The Absolution (12 page)

THE HACKER WAITED
patiently in the internet café. He had planned tonight's demonstration down to the last detail. It was now two in the morning in Misrata, Libya's third-largest city, and the streets were deserted, but even so the café had been closed all day as a precaution. No one would see the commander or the cleric arrive.

He was waiting for the sound of a car, but when they came it was on foot, opening the back door and silently slipping inside. The hacker, whose name was Tareq, saw the commander glance uneasily over to where Hassan, the café owner, was standing.

“It's all right,” he said. “Hassan will make tea, then leave us.”

The commander nodded. He was wearing an old camouflage jacket and a turban that had been washed so many times its colour was indeterminate – the same one he had been wearing ever since 2011 and the War of Liberation. The cleric, by contrast, was wearing a black woollen
chechia
, a Tunisian imam's hat, although, so far as the hacker knew, he wasn't from that country. He spoke Arabic with a strong Egyptian accent.

They waited in silence while Hassan made thick, syrupy black tea, pouring it repeatedly from one glass to another to
produce the
regwhet
, or foam, that proved how clean the utensils and water were. Then, with a respectful “
Ma as-salama
”, he left them.

The hacker turned back to the computer in front of him. The other two men came to stand behind him, looking over his shoulder as they sipped their tea. The screen showed what appeared to be a security camera's view of a road tunnel. Traffic was relatively light: mostly big commercial trucks, each one with a tail of three or four cars, unable to pass them on the single-lane carriageway.

“Of course, this is just a demonstration,” the hacker said quietly. “If it were a real operation, it would be done when the traffic was heavy.”

“What are we looking at?” the commander asked. “What country?”

“The Fréjus road tunnel,” the hacker said. “It runs under the mountains between France and Italy. Thirteen kilometres long – not the longest, by any means, but enough.”

He typed in an IP address and a crude menu appeared, asking him for a user name and password. He typed again and the menu was replaced by a list of numbers. To the commander, whose technical knowledge was limited, it looked like the menu of an internet router.

The hacker turned some nodes from “On” to “Off”. Then, typing a second IP address, he accessed another menu and checked “Disable”.

“Now we wait,” he said, almost to himself.

“How long?” It was the cleric who had spoken.

“Ten minutes. Perhaps twenty.”

“Time for a second glass, then.”

The commander poured them all more tea, and brought over the bowl of almonds Hassan had left.

“By the end of this year,” the hacker said in his soft, precise voice, “there will be more
things
connected to the internet than computers. By 2020 the world will have more ‘smart devices', as they are called, than people: over twenty billion of them. Security cameras, traffic lights, ovens, baby monitors . . . not to mention automated stock-trading networks, power stations and defence systems.” He tapped the screen. “Or in this case, air turbines.”

The commander and the cleric listened respectfully. The hacker might be thirty years younger than either of them, but they had travelled a long way to hear what he had to say this evening.

“These days computers have relatively sophisticated security systems,” the hacker continued. “Firewalls and anti-virus software that are constantly updated as new vulnerabilities are discovered. But the Internet of Things generally runs on the simplest, cheapest software each manufacturer can find. In many cases the devices don't even require passwords, or they're set to one of a few factory defaults.” He gestured at the screen. “The air turbines in that tunnel, for example, were set to require the username ‘admin' and the password ‘password'. But even if the engineers who installed them had thought to change the passwords, it would have been a relatively simple process to bypass them.”

“So that's what you did?” the cleric asked. “You turned the turbines off?”

The hacker nodded.

“And that's it?” The commander couldn't keep the disappointment out of his voice.

He had already recounted to the cleric the story of how, during Libya's War of Liberation, Colonel Gaddafi's troops had shut down the national cell-phone network to deny the
rebels a means of communicating. Someone had brought this skinny kid to see him. He claimed he could hack into the network and restore their communications. It had seemed worth a try, so he'd told the kid to go ahead.

Within a day, they not only had a phone network but the kid had also somehow fixed it that they didn't have to pay billing charges.

He had the kid brought back to him. The young hacker looked at him as if he was expecting thanks, but the commander had something else in mind.

“What else can you do?” he'd asked.

A week after that, Gaddafi's troops had towed two trailer-mounted batteries of Patriot missiles up to their forward positions and prepared to fire them at the rebels. Within an hour, one of the batteries had loosed off a rogue missile that exploded on top of the other battery instead of its designated target. The skinny kid had hacked into the missiles' electronic firing systems, changed the coordinates around, and then activated the firing protocol.

The commander hadn't even known that a Patriot battery was connected to the internet.

“It's not, in the conventional sense,” the kid had explained. “But the manufacturers built in an uplink so that it periodically sends maintenance data back to head office via satellite. With machines like this, it isn't even a person the data goes back to – it's machine talking to machine, via sensors and microcontrollers that communicate between themselves, using simple, low-cost networks.”

His words meant almost nothing to the commander; he was just vastly relieved to have the Patriots out of action. “Come up with more ideas,” he said.

The next thing the hacker did wasn't even hacking. He
devised a plan to get the local schoolchildren to mark the regime's sniper positions on Google Earth using their mobile phones, thus enabling the rebels to target them more effectively. He also came up with a way to improve their mortars' accuracy using videogame controllers.

When the regime sent in tanks, the hacker built a simple GPS spoofer to fool the tanks' satnavs into thinking they were in one part of the city when actually they were in another. It took the tank commanders an hour to realise what was happening, by which time their advance was in chaos.

After the regime fell, many of the rebels formed Libya's new administration. Others went into the army, or returned to their farms and villages. Some, though, went on to fight a different sort of war.

