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

operations in the past. Her unique skills have led to a very interesting career, if “interesting” really is the right word to describe it. She was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal and a couple of Home Secretary’s commendations and has spent most of the last two decades working undercover, much of that time down in South America. You don’t, obviously, need to be a detective to work out that she was helping to combat the drugs trade.’

‘Which, as I’ve said before, on every committee I’ve ever sat on,’ Barbara Simpson interjected, ‘was, is, and always will be a total and complete waste of time and effort. Trying to stop the supply of illegal drugs is about as sensible and as likely to work as passing a law that would make it illegal for it to rain at the weekend. As long as there’s a demand for narcotics there will be criminal gangs out there doing their very best to meet that demand. The only way to stop it happening is to legalise the whole lot of them so that your local neighbourhood jakies can pop into Boots and buy what they need for the weekend with their dole money.’

‘Jakies?’ Mitchell asked.

‘Junkies. Or druggies or addicts if you prefer. If we did that, they wouldn’t have to break into your house or your car to steal something to get enough cash to score their next fix. The number of street crimes and burglaries that are positively linked to jakies is massive. Most of them need to steal goods worth about a grand every single day, which means stuff like your computer, your phone or your watch or jewellery, so they can sell them for about a hundred quid and buy a few wraps of whatever they need from their local dealer. Drugs that, in reality, probably cost well under a fiver to produce. Ten years ago street crime and burglary directly attributed to drug addicts cost the economy about thirteen billion pounds every year. Today it’s a twenty-billion-pound industry, so the real cost has nearly doubled.’

Ian Mitchell raised his eyebrows slightly at the obvious passion and vehemence in the superintendent’s words.

‘As you might have gathered, Barbara has quite strong views about this,’ Richard Boston said, stating the obvious and directing his remarks towards Mitchell, ‘but she has both the experience and the knowledge to back up her argument. As she frequently tells me, the American DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, has an annual budget of over two billion dollars and at no point since its formation have its activities had any measurable effect on the supply of illegal drugs on the streets of America.’

‘But I thought the DEA seized hundreds of tons of drugs from dealers every year,’ Mitchell said.

‘It does,’ Simpson replied, ‘and they pat themselves on the back and tell the American public that they’re winning the fight against drugs and driving the dealers off the streets. But it’s all PR and spin. The only criterion that actually matters when you’re assessing the success of an organisation charged with stopping the supply of illegal narcotics is the availability of drugs, and nothing the DEA has ever done has had any effect on that. For every ton of cocaine or whatever that the organisation manages to seize, the cartels in Colombia and Mexico manage to deliver ten or a hundred times as much. The reality is that for the narco-economies of South America the DEA is nothing more than a minor inconvenience, just another business expense, something they need to budget for in the shipping costs incurred by their incredibly lucrative business.’

‘Quite,’ Boston said. ‘But interesting though it might be to explore this, we’re not here to talk about drugs.’ He looked across the table. ‘Tim Inskip here is a chief inspector, and for the last decade he’s been working at the sharp end of Britain’s counterterrorism operations and he’s heavily involved with both the Home Office and MI5, the Security Service, based at Millbank.’

Boston shifted his attention to Mitchell.

‘Which brings us to the last member of this group, Ian Mitchell. He’s the UK’s top official legal hacker. Right, that’s who we all are, so the next matter is why we’re here.’

Boston woke up his laptop and pressed a key. Immediately, the projection screen mounted on the wall at one end of the room sprang into life. The information it conveyed was neither comprehensive nor readily intelligible: all the screen showed were the words ‘Operation Leif’ in block capitals and the word ‘Confidential’ in red at the top and bottom of the screen, the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation.

‘Looks like you’ve got a small typo there, Richard,’ Barbara Simpson said, pointing at the screen.

‘I might have guessed that you’d be the one to pick that up,’ Boston replied, ‘but actually that is the correct spelling, because you’re thinking about the wrong kind of leaf. This is a reference to a man named Leif Erikson, who was almost certainly the first European to discover America, half a millennium before Christopher Columbus started his first westbound voyage. And of course Erikson actually found America, which Columbus comprehensively failed to do. I was going to call it Operation Cabot after John Cabot – Giovanni Caboto – who was probably the first European to set foot in North America after the Vikings, but I couldn’t do that because Operation Cabot had already been bagged by the Surrey police for an anti-drugs operation they ran in 2015.’

‘I know you love your history, Richard,’ Inskip commented. ‘Anyone else would have just picked a name at random. And that would have been quicker. And easier.’

‘Now I may not be the sharpest tool in this particular shed,’ Barbara Simpson said, ‘but would I be right in assuming that this has something to do with America?’

Boston grinned at her.

‘Obviously,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s probably going to end up as something of a joint operation between us and the Americans, because what we think we’re seeing is the