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

taking a kind of hands-off approach, just watching where they went and what they did, but now there’s a suspicion that one of them is a terrorist bomber mastermind, I’ll be suggesting we become a whole lot more proactive. Hopefully the senior seat-shiners will see the sense of that and let us get on with it.

‘But whether or not we involve you in any of this, Mr Morgan, rather depends on what you say next. Because I have a question that I’d like answering. We occasionally allow members of the public to roam around this building, at least some of the non-sensitive areas, on organised visits, but apart from that we’re very choosy about who we let in.

‘When we were told you were stopping by for coffee and doughnuts today we obviously asked who the hell you were, and that raised a red flag, because according to the background checks we did you hold a Top Secret security clearance with a bunch of specific SCI permissions, but you also have a police record back in Britain. And I’d like to know why.’

Chapter 34

Washington D.C., United States of America

The six devices – Sadir mentally referred to them as the ‘Peacemakers’, a somewhat cynical nickname bearing in mind their actual purpose – that were undergoing final checks and preparations in Damascus were only a part, albeit an important part, of the havoc he intended to visit upon the capital city of the United States of America. In fact, it was the second time the devices had been finally checked, but then the plans for both attacks had ground to a halt.

London had only needed a month’s lead time because of the attack mechanism, but Washington was very different and much more complicated. Preparations for that attack had been completed by March 2020, but before they could be implemented the Covid-19 pandemic began hitting the major centres of population around the world. Because of travel restrictions and for other reasons, the plans had to be placed on hold until the global situation improved, which took longer than any of them had expected. As the rate of infection in the United States climbed inexorably towards, and then exceeded, 20 million in the first weeks of 2021, and with a death toll of over a third of a million by the end of 2020, some of the elders began wondering if the attack was necessary at all. After all, even the magnificent events that had occurred in New York on 11 September 2001, the attacks universally referred to as 9/11, had killed fewer than three thousand Americans. But the microscopically small coronavirus labelled Covid-19 was effortlessly laying waste to similar numbers of American citizens on almost a daily basis, decimating the Great Satan. Streets in the cities were empty, road and air traffic had been reduced dramatically, face masks were everywhere and the population was frightened.

But that, as Rashid had pointed out both to his fellow elders and also to Sadir, was irrelevant. The Grim Reaper was working his way very efficiently through the population of the United States of America, as he was in virtually every other country in the world, mainly culling the old and the sick, but a high death toll was not the point. In political and ideological terms, deaths caused by an illness, by any illness, were irrelevant. They simply didn’t count. To promote and emphasise the message of radical Islam, deaths in the target country had to be seen to be entirely the work of the planners and the shahids of the Islamic movement. The devastation caused by Covid-19 was a bonus, that was all. Even if half the population of America died in the pandemic, the planned attack would still go ahead. Their action would just have to be delayed until an optimum time.

And with the overall improvements in the medical situation, with vaccines on stream and every country in the world moving forward towards normality, there was one obvious date when Rashid decided that the attack should be mounted.

Every year since 1776 the Fourth of July has been a cause for celebration and today is both a public holiday and the national day of the country, marked by a diverse range of celebrations including firework displays, carnivals, political speeches, concerts and the like. And most of the biggest events take place, exactly as would be expected, in and around the capital city of America.

It was arguably the biggest celebration in the country every year, bigger even than Christmas. Sadir was absolutely determined that it would be an Independence Day that nobody ever forgot. But for all the wrong reasons.

Chapter 35

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., United States of America

Whatever Morgan had been expecting, it wasn’t that, and for a few seconds he didn’t respond. Then he took another sip of his cooling coffee and looked over at Rogers.

‘That’s privileged information,’ he said.

‘I know. Your police file is sealed, so I know you’ve got one, but I don’t know what’s in it. The fact that it exists is a problem: it implies you’ve had a conviction, and we don’t like that here in the US.’

‘And why do you need to know anything if my clearances are all current?’

‘For exactly the same reason that you would want to know more, probably a hell of a lot more, if you’d been told that you had to work with a convicted felon. Before we take this any further I need to know what happened, what you did and why.’

Morgan didn’t reply immediately as he considered his options. He could get up and walk out, and probably have to hop on board the next available flight back to Heathrow, or he could do what Rogers was asking, and talk about an incident in his past that he wasn’t particularly proud of. In the circumstances, it wasn’t that difficult a decision. He reached into his pocket, took out his mobile phone, put it on the table in front of