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Read book online «Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕».   Author   -   James Barrington



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call that – perhaps predictably – woke him from a confused and confusing dream at a little after four in the morning. At least he wasn’t still jet-lagged.

‘Who is it?’

‘For God’s sake, Morgan, you sound about as sharp as a sponge. Where’s your get up and go? In the SBS we were trained to react in under a second from being sound asleep.’

‘It got up and went,’ Morgan replied, immediately recognising the caller’s voice. ‘It’s four in the morning, Cam, and I need my beauty sleep, so I hope you didn’t call me just so we could swap clichés.’

Three and a half thousand miles away, Cameron Riley sounded irritatingly chirpy and buoyant, probably just to annoy Morgan.

‘Not exactly, no. This is your early morning early warning call. The London Exchange has seen an unusually high level of well out-of-the-money index put options traded this morning, and that’s been mirrored in most of the European exchanges and the Far East as well. My guess is that when Wall Street opens you’ll see the same pattern on your side of the Pond. It’s time to circle the wagons. If your deduction is right, that means whatever these people have got planned is pretty imminent, so best you put on your boots and spurs, grab a six-gun and a Winchester rifle and sort it out.’

‘Washington these days isn’t quite like that, Cam, so enough of the Wild West stuff, okay. Anything else?’

‘Only that I assume you’ve checked the calendar?’

‘Why? Is it your birthday or something?’

‘Not my birthday, no, but you could say that tomorrow was and is the birthday of an entire nation, so I do just wonder if these guys are planning their own personal form of celebration. Something to remember them by, that kind of thing.’

Morgan didn’t need to check the date, because Washington was already abuzz with preparations for the parties and concerts that would dominate the city the next day.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean. Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll try to get the wheels turning.’

Morgan glanced at the illuminated digits of the bedside clock in the hotel room and made an instant decision. There was nothing he could usefully do at that time in the morning, so he reset the alarm for six, switched off the light and closed his eyes again.

But sleep proved elusive. By six he was up, showered and dressed and on his way down to the coffee shop to buy himself a double-shot caffeine kick-starter to complete the waking up process. An hour after that, he’d called both Barbara Simpson and Natasha Black on their mobiles to bring them up to speed and was sitting in the back of a cab on his way to 935 Pennsylvania Avenue to talk to Grant Rogers.

It was probably, Morgan reflected as the taxi driver carved his way through the early morning traffic, going to be a fairly short briefing. The single piece of new information he had, which was in fact merely a logical deduction based on a certain kind of activity in the stock markets, suggested that the terrorist attack – assuming that they weren’t seeing something that wasn’t there – was imminent.

He still had absolutely no idea what form the attack would take, where it would happen – except most probably somewhere in DC – when it would be launched, though sometime the following day looked favourite, and, crucially, he had no clue what the hell they could do to stop it.

Chapter 40

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

‘How sure are you about this?’ Grant Rogers asked, looking quizzically at Ben Morgan. ‘Say on a scale of one to ten.’

‘I suppose about a seven or eight would more or less cover it. It’s faintly possible that we could just be looking at a major change in the global market sentiment, the bulls all turning into bears, something like that, but I genuinely don’t think that’s very likely, not least because it seems to be worldwide. You always get fluctuations in the types of options being traded, but those tend to affect a single company or perhaps one specific sector of the market because the traders are expecting either very good or very bad news. But what my contact back in the UK is telling me – his name is Cameron Riley – is that all the markets he’s looked at are experiencing the same thing, all the way from Hong Kong to London.’

‘Look, finance isn’t really my thing,’ Rogers said, ‘so just assume I’m an idiot and I know nothing about options. Can you tell me what the hell is going on?’

Morgan knew that was a simple question with a complicated answer. Warfare in the twenty-first century was about controlling economic markets and who owned what, rather than trying to make territorial gains using armies and tanks and bombers. The Russians, the Chinese and even terrorist groups like IS had realised that misinformation, fake news and cyberattacks were low cost but high impact ways of becoming wealthier. They didn’t want to destroy companies, just to control them or make money from them. Globally, governments were less important than the big tech firms, banks and critical infrastructure, and all nations were beginning to realise this. In the UK there’s now a National Cyber Force that’s predicted eventually to absorb over 50 per cent of Britain’s annual military budget.

Explaining all that could take the rest of the day, so Morgan just answered the question Rogers had asked, sticking to the specifics.

‘Look, I’m not an absolute expert, but for a short period I was involved in banking in Britain so I do know how the markets work. In simple terms, buying an option is the same as placing a bet. Just assume that the share price of a company is ten dollars but you think the price is going to rise. If you want to make money out of it, you’ve got two choices. You can go out and buy

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