Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

fifteen minutes early to give him time to make sure his laptop would talk to whatever projection system the room contained. He was by any standards a computer expert, but just because he knew what he was doing didn’t mean some kind of electronic gremlin wouldn’t strike and simply refuse to allow him to connect to the system, so he always liked to have a little time in hand.

He was a solidly built man, standing just over six feet three inches tall, his dark hair cut short, perhaps to minimise the onset of typical male pattern baldness. Or maybe he just liked it that way. His square jaw and determined expression suggested he was a man who knew what he was doing, where he was going and how he was going to get there, an impression confirmed by the impressive speed with which he had ascended the ranks to the position he now held.

In the event, it only took him about five minutes to hitch up his lightweight Dell and by the time the first attendees arrived the title slide of his presentation was ready to be displayed on the screen at one end of the room, and Boston was sitting at the head of the table sipping coffee from a chipped china mug and nibbling on a shortbread biscuit.

He heard a brisk double tap on the door and two men walked in. Boston already knew Chief Inspector Tim Inskip, having worked with him before, and he knew the second man’s name but not his face.

‘Good to see you again, Tim,’ he said, shaking hands with the burly, fair-haired officer who was a couple of inches shorter but quite a few kilos heavier than him. Inskip’s face was dominated by his large and crooked nose, a legacy of his rugby-playing past and specifically of one memorable match when the scrum had collapsed with him at the bottom of it and the boot of one of the opposition front row forwards had made violent contact with his face. It had taken three operations to fix his nose so that he could breathe through it again, but the surgeons had never been able to get it completely straight. It wasn’t pretty but it did work, and that was all that mattered.

‘Afternoon, Richard,’ Inskip said, his voice as usual sounding slightly nasal. ‘It’s been a while. Now, I don’t think you know Ian Mitchell,’ he added, turning slightly to introduce the man beside him. ‘Ian, this is Assistant Chief Constable Richard Boston, who’s organised this little soirée.’

‘I know your name, Ian,’ Boston said, ‘but we’ve never met.’

The two police officers were wearing civilian clothes, but they both wore them as if they carried badges of rank while Mitchell, who was also in civvies, held himself in an indefinably different way, a kind of casually relaxed poise that suggested he had never worn a uniform. His fair hair was also just a shade too long and there was more than a hint of five o’clock shadow on his chin, as if he had shaved the previous night rather than that morning. He had piercing blue eyes deep-set below a wide forehead and he looked quite athletic, as if he was the kind of man who would enjoy a game of tennis or who perhaps went jogging each morning before work, an impression that was entirely erroneous in every single respect. Mitchell loathed all sport and subscribed to the view that hard physical activity as a young man led inevitably to a broken and crippled middle and old age. And he possessed an almost encyclopedic mental database of facts and figures and anecdotes to demolish the arguments of anybody who disagreed with this point of view.

‘Commander,’ Mitchell said, extending his hand.

‘I’m not in the Met or the City forces,’ Boston said, ‘and I prefer to keep it informal. Just “Richard” will do nicely.’

In both the Metropolitan and City of London police forces, the rank of commander is equivalent to assistant chief constable, and much less of a conversational mouthful.

‘Is anyone else coming?’ Inskip asked.

‘Yes,’ Boston nodded. ‘Superintendent Simpson should be here any minute. She called me to say her train was running about five minutes late.’

‘Ah, the Nutcracker,’ Inskip murmured, just loud enough to be heard.

Mitchell looked puzzled.

‘What? Is she a fan of the ballet?’

Inskip shook his head and Boston just smiled.

‘Nope, and she doesn’t look like the Sugar Plum Fairy either,’ Inskip replied. ‘She’s a very impressive woman who takes no crap from anyone, at any time or for any reason. She acquired the nickname because it’s slightly more polite than ball-breaker, but that’s what she is. On the other hand, she believes in equal opportunities, which means she frightens her superiors almost as much as she terrifies her subordinates.’

As he finished speaking there was a single knock on the door, and then a statuesque and attractive black woman, her appearance dominated by a halo of curly black hair styled as a kind of restrained afro, stepped into the office and looked, without any particular appearance of pleasure or even interest, at the three men standing there.

‘Richard, Tim,’ she said shortly by way of greeting, with a Geordie accent, then pointed a long and elegant forefinger at Ian Mitchell. ‘You I don’t know,’ she added, ‘so who are you?’

‘Good afternoon, Barbara,’ Boston said smoothly. ‘Come and take a seat, pour yourself a coffee and I’ll do the introductions.’

When the four of them were seated around the table, he began.

‘Mainly for the benefit of Ian here, I’ll just explain who we are and why we’re here. My name is Richard Boston and I’m currently the Head of Cyber Criminal Operations for the United Kingdom based within the Home Office. I also wear a couple of international hats as the cybercrime liaison officer between UK law enforcement, Interpol, the United Nations and – most relevant today – the CIA and FBI.’

He shifted his gaze to look at Barbara Simpson.

‘Superintendent Simpson and I have worked on covert