The commander was among the latter. He wasn't sure if he really believed in jihad, or if it was simply that, somewhere amongst the bombed-out ruins of Misrata and Sirte, he had found his vocation. He knew how to fight; but more importantly, he knew how to lead. Men trusted him.

He sought out the hacker and asked him what he planned to do next.

The hacker shrugged. He didn't know.

By now the older man knew something of what motivated the boy. “The tyrant who killed your father is dead,” he told him. “But the people who kept him in power for so long are still alive. We make jihad to glorify Allah. But we also fight to destroy the power of the West, so that Arab countries can at last be free from their interference.”

“How can I help?” the hacker said.

“I don't know. Go away and think of a plan. But make it a big one. When the twin towers of New York fell,
al-hamdulillah
, it inspired a movement. But ever since, we have been
biting them like fleas, when what we need is to roar at them like lions.”

“Give me a target.”

The commander had glanced at him, as if trying to decide how much to tell him. Then he pulled out a map of the Mediterranean.

“A decade ago,” he said, “America had more bases in Germany than in Italy. Soon, it'll be the other way round. Do you know why?”

The hacker shook his head.

“Because of us,” the commander said. His finger traced Italy's coastline, where it jutted deep into the Mediterranean. “If they control the Italian peninsula, they control North Africa.” He pointed at Sigonella, on the west coast of Sicily. “This is where their new Alliance Ground Surveillance system will be based. Two billion dollars' worth of high-altitude drones, capable of flying for days at a time, spying on the whole of Africa. They intend to expand it so that it eventually covers all of the Middle East as well.”

“We want to attack the bases?”

The commander shook his head. “We want to
remove
the bases. If we attack them, the Americans will simply make them stronger. But the bases have a weakness.”

“What?”

“They are actually owned by Italy.”

He waited to see if the hacker understood the implications of this. The younger man was nodding thoughtfully.

“In other words,” he continued, “if Italy were to
demand
the removal of the bases, then legally they would have to go. There would be no American drones spying on us any more. This would be a major breakthrough for our fighters on the ground.”

“And Italy would insist on the bases going,” the hacker said, “if the price of being America's ally was too high. If something happened – something as great as the Twin Towers, but on Italian soil.”

The commander nodded. “Exactly. I am in contact with a group of our brothers in Italy. They have raised funds for such an attack. All that is needed is for someone to come up with the right plan.”

The commander heard nothing for over a year. Then he received a request for money, so the hacker could travel abroad for some specialist training. He paid it immediately with funds from his backers.

Six months after that, the hacker finally sent word that he had a plan. This evening was meant to be the night he explained it, by way – he had said – of a demonstration. But so far, all he had done was turn off some turbines in a road tunnel. The commander had hoped for something better.

The hacker looked at the clock on the computer's taskbar. Ten minutes had gone by. “Not long now,” he said quietly.

On the screen, an articulated truck was thundering down the tunnel's right-hand lane. Half a dozen cars followed in its slipstream, impatient to get back on the dual carriageway. As they watched, a car coming in the opposite direction veered sharply across both lanes and drove straight into the front of the truck. The truck jammed on its airbrakes, jack-knifing. Its cab scraped along the right-hand wall, trailing sparks, while its rear wheels swung outwards, towards the other lane. Just ahead was one of the emergency lay-bys – which, with its sharp concrete corner, brought the cab abruptly to a halt. The vehicle's momentum caused the back end of the trailer to continue, skidding around the mangled cab's axis, until it struck the tunnel's opposite wall, crunching under the impact. A
minibus coming the other way tried to brake but only succeeded in broadsiding it, while the cars directly behind the truck had no chance at all. The screen flared white as vehicles on both sides of the crash exploded. Moments later, the whole pile-up was engulfed in flame.

“There are sprinklers? Alarms?” the commander asked.

“There were,” the hacker said. “I turned those off too.”

“And the one who started all this? The driver coming in the opposite direction – a brother seeking martyrdom? You had it all arranged?”

The hacker shook his head, although his eyes remained fixed on what was unfolding on the screen. “Just a tired businessman seeking sleep. And finding a tunnel full of carbon monoxide instead of fresh air.”

“You mean . . .” The commander was trying to get his head round this. “
You
did this? Just by turning off some switches on the internet?”

“Exactly.” The hacker still spoke softly, but his voice throbbed with passion. “This is their weakness – their soft underbelly. Imagine a day when all their so-called technology suddenly rises up against them. Not just road tunnels, but air-traffic-control systems, electricity plants, sewers, oil refineries – all malfunctioning at the same moment, and in the most dangerous ways possible. Their computers turning into firebombs, their transportation networks into weapons of destruction. Their financial systems selling and buying at random, paralysing their economy. Their cash machines emptying, their plastic cards no longer working in their shopping malls and supermarkets. Their hospitals, their food-supply chains, all breaking down at once. And at the centre of it all, while they are preoccupied with everything else that is going on, a spectacular gesture of destruction, unmatched by
anything since 9/11. It will be focused on Italy, just as you requested. But its effect will be felt far beyond Italy's borders.” He gestured at the screen. “On that day,
Insha'Allah
, even a few burning cars will pale into insignificance.”

“This is possible?” The commander's voice was equally quiet.
Allah, what have I done?
he was thinking.
What have I unleashed?

The hacker nodded. “There are many details still to be arranged. And it will be expensive. But the capability, the framework – that is all in place.”

The commander turned to the cleric, who hadn't spoken since the pile-up had started. His eyes, too, were glued to the monitor. At the rear, behind the main collision, other cars were still screeching to a halt, the drivers struggling from their crumpled vehicles only to flail around, clutching at their throats, their mouths gaping in unheard screams.