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

attention, but his belief that they could talk freely at the cafe was badly flawed, because in this case the threat was not anywhere around the table where they had been sitting, but above them and well outside their immediate vicinity.

The FBI team tasked with the surveillance of Karim Ganem had been aware from their initial surveillance of him almost three months earlier that he was always conscious of his surroundings and people in his vicinity.

The Bureau had started taking an interest in the man’s activities following a tip-off from the English policewoman Barbara Simpson who, in the process of investigating some of the low-level tips received by the FBI, had got close enough to Ganem in her normal street persona of a penniless vagrant, the kind of person that people saw but didn’t notice, to overhear part of a conversation he’d been carrying out on a mobile phone. What she’d heard – references to a sponsored hacking project as part of a much larger and more destructive operation – had been enough for her to convince Grant Rogers to elevate Ganem’s status to that of a person of interest. That status and level of surveillance meant that a tap had been placed on his landline, which turned out to be a waste of effort because the target never made or received calls on it.

After several weeks Rogers had begun to have his doubts, because Ganem didn’t appear to be involved in any kind of criminal activity, or indeed much activity at all. He spent most of his time in his apartment working on his computer. The techies at the FBI were able to confirm that he had a broadband connection, but as he invariably used a virtual private network, a VPN, whenever he was online they were unable to see what exactly he was doing. All they could establish was that his connection showed data being uploaded and downloaded, just the same as they would expect to see from anybody using the Internet. But they had no idea what was being uploaded or downloaded.

The Bureau had been able to get a bug into his apartment by going through the floor of the flat above and positioning the microphone within the structure of the ceiling of Ganem’s flat. As a security precaution and also to conserve its battery life, the mic was only switched on when a hidden camera mounted in the hallway on that floor of the building showed that the target was in the flat, and only then after at least an hour had passed, just in case he used some kind of bug detector as a precaution when he returned home. Deactivating the microphone wouldn’t prevent a sophisticated detector from locating it, but that technique would be enough to defeat most of the commercial devices on the market.

Simply getting authorisation to position that single microphone had taken longer and required far more form-filling at the Bureau than Rogers had hoped or expected, and he’d realised that trying to obtain permission to conduct video surveillance inside the apartment was unlikely to be granted: they simply hadn’t got enough information – or even credible suspicions – to justify it. So they could hear him, but not see him.

Rogers had almost been ready to pull the plug on Ganem’s surveillance, until the take from the microphone suggested he was heading out for a meeting, something he hadn’t done since the start of the surveillance. All his previous forays out of the apartment had been purely domestic, mainly shopping and visits to one of a handful of restaurants in the area that served Middle Eastern food.

But that morning the target had received a call on his unregistered mobile phone that, from the sound of his responses – because of course they could only hear his side of the conversation – he had been waiting for. Ganem had agreed the time without any apparent attempt to disguise what he was saying and had obligingly repeated it twice so that the microphone was able to pick it up clearly.

But just in case when he’d said ‘ten thirty’ that was actually code for a quarter to one or half past five or some other time that day, or even a different time on a different day, Rogers had immediately prepped and briefed the team ready to go. He’d positioned one agent with a pair of powerful binoculars, a mobile phone and a two-way radio in a high-rise on the opposite side of the street from Ganem’s apartment with orders to make the call the moment the target started doing anything that suggested he was about to leave the building.

But because they had known of the target’s preternatural awareness of his surroundings, they weren’t going to follow him from his apartment building. Instead, they identified the choke points, the places he would have to pass once he’d left the building, irrespective of where he was going, and positioned a watcher at each of them.

The FBI agent covering the building had used the radio at ten minutes to ten to alert the team that the target was on the move. Then he’d taken the elevator down to street level and walked out onto the pavement at virtually the same moment that Ganem had appeared opposite him. The target had walked down the street and the agent had immediately turned in the opposite direction to head away from him, at the same time again using his radio to warn his team which way Ganem was walking.

As the target had passed the first choke point, the closest watcher had called in the sighting using his mobile phone, which allowed other personnel to re-position to get ahead of him. Using this kind of leapfrog technique they had shadowed him as far as the Metro station. Then they’d risked sending a watcher after him to confirm the direction he was heading and to stay on the train until Ganem got off it, and at the same time they sent a