Читать книгу The Jerusalem Puzzle - Laurence O’Bryan - Страница 14

The British Embassy in Cairo is in Ahmed Ragheb Street, in an affluent suburb called Garden City, on the eastern shore of the Nile, between the river and the city centre, just south of Tahrir Square. The cream, colonial-style building with its first floor balcony and lawns down to the river was in a style more suited to the days of the Raj. But behind its calm exterior a number of alterations had been made to the building to bring it into the twenty-first century.

The basement area had been extended. It now housed an intelligence suite, a situation monitoring station for the British Intelligence Service in Cairo.

That Monday afternoon it was 1.30 p.m. in Jerusalem, 12.30 p.m. in Cairo and 11.30 a.m. in London. Mark Headsell, seconded to the embassy after three and a half years in Iraq, was watching a large LCD screen on the far wall of the suite.

The screen was showing the border crossing from the Gaza strip to Egypt. The crossing was open and trucks were using it, a line of them heading slowly into Gaza. It appeared they weren’t being searched.

The last time this had happened, an Israeli air raid had taken place. Two people had died. The Israelis had claimed they could prove rocket parts, destined for Hammas, were on those trucks. Whatever the UN said about Israel, there was no escaping the fact that the country would defend itself whenever it felt under threat.

Mark’s worry at that moment was how far that defence would go. Since the post-Mubarak elections, things were unpredictable here. The players were changing and the military restive, eager to regain influence. The reaction of the Egyptian army to the next Israeli air strike could not be guaranteed.

Other things about Egypt worried him too. Some of them were displayed on other, smaller screens along the wall. One showed an anti-Israel demonstration in Tahrir Square. An army unit, from Zagazig, was stationed there that day and Mark’s concern was about how they would react to the demonstration.

A report on the movement of an Iranian submarine near the southern entrance to the Suez Canal also disturbed him. A satellite image, courtesy of the United States NSA office, of the last known position of the submarine, was displayed on a different screen. A radar map of the area was overlaid on the image.

But the big screen on his own desk was showing what he was chiefly interested in that day. A high definition security camera feed from the main entrance to the hotel in Jerusalem where Dr Susan Hunter had stayed. The feed was paused. The Herod Citadel Hotel was one of the best in Jerusalem, but Susan Hunter hadn’t chosen it for its five-star facilities.

She had chosen it because of its security arrangements. One of these, which she wasn’t even aware of, nor were the security staff at the hotel, was the fact that the British Intelligence Services had tapped into the security camera system.

The ability to tap into private security systems, to relay images of diplomats and high-powered businessmen anywhere in the world, was not something the British Security Service wanted to advertise.

Dealing with public outrage about invasions of privacy would waste resources. Explaining that almost everyone would be better off with people watching their backs was unlikely to assuage true liberals. People who never had to deal with the threat of a gun attack or a suicide bomber intent on exterminating their kind were apt to be unaware of what was being done every day in their name.

And if corporate titans, religious leaders and government tsars were afraid that pictures of them with teenage escorts or coincidentally young and clearly gay personal assistants would end up in the media, they could always clean up their act.

Mark leaned forward. The woman in the centre of the screen – the reason the security camera had gone into frame-hold mode, as the facial recognition software had thrown her up as a possible – was similar in complexion and hair colour to Susan Hunter, but it was definitely not her. He pressed Ctrl-X on his keyboard. The screen jumped back to showing real time.

He turned to his secure instant messaging screen. The message he had highlighted a few minutes before was in the centre in a small pop-out screen. Other social media posts, Tweets and Facebook updates were flowing past it. He tagged the post as important, then closed the pop-up.

He turned to his secure email system and read his messages. A signal from Dr Susan Hunter’s phone had been picked up. It had only lasted ten and a half seconds, and tracing the exact location of the transmission hadn’t been completed, but the most interesting thing was that a signal had been picked up at all.

It could be a trick, of course, or a summons, but it could also be an amateur mistake on the part of her captors. The length of time the signal had been active made that a real possibility. Someone hoping to lure them would have left Susan Hunter’s phone on for longer. It was well known that it took thirty seconds for a phone’s location to be reliably established.

Few people knew about the latest, ultra-fast location tracking software the Israelis were using. It wasn’t always right, but with a bit of luck they would soon be able to identify the location of Susan Hunter’s phone and some other interesting information too.

The screen to his left was showing rolling news from the Nile News Channel, the state-owned Egyptian news service. He watched it for a few seconds, then turned up the sound.

The image on the screen was of the burnt-out house where a poor Jewish family had been found a few days before. The Arabic script flowing across the screen, from left to right, said that a ‘no questions asked’ reward of one million dollars had been offered by an American-Israeli group to anyone who could help them to arrest the perpetrators.

Whoever had blocked the doors and burnt that house would have to hope that everyone who knew they’d done it was as dedicated to the cause as they were.

And what would happen if someone pointed a finger at a terrorist who had recently crossed from Egypt?

What would the Israelis do then? Start bombing the crossings into Gaza?