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

Foster didn’t look surprised by the question. Most people in sensitive positions in either the military or civilian life are frequently asked to confirm this information.

‘I’m BPSS and CTC. That’s Baseline Personnel Security Standard and the Counter Terrorist Check.’

‘I do know what the initials mean,’ Morgan said. He’d already checked Foster’s background. The man had served in the Royal Air Force with distinction, a career path slightly at odds with the man in front of him. He looked bored and Morgan suspected he missed past glories stuck in EDF’s IT department. His answer was more or less what Morgan had expected.

‘Okay, and for your ears only, although no doubt the media will eventually get hold of it, the gas leak was a cover story, and the reason the cabin cruiser was rammed by the police launch was because the two Middle Eastern gentlemen on board were about to try and do a Guy Fawkes on the Houses of Parliament with a sodding great IED. But as far as we know at the moment, based on what little information and analysis I’ve seen, there’s no direct link between that failed attack and the cyber stuff.

‘However, the one terrorist who survived the collision did give a kind of warning that whichever outfit he worked for had something much bigger planned than blowing up the Houses of Parliament. And because the attack he was involved in was aimed at destroying the Palace of Westminster, the initial analysis from MI5 at Millbank is that they may be going after Western governments. If that’s correct, the next obvious target after Westminster is most likely Washington D.C. Because we know that cyberattacks have been launched in both America and here, it’s possible that there may be a link between destructive hackers on the Internet and physically destructive terrorists on the streets, or in this case on the water. But we don’t know for sure if there is a link, or what that link might be if there is one, because the two worlds are really entirely separate.’

‘If that bomb had gone off,’ Foster asked, ‘would it have destroyed the Palace of Westminster?’

‘It probably wouldn’t have flattened the building, because the epicentre of the explosion would have been too far away, but it would’ve done substantial damage to the structure. We’re talking about collapsing walls here, not just a few bits of broken glass. Millbank and everybody else in the loop thinks they probably had three separate but linked aims. They wanted to cause a massive loss of life, because that’s the hallmark of a radical Islamic attack, which we’re pretty certain this was. But they also wanted to kill as many members of the government as they could, because they would certainly create far more of a national and international sensation by slaughtering a hundred Members of Parliament than by killing a hundred assorted citizens of London. So those two aims kind of morphed into one.

‘The obvious way for them to achieve this would have been to cause massive damage to the Palace of Westminster while Parliament was sitting, and wrecking the building that’s home to the British government was their third aim. We were lucky that the crew of one of the river police boats spotted the cabin cruiser and worked out what the two terrorists were trying to do. That gave us time to evacuate the building so that even if the bomb had exploded the loss of life would have been minimal. If the attack had worked, it would have sent an unmistakable message to what was left of the British government, and you probably know how these terrorist groups like their messages. I’m slightly surprised they weren’t videoing it.’

‘Maybe they were,’ Foster suggested, ‘but they wouldn’t have wanted to broadcast a film of a failed attack.’

‘True enough. Anyway, I think the papers will have it on the front pages by the end of week, but until it’s in the public domain please keep all this to yourself.’

Chapter 21

Near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom

Dave North collected a pint of bitter from the bar and walked over to a wooden table on one side of the lounge bar of a pub called the Gloucester Old Spot located at Piff’s Elm on the A4019, just north-west of junction 10 of the M5 motorway. The slightly strange name of the location dated from the mid-eighteenth century when the pub, then known as the White Swan, was owned by a member of the Piff family and referred to a vast elm tree, reputedly with a girth of over twenty feet. The name lasted longer than the tree, which was felled in 1845, the process taking a team of nine men two weeks to complete.

It was a typical village pub, with uneven white plastered walls decorated with hunting prints and framed by wooden beams blackened by paint and age and smoke. At one end of the lounge bar was a fireplace that wasn’t quite an inglenook but which certainly had aspirations in that direction, and where a fire had been laid ready for lighting in the early evening.

North sat down opposite Ben Morgan, who already had a drink in front of him, having arrived a few minutes earlier.

Morgan stood up to shake hands, then lifted his glass a foot or so above the table in greeting. ‘Cheers. Good to see you again, Dave. Is this purely social, or was there something else?’

‘Both, really. I wanted to pass something by you before I raised it with the rest of C-TAC at Legoland, just in case I’m tilting at windmills and seeing something that really isn’t there.’

‘Go on,’ Morgan replied, replacing his glass on the table and leaning forward slightly. ‘I assume this is something to do with what happened to your helicopter pilot?’

North nodded.

‘It is. I told you the Ruperts up at Credenhill were going to run checks. They took blood samples from everybody there, from the CO downwards and including me. They had them analysed just in