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

plan one more time and obtained from both Michael and Joseph the answers he had expected to the questions he had asked, Sadir got back into his Honda for the return drive to Washington.

This, the final component, was in place and ready to be activated on his command. But there were still two other pieces of the overall plan he would need to check. All three different aspects of the attack were separate but complementary, and for the matter to reach the ideal conclusion, all needed to function faultlessly. His next job was to confirm that the weapons they would position within DC itself were also fully prepared, checked and ready to deploy.

Chapter 27

Washington D.C., United States of America

‘You don’t know me,’ the female and clearly English voice in the speaker of Ben Morgan’s mobile phone said, ‘but we have a mutual friend. Or possibly a mutual friend of a mutual friend.’

‘We have?’ Morgan replied, his voice sounding somewhat groggy even to his own ears. He’d overslept that morning and had had trouble getting to sleep the night before because he was getting into a different bed in a different city in a different country, and more importantly in a different time zone, to the one that his body clock assumed he was still occupying.

‘Are you drunk?’ the woman demanded. ‘It’s not even ten in the morning.’

‘No,’ Morgan replied, waking up rapidly. ‘I flew in last night. I’ve had about four hours’ sleep and I deliberately didn’t set an alarm. Your phone call woke me up.’

‘Sorry about that,’ the voice said, with no particular evidence of sincerity.

‘So who are you, and what do you want?’

‘First, let me just make sure I’m talking to the right person. I’ve been given your mobile number, but can you just tell me your name?’

‘Ben Morgan. So who gave you my number?’

‘Good. I got it from Assistant Chief Constable Richard Boston. You may not know him, but you do know Ian Mitchell. My name’s Barbara Simpson. I’m over here in the Wild West as part of a low-level surveillance operation and I need to talk to somebody outside the investigation who knows about cyber and all that crap. Your name popped up at the top of the list. So where and when do you want to meet?’

‘Hang on a minute,’ Morgan replied. ‘I’m not even awake yet. I need to shower and get dressed and then pour some coffee down my throat before I’m even halfway back to being human.’

Morgan was even more confused. What he had assumed was a covert operation involving only him and Natasha Black apparently also involved other people from the eastern side of the Pond. Maybe there was a full UK team on site and all sorts of cogs turning that somebody had decided he had no need to know about.

‘I’ll make a deal with you. Stop fannying about. Get up, wash the important bits and get dressed and I’ll buy you breakfast. Where are you staying?’

A couple of minutes later, Morgan dropped the phone on the bed and pulled himself out of it, still slightly shell-shocked and feeling steamrollered. Barbara Simpson sounded less like a human being and more like an unstoppable force of nature. She’d known exactly where his hotel was located and had told Morgan to meet her in a coffee shop about a block away. He needed to get moving, and quickly, if he was going to make the rendezvous at the time she’d specified.

He headed for the door of the en-suite bathroom then stopped and walked back to the bed. He glanced at his watch then picked up his mobile phone and dialled Ian Mitchell’s number back in the UK. Ten thirty Eastern Standard Time meant it was three thirty in the afternoon in London, so Mitchell would certainly be awake and working.

‘Do you know a woman called Barbara Simpson?’ Morgan asked when his call was connected and they’d exchanged the usual pleasantries.

‘I don’t know her so much as know of her,’ Mitchell replied, ‘and I met her exactly once. Why? And where are you?’

‘Washington, as in DC rather than Tyne and Wear. She’s just called me to arrange a meeting and I know the square root of sod all about who she is or why she wants to talk to me. Is she legit?’

‘Definitely. She’s a police superintendent who specialises in undercover work. I ran into her at a briefing here in London about five or six months ago. I gathered she was about to be sent off on some secret squirrel activity, probably in America, but that part of the briefing didn’t involve me so I don’t know for sure. But if she’s in Washington and so are you, it’s a fair guess that the faeces are about to impact the air-conditioning system, to coin a phrase. She said – several times, in fact – that she knew nothing at all about cyber, so if she wants to talk to you she’s probably run up against something computery that she doesn’t understand. But she is kosher.’

‘Anything else I need to know about her?’

Morgan heard Mitchell’s chuckle from three and a half thousand miles away.

‘Oh, yeah. Don’t call her a person of colour or try any of that PC crap on her or she’ll bite your head off: she told me she’s black and proud of it. Her nickname in the Met is “The Nutcracker” because that’s slightly more polite than “ball breaker”, and that should give you some idea about her personality. And don’t for God’s sake mention drugs to her. She’ll bore the arse off you for the next hour if you do. She hates drugs and she hates drug dealers and she’s spent a good part of her working life down in Colombia trying to disrupt the drug trade. But she also thinks we should legalise the lot. To say she’s conflicted doesn’t really cover it.’

‘Thanks,’ Morgan said, ended the call and resumed his journey to the bathroom.

He stepped