d reached into his jacket pocket, taken out an envelope and passed it to the customs officer.

  The man had read the sheet of paper that it contained, nodded, handed it back and told Sadir that he could proceed.

  He’d had no trouble at any border crossing, carrying the sealed vials obtained from Vektor quite openly because the name printed on the side of each one was a word that almost anyone would recognise, and the letter and prescription that he carried with him was all the justification he needed for possession of the medication. The only time a problem could possibly occur would be if somebody decided to run a comprehensive test on the liquid contained within the vials, and he was confident even that wouldn’t matter.

  Realistically, Sadir thought the chances of such a test being carried out were extremely remote: it would take a notably brave or a very foolish customs officer to start analysing a collection of obviously factory sealed vials of insulin belonging to a man confirmed by the letter he was carrying to be a diabetic. But even if they were analysed, the customs people would be looking for the usual suspects – the so-called recreational drugs like heroin and cocaine – and that would be all that their basic testing equipment would be capable of detecting. The nanoparticles and their lethal contents would be undetectable to anyone performing that level of analysis. That had been a part of his brief to Vektor from the very start. And the insulin was exactly that – insulin – as any test would confirm.

  Sadir, of course, was not a diabetic, and nor was he suffering from any other form of illness. He had ordered several different activation periods from Vektor and anticipated having to use only two of the remaining vials in America because the attacks there would not be martyrdom operations, or al-amaliyat al-istishhadiya, and he and the other jihadists had every intention of walking away afterwards. But there would be three exceptions to that. There were two people who would become involuntary shahids and who would have to imbibe the nanobot cocktail unwittingly – that was an integral and essential part of his plan. And there was one volunteer who would certainly not survive the encounter Sadir had planned for him, and so there would be no need to provide him with the lethal fluid.

  A well-placed contact in Riyadh, a man known to Rashid and who was sympathetic to ISIS and its aims, had come up with several helpful ideas and, more importantly, the contact details of several people in America, dedicated and committed volunteers for the cause, who would be glad to provide material assistance. They were, the man in Riyadh had told Sadir the first time they met, all on the same side and all facing the same enemy, the Great Satan. And the beating heart of that hated beast was Washington D.C.

  The city itself is something of an anomaly.

  It’s located within the geographical boundaries of the United States of America but it’s not a part of any of the fifty states. The Residence Act, signed in July 1790, mandated the creation of a capital and federal district beside the Potomac River to form the seat of gove
rnment for the newly independent fledgling nation, and the City of Washington was founded the following year. Today, the federal district extends to just over sixty-eight square miles in total, seven square miles of which are a part of the Potomac River so the land area is only sixty-one square miles, meaning that in global terms Washington D.C. is very slightly smaller than Lichtenstein. It encompasses the original settlements of Alexandria and Georgetown as well as land donated by the neighbouring state of Maryland. The original district also included a part of Virginia, but Congress returned this land, including the city of Alexandria, to the state in 1846.

  With a population of over 700,000 residents, a number that swells to more than one million people every day of the working week, it can get extremely crowded, which was just one of the reasons why Sadir had chosen it as his base for the American operation. The other reasons were rather more compelling.

  He had guessed that he, and almost anyone he associated with, would be likely to attract attention in America because of the colour of their skin and, more importantly, because of the identity of the nation that had issued his passport. Although the events of 9/11 were no longer fresh in the minds of most Americans, their memories were long and the identities of the perpetrators of that astonishingly successful attack had cast an almost permanent suspicion over the activities of anyone born in the Middle East or carrying a passport from that part of the world.

  He would undeniably have been more noticeable had he selected somewhere in small-town America as his residence, and so Sadir had decided from the start that the best place for him to hide was in one of the most crowded cities in the country, on the same basis that the best place to hide a tree is in a forest.

  What he did not know was whether or not he had managed to escape detection, but because he always took precautions when on the move and when meeting other people and had never seen the slightest sign of anybody following him or apparently taking any interest at all in what he was doing, he assumed he was still some way below the radar.

  Which at that moment he was, but that was about to change.

  Chapter 23

  Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

  ‘Is this line secure?’

  Ben Morgan had no idea who the man was, but because he had called his work mobile rather than his personal phone, he assumed it was an official call, not least because that number wasn’t published anywhere outside the various classified directories. So at least he was reasonably certain that he wasn’t about to be told that the caller understood he had had an accident that wasn’t his fault. In fact, Morgan had discounted that possibility as soon as he had heard the man’s voice: most of the desperate ambulance-chasing solicitors who resorted to that kind of pointless cold-calling employed young girls to read from a carefully prepared script at irritated people who had far better things to do than listen to such rubbish.

  But whoever the caller was, what he had asked wasn’t a sensible question.

  ‘These days,’ Morgan replied, quite sharply, ‘no mobile phone call is secure unless both the caller and the recipient are using encrypted phones like the Enigma, Blackphone or Blackview. This phone was given to me by the government, so it’s just a plain vanilla mobile, because encrypted phones and the encryption service cost money and the government, as usual, won’t pay for anything unless it absolutely has to. So the short snappy answer to your question is no, of course it’s not secure. Who are you, and what do you want?’

  ‘I’m calling from London and I’ve been told you need to return to Vauxhall Bridge as soon as possible, with clothes for a week and your passport.’

