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

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