PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller (9 page)

11

By the time the government Ford sedan was rounding Hyde Park on Park Lane, Cole had already learned as much about Aabid Karam, Osman Massoud and Ibrahim Nasrallah as there was to know.

All three men had lived in the local area their entire lives, and all came from families which survived at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Nobody was starving to death, but there was often trouble making ends meet. Of the three young men, only Massoud was employed, and he had only managed to be taken on as a minimum wage warehouse operative at the local glass factory.

Preliminary investigations had also shown that all three families were run by very hard patriarchs, and the short lives of the youngsters had been ones of violence, repression and sacrifice; such backgrounds had forced them out of the family home into shared accommodation, where they seemed to have been radicalized by online jihadist material, all too readily available if you knew where to look.

‘Didn’t your systems identify this material?’ Cole asked, knowing that certain websites and domains were under constant scrutiny, monitored with strict vigilance by the intelligence agencies.

‘They didn’t appear,’ Morgan said. ‘It was all on the Dark Web, and we still don’t have a handle on that, not fully anyway.’

Cole grunted, knowing it was true; the so-called ‘Dark Web’ was a law unto itself, web content existing on darknets which overlay the public networks and required specific access software and configurations. It was a part of the ‘Deep Web’, that largely unknown – though vast – sector of the internet not accessible via search engines.

It created many problems for intelligence and law enforcement agencies, with many criminal enterprises using its safety to operate and remain hidden from the authorities. Child pornography was one of the main uses of the Dark Web, but it allowed relatively secure routes of communication for drug dealers, gun runners, and terrorist organizations. The American NSA was at the forefront of the attempts to break the Dark Web, but it was an almost impossible task – as soon as one site or server got shut down, another two would appear in its place, like the heads of the Lernaean Hydra.

The Dark Web was the perfect place to hide extremist educational material, and scores of youngsters could be brainwashed by its content before being discovered. It was an evil of the modern world, Cole knew, but he didn’t have any answers in how to combat it. The only real way would be to shut the internet down in its entirety, and that was never going to happen.

‘You’ve tracked the sites now?’ Cole asked.

‘Yeah,’ Cranshaw answered as he piloted the sedan through the busy city streets, ‘we’ve got everything they were looking at, shut them down. Got the details back at Thames House, you can have a look over it all when we get back.’

‘Any organizations of particular interest?’

‘The kids were looking at all sorts, from Al’ Qaeda and ISIS propaganda, through Hezbollah and PLA stuff from the eighties. No main candidate really, they were just researching that shit themselves, at least as far as we can make out. But it’s early days yet, and they’re still recovering stuff from the hard drives. Who knows what they might turn up over the next few days?’

‘What do we know about the weapons?’ Cole asked next.

‘Hell of an arsenal, that’s for sure. They all had a Kalash for starters,’ Cranshaw said, using the Russian slang for the Kalashnikov rifle, one of the most ubiquitous small arms ever made.

‘Which variant?’

‘AKM, or at least an Albanian copy of the AKM.’

Cole nodded his head. The AKM was a common weapon, a simplified and lighter version of the Soviet AK-47 assault rifle. Many nations had copied the design, and Cole knew that Albania was one of its biggest fans.

‘The ASH-78?’ Cole asked.

Cranshaw nodded, impressed. ‘You know your weapons,’ he said.

‘Part of the job,’ Cole said. ‘Part of our culture too, maybe.’

‘Fair one,’ Cranshaw said, dodging quickly in between two red buses, then pulling out in front of a black cab with just inches to spare. ‘They had pistols too, though they didn’t use them. Two Tokarevs, and a CZ 82.’

So far, so normal – at least as far as terrorists were concerned. The weapons were cheap enough, but had proved themselves to be enormously reliable over the years. There was nothing hi-tech about them in the slightest, and were the sort of weapons that were always readily available on the black market.

‘The machine gun was Soviet?’ Cole said, and Cranshaw nodded.

‘Yes, the design was Soviet, another common enough weapon in war zones, the PK 7.62 millimeter general purpose machine gun, although this one was made under license in what was then Yugoslavia – now Serbia – by Zastava Arms, model M84. Nasty bit of kit.’

