Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  ‘What is it, Bill?’ Grant Rogers asked. ‘And before you say anything, nobody blames you for losing the target. In those crowds it would have been amazing if you hadn’t. And we have other leads we can follow.’

  Clark shook his head.

  ‘I wasn’t going to apologise,’ he said, ‘but I do want to explain what happened, because it didn’t make sense.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘We followed the target easily enough. Because of the pandemic, there are a lot less people out on the streets than usual. It’s still crowded, of course, but the target was quite distinctive in his appearance: blue jeans, blue denim jacket and when he left the cafe he put on a light blue disposable face mask. All three of us were keeping pace with him about fifty yards back, but obviously well separated. I’m reasonably certain we hadn’t been spotted, not least because all three of us were wearing face masks just like most of the other people on the streets, but he went into a department store, maybe just as a precaution to shake any tails he might have thought he’d picked up. I went in after him and Nick and Ivan covered the other exits. He headed for the lavatories and I decided it was too risky to follow him into such a small space in case he had seen me earlier on. So I found a place where I could see the lavatory door and waited for him to come out. The trouble was, he didn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rogers asked.

  ‘Exactly what I said. The man I’d been following didn’t come out, but three other men did. Obviously I checked all three of them very carefully, but none of them looked anything like the target. I used the camera in my phone to take a picture of each one – I can put the images up on the screen if you’d like to see them.’

  ‘Finish the story first.’

  ‘I gave him ten minutes, then went into the lavatory after him. All the stalls were empty and there was nobody else in the room. There were also no exits apart from a small square window maybe eighteen inches on the side and about eight feet off the ground. It was closed, the glass had wire mesh running through it and the opening was protected by steel bars, so he certainly didn’t go out that way.’

  Grant Rogers stated the obvious.

  ‘So he must have changed his appearance. Let’s see the pictures you took.’

  It took a couple of minutes for Clark to connect his mobile to the display system so that he could show the photographs.

  ‘Just to remind you,’ he said before he brought up the first image, ‘the target has black hair and a black beard, brown eyes and a tanned complexion and he was wearing a denim jacket, blue jeans and a blue face mask. Now check these out.’

  The first image showed a man wearing a casual jacket and trousers and with fair hair and fair skin who didn’t look unlike Clark himself. He had a light blue face mask in his left hand that he was apparently about to put on.

  ‘There’s no way the target could have made himself look like this in about three minutes,’ Clark said, ‘and that was roughly how long between the target going into the lavatory and this guy coming out.’

  The second photograph was of a heavily built white man, the crown of his skull shining in the overhead lights, flanked by the U-shape of his remaining hair and emphasised by the white face mask he was wearing. Again, simply the difference in body size and shape meant that this individual could not possibly have been the target.

  ‘And now we have contestant number three,’ Clark said, and all the men in the room leaned forward to look closely at the picture.

  The third man was wearing an open-necked shirt and khaki shorts or trousers, the photograph only showing him from about the waist up. Physically, in terms of height, body shape and skin colour the unidentified male resembled the target, but unlike him this man had no mask and was obviously clean-shaven, while the person they had been following had had a black beard. He was wearing large framed tinted glasses and a black beanie cap that covered his entire scalp.

  ‘I don’t want to sound like a cracked record,’ Clark said, ‘but you can’t easily go from a full beard to clean-shaven in under five minutes. And, in any case, I checked the lavatory when I got in there and there was no sign of any hair on the floor or in the sinks and there wasn’t enough time for him to shave and flush away the hairs.’ He stepped across the briefing room and pointed at the image on the screen for emphasis. ‘So that has to be the target that we’re looking at, but I’ve no idea how he did it.’

  For a few moments nobody said a word, and then Rogers started to ask the question that every other agent had already formulated in his head.

  ‘So it was probably a fake—’

  But Clark immediately shook his head.

  ‘I had eyes on him for over an hour at the cafe and as far as I could tell his beard was the real thing. Fake beards move differently to the real thing when people are talking. And don’t forget that all four of the targets have beards. In a lot of countries in the Middle East it’s a kind of cultural necessity.’

  ‘Leave the picture on the screen,’ Grant said as Clark reached for his mobile phone. He stepped right in front of the screen and stared in silence at the photograph in front of him.

  ‘A couple of questions,’ he said, glancing at Clark. ‘First, was he carrying anything when he left the cafe?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Second, was this man—’ Rogers pointed at the screen ‘—carrying anything when you saw him? And were there any discarded clothes in the lavatory?’

  Clark shook its head.

  ‘That’s three questions, not two,’ he pointed out. ‘There were no clothes in the lavatory, but he could have had a carrier bag or something in his hand that I wouldn’t have seen from where I was standing.’

  ‘Okay. Despite appearances, we have to be looking at the third man, so we’ll put this image in the database as well. The change of clothes is fairly obvious. He was probably wearing those shorts or trousers under his jeans, and he’s just taken off his jacket, so my guess is when he walked out of the crapper he was carrying a bag with his jacket and jeans in it. How he lost the beard I don’t know, but I’ll get our photo analysts to take a closer look at this picture and see if they can come up with anything.’

