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

Then he stood back and looked at what he’d done. Not only was the device completely invisible, but because of the shrubs and undergrowth and leaf litter the camouflaged tarpaulin was an almost exact match for the ground around it. Sadir turned away for a few seconds, then looked back and chuckled. Even knowing the shape of the shrouded device, and knowing exactly where it was, he still couldn’t see it. And that meant the chances of somebody else finding it were effectively nil.

Twenty minutes later, he was again sitting in the driving seat of the Honda, steering the car back north along Presque Isle Road on his way back to Washington. He wouldn’t get there until late in the evening, but that didn’t matter.

In the glade in the woods behind him, the device was absolutely silent. For now, the only part of it that functioned was the mobile phone. That was on standby waiting to receive the single call that would allow the circuit to be completed and the detonation to take place.

Chapter 39

Washington D.C., United States of America

For the forty-eight hours after his meeting with Grant Rogers, Ben Morgan stayed in contact with Barbara Simpson, meeting her in various cafes when she wasn’t dressed in rags and panhandling her way around DC, and remained in the FBI loop as well, attending some briefings and updates in the Hoover building – as in John Edgar, rather than a vacuum cleaner factory – as a specialist observer.

He also had a longish telephone conversation with Natasha Black, who was still wearing her GCHQ hat in the monolithic black slab of a building that was the home of the NSA out at Fort George G. Meade in Anne Arundel County in Maryland. It was basically a catch-up and ‘how are you doing out there?’ call, but Morgan did have one idea, and a fairly obvious related question, that he wanted to run by her.

‘The Fibbies have eyes on four Arab suspects here in DC,’ he began, ‘and there’s a strong possibility that one of them might be this Abū Tadmir character. The problem is that they have four names for these guys based on photographic ID but they only have an address for one of them. They tried following the other three suspects after a meeting but lost them in the crowds.’

Morgan could hear what sounded like a snort of disgust from the other end of the call.

‘Typical Bureau incompetence,’ Black said. ‘Most of the FBI agents I’ve met couldn’t follow a cow across an empty field in broad daylight without stepping in a pile of shit and managing to lose sight of the animal. Look, if these really are bad guys, the chances of them using a registered mobile are about the same as my chance of becoming the next American President. That’s nil, by the way. They’ll have burners, obviously, and they’ll have given false names and paid in cash at whatever hotel or apartment building they’re living in. They’ll be way under the radar.’

‘I had kind of worked that out for myself, Natasha,’ Morgan replied. ‘But I was wondering if there was a way we could at least use their mobiles to try and track them through the resources you’re sitting on out at Fort Meade.’

He outlined what he had in mind, but as usual Natasha Black saw exactly where he was going well before he’d finished.

‘The answer to that’s fairly obvious,’ she said. ‘It’s yes and no. Yes, we have the resources and ability to do what you’ve suggested and no, the NSA can’t legally do that. There are laws and rules in place, even when you’re turning over stones trying to find a bunch of scabby terrorists hiding under them while they plan to blow up the White House or whatever, and what the NSA can’t legally do is spy on American citizens or anyone living in the country.’

‘So that’s that, then?’

‘Of course it isn’t, Ben. Do try and keep up. We just do it through the back door. The NSA can’t spy on American citizens, just as GCHQ can’t spy on British citizens. So what we do is tell the NSA which people in Britain we’d like them to watch and let them get on with it, and they tell us which American citizens we need to keep an eye on. And then we just swap the data. That way, both the NSA and GCHQ are obeying the letter of our respective laws rather than their spirit, and that keeps the lawyers happy. Or at least quiet. We’ve been doing that for years. I’ll set it up through Cheltenham, but I will need whatever data you’ve got because we’ll have to have somewhere to start.’

‘I’ve got a date and a time and a confirmed location in DC for the receiving mobile.’

‘That’ll do nicely. Lay it on me.’

For the remainder of those two days nothing appeared to happen. The Bureau had teams of agents out on the streets monitoring the movements of Karim Ganem, the only suspected terrorist whose address they knew, but he never left the building except for domestic purposes such as food shopping, on each occasion trailing a full team of FBI watchers behind him like the straggly tail of an unlikely comet.

The single microphone the FBI had installed in his apartment hadn’t produced any useful intelligence. They suspected he was waiting for something, but at no point did he say anything in his infrequent telephone calls that gave any indication of what he was planning to do or when he was planning to do it. He never used his landline so the Bureau had to rely upon their electronic eavesdropping device to hear what he was saying, and even then they could only hear his side of the conversation.

The first useful clue, in fact, came not from anything organised by the FBI but in a long-distance telephone call to Morgan’s mobile from another UK-registered mobile, a