Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  ‘They went knocking with a team of armed officers from the Met carrying a big red key. They smashed open the door and grabbed the two occupants who were getting ready to clear out. Under interrogation, they were persuaded to reveal what they knew, which wasn’t much. The short version is that they were proud of the London attack and clearly very upset that it hadn’t been successful. They both used the same expression – “The West will pay” – which is exactly what the terrorist who briefly survived the Thames attack had told the two men from Five, and both said that the main attack was going to be in America. According to Angela, the Millbank interrogators said they were arrogant and totally convinced that the American attack would not and could not fail, which is obviously a bit alarming. But they had no idea of the details of it. Or so they claimed.’

  Natasha nodded in a somewhat distracted fashion, then leaned forward.

  ‘Some obvious questions,’ she said. ‘First, those two numpties were obviously foot-soldiers, just there to fulfil their warped destiny by strapping a few kilos of Semtex around them and then lighting the blue touchpaper in some suitably crowded place. When the men from Five with the rack and thumbscrews persuaded them to open up, did they find out anything about the puppet-master, the man pulling these idiots’ strings? Like a name or a description, I mean? Something we can scan for at GCHQ?’

  ‘I think interrogation techniques these days are a little more subtle than that,’ Morgan pointed out. ‘Perhaps some sleep deprivation and maybe a touch of chemical coercion if the subject is particularly reluctant to talk. But I gather from Angela that these two were reasonably willing to open up, almost as if they knew that they held the moral high ground. That’s something we’ve seen before with shahids. And as I said, they were both convinced that the American attack would be successful. To answer your question, neither man supplied any description of the person who organised the attack, and so far there’s no CCTV footage of anybody entering the house they rented in Waltham Forest apart from the two men now in custody and the two who were on the cabin cruiser. But they did both come up with a name for their leader – Abū Tadmir – so Millbank will be running that through their databases to see if it raises any red flags.’

  Natasha laughed shortly. ‘I suppose they can waste their time doing that if they want to, but I can guarantee that they won’t learn anything that would help identify him.’

  Morgan asked the obvious question. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘You know me, Ben. I’m like a sponge. I just soak up useless information, but maybe some of the time it’s not entirely useless. I’m sure Millbank will get hits, but they won’t learn his identity, because Abū Tadmir isn’t an Arabic proper name. It’s a kunya. In fact it’s a corrupted kunya, and it’s quite obvious to me that it’s an assumed name, a nom de guerre.’

  Not for the first time, Ben Morgan was somewhat awestruck by the depth, and especially by the breadth, of Natasha Black’s knowledge. ‘A kunya?’ he asked weakly. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a teknonym, a name assumed by a man or woman that incorporates the name of their eldest child. So a male might adopt the kunya Abū Hussein, meaning “the father of Hussein”, while his wife could call herself Umm Hussein, meaning she was Hussein’s mother. It’s quite a common practice.’

  ‘So this man is calling himself “the father of Tadmir”?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not quite. Tadmir isn’t an Arab name. It’s an Arabic noun, and it translates as “destruction” or “devastation”, so our shadowy master terrorist has adopted a name, an invented nom de guerre, that means “father of destruction”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like the sound of that.’

  ‘Well,’ Morgan suggested, ‘I suppose the good news is that if this terror campaign is concentrating on America, at least the citizens of Britain should be reasonably safe. We of course won’t be, because we’ll be flying into what might turn out to be the epicentre of the attacks across the Pond.’

  ‘That’s why they pay you so much.’

  Morgan gave a hollow laugh. ‘If only,’ he said. ‘Any other thoughts about this?’

  ‘Obviously the one that I’m sure has occurred to you as well.’

  Morgan had no idea what she was talking about, and the expression on his face confirmed his obvious bewilderment.

  ‘The expression they used,’ Natasha said, sounding slightly exasperated. ‘Come on, Ben, do try and keep up. This is more your world than mine. All three of them said “The West will pay”, which is an obvious threat, albeit non-specific. But it’s also ambiguous.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course it is. It could mean something like “We’re going to make the West pay for the damage caused to Iraq or Syria or somewhere” and off they trot with their Semtex or whatever and blow up the White House or the Capitol Building or just cause a massive loss of life in New York or somewhere. Eye for an eye stuff. Biblical, or rather Koranic, revenge. But it could also mean that the West will quite literally pay in hard currency for what’s happened, and I don’t mean that ISIS is planning on sending the American president a sodding great bill. I think it’ll be much easier than that.’

  It had taken Morgan a few moments to catch on, but he was finally on the same page as Natasha.

  ‘I see what you mean. Stock markets around the world hate uncertainty and tend to panic when anything unexpected happens. If you know when a major terrorist attack is going to take place you can buy a huge number of well out-of-the-money put options and clean up when the market falls through the floor. The gains these terrorists could make would potentially net them millions.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  Morgan picked up his mobile and opened up his contact list.