  ‘There’s one other thing as well,’ Clark added, ‘but it’s not something definite, more a kind of impression. There were four people sitting at that table in the cafe. We obviously already knew about Karim Ganem, though we still don’t know what he’s doing over here. So this afternoon we’ve seen three new faces.’

  ‘Agreed. And your point is?’ Rogers asked.

  ‘As I said, it’s just my impression, but I noticed that almost every time the more heavily built unsub said anything, the other three seemed to listen very carefully. And none of the other three ever interrupted him. I might be wrong, but that suggests to me that this man, whoever he is, could be the leader of the group. Maybe he’s had Ganem and the others working on something for the past year or so and now he’s come over to check on what they’re doing.’

  Rogers shrugged. ‘I didn’t notice that myself, Bill, but you were better placed to watch them than I was. I don’t dispute what you’ve said and you’ve been around long enough that your impressions are usually on the money. And that’s not necessarily good news.’

  ‘It isn’t? Why not?’ Dave Nicholls asked.

  ‘Because if Bill’s right and this new player is the leader of the cell or whatever, that could mean that whatever they’re planning is imminent. Maybe this guy isn’t just here to check on their progress. Maybe he’s here to kickstart the endgame. And in that case, the clock could already be running.’

  A couple of minutes after Rogers had wrapped up the briefing an email arrived from Clarksburg, West Virginia, from the Criminal Justice Information Services Division with the results of the analysis by FACE.

  The junior FBI agent sitting at the machine where it arrived glanced at it and immediately sent it to the high-speed laser printer on the console on one side of the room.

  Rogers heard the laser star
ting to spool up and glanced across at the agent.

  ‘That’s the stuff from Clarksburg,’ the man confirmed. He stood up, collected four sheets of paper from the output tray, handed them to Rogers and resumed his seat.

  The senior agent looked at each sheet very briefly, then held up his hand for silence in the room.

  ‘Okay, listen up, all of you,’ he said. ‘FACE has given us three new names and confirmed the identity of the guy we already knew about, Karim Ganem. The three new players are named Mahdi Sadir – he’s the big guy – and the other men are named Talat Wasem and Jamal Halabi. Their photo IDs come from their driving licence applications. Get them and their pictures on the board and start running the usual background checks. I want to know everything about them, from their mobile numbers and addresses to the size of their dicks, by close of business today.’

  Chapter 32

  Washington D.C. and Damascus, Maryland, United States of America

  Damascus is a fairly typical suburb of Washington, although it’s actually in Maryland, about thirty miles north of Capitol Hill and with excellent road links. It’s far enough out of Washington for the concrete forest of the capital to be replaced by trees and woods, and the town is closer to both Frederick and Baltimore than it is to Washington. By American standards, properties there are expensive, starting at around half a million dollars for anything of a reasonable size, entirely due to the town’s location and proximity to Washington.

  The problem that Sadir had faced when he’d been looking for a suitable location just over two years earlier was that he needed it to be no more than about an hour’s drive, preferably a lot less, from Capitol Hill, and it had to be big enough and sufficiently secluded for the operation he had planned to be undetectable. He also needed either a workshop on the premises or a suitable building where the machinery he needed could be installed, which further limited his choice. And, again because anywhere that close to Washington was prime commuter belt, the houses in every other town he’d looked at had been similarly priced. Eventually, and after an exchange of somewhat testy emails with the sponsoring elders in Iraq, a detached house sitting on about an acre of ground on the northern outskirts of Damascus had been identified and then rented by a proxy, a long-term expatriate Iraqi well known to, and completely trusted by, the elders.

  Sadir had taken possession of the property and handed the keys to the three men he had already recruited to carry out the work, made sure that they had all the tools, equipment and raw materials that they needed and left them to it. He’d kept in regular touch with them by email, both parties using draft emails and a web-based account to avoid compromise and detection, but with the deadline now approaching he knew he would have to visit the house in person once again to ensure that absolutely everything was as ready as it could be.

  If they’d met a last-minute snag or problem that could delay completion of the weapons it was essential that Sadir knew about it so he could adjust the timetable accordingly.

  That afternoon his Honda was on its usual floor in a multi-storey car park on 19th Street and not too far from his hotel, but Sadir certainly wasn’t going to walk there and climb into it, because the operation was far too important for that. It was crucial that nobody had any idea of who he was or what he had planned until the moment when everybody would know because their world would be crumbling around them.

  Instead, he followed his usual circuitous route to the car park, making his way in what amounted to a couple of rough circles using public transport, which meant several taxi rides and unnecessary visits to hotels and stores where he was able to enter through one door but leave through another. And because the traffic in Washington D.C. was always heavy, the streets were a virtual sea of red-painted cabs, making the task of anybody following him even more problematic.

