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

if they have already run. We have their names – maybe their real names but more likely aliases – and we have their pictures. We can stick them on the website in the Most Wanted Fugitives rogues’ gallery and wait for some citizen to spot them. And because of what’s happening in DC, we can probably put them right at the top of the top ten and add a juicy price tag to each one. That’s something else that seems to work.’

The Bell lifted off as soon as the pilot had checked that his three passengers were properly strapped in, and Morgan was treated to a view of Washington D.C. that he’d never seen before as the helicopter flew north-east in the general direction of Baltimore, more or less following the course of the Anacostia River. The most obvious landmark was the Washington Monument and behind that the unmistakable shape of the White House and, closer and further to the east, the Capitol Building. What surprised him was the number of green and open spaces there were once they’d cleared the centre of DC. It seemed to only take a few minutes before they were over more or less open countryside.

‘That’s where your girlfriend’s working,’ Rogers said, pointing out of the right-hand side window of the Bell at a brutal lump of a building entirely surrounded by acres of car parking, most spaces apparently occupied.

‘No Such Agency,’ Clark confirmed. ‘Famous for never telling anybody anything, even if you ask them really nicely. I’m really surprised that they let an Englishwoman in there, allowed her to cross the hallowed portal.’

Morgan nodded. ‘She works at GCHQ out at Cheltenham, back in England, and a lot of the stuff she does – which she also won’t tell me about, by the way – means tapping into the NSA’s databanks pretty much on a daily basis. So I suppose you could argue she’s kind of an honorary NSA employee, just with a different accent and a different colour passport. And she’s not my girlfriend, only a colleague.’

‘Whatever you say, Ben, whatever you say.’

The Bell continued heading north-east, the pilot maintaining a track that would take it to the north-west of the sprawling urbanisation of Baltimore and also keep them well clear, both laterally and vertically, of the traffic patterns at the busy Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, commonly known as BWI, which was rather less of a mouthful. Once the helicopter had passed abeam of the Liberty Reservoir, the pilot altered course to an easterly heading to track almost directly towards Bel Air.

The FBI resident agency in the town was a low, two- and three-storey brown brick building located at 2107 Laurel Bush Road, opposite a warehouse selling building supplies and in an area marked by industrial units of one sort or another. There was limited parking outside the building for cars and no spaces at all for helicopters, but that wasn’t a problem. A short distance to the west was a U-shaped development of businesses and retail units and in the centre of the U was a large car park, the centre of which had been cleared of vehicles and fenced off to allow space for the Bell to touch down.

‘Takes all the fun out of it when they make it so easy,’ the pilot – he’d introduced himself as ‘Richard Muldoon, and you can call me Rich but not Dick’ – muttered as he flared the helicopter and brought it in for a gentle landing on the tarmac surface. ‘I’m sticking around in case you need top cover for this op,’ he added as he started shutting down the aircraft, ‘and when you’ve blown away the bad guys or whatever the hell it is you’re doing out here in the sticks, I can give you a ride back to DC if you want.’

‘We might just take you up on that,’ Rogers said, ‘but we’ll definitely need you in the air, or at least ready to take off, once we hit the target.’

‘Which is where? Presumably not here in Bel Air?’

‘No. It’s near a place called Fairview, which is four or five miles north-west of here. A couple minutes in the air if you’re already turning and burning.’

‘Yeah. No sweat. I’ll stay here with the chopper. Don’t want some country boy getting inside and trying to hot-wire it.’

Waiting outside the cordoned off area which was marked by linked steel barriers were two men, both looking fit and well built, around six feet tall and wearing dark suits, white shirts and dark ties. One of them even had on a pair of sunglasses, making both of them look like the archetypal Men in Black, but these two weren’t looking for aliens. Or at least, not aliens from another planet.

‘ASAC Rogers?’ the one without sunglasses asked, extending his hand.

‘That’s me,’ Rogers replied, shaking his hand, and quickly made the introductions. ‘This is Senior Special Agent William Clark and the third member of our group is Ben Morgan, who’s on secondment to the Bureau for just this one operation.’

That was close enough to the truth, Morgan hoped, to avoid too many awkward questions being asked.

‘Understood. I’m Special Agent John Baker and this is Special Agent David Crawford, both of us out of the Baltimore Field Office. Our SAC is here as well, and he’s waiting for you at the resident agency. Our SWAT team is already in the area and on its way to Fairview. But everybody involved has a whole bunch of questions and they’d really like some answers.’

‘I’ll bet they have.’

Despite the distance from the car park to the resident agency only being perhaps two hundred yards, the two special agents had arrived by car. In fact, they’d arrived in two cars, if two black Chevrolet Suburbans could actually be classed as cars. To Morgan’s English eyes, used to the much more compact vehicles found in the UK and Europe, they looked vast, more like small coaches than cars.

‘We weren’t sure how many of you