Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  London had only needed a month’s lead time because of the attack mechanism, but Washington was very different and much more complicated. Preparations for that attack had been completed by March 2020, but before they could be implemented the Covid-19 pandemic began hitting the major centres of population around the world. Because of travel restrictions and for other reasons, the plans had to be placed on hold until the global situation improved, which took longer than any of them had expected. As the rate of infection in the United States climbed inexorably towards, and then exceeded, 20 million in the first weeks of 2021, and with a death toll of over a third of a million by the end of 2020, some of the elders began wondering if the attack was necessary at all. After all, even the magnificent events that had occurred in New York on 11 September 2001, the attacks universally referred to as 9/11, had killed fewer than three thousand Americans. But the microscopically small coronavirus labelled Covid-19 was effortlessly laying waste to similar numbers of American citizens on almost a daily basis, decimating the Great Satan. Streets in the cities were empty, road and air traffic had been reduced dramatically, face masks were everywhere and the population was frightened.

  But that, as Rashid had pointed out both to his fellow elders and also to Sadir, was irrelevant. The Grim Reaper was working his way very efficiently through the population of the United States of America, as he was in virtually every other country in the world, mainly culling the old and the sick, but a high death toll was not the point. In political and ideological terms, deaths caused by an illness, by any illness, were irrelevant. They simply didn’t count. To promote and emphasise the message of radical Islam, deaths in the target country had to be seen to be entirely the work of the planners and the shahids of the Islamic movement. The devastation caused by Covid-19 was a bonus, that was all. Even if half the population of America died in the pandemic, the planned attack would still go ahead. Their action would just have to be delayed until an optimum time.

  And with the overall improvements in the medical situation, with vaccines on stream and every country in the world moving forward towards normality, there was one obvious date when Rashid decided that the attack should be mounted.

  Every year since 1776 the Fourth of July has been a cause for celebration and today is both a public holiday and the national day of the country, marked by a diverse range of celebrations including firework displays, carnivals, political speeches, concerts and the like. And most of the biggest events take place, exactly as would be expected, in and around the capital city of America.

  It was arguably the biggest celebration in the country every year, bigger even than Christmas. Sadir was absolutely determined that it would be an Independence Day that nobody ever forgot. But for all the wrong reasons.

  Chapter 35

  J. Edgar Hoover Building, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., United States of America

  Whatever Morgan had been expecting, it wasn’t that, and for a few seconds he didn’t respond. Then he took another sip of his cooling coffee and looked over at Rogers.

  ‘That’s privileged information,’ he said.

  ‘I know. Your police file is sealed, so I know you’ve got one, but I don’t know what’s in it. The fact that it exists is a problem: it implies you’ve had a conviction, and we don’t like that here in the US.’

  ‘And why do you need to know anything if my clearances are all current?’

  ‘For exactly the same reason that you would want to know more, probably a hell of a lot more, if you’d been told that you had to work with a convicted felon. Before we take this any further I need to know what happened, what you did and why.’

  Morgan didn’t reply immediately as he considered his options. He could get up and walk out, and probably have to hop on board the next available flight back to Heathrow, or he could do what Rogers was asking, and talk about an incident in his past that he wasn’t particularly proud of. In the circumstances, it wasn’t that difficult a decision. He reached into his pocket, took out his mobile phone, put it on the table in front of him and set the audio recorder running.

  ‘Okay,’ he finally replied. ‘I’m recording this for my benefit so there’s no comeback later. This is confidential and privileged information and must not leave this room. Agreed? Both of you?’

  Rogers and Clark both nodded.

  ‘No, verbally for the recorder, please. State your names and your positions within the agency and that you agree to what I’ve just said.’

  The two FBI agents did that, both leaning slightly forward and obviously intrigued.

  ‘Right. My background is in computing and IT, and for a few years I was employed by the British police, including a stint with the Metropolitan force in London, to work on the PNC, the Police National Computer, and other computer systems. You may remember hearing about ten years ago that a paedophile had begun operating in the East Midlands area of Britain.’

  As he said the word ‘paedophile’ Morgan could see both the Americans immediately tense in their seats, wondering where this was going.

  ‘That was nothing to do with me, obviously,’ he said, ‘but because paedophiles tend to inhabit the darker reaches of the Dark Web, the kind of places where British Bobbies not only fear to tread but have absolutely no idea how to access, I ended up tracking one particular guy’s footsteps as he swapped images and photographs with other people who shared his tastes. The police knew who he was, but there was no evidence he was doing anything other than looking at pictures and videos as part of this paedophile ring. I was tasked with monitoring his activities and trying to identify as many of his contacts as I could so that when the police did finally roll up that network they could take down as many people as possible. My tasking was just to watch him.’

  ‘I’m guessing something changed,’ Roger suggested.

