Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  Khalid nodded and reached down to rest his hand on the blanket concealing the Kalashnikov.

  ‘You can rely on me, my brother.’

  Chapter 8

  Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

  ‘There’s no doubt about that,’ Morgan agreed. ‘But that does pose a lot of questions, beginning with how and who and why. Like how did he get infected – if that’s the right word in this case – and how was he able to fly the helicopter as far as he did? Why didn’t the drugs take effect a hell of a lot sooner? And that’s only the start.’

  ‘I might be able to help about the timing,’ North said. ‘If what the medical people found so far is accurate, then the payload was this lethal chemical cocktail and it was carried in the buckyballs. One of the medics suggested they must have been constructed so that they would dissolve a certain number of hours or even days or weeks after being administered, or maybe even because of some trigger.’

  ‘If there had been a trigger,’ Natasha Black pointed out, ‘the medics would probably have found it. We’re talking about something like a spike in one element of blood chemistry, something to start a reaction. For example, there’s a new treatment for diabetics involving nanoparticles that hold insulin but also a glucose-specific enzyme. When the level of glucose in the blood reaches a certain level, the enzyme starts to dissolve, which releases the insulin. The glucose level drops, the enzyme stops dissolving and the release of insulin stops, so it’s self-regulating. That’s the kind of trigger I mean. There are changes in blood chemistry at different altitudes, but these are quite slow and mild and you need to be a lot higher than most helicopters fly to even notice them. So I doubt there was a trigger. I think this was a timed release that just happened to take place while he was in the air.’

  ‘The nanoparticles can be made to dissolve with that accurate a degree of timing?’ Dame Janet asked.

  ‘According to what I’ve read,’ Natasha replied, ‘they can be prepped to dissolve anything from a few seconds to months after being administered. But I don’t know too much about this subject.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ North said. ‘Anyway, at least we now know what killed O’Brien and how. Because this is such a new field, nobody really knows what can be done and what can’t, but that looks the most likely explanation.’

  ‘If you’re right about this,’ Dame Janet observed, ‘it sounds like there’s somebody out there who’s managed to turn nanotechnology into a weapon. But as far as I can see it’s nothing to do with C-TAC. Or do you know something we don’t?’

  ‘Probably not,’ North admitted, ‘but it is weird. And whoever did it nearly killed me, so it’s become kind of personal. But there’s nothing much I can do about it. I’m a soldier, of a sort, and I have this limitation: if it’s not big enough for me to shoot I kind of run out of ideas about how to deal with it.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Morgan said. ‘What you’ve told us about Bob O’Brien is really weird – you’re right about that – and I’ve no reason to doubt what you’ve said. So we know what happened and you’ve come up with a possible method for how it happened, but what we don’t know is why it happened. Why was O’Brien targeted? Or were you the target and he just happened to be the means for somebody to try to kill you?’

  North laughed shortly.

  ‘I’ve pissed off a lot of people in my career, such as it is, but if somebody wanted to kill me they could take me out with a bullet or a knife or even drive a car into me. And the same applies to O’Brien. There are much easier ways to kill somebody than to do something like this, and using any kind of nanotechnology is really expensive. Scanning electron microscopes are sodding pricey to hire, and lottery money to buy, like over a million quid a pop, and you can’t do anything in this field unless you have access to one of them. A bullet costs a few pence, so that doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘So how do you think some person unknown did this, then? And more to the point, why did they do it?’

  ‘Buggered if I know,’ North said.

  ‘This is an obvious question,’ Angela Evans said, ‘but was Bob O’Brien the only man up at Hereford who was affected?’

  ‘I was getting to that,’ Dave North said, ‘because that’s the really bad news.’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded copy of the Hereford Times, a weekly tabloid newspaper. He unfolded it, smoothed it out and showed them the headline on the front page – ‘MYSTERY ILLNESS KILLS FOUR AT CREDENHILL BARRACKS’ – and passed the newspaper over to Ben Morgan.

  ‘We don’t know what’s going on or why it’s happening,’ North admitted, ‘and I’ve no idea if there are any other people at Stirling Lines who are still affected by this thing. The Credenhill Ruperts are running further checks and they’ll let me know if anything pops out of the woodwork.’

  Chapter 9

  River Thames, London

  The oldest police force in England is not, as many people erroneously assume, the Metropolitan Police Service, established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 with a staff of 1,000 constables and based at 4 Whitehall Place in London. The building had a back door in Great Scotland Yard that was used as the entrance to the police station and eventually the shortened form ‘Scotland Yard’ entered common usage as a synonym for the Metropolitan force. The ‘peelers’, as they quickly became known – the name a nod to the surname of the founder – were modelled on a law enforcement organisation created in Ireland in 1814, again by Sir Robert Peel, a force that morphed into the Irish Constabulary in 1836. Peel is known as the founder of modern policing, and it’s probable that the later nickname ‘Bobbies’ for police officers is derived from his Christian name. But to discover the earliest organised police force in England it’s necessary to look back over thirty years before, to the end of the previous century.

