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

‘Yes, but I think most of it will be concentrating on the NYSE Composite, because that covers all the stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange. If there’s no activity, or only the normal level and types of trades, I’d be really happy because that would mean we’ve got it wrong.’

Sometimes the timing of events just seems to work out almost perfectly. As Rogers finished talking he glanced at his watch and opened his mouth to say something else, but right then his mobile phone rang. The conversation was short, probably less than a minute in length, and Rogers said hardly a word, just listened. When he’d finished he looked over at Morgan.

‘New York’s been open about twenty minutes,’ he said, ‘and they’re already reporting unusually heavy trading on the Composite index, most of the purchases being well out-of-the-money put options.’

‘Bugger,’ Morgan muttered. ‘So we need to decide—’ He broke off as his own mobile rang.

His conversation was also short and largely monosyllabic.

‘That,’ he said when he’d finished, ‘was the NSA. Or to be more exact, a friend of mine who’s been seconded to Fort Meade. Just like before nine eleven, the NSA is picking up significantly increased Internet traffic, particularly in and around the Middle East and also from that region to destinations worldwide including here in the States. They’ve also intercepted a handful of encrypted emails, some of which your NSA analysts and our guys over at GCHQ in England have managed to decrypt.’

‘And they say what?’

‘Pretty much what you’d expect them to say, which means nothing specific, and what they do say needs to be interpreted because of the nuances in the Arabic language and the possible different translations into English. They include general and non-specific statements like “Death from the skies,” “Vengeance is coming” and “America will pay” – which is exactly the same expression that those attempted boat bombers in London used – but much of it is the kind of doubletalk that we’re used to from radical Islam and Arabic terrorists generally. Messages where they substitute innocuous words for what they really mean. Bicycle instead of bomb, that kind of thing.’

‘Like al-Qaeda weddings, you mean? Which are actually planned bombings.’

‘Exactly. Trying to decide which emails and stuff on the Internet relate to a real wedding rather than a planned al-Qaeda attack is almost impossible, and they can even send them in clear. But these messages were encrypted, so at least we can be reasonably sure we’re looking at the right stuff. Even so, there are no mentions of the kind of attack being planned, but at least we know when. It’ll be tomorrow. Independence Day. Several of the emails encode the date rather like Mohamed Atta did before the nine eleven attack, with his message about two sticks and a cake with one stick down, representing the numbers eleven and nine. These messages use different imagery, but the numbers four and seven are fairly obvious and consistent, and April has come and gone so it looks like the Fourth of July is the target date.’

Grant Rogers looked like a man bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. He slumped down in his seat, shoulders sagging. Then he appeared to mentally strengthen himself and straightened up.

‘Okay. We’ve got one suspected terrorist identified and under surveillance. Everything we found out so far suggests that the attack will happen tomorrow, so what do we do with him? Pick him up and sweat him, or let him run?’

Morgan wasn’t sure if those were rhetorical questions, but he did have some ideas of his own.

‘I’m not sure that picking up that one man would be particularly helpful,’ he said. ‘There’s no way that those four people could carry out any kind of catastrophic attack on a city this size by themselves unless they’ve got a suitcase nuke or something equally devastating tucked away somewhere. There must be more of them involved than that, and if you arrest him the other three will still be out there and we’ll have no idea how to identify and locate any of them. So if it was up to me I’d let him run and hope he leads us to whoever else is involved so we can seize whatever weapons they’re planning on using. You’d just have to make sure your people didn’t lose him, because that could be a disaster.’

Rogers nodded. ‘That would make sense to me as well, but it won’t be my decision. At the very least my SAC will have to sign off on it, and he’ll probably take some convincing because he’s more of a bureaucrat than a streetwise agent, plus he’ll want top cover from the high-level seat-shiners. For now I’ll leave the surveillance team in place and make sure there are no holes in the net he can slip through. Then I’ll kick the problem upstairs and wait for guidance from on high.’

‘Before you do that,’ Morgan said, ‘I was told back in the UK that you had cyberattacks on some of your utility companies, and we were experiencing the same kind of thing. Is that still going on over here?’

‘It is, but as far as I know there haven’t been any successful breaches. The agent giving one of our threat briefings said it was possible the intention was to hack into the local electricity companies and shut down their systems to try to create a blackout, but there’s a whole lot of redundancy here, just like you’d expect around the capital, and even if they did manage to disable one provider – and the briefer didn’t know exactly how that could be done because their systems are really robust – there are other companies that could take over the demand. So at worst you might get a blackout lasting a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes.’

‘Not exactly “Death from the skies” then?’

‘No. We did look at the radar and radio links at Andrews and