  ‘I’m going to give Cam the Man a heads-up and ask him to check the London Stock Exchange records to see if there was any unusual trading in the few days before the failed attack using the cabin cruiser. And I’ll ask him to talk to his opposite number in New York and get some tripwires set. If you’re right, as soon as there’s an unusually high level of that sort of trading on the options market we need to know about it, because it could tell us that whatever’s going to happen is going to happen soon. It wouldn’t tell us what or exactly when, but it would be some kind of an early warning.’

  Cameron Riley was another member of the C-TAC team, a former Royal Navy and Special Boat Squadron officer currently employed by the Bank of England in the most senior position within the security apparatus. He and the Governor apparently almost never saw eye to eye on anything, but because Riley was the keeper of the secrets and knew where the bodies were buried, not necessarily only in a metaphorical sense, his position was secure.

  He and Morgan had successfully exposed a personal blackmail conspiracy generated from China that had sought to manipulate leading banking executives guilty of less than acceptable behaviour. Monthly fees had been demanded from the executives and their exposure would have destroyed market confidence. The sheer number of compromised people, their status and the depth of the plot, had shaken the UK government to its core.

  Morgan ended the call a few minutes later and nodded to Natasha.

  ‘Any other suggestions or questions or snippets?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. What are we doing?’

  ‘You mean why are we being sent out to Washington, and what are we supposed to do when we get there?’

  ‘Exactly. America is crawling with alphabet soup agencies – CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS and all the rest of them – and everybody involved in law enforcement and a hell of a lot of people who aren’t carrying weapons at all times. So exactly what they’re expecting a GCHQ analyst and a slightly overweight professor of cybersecurity, both unarmed and largely uninformed, to do in Washington is somewhat beyond me.’

  ‘What do you mean “overweight”?’ Morgan asked. ‘I’m in my physical prime.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Chubby.’

  Chapter 24

 
Washington D.C., United States of America

  When Barbara Simpson had arrived in Washington she’d done things in what seemed to her to be a logical sequence. Her most immediate concern was accommodation, so the first thing she’d done was to find a seat in a cafe at Dulles, order a coffee and a sandwich and use her mobile to identify what she hoped was the cheapest hotel room in or near DC, though the price was still eye-wateringly expensive. She’d booked it for two nights, then taken a cab to the hotel, checked in, dumped her bags in the room and called the private mobile number of the FBI officer known personally to, and vouched for by, Richard Boston.

  It wasn’t a long conversation, and just over forty minutes later Simpson had walked into the coffee shop of a completely different, and clearly much more expensive, hotel near the centre of DC. The briefing document she’d been given had done much more than outline the situation on the ground and her personal tasking, which was to work deep undercover as an unacknowledged FBI asset. It had also provided the names and contact details of various people located in and around Washington in various government organisations and had included mugshot-type photographs of most of them. Those images, and her extremely retentive visual memory, had enabled her to walk without a pause directly across the coffee shop and to slip lithely into a corner booth directly opposite a solid, fair-haired man with what she thought were typically American regular features – blue eyes, tanned skin and a wide jaw that seemed to contain far too many teeth, all of them far too white – who looked more like a professional footballer than anything else.

  ‘Hi Grant,’ she’d said, extending her hand across the table.

  Grant Rogers had immediately stood up, shaken her hand, called over a waitress and ordered her a drink and a snack, all apparently without drawing breath. Then the FBI agent had sat down, formally introduced himself and laid out the immediate problems that American law enforcement, and specifically those involved in Washington D.C., were facing.

  ‘It’s a combination of things, really,’ he had concluded, as Barbara Simpson finished her coffee. ‘As I said, we’ve been getting whispers from informants and traffic intercepts that seem to suggest some group, most probably with a radical Islamic agenda, is planning on creating a major atrocity right here in DC. But there’s been nothing specific, nothing that we could get a proper handle on. And at the same time we’ve been trying to do a little in-house sanitising, identifying people in the Bureau whose ethnicity or background or anything else might have made them liable to radicalisation, just in case they’re a part of it. Whatever it is. If it really exists. Sleepers are a real big problem for us right now and yet no one ever mentions it. Almost every day we find men and woman who slip up somehow and we uncover depths of deception that keep me awake at night. You wouldn’t ever know or even suspect that people you’ve worked with for ten years, people who’ve served their country with honour and earned medals in combat, harbour a desire to do harm to their communities.’

  ‘Trying to identify the viper in the bosom before it strikes,’ Simpson had suggested. ‘Treachery has always existed and it always will. The problem is that nobody ever learns the lessons of history. In fact, the one lesson we do learn from history is that nobody ever learns the lessons of history.’

  ‘Exactly. And it’s not just us. The Agency – the CIA – and the Secret Service have been doing the same, and probably the NSA as well, but their policy is to never tell anyone anything, so we can’t be sure. It’s a hellish difficult situation and we have to tread real carefully. If we had any concrete suspicions we’d at least know where we should start looking, but we haven’t, so it’s all low-key and non-specific.’

  ‘And who checks the checkers?’

  Rogers shook his head.

  ‘Don’t get me started on that. We’re in what James Jesus Angleton called a wilderness of mirrors and we don’t know whether we’re looking at reality or a reflection.’

