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

Parliament. He has a name for the mastermind behind it, the guy pulling the strings and working the members of the cell to mount the attack. And the name is interesting, because it’s not a genuine Arab name but a kunya, an adopted name. In this case, more like an adopted title, because he calls himself Abū Tadmir. And that, as Ben explained to me just before you came down, translates as “father of destruction”, and that’s not good news.’

‘That Arabic word is both specific and broad ranging,’ Morgan clarified. ‘As you said, it translates as “destruction”, but it can also mean “demolition”, “devastation”, “ruin”, “wreck” and, potentially the nastiest of all, “annihilation”. You really don’t want him loose on your streets.’

‘The trouble is,’ Rogers said, ‘I have a feeling he’s already here. Okay, the circumstances of the meeting at Tysons weren’t ideal from a surveillance point of view. The targets were sitting at a table outside a busy coffee shop in an area with heavy pedestrian traffic. We got some people on the roof of the building with a shotgun mic and another team in a car with a camera and a microphone, but the recordings we’ve got—’ he tapped the pages in front of him ‘—and that we’ve now had transcribed are full of gaps and broken sentences caused by people walking past or standing in front of the mics.

‘I’ve listened to the tapes as well as read the transcription and when you said the name Abū Tadmir it rang a kind of distant bell with me. Quite early in the meeting Ganem responds to something that Sadir asked him, something that neither of our mics picked up, but we have got part of what Ganem replied. He said “three of the locations” – which could mean anything but might be a reference to three separate targets if these people are planning some kind of a terror campaign – and then we got a partial name before the mic was blocked again. The transcribers thought that might be Abd or Abdul but it’s underlined in the transcript because they weren’t sure. When I heard it, it sounded to me like “Aboot”, which obviously isn’t an Arab name, but if he was actually saying “Abū Tadmir” and we just heard the “Abū T” that would seem to fit.’

‘Can I take a look at that transcript?’ Morgan asked.

Rogers slid the stapled sheets of paper across the table. ‘That’s a combination of the feeds from the shotgun mic on the roof of the shopping centre near the cafe and the device used in the car. As you can see, the feeds were blocked a lot more often than we’d hoped.’

In Morgan’s opinion, that was something of an understatement. Underneath the FBI logo and other stuff at the top of the first page was a rough diagram comprising a square to represent the cafe table and then the letters G, H, S and W positioned around it. The locations of the two shotgun mics were indicated simply as MIC 1 and MIC 2 together with their approximate distances from the targets. And below that was a decode of the lettering system, obviously based on the later identification of the three new suspects: G was Karim Ganem, H was Jamal Halabi, S was Mahdi Sadir and W was Talat Wasem.

‘As you can see from the diagram,’ William Clark said, leaning forward over the table and pointing, ‘Ganem is facing the shotgun mic on the building roof, Halabi and Wasem are side-on to the mic and Sadir has his back to it. And that’s unfortunate, because I think he’s the most important of the four men.’

‘Why?’ Morgan asked.

‘It’s just my opinion, but I watched almost the entire meeting apart from the first five minutes or so when we were getting into position. I couldn’t hear what was being said because we couldn’t get a live feed from the shotgun mic on the roof without it being fairly obvious, but I did watch the four men and to me their body language was interesting. When they were in normal conversation they would interrupt each other or make comments and remarks of their own, just like any small group of people talking together. But whenever Sadir spoke, as far as I could tell the other three men stayed silent until he’d finished speaking. To me that suggests that he’s the leader of that particular group, and if Grant is right about the Abū Tadmir link Sadir could be the mastermind behind the London attack and the puppet-master for whatever is being planned over here in the States.’

Morgan nodded and looked back at the transcript. It was laid out in three columns, the left-hand one being the time any piece of speech began, the second the identity of the person talking and the third, and by far the biggest column, the transcribed text. The page in front of him was the one Rogers had picked out, and Morgan saw the four words uttered by Ganem about halfway down the sheet.

‘There’s no point in me listening to the audio,’ Morgan said. ‘If your techie experts can’t identify it for certain, there’s no way that I’d be able to be definitive. I think you’re making a bit of a jump, and assumptions are always dangerous, but you could well be right. If Sadir is this “father of destruction” that does at least tie in with him flying out of Heathrow after the Thames attack. And if you are going to make an assumption, it always makes sense to assume the worst, and having Abū Tadmir loose on the streets of Washington is definitely a worst-case scenario. So what’s your plan? And how do I fit in?’

Rogers glanced at Clark before he replied. ‘That’s two separate questions and right now I’m not sure they’re related. Our plan—’ and Rogers unmistakably emphasised the word ‘our’ ‘—is to increase surveillance of Sadir and the other three men. Up to now we’ve been