‘Believe it or not,’ Morgan responded, ‘I don’t really know why I’m here either. I received orders from on high and in my experience the best course of action is usually to obey them, as long as they seem to make some kind of sense. Which is not necessarily the case here.’
Rogers, as the man running the investigation into Karim Ganem and the people he appeared to be associating with, had also been the recipient of instructions from above, in his case from a senior seat-shiner on one of the more elevated levels in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His remit, shorn of the usual bureaucratic verbiage, was to see if ‘the Limey’ had anything useful to contribute to the ongoing investigation and, as something of a secondary issue, to find out why Morgan, as a kind of representative of Her Britannic Majesty’s government from the other side of the Pond, and who had apparently been sent to Washington to provide advice and assistance as a cybersecurity expert, had both a stratospheric security clearance and a police record. In Rogers’s mind, those two things were mutually exclusive, and he guessed that getting to the bottom of that particular conundrum would probably be quite a good idea.
‘According to my briefing notes,’ Rogers began, ‘what you specialise in is cybersecurity, and because all you need to follow that particular career path is a halfway decent laptop and a fast Internet connection, you could do that job anywhere in the world. Which, as I’ve already said, makes me wonder why you’ve been sent over here.’
Morgan shrugged. ‘Me too. But let me tell you why I think I’m here. You’ve obviously heard about the failed boat bomb attack in London, which was a really close call. Luckily, we had a Thames police officer who was prepared to break all the rules and rammed the cabin cruiser carrying the weapon. If he’d been about five seconds slower in his reaction time, the Palace of Westminster would need hundreds of new windows and several months of repair work and the British government would potentially be looking for over a hundred new Members of Parliament. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing. It was that big a device, and they got that close.’
‘I heard about that,’ Rogers said, nodding. ‘Sometimes the good guys do just get lucky.’
‘But what you might not have heard was what happened afterwards.’ Morgan explained about the surviving terrorist dying in police custody and the manner of his death, and the questioning of the other two members of the cell once they’d been arrested. ‘They were all clearly committed to the attempted bombing, but our interrogations suggested that they regarded it only as a starting point, an attack intended to cripple the British government but which was a precursor to a much bigger event. And that event, at least by inference, is probably going to happen in America.’
Rogers leaned forward across the table. ‘Did your people get anything more concrete out of them?’
‘Nothing substantive,’ Morgan admitted. ‘We did establish that all of them were cleanskins and only one of them had ever come to the attention of our intelligence services, and not as a major player. They were all home-grown British citizens nursing a grudge against the West. But it looked like a tight organisation and the man who’d been directing it obviously applied the need-to-know principle. So he’d been prepared to tell them that the London attack was just one step in a much bigger scheme, maybe to keep them onside in the knowledge that they were part of a more ambitious plan to strike at the West, but he apparently never divulged any of the details of that scheme to them.’
‘I presume this man wasn’t one of the people your guys picked up?’
‘No. We know almost nothing about this person, except that he ran the terrorist cell from a distance, never visited the property where they lived as far as we know and just told them what to do and when to do it. The two people we questioned just said he was a brother Muslim who had directed the operation and provided the funding for it, so he’s probably acting on behalf of some Islamic organisation in the Middle East. Maybe ISIS, or perhaps some other group. Oddly enough they did name him, though that isn’t likely to prove much of a help.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the name they used was a teknonym, a thing called a kunya, which is an adopted name that Arab parents often use to show their relationship to their eldest child.’
‘You’re referring to “Abū” and “Umm” meaning “father of” and “mother of” whatever their kid was called, I guess,’ Rogers suggested. ‘It’s not my field, but we get regular threat briefings and radical Islam is pretty much always the main topic. I remember hearing about kunyas in one of them. So what name was this guy using?’
‘He was calling himself Abū Tadmir, which has to be a nom de guerre, not a family name, and chosen for effect, because tadmir is an Arabic word meaning “destruction” and not a proper name at all. So he believes he’s the “father of destruction”, which we think sounds bloody ominous, at best.’
Rogers opened his mouth to reply, then stopped and shook his head. ‘Gimme a second,’ he muttered, picked up his mobile phone and dialled a number from his contact list.
‘Bill?’ he said, when the call was answered. ‘Can you come down to the interview room and bring the transcript with you.’
Rogers put down his mobile, pointed at the china mug in front of Morgan. ‘You want more coffee?’
He pronounced it ‘cawfee’ and Morgan was already somewhat awash, but he guessed that this meeting wasn’t likely to be over any time soon and he would need something to keep him going, so he nodded and at the same time reached for another doughnut. He also knew from his previous visits to the States that the lubricating oil which ensured the smooth running of American law enforcement at all levels was Java.
His mug was slightly chipped and was presumably official issue. Or possibly bought from a giftshop. It bore the letters ‘FBI’ on one side and the organisation’s crest on the other. This comprised the scales of justice in dark blue on a yellow background in a stylised shield above five vertical red-and-white lines flanked by what looked like a laurel wreath with the motto ‘Fidelity Bravery Integrity’ in a scroll below, all set in a dark blue background inside a circle of yellow stars and surrounded by the legends ‘Department of Justice’ and ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation’ in a gold-rimmed circle. Morgan had seen variants of the badge being offered by street sellers on his way to the building that day and he was thinking about buying a couple of ‘official’ FBI sweatshirts as souvenirs of his visit.