  ‘T. S. Eliot,’ Simpson had replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know Angleton used the expression, but it comes from “Gerontion”, a poem by T. S. Eliot that he wrote just after the end of the First World War. The title’s Greek and it translates as “little old man”, and the poem is a dramatic monologue describing the state of Europe after the fighting was over as seen through the eyes of that old man.’

  ‘Literature’s not my thing,’ Rogers had admitted, ‘and I didn’t know that. But you can see our problem. What I do know is that the team of people I’ve got working for me are one hundred per cent straight and loyal. I’ve picked them myself and I trust every single one of them with my life because that’s what you have to do when you’re working as a real tight-knit group. Or, to put it another way, if any of my people were actually radicalised closet Muslims, then I have no idea how you could ever trust anybody again.’ He looked across at her keenly and shook his head. ‘Richard said you specialised in undercover operations and have something of a gift for spotting bad guys.’

  ‘I have. I’ve spent the last few years down in Colombia trying to identify cartel members on the streets and at the same time trying to work out which of the police officers working with me were also full-time employees of those same cartels. That, let me tell you, was a real wilderness of mirrors, not to mention bloody dangerous with everybody armed to the teeth and just itching to start pulling the trigger. Now, there’s not much I can do to help identify people in the Bureau or any other organisation who might be about to switch from being an all-American patriot to a dedicated shahid whose latest fashion accessory is a Semtex waistcoat, because that’s an in-house problem and you need to be inside the organisation to tackle it. But I should be able to do something on the streets.’

  Rogers had waited while the waitress refilled their coffee cups before he’d leaned forward and replied.

  ‘That’s where the danger lies, at least in my opinion. But you’re brand new here in DC. I’ve seen your briefing notes, but you don’t know the area and you don’t know the people, so how do your bosses expect you to be able to help us out?’

  ‘I’m a quick learner, and I have a very good memory. More importantly, people are pretty much the same wherever you go, and in my experience those people who are walking on the wrong side of that thin blue line that separates the law-abiding from the lawless do have certain characteristics. For one thing, they tend to be more aware of their surroundings and that shows. Your average member of Joe Public will travel to work looking straight ahead while he or she thinks about what they’ll be doing that day, what meeting they’ll be attending, what jobs they need to do, even where they’re going to have lunch. They’ll take no more notice of their fellow pedestrians or commuters than they need to avoid bumping into them. But the lawless will always be aware of where they are and what’s going on because they’ll be looking out either for a chance to break the law, to commit some crime like dealing drugs, or for any sign of a police officer who might be looking for them. After a while, you can quite easily spot the bad guys.’

  ‘It’s as simple as that?’ Grant Rogers had demanded.

  ‘No, of course not. That’s just a very basic example of the kind of thing I look out for. Now, I’m going to need some things from you, like a cheap and anonymous place to stay while I’m here in DC. I can’t do this from a hotel. I need to be anonymous, just one more face in the crowds on the streets, so that means a small apartment or something.’

  ‘We can sort that. Might take a couple days, but not a problem. What else?’

  ‘Information, really. I’m sure the Bureau has reams of regulations about who can see what, when and why, and as a non-American citizen I’ve no doubt I wouldn’t even be entitled to look at a file cover, far less see what’s inside it. But if I’m going to be able to help you I will need an abstract or a summary of whatever leads you’re following. Ideally the names, addresses and if possible photographs of anybody your informants have fingered, something like that, just to give me somewhere to start.’

  Rog
ers had nodded, then removed a thumb drive from his pocket, checked that the waitress was out of view and that nobody was paying them any attention. He slid the tiny memory stick across the table and as his fingers released it Simpson had deftly palmed the device.

  ‘You have got a laptop with you, I guess? Okay, I figured you’d need that sort of data so I prepped that thumb drive myself, with the approval of the director of the Counterterrorism Division, the man who’s more or less at the top of the FBI tree when it comes to this kind of operation. He’s a guy that I trust absolutely. That’s pretty much all we have, and it’s current as of about two days ago. Everything on it is copy-protected, so don’t try moving it onto your laptop because you can’t. It’s also password-protected.’ He’d handed her a thin slip of paper with about a dozen random characters written on it. ‘That’s it. Please memorise that as soon as you can and certainly before you leave this building. Then eat it. It’s rice paper and it doesn’t even taste too bad.’

  * * *

  Three days later Barbara Simpson had moved into a tiny studio apartment that had somehow been carved out of what had originally been a small two-bedroom flat in the Bloomingdale district in the northern part of Washington, not far from Howard University. It was a long way from the glamour and grandeur of Capitol Hill and the centre of DC, which suited her very well.

  And for the next weeks and months she’d walked the streets of Washington, blending in with the crowds and watching. Always watching. She’d followed up the leads Grant Rogers had supplied and built up her own data files on an increasingly long list of persons of interest to her because of their behaviour and actions. She’d also identified links between certain individuals that the FBI hadn’t been aware of, and that she’d clarified to Rogers at their regular meetings in coffee shops and cafes.