  What became known as the golden age of piracy began, broadly speaking, in about 1650 and lasted until the 1730s with pirates and privateers – essentially licensed pirates carrying a ‘letter of marque and reprisal’ issued on behalf of their monarch to authorise their lawless activities against the ships and ports of countries perceived to be enemy states – plying their brutal trade first in the Atlantic and Caribbean and later in the Pacific and Indian oceans. But by the end of the eighteenth century arguably the richest pickings for pirates were to be found a lot closer to the British Isles than the Caribbean Sea, and in many cases there was no need to even bother boarding a boat in order to participate in the trade.

  It’s been reliably estimated that in the 1790s the value of the cargoes held on the thousands of merchant ships moored or anchored in the River Thames at any one time typically exceeded £80 million when converted to today’s currency. And, equally typically, river pirates and gangs of dockyard thieves were known to make off with around £50 million worth of that cargo in an average year.

  Such massive losses were obviously unsustainable, and in 1798 the Marine Police Force was formed on the instigation of three men – a Scottish magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun, an Essex-based mariner and Justice of the Peace called John Harriott and, as a somewhat unexpected participant, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham – initially with a staff of just fifty officers to police an estimated thirty thousand river and dockside workers.

  Against the odds the organisation, based in Wapping High Street, was effective and two years later an act of Parliament – the Marine Police Bill – converted this private police force into a public entity and in so doing created the first uniformed police force anywhere in the world. Almost forty years later, in 1839, it merged with the fledgling Metropolitan Police Force to form Thames Division.

  Today, it’s still based in Wapping High Street and is now known as the Marine Policing Unit, or MPU. It’s an elite division within the Met, responsible for the safety and security of about forty-seven miles of the tidal Thames within Greater London between Hampton Court to the west and Dartford Creek to the east. Like all British police forces, the MPU is on dut
y 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, operating boats of various types from RIBs – rigid inflatable boats – up to 31-foot Fast Response Targa vessels in its patrols of the river.

  Just like police officers on land, the crews of the MPU boats are keenly attuned to the traffic they see in their patch, and do not hesitate to intervene when they think it’s necessary, stopping and questioning the crew of any vessel that raises a red flag in their minds. And the old and somewhat battered cabin cruiser that had just passed under Lambeth Bridge had raised at least two of them.

  First, it was heading north along the river towards the open sea at the mouth of the Thames, several miles distant to the east. That didn’t mean the people on board were planning on going that far, obviously, but in the opinion of the MPU officers what they were looking at was strictly a river craft, and an old one at that, entirely unsuited to tackling the rough water conditions that might be found even in the Thames estuary.

  The second point was related to the first, because it appeared to be very heavily laden. Most boats have a colour change at the waterline, often a white hull above the water while the lower section of the hull is painted a much darker shade. On the cabin cruiser Anna – the name, inscribed in capital letters on the stern of the vessel, was visible to the skipper of the Targa launch through his binoculars – no part of the darker lower hull could be seen, and the boat appeared to be wallowing slightly, as if it was either unbalanced because it was overloaded or because the man standing in the rear cockpit was very inexperienced. Or possibly both.

  It could all of course be entirely innocent, but it never hurt to make sure and to ask the appropriate questions. And Sergeant Paul Carter, the Targa’s skipper, had several. He also thought it was worth running a preliminary check. All boats on the Thames are required to be licensed with the Environment Agency, though it didn’t look to Carter as if the owner of such an old vessel would necessarily be interested in complying with all the rules.

  ‘Get someone to check the registry, Bob,’ he instructed the constable standing beside him, ‘and find out who owns that wreck.’

  At the same time Carter goosed the throttle slightly to start closing in on the suspect vessel from behind.

  ‘I think there’s a problem,’ Constable Fisher said a couple of minutes later, having done Carter’s bidding. ‘There are three boats registered on the Thames with the name Anna, but none of them are anything like that.’ He pointed ahead. ‘But about a fortnight ago a cabin cruiser named Hannah was reported stolen from a mooring up at Walton-on-Thames and the description of the missing boat is pretty much a match for what we’re looking at. I reckon the aquatic tea leaf who did the job just painted over the first and last letters of the name and figured that would fool us.’

  ‘I’m not certain,’ Carter replied, ‘that I’d be particularly enthusiastic about getting it back if I owned that boat. I think I’d prefer the insurance payout, but that’s another story. Okay, Bob. We’ll go alongside and get this sorted.’

  As well as Carter and Fisher, there was another constable, Mark Crichton, making up the crew of the patrol boat, and as they headed towards the vessel he suspected was stolen, Carter issued the appropriate orders.

  ‘We’re going to come alongside the cabin cruiser ahead of us, starboard side to. As soon as we’re next to it you two get on board, arrest the guy driving it and anyone else and give them the usual warning about it being a suspected stolen vessel. Get cuffs on them as soon as you can and each of you take a spare pair as well in case there are other bodies inside the cabin. Take over the controls and obviously keep it running until our lords and masters decide where they want us to park it, and we’ll sort it out from there. Any questions?’

  It was the kind of operation that the team had carried out dozens of times before, and Carter was completely unsurprised when both constables shook their heads.