‘It certainly is,’ Cole said, not wishing to imagine the effect the powerful belt-fed automatic weapon would have had on the kids and teachers who had been pouring out of the school into the courtyard, right into the path of its field of fire.

‘The grenades?’ Cole asked next. ‘The rocket launcher?’

‘Yes,’ Morgan said in her upper-class tones, ‘those were rather more specialist items. The grenades, we’re not too sure about yet, we’re waiting for the shrapnel to be gathered and examined. Part of a firing pin was found, and one of our experts thinks it’s from the small-town factories in the Balkans, said during the war back in the nineties they were producing so many that they didn’t even have names, they were just called after the city they were made in. We should have more details soon though, our people are pretty good in that area. The rocket launcher was a Soviet model, just about the most common type you can find, the RPG-7.’

‘Yeah,’ Cole said, ‘I know it well. There are about nine million of the things out there, unfortunately. They’ve been knocking them out since the sixties. What kind of warhead?’

‘We can’t be entirely sure as yet – as I said, we’re still picking through the debris – but from the effects in the courtyard it looks like something called . . .’ Morgan looked down at her notes to check . . . ‘the OG-7V.’

‘Forty millimeter fragmentation warhead,’ Cole confirmed, ‘used for anti-personnel warfare. Sonsofbitches.’ He shook his head sadly as he thought of the horror that had been wrought on that school, on those poor children.

‘You said it, pal,’ Cranshaw said bitterly. ‘What kind of sick sadistic bastards would target a school? A fucking
school
?’

He took a deep breath, trying hard to contain himself, and Cole realized how hard it must be for him and Morgan to be working on this, such an horrendous tragedy so close to home. These were their own people, London was where they lived. It was a nightmare come to life in horrifying technicolor. He wondered whether either of them had children, but decided not to ask.

‘Sorry Mark,’ Cranshaw said. ‘I guess it’s still a bit raw. At least they’re dead though, there’s some comfort in that, I suppose.’

‘There is,’ Cole said softly. ‘You’re damn right there is. But do you guys think it’s just the three of them?’

‘What do you mean?’ Morgan asked.

‘I mean, how easy is it to get these weapons here? You’ve got some of the strictest laws in the world on importing this stuff, it’s not exactly just lying around like it is in some other countries.’

It was true, too. Even though Britain was seeing a heavily armed response to the attacks, with specialist firearms officers all over the streets of the UK capital, there just wasn’t the gun culture here that there was back in the States.

Morgan and Cranshaw had drawn weapons from the armory before they’d left Thames House, 10mm Sig Sauer semi-automatic handguns, and Cole had been genuinely surprised. The British agents hadn’t exactly looked at home with the weapons either, claiming not to have even fired them since a brief acquaint course when they’d undergone their field training a few years before. But the current ruling that had come down from the top was that all agents involved directly in the case – even those with no real powers of arrest – had to carry at all times when on official business.

It was a political move, a knee-jerk reaction to claims that if the cop who had been killed outside the school had been armed, he might have been able to better defend himself; and it was felt in the halls of power that if another attack was to occur, it was better to have the ability to stop it in its tracks.

Both agents had looked rather nervous when they’d received their Sigs, the armorer sure to remind them where the safety catch was, and how to safely load, unload, and make them ready. They looked as if they would be far more comfortable, in fact, to leave the weapons right where they’d found them. But orders were orders, and so they carried them in snug clip holsters on their belts, disguised by the fall of their dark business jackets.

Cole – far more used to such weapons – had asked the armorer for one of his own, but had been turned down without further debate.

‘I think it’s an open question,’ Morgan said carefully. ‘At the moment, it appears that there were just three people involved. But it’s our job to check the evidence, and if that initial conclusion is proved wrong, then we’ll move Heaven and Earth to follow up on what we find out.’

Cole smiled. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘because as I see it, there’s got to be others involved. I know they might be self-radicalized – I don’t buy it completely, but I accept it’s a possibility – but they
must
have had help getting those weapons, even if it was from a criminal gang rather than terrorists. And who paid for them? An arsenal like that must have cost a few thousand at least, and it seems like these guys had peanuts. So were they funded? And if so, by who?’