  ‘It did,’ Morgan nodded. ‘That July a seven-year-old girl named Lizzie French disappeared from the back garden of her family home just outside Lincoln. Her body was found about ten days later. She’d been raped multiple times, then strangled and dumped in a ditch on a quiet side road outside a village around fifteen miles away. That case was followed by the disappearances of three other girls of similar ages over the next six months, all in broadly speaking the same area, within about fifty miles of Lincoln, and all the bodies were later dumped on quiet country roads. Obviously finding this killer became the highest priority of the Lincolnshire police force, but they had very little to go on. No suspects, no DNA – the killer always used a condom and the bodies of the victims were found naked and they all appeared to have been thoroughly washed before they were dumped – no witnesses and no detectable trace evidence.

  ‘Long story short. I wasn’t a police officer, so I wasn’t involved in the investigation, but obviously I knew what was going on and photographs of the girls were everywhere, on television and in the newspapers, as the police tried to identify anybody who had seen them being abducted or afterwards. And one afternoon I suddenly realised I was looking at a close-up of Lizzie French’s face in a Dark Web video.

  ‘Then the camera panned back and I could see that she was naked and spreadeagled on a single bed covered in a plastic sheet with her wrists and ankles roped to the four corners of the metal bed frame, and with a gag stuffed in her mouth. You don’t need me to tell you what the rest of that particular video consisted of, but the perpetrator filmed the entire proceedings, first holding the camera in his hand and then putting it on a tripod and pointing it down at the bed to record the main events.

  ‘Police forensic technicians pulled the film apart frame by frame and they found enough clues to suggest that the rapist – who was no doubt also responsible for murdering the girl – was the paedophile I’d been tracking through the Dark Web. There was a very brief shot of part of his face as he turned the camera and that was sufficient to potentially identify him. He was arrested and charged and his house was searched. The room where the rape had occurred was identified, but they couldn’t find a single t
race of usable forensic evidence that would link him to any of the four dead girls. Everything rested upon the video that the perpetrator had shot himself and on half a dozen other videos we recovered showing him in the same room abusing the other three victims.’

  Morgan swallowed the last of his coffee and nodded as Rogers topped up his mug again. The memory still shook him after all this time.

  ‘In the United Kingdom we appear to have a whole flock of senior judges who are very well versed in the law but who don’t seem to have any particular regard for justice. When the case came to court, before the proceedings got started there was a long legal discussion between the judge and the prosecuting and defence counsels. It was held in camera, which means everybody else was excluded from the courtroom while it was going on. In fact I think it might even have been held in the judge’s chambers. And the conclusion, bizarrely enough, was that the video evidence was inadmissible because all the sequences had been filmed for the man’s own private and personal use and the police had had no right to take copies of them without his permission. Which obviously he hadn’t given. There was a lot of legalese surrounding the decision but that, as far as I remember it, was the thrust of the argument.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Bill Clark asked.

  ‘Exactly what you would expect to happen. The case was dismissed for lack of evidence and this proven paedophile and multiple murderer walked out of the High Court a few minutes later without a stain on his character. There was no doubt about his guilt. He’d actually filmed himself raping all four of the girls and in one video he was clearly strangling his victim, although it wasn’t certain that he had killed her on that particular occasion.’

  ‘Shit,’ Rogers muttered.

  ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself. Of course, the media had been following the case and had been expecting to splurge all the gory details for the delectation of their readers. But suddenly there was no case and they were forbidden from identifying the accused man because in the eyes of the law he was innocent. So none of the families of the victims got their day in court or the satisfaction of seeing the man who’d killed their daughters and ruined their lives sent down for life without possibility of parole, which is what they’d been expecting. They got no kind of closure.

  ‘I was a lot younger then and perhaps a bit too idealistic, and I decided that really wasn’t right. It might have been the law, but it bore not even the most tenuous relationship to any kind of justice. A man who’d raped and killed four children and who’d been freed on a point of law, just a technicality, did not, in my opinion, deserve to walk the earth.’

  ‘You mean you killed him?’ Rogers asked.

  ‘No. But I had something that neither the media nor the families of the victims possessed. I had videos of the rapes, and I knew the perpetrator’s name and address because that information was freely available within the police force. So I put the two things together – copies of the videos and his identity – and sent them anonymously to the fathers of the dead girls, explaining what they were. Then I covered my traces to make sure there was no link between me, the videos and the families. And when, a little over a week later, the perpetrator vanished from his home, a house which was then set ablaze in an obvious arson attack, I pretended to be just as surprised as everybody else. His body was found in a ditch a week or so later. He’d been tied up, severely beaten and castrated – most probably with a saw – and left to bleed to death, and nobody shed so much as a single tear.’

  ‘But somebody rumbled you, I guess,’ Clark said.

  ‘That was inevitable. The chain of evidence was clear. I’d burned one copy of each of the videos and given that, with a statement, to the SIO, the senior investigating officer. Every subsequent copy of the video was properly recorded and there were no breaks in the chain, though that obviously didn’t mean some officer in the investigation couldn’t have burned an illegal copy and then duplicated it. But the obvious conclusion was that if the videos, the only pieces of evidence that unequivocally linked the perpetrator with the murders, had been leaked they could possibly, maybe even probably, have come from me.

