Cyberstrike James Barrington (book recommendations for teens TXT) 📖

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