‘We’ve been asking those questions ourselves, don’t worry mate,’ Cranshaw said, ‘but it’s early days yet, and we don’t have anything solid.’

‘Nothing on the computers?’

‘Not as yet,’ Morgan said, ‘but they’re still looking, so maybe something will turn up.’

‘We need to look at any travel they’ve taken too, try and work out their movements over the past few months – maybe even the last few years. Because you don’t just pick up an RPG-7 and start firing, you need someone to tell you how to do it.’

‘There’s all sorts of instructions on the internet,’ Cranshaw said, but Cole shook his head.

‘I’ve seen amateurs try and fire one of those things, and they normally end up worse than the people they’re firing at. Grenades too, for that matter. And from what we can tell, these are not highly educated people we have here. No, from the descriptions I’ve read of the attacks, the three guys were using military tactics, they were well-drilled. Take the head shot to that cop, for instance – that wasn’t the action of someone who’d just picked up that weapons system for the first time, no way. These people were trained somewhere, and we need to find out where. If we can do that, then we’re on our way.’

‘On our way where?’ Morgan asked.

‘On our way to finding out who else was behind this.’

12

‘Are you okay?’ Karl Tracy asked, surprised to see Michiko still at her work desk where he’d left her the night before. ‘You haven’t been here all night, have you?’

‘Do I look that bad?’ Michiko replied, feigning indignation. Tracy was the head of the Paradigm Group’s information technology department, and Michiko’s direct boss, the man she reported to. ‘I’m in completely different clothes, you know.’

‘Hey, sorry Michiko. Didn’t mean anything by it, just surprised to see you here, that’s all.’

Tracy was an early riser, like many people in high positions, and Michiko knew that he would have expected to be the first here this morning; after all, it was just after six in the morning, and the IT department didn’t routinely start work until eight.

His concern was well-founded, too; Michiko
hadn’t
been home, but had been sat at her desk working all night instead. And working, more to the point, on things she really shouldn’t have been working on.

‘That’s okay Karl,’ she said, ‘I guess it must look a bit strange, being here at this time. It’s just that I’m normally hitting the gym with my Dad at this time, and he’s away and I didn’t really fancy it. But I was up anyway and . . . well, I guess I couldn’t think of anything else to do.’

‘Well, seeing as you
are
here, can I get you a cup of coffee? I’m just off to get one for myself anyway.’

‘That would be great,’ Michiko said with a smile. ‘Thanks Karl.’

As Tracy moved off towards his corner office, Michiko breathed out and sipped from her glass of mineral water.

The project she was supposed to be working on was something she could have almost done in her sleep, a simple debugging of an analyst’s system. It wasn’t something to tax her in any way at all; and in fact it hadn’t, as she’d already done the job the previous day.

Since she’d been there, she’d discovered the average time it took for people of her grade to perform their daily tasks. Her colleagues were good, but she wasn’t being immodest when she considered herself to be much better; it was a fact, plain and simple.

She always made sure she did her work ahead of the others – her competitors, as she thought of them – but not as fast as she actually could, which gave her plenty of downtime, when she was pretending to still be engaged in the work she’d been assigned, but was actually familiarizing herself with all of the Force One systems she hoped to be using in the future.

She wasn’t authorized to be accessing these systems – on the contrary, she had been warned off doing so by her father, Bruce Vinson
and
Karl Tracy – but she was good enough to cover her tracks, and what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

By now, she was thoroughly familiar with the Force One set-up – more so, she believed, than the people who were actually authorized to operate it – and so she had started to have a little peek into some of the covert unit’s actual operational work.

The main difference between the open systems of the Paradigm Group and the closed subsystems of Force One was that the former was completely official and authorized – if anybody came looking, they would find nothing at all out of place, merely a set of powerful supercomputers that could crunch open-access data with the best of them. The Force One systems, however, piggybacked straight into the vast databanks of the world’s premier intelligence agencies, from America’s own NSA and CIA, through friendly agencies such as the British SIS and the Israeli Mossad, and all the way through to the agencies of less friendly nations such as Iran and North Korea.

