Cyberstrike James Barrington (book recommendations for teens TXT) 📖

‘Is everything prepared?’ he asked.

The Muslim brother in front of him – he was using the alias Nadeem Ramli – gave a smile and nodded.

‘All the devices have been assembled and every component has been checked. We will be running several further final sequences of checks until it is time for the weapons to be deployed.’

‘And you are sure that they will work as intended?’ Sadir was still acutely aware of the depth of his failure to successfully prosecute the London attack. Ever since the day of the failed attack on the Palace of Westminster, his contact with Rashid had been increasingly tense and strained as he had been reminded time and again of his earlier certainty that both attacks would be not merely successful but devastating. To make matters worse, he still had no idea why it had failed, only that it had. He’d found nothing substantive on social media, the Internet or anywhere else. It was almost as if nothing had happened on the river that afternoon.

The only thing that Sadir could take comfort in was that the Thames attack was a one-shot operation. If the explosive charge had failed to detonate because of a defective blasting cap, or the cabin cruiser had struck some object and been holed or the engine had failed, that would have marked the end of the attack. A single simple glitch that could have ruined everything.

But the DC attack would be very different, with multiple components and built-in redundancy measures. The failure of a single part of the operation, or even three or four parts, would not derail it. And after London, Sadir was going to check every single factor and event to make absolutely sure that it would succeed and vindicate him in the eyes of the elders in Iraq. This time there would be no mistakes.

Ramli nodded again. ‘The technology is fairly simple in both concept and execution and the theory behind it is almost a century old.’

‘And they will work?’ Sadir asked again.

‘They will. I have been told that the Americans themselves have such weapons, though as far as I know they have never deployed them. And a few months ago, as you instructed, we fabricated a miniature version of the device and tested it in a remote location. Apart from its size, it was identical to the full-size weapon. We used the same components and precisely the same design and, as I reported to you after the event, it functioned exactly as we had expected. These devices will work. They will do what we want them to do. And they will be ready on time. In fact, they’re ready now.’

Ramli’s obvious confidence and his known competence in this field helped Sadir to banish, to some extent, the spectre of his failure in London. And he knew that the test of the miniature device had been successful because he had seen a video of the event and of the effects that it had caused.

‘Good, my brother,’ Sadir said. ‘Now show me the results of your labours.’

Ramli led the way through the property to the rear door and then across the backyard of the house to a substantial concrete outbuilding, which had been one of the main reasons for selecting this particular property: it offered somewhere private and secure where Ramli and the other two technicians could work. The outbuilding was entered through a pair of large doors at one end to allow access for a vehicle, and an extension of the tarmac driveway terminated in front of them. The wooden doors appeared battered and on the point of falling apart, which was quite deliberate, but the wood was securely bolted to new solid steel doors underneath. There was also a separate steel pedestrian door on the side of the building, and Ramli led the way to it.

He knocked twice on the door, paused for a couple of seconds then knocked three times more. Almost immediately, Sadir heard the sound of two heavy bolts being withdrawn and then the door opened outwards, because you can’t use a battering ram to force a door that opens that way. Silhouetted against the light, he recognised Rafiq Khayat, and behind him Imran Wardi, both men using aliases that would withstand at least a superficial level of investigation.

‘No check to see who was outside?’ Sadir asked, quite sharply, as he stepped into the building.

Ramli pointed to a small flatscreen television mounted on the wall beside the door, where four colour images were displayed, one in each quadrant, and showing views of different parts of the property.

‘Those are the feeds from four cameras with infrared capability covering the approach to the house, the outside of this building and the path between the two. Installing them was one of the first things we did when we took over the property. Rafiq would not have opened the door to me unless I’d given that specific knock, which meant that I was not under duress with a gun sticking in my back. If I’d just hammered on the door it would have stayed closed but Rafiq would have opened that flap—’ Ramli pointed at a steel shutter located in the middle of the door ‘—and we would have received a very different welcome.’

He gestured to a workbench bolted to the wall beside the door on which was a simple gun rack. Sadir saw that it held three weapons, all pump-action shotguns with cut-down barrels, and an open box of twelve-bore cartridges.

‘Much better than pistols in a close quarter fight,’ Rafiq Khayat said, ‘and a lot easier to buy than any kind of handgun. All three of them are kept fully loaded all the time so all we have to do is click off the safety catch and pull the trigger. Luckily, so far we’ve never even had to pick one up.’

‘Good,’ Sadir said, looking around the inside of the building. His attention was immediately drawn to a freestanding bench more or less in