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

Morgan’s slouching, casually dressed and faintly jet-lagged – though this was not visually apparent – figure.

‘Believe it or not,’ Morgan responded, ‘I don’t really know why I’m here either. I received orders from on high and in my experience the best course of action is usually to obey them, as long as they seem to make some kind of sense. Which is not necessarily the case here.’

Rogers, as the man running the investigation into Karim Ganem and the people he appeared to be associating with, had also been the recipient of instructions from above, in his case from a senior seat-shiner on one of the more elevated levels in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His remit, shorn of the usual bureaucratic verbiage, was to see if ‘the Limey’ had anything useful to contribute to the ongoing investigation and, as something of a secondary issue, to find out why Morgan, as a kind of representative of Her Britannic Majesty’s government from the other side of the Pond, and who had apparently been sent to Washington to provide advice and assistance as a cybersecurity expert, had both a stratospheric security clearance and a police record. In Rogers’s mind, those two things were mutually exclusive, and he guessed that getting to the bottom of that particular conundrum would probably be quite a good idea.

‘According to my briefing notes,’ Rogers began, ‘what you specialise in is cybersecurity, and because all you need to follow that particular career path is a halfway decent laptop and a fast Internet connection, you could do that job anywhere in the world. Which, as I’ve already said, makes me wonder why you’ve been sent over here.’

Morgan shrugged. ‘Me too. But let me tell you why I think I’m here. You’ve obviously heard about the failed boat bomb attack in London, which was a really close call. Luckily, we had a Thames police officer who was prepared to break all the rules and rammed the cabin cruiser carrying the weapon. If he’d been about five seconds slower in his reaction time, the Palace of Westminster would need hundreds of new windows and several months of repair work and the British government would potentially be looking for over a hundred new Members of Parliament. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing. It was that big a device, and they got that close.’

‘I heard about that,’ Rogers said, nodding. ‘Sometimes the good guys do just get lucky.’

‘But what you might not have heard was what happened afterwards.’ Morgan explained about the surviving terrorist dying in police custody and the manner of his death, and the questioning of the other two members of the cell once they’d been arrested. ‘They were all clearly committed to the attempted bombing, but our interrogations suggested that they regarded it only as a starting point, an attack intended to cripple the British government but which was a precursor to a much bigger event. And that event, at least by inference, is probably going to happen in America.’

Rogers leaned forward across the table. ‘Did your people get anything more concrete out of them?’

‘Nothing substantive,’ Morgan admitted. ‘We did establish that all of them were cleanskins and only one of them had ever come to the attention of our intelligence services, and not as a major player. They were all home-grown British citizens nursing a grudge against the West. But it looked like a tight organisation and the man who’d been directing it obviously applied the need-to-know principle. So he’d been prepared to tell them that the London attack was just one step in a much bigger scheme, maybe to keep them onside in the knowledge that they were part of a more ambitious plan to strike at the West, but he apparently never divulged any of the details of that scheme to them.’

‘I presume this man wasn’t one of the people your guys picked up?’

‘No. We know almost nothing about this person, except that he ran the terrorist cell from a distance, never visited the property where they lived as far as we know and just told them what to do and when to do it. The two people we questioned just said he was a brother Muslim who had directed the operation and provided the funding for it, so he’s probably acting on behalf of some Islamic organisation in the Middle East. Maybe ISIS, or perhaps some other group. Oddly enough they did name him, though that isn’t likely to prove much of a help.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the name they used was a teknonym, a thing called a kunya, which is an adopted name that Arab parents often use to show their relationship to their eldest child.’

‘You’re referring to “Abū” and “Umm” meaning “father of” and “mother of” whatever their kid was called, I guess,’ Rogers suggested. ‘It’s not my field, but we get regular threat briefings and radical Islam is pretty much always the main topic. I remember hearing about kunyas in one of them. So what name was this guy using?’

‘He was calling himself Abū Tadmir, which has to be a nom de guerre, not a family name, and chosen for effect, because tadmir is an Arabic word meaning “destruction” and not a proper name at all. So he believes he’s the “father of destruction”, which we think sounds bloody ominous, at best.’

Rogers opened his mouth to reply, then stopped and shook his head. ‘Gimme a second,’ he muttered, picked up his mobile phone and dialled a number from his contact list.

‘Bill?’ he said, when the call was answered. ‘Can you come down to the interview room and bring the transcript with you.’

Rogers put down his mobile, pointed at the china mug in front of Morgan. ‘You want more coffee?’

He pronounced it ‘cawfee’ and Morgan was already somewhat awash, but he guessed that this meeting wasn’t likely to be over any time soon and he would need something to keep him going, so he nodded and at the same time reached for another doughnut. He