As Rogers topped up both their mugs there was a knock at the door and a smartly dressed middle-aged man walked in carrying a folder in his left hand. Rogers gestured with the coffee pot and the new arrival nodded and extended his hand towards Morgan.
‘Bill Clark. Good to meet you.’
‘Ben Morgan, from London. More or less.’ He didn’t think that ‘Charlton Kings’ – where he actually lived – or even ‘Cheltenham’ would mean much to either of the two Americans. Or to most residents of the UK, come to that.
Clark sat down opposite him and beside Rogers, then opened up the folder.
‘You wanted to see this, Grant.’
Rogers nodded and switched his attention to Morgan. ‘We’re mounting surveillance at the moment on four Arab males.’
‘Let me guess,’ Morgan interrupted. ‘Did a lady called Barbara Simpson finger them for you?’
Both Rogers and Clark just stared at him.
‘I’m not psychic,’ Morgan clarified. ‘I met her this morning here in DC because she had a few questions about the cyber world and she reckoned I was the right person to answer them. She’s quite something, isn’t she?’
‘You got that right,’ Rogers replied. ‘And she was the source who identified the first man, yes. Yesterday we had just one suspect in our sights, flagged up by Simpson as a possible person of interest, but because of an operation this afternoon that number’s just quadrupled. We believe him to be an accomplished hacker and most probably a member of a known hacking group, an outfit that calls itself AnArchy An0nym0us.’ He jotted the name down on a piece
of paper and slid it across to Morgan. ‘I don’t know why the hell they can’t just spell the words the same way that everybody else does. Anyway, that group’s been implicated in a whole bunch of cyberattacks on government websites and what you’d probably describe as hard targets, sites belonging to the government, major organisations and official entities.’
‘They’re not that hard, most of them, in my experience,’ Morgan commented. ‘The trouble with websites of that type is that they want and expect members of the public and anybody else to be able to get into them to find information, to download forms or view stuff or to interact with the website in some way. That means that the integrity of those sites is automatically compromised, ever so slightly. And for a talented hacker, any way inside offers potential for an attack. Hard targets are things like very limited access intranets with no public portals.’
‘That’s your field, not mine,’ Rogers said. ‘Right, the guy we’ve been watching is named Karim Ganem. We know where he lives and what he does every day. We have a hidden microphone in his flat, a tap on his landline phone and we’ve been monitoring his email account, but so far we’ve picked up nothing incriminating. He’s got a burner mobile for phone calls and we also know he uses a VPN whenever he goes on the web.’
Morgan didn’t entirely see where this conversation was going, but what Rogers said next clarified the situation.
‘We’re using Ganem to lead us to other members of his cell, or at least that was the plan sent to us down here at the coalface from our esteemed leaders above.’ Rogers pointed a finger at the ceiling of the interview room. ‘The hidden mic picked up his half of a short conversation Ganem had on his mobile arranging a meeting. Through the NSA and the phone company we know that the call came from an unregistered mobile that was located here in DC. The meeting went ahead at a coffee shop in a district called Tysons Corner. That’s not in Washington but just over the state line in Fairfax County, Virginia, about ten miles from the centre of DC. We followed Ganem there, where he met three other men. We covered the meeting as best we could with video and audio and stills and when it broke up we ran checks through FACE to identify the three new players. Bill, let me have that transcript for a second and tell Ben what happened after the meeting.’
‘It turned out that we could identify all three of them,’ William Clark said, ‘because they’d all made driving licence applications over the last few years and they had to include photographs that were stored in one of our databases. One was a heavily built man named Mahdi Sadir and the other two were called Talat Wasem and Jamal Halabi. Right now, that’s about all we know about them, but obviously we’ve got background checks running. So far, the only new information we’ve got is that Sadir flew into the States from your London Heathrow a couple days ago.’
Grant Rogers muttered something inaudible under his breath and interrupted.
‘This is what I was looking for,’ he said, putting the transcript down in front of him. ‘What you don’t know, Bill, is that our visitor here has some interesting information about those two terrorists who tried to blow up the British Parliament. He has a name for the mastermind behind it, the guy pulling the strings and working the members of the cell to mount the attack. And the name is interesting, because it’s not a genuine Arab name but a kunya, an adopted name. In this case, more like an adopted title, because he calls himself Abū Tadmir. And that, as Ben explained to me just before you came down, translates as “father of destruction”, and that’s not good news.’
‘That Arabic word is both specific and broad ranging,’ Morgan clarified. ‘As you said, it translates as “destruction”, but it can also mean “demolition”, “devastation”, “ruin”, “wreck” and, potentially the nastiest of all, “annihilation”. You really don’t want him loose on your streets.’