  For ‘Vauxhall Bridge’ Morgan read ‘Vauxhall Cross’ and for ‘Vauxhall Cross’ he read ‘C-TAC’ and wondered why he hadn’t been called by Dame Janet or maybe Angela.

  ‘Why?’ Morgan asked, which seemed to stump the man who had called him.

  ‘I have no idea. I’m just delivering the message. You’ve got it, so it’s up to you. What’s your estimate for London?’

  Although Morgan frequently travelled by train to the capital, he didn’t retain an up-to-date timetable in his head and he certainly didn’t know the time of the next train. Plus he needed to sort out his bag, secure the house if he was going to be away for a week – and in his experience it would probably turn out to be longer than that – and get a cab to the station.

  ‘Three hours,’ he replied. ‘Maybe four. It all depends on the trains.’

  He heard the caller hold a muffled conversation with somebody else in the background, then the line cleared again.

  ‘You’ll need to get your skates on then. You’re booked on the 1700 British Airways flight out of Heathrow to Dulles. Your ticket will be waiting for you at Terminal Five.’

  ‘Why am I going to Texas?’ Morgan demanded, looking at his watch.

  There was a brief pause while the caller digested his question. ‘Not Dallas,’ he replied. ‘Dulles Airport, in Washington.’ And with that he rang off.

  Morgan stared at his silent mobile for a couple of seconds as if daring it to emit any kind of sound, then put it in his pocket and walked into his study, where he kept a bag ready packed for short notice journeys. Living on his own had some advantages, and he was used to not having to explain his actions to any dependants and being able to act and react as he wanted and needed to. The downsides were the evenings usually spent alone, and not much of a social life.

  He picked up his landline phone, speed dialled the number of the local taxi company he normally used to book a ride and organised a cab, then opened the bag to quickly check its contents. Then he took a leather briefcase and put in it his Panasonic Toughbook – he liked travelling with a laptop that was heavy enough to use as a weapon – one of his backup hard drives that contained additional software that he found useful, the connecting leads, mains charger and a couple of travel adapters so that he could plug it in when he reached whichever hotel he would be using in the States. He added his phone charger, checked that he had his mobile in his jacket pocket along with his passport and credit cards, then walked quickly around the house, checking the security of the doors and windows before setting the alarm and stepping outside. As he locked his front door he heard a brief toot from the road and saw his taxi just pulling up. The timing had worked perfectly and he hoped that might be an omen for the rest of the journey.

  Or perhaps not, he wondered less than ten minutes later as the taxi joined the end of a seemingly unmoving queue of cars at an extensive length of carriageway repairs controlled by a set of traffic lights. Traffic lights that had clearly been programmed by an idiot, because the green period in each direction lasted only long enough to allow half a dozen vehicles to drive through, providing they were already in first gear and ready to move, followed by an unnecessary long wait while the lights at both end were obviously showing red. The queues in both directions were lengthening by the minute.

  ‘This is nothing,’ the taxi driver commented when Morgan expressed his understandable irritation in words consisting largely of four letters and single syllables. ‘You should see it in the morning rush hour. It’s like the biggest car park outside the bloody M25.’

  But eventually they were through that particular jam and a few minutes later the taxi turned into Queen’s Road and stopped outside the white painted building that was Cheltenham Spa station, a structure that Morgan always thought looked more like a provincial cinema than a railway station.

  In the ticket hall he offered his credit card to exchange what seemed like an excessively large amount of money for a small piece of cardboard that would give him the right to – probably – stand all the way to London’s Paddington Station, then changed his mind and spent twice as much to buy a first-class ticket, on the grounds that he could probably reclaim the money through C-TAC. And at least then he would get a seat.

  Almost the first person he saw when he stepped onto the platform was Natasha Black.

  ‘I assume you also had the urgent summons from above?’ she asked as M
organ walked over to her. ‘And I’m not talking about a message from the divine ruler and creator of the universe, just some irritating and anonymous little oik in London issuing orders on behalf of somebody else.’

  Morgan nodded. ‘You’re going to Washington as well?’

  Natasha nodded in her turn. ‘I am, and I don’t know why. I find that irritating, and when I’m irritated I tend to get quite snappy, so I apologise in advance for anything I say that you don’t like. What ticket have you got?’

  ‘I splashed out on first class,’ Morgan said. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘So did I. I worked on the basis that if I’m going to be irritated for the next few hours at least I can be irritated in comfort, or at least in something marginally more comfortable than standing up in Great Western Railway’s usual cattle class accommodation.’

  The train departed Cheltenham Spa just over nine minutes late, which probably counted as being bang on time to a twenty-first-century railway company, and Morgan spent nearly twenty minutes talking to Angela Evans on his mobile once they’d found their seats. He ended the call and glanced at Natasha, sitting opposite him.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded.

  ‘If I said I knew what was going on I’d be lying,’ Morgan replied. ‘Angela was able to provide some information, but the situation is still unfolding.’

  ‘Don’t fanny about,’ Natasha ordered. ‘Give me the alligator sandwich version – make it short and snappy.’

  Morgan grinned at her, then glanced round to ensure that nobody else was within earshot. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how they managed it, but a team from Millbank was able to retrace the route the cabin cruiser took when it travelled to Westminster and discovered a derelict boathouse where they think it was prepared for the operation. They obviously found some usable clues either there or on what was left of the boat, most probably fingerprints, and that led them to a terrorist cell in north-east London. Apparently one of the men involved was already on the MI5 radar and they analysed the street camera images to pin down his address.

 

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