Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best english books to read .txt) 📗

finally opened his laptop and began preparing a very different email from the one that he had hoped to be composing. In it, he explained that the major attack he had been supposed to carry out in London, the precursor strike directly targeting the British government and intended to be almost as devastating as the main strike against the American administration, had completely failed. He had to conclude that the boat loaded with explosives had been intercepted just before the detonation was supposed to take place.

He apologised for the lack of any definitive information and explained why he had nothing else to tell Rashid and the elders back in Iraq. But he was able to reassure them that even if the two shahids had been captured alive by the British authorities, they would not be able to compromise the second, and much more important, part of the mission. First because, although all four members of the cell knew there was going to be a second and much bigger attack in America, only Hassan and Khalid had been told any of the details, and only enough to convince them of the vital importance of their sacrifice. So they had no critical information they could divulge. And second, Sadir had taken his own precautions to ensure the permanent silence of the two shahids.

The sealed vials he carried in his luggage had been designed by the scientists at Vektor for precisely this kind of situation. Before Hassan and Khalid had set off that day, Sadir had given each of them a drink of water. Both men had remarked that it was somewhat cloudy, and Sadir had then explained that each glass contained a substance that would ensure they would enter paradise at a particular time that very day in an entirely painless manner even if something went wrong with the attack.

It was, in its own way, something of a final test of the commitment of the two shahids, and both men had swallowed the drink without even a pause. Sadir had calculated that the detonation of the IED would take place in mid-afternoon, and the chemicals in the drink would only be released, through the magic of nanotechnology, after five o’clock, around two hours later. So all the two men had to do if they were captured was to tell the authorities nothing at all in the certain knowledge that the gates of paradise would be standing open to welcome them before nightfall.

He didn’t explain this in his email, but simply said that he had ensured the silence of the two volunteers. He had absolutely no doubt that the two shahids in the cabin cruiser were dead, because as well as the live demonstration that the Vektor management had arranged for him to see in Koltsovo, he had also spent a little over a week in the Hereford area visiting local pubs and looking out for two things: the right group of people and the opportunity he needed.

Although he knew that the hated British SAS – Special Air Service – had left Iraq in 2009, the year before the disastrous assault on the safe house at Tikrit, he also knew the soldiers from that unit of the British Army had been responsible for killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of his Muslim brothers. And just as he knew that the SAS liked to move in darkness, like ghosts, the ability to exact a form of revenge upon them by employing an invisible killer had seemed too good an opportunity to waste. He had eventually found himself sharing the bar of a public house with a group of about a dozen young men that he had been certain were soldiers.

He’d picked his moments with care, ensuring he was standing at the bar ordering a drink at the same time as a couple of the men from the group were buying a round. He’d slipped a prepared syringe out of his pocket and ejected the contents – a long-delay dose of the product he’d obtained from Vektor – into one of the pints of beer waiting on the bar, then repeated his action with a second syringe in another pint. Half an hour later, he’d done exactly the same thing with two more pints. Then he’d left the pub and returned to his hotel, certain that he had enacted some form of revenge. The headline in the local newspaper had been an unexpected but welcome confirmation.

So he had no doubt Hassan and Khalid were dead, and the other two members of the cell knew none of the details of the American component of the plan, only that an attack was going to happen. Sadir had made sure of that.

He was using a web-based email client, and he read his message through several times before saving it as a draft. Rashid or one of the other elders would log on to the same email account before the morning and read and probably copy the message before deleting it. In that way, there was no possibility of the message being intercepted by any law enforcement agency, because it had never been sent. If it was never on the system it was, by definition, impossible for Echelon or any of the other national and international monitoring systems to detect it. It was a very basic but extremely effective way of communicating important information with complete security.

Chapter 20

EDF Data Centre, London

‘I have no idea why you’re even in the building.’

It was almost lunchtime the following day and Nigel Foster was clearly irritated at what he perhaps saw as an unjustifiable and unnecessary interference in his domain. He was, Morgan guessed, in his late forties, though he looked older, the brown-tinted frameless glasses, obvious comb-over and wispy beard evidence of his desire to retain at least the appearance of youth. If that was the reason for his trichological uncertainty and inadequate and ill-advised growth of facial hair, it wasn’t working.

‘As I told you before,’ Morgan replied, his patience slipping away by