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

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,