‘The trouble is,’ Rogers said, ‘I have a feeling he’s already here. Okay, the circumstances of the meeting at Tysons weren’t ideal from a surveillance point of view. The targets were sitting at a table outside a busy coffee shop in an area with heavy pedestrian traffic. We got some people on the roof of the building with a shotgun mic and another team in a car with a camera and a microphone, but the recordings we’ve got—’ he tapped the pages in front of him ‘—and that we’ve now had transcribed are full of gaps and broken sentences caused by people walking past or standing in front of the mics.
‘I’ve listened to the tapes as well as read the transcription and when you said the name Abū Tadmir it rang a kind of distant bell with me. Quite early in the meeting Ganem responds to something that Sadir asked him, something that neither of our mics picked up, but we have got part of what Ganem replied. He said “three of the locations” – which could mean anything but might be a reference to three separate targets if these people are planning some kind of a terror campaign – and then we got a partial name before the mic was blocked again. The transcribers thought that might be Abd or Abdul but it’s underlined in the transcript because they weren’t sure. When I heard it, it sounded to me like “Aboot”, which obviously isn’t an Arab name, but if he was actually saying “Abū Tadmir” and we just heard the “Abū T” that would seem to fit.’
‘Can I take a look at that transcript?’ Morgan asked.
Rogers slid the stapled sheets of paper across the table. ‘That’s a combination of the feeds from the shotgun mic on the roof of the shopping centre near the cafe and the device used in the car. As you can see, the feeds were blocked a lot more often than we’d hoped.’
In Morgan’s opinion, that was something of an understatement. Underneath the FBI logo and other stuff at the top of the first page was a rough diagram comprising a square to represent the cafe table and then the letters G, H, S and W positioned around it. The locations of the two shotgun mics were indicated simply as MIC 1 and MIC 2 together with their approximate distances from the targets. And below that was a decode of the lettering system, obviously based on the later identification of the three new suspects: G was Karim Ganem, H was Jamal Halabi, S was Mahdi Sadir and W was Talat Wasem.
‘As you can see from the diagram,’ William Clark said, leaning forward over the table and pointing, ‘Ganem is facing the shotgun mic on the building roof, Halabi and Wasem are side-on to the mic and Sadir has his back to it. And that’s unfortunate, because I think he’s the most important of the four men.’
‘Why?’ Morgan asked.
‘It’s just my opinion, but I watched almost the entire meeting apart from the first five minutes or so when we were getting into position. I couldn’t hear what was being said because we couldn’t get a live feed from the shotgun mic on the roof without it being fairly obvious, but I did watch the four men and to me their body language was interesting. When they were in normal conversation they would interrupt each other or make comments and remarks of their own, just like any small group of people talking together. But whenever Sadir spoke, as far as I could tell the other three men stayed silent until he’d finished speaking. To me that suggests that he’s the leader of that particular group, and if Grant is right about the Abū Tadmir link Sadir could be the mastermind behind the London attack and the puppet-master for whatever is being planned over here in the States.’
Morgan nodded and looked back at the transcript. It was laid out in three columns, the left-hand one being the time any piece of speech began, the second the identity of the person talking and the third, and by far the biggest column, the transcribed text. The page in front of him was the one Rogers had picked out, and Morgan saw the four words uttered by Ganem about halfway down the sheet.
‘There’s no point in me listening to the audio,’ Morgan said. ‘If your techie experts can’t identify it for certain, there’s no way that I’d be able to be definitive. I think you’re making a bit of a jump, and assumptions are always dangerous, but you could well be right. If Sadir is this “father of destruction” that does at least tie in with him flying out of Heathrow after the Thames attack. And if you are going to make an assump
tion, it always makes sense to assume the worst, and having Abū Tadmir loose on the streets of Washington is definitely a worst-case scenario. So what’s your plan? And how do I fit in?’
Rogers glanced at Clark before he replied. ‘That’s two separate questions and right now I’m not sure they’re related. Our plan—’ and Rogers unmistakably emphasised the word ‘our’ ‘—is to increase surveillance of Sadir and the other three men. Up to now we’ve been taking a kind of hands-off approach, just watching where they went and what they did, but now there’s a suspicion that one of them is a terrorist bomber mastermind, I’ll be suggesting we become a whole lot more proactive. Hopefully the senior seat-shiners will see the sense of that and let us get on with it.
‘But whether or not we involve you in any of this, Mr Morgan, rather depends on what you say next. Because I have a question that I’d like answering. We occasionally allow members of the public to roam around this building, at least some of the non-sensitive areas, on organised visits, but apart from that we’re very choosy about who we let in.
‘When we were told you were stopping by for coffee and doughnuts today we obviously asked who the hell you were, and that raised a red flag, because according to the background checks we did you hold a Top Secret security clearance with a bunch of specific SCI permissions, but you also have a police record back in Britain. And I’d like to know why.’
Chapter 34
Washington D.C., United States of America
The six devices – Sadir mentally referred to them as the ‘Peacemakers’, a somewhat cynical nickname bearing in mind their actual purpose – that were undergoing final checks and preparations in Damascus were only a part, albeit an important part, of the havoc he intended to visit upon the capital city of the United States of America. In fact, it was the second time the devices had been finally checked, but then the plans for both attacks had ground to a halt.
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