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

situation in DC was probably going to get a lot worse before it got any better. His phone was almost fully charged and was still working, but he had no idea how long it would be before the service provider shut down the system because of the power outages.

Morgan decided not to call the FBI agent in case he was still being bellowed at by Charles Bouchier and simply sent him a five-word text message: ‘I know where they are.’ That should, he thought, provoke the reaction he expected.

His mobile rang less than a minute later.

‘Where are you?’ Rogers asked.

‘Sitting outside the Hard Rock. Fancy a drink?’

‘Yes, but not there. That’s far too close to your new best friend in the Bureau. Meet me at The Smith on the corner of Ninth and F Street. Ten minutes.’

‘I’ll be there.’

Morgan headed north on 10th, then turned east on F Street before crossing the road to the opposite side where the restaurant was located, taking his life slightly in his hands because none of the traffic lights there were working either and the cop standing in the middle of the intersection clearly had his hands full just trying to unravel the angry automotive jigsaw surrounding him. He obviously had no time at all to help pedestrians get where they needed to go.

Rogers walked into the restaurant a few minutes after Morgan had taken a seat, plopped himself down in the chair opposite him and nodded his thanks for the can of Coke that was already on the table. Just like the Hard Rock, the interior of the restaurant was a confusion of shadows barely illuminated by wall-mounted emergency lighting, but the staff were doing their best, serving cold drinks and salads and only taking payments in cash. American ‘can do’ in action.

‘Did Bouchier give you any trouble?’ Morgan asked. ‘I don’t think he and I got off to the best of starts, somehow.’

‘You got that right. I don’t think anybody ever called him a brain-dead sack of shit before, but I know quite a few people who wouldn’t disagree with that description. He’s typical of the kind of desk-bound bureaucrats who clamber over everybody else to get to the upper floors of the Bureau where they can sit and pass judgement on the guys who actually do the work, who get out on the streets and mix it with the bad guys. Anyway, he can’t ban me from talking to you. The FBI is there to serve the public and as far as I’m concerned you’re a member the public, so fuck him. Okay, what have you got?’

Morgan quickly explained about the trace and intercept program that the analyst at GCHQ had been running on Natasha Black’s orders, and the results that had been obtained.

‘This woman a friend of yours?’ Rogers asked, when he’d finished.

‘She’s both a friend and a colleague,’ Morgan replied. ‘We move in different circles and different disciplines but our paths often cross. And she’s definitely a wheel, not a cog, in the GCHQ machine.’

‘Well, it looks as if she’s managed to do some stuff that I didn’t even know you could do. So these intercepts can pin down the locations of these guys – Ganem, Halabi, Sadir and Wasem – or at least the locations of the mobiles they’ve been using, plus another three potential suspects whose names and involvement we don’t know. Not that knowing their names would help much, because they’ll probably all be using aliases.’

‘Exactly,’ Morgan said, leaning closer and showing Rogers the screen of his mobile phone, on which he’d brought up a map of DC. Overlaid on that were four locations each marked with a capital letter: G, S, X and Y.

‘Those are the places where the four suspects were staying in DC,’ he said. ‘The letter G, obviously, is Ganem, the suspect you first identified, and you already had his address. But the important thing is that they’re not there any more. The trace shows that at exactly eight thirty-eight this morning all four of them – not just Ganem – started moving, and I don’t believe that was a coincidence. That was a pre-planned and timed move designed to throw off any surveillance they might have picked up.’

Morgan used his finger and thumb to change the scale of the map display and then pointed over to the west of DC where the letters G, X and Y were showing.

‘That’s where Ganem’s now located,’ he said. ‘He’s in an apartment building in Woodstock, and if he’s there for the music he’s half a century too late and in the wrong Woodstock. X and Y are Halabi and Wasem, but I don’t know which one is which, and they’re out here, at opposite ends of Harrisonburg, but the one we should be concentrating on is Sadir, because he’s way up here in Fairview, north-east of Baltimore.’ He altered the display again to show the area around Bel Air. ‘The rats are scattering, abandoning the ship they’re trying to sink.’

‘So you think Sadir is the one pulling the strings?’

Morgan nodded. ‘He’s the only one who switches his mobile off and on at irregular intervals. The other three – in fact the other six people involved, if we include the people he’s got lurking out at Damascus, Fairview and Syracuse – have their phones on all the time. So they’re the ones waiting for orders and instructions, and Sadir is the person giving those orders. He only turns his phone on when he’s got something to tell them. And what he’s doing is issuing orders. You can see that from the translations of some of his calls and what he’s said in his text messages. Sadir is definitely the one we need to nail.’

‘If we take him down, do you think that will stop the attack?’

‘I still don’t know what the attack is, or how they’re going to do it, but if we can take Sadir out of the loop that might be all we