  ‘As a matter of routine, when the perpetrator turned up dead members of the families of the four victims were questioned and one of them admitted to having been sent a copy of the video, though of course they denied having had anything to do with the man’s death. I was investigated by the police force that I worked for, but there was absolutely nothing that they could do. They had their suspicions, but there was no way to prove that I had done anything other than my job and I made certain that I had rock-solid alibis for the two weeks after I sent out the videos, so there was nothing to link me to the murder. Eventually the investigation was closed, and because of the job I had been doing and the security clearance that I held, the file was sealed.

  ‘And, just between the three of us, right here and right now, I think that even if they could somehow have proved that I had had something to do with those events, I doubt if it would ever have come to a prosecution. The British police don’t like stupid blinkered judges any more than anybody else does, and they particularly don’t like the idea of violent rapists and multiple murderers walking free.’

  Morgan looked from Rogers to Clark and back again. That hadn’t sounded too bad to him, and it had the undoubted benefit of being true. Or more or less true.

  ‘So that’s why I have a sealed police record, but no conviction. I’ve had my security clearance since 2005, when I helped prevent a terrorist attack in London and got a new job. Are you happy with that?’

  Rogers stood up and leaned across the table, extending his hand. ‘Welcome to the team, Ben. I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for a guy who does what he knows is right, even if it’s wrong, if you see what I mean. I think pretty much anyone else in this building who found themselves in the position you were in would have done the same thing, or something pretty similar, like wasting the guy themselves. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Bureau is hidebound by regulations governing everything from how often you can take a crap upwards, and they don’t exactly encourage free-thinking. Having you around, as a kind of free agent, might be really useful.’

  ‘Thanks. So what’s the plan with these four men?’

  ‘So far, we’ve just done passive surveillance, trying to keep eyes on these guys without them being aware of it, but it’s already obvious that they’re being careful. They’re using counter-surveillance techniques even though we’re fairly sure that our men haven’t been spotted.’

  ‘I can vouch for that,’ Clark said. ‘And they’re being really inventive. I followed one of the suspects into a department store and watched him walk into the male restroom, but I never saw him come out. Or rather, I watched him come out, but I didn’t realise it was him.’

  ‘You mean he put on a disguise?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘You could say that. These guys all have a similar appearance – dark tan complexions, black hair and beards. The man who came out of the restroom was wearing different clothes, which most probably meant he’d just taken off his denim jacket and jeans and put them in a carrier bag that I couldn’t see or didn’t notice, so he was wearing a shirt and khaki trousers or shorts.’

  ‘But you should still have recognised his face,’ Morgan said.

  ‘I agree. When I lost sight of him he was wearing a blue face mask: the man who came out of the restroom had a similar complexion but no mask. He was completely clean-shaven. The beard had gone. Before you ask I did check the restroom and there was no sign of him having shaved it off. And in any case he hadn’t been in there long enough to do that.’

  ‘So how the hell—’

  ‘Beat the hell out of us too. Our photo technicians solved the problem. I took a picture of him on my mobile when he left the restroom. It wasn’t the best picture in the world but it was clear enough for them to work out what he’d done. He was wearing a mask, but one he’d obviously had custom made, and it was incredibly effective. It
exactly matched his skin tone and it was printed with a nose that was slightly more flared than the subject’s nose, different lips and, obviously, no beard. Plus he had on tinted glasses and a beanie cap. It gave him a completely different appearance, and I genuinely never gave him a second glance. He looked just like a guy walking out of the restroom who hadn’t yet put on his paper mask.’

  ‘Masks are a real problem,’ Rogers pointed out, ‘and I don’t just mean they’re uncomfortable to wear and probably don’t work to stop this fucking virus. But look at it from a law enforcement point of view. Before this pandemic got exported from China, if a couple of guys walked into a bank wearing masks you’d have the tellers pressing the panic button and the guards reaching for their weapons. Today, the only people the guards look at closely are those who aren’t wearing masks when they walk in.

  ‘And as Bill here knows only too well, live surveillance is a nightmare, because people are expected to have their faces covered. Lose sight of somebody for even a minute and in that time they can take off their jacket, lose their hat and change the colour of their mask and they’ll look completely different. I mean, if we hadn’t already shot him full of holes we could have Osama bin Laden walking around in DC wearing a suit and a mask and nobody would give him a second glance or have any idea who he was.’

  Chapter 36

  Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, United States of America

  On New Year’s Day 1942, just twenty-five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, construction began on a military air base at Syracuse, New York, and by August the same year the first military personnel were operating there. Known as the Syracuse Army Air Base or Mattydale Bomber Base – taking this name from the suburb of Syracuse where the airfield was built – it was used as a training facility and for repairing and updating B-17 and B-24 bombers. At the end of the Second World War the military airfield was redesignated for civilian use and became the Clarence E. Hancock Airport. But the military didn’t stay away for long, exercising their right of return in 1951.