Читать книгу The Jerusalem Puzzle - Laurence O’Bryan - Страница 22

‘There’s something weird going on,’ said Henry. He shook his head. The social media tracking screen in front of him was blinking with the amount of data scrolling down it.

Normally he’d have let the automated systems deal with the feeds. They hunted for genuinely suspicious posts among the billions of Twitter, Facebook and forum posts, and spam ads and emails that filled the web each day. The algorithms they used were as important to the service as their best code-breaking tools.

The volume of postings on one subject was cresting like a wave. There’d been a thousand posts an hour about it yesterday. Now there was ten thousand an hour. And the rate was climbing.

Sergeant Finch looked down at him. She adjusted her glasses so they were further down her nose. She looked like a schoolmistress. A large and commanding school-mistress.

‘I hope this isn’t another one of your hunches,’ she said.

He smiled up at her. ‘This is no hunch. It’s a prophecy.’

‘You’re a prophet now?’ The smile at the corner of her mouth was either conspiratorial or from her anticipation of how she would describe this exchange to her boss over a coffee.

Henry didn’t care. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘This is about what’s been trending on Twitter and Facebook in Egypt over the last twenty-four hours.’

‘Are you going to tell me?’ Her eyes had darted to another monitoring screen operator who had raised a hand. The room was responsible for real-time monitoring about a hundred current threats to the UK’s national security.

‘All these posts are about a claim that a letter from the first Caliph of Islam has been found. Apparently, it states that Jerusalem, once captured by Islam, will remain Islamic for all time.’

‘Do we know if this letter is real?’

‘It’s being looked into.’

‘Let me know what they find, Henry. Another religious prophecy is the last thing they need in the Middle East. The place is a tinderbox right now. It could burst into flames at any moment.’