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

before the attack began. The only limiting factor was battery life, but the people who had built the weapon had calculated that as long as the detonation sequence was initiated within one month, maybe as long as two months, of positioning, the battery should function perfectly.

And that was why, early in the morning after collecting the seventh weapon from the house in Damascus, Sadir drove his old Honda through the streets of Washington D.C., merging in with the start of the morning rush hour. He had a fairly long drive ahead of him, about three hundred and fifty miles, to reach Syracuse, where he’d find a room for the night somewhere on the outskirts. He wouldn’t book anything, because that would involve names and credit cards: it would be far easier, and a lot safer, to pick somewhere at random and just pay cash. He was paranoid about not leaving a paper trail. The distance didn’t bother him because he knew the roads were good and fast and there should be few hold-ups.

His vehicle was entirely street legal and he would take considerable care not to attract the attention of any patrolling police officers by committing a moving traffic violation. His documentation would obviously raise no questions, but he couldn’t afford to let anybody look in the boot of his car because the device he was carrying would be difficult or impossible to explain away.

The motel he picked early that evening was on the northern side of Syracuse – in fact, it was actually in Cicero, the next town and further north than he needed to go – and was somewhat run-down, but the room was clean and the air conditioning worked most of the time. He picked a name at random when he signed in, handed over some dollars in exchange for the room key and received directions to a nearby diner that served meals all day. But Sadir had no intention of leaving the room that night, to eat or for any other purpose. Quite apart from the fact that he needed to keep his eyes on the Honda, which he had secured against theft with a brace across the steering wheel to prevent it turning and by removing the battery fuse from the fuse box, he was not prepared to eat in any American diner because of the danger of inadvertently eating pork.

Islamic law absolutely forbids any Muslim to consume pork, the meat being considered haram, meaning both a religious and a cultural taboo. He was aware that Americans enjoyed eating bacon and in his opinion there was too much chance of bacon fat or – a most disgusting thought – even small pieces of that meat being served in other dishes simply because they would be cooked in the same kitchen. Instead, he had prepared a number of cold snacks made with halal meat and vegetables – that Arabic word meaning lawful or permissible, almost the exact opposite of haram both practically and linguistically – which he would eat in his room.

And the following morning he would position the weapon that would trigger the start of almost the final act in the attack on America.

Chapter 37

Washington D.C., United States of America

‘There’s something else you need to know. Barbara Simpson’s uncovered something peculiar that’s relevant to this problem. She was checking back through some of the historic data you’d supplied and she noticed an anomaly. Nearly three years ago an Arab male with an Iraqi passport arrived in Baltimore on a flight from the UK. Also on the flight were two Chinese nationals, and the odd thing is that the Arab passenger’s ultimate point of departure was Beijing, and those two Chinese men were also passengers on every flight he took from China all the way to Baltimore.’

‘That could just be a coincidence,’ Rogers suggested, not sounding entirely convinced.

‘It could be, but Simpson thought it looked odd, so she did a bit more checking through her contacts back in the UK. The people at Six – James Bond-land in London – discovered that the two Chinese passengers were officers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and they’d almost certainly been working at Unit 61398 in Shanghai. That’s one of the most persistent and dangerous of all the Chinese hacking outfits. Then she checked some of the details over here in the States and found that the two Chinese men had dropped off the grid almost as soon as they’d arrived.’

Roger shook his head. ‘That doesn’t make sense. Cyber’s more your thing than mine but I do know that these hackers can run their attacks from anywhere in the world, so why would they travel to America if that was their target? They could have stayed in Shanghai and done everything from there.’

‘That,’ Morgan agreed, ‘is the anomaly. What could they be doing here that they couldn’t be doing just as well from the other side of the world? But the fact that according to your records they haven’t used credit cards or driving licences or any other kind of document that could identify them suggests that they’ve gone to ground somewhere and somebody has been providing them with cash for their living expenses.’

‘So why do you think they could somehow be involved in this attack?’

‘The thing about passports is that the days when you could just wave a reasonable facsimile at an immigration officer and hope that that would do the trick are long gone. These days, at least in the developed world, every passport is scanned electronically and if it doesn’t match what’s in the linked databases it won’t be accepted. So the passports the two Chinese men produced were the real thing, or at least they were genuine People’s Republic of China passports, and the document produced by the Arab was also genuine. Whether or not the names given in those passports match with the actual birth certificates of the three individuals is another question altogether.

‘What I’m getting at is that these days even