Force One had presidential authority to access the US agencies, but Michiko had found herself impressed with the hacking ability of the unit’s techies – the North Korean system in particular was notoriously hard to get into.

The problem, of course, was that there was too much data for anyone to ever sift through, especially an organization as small as Force One, and so they were at the mercy of their interrogative programs – specialist software which would sort through the vast amounts of data available, and decide what was useful and what was not, before sending the former on for further analysis.

It was here that Michiko felt that improvements could be made, and she had already started writing her own software that could be embedded within the immensely powerful parallel quantum supercomputers hidden underneath the Paradigm Group campus.

But for now, she would have to work with the system as it stood – because she was busy using that system to find out anything and everything she could about the terrorist attacks in London.

She’d been reading reports coming in from MI5, SIS and the Met Police throughout the night, and some of the evidence – details of the weapons, and of the men’s bank accounts – had set her off down investigative avenues of her own.

And, she thought with a smile as Tracy returned with a mug of steaming coffee, at last she was starting to get somewhere.

‘Do you think that’s wise?’ Vinson asked President Abrams over the secure line in his office.

He was also an early riser, and it was a rare day that he wasn’t already at work at the Forest Hills campus before seven.

He had been expecting the news from Abrams, and knew that – from a protocol and public-relations point of view, at least – the suggestion was a good one.

Nothing official had yet been planned, but rumors had started circling in the international media that a huge memorial procession was being planned in London, to which most of the major world leaders would be invited as a show of solidarity against the global terrorist threat.

‘Wise?’ Abrams replied, from her own private office at the White House. ‘Perhaps not. The right thing to do? Absolutely. Don’t forget, the United Kingdom is still our most loyal ally, and the links between us aren’t just cultural and historical, they run even deeper. How would it look if the French president turned up, the German chancellor – hell, the presidents of Nigeria and Guinea – and I stayed here at the White House and sent over a cute little video message wishing them all well?’

‘Obama did it back in ‘fourteen,’ Vinson commented, before realizing that this was probably one of the reasons why Abrams was so adamant that she would go, if the ceremony did indeed go ahead.

‘Yes, and we all know how well that was perceived,’ Abrams fired back.

It was true, Vinson had to admit; Obama was widely criticized for not attending the ‘rally of national unity’ led by the French president, Francois Hollande, after the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that often poked fun at the Prophet Muhammed and was therefore seen as blasphemous. Seventeen people were killed by two home-grown Islamic terrorists, and over forty world leaders gathered with President Hollande just a few days later in a city-wide protest march.

Barrack Obama’s credibility was called into question when he sent an envoy in his place, the US ambassador to France, and Vinson knew that Abrams would obviously be reluctant to follow the same path.

‘I understand that,’ Vinson said, undeterred. ‘But the fact is that security arrangements are so hard to make in such a short space of time, as I’m sure Dennis has already pointed out.’

Dennis O’Hare was the Director of the Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting the president, and Vinson knew that the man generally required as much time as possible to take care of security for presidential visits. Whereas many heads of state were happy to allow the country being visited to provide most of the protection, the US protocol was that the Secret Service always took primacy when it came to the president, no matter where in the world she might be going. Either the country in question accepted that, or the president didn’t go.

‘He has pointed it out, yes,’ Abrams confirmed, ‘and I understand the problems, and the reticence you all feel about it. But the bottom line is that I have to worry about international political relations, and the impact they have on the US.
You
have to worry about how to do that safely.’

‘So you’re going?’

‘If there’s a gathering of world leaders to show support for the United Kingdom, then yes – I’m definitely going.’

‘Okay then,’ Vinson said with a sigh, imagining what a headache this was going to cause for O’Hare and his people, ‘please keep me in the loop as regards O’Hare’s plans. I’ll contact Mark and give him the heads-up, maybe he’ll be able to assess the situation there, give us more of an idea how safe it is.’

‘Do it,’ Abrams agreed. ‘I’ll still have to go, you’ll just have more information so that you can manage the visit better.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ Vinson said. ‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning,’ Abrams replied, and the line went dead, leaving Vinson to ponder his next course of action, and how they were going to protect the president on the other side of the world, with what was probably less than a week’s notice.

Still, he reflected, what was life without a challenge?