  The colour scheme – a uniform bright red bisected by a curved grey stripe running from the front wheel arch of each vehicle and tapering towards the rear wing, within which the name of the taxi company and its contact number were displayed in black lettering – had been introduced in 2013 by the DC Taxicab Commission to standardise the appearance of the cabs serving America’s capital city. The taxis were nothing like as iconic as the ubiquitous yellow cabs that prowled the streets of New York in vast ill-tempered hunting packs, but at least it made identifying a taxi easy enough.

  Twice when his chosen vehicle had come to a dead stop in the snarled-up traffic at yet another red light, Sadir had paid the driver what he owed and climbed out of the cab in the road. Then he’d waited on the sidewalk scanning the traffic to make sure that nobody else did the same thing, before finding another cab going in the opposite or at least in a different direction. To further confuse any possible surveillance, Sadir also took one of the Metrobus DC Circulator vehicles for a part of his journey.

  The whole of his counter-surveillance checks took over an hour, as usual, and at the end of it he was left with a roughly quarter of a mile stroll to reach the parking garage from where he’d told the last taxi driver to drop him off. Even then, he didn’t enter the building but stayed on the opposite side of the road and took a seat at one of the outside tables in the coffee shop almost directly opposite the multi-storey. The fact that there was a cafe with an uninterrupted view of the garage was one of the main reasons why Sadir had chosen that location.

  He ordered and paid for a coffee and a pastry and took his mobile and a novel from his pockets. For the next twenty minutes he watched the exit from the multi-storey without at any time appearing to look directly at it, not least because he was more interested in anybody who might be waiting on either side of the street than anyone driving out of the building.

  But he saw nobody who raised his suspicions and finally decided that it was safe for him to move. He waited for a gap in the traffic, crossed the road and walked inside the building, but took the stairs rather than the lift as a final check that he was still not being followed. He did a complete circuit of the level where his Honda was parked before approaching the vehicle.

  Even then he was cautious. He was very aware that motor vehicles of all sorts had enormous potential as killing machines – the forces of radical Islam had frequently made extensive and lethal use of truck bombs driven by dedicated shahids and more recently trucks and large vans had been used to mow down crowds of pedestrians in London and France – but he was more concerned with the possibility that his car might have been targeted with explosive charges if the American authorities had discovered what he was up to. He thought that was unlikely, but he was aware that American law enforcement agencies were perfectly happy to bend the rules when it came to aggressive interrogation of suspects, and in his opinion it was only a fairly short step from sending a rendition flight to Poland to allow suspected Islamic freedom fighters to be tortured in an anonymous black site to eliminating somebody like him with a kilo or two of C4 explosive rather than go through the bother of a lengthy and expensive trial.

  In that regard, operating in England was much safer, because the British always obeyed the rules that they themselves had created, something which Sadir had never really understood. But he did know that if he was caught planning some kind of atrocity – the word that the Western media seemed to use with increasing frequency when discussing Islam – in the United Kingdom, the absolute worst that could happen to him would be a long but fairly comfortable incarceration in some prison. In America, the same action would almost certainly see him either strapped to an electric chair waiting for somebody to throw the switch or tied to a purpose-built gurney ready to be given a lethal injection.

  In reality, Sadir was still confident that although his presence in Washington might have been noticed by the FBI, they had no idea of the scope of the operation that he was planning. And in the absence of any hard information, the possibility of a booby-trap in his car was fairly remote. But it was still a possibility, so he took precautions.

  He used the remote control to unlock the car from as far away as possible, pre
ssing the control into the side of his head as he pressed the button. He had no idea why, but he knew that doing that extended the range of the device by several feet.

  When he reached the Honda, he opened the boot and took out an extendable rod with a battery-powered torch and a mirror screwed on to the end of it. He switched it on, slid the mirror underneath the car and carefully examined every part of the underside of the vehicle from the front to the rear bumper. And saw nothing out of place, which was exactly what he had expected.

  Then he popped the bonnet and used a different torch to look all around the engine and ancillary equipment. This time, he wasn’t only looking for explosives but for any kind of a small box that might conceal a tracker. When he was satisfied, he used the torch and mirror once again to make a final check inside the wheel arches. All his checks were negative, which was what he had both hoped and expected. But checking was never a waste of time, because his life might depend on it.

  A couple of minutes later he drove out of the multi-storey and turned south – he had no option about this because that bit of 19th Street was one way – and then followed a somewhat meandering route to the north-east and up into Maryland. He continued as far as Bladensburg before making a left towards Riverdale Park and then continued north towards Damascus.

  The cars that stand out in traffic are those that are visually unexpected, like a lime-green Lamborghini or a pink Hummer or something equally exotic or stupid and, on a more mundane level, cars that travel either too fast or too slow. Those are the vehicles that people notice, and more importantly they are also the vehicles that the police notice, and so Sadir ignored the posted speed limits and simply ensured that he was travelling at the same speed as everybody else, maintaining his place in the lines of traffic as he drove out of the built-up area.