Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕

which he was certain would travel around the world in a matter of seconds thanks to the power of social media and, almost incidentally, send most of the stock markets into free fall, would be the culmination of the attack that he and his associates in Iraq had been working on and planning for most of the last decade.

He sipped his own, uncontaminated, Coke with a feeling of quiet satisfaction as he waited patiently for his two companions to die.

Chapter 53

Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

Grant Rogers stared back at the clearly angry Lewis Gordon. The Baltimore SAC’s reaction had not been entirely unanticipated, because obviously Charles Bouchier would have discovered fairly quickly that one of his ASACs and a senior special agent had left the Hoover building unexpectedly and he would probably have been informed about the flight of the Bell helicopter out of DC up to Bel Air carrying three passengers and requested by somebody at the Bureau. Putting two and two together to make four is not a particularly difficult trick.

‘We have an unfolding situation in DC,’ Rogers began, but Gordon interrupted him immediately.

‘I know. A few blackouts. Perhaps you can tell me what the hell that has got to do with the FBI. Or has the Bureau now started working for the power companies?’

‘Sorry, but you’ve been badly misinformed,’ Rogers replied. ‘There haven’t just been a few blackouts in DC, as you put it. The information I received from the electrical engineers who were trying to restore power was that they were facing a cascade situation where circuits would overload, trip and shed the load onto other circuits which would then do exactly the same thing. And the reason they were doing this wasn’t because half the residents of DC suddenly decided to hike their air-conditioners up another notch or two or turn on their ovens. It was because some hackers had created artificial faults inside the networks, shutting down generator cooling systems, fiddling with thermostats and altering settings. And they managed to affect virtually every power company that supplies DC and the surrounding areas. Unravelling it and finding and fixing all of these faults is probably going to take them at the very least the rest of the day, maybe longer.’

Somewhat to Roger’s surprise, Gordon had listened to what he said attentively and without interrupting.

‘Okay, maybe I was misinformed. Maybe there are a lot of blackouts. But my question still stands: what has that got to do with the FBI? And while you’re at it, maybe you can tell me exactly what the hell you’re doing here in Bel Air and why you needed my SWAT team activated?’

Rogers nodded. At least Gordon was listening to him, something that Bouchier only very rarely did, and even then he had a habit of constantly interrupting whoever was talking, like the kind of unpleasant, biased and aggressive interviewers seemingly favoured by many satellite television news channels. He’d never met the Baltimore SAC before but he knew of him, the FBI being just as gossipy as any other large organisation, and Gordon had a reputation for being exceptionally bright and with a very low tolerance for both bullshit and fools. And the fact that he had made it as far as he had in the Bureau’s hierarchy not only as a comparatively young man, but also as a comparatively young black man, was a clear testament to his abilities.

‘The short version is that DC is under attack, and the information that we’ve obtained suggests that the blackouts are simply the first stage in what’s going to happen. We’ve had help from the NSA and the British GCHQ and what we know is based primarily on mobile phone intercepts and the triangulation of those same mobiles. That’s why we’re here, and also why we requested the activation of your SWAT team – because we believe the mastermind behind these attacks is located just a few miles from here, in Fairview, and right now he’s probably making his final preparations to launch his strike against DC. Time’s passing and the longer we just talk, the more chance there is of that attack happening. And what we certainly can’t do is hang around waiting for somebody like Charles Bouchier back in the Hoover building to decide there really is a problem and start issuing orders. Our information suggests we don’t have days. We might not even have hours. Right now we might be looking at just a few minutes before the attack commences.’

‘Okay, Rogers, you’ve got my attention, and I agree that if we waited for Bouchier to make a decision we’d probably be sitting around here for the rest of the week. To set your mind at rest, the SWAT team is fully kitted out and on its way to Fairview right now, as your man requested, with no lights or sirens, just a couple of black Suburbans driving nice and quietly through the suburbs. I know those SUVs just scream “Bureau” or “Secret Service” but they’re all we’ve got. They’ll park up somewhere and wait for the go signal, and I guarantee they will be ready when we need them.’

‘Thank you for that.’

‘So what’s the target?’

Rogers outlined the information they had obtained from the GCHQ intercepts, the translations of the Arabic speech used in the phone calls, and the content of the SMS messages.

‘So you hope the local cops have picked up those three hackers, or the people you think are hackers, and you believe this man Sadir, this “father of destruction” as he calls himself, is out at Fairview right now, presumably with his finger on the trigger. What you don’t know is what pressing the trigger will do. And these other two contacts, one at Damascus and the other at Syracuse. What are we doing about them?’

‘There’s not a lot we can do, as far as I can see. We had enough evidence to move against the three suspected hackers – or just about,