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

into the coffee shop only three minutes late and stood for a moment just inside the doorway looking round. He could see three black women, one by herself in a booth at the back and the other two sitting at tables, all of them alone. But the question of which one was Barbara Simpson was quickly resolved when the woman in the booth stopped looking at her watch, pointed at him, crooked her finger and then gestured at the seat opposite her.

‘You’d better be Ben Morgan,’ she said as he sat down, ‘otherwise you’re going to feel a massive spike of pain in your groin, which will be the heel of my shoe crushing your testicles, after which I’ll scream rape and run out.’

‘I am Ben Morgan, and I’d really appreciate it if you left my wedding tackle alone. Are you going to do me serious bodily harm if I order a coffee?’

Simpson grinned at him and slid a plastic covered menu across the table towards him.

‘Good morning, Ben. A deal’s a deal. I said I’d buy you breakfast, so why don’t you whistle up a waitress, order what you want and get some coffee down your throat. Then we need to talk.’

One of the waitresses cruised by at that moment, poured coffee into the cup that was already on the table and wrote down what Morgan wanted to eat, which was basically an Americanised version of a full English – bacon, sausage, eggs over easy, whatever that meant, and hash browns – then disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

‘How did you know it was me?’ Morgan asked, adding milk to his cup and taking a sip.

‘I guessed. No new customers had walked in here for the last ten minutes, which is when I arrived, and then you pitched up, a single white male, bit geeky, looking lost and three minutes late. It wasn’t particularly difficult to identify you.’

Morgan’s breakfast arrived much sooner than he had expected, but America was, after all, the home of fast food, which didn’t necessarily just mean burgers and fries. It was hot, tasty and well cooked, and certainly filled the gap left by him not eating dinner the previous evening.

‘Finish that,’ Simpson ordered, pointing at his plate. ‘Then we can talk.’

‘So how can I help you?’ Morgan asked about five minutes later, cutting the last piece of spicy sausage in half and popping a piece of it into his mouth.

‘Do you know why I’m here? In America, I mean, not in this particular coffee shop?’

‘I talked to Ian Mitchell,’ Morgan replied, glancing around, ‘and I gather you’re a senior British police officer and you’re probably doing something undercover over here. But that’s the limit of my knowledge.’

Simpson nodded. ‘That’s it in a nutshell, yes,’ she replied. ‘My services, such as they are, were requested by the Americans, specifically by the Feds, because I’m a complete outsider and all the alphabet soup three-digit agencies over here are worried about penetration by people who might have been radicalised. And, more significantly, about the threat of some possible unspecified terrorist attack possibly being planned by a group of possible radical Islamists. There have been whispers in the ether, all kinds of mutterings picked up by low-level informers, but not much in the way of solid information. All possibles but no probables or certainties. My job has been to try to put some flesh on the bones. Either that, or to somehow prove that there is no such threat. I have a knack for spotting bad people hiding in plain sight.

‘Now let me answer your obvious first question before you ask it. The Bureau gave me all the relevant information they had, all the whispers, so I knew who they suspected of being involved. That gave me somewhere to start. The reason they thought I might be a useful asset was because they guessed that if there was some terrorist plot being hatched, the people involved would be making sure they weren’t observed or followed. And they believed that a black female street person, which is the way I usually dress when I do my surveillance, would be less likely to be spotted than a bunch of white guys in suits with lapel mics and bulges under their left armpits standing about on street corners. Or even the same white guys in casual clothes trying to blend in. My speciality, or specialism as the Americans persist in calling it, is becoming effectively invisible. Just another wino or dropout dressed in rags, wandering the streets or sitting in a doorway. The kind of person that everybody sees but nobody notices.’

Morgan stared across the table at the slim and smartly dressed woman looking at him. He found it difficult to imagine her wandering the streets in rags and begging for coins or drinks or other scraps – what the Americans called panhandling. But that, he supposed, was really the point.

‘And is there a viable threat?’ he asked.

Just as Morgan had done a couple of minutes earlier, Simpson also glanced round the coffee shop before she replied. ‘Yes, there is,’ she said, looking troubled. ‘At least, I think so.’

As Morgan slid his empty plate to one side, Simpson leaned forward and explained what she’d found. Or thought she’d found.

Grant Rogers, her FBI handler, for want of a better word, had kept her supplied with encrypted thumb drives containing the take from dozens of different data sources, including extracts of passenger flight arrivals at all the major airports from New York down to Charlotte and west as far out as Indianapolis and Detroit. This data catchment initiative was based on two slightly shaky assumptions: first, that any terrorists planning an atrocity in DC wouldn’t be home-grown and radicalised in America but would be travelling from the Middle East, so all arrivals with Arabic names or passports issued by any of the countries in that region were being backtracked through airline records to their point of origin to check on their entire