  He looked ahead, estimating the distance to the cabin cruiser by eye rather than using the radar because the two vessels were now quite close together.

  ‘Three minutes, maybe four,’ he said. ‘Get ready.’

  Just like marked police patrol cars on land, the MPU’s Targa launches have sirens and blue lights as attention-getters in case anyone should fail to recognise the word ‘POLICE’ in large white capital letters on either side of the dark blue hull, or didn’t notice the bright blue and yellow Battenberg-pattern paint on the superstructure.

  As the Targa closed to within about a hundred and fifty yards of the cabin cruiser, Carter switched on the blue lights and gave a brief whoop of the siren.

  Immediately, the man standing in the stern of the cabin cruiser turned round and stared at the approaching police boat. But, conspicuously, he failed to reduce speed. In fact, it looked to Carter as if he had actually opened the throttle still further.

  ‘Possible failure to stop,’ Carter reported, his voice untroubled. There was no possibility the probably stolen vessel could outrun him, and there was also nowhere on that stretch of the river where it could hide.

  It was all standard and routine, though stopping a stolen boat was actually something of a rarity, and Carter guessed that his men would have control of the cabin cruiser within a matter of minutes and shortly after that they would know whether or not the vessel was the stolen Hannah.

  And then, as the police boat closed to within about eighty yards of the cabin cruiser, the incident stopped being routine in any sense of the word.

  Chapter 10

  Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

  ‘So what’s next?’ Morgan asked, into the silence that followed North’s final comment and looking along the table towards Dame Janet. ‘We didn’t all pitch up here just to hear about Dave North’s aerial adventures.’

  ‘Correct,’ she said. ‘Keep us in the loop about this, Dave, and especially if there are any other deaths. Now, the Prime Minister is worried. The Home Secretary is worried, and so is the Foreign Secretary. And just for a change they’re not all worried about the next election, because it’s too far away. What’s caused this particular high-level angst-fest is the bloody French. And the bloody Germans, in fact.’

  ‘Not planning to invade, are they?’ North asked.

  ‘What do you mean “invade?” The buggers are already here, but that wasn’t what I was driving at. Here’s a quick general knowledge quiz for you. Who owns British Gas?’

  ‘That’s something of a non sequitur,’ Angela Evans said, ‘but I’ll take a wild stab in the dark and say we do. The British, hence the name.’

  ‘Correct. It’s a subsidiary of Centrica. How about EDF?’

  ‘I think you’ll find the clue there is also in the name,’ Morgan said. ‘EDF – Électricité de France. Which means it’s ultimately owned by the French government, because that’s the biggest shareholder in EDF.’

  Dame Janet nodded.

  ‘What about E.ON and Npower?’ she asked. Nobody replied as she looked around the table. ‘Both German. Here’s an easy one, or rather an easy two. ScottishPower and Manweb. You should know about Manweb, Dave. It supplies North Wales, not that far from your usual stamping ground up around Hereford.’

  ‘Not a clue,’ North replied. ‘Presumably not British, so maybe they’re French?’

  ‘Nearly right. Spanish, both of them.’

  ‘Is there a point to this?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘There’s a point to everything I say or do, Ben,’ Dame Janet replied. ‘You should know that by now. Now, I personally happen to believe that every nation should have control of its essential utility companies, but of course decisions about ownership are taken by politicians whose only interest is in getting elected and keeping their seats and who are, by definition, totally unqualified to govern and in most cases have about the same level of intelligence and attention span as a fruit fly. And to save any of you asking, yes I have had something of a run-in with a couple of members of our alleged government in the House, both of whom demonstrated a lack of knowledge
about the dangers this country faces that would have been frankly embarrassing if they’d been expressed on a street corner by a homeless wino.’

  Nobody responded. Dame Janet’s critical and somewhat strident views on politicians in general were well known to all the members of C-TAC.

  ‘The short version is that over the last ten days both EDF and Npower have suffered attacks on their corporate networks.’

  Ben Morgan immediately looked interested. Cybersecurity and cyber warfare were his speciality.

  ‘In fact, not so much attacks as intrusions,’ Dame Janet continued. ‘But however you describe or define what happened, a third party managed to get inside one supposedly secure system, and neither of the two idiots I spoke to today in Westminster seemed to think that was much of a problem.’

  ‘Which it certainly is,’ Natasha Black said.

  ‘Obviously. One of the two MPs kept wittering on about zombie servers and—’

  ‘Zombie servers?’ Morgan interrupted. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Hang on, Ben, I’m getting there. He talked about zombie servers and Tor and the dark web, so he’d obviously picked up a few buzzwords from somewhere. Eventually I played the “I’m just a simple woman and I don’t know what you’re talking about so please explain it all to me in words of one syllable” card and it turned out he knew some words and names but not what they meant. As you all know, I’m not an IT expert, but when he told me what a zombie server was he was actually describing a proxy server, and he knew that Tor was a browser but he had no idea what the name stood for. I even gave him a clue. I asked him if he’d ever heard of The Onion Router and he just shook his head. That should give you some idea of the calibre and level of ignorance of the sort of people I have to deal with at Westminster.’

  Dame Janet slumped back in her chair and shook her head.