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

three men with Sadir were doing exactly that – taking a break – and had been summoned to that spot at that time by the Iraqi.

Two of them had baulked slightly at the idea of a face-to-face meeting, but Sadir had his reasons, and he was the man with both the plan and the money, so they turned up anyway. And almost the first thing Sadir did once they’d bought their coffee and sat down was to explain his reasoning.

‘I know you might have preferred a virtual meeting,’ he said, ‘but I have a problem with that. If we can all log on to a virtual meeting, then so can other people and organisations, and you don’t need me to tell you who I’m referring to. Or they can potentially listen in, anyway. And if they were sitting there quietly on the Internet monitoring us, we would never have any idea that they were there. But here—’ he gestured at the pavement around them ‘—we would immediately notice if anyone was paying us any attention. So here we can talk freely and securely.’

That sounded reasonable to the other three men, but in fact Sadir had another, and rather different, reason for not wanting to communicate over the Internet, something he would only ever do if there genuinely was no alternative. He was, and always had been, paranoid about the possibility of betrayal, and he didn’t believe he could properly gauge a man’s responses and reactions by watching the changes in his expression through the small and inadequate lens of a webcam. In the kind of discussions he was involved in, he wanted to be able to look at, listen to and even smell the man in front of him. That way, he knew he should be able to detect the slightest hint of deception in his voice or body language. And that was of crucial importance.

In fact, Sadir doubted if any of the men he had become associated with in America would do anything to betray him, not least because he had made it very clear what would happen to them if they did. They were all totally dedicated to the cause and had enthusiastically welcomed his initial contact, a couple of years earlier, as a validation of their beliefs. They had been told that one day somebody like Sadir would approach them, and they had all known what to do when that happened. But still, it never hurt to check.

‘So where are you now, Karim?’ he asked the man sitting opposite him. ‘And be careful how you answer. No dates or proper names, nothing like that.’

Karim Ganem was the youngest of the four men, tall and slim, with delicate, almost feminine features and long black eyelashes. He had been approached by Sadir because he was a talented hacker and the leader of a group that called itself AnArchy An0nym0us that had attacked numerous American government and corporate websites, causing damage and defacing the former and stealing data and commercial information from the latter.

‘We have access to three of the locations, Abū Tadmir,’ Ganem replied. ‘We’ve created backdoors and we’re checking each one at least once a week to ensure our points of access have not been detected or blocked. We’re working on the newest site you specified but cracking that is taking longer than we expected. Of course, because they are all high-value sites we had always anticipated that we might encounter some difficulties.’

That was not good news for Sadir, because now they had so little time in hand. He thought for a few moments, then made a decision.

‘The deadline is set and cannot be altered. Abandon that site and just ensure that your accesses to the other three aren’t compromised.’

Half an hour later, having received similar information, in vague and non-specific language, from the other two men, each of whom had confirmed they had access to the targets he had given them, and discussed the operation, again in general and non-specific language, Sadir issued very specific orders for what they were to do and when they were to do it. Then they stood up, shook hands and walked off in different directions.

It was all, he reflected as he strolled along the street in the general direction of his hotel, coming together neatly and as he had hoped and expected. The men he had recruited were motivated primarily by ideology – just as he was – but the essentially unlimited funds at his disposal meant he could cut corners and purchase equipment like fast, high specification computers to facilitate the tasks they had to perform.

And now the culmination of what he had been planning for the better part of the last decade was only a matter of days away.

Chapter 29

Tysons, Virginia, United States of America

Just like the other three members of the group, Karim Ganem was supremely aware of his surroundings and the people near him as he constantly checked to make sure that he was not being followed. When he reached Greensboro Station, he was certain that he had not picked up a tail and that nobody was paying him anything more than the most casual attention, the same kind of attention anyone would give to a fellow pedestrian on the street.

But in this he was not entirely correct.

Evolution has taught human beings to look at eye level and below because that’s where they’ll see both predators and prey. Birds were not usually a threat, but bears and sabre-toothed tigers certainly were, so early man naturally concentrated on looking in the most likely threat direction. Millions of years of evolution only reinforced the message and today people rarely look higher than their own eye-line unless there’s some object in that area which draws their attention. Or if there’s movement, of course. The human eye is particularly well adapted to detecting moving objects, a trait again reinforced by countless millennia of evolution.

Sadir had been right in his belief that they would notice anybody around them paying any special