Mad Dog - First Strike Ch. 08

8 - All About the Pentiums:

I moved slowly, pressing my back close to the wall. Not that my victim would notice. He was facing away from me.

My target was concentrating on the big monitor on the wall, while his thumbs jabbed at an X-Box controller. On the screen he was cruising the mean streets of San Andreas offing hookers in drive-by shootings. He had a pair of Bluetooth headphones on and was singing along with the music.

"Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you. It's all about the Pentiums..."

I gently touched VJ on the shoulder and he jumped out of his skin. He tore his phones off and stood to face me.

"Mate! Don't do shit like that."

"Just getting you back for yelling Mad Dog across the Bunker yesterday." I paused, then asked, "I thought Puff Daddy reckoned it was all about the Benjamns, not the Pentiums."

"Nah, this is Weird Al Yankovic's version."

"Oh," I nodded like I knew what he was taking about. "Dirty Harriet wants us in Colossus."

"What for?"

"Your guess is a good as mine," I told him, "but its not a scheduled meeting."

"You think it's anything to do with my sussing that video's a Deepfake?" he asked.

"It was all over BBC News 24 yesterday."

"Since when do you watch the news?"

"I clicked on it by accident," he admitted, "I was looking for the Sci-fi Channel."

In Colossus the usual suspects were gathered. VJ and I sat down next to Clive Braithwaite. He was in the middle of an animated conversation with Nikita Burton.

"Do you remember the way people used social media during the COVID 19 lockdown?" she asked him. "Everyone was posting stuff about how they were using their hour per day for exercise to do a couch to 10k. Twitter was full of people the hashtag: 'living-my-best-life-during-lockdown'."

"What about 'hashtag-people-should-stop-boasting'?" Braithwaite asked, "see, that's what I hate about social media. It's not like everybody in the world's interested in every detail of your life."

"I dunno, speaking from a professional standpoint I find social media interesting," Burton retorted.

"Then you're the only person on the planet who does," Braithwaite snorted.

"Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have been a massive breakthrough for Open Source Intelligence," she snapped back.

I kept my thoughts to myself. This sounded like an argument that I didn't want to get involved in.

Dirty Harriet swept in with Kim her PA keeping station the obligatory six feet behind her. She started the meeting as soon as she came through the door.

"Right, things have gone from bad to worse," she announced as she sat down at the head of the meeting room table. "All the kids injured as a result of the hacked drone strike were black. Add onto that the video of the Prime Minister apparently spouting racist crap about his upcoming trip to Africa and..."

She shrugged and raised her hands palms up.

"Is the video genuine?" Nikita Burton asked.

"MI5 has a team in investigating who might have recorded it and GCHQ over at Cheltenham are trying to track down who posted it," she said, "but at the moment nobody's certain of anything."

"I'm certain it's a fake," VJ said, "at least, I'm seventy-eight percent certain that it is."

Dirty Harriet turned her basilisk stare on my mate. I felt uncomfortable just sitting next to him. VJ, however, was undaunted.

"And how, pray tell, can you be so statistically sure of yourself?" she asked/

VJ explained how he'd been the first to discover the video was a Deepfake and the software he used to prove it.

"Why wasn't I informed of this?" she demanded.

"You were," I told her, "I emailed a report to you yesterday."

"Oh," she sounded more than a little surprised.

"You have seen it," Kim chipped in, "you asked me to forward the report to HQ in London."

"Did I? I must admit it doesn't ring any bells," Dirty Harriet seemed vague. "With all this sodding anarchy breaking out my in-box has begun to fill up. You should've marked it priority."

"I did," Kim told her.

"Oh."

"We think that there's a link between what's happened with the drone strike and something else you asked us to deal with."

"Do you," she took her reading glasses off and let them dangle from the cord round her neck. "And what was that?"

"It was with reference to the, ah, favour you asked me to perform for Brigadier General Dankworth," I told her. "if you recall we got a bit of collateral intelligence suggesting that the target Simon..."

"I'll stop you there," Dirty Harriet held her hand up like she was directing traffic, and turned to Kim sitting next to her. "Kim do we have a code name for this target?"

"Green Zinc," Kim said quickly and passed her tablet to her boss.

"Thank you." She put her reading glasses back on and looked at the iPad. After a moment reading she looked up, "so both Green Zinc and this former GRU officer are, potentially, involved in using social media to plant fake news and whip up anti-British fervour."

"I don't think there's any 'potentially' about it," VJ told her. "I think we've proven that these guys are involved."

"Better than a seventy-eight percent level of certainty?" Braithwaite asked.

"Yeah, I'd give it a hundred percent level of certainty," I told him. "Taking into account the other aspects of the incident and the way these two keep cropping up around it," I shrugged, "well, they keep cropping up like the proverbial bad penny."

"We have to wonder what they get out of this," Nikita Burton asked. "I mean, I get that they're using this to stir up trouble, but what do they get out of it?"

"That is something we need to work at finding out," Dirty Harriet said thoughtfully.

"Mike, do you feel your CAT team may need to be deployed?"

"Yes I do," I said levelly. "This IT firm, AnalitIQ, Green Zinc's the MD of it. I'd like to have VJ hack into their Local Area Network and see what he finds. More than that though, I think the personal touch is called for. Their office in London's just crying out for a a black bag job."

"I'll have to get it cleared," Swann said thoughtfully, "it'll need to be sanctioned from someone higher up in the Directorate."

"Dankworth owes us a favour, he said as much to me before I, ah, I did that little chore for him..."

"Quite," Dirty Harriet cut me short.

"Well, as he's the officer commanding the First Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Brigade - which is our military wing," I shrugged, "if anyone can green light a spot of sneaky breaking and entering it's going to be him, right?"

"One presumes so," she nodded in agreement. "In the meantime, I believe that you and Vikram have a CQB training course soon."

"CQB?" VJ asked, "what's that?"

"Close Quarter Battle, otherwise known as how to beat people up," I told him, "or in your case, how to get beaten up."

"I don't need lessons in that," he grumbled, "I've been getting beaten up fairly successfully ever since I started school."

"Yes, but the ministry want you to be professional at it,"